{"title":"D. H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective by Ben Stoltzfus (review)","authors":"Andrew Harrison","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921554","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"33 29","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140277110","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":"Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Un-making of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America by Korey Garibaldi (review)","authors":"Maureen T. Reddy","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921559","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"42 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140268003","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":"Elizabeth Bowen’s Grammar of Waning Empire","authors":"Wendi Bootes","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921549","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay theorizes a connection between referential instability and British imperial collapse in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Last September . It argues that the felt experiences of the rapidly shifting historical situation in Ireland must be understood through the novel’s linguistic indirection. By tracing the development of “enabling generalizations,” it shows how the novel’s dialogic language exposes the unstable nature of colonial identification—evidenced in the volatility of setting—while offering a formal strategy for grappling with that very instability.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"262 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140276875","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":"Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey (review)","authors":"R. E. Hosmer","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921555","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"169 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140278434","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":"Not Quite So Kind: Mrs. Dalloway and the Problem of Kindness","authors":"Anne E. Fernald","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2024.a921547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a921547","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: An exploration of the two senses of the word kind—“kind” as “of a piece” and “kind” as “amiable”—in Virginia Woolf. The essay focuses on Mrs. Dalloway , with reference to the short story “The Man Who Loved His Kind” and To the Lighthouse . Unlike goodness or beauty, kindness in Mrs. Dalloway operates as a conservative virtue, designed to reinforce social hierarchies and demand gratitude from the recipient. Kindness is not only demonstrated in action, but also in thought. Despite Woolf’s satire, Mrs. Dalloway retains a faith in what we might term “real kindness,” though examples of such kindness are rare.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"13 46","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140269853","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":"\"Recalling this\": Language and Irony in Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story","authors":"Jap-Nanak Kaur Makkar","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.a915963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.a915963","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay interprets Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story in relation to the history of irony, focusing particularly on the ideas of Paul de Man. By considering Gordimer's engagement with theory in essays she wrote during the novel's composition, I argue that she acquired an appreciation for the notion that language mediates one's relationship to reality; such a principle lets her develop the novel's ironic conceit. The effect of the novel is to shift attention away from ethical conundrums posed by oppression to problems of representation: an effect that helps us to understand certain features of theory.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"86 11","pages":"707 - 730"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139195118","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 Books on the Bedside Table: Re-Reading \"Mother\" in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime","authors":"Christina J. Lambert","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.a915961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.a915961","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the character of Mother in E. L. Doctorow's 1975 novel, Ragtime, through the lens of the literature that sits on her nightstand: an antisuffragist text by Molly Elliot Seawell and a pamphlet about family limitation by Margaret Sanger. Mother's character stands with one foot in the world of radical feminism and another in the milieu of antisuffragists. This context reframes her interactions with marginalized figures in the narrative and undermines her supposedly happy ending. Reading Mother in view of these texts makes her a dynamic character in the novel, revealing her inner life and agency.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"23 17","pages":"669 - 686"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139195059","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":"Queer Mrs. Ramsay, or Virginia Woolf's Geomorphic Family","authors":"Benjamin Bagocius","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.a915959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.a915959","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Widely regarded as a prototypical Victorian woman, Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse might also be read as embodying a surprisingly queer subjectivity. Drawing from the geological sciences and queer vitalist thought, I attend to Woolf's language for limning Mrs. Ramsay less gendered as a woman and more queered as a subject of lights and darks in motion. Woolf's father Leslie Stephen uses a similar lexicon to describe mountains in his acclaimed mountaineering tracts. Woolf borrows Stephen's mountaineering vocabulary to narrate queer subjectivities as more geological than gendered and thus loosens subjectivities from heteropatriarchal orthodoxy.","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"35 4","pages":"614 - 643"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139190267","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":"Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature by Mitchum Huehls (review)","authors":"Lee Konstantinou","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2023.a915968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2023.a915968","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":509181,"journal":{"name":"MFS Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"81 4","pages":"743 - 747"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139193432","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}