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Novels
Selected AbstractsSelim's Sisters: Muslim Women in Novels by Uwe Timm and Hermann SchulzGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2010Monika Albrecht ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the fact that German writers with a German background do not seem to be very interested in casting Germans with a migrant background as their literary characters, this paper focuses on two of the rare exceptions that deal with Muslim women of Turkish origin, Uwe Timm's,Rot,(2001) and Hermann Schulz's,Iskender,(1999). In discussing these novels, I am mostly interested in the way these writers take part in current debates on Muslims in Western societies and in how they engage in their specific vision of a multicultural Germany. The results are at least twofold; on the one hand one has to conclude that both Hermann Schulz and Uwe Timm are dividing Muslims into good and bad, desired and not desired; on the other hand their novels also provide facets of a counter image and introduce largely unfamiliar aspects , which can count as a major achievement in the light of the prevailing idea of the Islamic world in the imagination of the German public. Ethnische Minderheiten sind selten in Werken von einheimischen Schriftstellern zu finden. Vor diesem Hintergrund konzentriert sich der vorliegende Essay auf zwei der wenigen Ausnahmen, Uwe Timms Roman,Rot,(2001) and Hermann Schulz',Iskender,(1999), in denen türkisch-muslimische Frauen Teil des literarischen Ensembles sind. Das Interesse gilt insbesondere der Art und Weise, wie ihre Autoren an gegenwärtigen Debatten über Muslime in westlichen Gesellschaften Teil haben, und es wird nach ihrer Vision eines multikulturellen Deutschland gefragt, wie es in den Texten zum Ausdruck kommt. Dabei fällt auf, dass Muslime sowohl bei Hermann Schulz als auch bei Uwe Timm in gute und schlechte, erwünschte und weniger erwünschte aufgeteilt werden. Andererseits entwerfen die Romane jedoch auch Gegenbilder und beziehen Aspekte ein, die der Mehrheit der Deutschen nicht vertraut sind , was angesichts gängiger Vorstellungen über die islamische Lebenswelt als bemerkenswerter Beitrag zur Multikulturalismusdebatte gelten kann. [source] Talkin''Bout My Generation :Memories of 1968 in Recent German NovelsGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 2 2006Monika Shafi This article examines the depiction of 1968 in the novel Rot (2001) by Uwe Timm, in the narrative Mein Jahrhundert (1999) by Günter Grass, and in the autobiographical novel Die Brücke vom goldenen Horn (1998) by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, asking to what extent the concept of generation, understood sociologically and symbolically, is useful in analysing West Germany's 1968 generation and its legacy. The three authors display not only contrasting generational, literary and political profiles, they also entertain a different relationship to German mainstream culture. It becomes clear that Özdamar's novel unsettles precisely this dichotomy between the German mainstream and a multicultural niche-discourse in its intense engagement with the 1968 movement in Germany and Europe. Her text therefore invites us to reconsider the value of the generational parameter in assessing the events of 1968. [source] The American Indian in German Novels Up To The 1850sGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 4 2000Wynfrid Kriegleder A close look at a number of early German novels about the USA (e.g. Sophie von La Roche, Erscheinungen am See Oneida, 1798: Henriette Frölich, Virginia oder Die Kolonie von Kentucky, 1820; Charles Sealsfield, Der Legitime und die Repunlikaner, 1833; Jogann Christoph Biernatzki, Der braune Knabe, 1839) reveals that they hardly ever portray Indians as noble savages in an enviable state of nature - the image prevailing in many late nineteenth-century novels (e.g. by Karl May) that tend to sympathise with the Indians' lot and even suggest a peculiar affinity between them and the Germans. On the contrary, the earlier novels wholeheartedly embrace the notion that the bast continent of Northern America is there to be civilised - which is to say: Europeanised. The Indians are considered as representatives of a lower social and cultural order that will either voluntarily join the new, European order of things or else disappear. [source] Interpreting the self: Two hundred years of American autobiography; The book of the heart; The economy of character: Novels, market culture, and the business of inner meaning; Romantic science and the experience of self: Transatlantic cross-currents from William James to Oliver Sacks (Studies in European Cultural Transition.JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 4 2001No abstract is available for this article. [source] Outside Looking In: Material Culture in Gaskell's Industrial NovelsORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 5 2000Christoph Lindner This essay looks at material culture from the production end of the economic cycle in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and North and South where, as an elusive luxury glimpsed only in passing, the consumption of commodities remains oddly and conspicuously absent. Gaskell's writing, that is, shows not so much commodity culture, but the industrial and social conditions required to underwrite it, the human machinery of an industrial market economy. In particular, the essay examines Gaskell's response to the reifying influence of the commodity on productive society and the ways in which industrial conditions serve as a matrix for human relations. In Gaskell, the commodity and its attendant cultural practices have an alienating and dehumanizing influence on society's productive membership. The novels, however, resist that influence every step of the way, investigating ways in which to restore humanity and so reconcile a fractured society. [source] Fitzgerald and the Influence of Film: The Language of Cinema in the Novels by Gautam KunduTHE F. SCOTT FITZGERALD REVIEW, Issue 1 2009SCOTT D. YARBROUGH No abstract is available for this article. [source] The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels: Includes Exclusive Graphic Novel by Danny FingerothTHE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN CULTURE, Issue 2 2009Ray B. Browne No abstract is available for this article. [source] The Cinematic Jane Austen: Essays on the Filmic Sensibility of the NovelsTHE JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE, Issue 4 2010Beth Kowaleski Wallace No abstract is available for this article. [source] Pink Sugary Pleasures: Reading the Novels of O. DouglasTHE JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE, Issue 1 2001Debbie Sly First page of article [source] Neurology in Thomas Mann's NovelsACTA NEUROLOGICA SCANDINAVICA, Issue 6 2003Halfdan Kierulf First page of article [source] The Strict Maze of Media Tie-In NovelsCOMMUNICATION, CULTURE & CRITIQUE, Issue 4 2009M. J. Clarke First page of article [source] Selim's Sisters: Muslim Women in Novels by Uwe Timm and Hermann SchulzGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2010Monika Albrecht ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the fact that German writers with a German background do not seem to be very interested in casting Germans with a migrant background as their literary characters, this paper focuses on two of the rare exceptions that deal with Muslim women of Turkish origin, Uwe Timm's,Rot,(2001) and Hermann Schulz's,Iskender,(1999). In discussing these novels, I am mostly interested in the way these writers take part in current debates on Muslims in Western societies and in how they engage in their specific vision of a multicultural Germany. The results are at least twofold; on the one hand one has to conclude that both Hermann Schulz and Uwe Timm are dividing Muslims into good and bad, desired and not desired; on the other hand their novels also provide facets of a counter image and introduce largely unfamiliar aspects , which can count as a major achievement in the light of the prevailing idea of the Islamic world in the imagination of the German public. Ethnische Minderheiten sind selten in Werken von einheimischen Schriftstellern zu finden. Vor diesem Hintergrund konzentriert sich der vorliegende Essay auf zwei der wenigen Ausnahmen, Uwe Timms Roman,Rot,(2001) and Hermann Schulz',Iskender,(1999), in denen türkisch-muslimische Frauen Teil des literarischen Ensembles sind. Das Interesse gilt insbesondere der Art und Weise, wie ihre Autoren an gegenwärtigen Debatten über Muslime in westlichen Gesellschaften Teil haben, und es wird nach ihrer Vision eines multikulturellen Deutschland gefragt, wie es in den Texten zum Ausdruck kommt. Dabei fällt auf, dass Muslime sowohl bei Hermann Schulz als auch bei Uwe Timm in gute und schlechte, erwünschte und weniger erwünschte aufgeteilt werden. Andererseits entwerfen die Romane jedoch auch Gegenbilder und beziehen Aspekte ein, die der Mehrheit der Deutschen nicht vertraut sind , was angesichts gängiger Vorstellungen über die islamische Lebenswelt als bemerkenswerter Beitrag zur Multikulturalismusdebatte gelten kann. [source] MEMORY, AMNESIA AND IDENTITY IN HERMANN BROCH'S SCHLAFWANDLER TRILOGYGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 2 2008Graham Bartram ABSTRACT Through its three novels, set in 1888, 1903 and 1918, Broch's Schlafwandler trilogy traces a progressive fragmentation of social values in late modernity. This article investigates a key marker of this fragmentation: the figuration of individual and collective memory, which undergoes a radical shift between Part I and Part III. In Part I the depiction of memory engages the reader with the protagonist's psychological and moral conflicts and the formation of his individual identity. In Part II memory features as abstract and collective, in allegorical meditations on man's existence in time; in Part III the theme of remembering is largely displaced by that of amnesia, emphasising the isolation of the individual in the era of ,Wertzerfall'. This depiction of cultural disintegration is, however, counterbalanced by the symbolic unity of Die Schlafwandler, whose aesthetic structures play an essential part in what Broch saw as the novel's ,cognitive' task. Here memory features within the reading process itself. To conclude we examine some of the trilogy's densely intersecting leitmotifs that activate the reader's memory in defiance of disintegration and amnesia, and thereby contribute a vital element to the realisation of the ,cognitive novel'. [source] ,Zum Ruhme Englands': The ,Vorgeschichte' of the Nazi Film TitanicGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 2 2007Gerwin Strobl ABSTRACT This article examines the background to the Nazi film ,Titanic'. Commissioned by the Propaganda Ministry in 1940, at the height of war with Britain, the film was able to draw on extensive German engagement with the fate of the ,R.M.S. Titanic', stretching back to the original newspaper reports of April 1912. The sinking of the ,Titanic' had made a deeper impression in Germany than in other European countries, perhaps because a substantial number of the victims were in fact German or had ties with Germany. The extent of the emotional engagement showed not only in the tone of the newspaper reporting but in the sheer range of tributes that appeared in Germany: newspapers apart, there were films, paintings, poems, novels, lectures or even children's toys. The enduring interest in the ,Titanic' throughout the 1920s and 30s may explain the propagandists' decision to exploit the topic for Nazi purposes. Widespread German unease about the apparent preference given to first-class passengers during the rescue operation and rumours of financial improprieties surrounding the owners of the ,Titanic' made the topic especially attractive to the Nazis. Ultimately, however, the favourable German perceptions of ,heroic British seamanship' undermined the Nazi film and led Goebbels to restrict its release. [source] The Mystery of Feilenhauer Torgelow: Fontane's Elusive Social DemocratGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 3 2004Scott Tatchell As Günter Grass (among others) has highlighted, Theodor Fontane's Der Stechlin is one of the first German novels to feature a social-democratic politician. This article examines the character of Torgelow, who is elected to the Reichstag. Anything we learn about Torgelow is always at one remove, by way of other characters. He never features directly in the narrative, and remains a mysterious figure. After summarising the political backdrop against which the novel is set and providing a brief overview of Fontane's own attitude to the SPD, the article argues that pragmatic concerns and Fontane's burgeoning interest in the party combine to explain Torgelow's inclusion. Subsequently, Torgelow's abstract characterisation is explained as a consequence of Fontane's desire to portray the fear, loathing and ignorance inherent in bourgeois and aristocratic attitudes towards the party. The argument that Torgelow is a mere cipher for the party is rejected. Instead, Torgelow should be seen in the wider context of Fontane's depiction of the SPD as a whole. Overall, the article argues that the character of Torgelow provides a means for Fontane to acknowledge the SPD's rise, to suggest that its predominance will be of finite duration, and to oppose the party's persecution. [source] The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: Maternity, Agency and Community in Women's Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980sGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2002Emily Jeremiah This article puts forth the idea of ,maternal performativity' as a way of going beyond pre-existing feminist conceptions of maternal agency. ,Agency' is important because, as numerous feminists have pointed out, the mother in Western culture has traditionally been conceived as passive and mute. I argue that challenging the traditional public/private divide is vital to the project of developing and enacting this maternal performativity, as the novels in question demonstrate. Where this opposition is left unquestioned, the texts suggest, mothers are marginal to the point of abjection. I look firstly at three texts in which mothers are depicted as utterly abject (Elsner, Pedretti, Beutler), then at two in which the idea of maternal agency is approached but ultimately jettisoned in favour of a resigned kind of essentialism (Struck and Frischmuth), and finally at one in which the mother is active and performative, but is still shown as hampered by traditional structures (Schroeder). The novels, and my article, thus performatively reveal the need for a maternal performativity to be acknowledged and practised. [source] The American Indian in German Novels Up To The 1850sGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 4 2000Wynfrid Kriegleder A close look at a number of early German novels about the USA (e.g. Sophie von La Roche, Erscheinungen am See Oneida, 1798: Henriette Frölich, Virginia oder Die Kolonie von Kentucky, 1820; Charles Sealsfield, Der Legitime und die Repunlikaner, 1833; Jogann Christoph Biernatzki, Der braune Knabe, 1839) reveals that they hardly ever portray Indians as noble savages in an enviable state of nature - the image prevailing in many late nineteenth-century novels (e.g. by Karl May) that tend to sympathise with the Indians' lot and even suggest a peculiar affinity between them and the Germans. On the contrary, the earlier novels wholeheartedly embrace the notion that the bast continent of Northern America is there to be civilised - which is to say: Europeanised. The Indians are considered as representatives of a lower social and cultural order that will either voluntarily join the new, European order of things or else disappear. [source] ALL THIS HAPPENED, MORE OR LESS: WHAT A NOVELIST MADE OF THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN,HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2009ANN RIGNEY ABSTRACT Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was a popular and critical success when it first appeared, and has had a notable impact on popular perceptions of "the bombing of Dresden," although it has been criticized by historians because of its inaccuracy. This article analyzes the novel's quirky, comic style and its generic mixture of science fiction and testimony, showing how Vonnegut consistently used ingenuous understatement as a way of imaginatively engaging his readers with the horrors of war. The article argues that the text's aesthetics are closer to those of graphic novels than of realist narratives and that, accordingly, we can understand its cultural impact only by approaching it as a highly artificial linguistic performance with present-day appeal and contemporary relevance, and not merely by measuring the degree to which it gives a full and accurate mimesis of past events. The article uses the case of Vonnegut to advance a more general argument that builds on recent work in cultural memory studies: in order to understand the role that literature plays in shaping our understanding of history, it needs to be analyzed in its own terms and not as a mere derivative of historiography according to a "one model fits all" approach. Furthermore, we need to shift the emphasis from products to processes by considering both artistic and historiographical practices as agents in the ongoing circulation across different cultural domains of stories about the past. Theoretical reflection should account for the fact that historiography and the various arts play distinct roles in this cultural dynamics, and while they compete with one another, they also converge, bounce off one another, influence one another, and continuously beg to be different. [source] History and Story: Unconventional History in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and James A. Michener's Tales of the South PacificHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2002Madhumalati Adhikari "Literary history" is a cross between conventional (scientific) history and pure fiction. The resulting hybrid provides access to history that the more conventional sort does not (in particular, a sense of the experiences of the historical actors, and the human meaning of historical events). This claim is demonstrated by an analysis of two novels about World War II, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, and Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. These two very different novels in English are by writers themselves very different from each other, writers from different times, different social and political backgrounds, and different points of view. Their novels examine the effects of the Second World War and the events of 1942 on the human psyche, and suggest how human beings have always searched for the silver lining despite the devastation and devaluation of values. Both novels resist any kind of preaching, and yet the search for peace, balance, and kindness is constantly highlighted. The facts of scientific history are woven into the loom of their unconventional histories. The sense of infirmity created by the formal barriers of traditional history is eased, and new possibilities for historical understanding are unveiled. [source] Book-History Approaches to India: Representations of the Subcontinent in the Novel and Verse, 1780,1823HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2010Ashok Malhotra Literary representations of India in verse and novels written by British authors during the period 1780,1823 have been approached by contemporary scholars either from the postcolonial perspective of relating the fiction to the shifting relationship between colonizer or colonized, or to correlating portrayals to elitist political debates taking place within the metropole. The argument proposes that forthcoming scholarship should adopt a book-history approach to the topic which would add an important contextual dimension to the readings of fictional texts and understanding of a whole set of British cultural attitudes towards Indians. To this end, it proposes that further critical analysis of British India fictions could situate recurring tropes about India in relation to the demands and prevailing fashions of the literary marketplace, and determine how the varying perceived cultural status and the internal development of the two literary modes affect portrayals of the subcontinent. [source] Searching for Sacajawea: Whitened Reproductions and Endarkened RepresentationsHYPATIA, Issue 2 2007Wanda Pillow Pillow's aim is to demonstrate how representations of Sacajawea have shifted in writings about the Lewis and Clark expedition in ways that support manifest destiny and white colonial projects. This essay begins with a general account of Sacajawea. The next section uses two novels (one hundred years apart) to make the case that shifts in the representation of this important historical figure serve similar purposes. There is some attention to white suffragist representations, but the central contrast is between manifest destiny and multiculturalism. The final section addresses the important question of whether it is possible for feminists to theorize Sacajawea in ways that are not co-opted by colonial projects. [source] A Critical Study of ComicsINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ART & DESIGN EDUCATION, Issue 2 2001Jeff Adams The paper describes a project for Liverpool John Moores University PGCE Art and Design students in which they carried out practical research into comics and graphic novels as part of their preparation for teaching. The students were encouraged to investigate the history of the genre, its formal properties as well as its potential as a vehicle for social realism. The practical task was to prepare a single comic book page design, in the course of which they explored a range of possibilities from imaginative children's stories to serious issues such as illness and abuse. They took the opportunity to investigate the potential of this sequential medium to construct narratives using devices such as sequence, repetition and multiple perspectives as well as the juxtapositions of image and text. The paper contains examples of students' work where the investigations yielded interesting and innovative results. [source] Concept, Image and Story in Systematic TheologyINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Issue 1 2009PAUL S. FIDDES This article enquires about the place of ,aesthetic theology' within the conceptual enterprise of systematic theology. If narrative theology is to be of any help in answering the question, it will have to include an appeal to extra-biblical images and stories in its method, and will also need to relate metaphor to some kind of analogy and metaphysics (carefully defined). Working from a theological basis in doctrines of revelation and canon, poems and novels outside the Bible may thus be seen to contribute to systematic theology in at least three ways: in deciding between concepts, in enabling connections to be made between concepts, and in developing the Christian story for the present age. Finally, the concept of God as ,relational being' is explored as an example of aesthetic forms of theological discourse, connecting everyday religious speech to systematic theology with an ,analogy of relations'. [source] Peopling Skilled International Migration: Indian Doctors in the UKINTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 1 2000Vaughan Robinson This article uses a case-study approach in relation to the migration of Indian doctors to the UK in order to illustrate the complexity and multi-levelled nature of explanations for international migration. It argues that whereas, at the level of discursive consciousness, the movement of Indian doctors to the UK appears an economically driven and shapedphenomenon akin to other examples of highly skilled international migration, when the practical consciousness of participants is investigated through qualitative methods, the migration can also be seen as a cultural and social phenomenon. Although migrants move to "better themselves", they also make choices based on factors such as the kind of novels they read as children or "taken for granted" familial obligations rooted in the everyday life of their culture. [source] The Trollopian Geopolitical AestheticLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 9 2010Lauren M. E. Goodlad Trollope's reputation as a formally dull post-1848 realist persists even though the period of his Palliser series (1864,1879) was characterized by intense political and imperial dynamism. While most of Trollope's novels during this period exemplify a historically engaged realism, The Eustace Diamonds is distinct for its rare meditation on empire in South Asia,a topic that Trollope seems purposely to have avoided. Trollope's fourth Palliser novel captures the vexed ethics of a so-called liberal imperialism through two classic characters,Lucy Morris and Lord Fawn,and their interactions with the Sawab of Mygawb, a "non-character"who marks the novel's geopolitical unconscious. But the novel's most formally distinct features revolve around representation of Lizzie Eustace, who figures Trollope's uneasiness over the New Imperial era's neo-feudal aesthetics. Trollope associated the New Imperialism with Benjamin Disraeli whose Jewish ethnicity he tied to a "conjuring" political agency that could master the theaters of mass democracy and imperial expansion. In The Eustace Diamonds, Lizzie becomes the embodiment of an actively performed New Imperial aesthetic. As a Disraeli-like schemer, she introduces a stylistic referentiality that is alien to Trollope's ,pellucid' linguistic ideal. Where Trollope's sociological and global capitalist novels offer nuanced aesthetic capture, Lizzie marks the representational limits of such realism. Like the Sawab, she is the sign of a Trollopian power to stretch form beyond the crude anti-realism of the racialized scapegoat. [source] Victorian Psychology and the NovelLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2008Anne Stiles Over the last three decades, literary critics have evinced growing interest in nineteenth-century psychology and its reciprocal relationship with the Victorian novel. The resulting body of interdisciplinary scholarship has yielded insight into how early and mid-Victorian psychological movements (moral management, associationism, evolutionary psychology, and so forth) left their mark on realist authors like George Eliot and writers of sensation fiction such as Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon. But these scholarly works have dealt less comprehensively with the psychological significance of late Victorian genres like the romance and neo-Gothic novel. Moreover, literary critics are only beginning to explore the ways in which psychology subtly shaded into physiology during the late Victorian era. This materialist shift was felt most strongly after 1870, when cerebral localization experiments by David Ferrier, John Hughlings Jackson, and other neurologists linked specific emotions, faculties, and movements to discrete areas of the brain. These experiments suggested that human behavior amounted to the sum of various neurochemical impulses, a conclusion that raised hackles because it threatened cherished notions of the soul, will, and individual identity. Literary scholars have only recently discussed the ways in which late Victorian novels engaged with these unsettling neurological discoveries. Based on the early promise of these discussions, we might expect to see more work on Victorian brains than Victorian psyches in future literary criticism. [source] Thomas Pynchon: Realism in an Age of Ontological Uncertainty?LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2008Cate Watson This paper considers literary realism in the novels of Thomas Pynchon as a means to examine the ways in which realism is embedded within a post-modern context. After first considering some of the problems surrounding the concept of realism , its historical lineage, conflation with philosophical realism and the changing nature of reality itself , I discuss Pynchon's novels in terms of his technological construction of reality effects within a context of ontological doubt. I suggest that in Pynchon we arrive at what might be called a ,baroque realism', which draws on the Deleuzian metaphor of the fold, and is concerned with questions of illusion and reality, paradox and complexity in tune with the ontological uncertainty that characterises the age. [source] The Making of American Working-Class LiteratureLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2008Janet Zandy This essay traces a line of American literary history that emerges from the lives of workers. Starting with early ballads and songs from indentured servants and enslaved blacks and concluding with contemporary multicultural writing, it documents a process of cultural formation that is embedded in class relationships and struggles. Events in labor history and conditions of unsafe work become the subjects for cultural expression as poems, songs, stories, and novels at the time of the event and as reclaimed cultural/labor antecedents by future generations. The writing shows a reciprocal worker visibility across time and across race, gender, and ethnic differences. The continuous thread is struggle , for physical and material sustainability , and for the right of human expression. Drawing on the chronology of working-class writing from the anthology, American Working-Class Literature (co-edited with Nicholas Coles, Oxford University Press), the author shows how American working-class literature is at once a literary line, a body of work, and a labor line, the work of bodies. [source] Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life WritingLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2007Valerie Sanders Author's Introduction The Victorian period was one of the great ages for life-writing. Though traditionally renowned for its monumental ,lives and letters', mainly of great men, this was also a time of self-conscious anxiety about the genre. Critics and practitioners alike were unsure who should be writing autobiography, and whether its inherent assertiveness ruled out all but public men as appropriate subjects. It was also a period of experimentation in the different genres of life-writing , whether autobiography, journals, letters, autobiographical novels, and narratives of lives combined with extracts from correspondence and diaries. Victorian life-writing therefore provides rich and complex insights into the relationship between narrative, identity, and the definition of the self. Recent advances in criticism have highlighted the more radical and non-canonical aspects of life-writing. Already a latecomer to the literary-critical tradition (life-writing was for a long time the ,poor relation' of critical theory), auto/biography stresses the hidden and silent as much as the mainstream and vocal. For that reason, study of Victorian life-writing appeals to those with an interest in gender issues, postcolonialism, ethnicity, working-class culture, the history of religion, and family and childhood studies , to name but a few of the fields with which the genre has a natural connection. Author Recommends A good place to start is the two canonical texts for Victorian life-writing: George P. Landow's edited collection, Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979) and Avrom Fleishman's Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983). These two re-ignited interest in Victorian life-writing and in effect opened the debate about extending the canon, though both focus on the firmly canonical Ruskin and Newman, among others. By contrast, David Amigoni's recently edited collection of essays, Life-Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) shows how far the canon has exploded and expanded: it begins with a useful overview of the relationship between lives, life-writing, and literary genres, while subsequent chapters by different authors focus on a particular individual or family and their cultural interaction with the tensions of life-writing. As this volume is fairly male-dominated, readers with an interest in women's life-writing might prefer to start with Linda Peterson's chapter, ,Women Writers and Self-Writing' in Women and Literature in Britain 1800,1900, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 209,230. This examines the shift from the eighteenth-century tradition of the chroniques scandaleuses to the professional artist's life, domestic memoir, and spiritual autobiography. Mary Jean Corbett's Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992) begins with material on Wordsworth and Carlyle, but ,aims to contest the boundaries of genre, gender, and the autobiographical tradition by piecing together a partial history of middle-class women's subjectivities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' (3). Corbett is particularly interested in the life-writing of actresses and suffragettes as well as Martineau and Oliphant, the first two women autobiographers to be welcomed into the canon in the 1980s and 90s. Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1994) revises and updates the theoretical approaches to the study of life-writing, stressing both the genre's hybrid qualities, and its inherent instability: in her view, it ,comes into being as a category to be questioned' (37). Another of her fruitful suggestions is that autobiography functions as a ,site of struggle' (9), an idea that can be applied to aesthetic or ideological issues. Her book is divided between specific textual examples (such as the debate about autobiography in Victorian periodicals), and an overview of developments in critical approaches to life-writing. Her second chapter includes material on Leslie Stephen, who is also the first subject of Trev Lynn Broughton's Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999) , her other being Froude's controversial Life of Carlyle. With the advent of gender studies and masculinities, there is now a return to male forms of life-writing, of which Martin A. Danahay's A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993) is a good example. Danahay argues that nineteenth-century male autobiographers present themselves as ,autonomous individuals' free of the constraints of social and familial contexts, thus emphasizing the autonomy of the self at the expense of family and community. Online Materials My impression is that Victorian life-writing is currently better served by books than by online resources. There seem to be few general Web sites other than University module outlines and reading lists; for specific authors, on the other hand, there are too many to list here. So the only site I'd recommend is The Victorian Web: http://.victorianweb.org/genre/autobioov.html This Web site has a section called ,Autobiography Overview', which begins with an essay, ,Autobiography, Autobiographicality and Self-Representation', by George P. Landow. There are sections on other aspects of Victorian autobiography, including ,Childhood as a Personal Myth', autobiography in Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and a list of ,Suggested Readings'. Each section is quite short, but summarizes the core issues succinctly. Sample Syllabus This sample syllabus takes students through the landmarks of Victorian life-writing, and demonstrates the development of a counter-culture away from the mainstream ,classic male life' (if there ever was such a thing) , culminating in the paired diaries of Arthur Munby (civil servant) and Hannah Cullwick (servant). Numerous other examples could have been chosen, but for those new to the genre, this is a fairly classic syllabus. One week only could be spent on the ,classic male texts' if students are more interested in pursuing other areas. Opening Session Open debate about the definition of Victorian ,life-writing' and its many varieties; differences between autobiography, autobiographical fiction, diary, letters, biography, collective biography, and memoir; the class could discuss samples of selected types, such as David Copperfield, Father and Son, Ruskin's Praeterita, and Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Alternatively, why not just begin with Stave Two of Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), in which the First Spirit takes Scrooge back through his childhood and youth? This is a pretty unique type of life-writing, with Scrooge ,laughing and crying' as his childhood and youth are revealed to him in a series of flashbacks (a Victorian version of ,This is Your Life?'). The dual emotions are important to note at this stage and will prompt subsequent discussions of sentimentality and writing for comic effect later in the course. Week 2 Critical landmarks: discussion of important stages in the evolution of critical approaches to life-writing, including classics such as Georges Gusdorf's ,Conditions and Limits of Autobiography', in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28,47; Philippe Lejeune's ,The Autobiographical Pact', in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (original essay 1973; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3,30; and Paul De Man's ,Autobiography as De-Facement', Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919,30. This will provide a critical framework for the rest of the course. Weeks 3,4 Extracts from the ,male classics' of Victorian life-writing: J. S. Mill's Autobiography (1873), Ruskin's Praeterita (1885,89), and Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). What do they think is important and what do they miss out? How open or otherwise are they about their family and personal lives? Are these essentially ,lives of the mind'? How self-aware are they of autobiographical structures? Are there already signs that the ,classic male life' is fissured and unconventional? An option here would be to spend the first week focusing on male childhoods, and the second on career trajectories. Perhaps use Martin Danahay's theory of the ,autonomous individual' (see above) to provide a critical framework here: how is the ,Other' (parents, Harriet Taylor) treated in these texts? Weeks 5,6 Victorian women's autobiography: Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (1877) and Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography (1899): in many ways these are completely unalike, Martineau's being ordered around the idea of steady mental growth and public recognition, while Oliphant's is deeply emotional and disordered. Can we therefore generalize about ,women's autobiography'? What impact did they have on Victorian theories of life-writing? Students might like to reconsider Jane Eyre as an ,autobiography' alongside these and compare scenes of outright rebellion. The way each text handles time and chronology is also fascinating: Martineau's arranged to highlight stages of philosophical development, while Oliphant's switches back and forth in a series of ,flashbacks' to her happier youth as her surviving two sons die ,in the text', interrupting her story. Week 7 Black women's autobiography: how does Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) differ from the Martineau and Oliphant autobiographies? What new issues and genre influences are introduced by a Caribbean/travelogue perspective? Another key text would be Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl (1861). How representative and how individual are these texts? Do these authors see themselves as representing their race as well as their class and sex? Week 8 Working-class autobiography: Possible texts here could be John Burnett's Useful Toil (Allen Lane, 1974, Penguin reprint); Carolyn Steedman's edition of John Pearman's The Radical Soldier's Tale (Routledge, 1988) and the mini oral biographies in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861,62) (e.g., the Water-Cress Seller). There is also a new Broadview edition of Factory Lives (2007) edited by James R. Simmons, with an introduction by Janice Carlisle. This contains four substantial autobiographical texts (three male, one female) from the mid-nineteenth century, with supportive materials. Samuel Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839,42; 1844) and Early Days (1847,48) are further options. Students should also read Regenia Gagnier's Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832,1910 (Oxford University Press, 1991). Week 9 Biography: Victorian Scandal: focus on two scandals emerging from Victorian life-writing: Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) (the Branwell Brontë/Lady Scott adultery scandal), and Froude's allegations of impotence in his Life of Carlyle (1884). See Trev Broughton's ,Impotence, Biography, and the Froude-Carlyle Controversy: ,Revelations on Ticklish Topics', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7.4 (Apr. 1997): 502,36 (in addition to her Men of Letters cited above). The biographies of the Benson family written about and by each other, especially E. F. Benson's Our Family Affairs 1867,1896 (London: Cassell, 1920) reveal the domestic unhappiness of the family of Gladstone's Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, whose children and wife were all to some extent homosexual or lesbian. Another option would be Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) in which the son's critical stance towards his father is uneasy and complex in its mixture of comedy, pity, shame, and resentment. Week 10 Diaries: Arthur Munby's and Hannah Cullwick's relationship (they were secretly married, but lived as master and servant) and diaries, Munby: Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur Munby, ed. Derek Hudson (John Murray, 1972), and The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984): issues of gender and class identity; the idealization of the working woman; the two diaries compared. Half the class could read one diary and half the other and engage in a debate about the social and sexual fantasies adopted by each diarist. It would also be sensible to leave time for an overview debate about the key issues of Victorian life-writing which have emerged from this module, future directions for research, and current critical developments. Focus Questions 1To what extent does Victorian autobiography tell an individual success story? Discuss with reference to two or three contrasting examples. 2,All life writing is time writing' (Jens Brockmeier). Examine the way in which Victorian life-writers handle the interplay of narrative, memory, and time. 3To what extent do you agree with the view that Victorian life-writing was ,a form of communication that appeared intimate and confessional, but which was in fact distant and controlled' (Donna Loftus)? 4,Bamford was an autobiographer who did not write an autobiography' (Martin Hewitt). If autobiography is unshaped and uninterpreted, what alternative purposes does it have in narrating a life to the reader? 5,Victorian life-writing is essentially experimental, unstable, and unpredictable.' How helpful is this comment in helping you to understand the genre? [source] Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies?LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2007Collaboration, Digital Editing, Historicism This paper forms part of a Literature Compass cluster of articles which examines the current state of Victorian Literary Studies and future directions. This group of four essays was originally commissioned by Francis O'Gorman (University of Leeds), who also provides an introduction to the cluster. The full cluster is made up of the following articles: ,Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies? , Introduction', Francis O'Gorman, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00467.x. ,Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies? , Revising the Canon, Extending Cultural Boundaries, and the Challenge of Interdisciplinarity', Joanne Shattock, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00468.x. ,Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies? ,"Interesting Times" and the Lesson of "A Corner in Lightning"', David Amigoni, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00469.x. ,Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies? , Historicism, Collaboration and Digital Editing', Valerie Sanders, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00470.x. ,Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies? , Historicism and Hospitality', John Bowen, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00471.x. *** This essay argues that, while research in Victorian Literary Studies remains rich and vibrant, it faces several types of pressure in the immediate future. These range from undergraduate resistance to reading long novels, to the funding councils' apparent preference for collaborative, interdisciplinary or large editorial projects, and proposed changes such as the Block Grants Partnership Scheme. The decline of ,feminist' in favour of ,gendered' critical approaches, and preference for generic and cultural issues over single author studies, mark a notable change of approach in the last few years. Although continuing loyalty towards historicism, and rejection of the more abstract literary theories of the 1990s, suggest that Victorian literary studies remains confident of its own direction in the next five years, the essay closes with a hope that the purely ,literary' analysis will not disappear for ever. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||