Transnational Literature最新文献

{"title":"Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View","authors":"J. Osborn","doi":"10.5860/choice.196549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.196549","url":null,"abstract":"Censorship and the limits of the literary: a global view, edited by Nicole Moore (Bloomsbury, 2015)This volume of essays, edited by literary historian Nicole Moore, explores the dynamic between literature and censorship. Moore describes her collaborative scholarly project in these terms: 'The essays ... engage with more than twelve countries or nation states, placing into revealing contiguity a set of case studies examining national regimes, publishing industries, book trades, reading contexts or authorial circumstances' (5)Her introduction proposes two possible approaches to reading Censorship and the limits of the literary. First, through the four-part 'chronologically-ordered' structure, beginning in the Enlightenment with Simon Burrows's essay on 'French Censorship on the Eve of the Revolution', through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the Cold War (Part III) and then 'the final, contemporary section [which] has much to say about our world right now' (7). Within this structure, the reader can also move easily across the book's global perspective, selecting chapters on a range of countries, including South Africa, Quebec, East Germany, Australia, China and Iran.The second approach recommended by Moore turns on 'the volume's reflect[ing] a moment of congruence, when new directions in a number of scholarly fields are converging' (2). This approach would work well for the specialist reader, one who is willing to engage with Foucault's theories relating to contemporary censorship scholarship and 'the degree to which, rather than removed and antithetical opposites, literature and censorship have been dialectical forms of culture, each actively defining the other in ongoing, agonistic engagement' (2). The 'scholarly fields' mentioned include various forms of literary studies, history, theatre, film, books and printing.The contributors' areas of expertise, and the accompanying case studies, focus on historical period and on place. For example, Peter McDonald's excellent essay on 'the Critic as Censor' deals with Apartheid South Africa, where censorship was 'always officially euphemized as \"publications control\"'. McDonald is also the author of The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009); in his essay in Moore's collection, he covers the white, universityeducated, predominantly male censors who acted as 'guardians of the literary'. These were men who allowed J.M. Coetzee into their 'Republic of Letters ... despite [his] obvious offensiveness towards the government' while excluding Wilbur Smith, writer of 'morally corrupting pulp fiction for the masses' (124).Christine Spittel's rewarding essay, 'Reading the Enemy', deals with East German censorship during the 1990s. …","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"341 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132629502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity","authors":"Sue Bond","doi":"10.5040/9781472544025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472544025","url":null,"abstract":"Micaela Maftei, The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity (Bloomsbury, 2013)Micaela Maftei discusses issues of memory, truth(s), multiplicity of narrative voice, and uncertainty in her perhaps provocatively titled book, The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity. Her primary concern is writing truthfully in autobiography, but she argues that truth and facts are not necessarily the same thing.The book is structured in four chapters with an appendix of Maftei's own autobiographical stories. In the first chapter she discusses truth; the second 'dismisses' unity and argues for a multiplicity of voices in autobiographical writing; the third deals with memory; and in the fourth she posits that autobiography is a 'new product' (4) created from memory, not a direct transcript fixed in time. The autobiographical stories, which I found to be well written and engaging, were a 'launch pad for research and critical writing' (11). Using these she has created a 'story of the stories' (9).In her introduction, Maftei delves further into these aims for her book. She wants to 'explore the development of a way of thinking about and around autobiography and memoir that has three primary focuses' (9). She really sets out to unravel old preconceptions of what autobiography actually is: it is not a succession of facts about a person's life that is set in concrete; the protagonist or subject of the autobiography is not the same person as the writer of the text, and, in fact, both change through time and with each writing out of the memory; memory is a process, as is autobiographical storytelling, and each instance of the latter is a 'new, creative construction' that has 'a strong link to past events' but is 'not bound by' them (9).I would like to have seen more discussion of Maftei's own autobiographical writing, rather than it being relegated to the end of the book and only mentioned briefly. To integrate her own writing into the discussion would have made this especially interesting for those readers who write autobiography themselves.In Chapter One, 'Truth and Trust', Maftei brings in discussions of William Zinsser's collection Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (1998), and the viewpoints of various contributors. Zinsser's title alone 'complicates the categories of invention and truth by binding them' (23) and making them both apply to the writing of memoir. Maftei argues against the idea of authorial intention as the basis for autobiographical truth, as she feels that not even the author may know his or her own intentions, let alone the reader (25).In this chapter, autobiography as testimony and a means of surviving trauma is discussed, referring extensively to the writers Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (mistakenly referred to throughout as Lori Daub) and their significant work Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), as well as John Beverley's Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124293790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Perspectives on World War I Poetry","authors":"H. Yeung","doi":"10.5040/9781472593979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472593979","url":null,"abstract":"Robert C. Evans, Perspectives on World War I Poetry (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)A timely contribution to studies of the poetry of the First World War, Perspectives on World War I Poetry is part of Bloomsbury's multiple-genre 'Great War' collection, whose aim, in the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, is to provide a 'one-stop resource for those seeking to understand the Great War and its impact' (see: www.bloomsbury.com/thegreatwar).As the book's preface set out, its aims are primarily pedagogical and equalizing: to bring to the foreground of the study of the poetry of the First World War numerous relevant literary theories, while also dispelling the notion that literary theory is difficult or daunting. Many so-called 'simple' introductions to the study of literature through literary theory confuse rather than clarify through their attempts at simplification or accessibility, but Evans's study, perhaps because he chooses a specific literary focus for the theoretical exposition, is not one of these.It is unfortunate that there still should be an apparent need to dispel the myth of theory as the preserve of the over-complicating academic critic. And yet, in the average high school or even undergraduate classroom, the fear of 'theory' that this book seeks to address, is still all too apparent, manifesting as a disparagement of anything remotely abstract, and a resort to close-textual, biographical, or thematic readings. The pressures on teachers of literature by national or institutional bodies to take a 'bit of everything' approach to pedagogy (in the UK, the English A-Level 'Assessment Objectives' which each student must hit in order to get a high mark, springs to mind), coupled with the resistance of the student to read anything outside the text at hand, perhaps also contributes to the fact that the 'theory myth' is often only debunked once the reader in question has reached advanced undergraduate level or beyond.As Evans writes in his introduction, 'any reader of a literary text inevitably uses literary theory of some sort' (1), and it is with this in mind that Evans uses the springboard of a selection of First World War poems to introduce the complexities of various theoretical approaches to his reader. In order to provide a framework through which the interested 'lay' reader can begin to engage with literary theory, Evans takes as a starting point M.H. Abrams's schematic of writer-text-audience- 'reality critic (2), which is expanded and tabulated in terms of the different literary theories the book later introduces in Table 12.1 (218-19). And in the chapters that ensue, the author looks at poems from a wide, international range of poets of the First World War, elucidating their various complexities from the most appropriate literary-critical angles.To the academic reader who will likely take as a given that it is now impossible to 'do' literary criticism without a strong literary theoretical knowledge, Evans's use o","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131619853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines","authors":"Christine Runnel","doi":"10.1163/9789401210027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401210027","url":null,"abstract":"Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grunkemeier (eds) Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines, ASNEL Papers 18 (Cross /Cultures 170) (Rodopi, 2013)Cross/Cultures 170 provides readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English; however, the editors of Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines explain in their excellent introduction to the book that the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (ASNEL) originates in German-speaking countries. Notwithstanding that the cultural distinction is clearly framed - geopolitics do matter - the domain of postcolonial studies is understood to be a global and interdisciplinary field of inquiry.The editors of ASNEL Papers 18 suggest that the postcolonial movement manifests ubiquitously within various academic disciplines and institutionalised departments and is often aligned with linguistics, literature and cultural studies - just another framing device in the vast range of critical approaches in literature, history and culture. However, there is an embedded caveat to study in the field. Scholarly engagement is often repressed or marginalised until Master's specialisation and often endowed with a negative aura within establishments because of its challenging nature. Postcolonial studies are concerned with critical consciousness-raising in complex matters 'of racism, colonialism, Orientalism and Eurocentrism while simultaneously engaging the mantra of race, nation, gender, class and sexuality'.1 Inevitably, in exploring the underbelly of colonialism - master/slave relationships, marginalisation, inclusions/exclusions, solidarity and social justice issues - postcolonial scholars are drawn towards deconstruction and revisionist discourses (including the criticism of entrenched Western-style models of knowledge production). And change - especially the transfer of power and privilege that goes with the devolution of master narratives - is often resisted by those authorities with a personal stake in maintaining the status quo. Postcolonial scholars however believe in the possibility of metamorphosis. Attitudes, intentions and life-systems may be moved in response to alterity - something completely strange/familiar in [anjother - and the need for communion. The suggestion here is that they work in a space where altruism and realpolitik must be calibrated in practical application and contemporary issues filtered through sensitive, open minds in proximity and dialogue with that irresistible other.ASNEL Papers 18 is the product of the 22nd Annual conference held in June 2011, a collaborative venture, drawing in the main upon communities surrounding the Atlantic - the Americas, Africa, the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean and Europe - and for those researchers interested in comparative reflection in areas of specialised interest, despite the spacial distances between their homelands or milieu. This publication cogently reflects current nerve endings in academia; for instance, the editors observe","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128360923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller","authors":"Alan Johnson","doi":"10.5040/9781472543837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472543837","url":null,"abstract":"Eamonn Dunne, Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013)When the subject of a study himself declares, as J. Hillis Miller does of Eamonn Dunne's book (in the Preface), that it is 'the best introduction I know to my work', it gets our attention. Dunne's book is indeed a useful, clearly written and thoroughly informed entry point into the astonishing range and acuity of Miller's many publications, from 1958's Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels to 2012's Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited. I know this because Dunne provides an excellent annotated bibliography of Miller's 'major works' at the end of this book. Before this, as his title suggests, Dunne has, in the manner of a classic primer, used the alphabet as a practical way of structuring his 'provisional, even speculative foray into' Miller's works. Dunne cleverly uses Miller's own thread metaphor to characterize this working-through of both Miller's meditations on reading and the maze of narrative itself.Dunne tells us at the outset that 'what has most interested me about Miller's work ... is [his] attention to the event and act of reading', specifically the ways in which narratives 'have an uncanny way of escaping cognition and will, given half a chance, always exceed a reader's expectations' (xviii). Miller's (post)structuralist readings attest to his keen interest in the uncanny ways in which texts are spatial and temporal - on the page, in the moment of reading - and yet, at the same time, exist in a kind of Platonic, ever-changing, 'virtual' world of words and stories. Dunne bears this out nicely in his A to Z entries. This does not mean that Dunne assumes Miller's work is programmatic, only that this approach is a good as any other possible one.The first entry, 'A before B - of course ... ', exemplifies this. Quoting from Miller's 1999 book Reading Narrative (whose abbreviation Dunne has listed, along with 21 other Miller titles, at the outset), Dunne writes: \"'Anacoluthon doubles the story line and so makes the story probably a lie\" (RN, 149).' In what proves to be characteristic, Dunne goes on to unpack the quotation in brisk and well-illustrated fashion. The line tells us, writes Dunne, 'that storylines are assembled and dismembered by the implicit demand made on each reader to remember the way at all times, to follow the line back and forth from the clue ... to the center of the labyrinth' (1). But doing so is bound to include some 'wandering' from what the text is asking of us. The word anacoluthon - literally, an ungrammatical, nonsensical sequence - here means 'an abrupt breach in the line', such as Proust's habit of switching pronouns mid-sentence to call our attention to the fictionality of all narratives, including ones we think are based on true memory. By drawing on a wealth of literary examples, Miller shows us how storytelling, which after all constitutes memory, rests at the juncture of Tying and","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125596676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literary Fiction: The Ways We Read Narrative Literature","authors":"R. Almond","doi":"10.5860/choice.52-0113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.52-0113","url":null,"abstract":"Geir Farner, Literary Fiction: The Ways We Read Narrative Literature (Bloomsbury, 2014)Geir Farner's Literary Fiction: The Ways We Read Narrative Literature offers a cognitive model for reading and interpreting literature. This model breaks traditional elements of fiction, such as message, structure, and voice, into a precised discussion of how we interpret these elements and their overall effects on the text, arguing that the 'interaction between reader and text plays an indispensable role' in literary communication (42). The six-page table of contents makes the text easy to navigate, which may be ideal for literature teachers and students to focus on particular elements; however, the book develops these throughout, and some sections rely on Famer's discussions in previous sections for the nuances of his argument to be patent.Early in the book, Farner outlines a number of methodological frameworks that outline what makes fiction fiction - which sounds an easier task than it is. By addressing a range of theorists from Aristotle to Hayden White, and considering the incorporation of factual elements into fiction, he encapsulates a breadth of arguments in his discussion. He reaches the conclusion that the greatest difference between fiction and non-fiction is in the intention of the author - or 'sender', in Farner's terms - to be loyal to the truth, and that 'fictional texts do not purport to render facts in a comparable way, because the only link between fiction and reality is indirect and consists in likeness' (23). He draws on structuralist and formalist literary theory regarding modes of reading, and critiques some of the dominant theories of genre for their limitations when extended to fiction.He asserts that all the information we are given about a text is that which is in the text itself, and '[bjecause the text comes into existence simultaneously with narration, it is part of the narrative act and at the same time a result of it, as the only testimony of the finished narrative process' (33). Thus, the interplay between the discourse of the text and the reader is the 'only testimony of the finished narrative process' (33). The information that has been imparted to us has been filtered by the author, and therefore the way in which we interpret the actions in fictional texts is necessarily biased by the author (42). Farner critiques theories that fictional truth is 'only a question of linguistic perception based on rhetoric' (43).Farner's cognitive model necessitates an acceptance of the subjectivity of the 'mental' processes and imagination of the reader in their interpretation as distinct from the 'real world', to which a non-fiction text would refer (37-38). His understanding of literature of mimetic necessitates that '[t]he fictional world is constructed according to the same pattern as the real world and resembles it. On account of this likeness, the fictional events shed useful light on the general structure in the real world' (40). The p","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131040716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization","authors":"A. Hartwiger","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-3647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-3647","url":null,"abstract":"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2012)For over a quarter of a century, Gayatri Spivak's scholarship has remained at the forefront of postcolonial studies, pushing the discipline forward, asking the uncomfortable questions, and engaging in spirited debates. Spivak's 1988 essay, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' launched her into academic prominence, and while the essay still is regarded as enormously influential, unfortunately, it often overshadows many of her other important works, which is why her recent book, An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization, published by Harvard University Press, is such a welcome reminder of her varied and important contributions. The 25 essays, spanning nearly an equal number of years, not only reveal Spivak's unwavering commitment to an ethical, aesthetic engagement with literature (and the world) as a way of fulfilling the humanities' promise to contest the logic of capital, but also they reveal her enormous capacity as a teacher.In the preface and introduction, Spivak informs readers that she writes now with a 'desperate honesty' and that doubt will be her guiding refrain (x). From the outset, it is clear that she is concerned deeply by 'this era of the mantra of hope' and deploys doubt, which she sees as a great inheritance of the Enlightenment, as a way to recuperate the aesthetic (1). This meditation on the aesthetic gives the collection a thematic thread for readers to grasp as they move through the essays. Additionally, running throughout the collection is the frame of the double bind. Spivak instructs readers to keep this structure in mind while engaging with the essays as it reveals the tensions that undergird many of her arguments. Ultimately Spivak's work attempts to displace globalisation's hold on information, data, and capital through a 'productive undoing' of the legacy of the aesthetic coupled with the structure of the double bind (1). At times this lofty project is undermined by a determined insistence to use the double bind framework even when the fit isn't comfortable, leading to several unnecessarily opaque moments. The introduction also is mired in a selected history of the double bind that contain large tracts of quoted text, with little exposition, that divert readers from Spivak's more urgent claims. To be fair, Spivak asks for 'an interactive reader' that is willing to take this journey with her in which the 'reconsiderations and realizations' of the introduction are not always expounded in the essays themselves (3).The book is not divided into sections, but there are narratives that reflect a progression of ideas. Spivak's essays transition fluidly from issues of difference to translation to disciplinary concerns. Throughout these movements, readers will observe Spivak's willingness to draw from intimate, often private moments to forward a thesis. It is this vulnerability that reveals the stakes of Spivak's wo","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124974015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Hologram for the King","authors":"Martina Sciolino","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv6wgdww.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv6wgdww.10","url":null,"abstract":"Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney's, 2012)Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King plots the expatriation of American Alan Clay, who travels to the United Arab Emirates to sell King Abdullah telecommunications for his city in development. The baldly named 'King Abdullah Economic City' would outdo Dubai in its expression of limitless ambition, in size, in defiance of habitat. Following Clay's dogged attempt to find business there, the plot presents a series of displacements that show how 'westernisation' no longer exists as such. The proposed city, whose immediate models are eastern, is an obvious sign not of western imperialism, but of globalisation. Eventually, the contract Clay vies for is finally awarded to a Chinese company (one that has appropriated an American patent). Ultimately, Clay is a deterritorialised American for whom all roads lead east. Clay's fate parallels America's in the era of globalised techno-capital, its great age as a superpower supported by domestic production and national economic agency decidedly past. In the end, Clay remains in the UAE, hoping to be repatriated in a city that doesn't yet exist. He is the very subject of multinational business, with no real home, no determinate national base. Thus Clay represents American industrialism that has literally lost its place in the world's economy. He seems virtual, the eponymous hologram, no more American the golden arches or any other multinational brand (such as the Schwinn bicycles he once sold, lost to outsourcing and finally to China). On the other hand, Clay (as his name suggests) is constituted by earth, however pliable. Indeed, like the absurd but realisable city King Abdullah builds on earth that can hardly support it, Clay is a paradox.Egger's postnationalist theme displaces rather than foregrounds environmental concerns. While the novel includes careful descriptions of the mountainous land around Jeddah, the coast where the new city is in being built, the desert in between, all appear as an uncanny frontier where the American cannot adapt. No one can because the enthusiastic creation of all-you-can-eat markets promote blatant disregard for human and environmental wellbeing. Unfortunately, when Egger addresses the division of the virtual and biotic, he does so with romantic asides that maintain their separation. Nature, here, provides a romantic counternarrative to the story of economic progress: 'The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.' This Ozymandian mystique obscures the premodern history of coexistence between bioregion and human lifeways. The only past the novel really concerns itself with is Clay's, with its domestic post WW II trajectory leading directly to the Middle Eastern present.Hologram sounds the death knell of American exceptionalism as the late petroleum economy and the information age move the action decidedly away from a North America","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134226918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction","authors":"David Buchanan","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1304","url":null,"abstract":"Brian R. Hamnett, The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011)This book revisits Gyorgy Lukacs's The Historical Novel (1937) by considering the historical novel of nineteenth-century Britain, France, and Italy, emphasising key authors such as Walter Scott, Honore de Balzac, and Alessandro Manzoni, and by discussing development of the historical novel in relation to drama early in the century and realism later. It also extends Lukacs's seminal work by discussing the historical novel of nineteenth-century Spain, Germany, and Russia, and the historical novel as it continued and changed into the Modernist period and throughout the twentieth century. The stated aims of the work are to set 'historical fiction in relation to the development of historiography in general' (1); 'to restate the case for historical fiction as a major branch of literary fiction' (2); and to challenge 'the disciplinary compartmentalizing of literature and history, and the containment of both disciplines into particular national straight-jackets' (2). The subject of this wide-ranging work is genre specific and comparatist, interdisciplinary and transnational, with potentially significant theoretical and practical implications for pedagogy and research of the novel, historiography, and history.Part one, 'The historical novel as genre and problem,' begins with an exploration of the categories 'history,' 'narrative,' 'the novel,' and 'romance.' Such categorisation could provide the basis to better understand the genesis and development of the nineteenth-century historical novel. However, the terms remain vague, along with others such as 'Romanticism.' More particularly, in a work that aims to examine the relationship between historical fiction and historiography, with initial emphasis on the Romantic period in Britain, the inclusion of histories (e.g. Hume's History of England [1754-61]), antiquarianism (e.g. by Percy, Ritson), narrative poetry (e.g. by Scott), national tales (e.g. by Edgeworth, Owenson), dramatisation (i.e. historical and otherwise), and other forms, upmarket and downmarket, would add to the discussion. In the following two chapters, important issues and topics common to criticism of the historical novel are addressed: chapter two, 'History and fiction: the trials of separation and reunion,' reconsiders the 'how much history and how much fiction?' question; chapter three, 'The German Sturm und Drang, historical drama, and early romantic fiction,' builds upon Lukacs.1 In chapter four, 'Scottish flowering: turbulence or Enlightenment?,' Hamnett justly locates Scott as a central figure in the development of the historical novel, but given the transnational connections pursued in later chapters it would be useful to more thoroughly relate the immediate and extended impact of the Waverley novels on the novel, publishing, criticism, and reading beyond Britain.2 Of more concern, to d","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127679034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gonzo Republic: Hunter S. Thompson's America","authors":"D. Lohrey","doi":"10.5040/9781472542458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472542458","url":null,"abstract":"William Stephenson, Gonzo Republic: Hunter S. Thompson's America (Continuum, 2012)William Stephenson, in his new study of Hunter S. Thompson the man and the writer, seeks, perhaps above all else, to give his subject the benefit of the doubt. This should not surprise readers. After all, Stephenson, a senior lecturer in modernist and postmodernist literature, finds as his subject an American writer who, as very few others before or after, not only grew in fame as a writer but established singlehandedly a new genre, a new way of expressing oneself in a rapidly changing world. Readers are leftto judge whether he deserves Stephenson's sympathetic scrutiny.The word 'gonzo' or 'gonzo journalism' and the expression 'fear and loathing' will always be associated with Thompson, a writer who today may not be read, but continues to be remembered and revered. Stephenson does his best to explain the origins of each. Typical of Stephenson, the writer's contribution to his age is placed in historical context, a context that begins in the near past, but which often stretches far beyond. Stephenson sees Thompson's role in modern literature multi-generationally, from the early Modernists such as T.S. Eliot to his contemporaries such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Williams Burroughs. However, he locates the man and his work in the context of his times and in reaction to current events. This, it would seem, is the essence of 'gonzo':Writing on 22 November 1963, the day of Kennedy's assassination, Thompson used the phrase 'fear and loathing' for the first time, as a description of his gut reaction to the murder. He perhaps borrowed it unconsciously from Soren Kierkegaard's nineteenth-century existentialist interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Fear and Trembling. Thompson later denied the connection with Kierkegaard: the phrase 'came straight out of what I felt ... I just remember thinking about Kennedy, that this is so bad I needed new words for it.' Douglas Brinkley states that Thompson's source for the phrase 'fear and loathing' was Thomas Wolfe's novel The Web and the Rock, published posthumously in 1939. The Web and the Rock's protagonist, George Webber, is appalled by the squalor of his own background: 'Drowning! Drowning! Not to be endured! The abominable memory shrivels, shrinks and withers up his heart in the cold constriction of its fear and loathing.' (101)Kennedy and, we will find out, Richard M. Nixon played important roles in the forming of Hunter S. Thompson's world view. It is to some extent a way of seeing things that men and women of his generation shared. There was Kennedy and his Camelot, a moment of hope, one might say, that intelligence, charm and justice might win out in the end. Nixon, the author points out, came to be seen by Thompson and his contemporaries as the incarnation of evil or, at the very least, the end of American innocence.I said earlier that Stephenson takes Thompson seriously. It should perhaps be pointed out that St","PeriodicalId":135762,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Literature","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127257080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}