‘Not at all afraid’: Queer Temporality and the School Detective Story

Kate Haffey has recently argued that if queer time can be seen as a turning away from narrative coherence, it suggests new possibilities for considering narrative structures more generally. Combining the narratively rigid structures of the school story and the detective novel, the four novels discussed in this article – Gladys Mitchell’s Laurels are Poison (1942), Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946), Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951), and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) – disrupt conventional understandings of linear time. Depicting not only queer, or potentially queer, characters, but a queer phenomenological perspective, they challenge reader expectations with a focus on aporias and gaps, whether in terms of trauma (Jackson), the blurring of fact and fiction (Lindsay), or the prolonged delay of both crime and resolution (Tey). These novels draw attention to the insufficiency of texts to capture experience, and the inadequacy of textual authority. As such, they reveal the extent to which mid-twentieth-century women’s fiction was able to challenge the genres and narrative structures with which it was most closely associated.

ENGLISH HYPERBOLE IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION PROSE (A STUDY OF SOPHIE KINSELLA’S NOVELS)

The article presents findings of the ongoing project on the use of hyperbole in contemporary women’s fiction prose, as one of the peculiarities of this genre. The novelty of our study consists in the fact that the genre characteristics and plot devices of romance novels have been abundantly dwelt upon in scholarly researches while the stylistic aspects of the genre have not been explicated enough. The texts constituting the empirical material for the research are the novels “Twenties Girl” and “Can You Keep a Secret?” by Sophie Kinsella, one of the bestselling contemporary English writers. The theoretical background of the research is based on the studies that were carried out by scholars whose field of expertise combines the issues related to literary criticism, context and rhetorical devices. Hyperbole being a typical feature of female writing, and there existing multiple taxonomies of hyperboles, the present study aims at defining peculiarities of the target trope, which is typical of female romance novel. Therefore, the focus in the given study is on the types of hyperbolic expressions, which prevail in the analysed text, i.e. quantitative hyperboles and adjectives-in-thesuperlative-degree hyperboles. The research confirms that hyperbole is a context-dependent linguistic phenomenon. The results of the study are reflected in the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the hyperbolic occurrences. The former shows that among hyperboles-numerals, million is most frequently used in the female writing by contrast with the numerals fifty, ten thousand, bazillion, which are least frequently used. Qualitative analysis presents the taxonomy of semantic fields formed by adjectives-in-the-superlative-degree hyperboles (e.g. inanimate objects, behavior, relationships) and displays a high prevalence of occurrences of those from anthropological domain. Moreover, the study demonstrates that the numerical hyperbole’s literal, objective-logical meaning denoting quantity becomes an intensifier and merges with the acquired in the context subjectiveevaluative, more expressive meaning, with a positive or negative connotation.

Women’s Fiction

This essay gives an overview of women’s fiction published between the late 18th and early 19th century, focusing on their interest in sensibility, education, and marriage. Women’s novels during this period were very much influenced by the literary genre called the novel of sensibility, which celebrates emotional concepts such as sentiment, delicacy, and sensibility. In promoting education for women, many female novelists not only vindicated women’s capacity to reason, but also recommended moral feeling for others. Although Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Susan Ferrier believed that women should embrace reason, they knew that domestic affections were necessary. Affectionate ties or compassion are key to understanding the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Possessing neither was detrimental to the happiness of heroines of this period, and this is typically observed in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) – pursuing one’s desire without restraint would lead to self-destruction. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley were writing their novels when the radical movement connected to Mary Wollstonecraft’s assertion about the need for women’s education had subsided: excessive indulgence of emotions and sexual appetite were cautioned against in their novels. Although in the early 19th-century sexual transgressions were condemned, some novelists such as Charlotte Dacre explored the theme of women’s sexual freedom.