"Dynamite Scrupulously Packed": A Revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year

The essay proposes a reinterpretation and revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s 1919 novel Bertram Cope’s Year and argues that it deserves permanent currency within the canon of gay fiction. My reinterpretation and revaluation of it is based on the premise that readings of it over the past 50 years (since Edmund Wilson’s 1970 essay on Henry Blake Fuller’s fiction in the New Yorker) have failed to understand its representation of homo-sexuality. Criticism of the novel has been based on post-Stonewall assumptions of what a 'gay novel’ should be and what cultural work is should perform. The post-Stonewall paradigm of the gay novel is that it is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman, focused on a protagonist who, through a process of self-discovery, arrives at an acceptance and affirmation of his sexual identity. The prototype is Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice a precursor. To appreciate Bertram Cope’s Year, we must, I argue, abandon post-Stonewall presuppositions of what we should expect from a gay novel. Bertram Cope’s Year is not a coming-of-age novel. Rather it is a comic novel formed from Fuller’s successful fusion and subversion of the romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, and the campus novel. Bertram Cope is a comic hero who ultimately triumphs over the efforts of a college town, presided over the matchmaking socialite Medora Phillips, to marry him to one of the three young ladies in her circle. He is rescued from this unwanted marriage by his boyfriend, who arrives to save him from the unwanted marriage. Fuller successfully exploits the conventions of the comic novel to tell a story that anticipates one of the aspirations of the gay liberation movement half a century later. As such, it deserves permanent currency.

Meandering musings on the comic fiction index: a peer review on Three men in a boat

The Society of Indexers recently ran a peer review exercise, via their online forum SIdeline, on indexing a section from the comic novel Three men in a boat by Jerome K. Jerome. The exercise was run by Melanie Gee and involved a group of indexers indexing the same text, looking at all the combined indexes, and discussing their thoughts on the process. Paula Clarke Bain reports on the insights and wisdom shared during these discussions, and considers the role and purpose of indexes in more unusual texts like novels and comic fiction.

Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh is unique among modern Irish writers in that he spent the first half of his life as a largely self-educated small farmer in Monaghan, while struggling to find a voice for that experience as a writer. In his early poetry and his autobiography, The Green Fool, he sought to render the realities of farming and to escape romantic literariness; ‘Inniskeen Road’ and ‘Shancoduff’ are key breakthrough poems in this effort. While he was later to reject the didacticism of The Great Hunger, the achievement of this extraordinary long poem is the combination of inside and outside perspectives on the stunted life of the bachelor farmer Patrick Maguire. Moving away from Monaghan to Dublin allowed Kavanagh to re-create his farming world in the comic novel Tarry Flynn and later lyrics such as ‘Threshing Morning’, ‘A Christmas Childhood’ and ‘Art McCooey’.

Apologie der deutschen Sprache und Dichtkunst in Johann Fischarts Geschichtklitterung

In competing with Rabelais’ French novel Garguanta, the German author Fischart aims to illustrate the richness of the German language and its poetry in his comic novel Geschichtklitterung. Focusing on the second chapter of this text, which has so far been viewed as nothing more than an absurd play on language, this article offers a new interpretation and demonstrates how the German author stylizes himself as a poeta vates in his Pantagruelian prophecy and presents himself as a being purified by wine in his poem “Glucktratrara”. In the end, inspired by Apollo and the Muses, he seems to create an epic poem praising both Germans and the German language.

Fundido en negro

Resumen: La serie Blacksad, del guionista Juan Díaz Canales y el dibujante Juanjo Guarnido, ha cosechado un gran éxito internacional desde su aparición a finales del año 2000. La apuesta de los autores, ganadora a la postre, fue crear una historieta protagonizada por animales en un universo realista noir de los EE. UU. de los años 50 del pasado siglo. Si bien Blacksad nació de la admiración por las grandes novelas y películas de serie negra, la vinculación de los álbumes del gato detective con el cine va más allá, sin embargo, de esta relación directa. En sus páginas es posible encontrar alusiones y homenajes a películas de diferentes géneros que han ayudado a conformar el decorado, los personajes e incluso las tramas de las aventuras del protagonista a lo largo de los cinco volúmenes publicados hasta el momento. Abstract: The Blacksad series, by scriptwriter Juan Díaz Canales and illustrator Juanjo Guarnido, has enjoyed great international success since its creation in late 2000. The authors took a chance – and eventually succeeded – on creating a comic novel starring animals set against a realist, noir, 1950s America background. Blacksad was born out of the authors’ admiration for great noir novels and films, but the link between the cat detective albums and the cinema goes well beyond this point. Throughout the albums’pages we find hints and tributes to many genre films in aspects such as the general background, the personae, and even the plots of the main character’s adventures, which span five volumes so far.

«The good comic novel»: la narrativa comica di Henry Fielding e l’importanza dell’esempio cervantino

«The good comic novel». La narrativa comica di Henry Fielding e l’importanza dell’esempio cervantino analyses the influence of Don Quixote on Henry Fielding’s fiction, starting with a survey of the reception of the Spanish novel in England. Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones are analyzed and compared with the Spanish novel, from which Fielding overtly borrowed some characters, episodes, and Cervantes’ parodic strategies. Fielding’s and Cervantes’s narrative proceeded from the parodic deconstruction and subsequent innovation of previous literature, with the main purpose of teaching and amusing the reader at the same time. Finally, the volume examines the role of Fielding and Cervantes in the rise of the fictional and the self-conscious novel.

INCREASING STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION SKILL BY USING WRITTEN TEXT BOOK

The purpose of this article is deeply to investigate of some issues about increasing students’ reading comprehension skill by using written text. According to article that I use to support my article states that one of important point in increasing students’ reading comprehension skill is by giving them written text which can attract their interest, such as: comic, novel, short story, storytelling, etc. Some other issues about students’ reading skill are also interesting to be discussed, for example teaching reading methods, the benefits, and the problems which about students’ are reading skill by using written text. The high percentage of success in increasing students’ reading skill is really important to make sure that they have input in mastering or improving their English. However, increasing students’ reading comprehension skill is not easy and it needs to be discussed to figure the best way out.

Hearing Voices: The Extended Mind in Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Waugh's last comic novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) takes ‘exterior modernism’ to a new height, no longer avoiding interiority – as in his interwar fiction – but exteriorising the interior through dissociation. ‘The Box’, to which the writer-protagonist attributes the source of the tormenting voices, may well be his own mind, an extended – albeit unhealthy – mind that works as a radio: he transmits his thoughts and then receives them as external signals in order to communicate with them. Pinfold's auditory hallucinations are caused by the breakdown of communication. Interestingly, writing is also a dissociative activity. Concerned with the writer's block, the novel reflects on the creative process and illuminates the relationship between madness and creativity. If dissociation, or the splitting of the mind, is a defence against trauma, the traumatic experience Pinfold attempts to suppress is the Second World War. The unusual state of mind accentuates the contingency of Waugh's radio writing; his preferred medium is cinema.

Comedy, History, and Culture

How has comedy evolved around the globe from earliest times to today? Chapter 4 offers a chronology of comedy. Distinguishing among laughter, comedy, and humor, it finds evidence of humor in ancient texts and imagery, tracing the evolution of comic genres through classical Greek drama, Sanskrit poetry, early China, medieval Europe, and feudal Japan. The chronology continues with an account of popular festivals of laughter, comedic stage performances, and precursors of the comic novel, showing how they led to modern literary and cinematic forms as well as televised sitcoms and live standup. Motion pictures borrowed silent gags and witty wordplay from vaudeville, channeled the freewheeling energy of picaresque stories into episodic road movies, adapted the amatory impulses of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies to the screen, and turned the Carnivalesque spirit into scenes of cinematic mischief and mayhem.