Contemporary Historical Fiction

The editors of Sargasso invite submissions for a volume on post-narrative futures in Caribbean letters and cultures that will engage works of literature, art, and culture that challenge, subvert, reimagine, and transcend, dominant colonial, postcolonial, and traditional forms of narrative. By "post-narrative," we mean not the abandonment of storytelling but its reconfiguration: a refusal of closure, a practice of intermedial experimentation, and an archipelagic poetics that disperses authority, bends temporality, and exceeds the limits of linear plot. Post-narratives emerge as forms of errantry, fracture, and polyphony, illuminating the ways Caribbean expression unsettles narrative as container and transforms it into relation, fugue, and open-ended becoming.

In response to the TRC, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) has made its own commitment to reconciliation with its Action Plan on Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, 2021–2025, which seeks to “guide the department’s efforts to advance the rights, perspectives and prosperity of Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world over a 4-year period". While ostensibly a transformative document, couched in terms of “partnership with Indigenous peoples,” we argue that the Action Plan ultimately seeks to accommodate Indigenous peoples into GAC’s existing foreign policy framework, rather than remaking it along nation-to-nation lines as would be effectively necessitated by a program of reconciliation. As such, we contend that GAC’s efforts toward achieving reconciliation will not produce the envisioned transformative change and, instead, continue to frame Indigenous peoples as domestic contributors to a Canadian foreign policy agenda.

Shirley Shackleton said that after her husband Greg was killed in Timor-Leste in October 1975, for seven weeks she became a campaigner for justice for the journalists murdered in Balibo, then after Indonesia invaded in December 1975 she became a campaigner for justice for all the East Timorese too.  Shackleton saw the Australian government treatment of the killings as a litmus test of Australian East Timor policy. She continued to pressure the government for a Federal Police investigation of those responsible for the deaths, culminating with Australian politicians and diplomats being put in the dock and scrutinised under oath in a Coronial Inquiry in 2007.

This research paper explores the cultural conflict and ecological decline: Opposition of indigenous people to colonizers. In Barkskins, large areas of woodland in New France are cleared by two Frenchmen, Charles Duquet and René Sel, on behalf of a landowner, Claude Trépagny. Duquet quits the work to pursue the fur trade, leaving Sel to carry out their arrangement. Sel's descendants become ardent environmentalists committed to preserving their surroundings. With an emphasis on the value of leaving a legacy for future generations, the novel ends with hopeful note of the significance of conservation of the nature. It makes an attempt to deal the following issues: In what ways does this text explore the impacts of colonialism on Indigenous cultures and traditions? How does Proulx connect environmental degradation to cultural loss and societal collapse? And in what ways do Indigenous characters challenge the colonial exploitation of both land and culture? Ecocriticism, Anthropocentrism, and postcolonialism are the theoretical frameworks and research techniques that are used to examine the issues of Cultural Clash, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Colonial Anthropocene in Barkskins.

Popular romance literature has long been neglected and underestimated in the global literary context and little research on the translation of this genre has been carried out so far. Even taking into account its "popular connotation", romantic fiction seems to occupy the lower shelf in the literary polysystem compared with other popular genres. The discrepancy between the importance of this genre in the publishing industry and the scarce attention given to it by traditional scholars means that little is known about the textual practices and processes that accompany its production and circulation, including translation. In this paper, we deal with the issue of translating romantic fiction, focusing on the specific translation of historical romances, one of its most popular subgenres. In particular, through the analysis of a specific case study, the novel Outlander by American author Diana Gabaldon, we suggest that the double filiation of historical romances, i.e. their connection to both popular and canonical traditions, may have consequences at the textual level as when such books are translated, their ambiguous generic labelling tends to be resolved, favouring either the romantic or the historical component, thus resulting in a stronger generic identity. 1

A menudo oímos en los medios el término "caza de brujas" para referirnos, según la RAE, a una persecución motivada por prejuicios sociales o políticos. La obra de teatro de El crisol de Arthur Miller (también traducida como Las brujas de Salem, The Crucible en el original), escrita en 1952 y estrenada un año más tarde, está basada en una caza de brujas real. Se trata de la persecución ocurrida en el pequeño pueblo de Salem, Massachusetts, entre 1692 y 1693, contra cientos de vecinos de la localidad que fueron acusados de brujería. Esta espiral de acusaciones sin pruebas se saldó con la muerte en la horca de 19 residentes (catorce mujeres y cinco hombres). Caza de brujas Arthur Miller se remontó a un caso real del siglo XVII para criticar la situación política que estaba viviendo Estados Unidos en aquella época.

L’article analyse la représentation de la construction d’un lieu central du pouvoir dans la série télévisée Versailles dans le contexte de la crise de déterritorialisation suite au terrorisme international. Une comparaison de la représentation de la lutte de l’État contre ses adversaires intérieurs et extérieurs à des fictions historiques de la cour du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle révèle que les motifs centraux de la série peuvent être reliés à ces fictions, tandis que les différences par rapport à celles-ci sont expliquées par la confronta­tion de la série avec son propre lieu historique : l’ambivalence par rapport à l’aspect stratégique de la construction du pouvoir central à partir d’une position de fragilité intense ainsi que l’analogie implicite entre les protestants révoltants contre ce pouvoir et le terrorisme islamiste. Dans le contexte des attentats de Paris en 2015, la divergence entre une représentation antipathique des protestants comme traîtres et agents d’une infiltration étrangère dans la première saison de la série (2015) et la représentation sympathique dans la troisième (2018), qui en fait des victimes d’un pouvoir de contrôle excessif et d’une exclusion intolérante, est attribuée à l’évolution des affects contemporains allant d’une condamnation des attaques terroristes à la critique de la réaction politique à ceux-ci et aux reproches d’islamophobie et d’intolérance.

The biographical novel is a subgenre that lies at the intersection of history, biography, memoir and fiction, partially sharing the features of each, but not fully fulfilling any. Besides, the boundaries that separate the historical novel and biographical fiction from the tradition of life writing, (auto)biography, memoir or factional biography are indeterminate and further blurred by the filter of the author, who can be both subject and object of discourse. In the last three decades, Irish biographical fiction, if one can claim the existence of that category, has expanded its horizons to accommodate the “real” lives of forgotten and silenced figures from the past, including women, nobodies and marginal others. Colm Tóibín, Joseph O’Connor, Colm McCann, Roddy Doyle, alongside a flourishing group of women writers, such as Emma Donoghue, Anne Enright, Mary Morrissy, Evelyn Conlon, Martina Devlin or Nuala O’Connor have all had their share challenging master narratives that approached history as a linear succession of events and left conspicuous silences that spoke volumes. Intending to reshape the space occupied by the iconic figure of Nora Barnacle and to place her centre stage, Nuala O’Connor’s most recent novel Nora (2021) comes to explore female individuality, with an authenticity that had been absent in authorized biographies of the Joyces. With two previous biographical novels on her account, Miss Emily (2015) and Becoming Belle (2018), O’Connor here subscribes Patricia Waugh’s belief that both reality and history are provisional, “no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures”. Considering these ideas, the present proposal will delve into the subgenre of biofiction from an ethical and aesthetical perspective, intending to highlight its potential to render a female subjectivity that surfaces in the interstices of history.

The classical Cartesian dualism body/mind has informed much of western thought since the 17th century and it has also served as a means with which to validate unbalanced dichotomies, especially those associated to gender roles, which placed women closer to the body, or to emotions, and men closer to reason. In their refusal to endorse this reductionism, feminist scholars have been at pains to redefine biased ideological positions and have articulated discourses that delved into the blurring of boundaries of such artificial categories. Besides, recent discoveries in neuroscience have confirmed the interrelationship of body and mind, suggesting that emotions and feelings, even more than reason, shape our decision-making processes and therefore our daily lives. In Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012), a subversive revision of one of the most emblematic symbols of Catholic faith, the Passion of Christ, a grieving Mary recollects the last days of her son’s life more than twenty years after his death. Questioning the validity of the Gospels as given truths and refusing to collaborate with the apostles to confirm their version, she vindicates her authority to narrate her own experience as a resilient woman and a witness of the events, triggering her own healing process. In so doing, she refuses to endorse the received image of herself as an atemporal, iconic symbol of a sacrificing mother. Empowered and gendered, Mary gives shape to her consciousness through an unorthodox account that relies on emotions located in a corporeal reality that, as signifiers of truths, exist beyond given interpretations.
Bearing these aspects in mind, this discussion will explore Mary’s resilient narrative as a self-therapeutic exercise with which to redeem her sorrow and properly grieve the loss of her son. A close look will be placed at the function of the body in understanding the shaping of consciousness, with a view to dissolve traditional binaries as regards body/mind and reason/emotion. Within this framework, I will rely on the theories of neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Antonio Damasio, who argues that emotions need to be located in the body whereas thought emerges at a further stage in the cognitive process, as he has demonstrated in influential works on the emotional mapping of the mind such as Descartes’ Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (2000) and Looking for Spinoza (2003). This proposal will eventually aim at demonstrating how in Tóibín’s controversial The Testament of Mary –originally written for the stage as a solo play and later adapted in the form of a novella–, resilience functions as a mechanism of resistance against received assumptions of Christian thought and as a driving force in its capacity to challenge any authoritative narrative that does not rest upon the experiencing self.

This chapter explores Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016) and The Pull of the Stars (2020) from a cultural memory approach and addresses the wrongs of the male-dominated institutions of religion and medicine, silently complicit of various kinds of female invisibility. Set in 19th-century post-famine Ireland, The Wonder probes into the so-called fasting-girls phenomenon in a story tinted with religious fervour and scientific scepticism, whose resolution discloses a diseased culture nurtured by toxic practices of silence. Similarly, set in a Dublin ward during the 1918 Great Flu pandemic, The Pull of the Stars interconnects the lives of three female characters, in their struggles to save the lives of labouring women affected by the deadly influenza, disclosing concerns of the historically supressed female body, controlled by male regulatory practices of health care and religious morality.

Considerat cel mai reprezentativ scriitor sloven al prezentului (și cel mai tradus, având deja mai multe cărți publicate în diferite spații culturale europene și nu numai), prozator, dramatug și eseist deopotrivă, comparat nu o dată, pentru profunzimea sa filosofică, dar și pentru dimensiunea simbolică a creației sale, cu Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera sau Günter Grass, Drago Jančar (născut în 1948, la Maribor) a fost recompensat de-a lungul anilor cu numeroase premii literare, dacă ar fi să amintim aici doar Premiul Herder, Premiul European pentru Literatură, Premiul Prešeren sau Premiul Kresnik, acesta din urmă fiindu-i acordat de patru ori.

This article takes as its starting point the end of history in the post-colonial and post-modern horizon, and the consequent liberation of histories, the emergence of new narratives, and the strong return of the historical novel in particular and historical fiction in general, which has given more freedom and confidence to writers of historical fiction, revealing a world of diversity and deconstructing traditional views of history and power relations.

This article focuses on Shoaib Halifi's novel The Time of the Chaouia, and categorises it as a founding text of the historical imagination in contemporary Moroccan fiction. It aims to analyse it from the perspective of historical fiction and the postcolonial novel. It argues that the author attempts to revise and rewrite the stories that have been silenced in official Moroccan histories. In particular, it reveals how the author incorporates historical facts into the fictional narrative to challenge the official version of history in open opposition to the idea that any one version of history can hold the truth by creating new and inclusive versions of this history that actually overturn many notions of history, in an effort to reconfigure Moroccan cultural identity in its multiplicity through the liberation of history.

The concept of "cultural memory" serves as the foundation for this article, which explains the complex relationships between two prominent figures in the history of English letters, Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, as well as how A. S. Byatt"s own work was influenced by their combined, though occasionally diametrically opposed, approaches to literature, culture, and criticism. As a result, this article begins with a discussion of the conflictual continuity and/or sustained ambivalence in Byatt"s critique of Leavisite criticism. It does this by first looking into Leavis"s position within the larger literary criticism context and then focusing on how Leavisite criticism fits into Byatt"s critical thought. Thus, Byatt"s assertion that Leavis made English literature the focal point of university education is examined by first looking into Leavis"s Cambridge. Lastly, Byatt"s criticism of Leavis"s idea of English studies is looked into in the context of critical evaluations of English literature"s place in higher education, at the same time that Byatt"s work is used as a prism to analyse the Arnoldian matrix of the Leavisite concept of "moral seriousness". Afterward, Byatt"s critical work is critically examined in the framework of culture, society, and literature, continuing Arnold"s legacy.

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Timothy Findley's The Wars (1977) started to investigate the underlying ideological assumptions about the writing of history before the rise of the postmodern epistemological and ontological questioning about history. Its problematization of realist presumptions of historical representation has been analysed by commentators, but the way Findley engages in genre transgression in order to unsettle history's claims to authenticity and objectivity has not received adequate critical attention. This essay is concerned with how he employs the biographic form for his protagonist's story but juxtaposes it with a nameless researcher's collection of information about him and investigation into related historical documents as a metafictional device to problematize the writing of biography and history as mimetic representation. The focus will be on the narrative strategies used to achieve genre transgression and blur the distinction between biography and history.

Margaret Sweatman’s When Alice Lay Down with Peter (2001) is a
multigenerational saga that interweaves the stories of two Scottish settlers and
their descendants with influential historical events in Canada between 1869 and
1979. Commonly classified as a magic realist text, the novel also employs a few
conventions of ghost stories to multiply the layers of haunting in the Canadian
context. By manipulating these conventions of ghost stories, Sweatman shifts
attention to the figure of the ghost-seer, foregrounds the spatial dimension and
the economic basis of haunting, and applies the dialectical relationship between
possession and dispossession to revisiting the history of two Métis uprisings, the
Red River Resistance of 1869-1870 and the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Her
fictional account rejects the binary relationship between the colonizer and the
colonized, highlights the in-between position of the Métis, and exposes the
dispossession and displacement inflicted on Indian populations by the conflict
between Métis nationalism and Canadian settler nationalism. This article
examines how the manipulation of these conventions enables Sweatman’s novel
to turn its readers into ghost-seers listening both to ghosts speaking and to talks
with ghosts, to differentiate the multiple layers of haunting involved in the
tripartite struggle over territory between white settlers, the Métis, and Indian
communities, and finally to shatter the dream of indigenization in the
settler-invader society of Canada, where the very fact that the craving for
indigenization has been rekindled during the recent decades makes it more
compelling than ever to revisit When Alice Lay Down with Peter.

Indulging the impulse to bypass the poems featured in A. S. Byatt's Possession, this essay explores the ramifications of their integration into the novel beyond the obvious analysis of their content. Starting from the grounds on which readers and critics reject the poems, namely from their designation as paratextual elements and instances of pastiche respectively, it goes on to argue that their creators' views verify the poems' value as insightful indicators of the novel's neo-Victorian quality. However, since the establishment of such a characteristic cannot be easily liberated from questions of originality and authenticity, this essay also proposes an appreciation of the poems through the lens of simulation, which allows them to be approached as self-standing artistic occurrences, proposing, thus, constructive ways of reading neo-Victorian fiction.

The postmodernity of A. S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (1990) has been much discussed. 1 However, the novel's formal treatment of postmodernism, through its use of intertextuality, pastiche and textual self-consciousness, diverges significantly from its treatment of postmodernism as a theme. In this essay, I will discuss the relatively neglected issue of Byatt's thematic portrayal of the postmodern, and will show how Byatt sustains a fundamentally humanist impulse from within the novel's framework of postmodern awareness. Possession is set in a world obsessed with academia and literary research. Its central characters, the dull but lovable Roland, and the icily beautiful Maud, are drawn together through their mutual passion for Victorian poetry. Their scholarly pursuits soon escalate into a Romantic quest, as they discover that their respective objects of study, the poets Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, not only knew and influenced each other, but may have had a clandestine affair in 1859. Byatt's tale is enriched by her brilliant emulation of Victorian consciousness, delivered through the poetry, letters and stories of her characters. As the novel progresses, Roland and Maud gradually adjust their jaded postmodern scepticism to accommodate the vitality and ardour of the Victorians. Reinstalling humanist values: using postmodern strategies against the grain ' … what is Randolph Ash's importance to our society now?' Blackadder heard himself say, 'He thought carefully and didn't make up his mind in a hurry. He believed knowledge mattered-' 'Sorry, I don't understand-' (401)

's now famous critique of Mayotte Capecia's works as examples of the pernicious effect of colonial racial attitudes on the colonized woman's sense of self was the first entry in what has become an intense scrutiny of racial attitudes in the works of Francophone Caribbean women writers. This scrutiny has focused primarily on the triad composed by Capecia (Martinique, 1928-1953), Michele Lacrosil (Guadeloupe, 1915-), and Jacqueline Manicom (Guadeloupe, 1938-1976), novelists whose mulatto protagonists appear to have internalized the colonizers' myth of black racial inferiority, with its resulting self-contempt, an internalization which leads to ambivalent, at times almost hostile, relations with black men, whom they reject in favor of ill-fated liaisons with whites. The three novelists have published seven novels between them: Mayotte Capecia's Je suis martiniquaisel and La Nigresse blanche2; Lacrosil's Sapotille et le serin d'argile,3 Cajou,4 and Demain Jab-Herma5; Manicom's Mon Examen de blanc6 and La Graine: journal d'une sage femme.7

Wilderness, the West and the national imaginary in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy Guy Vanderhaeghe scrutinises the garrison image in the wider context of the North American West in The Englishman's Boy. His appropriation of the conventions of the Western lays bare the underpinning ideologies of the genre, especially imperialist assumptions about wilderness and the role that genre and wilderness play in American and Canadian national mythologies. His configuration of the North American West rejects the traditional idea of space as a static background for historical events. This article investigates how Vanderhaeghe rewrites the past of the North American West in spatial terms to expose the interconnection among colonialism, the Western and the national imaginary, and how such remapping presents the Western landscape as a space palimpsestically inscribed by diverse social discourses.

In 1995, a two-page-long letter signed by Professor Maud Michell-Bailey-which furthermore enclosed two original poems by Christabel LaMotte-prefaced a special edition on women poets in the academic journal Victorian Poetry. The letter and poems invite a critical return to Possession, since they are a complex game in which made-up characters come to life and actual people are fictionalized. They also raise significant theoretical issues while appearing to break free from the limitations imposed by what Victorian Poetry editor Linda Hughes has correctly described as "overdetermined readings, simplification, distortion" (6). In doing so, they masterfully create a parodic and intertextual dialogue in an inverted mirror game that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined and invites the reader to engage in an active participation. When combined, Maud's letter and LaMotte's poems offer an intriguing look at the fruitful fusion of A.S. Byatt's critical and literary imagination. Therefore, this article explores Byatt's intersections between academia, literary criticism, and fiction by analysing her metafictional discourse on fictional Victorian poems vis-à-vis the real contemporary academic journal in which they were published.

na Tolminskem, med sopotnike moderne oziroma med predstavnike realistično-naturalistične struje v obdobju moderne. Danes precej pozabljeni Ivo Šorli je bil v svojem času znan kot izjemno plodovit pisatelj, po prvih proznih objavah iz leta 1900 je napisal številne novele, črtice, povesti, romane in jih objavljal v osrednjem periodičnem tisku ter samostojnih knjižnih izdajah vse do leta 1940, ko je svoje literarno ustvarjanje zaokrožil z avtobiografskim romanom Moj roman, nekakšnim obračunom življenjske in pisateljske poti. (Prim. Kocijan 2002: 201-214.) UDK 821.163.6.09-3 Jožica Čeh Pedagoška fakulteta v Mariboru ŽENSKA V MEŠČANSKI PROZI IVA ŠORLIJA Razprava se ukvarja s Šorlijevim pogledom na žensko in ženskimi liki v njegovi meščanski prozi, s katero je v slovenski književnosti nadaljeval Kersnikovo in Govekarjevo tematizacijo meščanskega erotike. Šorlijevi tipični ženski liki, kot so lahkožive ženske, spogledljivke, nezveste žene, prešuštnice, histerične ženske, so povezani z avtorjevo odločitvijo za tematizacijo meščanske erotike, pri tem je opaziti nekatere motivne sorodnosti z Maupassantovo prozo, ki jo je Ivo Šorli tudi prevajal. Podobno kot pri Maupassantu je tudi v Šorlijevi prozi iz prve polovice 20. stoletja zapisanih veliko moških predsodkov o ženski, ki jih je avtor poznal tudi iz nekaterih znanih filozofsko-psiholoških spisov o ženski. The paper discusses Šorli's view of the woman and female characters in his bourgeois prose, which continues Kersnik's and Govekar's thematization of bourgeois eroticism in Slovene literature. Šorli's typical female characters, e.g., loose women, coquettes, unfaithful wives, adulteresses, hysterical women, are connected with the author's decision to thematize bourgeois eroticism, in which there are some thematic similarities with Maupassant's prose, which Ivo Šorli also translated. Like Maupassant's work, Šorli's prose from the first half of the 20 th c. includes a lot of male prejudice about women, which the author also knew from some well-known philosophical-psychological essays on the woman.

Razprava se ukvarja s Šorlijevim pogledom na žensko in z ženskimi liki v njegovi meščanski prozi, s katero je v slovenski književnosti nadaljeval Kersnikovo in Govekarjevo tematizacijo meščanskega erotike. Šorlijevi tipični ženski liki, kot so lahkožive ženske, spogledljivke, nezveste žene, prešuštnice, histerične ženske, so povezani z avtorjevo odločitvijo za tematizacijo meščanske erotike, pri tem je opaziti nekatere motivne sorodnosti z Maupassantovo prozo, ki jo je Ivo Šorli tudi prevajal. Podobno kot pri Maupassantu je tudi v Šorlijevi prozi iz prve polovice 20. stoletja zapisanih veliko moških predsodkov o ženski, ki jih je avtor poznal tudi iz nekaterih znanih filozofsko-psiholoških spisov o ženski.

, appears biannually under the aegis of the Research Centre for Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies, and in collaboration with the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. It is a peerreviewed journal that sets out to explore the intersections of culture, technology and the human sciences in the age of electronic information. It publishes work by scholars of any nationality on Anglophone Studies, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Linguistics, Area Studies, Multimedia and Digital Arts and related subjects. Articles addressing influential crosscurrents in recent academic thinking are particularly welcome.

This paper explores three works of fiction-Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010), Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World (2014) and Jessie Burton's The Muse (2016)-all of which attempt to answer the question "why have there been no great women artists?" by exploring the possibility that artworks by women may have been misattributed to their male contemporaries. It is suggested that authors of art-fiction often draw on the work of feminist art historians not only to show how such misattribution might occur, but also how it might be consolidated and perpetuated via the international mechanisms which govern the circulation of art, thus relegating female artists from the status of practitioner to muse. In exploring how the reception of an artwork can be influenced by viewers' perceptions about the artist's gender, fiction about women's art also contributes to the debate over whether it is possible to identify a distinctive feminine aesthetic. Whilst suggesting that art-history novels often defer to a traditional hierarchy of art forms, in which oil paintings of mythological subjects carry the greatest prestige, this paper argues that art-fiction can also create an alternative narrative of art history which can be used to challenge or at least supplement the mainstream narrative in which great artworks are almost exclusively produced by men.

EventhoughearlierworkssuchasJohnFowles'TheFrench Lieutenant's Woman or Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea foreshadow current interest in the Victorian period, neoVictorian fiction has beendefinedasanindependentgenresincethe1990s.Morethanjust examples of historical fiction, neoVictorian novels engage with and (re)interpret the Victorians with a marked selfconsciousness. Thus, theyperformadoubletask:inmasqueradingasVictoriannovels,they raise questions about identity and difference between the Victorian period and the present day, shedding light on contemporary issues as well as providing a vehicle for expressing Victorian taboos, or questioningtheir(our?)values.Therecurrenttropeofcrossdressing andmasqueradecanbeunderstoodasareflectionofthisduality.The aimofthispaper,then,istoexploretheuseofthistropeinthenovels ofSarahWatersasametaphorforthestatusofneoVictorianfiction ingeneral.

It is the purpose of this paper to argue that trauma constitutes the bond between the Victorian and postmodern civilisations such as they are depicted in Swift's Ever After (1992). By fictionalising the Darwinian, nuclear and ontological crises, Swift manages to capture the quintessence of both nineteenth-and late twentieth-century senses of loss, deprivation and doubt. Beyond the historicised treatment of trauma, what interests Swift in this novel is the ethical dimension of trauma, which he explores by reassessing the suffering of the minor actors of history. As a reader of the recent and distant past, Swift takes on the responsibility of historical testimony and embodies the ethics of witnessing. As a novelist juxtaposing, comparing and adjoining Matthew's ethics of truth and Bill's ethics of dissolution, he embodies the specifically postmodern version of an ethical plurality. What is also, and perhaps mainly, postmodern in Swift's novel is the deconstruction of the concept of transcendence and its replacement by the concept of excendance, that is, the ethical urge to explore forms of otherness, as defined by Emmanuel Levinas. Swift illustrates this ethical drive by textualising the infinite otherness-and, of course, similarity-of our Victorian alter egos. As such his quest is typical of neo-Victorian fiction which can be considered as a form of literature of excendance.

This paper is a comparative cross-gender inquiry into representations of sexuality in Sarah Waters's Fingersmith and P. J. Parker's Roxelana & Suleyman, since the body, as a constitutive part of social identity and a main site for the economy of pleasure and desire, is simultaneously inscribed in the economy of discourse, domination, and power. While both authors, in representing same-sex desire, borrow from a sizeable storehouse of Victorian literature by employing plots and themes from the sensation novel, the Gothic mode, melodrama, mystery fiction, romance, and pornography, within the framework of historical narrative, they diverge considerably in their textual strategies. Parker draws on the erotic charge of Orientalist fantasies, adopting them as s trans-historical constant, whereas Waters explores sexuality and its articulations by re-imagining the nineteenth century and representing the diverse investments of contemporaneity in historical rememoration, revision, and reconstruction.

Shirley Shackleton said that after her husband Greg was killed in Timor-Leste in October 1975, for seven weeks she became a campaigner for justice for the journalists murdered in Balibo, then after Indonesia invaded in December 1975 she became a campaigner for justice for all the East Timorese too.  Shackleton saw the Australian government treatment of the killings as a litmus test of Australian East Timor policy. She continued to pressure the government for a Federal Police investigation of those responsible for the deaths, culminating with Australian politicians and diplomats being put in the dock and scrutinised under oath in a Coronial Inquiry in 2007.

Shirley Shackleton said that after her husband Greg was killed in Timor-Leste in October 1975, for seven weeks she became a campaigner for justice for the journalists murdered in Balibo, then after Indonesia invaded in December 1975 she became a campaigner for justice for all the East Timorese too.  Shackleton saw the Australian government treatment of the killings as a litmus test of Australian East Timor policy. She continued to pressure the government for a Federal Police investigation of those responsible for the deaths, culminating with Australian politicians and diplomats being put in the dock and scrutinised under oath in a Coronial Inquiry in 2007.

One of the dominant concerns of postmodern writing is to discuss the importance and modes of knowing the past. e aim of this paper is to explore how the British novelist A.S. Byatt rereads the Victorian past in her novella " e Conjugal Angel" by using Victorian spiritualism as a multilayered metaphor for dynamic communication between the past and present. Spiritualist rituals will also be read as a cultural practice characterised by the playful undermining of gender roles and norms. Finally, the paper will discuss spiritualist séances as a metaphor for the writing and reading of historiographic metafiction seen as a process of restless summoning of and intense communicating with the ghosts/texts from the past.

One of the dominant concerns of postmodern writing is to discuss the importance and modes of knowing the past. The aim of this paper is to explore how the British novelist A.S. Byatt rereads the Victorian past in her novella “The Conjugal Angel” by using Victorian spiritualism as a multilayered metaphor for dynamic communication between the past and present. Spiritualist rituals will also be read as a cultural practice characterised by the playful undermining of gender roles and norms. Finally, the paper will discuss spiritualist séances as a metaphor for the writing and reading of historiographic metafiction seen as a process of restless summoning of and intense communicating with the ghosts/texts from the past.

There are things which happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been." Postscript, Possession. Linda Hutcheon (1988) presents many historical concerns in her article "The Postmodern Problematizing of History", which are reflected in Antonia S. Byatt's historiographic metafiction masterpiece, Possession. However, is history important in literature? In postmodernism, it is common to find reinterpretations of history that play an essential role in understanding our present. Let's consider The Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Time's Arrow by Martin Amis, or the short story "Recitatif" by Toni Morrison. What makes Byatt's novel outstanding is that she does not only revisit the past, but she also goes a step forward by applying the historical method and showing its flaws in a clever game between what scholars can discover and what the readers can acknowledge. The author is at a clear advantage as she has the whole picture in her mind, but this is something the historian, unfortunately, will never have. Can the reader have full access to the author's mind? I am not quite convinced.

The purpose of the present article is to investigate Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) within a theoretical context set by Linda Hutcheon’s definition of parody. In Hutcheon’s view, parody is a repetition with critical distance. Hucheonian parody allows the adapted work to challenge and ironically transform the form and the content of the hypotext in order not to ridicule but to create. The central questions of this research are: How does Jack Maggs employ Hutcheonian parody within the broader postmodern narrative discourse to view its source text with a critical distance? And, how does Hutcheonian parody engage Jack Maggs in contemporary social debates? In order to answer these questions, the research applies various aspects of Hutcheonian parody to Carey’s novel. The present paper demonstrates that Carey’s Jack Maggs recontextualizes Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860) in a new Australian setting. It also argues that the novel, which has mostly received positive responses and...

When Alice Lay Down with Peter (2001) is a multigenerational saga that interweaves the stories of two Scottish settlers and their descendants with influential historical events in Canada between 1869 and 1979. Commonly classified as a magic realist text, the novel also employs a few conventions of ghost stories to multiply the layers of haunting in the Canadian context. By manipulating these conventions of ghost stories, Sweatman shifts attention to the figure of the ghost-seer, foregrounds the spatial dimension and the economic basis of haunting, and applies the dialectical relationship between possession and dispossession to revisiting the history of two uprisings, the Red River Resistance of 1869-1870 and the NorthWest Rebellion of 1885. Her fictional account rejects the binary relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, highlights the in-between position of the and exposes the dispossession and displacement inflicted on Indian populations by the conflict between This article to turn its readers into ghost-seers listening both to ghosts speaking and to talks with ghosts, to differentiate the multiple layers of haunting involved in the tripartite s communities, and finally to shatter the dream of indigenization in the settler-invader society of Canada, where the very fact that the craving for indigenization has been rekindled during the recent decades makes it more compelling than ever to revisit When Alice Lay Down with Peter.

This article proposes to read the landscape in Jane Urquhart’s Away
both as a stratigraphy of memories and as a cultural medium that not
only symbolises power relations but also works as an agent of power.
Through investigating the dehistoricised and decontextualised landscape
in Northrop Frye’s garrison mentality, the article argues that Away refuses
to participate in the colonialist operation of reducing the Canadian
topography to terra nullius by raising the issue of amnesia and restoring
the trauma of history to the landscape that has been emptied of its layered
past for (re-)territorialisation.
Keywords: Jane Urquhart, Away, history, landscape

Wilderness, the West and the national imaginary in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy Guy Vanderhaeghe scrutinises the garrison image in the wider context of the North American West in The Englishman's Boy. His appropriation of the conventions of the Western lays bare the underpinning ideologies of the genre, especially imperialist assumptions about wilderness and the role the genre and wilderness play in American and Canadian national mythologies. His configuration of the North American West rejects the traditional idea of space as a static background for historical events. This article investigates how Vanderhaeghe rewrites the past of the North American West in spatial terms to expose the interconnection among colonialism, the Western and the national imaginary, and how such remapping presents the Western landscape as a space palimpsestically inscribed by diverse social discourses.

Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (1996) dramatizes the after-effects of the Holocaust to investigate the interconnections among trauma, memory, and history. Her attempt to make sense of and articulate the unrepresentable horrors of the Nazi genocide of Jews has been widely recognized, and many critics acknowledge the contributions the novel has made to Holocaust literature. While a good deal of critical attention has been paid to its thematic concerns, the ways in which Fugitive Pieces achieves genre transgression remain relatively under-explored. Consisting of a prefatory note and two separate but related autobiographies, this novel appears to be quite uncomplicated in form. However, despite the absence of obvious metafictional or postmodern narrative strategies, Fugitive Pieces succeeds in subverting and undermining the generic conventions of biography and autobiography. Issues such as selectivity, constructedness, contingency, and uncertainty in the writing of personal history are brought to the fore. With the creation of a "ghostwritten autobiography," Michaels challenges the supposed convention of autobiographical referentiality, blurs the distinction between biography and autobiography, and exposes the ideological assumptions that underpin both genres. This unsettling of generic boundaries has a lot to do with the author's awareness of the risks of literary exploitation of the Holocaust. This paper aims to examine how Michaels adopts simple but effective strategies to cross generic boundaries between biography and autobiography, and how self

Timothy Findley's The Wars (1977) started to investigate the underlying ideological assumptions about the writing of history before the rise of the postmodern epistemological and ontological questioning about history. Its problematization of realist presumptions of historical representation has been analysed by commentators, but the way Findley engages in genre transgression in order to unsettle history's claims to authenticity and objectivity has not received adequate critical attention. This essay is concerned with how he employs the biographic form for his protagonist's story but juxtaposes it with a nameless researcher's collection of information about him and investigation into related historical documents as a metafictional device to problematize the writing of biography and history as mimetic representation. The focus will be on the narrative strategies used to achieve genre transgression and blur the distinction between biography and history.

El proyecto que presento propone analizar y estudiar los elementos de la narrativa de Sarah Waters en cuanto a su significacion en la representacion de la locura y su manifestacion en los distintos espacios representados en sus obras neovictorianas: Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) y Fingersmith (2002). El eje central de esta tesis es la narrativa de la escritora galesa Sarah Waters que en sus tres novelas neovictorianas visibiliza a personajes que representan aquellos aspectos de la sociedad victoriana que han sido silenciados. Sarah Waters analiza a traves de sus protagonistas los huecos y los silencios de la epoca y nos enfrenta a una vision diferente, nueva y cambiante del siglo XIX. En este trabajo me centro en las tres primeras novelas de Waters, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity y Fingersmith, que se desarrollan en las ultimas decadas del siglo XIX. Observo como a traves de las protagonistas de las novelas neovictorianas de Sarah Waters se funden el entramado narrativo y...

It is the purpose of this paper to argue that trauma constitutes the bond between the Victorian and postmodern civilisations such as they are depicted in Swift's Ever After (1992). By fictionalising the Darwinian, nuclear and ontological crises, Swift manages to capture the quintessence of both nineteenth-and late twentieth-century senses of loss, deprivation and doubt. Beyond the historicised treatment of trauma, what interests Swift in this novel is the ethical dimension of trauma, which he explores by reassessing the suffering of the minor actors of history. As a reader of the recent and distant past, Swift takes on the responsibility of historical testimony and embodies the ethics of witnessing. As a novelist juxtaposing, comparing and adjoining Matthew's ethics of truth and Bill's ethics of dissolution, he embodies the specifically postmodern version of an ethical plurality. What is also, and perhaps mainly, postmodern in Swift's novel is the deconstruction of the concept of transcendence and its replacement by the concept of excendance, that is, the ethical urge to explore forms of otherness, as defined by Emmanuel Levinas. Swift illustrates this ethical drive by textualising the infinite otherness-and, of course, similarity-of our Victorian alter egos. As such his quest is typical of neo-Victorian fiction which can be considered as a form of literature of excendance.

A.S. Byatt's French translator, Jean-Louis Chevalier, once remarked on the fleeting similarities between her and some of her female characters that give away the woman writer behind the woman written. In fact, however much Byatt rejects the presence of the self in her idea of writing, she has somewhat reluctantly acknowledged that, on occasion, she has used herself as a source of composition for her characters. In my reading of 'The July Ghost', the most striking contradiction derives precisely from Byatt's own relationship with autobiographical writing: deeply suspicious of both biography and autobiography as she is, this short story is both ventriloquist distance and autobiographical grief.

The research in hand aims at exploring ekphrastic writing as a literary phenomenon that appears in selected works of Antonia Susanne Byatt (1936) and Radwa Ashour (1946-2014). The material of the research is "Medusa's Ankles" from Byatt's The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye from a book of short stories that carries the same title (1994), and Ashour's Heavier than Radwa (2013) and The Scream (2015). The paper examines one example from each of the four works from a cultural perspective making use of theories relevant to cultural studies. The theoretical aspect of the paper includes the exploration of the various definitions of ekphrasis, the types included in the paper in hand, and the various functions that they perform. The examples that the paper uses as material for illustration and analysis are Byatt's ekphrastic writing about Matisse's "Rosy Nude" (1935) in "Medusa's Ankles", and her ekphrastic description of Haghia Sophia in "The Nightingale's Eye"; and Ashour's ekphrastic writing about Munch's "The Scream" (1893) and her description of the location of Orabi's house in Heavier than Radwa. Due to the flexible aspect of descriptive exploration of several objects and aspects of things, the research relies on a number of analytical theories including cultural studies, semantics, semiotics, and reception theory. The research comes to the conclusion that ekphrasis is a flexible literary tool that enables writers to free their creative abilities, and express their ideas and impressions in a creative and literally entertaining way. It is also flexible in the sense that it has a variety of objects including works of art, architecture, and geographic space. This rather adds to its depth of expression and makes cultural studies the best theoretical field that allows the best tools of exploration possible to this literary genre.

This paper explores three works of fiction-Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010), Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World (2014) and Jessie Burton's The Muse (2016)-all of which attempt to answer the question "why have there been no great women artists?" by exploring the possibility that artworks by women may have been misattributed to their male contemporaries. It is suggested that authors of art-fiction often draw on the work of feminist art historians not only to show how such misattribution might occur, but also how it might be consolidated and perpetuated via the international mechanisms which govern the circulation of art, thus relegating female artists from the status of practitioner to muse. In exploring how the reception of an artwork can be influenced by viewers' perceptions about the artist's gender, fiction about women's art also contributes to the debate over whether it is possible to identify a distinctive feminine aesthetic. Whilst suggesting that art-history novels often defer to a traditional hierarchy of art forms, in which oil paintings of mythological subjects carry the greatest prestige, this paper argues that art-fiction can also create an alternative narrative of art history which can be used to challenge or at least supplement the mainstream narrative in which great artworks are almost exclusively produced by men.