Volume 62, Issue 2

Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is commonly described as a typical sentimental novel, yet the work has many aspects that a straightforward sentimentalist interpretation cannot possibly account for. I argue in this paper that The Man of Feeling , far from being a straightforward sentimental novel, encapsulates a profound critique of both moral sentimentalism and the genre of sentimental fiction. This critical stance is established in the first instance, I claim, by the ironic distance to the sentimental material in the novel, which results from the complex, multilevel narrative structure, and is further reinforced by numerous satirical elements in the text. As I demonstrate, reading Mackenzie’s work as an antithesis of the sentimental novel that parodies the sentimentalist moral epistemology underlying this mode of fiction does a much better job at explaining several crucial aspects of the novel than the sentimentalist interpretation.

This paper analyses the development of the theme of solitude in the work of Philip Larkin, one of the most popular English poets of the post-war era, in his poems and letters covering a period of thirty years. In his lifetime, the “best poet laureate we never had” was often considered as the “Hermit of Hull,” due to his well-known reluctance to socialise. Over the period of his productive life, Larkin weighs the aspects of solitude, togetherness, and gregariousness. His poems reflect how the early wish to be alone as a precondition for his creativity gives way to an unwilling acceptance of conviviality and, finally, the blank fear of isolation and death, as expressed in his last great published poem, “Aubade.” It is shown that as his creativity dwindles away, Larkin grudgingly acknowledges his daily work as a librarian, once described as the ‘toad work,’ as a stabilising force in his life.

In a postmodern understanding of textuality, fact and fiction can no longer be regarded as opposites; in this context, Hayden White’s studies of fictional techniques in historical texts have initiated an interdisciplinary discussion about the significance of fictional narration as a meaningful cultural technique . The narrative reconstruction of the history of lost civilisations and earlier cultures also plays a central role in contemporary literature in English. The historiographical search for the reality of the lives of earlier oral cultures and the attempt to provide academic interpretations of such cultures in order to explain the past structure novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale , Jane Yolen’s Sister Light, Sister Dark , and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft . By analysing the different textual layers and narrative forms of these novels, the difficulties of a historiographical reconstruction of lost cultures in the medium of fiction are highlighted and the ambivalent truth claims of academic discourse become apparent. These novels illustrate how the integration and negotiation of historiography in fictional literature creates a tension-fraught discursive network of different competing voices that sheds light on the complex processes of cultural meaning-making.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq initiated a surge of texts by US soldiers who utilized recent Web 2.0 technology to forge new types of war narratives, such as the so-called “milblogs.” Milblogs merge letter and journal writing with journalistic reporting, and they maintain contact between soldiers and their social environment. They are at once public and private communication. Military psychology since Vietnam has referred to warrior traditions of Native American communities to discuss public narration and ceremonial acknowledgment of a soldier’s war experience as vital elements for veteran readjustment and trauma recovery. This article analyzes an exemplary milblog to argue that the interaction between blogger and audience does similar cultural work and has comparable ceremonial and, therefore, therapeutic functions: Soldiers publicly share their experience, reflect on it with their audience, receive appreciation and support, and thus mutually (re-)negotiate group identity.