Volume 62, Issue 4

This article discusses Elizabeth Bowen’s appropriation of a traditionally male-addressed literary genre, namely, of what Elaine Showalter has termed “male romance,” which Bowen radically reformulates in order to foreground the complexity of female subjectivity and sexuality against a backdrop of war. In her short story “Mysterious Kôr” (1945), Bowen both draws and departs from Henry Rider Haggard’s prototypical male romance She: A History of Adventure (1887) not only by intertextually incorporating Haggard’s literary landscape in her story, but also by inserting contemporary assessments of Haggard’s novel – most notably those of his friend and admirer Andrew Lang in his sonnet “She” (1888). Like Haggard and Lang, Bowen produced “Mysterious Kôr” in years marked by a profound sense of crisis and disenchantment which, in Bowen’s case, was enhanced by the horrors of the Blitz War in London. Haggard, Lang, and Bowen articulate their respective narratives as a literary response to such disenchantment, shaped as a quest-myth of ‘re-enchantment’ which departs from a civilization on the verge of collapse to a mythical destination. However, Bowen is also careful in articulating difference from Haggard’s male narrative and Lang’s appreciation of it: Departing from many of these writers’ literary motifs, Bowen produces a female version of an imaginative escape which entails a woman’s experience of war, and her mental strategies to preserve sanity.

In a number of recent British novels, readers encounter startlingly hyperbolic representations of characters and settings, indicative of an ambition to represent the human condition comprehensively. This essay reads this phenomenon in the context of recent critical commentary on the novel that has engaged with various kinds of universalisms (‘hysterical realism,’ ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘cosmodernist’ novels, and ‘traumatological’ fiction). It suggests that the texts discussed here, Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (2008), and McEwan’s Solar (2010), do not (only) aim at negotiating the place of individuals in globalized society and the dread of impersonal catastrophes, but at spelling out an anthropology: by way of autopoetological self-valorization, literature is presented as a prime medium of human relations to the world, answering to an essential anthropological deficiency.

Maya Angelou’s travelogue All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) has been read as a quintessential (African-)American story of self-discovery, with critics celebrating Angelou’s ability to find her own identity within or against prescriptive images of womanhood and blackness. This article argues, quite the contrary, that Maya’s ‘success story’ is due to a constant deferral of identification, which results from a reluctance to fully identify with any image imposed from without or within and thus to become complicit in one’s (self-)containment. To highlight the method and results of Maya’s self-deferral, this article focuses on a central episode in the travelogue reporting an acting trip to Berlin where Maya jokingly sets the stage for a confrontation of the Black, the White, and the Jew. The article describes Maya’s behavior as an act of trickstery, in the sense conceptualized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. based on African-American folklore, and further uses the trickster episode to illustrate, as well as to challenge, Gates’ theory of signifyin(g) as accounting for the discrete black difference of African-American literature.

The present article analyzes visual and literary surrealism as a theme and method in Olga Grushin’s debut novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov , paying particular attention to ambiguity and estrangement, unreliable narration and ekphrasis shading into hallucination. It discusses the functions of Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Todorov’s fantastique in the surreal, and analyzes the novel’s use of the three gateways to surrealism: dreams, drugs, and madness.

This article examines the relationship between the form of Canadian poet Anne Carson’s Nox and its content, particularly as they relate to shame and subjectivity. As an elegy, Nox is as much about the person mourned – Carson’s long-estranged brother – as it is about Carson herself. Yet, even as the book hints at real personalities and the kinds of shame they experienced, Nox also lends a dignity to both, enacting therefore the protective measures of shame through both the aesthetics of the book and the narratives it recounts. As a study of shame, therefore, I argue that Nox writes of the self without relying on the construct of the coherent, core self. Nox illustrates the various shames a self can feel but also the way shame can emerge as an aesthetic or poetics independent of the feeling self.