scholarly journals A Maud of her own: re-visioning L.M. Montgomery’s “Western Eden” in Melanie Fishbane’s historical fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Young
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Revisionist History

This major research paper considers the connection between the genre of historical fiction and the complex dynamics of revisionist history in Melanie Fishbane’s young adult novel Maud: A Novel inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery (2017). More specifically, this study critically examines how Fishbane appropriates L.M. Montgomery’s Western Canadian writings for her own purposes to update complex social realities and sensibilities in her historical novel. Because Montgomery’s personal and fictional writings reveal a deeply conflicted and contradictory ideological stance on race issues, particularly where Indigenous peoples are concerned, which may frustrate or alienate 21st century mass readership, Fishbane opted to make her character, Maud, more sympathetic towards the plight of the Indigenous peoples in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan; this revisionist approach, I argue, has potential to gloss over the real Montgomery’s more problematic and more heteroglossic representations on race. This study’s findings indicate that the revisionist nature of historical fiction, moulded by the new context in which it is written, influences the way that texts and historical figures, like L.M. Montgomery are re-imagined and re-written.

scholarly journals A Maud of her own: re-visioning L.M. Montgomery’s “Western Eden” in Melanie Fishbane’s historical fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Young
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Revisionist History

This major research paper considers the connection between the genre of historical fiction and the complex dynamics of revisionist history in Melanie Fishbane’s young adult novel Maud: A Novel inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery (2017). More specifically, this study critically examines how Fishbane appropriates L.M. Montgomery’s Western Canadian writings for her own purposes to update complex social realities and sensibilities in her historical novel. Because Montgomery’s personal and fictional writings reveal a deeply conflicted and contradictory ideological stance on race issues, particularly where Indigenous peoples are concerned, which may frustrate or alienate 21st century mass readership, Fishbane opted to make her character, Maud, more sympathetic towards the plight of the Indigenous peoples in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan; this revisionist approach, I argue, has potential to gloss over the real Montgomery’s more problematic and more heteroglossic representations on race. This study’s findings indicate that the revisionist nature of historical fiction, moulded by the new context in which it is written, influences the way that texts and historical figures, like L.M. Montgomery are re-imagined and re-written.

Feeling Like It Wasn't

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Or History ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

scholarly journals Decolonizing the Anthropocene: ‘Slow Violence’ and Indigenous Resistance in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Il Tolomeo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Xausa
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Species Level ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Eruptive Event ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Indigenous Theory ◽  
Slow Violence

Through a reading of Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves, a survival story set in a futuristic Canada destroyed by global warming, this article explores the conceptualization and reimagination of the Anthropocene in contemporary postcolonial and Indigenous theory and fiction. Firstly, I will argue that literary representations of climate change can be complicit in producing hegemonic strands of Anthropocene discourse that consider human destructiveness and vulnerability at undifferentiated species level. Secondly, I will suggest that the novel’s apocalypse reveals the processes of colonial violence and dispossession that have culminated in the eruptive event of environmental catastrophe, rather than portraying a story of universal and disembodied human threat that conceals oppression against Indigenous people.

scholarly journals Change the Narrative

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
Tynan Drake
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Real World ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Empathic Understanding ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Personal Level

In post-apocalyptic fiction, the concept of empathy often is depicted as a weakness that the characters cannot afford if they hope to survive. This depiction leads to harmful perceptions on the value of empathy and its ability to avert apocalyptic catastrophes. By examining David Clement-Davies young adult novel The Sight through theories of narrative empathy and through James Berger’s theories of post-apocalyptic representation, this essay argues that by representing empathic understanding, fiction writers have the power to influence positive changes in real world situations. By representing the need to teach empathy for all people, regardless of their differences, and the harm a lack of empathy can cause on both a personal level and on a large societal scale, this novel encourages future generations to seek peaceful and empathic solutions instead of repeating the cataclysmic mistakes of their forebearers.

scholarly journals For konge og fædreland

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (81) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Lis Møller
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
And Function

Lis Møller: “For King and Fatherland – King Valdemar the Victorious in works by B.S. Ingemann and Agnes Slott-Møller” This article offers a comparative reading of two fictionalized renditions in two different media of the Danish king Valdemar the Victorious (1170-1241): B.S. Ingemann’s historical novel Valdemar Seier (1826) and Agnes Slott-Møller’s cycle of historical paintings Valdemar Sejr (1927-1934). Focusing on Ingemann’s and Slott-Møller’s medievalism and their views on the nature and function of historical fiction and historical painting, respectively, the article argues that the two representations of King Valdemar are in fact compatible. What sets them apart is the historical context.

scholarly journals Riña de Gatos. Madrid 1936: Mendoza desde la óptica de la memoria histórica en el siglo XXI

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
War Literature ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Eduardo Mendoza ◽  
The Past ◽  
Civil War Literature

Abstract: 21st century Spain has witnessed a re-awakening of the past with Zapatero’s Historical Memory Law legislated in 2007 and a clamor to re-visit the Civil War (1936-39) and the Transition period with a critical stance. This new historical conscious has also resulted in a new wave of literature published on the Civil War. The objective of this paper is to explore how a work like Riña de Gatos. Madrid 1936 challenges the traditional boundaries of what is known as Civil War literature in Spain. The paper would encompass a thorough reading of the work authored by Eduardo Mendoza. In the process, it shall demonstrate the ability of this contemporary historical novel to transcend the boundaries of Civil War literature through a "rediscovery" of the Falange leader, Primo de Rivera (1903 – 1936) who was instrumental in the coup of 1936. Reseña: La España del siglo XXI ha atestiguado una vuelta del pasado con la Ley de Memoria Histórica de Zapatero (2007) y un clamor de retomar la Guerra Civil (1936-39) y el período de la Transición desde una postura crítica. Esta nueva consciencia histórica también ha resultado en una nueva ola de literatura publicada sobre la Guerra Civil. El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar cómo la obra Riña de Gatos. Madrid 1936 (2010) desafía los límites tradicionales de lo que se conoce como literatura de la Guerra Civil en España. El trabajo pretende una lectura detallada de esta obra de Eduardo Mendoza. En el proceso, demostraría su capacidad de trascender los límites de la literatura de la Guerra Civil a través de un "redescubrimiento" del líder de Falange, Primo de Rivera (1903 - 1936), que jugó un papel fundamental en el golpe de estado de 1936.

School Leavers With Verified Disabilities

2020 ◽  
pp. 327-366
Author(s):  
Helena Stark
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Retrospective Study ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Youth Engagement ◽  
Transition Outcomes ◽  
Employment Rates

Globally, young adult employment rates have declined in the 21st century. In Australia, youth from non-metropolitan areas have a lower engagement rate in employment than their metropolitan peers, despite one rarely hearing declarations from school leavers that they aim to be unemployed and never work. This chapter investigates transition outcomes for young adults from a non-metropolitan area through a small retrospective study. The purpose is to identify influences that may impact youth engagement in employment or training for school leavers in a small town, and that may be dissimilar from influences affecting their metropolitan counterparts. Research also focuses on the influences affecting transition to employment for school leavers with verified disabilities in non-metropolitan areas and what barriers they experience to accessing employment or study.

Revising the Socio-Technical Perspective for the 21st Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Louise Harder Fischer ◽  
Richard Baskerville
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Technical System ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
Systems Research ◽  
Information Systems Research ◽  
Parallel Structures ◽  
Realist Analysis ◽  
Collaboration Platforms

A predominant understanding in information systems research (ISR) is that technology has institutionalizing, routinizing, and socializing effects in its interaction with users in the human enterprise. Subscribing to these effects from an organizational point of view no longer provides a full understanding of the more complex dynamics in the 21st century workplace inhabited by a vast amount of different technologies with different purposes. Through a critical realist analysis, focusing on patterns in socio-technical structures and more specific actions and outcomes afforded by the recent and forceful adoption of unified communication and collaboration platforms (UCC), the authors see a new, powerful socio-technical mechanism of individualization that is profoundly changing these socio-technical dynamics. Through 18 interviews with knowledge professionals, the study finds that the mechanisms of individualization reduce the influence of the organization as an institutionalizing and socializing socio-technical system. As an example, the power of individualization creates new parallel structures of small networks of close colleagues. Thus, this research sees new structural patterns and dynamics emerging, forming a much more complex, yet self-organizing socio-technical system. The authors suggest expanding the socio-technical understanding of the present techno-organizational reality by taking into account the socio-technical mechanisms that produce certain outcomes. By understanding the fundamental mechanisms at work, they provide those with a fuller understanding of how these mechanisms can enable, while simultaneously crippling, each other. This fuller understanding also aids the pursuit of providing workplaces that achieve both humanistic and economic objectives.

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