Volume 57, Issue 4

Dickens’s Great Expectations has inspired creative reactions by English, American, Australian and New Zealand novelists. One of the latest, Jones’s Mr. Pip , transfers the Victorian text to a completely different time and culture, to the South Sea island of Bougainville in 1991 where it is used to teach a group of young children. The analysis of the novel shows that though Jones is ‘writing back to the canon,’ he confirms the values of Dickens’s text. With his first-person narrator, the black girl Matilda, he illustrates what the function of literature, even in an alien environment and under unfavourable conditions, can be.

In this article, I read Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) against the background of realism to unravel the novel’s distinct critique of racial discourse. I argue that realism’s characteristic technique of appealing to the visible to establish the reality and realness of its fictions enables the novel to trace a similar operation in the discourse of race. My focus rests on the novel’s treatment of two pairs of characters that challenge the visual confidence of both realism and race, pairs that exemplify what Samira Kawash has called ‘interracial twins:’ sets of characters whose parties ‘actually,’ ostensibly belong to different ‘races,’ yet whom the text presents as strikingly similar in their appearance. In its characterization of and narratives surrounding these ‘twins,’ the novel exposes the techniques by which racial discourse naturalizes itself and unmasks race as a textual construct, generated by stories and documents that dangerously sustain a reality of their own.

This article discusses the political dimension of post-war American Poetry from around 1950-1980. The underlying argument is that the antirepresentationalist poetry produced in and around the LANGUAGE-school in the 1970s is the necessary continuation of the political and social activism initially opted for by the Beat Generation. I assert that the kind of language-centeredness typical for many works of the LANGUAGE- school was already entailed in central texts of the 1950s and 1960s, as writers began to examine processes of meaning production/construction in the social sphere. Looking at selected poems by Allen Ginsberg (“A Supermarket in California”, “Wichita Vortex Sutra”), Denise Levertov (the text collection To Stay Alive ) and Bruce Andrews (“I Guess Work the Time Up”), the article traces a specific feature of postmodern poetry, spotlighting the growing ambivalence inherent in the search for an alternative cultural politics instigated by post-war American poets. I point out how the increased interest in the (linguistic) constructedness of political realities resulted in a poetics of “nonnarrativity” and hermetic closure that began gradually to jeopardize the communicative foundation of their collective political goals. My article concludes by suggesting a conceptual link between the projects of multiauthorship engaged in by several LANGUAGE-poets and the Habermasian notion of “communicative rationality.”

In recent years there has been an ongoing debate about whether or not modern Wales can be defined as a postcolonial society in the same way as the other Celtic nations of Britain - Scotland and Ireland. This essay seeks to cast new critical light on this discussion by approaching it through the writing of Idris Davies, one of Wales’s most distinctive modern poets. It is claimed that Davies’s own background as a Welshspeaking, working-class writer living both in Wales and England allowed him to develop a unique poetic voice that has much to say about some of the key issues in a Welsh postcolonial experience: the conflict of languages, the impact of history, the relationship between class and nation, margin and centre, and not least the existential condition of exile.

Although references to various literary, pictorial and musical works of art are central to the meaning and aesthetics of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty , the critical discussion has so far mainly focussed on its relationship to Forster’s Howards End and widely refrained from a functional interpretation of On Beauty ’s intertextuality. While Howards End is an important reference point, the full functional potential of the novel’s intertextuality can only be described in a wider and more differentiated analysis. As a contribution to such an analysis, this paper distinguishes between three functions of On Beauty ’s intertextuality: it is argued that in Smith’s novel intertextuality is (a) a means of constituting the storyworld, (b) a means of staging the novel’s central themes and (c) a means of poetological self-positioning.