scholarly journals GENRES’ BALANCING IN E. MENDOZA’S NOVEL “THE AMAZING JOURNEY OF POMPONIUS FLAT”

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Anna A. Bagdasarova ◽  
Alexandr I. Slyshenko
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Literature ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Eduardo Mendoza ◽  
Postmodern Novel

The article explores the genre specificity of the postmodern novel, “The Amazing Journey of Pomponius Flat” by the contemporary Spanish writer Eduardo Mendoza. The novel is based on the principles of a ludic literature tradition, one of the manifestations of which is a sophisticated interplay of various ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres in neo-baroque fashion. The novel develops an ironic detective story, but also represents different genre markers of the travel novel, the picaresque and historical novels, whose traditions and cliches are introduced in an ironic way. The journey of the heronarrator, which is mentioned at the beginning and at the end of the novel, in fact, has no significance for the plot. The image of the protagonist combines two archetypical figures, keys to Spanish literature – the trickster and Don Quixote. In accordance with the tradition of a historical novel, E. Mendoza’s work creates the illusion of historical reconstruction, but there is no true historicism in the novel, since reliable facts are interspersed with speculations and fantastic elements that question the reliability of the whole story.

scholarly journals The role of spatial images in R.D. Harris’s novel “Pompeii”

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-67
Author(s):  
E.V. Somova ◽  
E.B. Schemeleva
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
The Real ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
New Material ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
The Mind

The article focuses on the novel “Pompeii” by Robert Dennis Harris which has been little studied in Russia and presents a new material for further research. The purpose of the research is to identify the originality of spatial images in the novel of the British writer. Basing on the comparative historical and analytical methods, the authors of the article explore the main principles of creating historical narration and the specifics of R.D. Harris’s work with historiographical sources while creating a historical epoch; they identify the features of W. Scott and E.G. Bulver-Lytton. Within the context of the study of the originality of spatial topoi in “Pompeii” the authors use extensively the concept of “topoekphrasis”, introduced by O.A. Kling. It distinguishes the place setting as a protagonist who influences greatly the course of events. While analyzing, the authors make the following conclusions about the national condition of the scene given by using ekphrasis and the correlation of the myth with the actual realities in the modern cultural system which indicate the stereotypical thinking of a person in the postmodern society: the myth of Adam and Eve who found themselves in Paradise, associated in the mind of a European with Capri which represents “unearthly” life; the expansion of the semantic fields after reading the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah which describes the destruction of two biblical cities and is brought closer in the novel to the events associated with the real tragedy in Pompeii, undoubtedly show the similarity of its plot resolution with the modern eschatological myth of the Apocalypse, which tells us about the inevitable death of civilization. The analysis of the mythological paradigm of R.D. Harris’s novel "Pompeii", organized by combination of ekphrasis and topoi, discloses the transformation of the postmodernist writer’s worldview, creating a new metaphysical reality in the historical novel. In addition to the real spatial topoi of the ancient world (forum, aqueduct, temple), the postmodern novel reveals mythological images: a labyrinth associated with the ancient Greek story of Theseus; the underground world of the dead, linked to the myth of Charon. The artistic understanding of the historical process by R.D. Harris allows us to identify the originality of the writer’s historical concept in the context of postmodern literature.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
SARAH MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Welch ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Impact

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.

scholarly journals Cervantes and Don Quixote de la Mancha

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 397-401
Author(s):  
Femi Oyebode
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Literature ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
Sancho Panza

SummaryMiguel de Cervantes, the most influential writer in Spanish literature, created two of the most recognisable fictional characters, Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza, in 1605. His novel The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha is regarded as the first modern novel and first international best seller. This article, in the 400th anniversary year of Cervantes' death, introduces Cervantes' biography, discusses the enduring features of his classic novel and explores the value and importance of the novel for psychiatry.

Mary Shelley and the Monstrosity of War: Frankenstein and the Post-Waterloo Politics of Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 96-118
Author(s):  
Neil Ramsey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The People ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Politics Of Life

Although Frankenstein has long been read in relation to revolutionary politics, there has been little specific discussion of the themes of suffering and the trauma of war in the novel, concerns that were central to much of Mary Shelley’s writing. Taking inspiration from Ahmed Saadawi’s acclaimed Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014), which explicitly rewrites Shelley’s novel as a war story, this article draws on recent rereadings of Romanticism that focus on the atmospherics and trauma of war, to examine how Frankenstein can be considered a postwar novel. In particular, it follows Carl Freedman’s discussion of Shelley’s novel as proto-science fiction that emerges in the same postwar historical matrix that informed historical novels such as Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814). However, where the historical novel, in Georg Lukács’s reading, describes the wartime poetic awakening of the people in terms of the march of progress and development of the “inner life” of the nation, Frankenstein offers a different vision of awakening life by turning the novel, as Sara Guyer claims, toward biopolitical concerns with the organization of life and death. In Frankenstein, the wartime awakening of the people is entangled with estrangement, monstrosity. and suffering. The novel appeared in a postwar world of ruins, dismembered bodies, and revenants that formed around a newly heightened awareness of the living forces and traumas that compose war.

scholarly journals Kulturel liminalitet i Don Quixote

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 80-107
Author(s):  
Anne Fastrup
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of The Novel

Cervantes og den »algierske erfaring« Cultural Liminality in Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes’ two-volume satire from 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote de la Mancha, has often been been proclaimed the first European novel, especially by the continental theory of the novel. Most renowned in that regard is Milan Kundera’s description in The Art of the Novel of Don Quixote as the first narration in the literary history of Europe testifying to the absence of God. Thus for Kundera, Cervantes’ master piece demonstrates the close relationship between the genre of the novel, on the hand, and the rise of a scepticist, secular and worldlyminded mentality characteristic of the European Enlightenment, on the other hand. Being influenced by the general »re-historizing« of the literary studies that we are facing in these years, more recent Cervantine research has taken up topics that played a central role in the the cultural history of Golden Age Spain. Consequently, we have been witnessing a lot of studies focused on the representation of gender, ethnicity, identity politics etc. Within the frame of the cultural history approach to Don Quixote we also see examples of new biographical readings basing the literary analysis on a thorough historical reconstruction of Cervantes’ life and times, in particular with regard to his involvement in the war against the Turks. In my article »Cultural Liminality in Don Quixote. Cervantes and the Algerian experience«, I approach the question of Don Quixote as the first novel by combining the Bakhtinian theory of the novel with recent attempts at historical reconstruction.

Drawing the Written Woman

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-63
Author(s):  
Sonia Lagerwall
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Dynamic Adaptation ◽  
Adaptation Process ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Training

This article deals with Philippe Druillet's three-volume comic adaptation (1980–1985) of Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert's historical novel from 1862, set three centuries BC. Flaubert was famous for not wanting his texts illustrated: he argued that the preciseness of images would undo the poetic vagueness of his written words. The article examines how Druillet tackles the challenge of graphically representing Flaubert's canonical work without reducing the priestess Salammbô into a given type. The analysis shows a dynamic adaptation process in which Druillet gives a kaleidoscopic form to Flaubert's text. His variation on the Salammbô character foregrounds photography, a medium historically relevant to the novel but also to Druillet's own artistic training. Featuring his character Lone Sloane in the role of Mathô, the adaptation proves to be a highly personal appropriation of the novel, where Druillet enhances an autobiographical dimension of his work previously hinted at in La Nuit and Gaïl.

Kidnapped

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
West Coast ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
First Time ◽  
Adventure Stories

Your bed shall be the moorcock’s, and your life shall be like the hunted deer’s, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.’ Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his life in the dangerous company of Jacobite outlaw and suspected assassin Alan Breck Stewart. Their unlikely friendship is put to the test as they dodge government troops across the Scottish Highlands. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Kidnapped transforms the Romantic historical novel into the modern thriller. Its heart-stopping scenes of cross-country pursuit, distilled to a pure intensity in Stevenson’s prose, have become a staple of adventure stories from John Buchan to Alfred Hitchcock and Ian Fleming. Kidnapped remains as exhilarating today as when it was first published in 1886. This new edition is based on the 1895 text, incorporating Stevenson’s last thoughts about the novel before his death. It includes Stevenson’s ‘Note to Kidnapped’, reprinted for the first time since 1922.

Iraq

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haytham Bahoora
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War In Iraq ◽  
Critical Social

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.

scholarly journals A new myth regarding the Great Trek: Reinvention of identity in Die pad na skuilhoek [The path toSkuilhoek] by Hans du Plessis.

Literator ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlies Taljard
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Myth ◽  
The Way

This article aims to illustrate how Hans du Plessis, in his novel Die pad na Skuilhoek [The path to Skuilhoek] (a place of shelter), subverts the way in which history had been presented in historical novels in the past by addressing social issues that contemporary readers find relevant. The first part of the article deals with the social codes that shape the identities of the main characters and how these identities are relevant in terms of the social framework within which the novel is received. In the second place the focus will shift towards Du Plessis’s representation of cultural and national identities. The question: ‘Who were the Afrikaners at the time of the Great Trek?’ will be answered with reference to these identities. In conclusion it will be pointed out how Du Plessis avoids dated practices of historical interpretation by choosing ecocrticism as the ideological framework for his novel and is, in this way, constructing a new social myth about the Great Trek.

Yemen

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the development of the novel genre in Yemen. The novelistic form has taken a relatively long time to emerge in Yemen, but since 1992 Yemeni writers have produced a number of remarkable novels and the pace of publishing has increased. In addition, scholarly criticism of Yemeni fiction as a distinctive regional tradition has gotten well underway within the last decade. This chapter begins with an overview of the beginnings of the Yemeni novel before turning to works published from the revolution to unification (1962–1990), including historical novels. It also considers novels published from unification to the present, noting that Yemeni authors through the years have tackled a range of themes, including emigration, exile, racism, Muslim-Jewish relations, and cultural pluralism.

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