Nostalgia of Time and Return of Space: An Analysis of the Artistic Dimensions of Oates' Early Novels

Joyce Carol Oates’ early novel art is represented by the tetralogy of Wonderland. As a representative writer of “psychological realism”, she dissolves the character consciousness with dialogue characteristics into time and space. Oates constructed a nostalgic time and homecoming space, which showing the cultural landscape of the 1960s’ in the United States.

MASONIC TRACES IN DOSTOEVSKY’S LIFE AND WORKS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE WRITER’S THEOLOGY

For the first time are here presented to Dostoevsky scholars new facts concerning the masonic environment of the writer, who starting from his education in Chermak’s boarding school in 1834–1837 cultivated close relations of friendship with masons, some of them initiated even in 1840s (Apollon Grigorev), when masonry in Russia was officially forbidden, but nevertheless underground meetings continued. Reasons are given in support to the hypothesis, expressed for the first time by Tatiana Kasatkina in the middle of 1990s, of the possibility for Dostoevsky to have been a mason during the 1840s. Whether or not, direct references to masons and masonic symbolic in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre are impossible to explain (Uncle’s Dream, The Humiliated and the Insulted, The Adolescent, The Brothers Karamazov) if one ignores his interest for masonic teaching. Moreover, the specific characteristic of Russian masonry in the last third of the 18th – beginning of the 19th century was the fact that it was not overly differentiated from Christian teaching and theology, however, masonry stood against Orthodox church for the simple fact of its existence, as it held itself as a “small church”. The analysis of Dostoevsky’s early novel White Nights is here undertaken with regard to masonic teaching on death and resurrection of man.

Presenting “Truth” in Early Eighteenth-Century Travel Narratives

This essay clarifies the bibliographical history of the three published accounts of the sufferings of a Dutch sailor abandoned on Ascension Island in 1726 for sodomy, but is ultimately less concerned with what actually happened than with how the story was represented in each of three versions and with what those changes might tell us about shifts in expectations of fiction readers between 1726 and 1740. It also examines how later critics have responded to the story to demonstrate that ideas about credibility are relative and socially determined. While narrative theory generally argues that “the more information we have on a narrator, the more concrete will be our sense of the quality and distinctness of his or her voice,” this case study questions that relationship, at least for the early novel, when narrative techniques and readerly practices were still being developed.

The Maritime Yeats

The imagery of water runs through all of Yeats’s writing, from the Sligo of his youth to the Byzantium of his old age, just as sea travel was a constant factor in his migrant life. From the beginning he understood the world in which he grew up as coastal and maritime, and Yeats’s writing about Ireland is watermarked with the diverse cultures that he experienced first-hand, in libraries and in archives, the past and the present joined in an archipelagic network of signs and associations that stretched from the west of Ireland to the Mediterranean, Africa, and Asia. This chapter describes the fluid declension of water in Yeats’s poetry and prose overall, with a focus on his early novel John Sherman.

Enrique Mendieta and the Ghosts of Leftism Past: The Aftereffects of Mexico’s Dirty War in Élmer Mendoza’s Detective Fiction

The continuance of the revolutionary strife of Mexico’s dirty war into the present day, both as a legacy and in the form of its survivors, resonates strongly in the work of the novelist Élmer Mendoza. Mendoza’s early novel Janis Joplin’s Lover uses its protagonist to portray a 1970s Mexico torn between a revolutionary path of collective social amelioration and the corrupt, mercenary self-interest embodied by Mexican narco-traffickers, with the country pushed toward the latter through the repression of student activists by the Mexican state. Mendoza’s five subsequent novels that center on the exploits of detective Lefty Mendieta focus on the fallout from this period of repression, using the figure of Lefty’s brother Enrique, a former leftist guerrilla, to represent a lost (but not totally lost) egalitarian and socially just alternative to the neoliberal political economy that has ravaged the living conditions of most Mexicans for almost four decades. La continuada lucha revolucionaria en el marco de la guerra sucia que ha caracterizado a México hasta la hoy en día, tanto como legado a la vez que en la presencia de sus sobrevivientes, resuena poderosamente en la obra del novelista Élmer Mendoza. La primera novela de Mendoza, Janis Joplin’s Lover, utiliza a su protagonista para retratar a México en la década de 1970, dividido entre un camino revolucionario de mejora social colectiva y el corrupto y mercenario interés propio encarnado por los narcotraficantes mexicanos; el país se ve empujado en esta última dirección a través de la represión de los activistas estudiantiles por parte del Estado. Las cinco novelas posteriores de Mendoza, centradas en las hazañas del detective Lefty Mendieta, se centran en las consecuencias de este período de represión y emplean la figura de Enrique, el hermano de Lefty, un ex guerrillero izquierdista, para representar la pérdida (si bien no total) de una alternativa igualitaria y socialmente justa en oposición a la economía política neoliberal que mermado las condiciones de vida de la mayoría de los mexicanos durante casi cuatro décadas.

‘Of marble men and maidens’: Sculptural Transformations

This chapter takes as its starting point the fact that Hawthorne’s novel, The Marble Faun; or The Romance of Monte Beni, was also published under the title Transformation (1860), thus suggesting a tension between animation and stasis that is implicitly explored in the text. It examines the connections between Hawthorne’s work and Henry James’s early novel Roderick Hudson (1875). Drawing on both writers’ relationships with circles of sculptors, artists, and writers in Rome, this chapter considers the mediation of desire between protagonists in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson through key sculptural figures and metaphors of touch that contribute to the recognition, and eventual burial, of unruly desires.

On the way to Tobol

A. Timofeev takes a close look at the works of A. Ivanov, from his early novel Dorm-on-the-Blood [Obshchaga-na-Krovi] (1992), both simplistic and bearing marks of apprenticeship, to Stormy Weather [Nenastie] (2015), the writer’s most popular book, along with The Geographer Drank His Globe Away [Geograf globus propil] (1995), all the better known thanks to their film versions. The critic finds that, rather than a gallery of accomplished works, Ivanov’s writing represents an agonizing search, his path characterized by alternating moments of success and failure and his ambitious preconceptions hindering his development and forcing his artistic intuition to overcome them. Speaking of Ivanov’s undeniable triumphs, A. Timofeev mentions The Heart of Parma [Serdtse Parmy] and the later novel Tobol, whereas Ivanov’s ‘transitional’ novel Bluda and MUDO [Bluda i MUDO], the ‘network’ duology Dog-Heads [Psoglavtsy] and Community [Kommiuniti], and even the cult novel Rebels’ Gold [Zoloto bunta] are presented as flops. Nonetheless, Timofeev rates Ivanov as one of the best writers of the 2000s–2010s.

Zamieszkiwać w bezdomności, czyli motyw domu w powieści Olgi Tokarczuk Dom dzienny, dom nocny

Archetypal figures and themes inspired by myths have been present in Olga Tokarczuk’s prose from the beginning. The paper contains an interpretation of her early novel, House of Day, House of Night, and analyses the central theme of the text, that of home, to show the role of narrative creation in identity development.