scholarly journals Moulding the mid-twentieth-century Irish short story: Seán O’Faoláin and The Bell

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304
Author(s):  
Elke D’hoker ◽  
Phyllis Boumans
Author(s):  
Heather Ingman

This chapter explores why the three twentieth-century writers who arguably did most to establish the short story as the quintessential Irish literary form—Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, and Mary Lavin—fell short in the novel form. All three writers excelled in the shorter format, devoting meticulous care to their craft and revising and reshaping their stories many times, sometimes even after publication. Furthermore, O’Connor and O’Faoláin wrote influential critical studies of the modern short story, and Lavin was a perceptive arbiter of its aesthetic value and potential. As novelists, however, all three published works that, in the view of critics and also the writers themselves, were failures. The chapter critically examines the reasons that underpin such judgements.


Author(s):  
Haytham Bahoora

This chapter examines the development of the novel in Iraq. It first considers the beginnings of prose narrative in Iraq, using the intermingling of the short story and the novel, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, as a framework for reassessing the formal qualities of the Arabic novel. It then turns to romantic and historical novels published in the 1920s, as well as novels dealing with social issues like poverty and the condition of peasants in the countryside. It discusses the narrative emergence of the bourgeois intellectual’s self-awareness and interiority in Iraqi fiction, especially the novella; works that continued the expression of a critical social realism in the Iraqi novelistic tradition and the appearance of modernist aesthetics; and narratives that addressed dictatorship and war in Iraq. The chapter concludes with an overview of the novel genre in Iraq after 2003.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Dudy Syafruddin

Literature is a product of culture keeping abreast of human mind. Literary works is a means for the authors to express the social phenomenon in his life. The discourses about postmodernism in the second half of twentieth century, as a part of the story of human mind, was a profound interest for the Authors. In Indonesia, the postmodern discourse has come up in the 1960s. This paper involves the elements of Postmodernism in the short story “Abacadabra” written by Danarto. The dominant elements in this short story are parody, fragmentary, and historiographic metafiction.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
Sayed Mohammad Anoosheh ◽  
Muhammad Hussein Oroskhan

The first traces of modernism in Iranian society can be found in the second decade of twentieth century which was deeply embedded with religious concepts. With regard to Persian literature, short story was developed as a new genre and a sign of modernism of that period by prominent Iranian writers such as Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh (1892-1997) and Sadegh Chubak (1916-1998). In this way a cultural clash was broken out between the traditional religious concepts and the new modern ideas. Among these writers, Chubak was more influenced by the doctrine of modernism. He expressed his message colloquially through his short stories to instigate the lower part of society. His naturalistic style of writing delved into the most gruesome details of people's life with the aim of shocking his reader in experiencing a new perspective previously ignored. To highlight Chubak's style of writing attempt is made to explore one of the highly praised short stories entitled "An Afternoon in Late Autumn" on the ground of the Bakhtin's theory of grotesque realism cited in Rabelais and His World. Grotesque realism is a site upon which religious and social hierarchies can be subverted and renewed. This study tries to reveal that Chubak followed the Bakhtin's grotesque realism to evoke a new outlook particularly in the lower section of society.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 42-59
Author(s):  
Mikail Mamedov

This article analyses the scandal that broke out in Azerbaijan after the publication of Stone Dreams, a novel by Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli. Stone Dreams depicted and condemned the persecution against the Armenian population in Baku and Sumgait in 1988-1990, as well as the early twentieth century massacre of the Armenian community in the writer’s home village, Aylis in Nakhichevan. Akram Aylisli touched on a taboo and in a context with weak civic and democratic institutions, the discussion of such traumatic events in Azerbaijan’s recent past proved unacceptable to both society and the ruling elite. This article reaches beyond contemporary debates, however, to cover earlier and less well-known works with Armenian-Azerbaijani themes such as Evgeniy Voyskunskiy’s novel Maiden Dreams, Seymur Baycan’s Gugark, Maria Martirosova’s Photos To Remember Me By and Levon Javakhian’s short story “Kirve”. These works are reviewed here in terms of how they address issues of conflict, reconciliation and responsibility. This article underscores the importance of literary works dealing with conflict, as they usually reach a much broader audience than academic books.


Author(s):  
Claudia Sadowski-Smith

This chapter explores Sana Krasikov’s short story collection One More Year (2008) and Anya Ulinich’s novel Petropolis (2007) in order to develop a comparative approach to representations of irregular and unauthorized migration, a form of movement that has been largely identified with migrants from Mexico and Central America. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich represents ethnically and racially diverse protagonists from Russia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan, who arrive in the United States on nonimmigrant visas and become irregular or undocumented. These two works move beyond the themes of assimilation and family migration that dominated twentieth-century cultural productions by eastern European immigrants of Jewish descent, such as Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, and Anzia Yezierska. Their work laid the foundation for a literature of assimilation to a middle-class white US racial identity that became fully available to European immigrants by the mid-twentieth century. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich emphasizes post-Soviet characters’ experiences of diminished access to the US labor market, residency, and citizenship rights, and thus positions itself in the larger context of contemporary US immigrant writing.


Author(s):  
Karen R. Roybal

This chapter examines the short story, "Shades of the Tenth Muses," the novel, Caballero: A Historical Novel, and a master's thesis – each narrative written by Tejana folklorist and author, Jovita González – to reveal how she contributed to an alternative archive about the Texas/Mexico borderlands. As a member of the Texas folklore society, González participated alongside what were considered prominent Texas folklorists and historians (mainly Anglo males) of the twentieth century, in an effort to (re)tell her own version of Tejano history. The chapter argues that González uses her literary and academic work to create an alternative archive about gender and race relations along the Texas/Mexico border in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work contributes to an ever-growing body of Chicana/o work that recuperates Mexicana/o cultural memory.


Author(s):  
John Evelev

The discourse of the picturesque reshaped how Americans understood their landscape, but it largely ended in the mid-1870s. The decline of the picturesque can be illustrated in two emblematic works: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque” and William Cullen Bryant’s enormous 1874 scenery book Picturesque America. Woolson’s fictional story is a satire of travel in which a young urban woman accompanies her grandfather to the countryside “in search of the picturesque” and instead only finds development. This story signals the shift in literary interest in rural subjects toward regionalism. Regionalism disavowed the earlier focus on picturesque landscapes, instead featuring distinctive regional dialects and cultural practices that reflected the newly created social sciences. Bryant’s Picturesque America was a Reconstruction-era project aimed at reconnecting the divided nation through a nonhierarchical unification under the sign of “picturesque.” Adding not only the West but also the South to the compendium of American scenery, Picturesque America imagined the entire nation as picturesque. In this formulation, the picturesque became synonymous with landscape in general. Although the picturesque lost its appeal as an authoritative discourse for shaping the American landscape in the latter third of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that the spaces that dominated American life in the twentieth century and beyond are owed almost entirely to the transformative project of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque.


Author(s):  
Bryony Randall

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.


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