Neither remnants nor commodities: Spirit objects in early twentieth century Chinese regional fiction

This paper examines the regional fiction of early twentieth century China in order to understand how such texts presented the object world of rural life. In doing so it addresses a gap in the historiography of material culture in modern China, which has emphasized urban commodity regimes and has paid far less attention to the ways in which pre-existing object practices endured into the time of the modern Republic. Building off of the methodological insights of scholars such as Bill Brownand Janet Poole regarding the contribution that literary study can make to historical understandings of material cultures, this paper argues that the regional texts of Lu Xun, Xu Qinwen, Ye Shengtao, and Yu Dafu were bewitched by overlapping life worlds: one represented by the secular rationalism of the text's narrators, and the other represented by the animistic practices of the rural others they encounter, which was expressed through objects such as joss sticks, temple doorsills, and ancestral alters. These literary works reflected upon how objects were used to make meaning in ways that were not reducible to urban commodity fetishism or remnant “superstition.” As presented in these works, spiritual objects remain powerfully active parts of the affective worlds of rural people, collapsing binary distinctions between living language and inanimate matter, the human and the ghostly, the past and the present. For the narrators of these texts, these object practices invoke a complicated mixture of modernizing critique and empathetic recognition. As such, these texts allow readers to witness the early expressions of a complex dialectic of rejection and recognition/accommodation that has marked the attitude modernizing states in China have taken in relation to animistic material cultures over the past century.

Ian Maclaren's Scottish Local-Colour Fiction in Transnational Contexts: Networks of Reception, Circulation, and Translation in the United States and Europe

This article analyses the early circulation, reception, and translation history of Ian Maclaren's bestselling Scottish local-colour fiction in the United States, the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland. It sketches a comparative model which illuminates the agents of transnational cultural mediation crucial to the international popularity of local-colour fiction in the late nineteenth century. In the USA, key factors for Maclaren's popularity were the interconnected transatlantic publishing world and audiences already receptive to dialect literature. In Europe, while the bestselling quality of his collections and readers’ previous familiarity with regional fiction played a significant role, additional factors included: in the Netherlands, Maclaren's clerical background and the place of established religion in publishing; in France and Switzerland, periodicals attentive to international trends in fiction and to internal regionalist phenomena, along with the initiative of a translator with a flair for Breton regionalism and well connected to the Swiss and Parisian literary milieux.

Québec’s new regional fiction: Louise Penny and Johanne Seymour

Louise Penny’s Still Life (2005) and Johanne Seymour’s Le Cri du cerf (2005) are both murder mysteries set in the Eastern Townships, in south-eastern and south-central Québec. Much of the region borders the United States. To varying degrees, the border makes its presence felt in the novels by Penny and Seymour, along with other landmarks familiar to domestic audiences. This article argues that the apparent situatedness of the texts is, however, challenged by their adherence to the formal conventions of the murder mystery and associated subgenres. In so doing, it claims that Still Life and Le Cri du cerf foster multi-layered readings which, in bringing together the hyper-local and the international, prompt a reconsideration of understandings of regional fiction.

The Climates of the Victorian Novel: Seasonality, Weather, and Regional Fiction in Britain and Australia

Anthropocene criticism of Victorian literature has focused more on questions of temporality and predictability than on those related to climate in the nineteenth century. Climate knowledge is central to the regional novel, which is attuned to the seasonal basis of agriculture and sociality, but the formal influence of the British climate also becomes more apparent through a consideration of the genre's adaptation to colonial conditions. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge highlights how a known seasonal cycle underpins the differentiation of climate and weather and explores the role of economic systems in mediating the experience of climate. Rolf Boldrewood's The Squatter's Dream, set amid the nonannual seasonal change of Australia, demonstrates the fracturing of the regional novel form under the stress of sustained drought. Such a comparative approach highlights the importance of regular seasonality as the basis of the Victorian novel's ability to conceptualize the relation of climate, weather, and capital.

On the Limits of the Ural Megasupertext in Russian Culture. Review of: Sozina, E. K. (Ed.). (2020). Istoriia literatury Urala. XIX vek [The History of Ural Literature. 19th Century]. (Books 1–2). Moscow: Izdatel’skii Dom YaSK. 1439 p.

The book under review is the first research in the history of Russian philology aimed at structuring and comprehensive description of 19th-century Russian literature in the Urals. The monograph coauthored by the best scholars of regional fiction substantiates the term ‘Ural megasupertext’. The review raises a question about the outer limits and semantic capacity of the term. The History of Ural Literature gives an extended interpretation thereof, as the research subject comprises Russian as well as national literatures from the geographical Great Urals such as Bashkir, Komi, and Udmurt literatures. The authors look beyond the literary process research turning to studying the theatre and publishing trade which inevitably leads the ‘Ural text’ concept to extend. Besides, The History of Ural Literature comprises works by writers both directly connected with the region and those whose stay in the Urals was momentary. The review states that actual experience of writing monographs aimed at comprehensive construction of the history of literature demonstrates that each time scholars must consistently solve for themselves the fundamental issues connected with the capacity and structure of the research field.

Local-Colour Writers: Figures of Authority?

During the 1890s Irish local-colour fiction flourished. The strong emphasis in cultural nationalist movements on regional customs, folklore, oral traditions and mythology as the foundation of an authentic Irish identity, appears to have ignited a boom in regional fiction that was very popular among communities on both sides of the Atlantic, and even in the Pacific. This chapter examines the concept of authority in relation to this tradition of regional literature by asking how Irish local colour authors, who in frequent cases were not native to the region that they wrote about, established their authority as experts on regional character and customs. What role did their self-fashioning as writers play in this respect? In what other ways were their texts marketed as narratives that gave access to authentic regional experience? The present study looks at the author prefaces, the ways in which these texts present their sources, and their use of narrative structures as the means to negotiate authority. It also suggests links between these strategies and issues of gender.

Conceptualising place in historical fact and creative fiction: rural communities and regional landscapes in Bernard Samuel Gilbert’s ‘Old England’ (c. 1910–1920)

The theme of place guides much exploration in rural history and local history. Attempts have been made to create definitions and typologies of place, but these have had to contend with the diverse, complex and dynamic realities of historical pattern and process, local and regional. Nonetheless, historians and those in other disciplines have evolved different approaches to the concept. This study considers how these can inform the investigation of places existing in historical fact in particular periods in the past, and can do similarly for those places located contemporaneously in fictional constructions. Reference is made to various academic writings on place, including by the local historian, David Dymond. The analysis takes the work of the author of fiction, Bernard Samuel Gilbert. Gilbert, although relatively obscure now, incorporated a feature of special note into his later literary output, and one meriting greater attention. This was his personalised, reflective and explicitly articulated approach to forming and expressing place. Moreover, Gilbert’s ‘Old England’, with its imaginary district of 'Bly', can be recognised as corresponding to landscapes and communities existing more broadly in the years up to and through the First World War, and with creations by other authors of regional fiction.

‘GEMEEN VOLK’

‘COMMON PEOPLE’ Gypsies in European regional fiction Regional fiction is a genre in which the tension between local and national cultures tends to play an important role. This article explores the representation of a category of characters that seems to escape that binary opposition: gipsies. More specifically, it analyzes six case studies from regional literature produced in Ireland and the Low Countries to find out whether we can speak of a transnational trope. Although the representation of gipsies in the case studies are different in several respects, there are also striking similarities. The most important one is that the gipsies are not just mere outsiders posing a threat to the regional community. Rather, paradoxically, they constitute a model for that local community regarding the preservation and regeneration of its own cultural values.