ABSTRACT This article argues that the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day (1989) by Merchant Ivory evokes nostalgia as a trope that glorifies the imperial past of the British through portraying extravagantly both the butler protagonist’s professionalism and his attachment to the country house (Darlington Hall), one of the symbolic places used in heritage cinema. In the novel

ABSTRACT Critical attention to D. H. Lawrence’s two Italian novels has focused on themes of sexual politics and leadership politics, and few critics have noted their engagement with colonial politics. Informed by postcolonial studies, this paper argues that Lawrence’s representation of Italy in The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod is overloaded with Orientalist imagery in that Italy is imagined as an Other

ABSTRACT This article reads how obesity in Sapphire’s Push (1996) becomes a composite cultural metaphor for Gothic excesses. By critically analysing Claireece Precious Jones – the adolescent overweight African American protagonist of Push – with the help of contemporary Gothic theories of horror and excess this article makes a case for interpreting her fat body as a repository of cultural hatred, anxieties

ABSTRACT This is a ‘research editorial.’ It expounds the curatorial values that inform editing decisions for the Journal of Language Literature and Culture in 2020, setting them in a context of current scholarly debates and culture. Its main contribution to knowledge is also the JLLC’s main contribution: to embody the active recognition of the importance of a plenary function for journals such as this

ABSTRACT This paper contends that much of the discourse produced, received and exchanged online by ‘progressive subjects’ – activists committed to contesting oppression and examining privilege – is structured by neoliberal ideology. Human capital theory functions as the ‘interpellative arm’ of the neoliberal project, and a subject conceived as human capital is neoliberalism's discursive mark. Via the

ABSTRACT This article examines the phenomenon of migratory grief through an analysis of crónicas by Bolivian-born medical doctor Clara Espinosa, who migrated to Australia in 1988 and wrote under the pseudonym ‘Woggy Girl’. Crónicas are newspaper columns that comment on aspects of daily life, social habits and the concerns of communities. They have appeared in Spanish-language newspapers in Australia

ABSTRACT Australian poet Judith Wright has been read for her lyrical presentation of a woman-centred perspective on love, for her expression of guilt over colonial history and her solidarity with Aboriginal writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and for her support for environmental causes. Some critics have noted elements of mysticism, connecting them to Western literary traditions, but this article outlines

ABSTRACT Utopian literature is a literature of interfaces, as it is a discursive space in which countless modes and genres meet and converse. Utopia’s shadow, dystopia, is ‘a lens through which we filter historical reality’, and dystopian discourses have enabled productive and critical scrutiny of the excesses of modern history, although their role in perceiving the interconnectedness of political

ABSTRACT The David Malouf Collections at Canberra and Brisbane archive the manuscripts, correspondence, and diary entries of the noted Australian writer. Malouf’s authorship transforms these ordinary drafts and materials into finished works that are recognised and read internationally. The present paper attempts to indicate some nodes from the collections which bear traces of this metamorphosis of

ABSTRACT Colonial domination has been exercised by many means, exhibiting varied forms and expressions, one of the most prominent ones being language. Postcolonial countries and writers usually have to contend with the dilemma of which language to use, whether to employ their own native tongues, thus fostering national invigoration and a demise of colonial past, or whether the language of the coloniser

ABSTRACT Madame Beaumont’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ has become one of the most popular fairy tales to be appropriated in both text and screen over the years. This paper analyses how Donoghue’s reinterpretation of this classic tale in ‘The Tale of the Rose’ counters heteropatriarchal discourses about masculinity and femininity through a lesbian subject position. This paper attempts a queer reading of

ABSTRACT Parody is regarded as a ‘beside-or-against’ song. Based on the theories of parody and intertextuality, this paper analyses the parodic means adopted in Umberto Eco’s short story ‘Granita,’ which is meant to be a parody of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The study proceeds from three aspects: parody as imitation, parody as reconstruction and intertextuality as text of pleasure and jouissance. The

ABSTRACT This paper explores the politics of space, freedom and creativity through the prism of novelistic discourse in Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016), which is a twenty-first-century adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest (1610–1611). Hag-Seed, set in a Canadian prison, narrates the revenge orchestrated by the protagonist Felix on his antagonists Tony and Sal. Felix, an instructor

ABSTRACT The British dramatist David Hare (1947–) is a distinguished contemporary figure in the field of historical-political playwriting. To address the issues of his age, he makes use of history and the recent past as a model. Like Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the twentieth-century political theorist and activist, Hare conducts a pathological study of his surrounding environment and the world. Both

ABSTRACT While much has been written about Charles Dickens’s figuration of the daughter as a means of salvation for the capitalist father in Dombey and Son, the figure of the pet, which bears enormous ideological weight, is underanalysed. Attending to the style, content, and purposes of the symbolic and psychic economy of the pet, I argue that the distinction of public and private on which Dickens

ABSTRACT Violence is intimately connected with the body, and in particular with male embodied masculinity, in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-forthcoming) and its television adaptation Game of Thrones (2011–2019). While many scholars and media commentators have decried the series’ depictions of aggression, in this essay I focus on intersections of violence and male

ABSTRACT That Heart of Darkness continues to generate multiple critical responses owes to a large extent to the text's endemic ambivalence. Conrad's tendency to remain inconclusive, what Harold Bloom calls his ‘unique propensity for ambiguity'1, has received a great deal of critical attention, and its ideological and moral foundations have been thoroughly analysed. However, the possibility that the

ABSTRACT Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870) has notoriously been criticised by both Victorian and contemporary reviewers for its seeming oversimplified antagonism toward athleticism and sport. However, Man and Wife provides profound insights into the debates and anxieties of the time regarding the cultivation of physical prowess in conjunction with British imperialism. Collins’s antagonism represents

ABSTRACT Acclaimed as one of the best poets of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats is often the focus of critical attention. The connections between Yeats's work and the Abbey Theatre, Irish nationalism, language arts, and his love affair with Maud Gonne have been widely explored. Many of Yeats's poems focus on death, a universal topic which engenders fear and enchantment simultaneously, so

ABSTRACT The article reviews mid-century debates about politics and art by Sartre and Adorno to tease out a coherent sense of the political dimension of the novel form. The novel is essentially mediated by art-autonomous concerns, but it nonetheless exists to serve an ethical or political function. Alain Robbe-Grillet is then reviewed as developing a (late) modernist, critical, political aesthetic

ABSTRACT In his final novel, Virgin Soil (1877), Turgenev takes up the theme of the particular kind of populism (Narodnichestvo) that swept across the European part of Russia in the 1860s and 70s. Critics on both ends of the political spectrum believed that Virgin Soil failed to truthfully depict the populist movement; however, the novel provides an important cultural commentary that heretofore has

ABSTRACT An American novelist of Chinese origin, Amy Tan attempts to reconstitute the American experience for both the first and second generation Chinese immigrants in her fictional discourses. Curiously, she defiantly promotes the idea of a re-created identity through assimilation, even while she is aware of the inability of Asian Americans to discard their ethnicity and disappear into the American

ABSTRACT Throughout the twentieth century, and particularly prior to Stonewall, literature frequently represented same-sex desire in direct opposition to the forward-looking heterosexual romance narratives that ended with marriage and implied or literal procreation. When Patricia Highsmith published The Price of Salt, in 1952, its popularity with readers, and in particular queer readers, was attributed

ABSTRACT It is tempting to over-simplify the status of grotesque literatures in relation to genre. This paper moves beyond the binary of adherence and violation that often frames discussions of taxonomy, and instead suggests that the grotesque is vital in the construction of generic categories. Using two examples of early modern grotesque literature, seventeenth-century nonsense verse and Montaigne’s

These three short papers were initially formulated as contributions to a roundtable discussion on The Novel and Media held at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center in May 2018. Their brief was to contribute to the recent project of methodological reflection set in train by a resurgence of formalist analysis in literary criticism by thinking about the intersection of the novel form, novel

ABSTRACT In ‘Bridge and Door,’ Simmel makes a comment regarding the function of the window. He argues that the window acts as ‘a connection of inner space with the external world.’ He argues that ‘the teleological emotion with respect to the window is directed almost exclusively from inside to outside.’ Simmel speaks of the window as a mediating entity, a structural attribute that separates. With Simmel’s

ABSTRACT This paper relies on a feminist perspective on ageing to analyse Wendy Wasserstein’s plays. The Pulitzer-Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006) is good at dramatising the experience of women, especially their experience of ageing anxiety and ageing crises in their middle age. Their quest for identity is problematised in the paper in order to show the fluidity of identity through the passage

ABSTRACT This article reads contemporary Australian Indigenous poetics to substantiate the argument that nuclear threats inherently reproduce the same colonial tendencies of ontologic-epistemic categorisation and social hierarchisation through which terra nullius was claimed. Given the legacy of family destruction, forced assimilation and genocide advanced by colonial powers, and the incursion of nuclear

ABSTRACT The writings of Carmel Bird (Patrick White Award 2016) are a suitable literary canvas from which to explore a central concern in the work of a white Australian woman writer of Celtic descent: the need to reconcile herself with two dark chapters of Australia’s history; namely, the convict past and Indigenous genocide. This paper investigates Bird’s controversial focus on Australia’s – particularly

ABSTRACT In some contexts of institutional change, an initial condition of ‘love and the word’ may become something more like hate or boredom or indifference to the word. Drawing on three different moments of my professional experience, I explore this question by considering how three genres of writing that I used to love practising – the film review, the academic ‘theory’ essay, and the strategic

ABSTRACT This paper considers the ease and the difficulty of adapting the habits of philology to the exigencies of intellectual history. The title chosen by Michel Foucault for one of his major historical studies referred to ‘words and things’, but the relation between those two is not given once and for all. Foucault developed the notion of discourse, which involved articulated sets of words. Discourses

ABSTRACT Some protest movements around the globe have been deploying a rhetoric of love to make themselves feel less vulnerable to the cynical languages of neoliberal economics and managerial control. Often they involve youthful energies, from the Occupy Movements of 2011, to ‘Feel the Bern’, to the Nuit Debout movement in France. My own research has focused on an anti-gas mining protest in Broome

ABSTRACT The paper argues that the study of language in literature springs from the ancient discipline of philology which, far from having disappeared with the advent of modern theory, persists both in its repressions and in its techniques. It makes this argument in three parts, a polemic bearing on the temporality of philology, and two exercises each of which seeks to illustrate two of these techniques

ABSTRACT Harold Bloom’s 1973 essay The Anxiety of Influence posits a poetics of ‘great poets’ who use and deny the prototype-poets and prototype-texts that influence them. Bloom’s understandings of poetic composition and reception offer a strikingly sympathetic account of much political discourse. This article focuses on the ‘Eulogy’ that Noel Pearson delivered at the funeral for Gough Whitlam in 2014

ABSTRACT This is a paper about a possible philology. To help envisage it, I draw on three recent books which between them speak of two kinds of readerly love: love of the word, and love of literature; I examine the interplay between these two ways of loving written texts, together with the effects of subjectivity and coercion that they generate and the future they imagine for the love of the word.

ABSTRACT Solitude and a striving to communicate are major themes in the poetry of Walter de la Mare. While best known for his verse and fiction, de la Mare also produced a series of unconventional anthological works which contain explicit treatments of those themes which are only implicit in his creative work. Drawing on the insights found in these anthologies, this paper argues that, for de la Mare

ABSTRACT This article begins by questioning the ethical turn in literary studies (Hillis Miller, Attridge) and suggests that this redirection has tended to downplay the importance of what Friedrich Schiller had labelled ‘the play-drive’ (Spieltrieb). Drawing on neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp's findings concerning the primacy of the play instincts, the article focuses on Wolfgang Iser's ‘literary anthropology’

ABSTRACT In keeping with the current ethical turn in humanities, this paper analyses Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary as a literary testimony of post-Levinasian relationality. Such relationality – whereby the One and the Other both meet, ‘emasculate’ and give meaning to each other – draws on vulnerability. That is, the novella shows that to be human is to be exposed and vulnerable to the Other.

ABSTRACT This paper offers a reading of Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road (NR) (1991) in the light of Homi K. Bhabha’s theorisation of the relation between nation and narration. For Bhabha, the nation is narrated through narratives which are unstable and inconsistent. These narratives, based on the past or established regularly in the present, are relentlessly refashioned. Negotiating the questions of

ABSTRACT Scholarship of the Middle English King Horn (c. 1250–1290) has grappled inconclusively with its obscure toponyms Westernesse and Suddene and with identification of its nebulous Saracen antagonists. Recent work on the literary impact of the historical crises of the Norman Conquest and the Crusades may offer fresh resolution, positing that thirteenth-century romances responded to contemporary

ABSTRACT Tilism-e-Hoshruba is a part of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, which has entertained audiences in different parts of South Asia for many centuries. Despite its transregional appeal, Tilism-e-Hoshruba is little known in the West. The first English translation appeared as late as 2009, introducing it to the English-speaking world. However, Tilism-e-Hoshruba's new found accessibility does not recompense

ABSTRACT Women, from time immemorial, are always considered subservient to men, and they have remained at the disposal of the head of the family, the father. They are denied their basic human rights and the ‘biological control over their bodies’ as woman is the sexual property of her family and at the same time her body is negotiated for sustaining family honour. The female body is subjected to regulation

ABSTRACT Allan Pasco has noted the relative paucity of critical attempts to define the short story as a genre. Most critics, he suggests, ‘insist upon the story, for the causally and chronologically constructed narrative is generally viewed as central.’ One means of moving beyond causation and chronology, we argue, is by recourse to the concept of the plot genotype, first elaborated by Vladimir Propp

ABSTRACT Many critics of Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi have contended that the play portrays an atmosphere of terror and irrationality, which reflects Irobi’s fascination with an ‘invitation to orgy’ (Eagleton) as the panacea to the oppressive political leadership in his postcolonial Nigeria. Beyond this observation, however, the position that in his obsession with power, Nwokedi, the protagonist snowballs

ABSTRACT This article investigates the concept of culture as it has functioned in the discourse of crisis across the social sciences and humanities. As part and parcel of contemporary globality’s restructuring, culture as an ontological and ideational entity continues to structure the syntax of worldly antagonism even as its precise definition is ever expansive and elusive and without geographical

ABSTRACT Romantic impulses govern the fraught, family histories in these poems on conflicts that disrupt or threaten loss to lovers. In Isabella Keats explores a young woman’s resistance to her brothers’ machinations. In The Eve of St. Agnes Madeline confronts an uncertain future, either in her family’s bastion or in Porphyro’s domains. The attention to romantic energy in both poems discloses Keats’s

ABSTRACT Critics have employed a wide range of post-structuralist theories to cast light on Howard Barker’s art of theatre, but the application of Judith Butler’s theories to Barker’s dramatic works has so far been neglected. In an attempt to fill the existing gap in the scholarship and criticism on Barker’s drama, this study will employ Judith Butler’s conceptions of fluid identity and subversive

In Le Temps retrouvé, Proust writes regretfully of how his work has been misunderstood. Even those who were favourable to the Proustian project, he complains, ended up congratulating him for achieving the opposite of what he actually intended. They praised him for discovering certain truths through amicroscope whereas, Proust claims, he had used a telescope. Far from being a ‘fouilleur de détails’

ABSTRACT For all their differences, Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel and The Heart of Mid-Lothian have distinct similarities. Each has a morally upright protagonist and is set some years after a Scottish-English union has been effected. More important is that each depicts a journey from Scotland to England in search of justice at the monarch’s hand and, inseparably from that, the establishing of a secure

ABSTRACT The proliferation of life writings written by people on the autism spectrum is a relatively recent phenomenon and has quickly become the touchstone for autism culture. Cultural and literary studies have gradually acknowledged these autism narratives. Is it possible to approach them as a new subgenre within life writing or disability narratives, and if so, what are its distinctive features

ABSTRACT In Alice Munro’s short story, ‘Dimension,’ the protagonist Doree shifts through the nightmare aftermath of her children’s murder. Her husband Lloyd, the murderer, has been incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane, and his madness can be read as ‘clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic’.1 Lloyd demonstrably endures some kind of ‘narcissistic crisis’

ABSTRACT This article examines Ruth, the cerebral protagonist of Olive Moore’s novel Spleen, and how her processes of rumination affect the ways she interacts with modern gendered ideologies. These interactions, the article argues, suggest not only a ferocious feminism, but also a kind of homoeroticism or lesbianism extant in the protagonist. In order to make these arguments, the study first analyzes

ABSTRACT George Johnston’s novel, My Brother Jack, is set in an Australian suburb in Melbourne, the action beginning at the conclusion of the First World War. It is a time period in which American popular culture was rapidly spreading in Australia, threatening the local movie, theatre, music, and publishing industries, and America began displacing Great Britain as the provider of culture forms to Australia

ABSTRACT The nihilism consequent upon the First World War, and which T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets sought in some measure to dispel, emerges in ‘Burnt Norton’ as the chilling culmination of a putatively redemptive idealism. In common with his Romantic forebears, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, the ambivalent narrator of Eliot’s first quartet harbours a desire to transcend the limits of temporality

ABSTRACT As a Victorian form of transport, the bicycle is often linked with the New Woman and hailed as a harbinger of emancipation and public mobility for women, or a tool for female sartorial reform and physical improvement. This paper argues that until the end of the nineteenth century, the bicycle, with its high cost and its association with the younger members of the upper-middle class, is also

ABSTRACT A persistent tension between the physical limits of the novel form and the expansive scope of its representative possibilities is present in much of Doris Lessing’s fiction, and made explicit in The Four-Gated City, the concluding volume of her five-part series The Children of Violence. Lessing tests the imaginative parameters of her novel in a succession of different ways: introducing the

ABSTRACT Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wildness of radio. He encountered voices through his own radio that had encoded messages for him alone, and his novels are rich with radios that are engaged in all manner of unsettling activity: they change form and regress, they carry cryptic messages that can collapse entire political regimes, they

ABSTRACT This essay engages the world of the nineteenth-century naval novel, considering how the ‘wooden world’ presented in such narratives came to shape a unique representational order. Taking Captain Frederick Marryat’s The King’s Own (1830) as primary evidence, it is argued that naval novels depict the man-of-war as a place where the things – and men – of the parlour and marketplace find themselves

The word ‘world’ recurs ninety-six times in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a work more commonly understood as a Modernist experiment with temporality and voice, but which might also be thought of as one of the novel’s most self-reflexive engagements with world-making. The increasingly extended speech acts of six voices are encapsulated within typographically distinct interludes, whose description of the

ABSTRACT In the late eighteenth century, European novelists discovered youth. Writers like Goethe, Austen and Scott developed a new genre, the Bildungsroman, in which young, enthusiastic protagonists explore the world, develop themselves and find a place to remain. This, at least, has been a popular argument in modern criticism. Recently, however, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have brought