scholarly journals Recovering a “Lost Europe”: The De-Centering of Master Narratives in Eyvind Johnson’s Natten är här

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Elliott J. Brandsma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Face

A socially-engaged literary Modernist, whose writings possess an incisive skepticism toward political power, Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976) was a working-class autodidact who became a prominent voice in Swedish letters during the twentieth century. His historical novels have attracted the most critical attention to date, but his short fiction from the 1920s reveals a young author increasingly suspicious of what postmodern theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard would later call master narratives—totalizing views of historical events that serve a political or universalized function. In “Kort Besök” (A Short Visit), “Det Förlorade Europa,” (The Lost Europe) and “En Man i Etolien” (A Man in Aetolia), from his 1932 short story collection Natten är här (The Night Has Come), Johnson’s characters resist and subvert various master narratives, maintaining their dignity and individuality in the face of destructive political, military or nationalistic agendas. Although his formal experimentation, introspective storytelling and narrative irresolution firmly situate him in the Modernist literary tradition, Johnson’s disruption of grand narratives about historical events in these stories previews postmodernity, with its radical interrogation of language’s subjugating power, suggesting a new avenue for evaluating and apprehending his literary innovations. Short fiction, thus, offers an accessible entryway into the complex art of Eyvind Johnson, whose intricate novels about centuries past have long resisted casual readership.

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 The Intertextual Use of Greek Mythology in Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-331
Author(s):  
Tatiana Ternopol
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Comparative Methods ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The Face ◽  
Greek Myths ◽  
Story Collection ◽  
Over Time

This study investigates the intertextual use of Greek mythology in Agatha Christie’s short stories Philomel Cottage, The Face of Helen, and The Oracle at Delphi, a short story collection The Labours of Hercules, and a novel, Nemesis. The results of this research based on the hermeneutical and comparative methods reveal that A. Christie’s intertextual formula developed over time. In her early works, allusions were based on characters' appearances and functions as well as on the use of motifs and themes from Greek myths. Later on, she turned to using allusory character names; this would mislead her readers who thought they already knew the formula of her stories. Although not a postmodern writer, A. Christie enjoyed playing games of allusion with her readers. She wanted them not only to solve a case but also to discover and interpret the intertextual references.

Fictions of Irregular Post-Soviet Migration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Mary Antin ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Eastern European Immigrants

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.

Frame, Janet (1924–2004)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christy Pottroff
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Suicide Attempt ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Lunatic Asylum ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Janet Frame

Janet Frame was a celebrated New Zealand author with a prolific literary career and a dramatic personal history. Mirroring Frame’s own life, her writing frequently addresses poverty, marginalization, and the artist’s struggle in a conformist society. Both her prose and her poetry combine elements of modernism with magical realism. After a suicide attempt at university, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and spent eight years in mental hospitals in New Zealand, including the notorious Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, where she received numerous electroshock treatments. In 1952, while Frame was in the asylum, New Zealand’s Caxton Press published her collection of short fiction entitled The Lagoon and Other Stories, which was awarded a prestigious national literary prize, the Hubert Church Prose Award. At the time, Frame was scheduled to have a lobotomy—until hospital officials discovered that she had won the award. In total, Frame was the author of twelve novels, four short story collections, one book of poetry, and three volumes of autobiography. She received many awards and honors, and her writing has garnered numerous literary prizes and much critical attention.

From Newspaperman to Short Story Writer

Irvin S. Cobb ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Small Town ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Big City ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Attention To Detail

Ellis begins by describing Cobb’s successful ventures as a humorist and how his appearance played into his style. His attention to detail and offbeat subjects became a staple for Evening World readers. Cobb used his small-town Kentucky perspective to make observations about the big city in his first long-running humor series, “New York thro’ Funny Glasses.” The transplanted Kentuckian exemplified the racial attitudes of many white Americans in the early twentieth century. Eventually, Cobb’s writing found a place in the Sunday World Magazine. Cobb also tried his hand at writing short fiction. Over the next three decades, Cobb turned out an immense amount of copy for newspapers and magazines, wrote short stories and plays, dabbled in movies, and wrote novels. He never seemed to be short of ideas.

E.M. Forster’s Queer Re-Orientations: “Dr Woolacott” and “The Classical Annex”

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-71
Author(s):  
Manuel Hueso Vasallo
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Story Collection ◽  
To Come

E. M. Forster’s short story collection The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972) features a set of intensely homoerotic stories. In this article, I re-address two of them: “Dr Woolacott” (1927) and “The Classical Annex” (1930) through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s theory of Orientation. I shall argue that Forster’s erotic short stories offer their potential readers the possibility to re- orientate themselves towards the representations of queerness and towards Forster himself. They manage to do this by presenting readers with depictions of queer realities that are often ignored or misinterpreted in a direct way, and by subverting the traditional discourses of pathology and aestheticism. I argue, as well, the criticism of these stories needs to be reviewed so that they may attract the critical attention they deserve among Forster’s creations.

Uses of the Profane

Life of Paper ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Luk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Reproductive Activity ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Face ◽  
Epistolary Form

Chapter Six explores letter correspondence across prison walls as under-recognized mode of communal preservation in the face of publicly administered torture and genocide. This chapter shifts our perspectives on social movements by paying critical attention to ruptures in racial epistemology realized by twentieth-century liberation struggles and to interventions of the epistolary form in this context. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the life of paper constitutes a contradictory kind of creative shelter—a sacred place to foster social being, provide for its study, and generate a mode of its inhabitation. Reading archival materials for traces of the intellectual and affective labor they both congeal and augment, this chapter views letter correspondence as reproductive activity that instantiates life-sustaining claims of belonging to one another and enunciates the experience and significance of being human: nurturing forms of connection and conditions of existence that generatively stress the limits of what is currently knowable.

Weird History / Weird Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
Chloé Germaine Buckley
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Collection ◽  
Epistemological Uncertainty

The 2003 horror short story collection, Shadows over Baker Street partakes of the Weird tradition of revising the history of human civilisation whilst also producing a secret history of the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. The stories pit Conan Doyle’s master of rational enquiry against Lovecraft’s terrifying monsters. The contest is unsettling. Typically, detective fiction shores up faith in rational enquiry, whilst the Weird disrupts enlightenment narratives, suggesting that everything we know about the world is wrong. Shadows over Baker Street encourages the reader to surrender disbelief entirely in the face of the ‘ineluctability of the Weird.’ This surrender manifests a postmillennial structure of feeling towards epistemological uncertainty. Shadows over Baker Street is an example of how the Weird challenges rational, inductive reasoning and epistemological certainty, ushering in an era of belief - in the unbelievable.

scholarly journals What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 7-33
Author(s):  
Grażyna Maria Teresa Branny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Light In August ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Point Of Reference

The present article is part of a larger project on Conrad’s less known short fiction, the area of his writing which is largely undervalued, and even deprecated at times. The paper’s aim is to enhance the appreciation of “A Smile of Fortune,” by drawing attention to its “inner texture” as representative of Conrad’s “art of expression,” especially in view of the writer’s own belief in the supremacy of form over content as well as “suggestiveness” over “explicitness” in his fiction. To achieve this aim a New Critical (“close reading”), intertextual and comparative approaches to Conrad’s story have been adopted, involving nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts, i.e., both those preceding and those following the publication of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) volume featuring the tale in question. The intertextual reading of “A Smile of Fortune” against Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with Light in August as a point of reference, reveals the workings in Conrad’s story of the modernist device of denegation, which, alongside antithesis and oxymoron, seems to be largely responsible for the tale’s contradictions and ambiguities, which should thus be perceived as the story’s asset rather than flaw. The textual evidence of Conrad’s tale, as well as its comparison with three short stories: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” seem to confirm the presence of the implications of the theme of incest in Conrad’s text, heretofore unrecognized in criticism. Overall, the foregoing analysis of “A Smile of Fortune” hopes to account for, if not disentangle, the story’s complex narratological meanderings and seemingly insoluble ambiguities, particularly as regards character and motive, naming Conrad rather than Faulkner the precursor of denegation.

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