Volume 52, Issue 2

This article examines how eighteenth-century black writers and white abolitionists used the image of the slave child for their respective political purposes. (Auto-)biographies written by and about slaves abducted as children from Africa such as The Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772) and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) contrasted the ‘white’ bourgeois narrative of infantile development with a tale of loss and deprivation. Their conventional narrative patterns constructed Africa as a pastoral idyll; Rousseauian ideas of innate goodness were combined with the topos of the noble savage. White abolitionists, too, turned the black orphan child into a sentimental icon; examples can be found in the writings of James Montgomery, Ann Taylor, Thomas Clarkson, Laurence Sterne and William Blake. Eighteenth-century educational and colonial policies were articulated in markedly similar terms; infantile and lower-class “ignorance” was juxtaposed with the mental “darkness” of the colonial subject. The article ends with a look at a late-twentieth-century transformation of the ‘slave child’ motif, David Dabydeen’s novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999), which focuses on the figure of the black slave child in the second picture of William Hogarth’s eponymous cycle of paintings (1732). The novel discusses the problem of the narrative construction of ‘black childhood’ itself, rewriting the eighteenth-century sentimental tradition in postmodernist fashion

Edward Bellamy’s utopian novels are usually regarded as important albeit controversial contributions to the political discourse in American culture. However, the crucial role of technology, its impact on Bellamy’s political philosophy, theory of the subject, and concept of fictionality, has not been adequately acknowledged in recent critical discussions. This essay sets out to examine the wide range of machines and inventions introduced in Bellamy’s fiction as an essential aspect of his utopian imagination. On the one hand, technology takes on a metaphorical function by transforming the principles of cooperation and efficiency into a fascinating spectacle; on the other, it opens up a new realm of public entertainment shifting the notion of individuality into the context of an industrialized popular culture. Most importantly, technology contributes to the sense of ambiguity and anxiety noticeable in Bellamy’s novels. Even though the author advocates a republican ideal of technology where machinery should serve the common good by advancing use and beauty, his main character Julian West also comes to appreciate its potential for the creation of transgressive modes of experience. Thus, in a crucial shift indicative of Bellamy’s modern sensibility, the power of technology serves both to embody but also to destabilize and undermine his utopian vision

Otto Gross (1877-1920), psychiatrist from Graz and apostle of free love in a modern matriarchal utopia, had a short but very intensive affair with Frieda Weekley, née Richthofen, before she met D.H. Lawrence. This experience affected profoundly Frieda’s relation with Lawrence. Brenda Maddox thinks that Frieda “UnEnglished” young Lawrence’s sense of sexuality. This finds expression in his late novels, particularly in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Otto Gross evidently supplied the model for Connie’s lover Mellors. Considering the far-reaching consequences the acquittal of this novel from the charge of pornography in the much publicized trial of 1960 had on the presentation of sex in the modern novel, the role played by Otto Gross in this context deserves at least a footnote in the history of literature.

Nathanael West’s last two novels, A Cool Million, or The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934) and The Day of the Locust (1939), thematize the mass-cultural impact of simulation in ways that point forward to post-World War II American literature. They do so most notably by establishing a connection between the twentieth-century economic culture of consumption (the ideology of consumerism) and apocalyptic traditions of Western thought, a connection they explore through the figure of the simulacrum and the structural motif of unveiling. This article intends to demonstrate that West’s literary analysis of simulacra transcends the boundaries of traditional readings of ‘modernism’ and that, contrary to a number of interpretations, his texts do not offer a straight repetition of but a critical commentary on apocalyptic modes of thought and reading.

While New Historicism is spreading into other disciplines and continues to produce valuable studies, Greenblatt’s politics, methodology and scholary standards have come increasingly under attack. This essay endeavours to review and contextualize the various contributions to this debate in Critical Self-Fashioning: Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicism, an anthology edited by Jürgen Pieters (Frankfurt a.M. et al.: Peter Lang, 1999). Among other things, it is remarkable that, in this interesting anthology, the role of the imagination in constructing the past and the importance of the aesthetic dimension in the reception of a literary work, which has been so sadly neglected by the non-poetic branch of New Historicism, once more enter the field of critical discussion