English Novel

‘“Style is Morality”? Aesthetics and Politics in the Amis Era’

by David James

Published in Textual Practice (2012)

Ian McEwan, SATURDAY

by José Angel García Landa

A review, in Spanish, of Ian McEwan's novel SATURDAY (2005) understood as an allegorical portrait of Western... more A review, in Spanish, of Ian McEwan's novel SATURDAY (2005) understood as an allegorical portrait of Western middle-class everyday experience and life-stories within the historical and cultural context of the early 21st century.

Shades of the Eighties: The Colour of Memory

by Joseph Brooker

“Spells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself”: The Chaotics of Memory and The Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars

by Andrew Wenaus

Forthcoming: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

This article is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s most recent novel Falling out of Cars (2002) as a literary... more This article is a study of British author Jeff Noon’s most recent novel Falling out of Cars (2002) as a literary experiment engaged in raising the ghost of the modern novel, long hailed as dead.  Here, Noon samples canonic literature then transforms, manipulates, and reconfigures it in much the same way a message is transformed when being passed through a communication circuit. The result is a kind of poetic prose Noon terms “metamorphiction”: an elegant experimental mode of fantasy in which signs mutate within certain systemic parameters.  In metamorphiction, the textual past literally haunts the textual present.  This formal experiment is mirrored in the content: the novel concerns a middle aged woman mourning the death of her daughter.  Ultimately, Falling out of Cars is both a virtuosic piece of fantastic fiction and a serious meditation on the contemporary state of the novel.     

Reading Female Readers: The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism

by Marta Kvande

Jane Barker's Exilius: Politics, Women, Narration, and the Public

by Marta Kvande

Tourism as a Destructive Force in E. M. Forster’s Early “Italian” Fiction

by Krzysztof Fordonski

Submitted for publication in "The Linguistic Academy Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies".

The article begins with a brief presentation of the presence of English tourists in Italy, starting from the tradition... more The article begins with a brief presentation of the presence of English tourists in Italy, starting from the tradition of the Grand Tour to the mass tourism beginning in the mid-19th century. One of the English tourists who arrived in Italy was Edward Morgan Forster. The article concentrates on the influence of Italy upon Forster’s oeuvre, drawing upon the writer’s memoirs and speeches. This part of the article concentrates upon the image of Italy to be found in Forster’s works, often neglected in critical writings. The main part of the article is an analysis of his short story “The Eternal Moment” presented as an early example of the critical attitude towards the unexpected results of intercultural contacts. The analysis concentrates upon the multifaceted introduction of motifs connected with destruction brought unconsciously by foreign tourists.

Expiación y adaptación (Sobre "Atonement", de Ian McEwan y Joe Wright)

by José Angel García Landa

Atonement and Adaptation (on Ian McEwan's Novel and Joe Wright's Film)
   
This is a review of... more Atonement and Adaptation (on Ian McEwan's Novel and Joe Wright's Film)
   
This is a review of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001), with special attention to its narrative structure, and of the 2007 film Atonement directed by Joe Wright, discussing some issues specific to the filmic adaptation of this novel's metafictional structure.

Keywords: Literature, English novel, McEwan, Atonement, Adaptation, Reflexivity, Metafiction,

Literary Studies: A Computer Assisted Teaching Methodology

by Jon Mills

Co-authored with B. Chandramohan.
Published (1996) in Computers & the Humanities XXX.2 pp. 165-170. ISSN 0010-4817.

We used TACT computer software to teach Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness to BA (Hons) students at the... more We used TACT computer software to teach Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness to BA (Hons) students at the University of Luton in England. Conrad's novel is one of the texts used in the 'Language and New Literatures'modules (units). In these modules we combine analytical approaches to literary texts with linguistic methods. We used TACT to reinforce the understanding of the text of Heart of Darkness achieved through such a combination of methods. An exposure to the computer-based approaches to the text described in this article made the students' interaction with the text a more complex and rewarding experience.

Gothic Novel; Horror Fiction

by José Angel García Landa

Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH

by José Angel García Landa

Co-authored with Beatriz Penas Ibáñez. Published in ." In "NEW" EXOTICISMS: CHANGING PATTERNS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF OTHERNESS. Ed. Isabel Santaolalla. (Postmodern Studies, 29). Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.

This paper analyses Salman Rushdie's novel THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH (1995) as a postmodernist text emphasising the role of... more This paper analyses Salman Rushdie's novel THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH (1995) as a postmodernist text emphasising the role of narrative voice and of intertextuality within the intepretive act, and their implications for the study of intercultural understanding, the postmodern treatment of the exotic, of truth, and of the constructedness of the subject. Intertextuality becomes a central literary strategy whose function is to accomodate a multiplicity of cultural discourses and to articulate a postcolonial perspective on exoticism. In THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, Rushdie acknowledges the cultural and historical positioning of the reading and writing of narrative fiction, and reflects on the nature of the limits between the visual and verbal text as well as the more general one between fiction and history, and uses his individual historical locus (the aftermath of the Rushdie affair) in order to play with the generic frames activated in reading different kinds of texts.

Literacies of Violence after Things Fall Apart

by Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi

A Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Empire: Robert Tressell in South Africa

by Jonathan Hyslop

Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives

by Brian Cowan

forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel, J.A. Downie, ed., (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming)

The two most influential works for the study of eighteenth-century literary culture in the last half century must... more The two most influential works for the study of eighteenth-century literary culture in the last half century must surely be Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) and Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). 

This chapter discusses the influence of both Watt and Habermas on studies of the novel and the public sphere, and it explores the reasons for the endurance of their arguments despite decades of substantial criticism devoted to their interpretative shortcomings. 

It also explains the emergence of a post-Habermasian approach to the history of public making in response to these criticisms.  It concludes by discussing how recent post-Habermasian studies of news culture and political partisanship may illuminate the history of the origins of the English novel.

Keywords: 

Jürgen Habermas, Ian Watt, public sphere, novels, print culture, news, journalism, partisanship, publics

“‘Know the Past: know thyself’ – die Gattung der metafiktionalen Biographie als alternativer Zugang zur Vergangenheit.“

by Lena Steveker

IN: Jenseits des Poststrukturalismus? Eine Sondierung. Ed. Marcel Lepper, Steffen Siegel, Sophie Wennerscheid. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2005. 105-26.

“Imagining the Other – An Ethical Reading of A.S. Byatt’s Possession and The Biographer’s Tale.”

by Lena Steveker

IN: The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction Since the 1960’S. Ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 117-130.

As metafictional biographies, A. S. Byatt's Possession and The Biographer's Tale are literary experiments in the genre... more As metafictional biographies, A. S. Byatt's Possession and The Biographer's Tale are literary experiments in the genre of biography. Questioning the possibility of biographical accuracy and historical objectivity, they revolve around the problem of biographical ‘truth’. While emphasising the importance of biographical imagination, both novels discuss imagination as a potentially appropriating act in which the biographer runs the risk of subjecting the biographee to her/his own perspective. The novels differentiate between respectful and disrespectful biographical imagination, thus establishing ‘respect’ as an ethical category which regards the biographee as an ‘other’, a totally separate individual.

“‘My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have’: A.S. Byatt’s Female Artists”.

by Lena Steveker

commissioned for: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing. Ed. Annette Pankratz and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz. Special Issue of Anglistik und Englischunterricht. Heidelberg: Winter (forthcoming).

“‘You must recover your speech at once:’ Silence and Trauma in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy.”

by Lena Steveker

IN: Proceedings: Anglistentag 2009 Klagenfurt. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Trier: WVT, 2010. 453-461.

available for free download from www.wvttrier.de (click on "Anglistentag 2009 / Klagenfurt").

Pat Baker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995) represents WWI from what could be called a home-front perspective. Barker... more Pat Baker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995) represents WWI from what could be called a home-front perspective. Barker focuses on traumatised soldiers undergoing treatment for ‘shell-shock,’ a phenomenon nowadays known as post-traumatic stress disorder. In her stories of trauma, which do not foreground the war itself, but rather its devastating effects on the human psyche, silence is a recurring issue. As I will argue in my paper, silence is first of all depicted as a symptom of ‘shell-shock,’ as for example in the case of Billy Prior, one of Barker’s protagonists, who is sent home because a gruesome event in the trenches has robbed him off his ability to speak. Within this context, silence is represented not only as a strategy of repressing traumatic memories, but also as an act of defiance as soldiers who return from the front either mute or stammering are shown to unconsciously rebel against the slaughter caused by industrialised warfare. Breaking the soldiers’ silence thus turns out to be inherently ambiguous as it implies both healing and oppression.
What is more, Barker employs silence as a marker of both gender and class. Having the neurologist and social anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers repeatedly elaborate on the British class system and on the effects the war has on male self-fashioning, the novels argue that trench warfare forces soldiers into the role of the silenced other which patriarchy has traditionally ascribed to women. In short, Barker’s Regeneration trilogy uses the aspect of silence to link its discussion of trauma to the crisis of masculinity brought about by WWI, thus providing a fictional meta-commentary upon the impact WWI had on British society and culture.

“Reading Trauma in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy.”

by Lena Steveker

IN: Trauma and Ethics in British Literature Since the 1960s. Ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. 21-36.

It is impossible to understand the 20th century without knowing about its “seminal catastrophe” as the American... more It is impossible to understand the 20th century without knowing about its “seminal catastrophe” as the American historian George F. Kennan famously described WWI. Indeed, this war, which the British still call the “Great War”, claims a prominent position in British cultural memory not least because of the horrors of trench warfare and the unprecedented losses it cost.
Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995) is intricately engaged in investigating the impact of WWI on British society and culture. It does so by depicting the war from something which might be called a “home-front” perspective, focusing on a semi-fictional canvas of characters, most of them officers of the British army sent back from the French trenches for treatment of what was known by the term “shell-shock”. Not only do Parker’s novels retrace the crisis of masculinity expressed in “shell-shock”, they also deal with the traumatic experiences of WWI soldiers, depicting them as deeply detrimental to the human psyche. Especially The Eye in the Door (1993), the second novel of Parker’s trilogy, is a case in point. Drawing on the image of the split personality fed into the cultural imaginary by Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Parker’s novel frames the experience of a whole generation of British soldiers as one in which survival makes it necessary to split one’s personality, to develop another self capable of dealing with and committing the atrocities of industrialised warfare. What is more, The Eye in the Door outlines an ethics of recognition that forces the traumatised self to acknowledge and accept the otherness within oneself brought about by WWI. Based on a concept of identity in which the subject radically experiences himself as both self and other, Parker’s novel indicates an ethical strategy of negotiating trauma.

“‘Your soul is whole and completely your own, Harry’: The Heroic Self in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.”

by Lena Steveker

IN: Heroism in the Harry Potter Series. Ed. Katrin Berndt and Lena Steveker. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 69-83.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is deeply indebted to the tradition of Gothic literature. Not only are the novels... more J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is deeply indebted to the tradition of Gothic literature. Not only are the novels set in an enchanted castle complete with ghosts and hidden chambers, they also heavily depend on two key motifs of the Gothic tradition – the doppelganger and the split character.
Voldemort is set up as Harry’s doppelganger; due to the parallel structures used to construct both characters; he functions as Harry’s dark mirror image. In addition, Voldemort is represented as a split character in the very sense of the word since he has split his soul into seven Horcruxes, with which he hopes to defeat mortality. Harry is also sketched as a split character as he loses control over his own consciousness from time to time and enters Voldemort’s mind. In short, Voldemort and Harry can be seen as two rewritings of conventional stereotypes of the Gothic tradition.
However, the motif of the split character has an additional function in the Harry Potter series because it can be analysed to negotiate a specific concept of self as well as the relationship between self and ‘other’ which Rowling’s texts outline. As this essay will argue, her novels – especially Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) – conceptualise the self as a closed unity. Harry eventually succeeds in establishing his self when he is eventually able to purge himself from the part of Voldemort’s soul lodging inside himself. Since their hero is established as a separate, autonomous self, the novels can be seen to enter the philosophical discourse of ethics that negotiates the relationship between self and other. In contrast to such influential late 20th-century philosophers as Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, Rowling constructs a concept of self that denies any connection between self and ‘other.’ The Harry Potter series rather privileges a humanist notion of self which can only be called nostalgic from the perspective of 21st-century literary and cultural criticism.