STYLE最新文献

{"title":"Mediating a Western Classic in China: Woodcuts, Iconic Narrative, and the 1903 Chinese Translation of J. D. Wyss’s <i>The Swiss Family Robinson</i>","authors":"Sandro Jung","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0495","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Since the first publication of Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, illustrated editions have directed audiences to identify particular scenes, situations, and adventures as key to understanding the Swiss pastor’s narrative for children: illustrations—from the nineteenth century to the present day—have defined the ways in which to read and make sense of the text intermedially. This article will focus on a visual narrative consisting of six woodcuts that was commissioned for the first Chinese translation of the work, which was published in installments in the Shanghai-based magazine, The Tapestry Portrait Novel (绣像小说) in 1903. This translation was based not only on a rewriting of Wyss’s work, a rendering in monosyllabic words by Mary Godolphin, but the locally produced woodcuts also shaped the Chinese readers’ understanding of the text, at times not following details of the original and departing from earlier (western) illustration practice. The article will offer a detailed study of these woodcuts, their storytelling, and the visual interpretation they advance, at the same time focusing on how the illustrations adapted the narrative to the iconic-representational conventions of the target audience.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"38 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Excavating Stephen King: A Darwinist Hermeneutic Study of the Fiction","authors":"Mathias Clasen","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0519","url":null,"abstract":"Stephen King is one of the most popular novelists of our time, and probably the one with the highest number of fiction-induced nightmares on his conscience. His horror stories resonate with people across the globe, but why? What is it about King’s fiction that has catapulted him to the top of the best-seller charts? What, exactly, makes his particular brand of nightmare fuel so incredibly volatile? James Arthur Anderson, a professor of writing and literature at Johnson and Wales University, sets out to answer those questions in his new book. How, he asks, “do we account for Stephen King’s unparalleled popular success as a writer of horror fiction?” The answer, according to Anderson, “may not lie in the traditional realms of the literature departments of the academy, but in the fields of evolutionary psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience” (xv).Anderson’s claim is bold one, and one eminently worth pursuing. It would be highly surprising if the sciences of mind and language had nothing to say about the ability of King’s literary art to resonate with people. And while academic scrutiny of King has grown rapidly over the past several decades, there is almost no research on King’s fiction from an evolutionary perspective, even as evolutionary literary theory has been flourishing during that same period (but see Clasen, “Hauntings of Human Nature”). Anderson’s aim with his book is both ambitious and praiseworthy, but I am not convinced that he fully succeeds. His engagement with evolutionary science—evolutionary literary study in particular—is inadequate, and so his book comes off as a slightly awkward love letter to King, illuminated with scientific doodles in the margins, rather than a probingly consilient theoretical and critical synthesis.I do not mean that to sound as disparagingly condescending as it probably does; after all, I wrote my own awkward love letter to King in the form of a critical essay only a few years ago (a book chapter entitled “Why the World Is a Better Place with Stephen King in It”). I certainly understand the compulsion to mobilize science to prove to the world—in particular, perhaps, a snobbish critical establishment that historically has been dismissive of King—why his fiction has value and how it is so much more than the literary equivalent of a forgettable summer blockbuster. But Anderson’s main claim, which seems to be that King’s popularity is an effect of his ability to “tap into [human] universals” (xx), remains underwhelming. I think the claim is basically true, but it is trivially true. Anderson does develop that claim through the book, but not much. It remains too general and vague. It is almost like saying that houses are popular because they provide shelter for people. In the book’s conclusion, Anderson says that King “appeals to human universals, or basic human nature, if you will. His stories are actually about something and contain the conflict and suspense that people crave. His characters are real human b","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"35 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ford Madox Ford","authors":"Joseph Wiesenfarth","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0534","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0534","url":null,"abstract":"If one wants to know who Ford Madox Ford was and what he did, this is the book to read. It is excellent on Ford’s personal life as well as on the writers and artists he knew and promoted and on those who knew and promoted him. It not only gives us the chronology and history of Ford’s movements from place to place but also his mental and emotional life as it reveals itself in his books and letters and in those of his family, friends, and acquaintances. Max Saunders gave us Ford’s life in his two-volume biography Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life in 1996 and he has here distilled those twelve hundred pages masterfully in the two hundred pages of this volume in the Critical Lives series. In the time between these two books, many literary documents and personal letters have come to light, and some of what they tell us about Ford is in this book.Two novels and three women figure prominently in Ford’s life. The two novels are The Good Soldier (2015) and Parade’s End (1927). The three women are Violet Hunt, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala, though there are important glances at others like Elsie Martindale, Ford’s wife, who refused to divorce him, Jean Rhys, who fractured his relationship with Bowen, and Elizabeth Cheatham, who proved a significant distraction in the United States.Saunders shows that Ford’s first success came after publishing ten books that didn’t achieve much notice. The one that changed things was The Soul of London (1904). It put both Ford and London prominently on the literary scene. Ford followed it with The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land (1906) and The Spirit of the People (1907). These books gave Ford needed recognition, as did the novels in his trilogy on Henry VIII, The Fifth Queen (1906), which was a notable success. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, Ford founded The English Review, a periodical that gave a voice to modern writers and published the work of yet unknown writers like Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis, to name just a few. Appropriately, as Ford said, its “definite design” was “giving imaginative literature a chance in England.” The English Review did not live a long life, but its goal never died in Ford’s life.Ezra Pound became a lifelong friend of Ford’s, even visiting him in Provence late in Ford’s life. That friendship began with Ford’s dramatic evaluation of Pound’s fledgling poetry. He fondly recalled reading his early poems to Ford in Giessen, Germany, only to find Ford falling out of his chair onto the floor and rolling around in laughter at what he called Pound’s Swinburne verse. Pound learned his lesson quickly enough to give us in good time his most memorable poem: In a Station of the Metro: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd, / Petals on a wet, black bough.” This moment leads Saunders to a lucid and thorough discussion of Ford’s insistence on Impressionism and the use of everyday speech in poetry. Ford’s own poetry before, during, and after the Great War is generously sam","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"37 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction","authors":"Emelie Jonsson","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0525","url":null,"abstract":"Anna Neill’s Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction is bound to have different effects depending on who opens it. If the reader is an average literary scholar with an interest in science, the book will produce the warm fuzziness of familiar ideas unfolding familiarly. If the reader is an average historian of science, some puzzlement may occur about the presumed central role of literature, but the book’s pattern will be unsurprising. If the reader is a biologist or an evolutionary social scientist, the experience may resemble Neill’s citation of Samuel Butler’s hypothetical “grain of corn in the hen’s stomach,” which “finds itself in an environment so unfamiliar to the world its forefathers have taught it to navigate, that it ceases to remember it is grain” (97). If the reader is a literary scholar who believes in the epistemological validity of science, there might be neither surprise nor fuzziness. The present reader responded with mild fatigue when Butler, sentient grains and all, was placed next to Darwin and described as a “genius” (95).Neill’s book fits safely within literary study’s current program for interpreting evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century literature. I have characterized that program at length elsewhere, identifying its core tenets and tracing its roots to the early 1980s (Jonsson, “Old Tune” and Early Evolutionary Imagination 74–87). I argued that Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (first published in 1983) established parameters that largely remain in place for present scholars: a tendency to treat evolutionary theory as semi-fictional, a tendency to suggest that evolutionary theory owes more to literary inspiration than to scientific methodology, and a tendency to view any epistemological validity in evolutionary theory as a confirmation of literary theories popularized around the 1980s—deconstructive indeterminacy of meaning; the cultural construction of (human) nature; and the consequent vilification of hierarchies, definitions, and noncultural explanations. In line with the idea that meaning is indeterminate, Beer employed techniques of argumentation that simultaneously advance and withdraw claims (evolution both is and is not fictional), avoiding accusations of anti-scientific rhetoric (Jonsson, Early Evolutionary Imagination 74–87). The resulting program opens up a world of possibilities for reading and rereading novels with different degrees of emphasis on indeterminacy and hierarchies. It also prevents interdisciplinary understanding, feeds academic territorialism, encourages ideological distortion, and leads scholars in circles of repetition toward sheer stagnation. In my view, this program has stymied the study of a deeply fascinating subject for forty years.Neill indicates that no change is in sight. If anything, the slimness of her book and the meekness of its argument suggest some petering out of the program. Fantastic Victorian Fiction spends its conclusion—traditionally a place for extending and rhetor","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"24 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135763396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Jackass</i>, Ritual Clowning, and the Comic Themes of Universal Occurrence","authors":"Marc Hye-Knudsen","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0466","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The appeal of the Jackass television series and film franchise, centered around stunts wherein the performers deliberately hurt and humiliate themselves, has been considered a unique and peculiar mystery by cultural critics, one that can only be solved by looking at its particular historical and sociocultural context. In contrast, this article argues that Jackass constitutes a resurgence of a widespread form of comedy whose roots stretch far back into human history: ritual clowning. Comparing the stunts and gags of Jackass with those of ritual clowns in traditional societies around the world, both are shown to be characterized by four universal comic themes: pain, sex, the foreign, and the sacred. In contrast to previous critical readings that have attributed each of these themes in Jackass to its particular historical and sociocultural context, this article argues that they are all ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"24 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135763397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures","authors":"Xu Xiao","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0538","url":null,"abstract":"As one of the forerunners of econarratology, Marco Caracciolo has been devoting himself to enriching the patterns and methods of this contextual approach to narratology. Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures, the final volume of his NARMESH trilogy, explores both formal and experiential dimensions of narrative through an ecological and ecocritical perspective and demonstrates “how reading narrative (or engaging with narrative in other media) may train audiences in the acceptance or embrace of ecological uncertainty as a fundamental dimension of the experience of the present” (ix).The book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a coda. Taking a cue from contemporary narrative theories, Caracciolo in the introduction brings out the idea of narrative’s “negotiation” of uncertainty in an era of ecological crisis. In his opinion, narrative can help us come to grips with an unknowable future, especially when the “ontological security” of our lives is fundamentally threatened (4). By offering formal tools, literary narrative can cultivate readers’ affective and ethical acceptance of uncertainty. Therefore, in the chapters thereafter, he aims to discover the types of stories that might be most effective in adapting readers to the instability of the future, and the aspects of those stories that should be focused on to cultivate readers’ embrace of uncertainty.In Chapter 1, “Uncertainty in the Future Tense,” Caracciolo begins with temporality, a fundamental dimension of narrative, to explore narrative’s engagement with uncertainty. Before detailed textual analysis, he urges us to grasp four distinct but interrelated aspects of temporality in the new era of climate change: futurity; individual as well as collective temporal experience; the narratological significance of telling a future-oriented story and future-tense narration and parallel storyworlds as narrative strategies in contemporary fiction but significantly different from those in postmodernist literature. Taking Jesse Kellerman’s Controller (2018) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts (2019) as case studies, Caracciolo identifies future-tense narration and parallel storyworld-building as experimental narrative forms attempting to represent the affective and imaginative complexity of the climate crisis and having the potential to foster readers’ embrace of uncertainty.Chapter 2, “Pathways to Unstable Worlds,” re-examines another fundamental parameter of narrative, spatiality. Caracciolo’s discussion begins with “storyworlds,” a concept introduced by David Herman to narratology and the basis for Erin James’s econarratology. He then proposes that the destabilization of (story)worlds can be represented in four aspects: oscillation, erasure, fragmentation, and floating. However, Caracciolo reiterates that these are not completely developed narrative types but adaptable formal devices existing in different genres and contexts, such as postmodernist works. Thou","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"36 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Stylistics, Narratology, and Point of View: Partiality, Complementarity, and a New Definition","authors":"Dan Shen","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0415","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Both stylistics and narratology pay much attention to point of view. This article discusses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and tries to clear up the various kinds of confusion involved. It argues that the different concerns of stylistics and narratology result in two partial pictures that are very much complementary to each other. Both partiality and complementarity call for a redefinition of point of view to facilitate a more comprehensive investigation.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Case of Literary Journalism: Rethinking Fictionality, Narrativity, and Imagination","authors":"Cecilia Aare","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0440","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses the genre of literary journalism/reportage against a background of earlier assumptions on fictionality. At a local level in nonfiction, fictionality can be expressed through invented stories and scenarios that create a contrast to the global, nonfictive context. However, fictionality can also be expressed through stylistic devices that traditionally have been associated with narrative fiction. A local contrast may appear, but only if the genre in itself is not narrative. If the focus is on the nonfictional and narrative genre of literary journalism/reportage, there will be no contrast. Here, the rhetoric will work just like in narrative fiction and should be considered to be part of the features of narrativity. Furthermore, the concept imagination should be perceived in close relation to Monika Fludernik’s understanding of narrative as experience. The conclusion is a call to partly rethink existing connections between fictionality, narrativity, and imagination in order to better understand the narrative nature of reportage.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"36 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aubrey de Vere’s Political Passions in His Sonnet on Milton Annotated by Landor","authors":"Tianhu Hao, William Baker","doi":"10.5325/style.57.4.0459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.4.0459","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) annotates one of Aubrey Thomas de Vere’s (1814–1902) sonnets as “Worthy of Milton.” By delving into a complex web of intertextuality, this article analyzes de Vere’s sonnet in the light of his literary criticism and from the perspective of Landor’s manuscript neglected note, interpreted via the useful link of William Wordsworth.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"36 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135764328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Graveyard Smash: Analyzing Embodied Memories in <i>Lincoln in the Bardo</i>","authors":"Cara Vorbeck","doi":"10.5325/style.57.3.0350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/style.57.3.0350","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of embodied memory in literary fiction and aims to illustrate some of the many angles from which it can be examined. After reviewing three different approaches to understanding embodied personal memory, it argues in line with contemporary perspectives on embodiment and 4E cognition (Caracciolo and Kukkonen) that a combined approach of cognitive and more traditional perspectives on the concept has significant benefits for analyzing embodied memories in literary texts. A case study of Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) is presented to illustrate these claims in practice. The analysis shows that a medial or symbolic approach to embodied memory cannot contain the novel’s complex bodies on its own and that a cognitive perspective adds an analytic layer which is essential to forming an understanding of its personal as well as collective mechanics of remembrance.","PeriodicalId":45300,"journal":{"name":"STYLE","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135053031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}