Reception

From Oxford University Press's ‘Classical Presences’ series, Carol Dougherty's Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature places Homer's Odyssey in dialogue with five twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels which all deal in some way with the ideas of home or travel. The author focuses on novels which, on the whole, do not respond overtly to the Odyssey, but which instead share key themes – such as transience, reunion, nostalgia, or family relationships – with the Homeric poem. The conversations which she initiates between the ancient epic and the modern novels inspire us to rethink previously held assumptions about the Odyssey. For example, Dougherty's exploration of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), in which a veteran returns from the First World War with no memory of his wife, prompts her reader to consider Odysseus’ stay with Calypso as ‘a kind of nostalgic amnesia, a necessary break that enables rather than an obstacle that impedes his return’ (111). As ‘an experiment in improvisatory criticism’ (16), this book yields rich rewards for the reader who is already familiar with the Odyssey, as well as for those whose point of entry is one of the five modern novels. The framework applied – in which each chapter presents a reading of a relevant section of the Odyssey before setting out an analysis of the contemporary novel with which it is paired – is perhaps more familiar from comparative literary studies than from classical reception scholarship, yet Dougherty's approach is one which stimulates fresh thought about how we as readers (re-)interpret and ‘receive’ ancient texts based on the contexts in which we encounter them.

Early Novels and Stories (1915–1923)

Between 1915 and 1923, Virginia Woolf published her first three novels (The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room) as well as some of her most iconic essays and stories. This chapter examines that work with particular attention to how Woolf’s early fiction describes modern novels, placing it in conversation with her essays on the modern novel. Woolf turned repeatedly to the problem of how to achieve the freedoms of a new modernity, and her early work struggles to imagine a new kind of novel while acknowledging that this new kind of novel does not exist: not quite yet. This chapter examines Woolf’s deliberately undetermined vision of modernity, tracing how her early work persistently ponders and imagines what a new era of writing will offer even as she refuses to specify and delimit what has yet to come to pass.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a brief background of three schools of literary criticism: New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction. These three schools exposed serious concerns, emphasizing neglected aspects of literature. The chapters in this book focus on genre, realism, and relations with visual art. Concepts of genre figure in any sound literary theory. Meanwhile, chapters on realism demonstrate how the development of representation, far from being one of steadily improving verisimilitude, has gone through several distinct sorts of realism. They distinguish medieval and Renaissance realisms from the realism of pre-modern novels. Finally, chapters on visual art consider how conventions of visual art offer essential parallels with those of literature. The ‘sister arts’ display many family resemblances—obviously so in imagery, less obviously in their strategies of realism. The essays also look at emblems and emblematic poems.

Modern Kazakh novels: the genre transformation

This article discusses and analyzes the modern novel form, which went beyond the classical criteria. In particular, according to the works of such authors as T. Abdikov "Parasat Maidany", M.Magauin "Zharmak" and D.Amantay "Flowers and books", a genre modification of the modern novels is defined. As a result of the analysis of the works of contemporary writers, original tricks,and techniques for the transmission of modern reality by each author have been revealed. So, T.Abdikov resorts to a diary narrative,using for his artistic purposes it's "confessional", "reflective" function, which helps to reveal the character and creates the illusion of the authenticity and truthfulness of the depicted reality,and M.Magauin uses the paradigm of duality reflected in Western literature in the works of A. Camus, Z. Freud, C.-G. Jung. Thus, M.Magauin rises to the philosophical generalization of modern reality in the postmodern image. D. Amantay completely withdraws from the traditional forms of narration, tries to revealthe contradictory essence of modern reality.

Almost Shakespeare – But Not Quite

Taking Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Gary Schmidt’s Wednesday Wars as test cases, this article explores generic considerations in modern novels that employ Shakespeare but do not retell or recast the plot of any particular work by Shakespeare. Questions to be considered include how the works employ the Shakespearean genres of comedy, tragedy, history, romance and tragicomedy to create their own genres – and, conceivably, to transcend them. The article will also consider the mainstream appropriation of Shakespeare in Mandel and Schmidt. The Three Fates by Linda Lê will be briefly examined as a less straightforward reworking of the material of a single Shakespeare play (King Lear).