{"title":"Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle (review)","authors":"Lidan Lin","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"383 - 386"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78811934","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":"Ready Player One and the Reassertion of US Economic and Technological Supremacy","authors":"Claire Stanford","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay offers a geopolitical reading of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011), focusing on the novel's often-overlooked Japanese characters. While the novel is set in 2045, its narrative is an allegory for present-day global economic tensions between a recession-era US and a rising Asia. By reducing the novel's Japanese characters to premodern and postmodern Japanese tropes (the samurai and the hikikomori [shut-in]), Cline portrays Japan as an economic and technological threat that has been contained, and thus models a future in which American individualism wins out over Asian collectivism.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"75 1","pages":"201 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90678313","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":"Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout (review)","authors":"R. Millington","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":"386 - 389"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82396540","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":"Ali Smith's Parasitic Poetics","authors":"Liliane Campos","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the figure of the parasite in Ali Smith's fiction. Drawing on literary, political, and biological theorizations of the concept, I analyze the interaction between the parasite as narrative function and parasitism as social construction in \"The Hanging Girl,\" Hotel World, The Accidental, There But For The, Winter, and Spring. By examining the evolving role of this figure, I outline the gradual shift in Smith's poetics toward an ironic allegorical mode. In her recent novels, Smith uses cohabitation tropes to connect political satire with ecological paradigms, and targets failed mutualism as the ethical shortcoming of contemporary Britain.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"346 - 369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82662893","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":"29 1","pages":"399 - 402"},"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":"18 1","pages":"22 - 42"},"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":"46 1","pages":"43 - 63"},"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}
{"title":"Peripheral Labor","authors":"Christine Okoth","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay gives a literary account of contemporary capitalism's reliance on what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson refer to as differential inclusion through a focus on labor in contemporary Nigerian migrant fiction. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americanah and Lesley Nneka Arimah's short story \"Windfalls,\" characters find themselves occupying the economic peripheries of contemporary capitalism, oscillating between waged and unwaged work, formal and informal employment. As this essay demonstrates, the mechanisms of narrative peripheralization that these characters contend with also function as a means of maintaining an Anglophone, neoliberal, and value-producing vision of the African continent.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"117 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89976773","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":"Allegories of an Embattled Public: The Red Thread of the Modern Swedish Crime Novel","authors":"Phillip E. Wegner","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay takes up the red thread of the Swedish crime novel-Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck series (1965-75), Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels (1991-99 and 2009), and Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (2005-07)-through three forms of what Fredric Jameson terms cognitive mapping: realism, national allegory, and the allegorical encounter narrative. I do so in order to grasp, in new ways, the concrete labor, or symbolic actions, of these narratives, as they remold the content and form of their shared literary practice to respond to the dramatically changing global historical landscape in which they are located.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"238 1","pages":"141 - 172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76562703","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 Forms of Irish Modernism","authors":"Paul Stasi","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Reading James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman through Roberto Schwarz's notion of misplaced ideas, this essay demonstrates how these key works of Irish modernism formally mediate the experience of incongruity generated by Ireland's semiperipheral status. This experience is most visible when the characters grapple with the various discourses that do and do not describe their everyday realities. Thematizing questions of scale—and internalizing the dialectic of tradition and modernity out of which they emerge—the forms of Irish modernism reflect on the world economic system that conditions them.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"64 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80883990","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}