Volume 72, Issue 4

The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic romance that deals with the conflict of ownership and inheritance in a uniquely American setting of New England. This paper argues that The House of the Seven Gables ’ happy marriage of Phoebe Pyncheon and Holgrave does not redeem the Pyncheons’ sinful past and the apparent unraveling through marriage functions as an act to maintain the class distinction and to present ownership as an Eden-like and natural state of affairs. Discussed in a religious context, the Gothic modes in the novel, though secularized to an extent, completely conform to this prevalent interpretation. The subversion of the Puritan Calvinist theology and entailed predestination and its containment in liberal theology allows the present generation to redefine their condition by their own will. This new, semi-Jeffersonian world of the present leaves the conflict of ownership unresolved; questions about the lawful and just rights of property and inheritance are too readily overshadowed by the optimistic and lightsome ending of the novel.

Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of possible worlds as a new way of understanding literary texts. The main thrust of Possible Worlds Theory lies within the world-creating power of the reader’s imagination. Despite a considerable amount of literature on Possible Worlds Theory, investigating the consistent correlation between this theory and rhetorical devices such as intertextuality and metaphor still seems a productive endeavour. What remains unclear is how intertextual references and metaphors trigger alternative possible worlds, which may or may not be consistent with an actual world. In this regard, employing Ryan’s Possible Worlds Theory (1991), this paper seeks to unravel the underlying possible worlds of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by tracing its rhetorical devices, which develop the main idea of the novel. Additionally, a significant feature of postmodernist writing, i.e. ‘fiction within fiction,’ is examined to assess characterization. This research provides an exciting opportunity to advance our knowledge of possible worlds within the poetics of postmodernist fiction.

Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) tells the story of borderland characters moving between fictionalised versions of Guadalajara, Mexico, and the city of El Monte in the United States. This essay argues that the novel evades reductive readings within a simplistic framework of ‘Latinx fiction’ by rendering an aesthetic register of ambiguity and ambivalence, and a narrative politics of openness. The book is not only a metafictional comment on the nature of storytelling in general, but also on the dilemma of telling borderland stories within overdetermined political contexts. Plascencia uses allusive imagery from the political realities of the borderland (trauma, wounds, the border as dividing line) to highlight the symbolic indeterminacies of physical and abstract borders and their crossings, and about the political ambivalences that necessarily accompany such an endeavour. The essay focusses especially on how the novel navigates its speculative landscapes and the dissolution of geopolitical boundaries in a metafictional mode which self-consciously acknowledges the dangers inherent in the aestheticisation of historically situated suffering.

In common understanding, nostalgia is a past-oriented attitude that makes people turn their backs on the present and glorify former times. It leads to a self-indulgent ‘ossification’ of one’s thoughts and results in escapism and the break with contemporary reality. Jonathan Coe’s Middle England , one of the first English Brexit novels, is deeply steeped in the past and in certain forms of nostalgia that greatly contribute to the novel’s overall atmosphere. One of these forms, the hankering after England’s glorious past and the lost Empire, may easily be related to Brexit. This type of nostalgia, however, which contributed to England’s leaving of the European Union, is only one form of nostalgia which Coe makes use of. What I want to show is that there is another type of nostalgia in the novel that is future-oriented and filled with positive social and psychological energies. It is this type of nostalgia that characterizes most of Coe’s protagonists and that is responsible for the structure of his novel.

Growing discontent with the ideological formations of Hobbesian self-interest and capitalist progress narratives are countered in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and John Ironmonger’s The Whale at the End of the World ([2015] 2021) through the use of Bakhtinian polyphony which textually manifests collaborative survival. The converging narrative strategies of these books reshape the fiction/non-fiction boundary from opposite ends of the literature/science writing spectrum.