Nonami Asa’s family mysteries: the novel as social commentary

Eileen Mikals-Adachi

doi:10.1080/0955580042000222682

Altruism and the Monks of Thelema

Walter Besant ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789620351.003.0009 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 151-170

Keyword(s):

Liberal Education ◽

Social Reform ◽

Francois Rabelais ◽

The Novel ◽

Social Commentary ◽

Liberal Humanism ◽

Mass Democracy

The central concerns of Besant’s philanthropic novels of the 1880s were anticipated in 1878’s The Monks of Thelema: An Invention, his first sustained foray into social commentary. Although largely neglected by scholars, the novel is an intriguing satire that is rich with contemporary insights. In addressing the dilemmas of philanthropic activism, Besant mocks the naïve idealism associated with Oxford thinkers and undergraduates while finding positive value in their reformist schemes of liberal education for the emerging mass democracy. With the French humanist François Rabelais supplying a model for progressive liberal humanism, amid the satire Besant’s fiction develops a positive ideal of association and moral perfectibility that foreshadows his later, more celebrated work in philanthropy and social reform.

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ANTISEMITISM AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE IN DICKENS'SOLIVER TWIST

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150305000823 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 239-252 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Susan Meyer

Keyword(s):

Physical Violence ◽

The Novel ◽

Social Critique ◽

Social Commentary ◽

The Poor ◽

The Social

WHEN SIKES AND NANCY RECAPTURE OLIVER, in Dickens'sOliver Twist, intending to return him to the gang of thieves, Sikes warns Oliver against crying out to passersby, announcing that his dog will go for Oliver's throat if he so much as speaks one word. Looking at the dog, who is eyeing Oliver and growling and licking his lips, “with a kind of grim and ferocious approval,” Sikes tells Oliver, “He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!” (109; ch. 16). Sikes of course simply intends to say that his dog is as good as human, but Dickens's joke, in the context of the novel, is a chilling one. Sikes's bloodthirsty dogisas willing as the novel has shown many a professed Christian to be to exercise brute power over the weak and helpless, to drive Oliver into a life of crime, and to commit physical violence against him. In the course of the novel, Dickens shows what professed Christians have been willing to do to the poor and invites his readers to contemplate what they as Christians should instead be willing to do.Oliver Twistis of course deeply concerned with the condition of England's poor, and Dickens invokes the idea of Christianity as a rhetorical tool through which to make the social commentary that is at the novel's moral center.

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PRIMITIVE CRITICISM AND THE NOVEL: G. H. LEWES AND HIPPOLYTE TAINE ON DICKENS

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150317000353 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 125-142

Author(s):

Peter Melville Logan

Keyword(s):

Charles Dickens ◽

Common Knowledge ◽

Fine Art ◽

The Other ◽

The Novel ◽

Human Face ◽

Social Commentary ◽

Primitive Society ◽

Hippolyte Taine ◽

Complex Characters

In a controversial article onthe life and fiction of Charles Dickens, George H. Lewes ponders the inexplicable preference of readers for the novelist's too-simplistic characters over the more complex characters of other writers. He finds an answer in the primitive reaction to fine art: “To a savage there is so little suggestion of a human face and form in a painted portrait that it is not even recognized as the representation of a man” (“Dickens” 150). The implication, it would seem, is that readers turn to Dickens because they are similarly incapable of appreciating more refined modes of art. Today the remark reads as gratuitous and insulting to readers, to Dickens, and to the other cultures Lewes stereotypes as savage. At the same time, the casual nature of the passage also suggests that it reflects commonly held beliefs about primitive life, beliefs we do not have but that Lewes and his readers took for granted. He was clearly safe in assuming such a body of common knowledge, for many other articles in theFortnightly Review(in which Lewes's article appeared in 1872) had similar references to primitivism. Reading through the journal issues of the time, the extent to which anthropological concepts had escaped the covers of books on primitive society and taken up residence in the pages of review essays on contemporary issues – from history, to life in the colonies, to life in Britain itself – is striking. In its print context, the comment about savages and art is less isolated and inexplicable than it is representative of a broad turn to the topic of primitivism in social commentary and analysis during the 1870s.

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Irene Baird’s ‘North and South’ in The Climate of Power

Journal of the Canadian Historical Association ◽

10.7202/1015735ar ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 283-318

Author(s):

Joan Sangster

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Indigenous Peoples ◽

Canadian Arctic ◽

The Novel ◽

World War ◽

Social Commentary ◽

The North ◽

White Settlers ◽

North And South ◽

Political Scene

This article explores the production and publication of The Climate of Power, Irene Baird’s fictionalized account of the post-World War II Ottawa civil service and its interactions with administrators and Indigenous peoples in the Canadian Arctic. While written primarily as a satirical exploration of the Ottawa political scene, particularly the bureaucracy and its policies in the North, the book also reveals much about the gendered nature of the Ottawa bureaucracy, a decidedly masculine space of power. Baird’s experience as an information officer in the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs left her with a rich archive of ideas and impressions about northern development. Her observations are incorporated into the novel as critical social commentary on the ‘contact zones’ of north and south, the colonial space in which unequal encounters between white settlers and Indigenous peoples took place.

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Conexus: Crime Fiction and the State of the Nation.

10.46289/edhu2098 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Duncan Dicks

Keyword(s):

Information Technology ◽

Critical Discussion ◽

Crime Fiction ◽

The State ◽

First Century ◽

The Novel ◽

State Control ◽

Social Commentary ◽

The Past ◽

Crime Novel

Conexus: Crime Fiction and the State of the Nation consists of two parts. The first section is the novel, Conexus, which is a practice-based exploration and illustration of crime fiction as state-of-the-nation social commentary. The second is a critical discussion of the requirements of a state-of-the-nation novel that reflects the contemporary, globalised word, and how crime fiction contends with these needs. Conexus follows a range of characters in parallel threads that converge onto a single physical location in Gloucestershire. Ainsley Griffin, a technology journalist, his partner, Chelsey, his grandson, Sundance, and a range of other characters gradually become aware of each other through their use of IT as they investigate a series of undiscovered murders that began with a sophisticated network of paedophiles in the 1990s. The murderer chooses each new victim through the random last act of communication of the last victim, and controls their lives through surveillance hacking before murdering them. The critical underpinning of the thesis discusses the concepts, theories and controversies surrounding the concept of a nation (for example, following the legacy of Gellner’s work, Hroch, and the explorations of Bhabha), emphasising the importance of state control through jurisprudence, of communication technology, and of physical locations and boundaries over the past two hundred years. The relative importance and impact of these concepts is seen to have changed dramatically with the rapid explosion of information technology in the twenty-first-century, requiring a very different approach to literary explorations of a nation. A number of crime novels from the past 25 years are analysed in conjunction with Conexus. The locations and boundaries are discussed with reference to the uncanny implications of the physical as discussed by Freud. Approaches to the incorporation of information technology into crime fiction are explored, and the success of this integration is compared to other literary works. In summary, the suitability of the crime novel as portrayal and summary of the culturally and socially significant trends of the time is assessed.

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5. The Novel as a Vehicle for Social Commentary

Real and Imagined Worlds ◽

10.4159/harvard.9780674418998.c5 ◽

1977 ◽

pp. 119-132

Keyword(s):

The Novel ◽

Social Commentary

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“Al half dier”: objekgeoriënteerde ontologieë, gestremdheidstudies en Siegfried (Willem Anker)

Tydskrif vir Letterkunde ◽

10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.56i2.4423 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 56 (2) ◽

pp. 28-37

Author(s):

Bibi Burger

Keyword(s):

Disability Studies ◽

Object Oriented ◽

The Novel ◽

Disabled People ◽

Deleuze And Guattari ◽

Social Commentary ◽

Mentally Disabled ◽

Human Subjectivity ◽

The World ◽

Hands And Feet

Willem Anker’s debut novel, Siegfried, deals with the experiences of the eponymous character, who is mentally disabled and whose hands and feet are webbed. In this article, an attempt is made to investigate how the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object oriented ontologies, can be used to argue that the representation of the character of Siegfried involves a blurring of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. The second aim of this article is to establish whether such a blurring is ethically problematic, given the cruel ways in which people considered less human than others are often treated. Where the first aim is concerned, it is argued that Siegfried’s interaction with the world challenges hegemonic ideas of human subjectivity, especially ideas of what constitutes normal humanity. In the character of Siegfried traces are found of what can be described, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, as becomings. These becomings serve as lines of flight from blocked forms of human subjectivity. The boundaries between what is considered human and what is considered nonhuman are therefore indeed blurred. Concerning the second aim, it is argued that the novel can be read as a critique of the ways in which society treats disabled people, and that it can therefore be brought into dialogue with disability studies. The potential for object oriented ontologies to be apolitical (and even unethical, in this respect), is countered in the analysis of the novel by disability studies’ activism and social commentary.

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The Battle of ‘Isms’ in Kate Chopin's the Awakening

Romanian Journal of English Studies ◽

10.1515/rjes-2019-0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 1-8

Author(s):

Cristina Băniceru

Keyword(s):

The Novel ◽

Social Commentary ◽

The Awakening ◽

Female Consciousness ◽

The Creation

AbstractThis article will focus primarily on the ending of The Awakening: A Solitary Soul, probably the most discussed and debated part of Kate Chopin’s novel. The ending can be best understood if the novel is read as an exercise in late Transcendentalist philosophy, with Gothic undertones, plus realist, social commentary and modernist concerns. Walt Whitman’s hedonism meets Guy de Maupassant’s melancholy in a novel that speaks about multiple awakenings (hedonistic, erotic, artistic) but also about several deaths, all necessary for the creation of a new female consciousness.

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What is the literary function of the motherhood motif in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy?

Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal ◽

10.15695/vurj.v9i0.3806 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

Author(s):

Steve Monk

Keyword(s):

Toni Morrison ◽

Critical Analysis ◽

Research Paper ◽

The Novel ◽

Social Commentary

This research paper examines the literary function of the motherhood motif in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. The paper analyzes the presentation of the major characters in the novel and their relation to motherhood. A Mercy is a multi-layered, imagery-laden novel containing hidden themes and social commentary. Analyzation of the motherhood motif reveals the subtle societal comments Morrison makes in the novel. The complex motherhood motif fuels the characterization of two of the main characters in the novel, Jacob and Florens. In addition, its multi-perspective nature comments on the influence of stereotypes and discrimination in society. The scope of the investigation includes the opinion of Toni Morrison critics and interviews with Morrison. Thus, my critical analysis can be synthesized with Morrison’s own opinion of her own works as well as the opinion of literary critics.

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