scholarly journals The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: The Dundee Edition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Cook ◽  
◽  
James Morris ◽  
Valentina Bond ◽  
Monica Burns
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Critical Interest

Published anonymously in 1824, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor pushed the boundaries of genre. It has been called a Gothic novel, a psychological mystery, a religious satire, and an early example of modern crime fiction. The plot follows a staunch Calvinist, Robert Wringhim, who believes he is justified in killing those he believes are already damned by God. A masterclass of metafiction, many of the events are narrated twice; first by the 'editor', who gives his account of the facts as he understands them to be, and then in the words of the 'sinner' himself. Having sold poorly among its first readers, the novel suffered from a prolonged period of neglect. However, since the latter part of the twentieth century it has won greater critical interest and attention.

scholarly journals The Significance Of Space In Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn As A Twentieth-Century Irish Gothic Novel

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
Joanna Jarząb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Spatial Differentiation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Traditional Concept ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Almost All

Abstract During the twentieth century almost all literary genres came back to prominence in different and alternative forms. The Gothic is no exception to this phenomenon as many a writer made an attempt at using this eighteenth-century genre once again, but adding to it some contemporary elements. Consequently, an abundance of new techniques have been introduced to Gothic fiction to evoke the feeling of horror and terror among the more and more demanding readers of modern times. Still, some writers prefer to return to the traditional concept of the Gothic – as does Iris Murdoch in her novel The Unicorn. The purpose of this article is to analyse the text from the perspective of the Irish Gothic. Those features of the genre which are traditional as well as local are going to be discussed in the context of space as the dominating aspect of the novel. The typical Irish landscape abounding in marshes, bogs and the sea will be contrasted with the inner space of the house, and its resemblance to the old Victorian mansions popular among the Anglo-Irish ascendancy of nineteenth-century Ireland. In what follows, the paper aims at showing how Murdoch’s skilful play with the spatial differentiation between the inside and the outside dislodges other more universal issues, such as the question of freedom, of social taboos and of the different anxieties still present in Irish society today.

Katherine Mansfield and Translation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Interest

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

Materializing Ulysses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Perceived Power

This chapter compares the reception of Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses with that of Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of the novel. Although Ulysses had been legally publishable in England for decades, Strick’s film still encountered censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter argues that Joyce’s novel, for all its obscenity and provocation, mitigated its threat by foregrounding its own printedness, allying its fate to the waning power of print as a bearer of obscenity. Strick’s film, by contrast, activated the perceived power of film. The contrast of the two versions of Ulysses, which are often identical in language, thus offers a valuable window on how obscenity changed across media through the twentieth century. In making this argument, the chapter surveys print strategies of censorship, including the asterisk, and how these strategies operated in a range of works.

Gothic and Anti-Gothic, 1797–1820

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miles
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Novel

This chapter discusses the Gothic from 1797 to 1820. The Gothic reached its apogee in the late 1790s, when it secured a third share of the novel market, after which it withered. From 1797 onward, the Gothic seems inseparable from an anti-Gothic shadow that materialized in myriad forms, from ad hoc animadversions found in the reviews mocking the genre's formulaic character, to full-blown parodies. While the quantity of novels advertising themselves as products of the ‘terror-system’ declined during the first two decades of the century, the Gothic migrated downmarket, sustaining itself, post-1820, by embedding itself in other ‘genres’. Putting aside the tale, which the Gothic dominated, one quickly perceives that the Gothic is a variety of the novel—one of its subgenres best labelled ‘romance’. Moreover, one can best and most accurately represent the Gothic novel during the period as the proliferation of several schools, above all, of Radcliffe, Godwin, Lewis, and Schiller.

Publish the Picture at Your Peril: Visual Ideas and the Commercial Apparatus of Life Magazine

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-324
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Social Behaviors ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life Magazine ◽  
Advertising Revenue ◽  
Manufacturing Company

AbstractIn the early years of the twentieth century, Life magazine had only approximately one hundred thousand subscribers, yet its illustrated images (like the Gibson Girl) significantly influenced fashion trends and social behaviors nationally. Its outsized influence can be explained by examining the magazine’s business practices, particularly the novel ways in which it treated and conceptualized its images as intellectual property. While other magazines relied on their circulation and advertising revenue to attain profitability, Life used its page space to sell not only ads, but also its own creative components—principally illustrations—to manufacturers of consumer goods, advertisers, and consumers themselves. In so doing, Life’s publishers relied on a developing legal conception of intellectual property and copyright, one that was not always amenable to their designs. By looking at a quasi-litigious disagreement in which a candy manufacturing company attempted to copy one of the magazine’s images, this article explores the mechanisms behind the commodification and distribution of mass-circulated images.

scholarly journals Place matters: geographical context, place belonging and the production of locality in Mediterranean Noirs

GeoJournal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Gabellieri
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Geographical Discourse ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Narrative Medium ◽  
Geographical Context

AbstractScholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.

scholarly journals Biomedical knowledge in Mexico during the Cold War and its impact in pictorial representations of Homo sapiens and racial hierarchies

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Erica Torrens
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Biomedical Knowledge ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Race And Racialization ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Pictorial Representations ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the state of Mexican genetics and biomedical knowledge during the second half of the twentieth century, as well as its impact on the visual representation of human groups and racial hierarchies, based on social studies of scientific imaging and visualization (SIV) and theoretical concepts and methods. It also addresses the genealogy and shifts of the concept of race and racialization of Mexican bodies, concluding with the novel visual culture that resulted from genetic knowledge merged with the racist phenomenon in the second half of the twentieth century in Mexico.

scholarly journals Adapting Wives and Daughters for Television: Reimagining Women, Travel, Natural Science, and Race

Adaptation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Ballinger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African People ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract This essay examines the depiction of women, travel, natural science, and race in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) and Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of the novel (1999). It argues that the adaptation offers a recognizable transposition of Gaskell’s text, but makes some significant adjustments that reveal its contemporary reimagining of the novel’s gender and racial politics. In particular, Davies transforms Gaskell’s unexceptional female protagonist Molly Gibson into a proto-feminist naturalist adventurer, and revisions the casual racism the novel expresses towards black people in line with late-twentieth-century sensibilities. Each text, novel and film, reveals the period-specific ideological forces that shape its portrayal of Englishwomen and African people.

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