Volume 56, Issue 4

This article offers the sketch of a re-reading of William Wordsworth’s drama The Borderers (composed 1796-1799, published 1842), which at the same time opens up new vistas for discussions of the more general topic of the dialectics of transgression and affirmation, of deviance and defiance. Drawing upon the sociological concept of anomy as well as on recent developments in theory (Luhmann, Foucault, Derrida), this article focuses on The Borderers as a radically self-reflexive dramatic text that thematises and negotiates the modern dilemma, or ethical aporia, of individual conscience in a functionally differentiated society.

This paper deals with the narrative treatment of the naturally impossible phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC). Taking the popularity of scientific issues such as the sudden exchange of heat energy and notions of entropy in Dickens’s own life time as a point of departure, it traces and seeks to explain an extraordinary visual bias in Dickens’s approach to the matter of SHC, which seems in disaccord with (allegedly) accurate reports of such deaths where an eye witness is almost never present. While Dickens’s well-known statement of his belief in the real possibility of SHC is read as an attempt to forestall criticism of his idiosyncratically constructed notion of reality, the narrative procedure he adopted is discussed as a captivating rhetoric of visual as well as physical proximity and distance, and related to the most persistent metaphor of Bleak House : that of impaired and distorted, entropic vision.

As critical junctures of discourse, beginnings are reflexive moments, highly charged with creating expectations and setting the reader’s attitude towards a novel. Thereby they preserve the sociorepresentational climate of a particular historical moment. Assuming that the beginning of a work contains important cues that illuminate the specific quality of the fictional space and its relation to the non-fictional surroundings, this essay reviews cognitive frame conceptions for their heuristic value for a frame theory of literature. I suggest looking at framings that occur at the beginning of a work as culture-specific signposts which shed light on the historical discourse situation of fiction. In a case study of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing I will test the historicity of initial framings as interfaces between text, author, reader, and cultural context.

Rebecca Harding Davis’s still relatively obscure novel, Waiting for the Verdict (serialized in 1867), is a complex study of the vicissitudes of race and class during the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath. Using an array of sentimental/reformist, protorealist and realist narrative and stylistic procedures, the author creates an ideologically dense text which is ultimately unable to break away from the incipient contradictions, whether on the level of its narrative execution or on the level of its very heterogeneous content. This fascinating, if at times contradictory, heterogeneity is illustrated in the argument, principally through focus on the issues of color and those of class or social status. These issues are cast within the prevailing forms of racialist discourses and theories of society, unfolding under the heading of scientific Darwinism and environmentalism on the one hand, and its counterpart, religious, sentimental, and reformist discourses on the other.

The present article tries to find answers for a lack of narrative tension in Graham Swift’s The Light of Day . Taking its cue from recent theological approaches to Swift’s work, the article starts by analysing the way the novel expresses parental figures as representations of the Biblical God. The analysis yields a separation of feeling and truth/justice in both the representations and the novel as a whole. The article argues that this separation entails the naturalisation of guilt and evil, which has a deflating effect on the narrative tension of the novel. Through a comparison with Waterland , the article shows that The Light of Day lacks a problematic but seemingly necessary dimension of nature: its teleological dimension. The article concludes by showing how the absence of any teleological dimension in the novel leads to what I call poietic suicide.

Against the background of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001) this article takes issue with the politics of representation and the common labelling practises of refugees and asylum seekers in media in general and literature in particular. Through a thorough examination of the representation of flight, it is argued that Gurnah’s novel confronts the reader with a highly heterogeneous picture of refugee predicaments which counteracts with ‘easy’ stereotypical conceptions. Thus the novel manages to draw a more complex panorama of refugee stories that stirs the fine line between well known refugee imagery (with themes of loss and expatriation) and representations of modern identity in a multicultural nation-state.