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

Rewriting Universes: Post-Brexit Futures in Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe Quartet

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new strand of British fiction that grapples with the causes and consequences of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union. Building on Kristian Shaw’s pioneering work in this new literary field, this article shifts the focus from literary fiction to science fiction. It analyzes Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe quartet—comprised of Europe in Autumn (pub. 2014), Europe at Midnight (pub. 2015), Europe in Winter (pub. 2016) and Europe at Dawn (pub. 2018)—as a case study in British science fiction’s response to the recent nationalistic turn in the UK. This article draws on a bespoke interview with Hutchinson and frames its discussion within a range of theories and studies, especially the European hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. It argues that the Fractured Europe quartet deploys science fiction topoi to interrogate and criticize the recent rise of English nationalism. It further contends that the Fractured Europe books respond to this nationalistic turn by setting forth an estranged vision of Europe and offering alternative modalities of European identity through the mediation of photography and the redemptive possibilities of cooking.

Aristocracy Must Advertise: Repurposing the Nobility in Interwar British Fiction

In the interwar years, authors Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham wrote popular detective fiction that explored possible roles for the aristocracy in an age of universal suffrage. Critics have seen these novels as nostalgic encomia for hierarchy and tradition. This article argues that they should be seen instead as part of a larger trend in interwar fiction that sought to make connections between aristocracy, national identity, and social cohesion. Far from celebrating an imagined idyllic past, these novels suggested possibilities for the continuing relevance of the nobility to the upholding of justice, and indeed, to the success of British democracy.

Literature in a Time of Migration

Literature in a Time of Migration rethinks British fiction in the light of new practices of human mobility that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it confronts the paradox that at a time at which transnational human movement occurred globally, on a scale before unknown, British fiction appears to turn inward to tell stories of local places, in which stability and rootedness are rewarded. On the contrary, Literature in a Time of Migration reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement. Works by canonical writers (Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and George Eliot), and other popular contemporaries (Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas Martin Wheeler), examine issues that overlap with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration, which they also helped to shape. Debates concerning, for example, assisted emigration, ‘forced’ and ‘free’ migration, colonization, settlement, and the removal of native peoples, figure in complex ways in fictions. Read alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and enthusiasts, fictional texts reveal a sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within British cultural heritage.

DEPICTION OF WOMEN IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN AND BRITISH FICTION

It was time of nineteenth century when women writers used to have male pennames for publication. Theme of marriage and society were prevalent in both American and British society. It was a microcosm of its own as women readers used to write about their life through the eyes of women writers. This phenomenon is historical as it stands between Mary Wollstonecraft, arguably the first feminist thinker and Virginia Woolf, arguably the most famous one. Changing times in the second half of nineteenth century was affecting the sensibility and religious clutches on society. It was also affecting notions of patriarchy. Writings of the time ought to reflect that. However, author also presumes a gender of her or his own before writing. That makes her or his gendering of character political and biased. But honest portrayals are important for examining depictions of women in a particular time. This paper aims to analyse two popular writers of the age, a female and a male, to understand the changing notions regarding patriarchy. American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) have been written important social novels like novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Her novels features cast of female characters from the contemporary times. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a British writer writing detective fiction who used to portray his contemporary society. He also uses female characters in her stories. This paper aims to study works of both novelist employing methodologies of close reading and comparative literature to see how depiction of women in nineteenth century America and British fiction changes and what are the reasons for it.

Thuggee in England: Tracing the Origin and Development of Fantasies of Thug-Invasion and Reverse Colonization in late nineteenth century British Fiction

A lot has been written on Thuggee and nineteenth century British operations against it. Instead of delving directly into either of these two well investigated areas of research, this paper seeks to chart how several nineteenth century British writings exhibit a curious fear of Thug infiltration. Keeping in their minds some actual instances, early British colonial officials worried about the Thugs joining government services under them to survive and sabotage the anti-Thuggee campaign. This paper argues that this apprehension gradually developed into the fantasy of being reverse colonized by the Thugs. Late Victorian writers of fiction fantasized the Thugs invading England, or, what must have been more unnerving to them, converting the Britons themselves to Thugs. Using unpublished official records and literary works as sources, this paper tries to map how colonial anxiety of ‘Thug infiltration’ originated and later grew into the fantasy of reverse colonization by the Thugs. It also tries to link this to specific historical developments in that period.