Wharton and the Romance Plot

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-201
Author(s):  
Linda Wagner-Martin
Keyword(s):  
Romance Plot

Reading for differentiation: the family romance plot

2015 ◽  
pp. 118-168
Author(s):  
Helena Michie ◽  
Robyn Warhol
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Professional Success ◽  
The Family ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
The City

Despite George Scharf’s professional success and eventual social status, most people who have heard the name are thinking of his father. It is George Scharf Sr’s urban sketches– tracking street by street and demolished house by demolished house the emergence of Regency London and of the city we know today–that were brought together in the 1980s as an exhibition and a book, both entitled George Scharf’s London. If George Jr does not get to possess, in the contemporary imagination, the city in which he, too, lived and worked, he did in his own time manage to surpass his father in reputation and class, to leave behind the slightly pathetic figure, the chronically underemployed immigrant debtor who shared– that is to say, anticipated– his name. The remarkable story of George Jr’s class and professional ascendancy, marked by increasing signs of public respect, achieved its apotheosis in the nominal change that shortly preceded his death: the not-quite- posthumous creation of ‘Sir George Scharf’, the addition of ‘Sir’ to the name of the son, marked the distance between the two men for posterity.

scholarly journals A töredezett (kulturális) test írása Polcz Alaine "Asszony a fronton" című művében

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 35-51
Author(s):  
Louise O. Vasvári
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Married Life ◽  
Fragmented Self ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
Second World

In this paper I will discuss Alaine Polcz’s Asszony a fronton (1991) ‘ Woman on the Front,’ subtitled Egy fejezet az életemb?l ‘A Chapter from My Life,’ as an extreme example of self-contradictory life writing, offering a fragmented self-representation of the author’s subjectivity through the narrative itineraries of both her privatized and publicized body through the last year of the Second World War. The term life writing is a particularly useful categorization for this text, since Hungarian critics have referred to it variously, sometimes in the same article, as ‘memoir, novel, autobiographical novel, documentary novel, memorial records’(memoár, regény, önéletrajzi regény, dokumentum regény, emlékiratok). I will consider how Polcz narrativizes her identity in the two parts of her story. In the first, writing about her young married life with an abusive alcoholic husband during wartime Transylvania in 1944-45 she is unable to step outside the conventional romance plot, narrating her life in terms of the most conservative conceptualization of heterosexual femininity and wifehood, premised on self-renunciation. At the same time, she subverts her surface story of masochistic other-centeredness with manipulation of gaps and secrets, creating an ongoing tension between the concealed and revealed.

scholarly journals Consuming and Being Consumed

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-57
Author(s):  
Carla Scarano D'Antonio
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Snow White ◽  
The World ◽  
Romance Plot

The article explores how Margaret Atwood demystifies the romance plot in her first novel The Edible Woman by exposing the world of consumerism as artificial and threatening to the point of cannibalism. This is revealed through references to fairy tales and myths with cannibalistic undertones such as ‘Snow White’, ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. It is also highlighted in the reference to the theme of the eaten heart in Boccaccio’s Decameron and to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In the tempting world of advertisements and commercials, women are objectified and traded and their roles are diminished. In this realm, Marian, the protagonist, is in search of her identity but first tries to ‘adjust’ to society’s artificial and delusional narrative. The advertisements dictate a behaviour, objectify her body and force her to comply with preformed roles. She consciously tries to defend herself from this consumerist mentality by allowing her body to ‘speak’ for her. Her body starts to refuse food and she feels it is alive, until it cuts itself off. Therefore, showing how she refuses to ‘adjust’ to the consumerist society. The narrative points out the inherent cannibalistic quality of the consumerist society in which human beings are commodities and their roles are dictated by commercials and the ferocious rules of profit.

The Ambivalence of Testimony in Elizabeth Bowen’s

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-122
Author(s):  
Ana Ashraf
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Binary Division ◽  
Post War ◽  
Romance Plot

Ana Ashraf’s exploration of Bowen’s novel demonstrates how, in the post-war milieu, ambivalent narratives of testimony and witnessing challenged the ideology of war and the machinery of propaganda. The novel’s metafictional style emphasizes the self-reflexive nature of witness and testimony. Interweaving personal and political spheres in an experimental form that juxtaposes the classic romance plot and the traditional spy novel, The Heat of the Day offers a feminine view of the masculine world of intelligence. In its presentation of the conflict between love and patriotism, the novel’s treatment of treachery appears unstable and unusual. It also highlights the role of literary testimony in challenging the dominant narrative of war. Demonstrating the ‘intermodern’ preoccupation with political commitment during periods of war, the novel exemplifies an ‘interfeminist’ awareness of the notion of ‘women’s time’, the marginalisation of women’s experience of war and the binary division between fact and fiction.

Beside the Reclining Statue: Ekphrasis, Narrative, and Desire in Middlemarch

PMLA ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 111 (5) ◽  
pp. 1121-1132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail S. Rischin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Literary Response ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Mistaken Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Romance Plot

Eliot's Middlemarch reveals the effective alliance among ekphrasis (a literary response to a visual work of art), narrative, and the portrayal of desire. The novel's richest example of this dynamic occurs in the Vatican Hall of Statues scene, when Will Ladislaw and his painter friend Naumann observe Dorothea poised beside a celebrated antique statue, “the reclining Ariadne, then called Cleopatra.” Capitalizing on this statue's history of mistaken identity, Eliot affirms the power of visual art for literary representation by using the statue in three important ways: as a catalyst for the birth of desire, as a prefiguration of the novel's romance plot (through narrative references to the myth of Ariadne), and as a vehicle for representing female eroticism, which the statue's long-standing association with Cleopatra underscores.

Different Kinds of Silence: Revisions of Villette and the ‘Reader’s Romance’

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-457
Author(s):  
Lucy Hanks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Meaning Production ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
Alternative Reading ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article presents an alternative reading of Lucy Snowe’s silences in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Instead of interpreting silence as submission or antagonistic ‘evasions’, I suggest that it operates as a productive mode. This is emphasized by Brontë’s markings and excisions on the fair copy manuscript. Revisions render parts of the text intentionally ambiguous; I provide extended close readings of the manuscript that demonstrate how Lucy Snowe makes the fact that she has withheld something explicit to the reader. Villette draws attention to its own composition and reception to such an extent that it is the very act of non-narration – and the way it engages the reader – that produces meaning. Approaching this through the lens of the romance plot addresses some of the overtly unnarratable aspects of female selfhood in the mid-nineteenth century. As a female autobiographer, Lucy Snowe makes her struggle to express her sexuality explicit. Brontë crafts this self-reflexivity to form a relationship with the reader that is akin to Bakhtin’s description of the ‘activating reader’. It is only the act of reading, he suggests, that makes discourse possible. However, revisions show how Brontë attempts to influence the types of meaning that are gleaned by the reader; the ‘reader’s romance’ clarifies how she suggestively places the onus on the reader to resolve their expectations about the narrative’s events for themselves. This narrative mode allows the protagonist to reclaim power and use the very means of her oppression as a mode of meaning production.

Crossing genre boundaries: H. J. Golakai's Afropolitan chick-lit mysteries

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Rebecca Fasselt
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Romantic Relationship ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Women Detectives ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
Lazarus Effect

Crime fiction by women writers across the globe has in recent years begun to explore the position of women detectives within post-feminist cultural contexts, moving away from the explicit refusal of the heterosexual romance plot in earlier feminist ‘hard-boiled’ fiction. In this article, I analyse Hawa Jande Golakai's The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) as part of the tradition of crime fiction by women writers in South Africa. Joining local crime writers such as Angela Makholwa, Golakai not only questions orthodox conceptions of gender and sexuality in traditional iterations of the crime novel, but also combines elements of chick-lit with the crime plot. Reading the archetypal quest structure of the two genres against the background of Sara Ahmed's cultural critique of happiness, I argue that Golakai inventively recasts the recent sub-genre of the chick-lit mystery from the perspective of an Afropolitan detective. Her detective tenaciously undercuts the future-directed happiness script that structures conventional chick-lit and detective novels with their respective focus on finding a fulfilling heterosexual, monogamous romantic relationship, and the resolution of the crime and restoration of order. In this way, the novels defy the frequently assumed apolitical nature of chick-lit texts and also allow us to reimagine the idea of Afropolitanism, outside of its dominant consumerist form, as a critical Afropolitanism that emerges from an openness to be affected by the unhappiness and suffering of others.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: RACIAL IDENTITY IN ALICE PERRIN'S THE STRONGER CLAIM

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-508
Author(s):  
Melissa Edmundson Makala
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Domestic Novels ◽  
Social Messages ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
Anglo Indian

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.

Reading for success: the professional plot

2015 ◽  
pp. 169-218
Author(s):  
Helena Michie ◽  
Robyn Warhol
Keyword(s):  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Romance Plot

In the last two chapters we have read some key moments in Scharf’s life with and against two dominant cultural narratives: the romance plot and the differentiation plot. These plots are intimately but complexly related to literary genres– the marriage-plot novel and the Bildungsroman. This chapter focuses not so much on a single plot as on a culturally privileged place that has generated a variety of literary plots. By telling the story of Scharf’s relationship with two great country houses only seven miles apart, we cannot help invoking the frisson-inducing spectre of the Gothic and sensation novel and the linked cultural and literary plot of inheritance. Scharf’s relationships with Knole, the home of the Sackville family, and Chevening, the seat of the earls of Stanhope (both located in Sevenoaks, Kent), brought up for us some of the central questions of Gothic and sensation novels: who belongs to the house, and who does not? Who is absorbable into the household, and who, finally, is foreign to it and must be thrust out into a different space, whether that be a prison, an asylum or another country?1

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