Iconographies of ‘Childness’ and the Contemporary British Novel: Book Covers, Discourses, and Cultural Models

A sizeable segment of the contemporary British fiction market for adult readers consists of novels that focus on children and childhood. In accordance with interdisciplinary Childhood Studies, such texts can be understood as contributions to the social construction of children and childhood, or ‘childness’. Such constructions appear to be in particular demand in this phase of late modernity, when childhood is conceptualized as an antidote to the many uncertainties contemporary post-industrial societies are faced with. While on the level of societies, public constructions of childhood are best understood in terms of a Foucauldian notion of discourse, discourses are not what individual readers and book-buyers actually have in their minds when choosing a title. Rather, this article argues that the cover illustrations of these novels both activate and reinforce cultural models of ‘childness’ that readers have stored as schemata shared with their cultural community. On the basis of this alignment of discourse theory with a concept from cognitive anthropology, the article demonstrates that book covers play a role in maintaining particular conceptions of ‘childness’, and in feeding them back into the minds of the readers. Furthermore, the relevance of the book as a material artefact is once again acknowledged.1

Fame at Last!

Book review: Jordan, Julia. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies. Oxford UP, 2020. 256 pages. ISBN 9780198857280. Hb. $80.00.

Out of date: genetics, history and the British novel of the 1990s

This article examines the representation of human genomics in the British historical novel of the 1990s. A form which meditates on the past and its relationship to the present, the historical novel readily lends itself to the exploration of genealogy, heredity and inheritance. Forwarding an understanding of human history, and particularly of family history, as a direct and causal function of the genes, the neo-Darwinian explanation of the genome popular in the 1990s similarly advanced its own teleological relationship between past and present. Reading Jenny Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle (1994), A S Byatt’s Babel Tower (1996) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), this essay argues that the historical novel provides a unique form with which to critique the deterministic view of heredity promoted by neo-Darwinism. Focusing on moments of textual anachronism, asynchronicity and repetition in these family sagas, it shows how—at its most transgressive—the historical novel imagines temporal disruptions that bring the present into contact with the past in ways that defamiliarise conventions of linearity, order and progress. Refusing the idea of human history as a single, legible line that underpins neo-Darwinian ideas of genetic inheritance, Diski, Byatt and Smith’s novels are able to interrogate both the temporal logics and cultural capital of 1990s genetic science. While the decade was shaped and defined by popular science speculation and large-scale genetic research projects, such as the Human Genome Project (1990–2003), the novels addressed in this essay ultimately suggest the lively and seductive genocentrism of the 1990s to be inadequate to the task of explaining the complexity and meaning of the lived genome. As Diski, Byatt and Smith’s novels anticipate, the question of the uses, meanings and value of the human genome sequence continue to be of relevance within our current, postgenomic era.

How Not to Read like a Victorian: Reimagining Bankim’s Reader in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Novels

This article examines the novels of the nineteenth-century Bengali author Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in light of classical Sanskrit literature and the rasa theory and argues that practices of Sanskrit kāvya literature are as dominant in the structural and aesthetic elements of the Bengali novel as are Western forms of novel production. The arguments are located in the reader to suggest that Bankim’s novels train readers to read the Sanskrit past as encoded in the text and as coexisting with the westernized colonial present, albeit in a difficult relationship. The article pays particular attention to the novelist’s adaptation of two forms of Sanskrit prose, the kathā and the ākhyāyikā, and his exploration of the śṛngāra (erotic) rasa. While the Bengali novel emerges after the introduction of its Victorian counterpart, the former is a product of engagement with tensions foreign to the British novel. Exploring this alternative reading practice provides an opportunity to understand how Bengali and Sanskrit—in terms of literature and culture—are part of the lived experience of both Bankim and his nineteenth-century readers, and part of the aesthetic and ethical foundation of the early Bengali novel.