Volume 73, Issue 4

This article explores a particular history of Anglophone writing about polar exploration, starting with the work of H. P. Lovecraft. In Lovecraft’s stories and novellas “Polaris”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, and At the Mountains of Madness , Earth’s polar regions and their indigenous people serve as a horrifying reminder of the historicity and finitude of colonial Anglo-American civilization. Fears and traumatic cultural memories of failed expeditions, cannibalism, indigenous vengeance, and the potential upending of social order recur in Lovecraft’s work as well as that of Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe – the latter of whom Lovecraft directly quotes in Mountains of Madness . This article traces a persistent association between the polar regions and these cultural fears, situating them in an ideological history of Anglo-American colonialism.

Henry Lawson is best known for his short stories of the Australian rural “bush.” He also wrote stories set in urban Sydney, and in a rediscovered letter he describes one of those stories, “Two Larrikins” (1893), as “realistic or Zolaistic.” The story is set in Lawson’s fictional Sydney slum locality of “Jones’ Alley,” also the title of one of the urban-set stories in his definitive collection While the Billy Boils (1896). This reference to Zola invites new attention to Lawson’s own slum setting and to his own conception of realism, as applied in his urban stories. The term “zolaistic” also alludes to the sex- and gender-related content of these stories, and that content connects in turn with contemporary feminist thought. The article argues that these aspects of the literary significance of Lawson’s early urban material were inevitably overshadowed by the Bush, obscuring some of the earliest examples of a minority Australian urban realist tradition.

Placing modernist literary production into the larger context of avant-garde personal networks greatly erodes the myth of the modernist creative genius. It allows for an understanding of the complex mechanisms at play even in small-scale productions, each capable of influencing the final literary work. Easy to see from hindsight, especially with the help of Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker, it was also felt acutely by the modernist writers themselves. For fear of their work being viewed as unoriginal or, even more radically, collaborative, writers such as Lytton Strachey and D. H. Lawrence took pains to distance themselves from their patrons who often facilitated the production of their works by means of financial or non-material support. In order to navigate the labyrinthian relationships of patronage, both they and their patrons, chiefly Ottoline Morrell, assumed various identities and employed the narrative strategies explored in this paper.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses the genre of historical fiction to revisit the official annals of Nigeria’s civil war (1967–70). In Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), she weaves a web of male and female characters – and the intersections of their lives – within a large panorama of her home country during this bloodshed. Adichie’s novel offers an apocryphal history of Nigeria thanks to fictional stories of victims, losers, and socially insignificant individuals, insisting on human pain and endurance. This essay explores the author’s literary strategies of microhistory and empathy to narrate people’s experience of war, notably the impact of war radio news, displacement, air raids, famine, and violence in the lives of anonymous noncombatants and their heroic stories of survival, while prioritizing the viewpoints of women as the main sufferers of war. Therefore, this study analyzes gender inequality as Africa’s endemic problem but, thanks to two strong heroines, Adichie’s novel also suggests alternatives of female empowerment in a doubly conflicted territory – war and patriarchy – and, ultimately, fictionalizes Nigeria’s history for African women’s voices to be heard (inter)nationally.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is a harrowing story about life, death, and humanity. The narrative features protagonists striving to survive in a death-stricken landscape as they embark on an uncertain journey southward. The wasteland in which the story unfolds, and the road along which the father and the son traverse, form an inhospitable, disfigured world where the borders between cities are lines on a worn-out map and core values have lost their defining edges. The road stands as an indeterminate interface of dualities. The present study aims to uncover how the physical, post-apocalyptic setting functions as a liminal space, compelling the characters to develop a synthetic ‘borderland mentality’ while they grapple with the existential and moral challenges of survival as their archetypal journey is mapped out. Drawing on the major tenets of borderland studies and the concept of liminality, this essay examines how the protagonists need to adopt borderland mentality to deal with the landscape’s indeterminacies and binaries. It is suggested that despite its appalling imagery, The Road offers the possibility of survival amidst the dreariest conditions through resilience and developing a borderland mentality.