Landscape and Seascape

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Eleonora Stoppino
Keyword(s):  
British Isles ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Since the earliest reception of the Orlando Furioso, the episodes Ariosto set in and around the British Isles have fascinated readers and inspired iconic artistic depictions. This chapter explores these episodes, focusing on Ariosto’s manipulation of the traditional chivalric seascape, descriptions of the sea and shipwrecks, on places and toponyms as producers of meaning in the British Isles landscapes, and on the 1532 addition of the episode centred on Olimpia, which can be considered a laboratory of narrative techniques, stylistic choices, and geospatial innovation.

Entertainment and Irony: The Orlando Furioso from Modern to Postmodern

2019 ◽  
pp. 286-307
Author(s):  
Stefano Jossa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Small World ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
David Lodge ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Less popular than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso has however made an impact on Anglo-American fiction. Loved by Samuel Beckett, who called risolino ariostesco (Ariosto’s smile) the poetic strategy of his preferred artists, and C. S. Lewis, who famously claimed that his utmost happiness would be to be always sitting by a window overlooking the sea, reading Ariosto’s masterpiece, Orlando Furioso proves more and more influential in contemporary fiction when it comes to epic modes, narrative techniques, fantasy and sci-fi: taken as a source of inspiration by both well-educated and popular writers and filmmakers, such as, among many others, David Lodge in Small World, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in Ariosto and Jim Jarmusch in Mystery Train, Orlando Furioso proves in tune with two keywords of our contemporary age, irony and entertainment. This essay will explore his legacy in twentieth-century Anglo-American fiction in order to assess its potential in our times.

Illustrations and the genesis of Barrett and Yonge's Collins pocket guide to the sea shore (1958)

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
Biological Station ◽  
Marine Biological ◽  
Illustrated Text ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

Twenty nine items of correspondence from the mid-1950s discovered recently in the archives of the University Marine Biological Station Millport, and others made available by one of the illustrators and a referee, shed unique light on the publishing history of Collins pocket guide to the sea shore. This handbook, generally regarded as a classic of its genre, marked a huge step forwards in 1958; providing generations of students with an authoritative, concise, affordable, well illustrated text with which to identify common organisms found between the tidemarks from around the coasts of the British Isles. The crucial role played by a select band of illustrators in making this publication the success it eventually became, is highlighted herein. The difficulties of accomplishing this production within commercial strictures, and generally as a sideline to the main employment of the participants, are revealed. Such stresses were not helped by changing demands on the illustrators made by the authors and by the publishers.

On the Margins of Modernism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Rosenmeier
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Extensive Study ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Chinese Writing

Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Despite being an integral part of the Chinese literary scene, their bestselling fiction has, however, been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This book is the first extensive study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other Western language and it re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. Their romantic novels and short stories were often set abroad and featured a wide range of stereotypes, from pirates, spies and patriotic soldiers to ghosts, spirits and exotic women who confounded the mostly cosmopolitan male protagonists. Christopher Rosenmeier’s detailed analysis of these popular novels and short stories shows that such romances broke new ground by incorporating and adapting narrative techniques and themes from the Shanghai modernist writers of the 1930s, notably Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying. The study thereby contests the view that modernism had little lasting impact on Chinese fiction, and it demonstrates that the popular literature of the 1940s was more innovative than usually imagined, with authors, such as those studied here, successfully crossing the boundaries between the popular and the elite, as well as between romanticism and modernism, in their bestselling works.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

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