Volume 66, Issue 4

A common assumption about J.R.R. Tolkien’s works is that they are escapist, only dealing obliquely with issues related to the real world. This has been addressed in the field of literary studies by linking Tolkien’s literary output with twentieth-century concerns such as modernist practices and, in recent times, by reading his tales against the backdrop of ecocriticism. However, scholars in the latter field, such as Dickerson, Evans, and Campbell, frequently over-emphasize wonder and the spiritual connection with the natural world as the intended response of readers, which undermines the potential implications and relevance of Tolkien’s works for the real world. In this article I wish to show that Tolkien’s cosmological vision is not only premised on the idea of appreciating the wonder-inciting qualities of the world but that it also entails a certain amount of utilitarianism, and the need to combine both is related to the ethical theory of ideal utilitarianism as outlined by G.E. Moore. Moreover, in several early episodes of The Silmarillion , the combined approach to the natural world is represented by trees, setting a mythical precedent for later works. Of the latter, I will be looking mainly at “Aldarion and Erendis” in Unfinished Tales and “The Downfall of Númenor” in The Silmarillion .

This article traces the historical impulse in two intertextually connected dystopian texts – George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) – by reading the two novels in the context of the construction of historical narrative after the proclaimed ‘end of history’ in the twentieth century. It considers their representation of history within the framework of literary criticism of the historical novel (György Lukács), critical dystopias (Tom Moylan), and memory as an active, mediated engagement with the past (Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). It looks, more specifically, at how the texts contrast personal experience and the meta-narrative contemplation of memory with institutionalized versions of history on different diegetic levels by juxtaposing the narrators’/focalizers’ view of history with that presented in the framework of pseudo-historical appendices that accompany and significantly modify the interpretations of both narratives.

The post-9/11 wars produced a new generation of US veterans. As the military campaigns dragged on over extended periods, public discourse on the wars refueled ongoing discussions from the Vietnam era about veterans’ social and psychological wellbeing. The public increasingly voiced concerns about psychological injuries such as posttraumatic stress, veterans’ postwar reintegration struggles, and suicides. This article will discuss two NGOs organized by and for veterans to analyze how their activism responds to the sense of social crisis prevalent in these public debates on veterans’ affairs. It will present the projects’ online self-representation and their documentation in activist scholarship and journalism to carve out how civic engagement in veterans’ affairs challenges the traditional myth of American individualism to promote volunteerism and community service as vehicles for reintegration, promoting – and enacting – the civil-military social contract.

One of the most salient developments in recent short story criticism focuses on the genre’s connection with liminality. Both short fiction’s suitability to convey the liminal and liminality as a defining feature of the short story are at stake. The short fiction of contemporary author Janice Galloway is a good example of this. After a brief introduction to the concept of liminality, I discuss one story from each of Galloway’s collections of short fiction: “Frostbite” is the story of how a young music student crosses an existential boundary and leaves behind disabling expectations and fears; “jellyfish” features a divorced woman undergoing a liminal moment in her experience of motherhood, whereas the woman in a homeless couple in “a night in” narrates her experience as a privileged witness to ontological liminality affecting both space and language.

In Swing Time , her newest novel to date, Zadie Smith makes use of a first-person narrator for the first time in her career as a writer, and this change in narrative perspective is crucial to our understanding of the novel. Her narrator is slightly odd and we come to question the veracity of her account. Thus, she is ‘unreliable’ in traditional terms, but this article argues that we can equally call her inauthentic because she obviously represses feelings that are vital to the story. She does not fully expose herself, for she tries to hide the fact that she does not know who she is. Trapped between the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, oppressed by an overbearing mother and a racist society, the narrator has confined herself to an existence as a shadow. By way of Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition and Frantz Fanon’s image in the third person, this article tries to show that Swing Time ’s narrator exists only as a shadow because she finds no external affirmation of herself as a black woman.