Volume 68, Issue 3

In H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), the incursions of ‘exotic’ cultural and religious practices result in an isolated New England community’s moral and genetic degeneration. This article traces the story’s depictions of Orientalized Others and hybrid identities to themes of spatial transgressions as well as distortions of language and western rationality. In colonial times, when it functioned mainly as an outlet for accumulated domestic issues and tabooed fantasies, the Orient appeared as a safe space that could be conjured or ignored at will. Accelerating industrialization, globalizing trade, imperialism, and the advent of modernity diminished the epistemic and spatial distance needed to uphold these fantasies. This abating distance, the article suggests, is where Lovecraftian themes of the monstrous take hold by establishing an American variant of Orientalism that perforates the boundaries between whiteness and Otherness through the lens of nonwhite immigration during the first decades of the twentieth century.

The first part of the article deals with the national myths of Canada. It demonstrates that the long-time supposed lack of myths in Canada may itself be regarded as a myth. After presenting useful meanings of the term myth, the intersections of myth/mythology and gender are considered, both in Canadian culture and in Greek mythology. Linking Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey —the canonized beginnings of Western literature and their foundation on ancient myth—with Canadian culture, Margaret Atwood’s works and their treatment of ancient and social myths are then focussed on, particularly her revisionist rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey in her novel The Penelopiad (2005). This women-centered rewriting of the originally male-dominated story starts from two issues: what led to the hanging of the 12 maids, and what was Penelope really up to? Among the results are an intriguing re-conception of the original main characters, an upgrading of female domestic life, and a debunking not only of Odysseus and his supposedly heroic deeds but also of the authority of ancient myths where precarious not least concerning their conception of gender and gender relations.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of heroic figures and heroizing narratives, pointing to a possible change in contemporary attitudes towards the heroic in contrast to earlier cynicism and irony. While the renewed prominence of heroizations in popular culture has sparked increasing academic interest in the field of cultural studies and has seen wide academic discussion, it has not yet been specifically addressed from the perspective of studies on the role of the heroic in culture. This article outlines the specific strategy the series’ producers and writers followed to recast the archetypal detective, Sherlock Holmes, as a popular hero figure for the present, with a focus on both the discursive as well as the audio-visual elements of this representation. The article makes the argument that figures in twenty-first-century British popular culture reinstall the heroic while they are simultaneously aware of the pitfalls and the ambiguity of sympathy for the hero.

This article investigates the literary technique with which Patrick McGrath opposes two narrators and illustrates how the subtle story of one of them, Constance, deconstructs the apparently dominant discourse of the second narrator, Sidney. This article furthermore refutes the current critical interpretation of Constance as a hysteric and demonstrates that it is Sidney who deliberately constructs this notion of hysteria and who himself – paradoxically – can be linked to Histrionic Personality Disorder. This article finally explores how Constance experiences what Abraham and Torok called transgenerational haunting and how this psychoanalytic theory is reinforced and commented upon by a series of metaphors.

Postmodern fiction is marked by impossible worlds, the appreciation of which challenges readers and draws upon different cognitive operations. The present study reacts to the reading strategies proposed by Alber, J. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama . Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press. It adopts and adapts these strategies in a case study of Saunders’s experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). There is an attempt to investigate the cognitive operations that are activated in the process of communicating with and understanding such texts. The study evinces the pros and cons of Alber’s reading strategies. It proposes the cognitive operation of schematization in both online and offline forms as another reading strategy which helps readers understand impossibilities in texts.