scholarly journals ‘Weird and fantastic realism’: Science and Stories in the Work of Grant Allen

2021 ◽  
pp. 140-154
Author(s):  
Beth Mills
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Formal Training ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Professional Science ◽  
Economic Necessity ◽  
Fantastic Realism ◽  
Grant Allen

Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a well-known populariser of natural history who was widely recognised for his extensive knowledge of science and his ability to refashion complex ideas for general audiences. But his status as a popular writer, coupled with a lack of formal training, placed him at the margins of professional science and impeded his serious scientific ambitions. Although Allen tended to portray fiction-writing as an economic necessity, both contemporary and recent critics have noted stylistic innovations that place him within germinal popular genres of the fin de siècle. This paper aims to show that Allen’s contributions to late-Victorian popular literature derive in part from his negotiation of fiction and non-fiction genres. Focusing particularly on his experiments with the short story, it considers how and to what extent he distinguished scientific from literary writing, while revealing his views on plausibility in fiction to be more complex than is typically recognised. Little-studied reviews of Allen’s popular fiction suggest the wider contemporary impact of his experimentations. That critics recognised his style as unconventional endorses a reappraisal of his place within developments in late-Victorian popular literature.

The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
The Press ◽  
Character Study ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Plot Design

The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction charts the rise of the short story from its original appearance in magazines and newspapers. For much of the 19th century, tales were written for the press, and the form’s history is marked by engagement with popular fiction. The short story then earned a reputation for its skilful use of plot design and character study distinct from the novel. This VSI considers the continuity and variation in key structures and techniques such as the beginning, the creation of voice, the ironic turn or plot twist, and how writers manage endings. Throughout, it draws on examples from an international and flourishing corpus of work.

Head, Bessie Amelia (1937–1986)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig MacKenzie
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Bessie Head ◽  
White Mother ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Psychiatric Institution ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
History Of

Novelist, short-story and non-fiction writer Bessie Head was born in a Pietermaritzburg psychiatric institution, her white mother Bessie Amelia Emery (née Birch), who had had a long history of mental illness, having unexpectedly become pregnant (the identity of Head’s black father has never been discovered). Head grew up in foster care until the age of 13; thereafter the welfare authorities placed her in an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban. In 1961 she met and married fellow journalist Harold Head in Cape Town; their only child, Howard, was born in 1962. After the break-up of her marriage in 1964 she relinquished South African citizenship and took up a teaching post in Serowe, Botswana. Plagued by ill health and mental instability, she died in Serowe with six published works to her name and an international reputation as one of Africa’s foremost woman writers. Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), deals in predominantly realist fashion with the flight from South Africa of a young black political activist, his resettlement in Botswana and marriage to a Batswana woman. Her second novel, Maru (1971), which derives its name from its eponymous central character, is an altogether more complex work.

scholarly journals ‘A Marriage of Freud and Euclid’: Psychotic Epistemology in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Samuel Francis
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Scientific Status ◽  
Contemporary Status ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theories

The writings of J.G. Ballard respond to the sciences in multiple ways; as such his (early) writing may productively be discussed as science fiction. However, the theoretical discipline to which he publicly signalled most allegiance, psychoanalysis, is one whose status in relation to science is highly contested and complex. In the 1960s Ballard signalled publicly in his non-fiction writing a belief in psychoanalysis as a science, a position in keeping with psychoanalysis’ contemporary status as the predominant psychological paradigm. Various early Ballard stories enact psychoanalytic theories, while the novel usually read as his serious debut, The Drowned World, aligns itself allusively with an oft-cited depiction by Freud of the revelatory and paradigm-changing nature of the psychoanalytic project. Ballard’s enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis in his early 1960s fiction mutated into a fascinatingly delirious vision in some of his most experimental work of the late 1960s and early 1970s of a fusion of psychoanalysis with the mathematical sciences. This paper explores how this ‘Marriage of Freud and Euclid’ is played out in its most systematic form in The Atrocity Exhibition and its successor Crash. By his late career Ballard was acknowledging problems raised over psychoanalysis’ scientific status in the positivist critique of Karl Popper and the work of various combatants in the ‘Freud Wars’ of the 1990s; Ballard at this stage seemed to move towards agreement with interpretations of Freud as a literary or philosophical figure. However, despite making pronouncements reflecting changes in dominant cultural appraisals of Freud, Ballard continued in his later writings to extrapolate the fictive and interpretative possibilities of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas. This article attempts to develop a deeper understanding of Ballard’s ‘scientific’ deployment of psychoanalysis in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash within the context of a more fully culturally-situated understanding of psychoanalysis’ relationship to science, and thereby to create new possibilities for understanding the meanings of Ballard’s writing within culture at large.

Did pre-Revival Hebrew literature have its own langue? Quotation and improvization in Mendele Mokher Sefarim

1988 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis H. Glinert
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Prose ◽  
Mendele Mokher Sefarim

In the history of Hebrew letters, few dates have so cavalierly been invested with literary and linguistic significance as 1886/7, the publication date of Mendele's short story BeSeter Ra'am.Such scholars of literature as Ravnitzki, Klausner and Werses have hailed its style as the pointer or veritable trigger to a redeployment of the traditional ‘synthetic’ (composite Biblical/post-Biblical) Hebrew style—instead of being confined to the registers of non-fiction, it now rose to supplant Biblical Hebrew as the standard for narrative prose. Some historians of language have gone so far as to present it as a total innovation (for its time) in that the aforegoing Haskalah writers had adhered almost exclusively to a Biblical manner.

Stimulating Non-Fiction Writing!

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Hughes-Evans ◽  
Simon Brownhill
Keyword(s):  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Non Fiction

scholarly journals Queer Bodies, Queer Lives in China English Contact Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua M. Paiz ◽  
Anthony Comeau ◽  
Junhan Zhu ◽  
Jingyi Zhang ◽  
Agnes Santiano
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Short Story ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
China English ◽  
Ha Jin ◽  
Queer Spaces ◽  
A Site ◽  
Post Cultural Revolution

Abstract Ha Jin and his works have contributed significantly to world Englishes knowledge, both through direct scholarly engagement with contact literatures and through the linguistic creativity exhibited in his works of fiction (Jin 2010). His fiction writing also acts as a site of scholarly inquiry (e.g., Zhang 2002). Underexplored, however, are how local varieties of English as used to create queer identities. This paper will seek to address this gap by exploring how Ha Jin created queer spaces in his short story “The Bridegroom.” This investigation will utilize a Kachruvian world Englishes approach to analyzing contact literatures (B. Kachru 1985, 1990, Y. Kachru & Nelson 2006, Thumboo 2006). This analysis will be supported by interfacing it with perspectives from the fields of queer theory and queer linguistics (Jagose 1996, Leap & Motschenbacher 2012), which will allow for a contextually sensitive understanding of queer experiences in China. This approach will enable us to examine how Ha Jin utilized the rhetorical and linguistic markers of China English to explore historical attitudes towards queerness during the post-Cultural Revolution period. These markers include the use of local idioms and culturally-localized rhetorical moves to render a uniquely Chinese queer identity.

scholarly journals In conversation with Catherine Cole

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaydeep Sarangi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Sea Birds ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Dry Dock

Catherine Cole is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. In March 2017, she will take up the position of Professor in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, UK. Catherine has published three novels, Dry Dock (1999) and Skin Deep (2002) and The Grave at Thu Le (2006), two non-fiction books, Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction (1996) and The Poet Who Forgot (2008). She is the editor of the anthology, The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam (2010) and co-editor with McNeil and Karaminas of Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television (2009). Her poetry, short stories, essays and reviews have been published in Australia and internationally and produced by BBC Radio 4. In 2017 Catherine’s short story collection, Sea Birds Crying in the Harbour Dark, will be published by UWA Press.

scholarly journals Theory and Practice of the Long Novel

Prism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-352
Author(s):  
Kenny K. K. Ng
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Conscious Effort ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
New Literature

Abstract This article examines the promises and predicaments of May Fourth writers in their experimental writing of the “long novel” (changpian xiaoshuo 長篇小說) as a Chinese brand of the modern epic. May Fourth intellectuals showed a conscious effort to institute a new brand of fictional genre to enlighten the reading public. Yet their “education of the novel” was far from complete, as New Literature writers found fictional expressions primarily in the form of the short story, with strong undertones of individualism, subjective lyricism, and elitism. By focusing on Mao Dun's 茅盾 (1896–1981) Ziye 子夜 (Midnight; 1933), the article examines his call for the establishment of the long novel and his strenuous efforts to “take over” the modern novel as an ideological form to narrate a teleological progression of history. How do Mao Dun's fictional narratives illuminate the representational problems between fiction, locality, and modernity? For Mao Dun and his May Fourth contemporaries, modernity at large was expressed in a teleological mode of time and progress, both in the rhetoric of modernity and in fiction writing. The article reflects on Mao Dun's creative and ideological impasse by teasing out the narrative loopholes of traditional voices and popular fictional registers in the modern epic.

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