{"title":"Better Futures Needed","authors":"Simon J. James","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Both of the books reviewed consider the contemporaneity and the current relevance of the literary utopia and dystopia. Adam Stock's Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought traces the history of the dystopia by examining both well-known and less familiar twentieth-century literary texts, demonstrating how they provoke a counterfactual reflection on the social and cultural politics of their readers' present. Caroline Edwards's Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel focusses on more recent literary fiction, tracing themes of hopefulness and community as forms of resistance to hegemonic capitalism.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87836166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg (review)","authors":"Steve Tomasula","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"folk practices with cutting-edge research” (183). While noting that Joyce found Russell’s concerns for food security in times of war and emphasis on older farming techniques to be tainted with nationalist mythologizing, Martell also acknowledges Russell’s agriculturally informed expertise. In contrast to Russell, Joyce’s characters enjoy imported “weak tea” (195) and “sugared white bread,” thumbing their nose at “Revitalist milk drinkers” like Russell. Martell presents an astute reading of how Ulysses’s infamous penchant for gustatory, abject bodily profusions—in all its rule-breaking, defiant splurge of abundantly inclusive populations—should be read as an example of defying social control to rewrite famine scarcity as profundity. Her analysis of the “‘Oxen’ episode” (202) keenly illustrates how “Joyce triangulates food, birth, and death in an arrangement that positions sterility as slaughter and carnality as life-giving” by using Thomas Carlyle as an ironic speaker who imbues images of vegetables with sterility in contrast to the “red, raw, bleeding” beef fed to expectant mothers. This scene is then related to Odysseus’s sacrifice of divine cattle in defiance of Zeus, allowing Martell to show how these strategies rewrite Irish defiance of the British “gods of empire” (203). Farm to Form’s coda, “From a Morning World,” playfully combines scenes of milking with homages to modern-world pagan presences that appear in multiple authors’ texts, suggesting alternating energies of loss and promise. Using Joyce’s homophones mourning and morning as touchstones, Martell reminds us that the fraught modernist struggles with industrial food production, control, and farming resilience are poignantly relevant today. Indeed, the cultural and literary revelations within Farm to Table provide important insight for contemporary readers as we reckon with the capitalist forces mandating farming production goals amidst the threat of global climate change and food scarcity.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81791336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tragedy and the Modernist Novel by Manya Lempert (review)","authors":"G. Hankins","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83470386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Race, Gender, and \"Real Brains\": Interrogating Unreliability in Nella Larsen's Passing","authors":"V. Román","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes narrative reliability in Nella Larsen's Passing by putting it in the context of early-twentieth-century ideas about gendered modernity and the scientific racism of eugenics discourse. Larsen's use of focalization—the formal separation of narrating voice and focalizing consciousness—illuminates how bias against raced and gendered subjects are naturalized in ascriptions of reliability. Through such formal strategies, Passing asks readers to interrogate the systems of oppression the novel's Black women navigate, making visible the frame structures (both narrative and sociopolitical) that function to undermine their articulations of independence and intelligence.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80102832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Behind Barriers, Living a Man's Life: Imperial Masculinity in Graham Greene's \"The Basement Room\" and The Fallen Idol","authors":"Elizabeth Floyd","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Graham Greene's short story, \"The Basement Room\" (1936), and its later film adaptation, The Fallen Idol (1948), tell the story of how a young boy realizes the fallibility of his childhood hero. Although Greene has been lambasted as a middlebrow writer, his work offers an important critique of the lasting influence of imperial gender roles during the mid-twentieth century. Using the perspective of a young boy, the two works critique the Orwellian decent man as irrelevant and a façade for imperialism, insisting that the perpetuation of this form of middle-class English masculinity leads to individual alienation and self-destruction.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83777110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland (review)","authors":"Marshall Boswell","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76849981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cosmopolis, Civility, and the Practice of Heretical History in Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land","authors":"Rajeshwari S. Vallury","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:My essay argues that Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land (1992) constitutes an aesthetico-political reflection on a form of citizenship in the world; a way of sharing and taking part in it through a mode of freedom and equality. Conjoining Étienne Balibar's concepts of civility and heresy to Jacques Rancière's formulation of the dissensual logic of fiction, I study the incongruous cosmopolitics of Ghosh's text. Analyzing its poetics and politics of knowledge, I argue for the capacity of fiction to etch heretical forms of subjectivation that diverge from what Balibar designates as the anthropology of the (modern) political subject.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88603161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago (review)","authors":"J. Welge","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88753427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Aesthetics of the Oppressed: Oil and Capitalism in Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt","authors":"Rayah AlRaddadi","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt and its realist representation of the Arabian Peninsula'smassive transformation after the advent of oil. Deploying a Lukácsian materialist analysis attuned to literary and historical development, this essay shows—through asking fundamental questions regarding the relationship between literary production, oil, and global capitalism—how Munif is situated within the postcolonial alternative tradition. By delineating what can be described as an aesthetics of the oppressed, this essay offers a unique perspective on crucial issues such as labor exploitation, individual alienation, social inequality, and urban deprivation.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82494045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cognitive Maps of the Semiperiphery: Two Bengali Novels and the Transition to Colonial Capitalist Modernity","authors":"Sandeep Banerjee","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The essay focuses on two Bengali novels—Bankim Chandra Chatterji's Anandamath (1882) and Rabindranath Tagore's Gora (1909)—to reflect on how they register Bengal's transition to colonial capitalist modernity. It begins by discussing the novels' portrayal of the famine of 1769-73 and the Indigo Revolt, specific events from Bengal's colonial history. It then examines the novels' formal peculiarities to understand their mediation of Bengal's experience of transition. Arguing that the novels signal a crisis of praxis, the essay posits that how the texts each resolve this crisis illuminates a divergent conception of politics.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81611406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}