‘The extremely private literary giant’: Alice Munro’s poetics of humility

When the Nobel Prize committee awarded the laureateship to Alice Munro in October 2013, someone or something called ‘Alice Munro’ was immediately placed under a media spotlight. She had, over the years, accrued what Lorraine York has called ‘reluctant celebrity’, regularly gathering literary prizes, but making relatively few personal appearances. In the first decade of the twenty-first century she had become more visible in public whilst still retaining a degree of ambivalence. This ambivalence was evident in the brief interviews she gave in the weeks after the announcement, following which she returned to her private life and the retirement from writing that she had already announced. This article combines an interrogation of Munro’s humble public persona with an investigation into her poetics of short fiction, referring to her published texts and interviews. It concludes with some personal reflections on writing about a living author at the end of her career.

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Matters of principle for Jérôme Ferrari: Science and conscience, ethics and aesthetics in the life of Werner Heisenberg

French Cultural Studies ◽

10.1177/0957155819861045 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 30 (4) ◽

pp. 269-280

Author(s):

Nathan Bracher

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Nobel Prize ◽

Uncertainty Principle ◽

Nuclear Research ◽

First Century ◽

Werner Heisenberg ◽

Twenty First Century

This article analyses Jérôme Ferrari’s novel Le Principe, reflecting on the life and research of Werner Heisenberg, whose famous uncertainty principle is thus explored as a paradigm of a whole series of epistemological, existential and ethical quandaries. Juxtaposing the author/narrator’s personal vicissitudes with the ambivalent trajectory of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, without being a Nazi, carried out nuclear research under Hitler’s authority, Ferrari’s text proves to be emblematic not only of the tragic legacy of the twentieth century, but also of twenty-first-century narratives seeking existential significance, intellectual lucidity and aesthetic fulfilment in a world seemingly dominated by unprincipled finance and runaway technology.

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JUDI DENCH AND SHAKESPEAREAN PERSONAS IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY

Persona Studies ◽

10.21153/psj2019vol5no2art913 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 23-37

Author(s):

SOPHIE DUNCAN

Keyword(s):

Moral Virtue ◽

First Century ◽

Public Persona ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Role Choices

Dame Judi Dench’s twenty-first-century theatrical career has defied the expectation that her performance as the Countess in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2003 All’s Well That Ends Well would signal the culmination and conclusion of her stage acting career. This article draws on scholarship on the use of retrospection and persona-building to redirect attention from Dench’s conspicuously ‘late’ success in film to map how Dench has led, collaborated in and resisted public constructions of her persona. Shakespeare has been consistently key to this process. While enlisting persona-building strategies inherited from her Shakespearean forebears, Dench has resisted the overt appointment of any kind of Shakespearean ‘successor’ and thus the continuation of Shakespeare performance genealogies. Simultaneously, her role choices have contributed to her persona’s accrued significance as an avatar of moral virtue and authenticity – augmented by her association with the ‘national poet’, Shakespeare, as England’s most prestigious playwright. The article also examines Dench’s persona specifically as an ageing actress, and her significance for discourses of aspirational ageing, ageism, and national investments in the ageing female performer as a public persona.

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A Writing Life: 1954–1995

Iris Murdoch ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9780746312162.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 9-40

Author(s):

Anne Rowe

Keyword(s):

Moral Psychology ◽

Critical Reception ◽

First Century ◽

Literary Prizes ◽

Twenty First Century

This chapter describes how Murdoch’s ambitions to be a writer were fostered in childhood, and moves on to acknowledge the insecurities and depressions that haunted her later in life, despite her many achievements and the winning of prestigious literary prizes. After exploring the reasons for the popularity of her novels, as well as acknowledging their deep moral and philosophical seriousness, this chapter undertakes a tour d’horizon that is divided into the four decades of Murdoch’s ‘Writing Life’. Each of her twenty –six novels is explored in terms of enduring thematic concerns, her ‘moral psychology’, changes and developments in style, and their critical reception in academia. Particular attention is paid to illuminating the ways in which Murdoch’s novels are being re-thought and revised in the twenty-first century.

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Epistolarity in Twenty-First Century Nigerian Short Fiction

The Epistolary Renaissance ◽

10.1515/9783110584813-005 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 91-106 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

Short Fiction ◽

First Century ◽

Twenty First Century

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Criminal Peripheries: The Globalization of Scandinavian Crime Fiction and Its Agents

Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789620528.003.0013 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 184-204

Author(s):

Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen

Keyword(s):

International Market ◽

Crime Fiction ◽

First Century ◽

Literary Prizes ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Global Publishing ◽

The Uk ◽

Literary Agents

In the twenty-first century, the extraordinary success of Scandinavian crime fiction in translation has challenged long-held assumptions about the hierarchy of nations, languages and genres in global publishing. This chapter assesses the ‘Scandinavian publishing miracle’ by considering various consecration processes (e.g. literary prizes), domestic changes brought to the publishing field towards the end of the last century (e.g. literary agents and the regional publishing field) and the dynamics of translation and promotion of Scandinavian crime fiction with a focus on the UK market since 2000. The chapter presents a case study of Henning Mankell’s impact on the international market – a case which also demonstrates that the Scandinavian twenty-first-century publishing phenomenon is the tip of an iceberg hiding strategic coordinated practices between small-nation actors established in the early 1990s, which provided a ‘marginocentric’ model for how literatures from small European nations could successfully enter the international mainstream.

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The forgotten Spinozist: Romain Rolland, Gilles Deleuze, and the figure of Christ

French Cultural Studies ◽

10.1177/0957155817721680 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 28 (4) ◽

pp. 329-343

Author(s):

Ashok Collins

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Nobel Prize ◽

Gilles Deleuze ◽

First Century ◽

Intellectual Engagement ◽

Religious Question ◽

Twenty First Century

To this day, the thinking of Spinoza serves as a powerful tool for those seeking to negotiate the nexus between theological transcendence and the immanence of worldly existence. This paper explores the thought of one of the most important – and yet least remembered – Spinozists within twentieth-century French intellectual history: the Nobel Prize-winning French novelist, Romain Rolland (1866–1944). Past scholarship has repeatedly identified a divergence between the Catholic orthodoxy against which a youthful Rolland rebelled and the Spinozist non-conformism that shaped his thinking throughout life. By re-reading Rolland’s intellectual engagement with religion through the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, this study counters such critical interpretations and argues that the tension between Catholic orthodoxy and Spinozism cannot purely be seen in terms of a polemical conflict, but rather as the opportunity for a fruitful dialogue that has much to offer our own treatment of the religious question in the twenty-first century.

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