Bradbury Beyond Apollo

This book completes the biography trilogy begun in Becoming Ray Bradbury and continued in Ray Bradbury Unbound. Bradbury Beyond Apollo begins in the early 1970s, as Bradbury found himself fully established as a witness and celebrant of the Space Age. His storytelling powers were turning to stage, screen, and television adaptations of his classic midcentury titles, including The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Although he was no longer producing a high volume of masterful tales, Bradbury Beyond Apollo chronicles how the last four decades of his life produced the playful fantasies of The Halloween Tree, his award-winning television series The Ray Bradbury Theater, a collaboration with Disney Imagineers on EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth, and significant essays on the common ground between science and religion represented by humanity’s Space Age achievements. The book also documents how Bradbury’s influential lectures, interviews, and essays explored the history of ideas, the nature of creativity, and his own evolving work ethic of optimal behaviorism. Mid-book chapters analyze Bradbury’s significant late-life achievements in fictionalized autobiography and his completion of books that originated decades earlier, including Somewhere a Band Is Playing, perhaps his most significant late-life reflection on time and memory. The book’s overarching contention is that Bradbury’s wide range of ventures were largely sustained by his ever-increasing prominence as a Space Age visionary.

Exploited Bodies

This chapter analyses a tale about an unfortunate fox told by a man named Henri Vidal. While Henri’s tale is similar to other stories of not-so-cunning foxes collected by folklorists across France, it is also a profoundly local story. It makes sense as a kind of fictionalized autobiography of Henri himself, a critique of the system of sharecropping that predominated in the moorlands, and the violence and exploitation that this system encouraged. Through comparison to other tales told by other storytellers, the chapter suggests ways that ordinary workers like Henri used stories to narrate their experiences, and negotiate better lives.

FIGHTING WORDS: TWO PROLETARIAN MILITARY NOVELS OF THE CRIMEAN PERIOD

About a decade after Waterloo, there arose in England a subgenre of fiction that can be called the military novel. George Robert Gleig is credited with originating the genre with a fictionalized autobiography entitled The Subaltern, which appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1825 and was subsequently published as a book. Military memoirs were appearing from soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the military novel was an outgrowth of that literature. Many of the authors of military novels had themselves served in the army, but the most notable of them all, Charles Lever, had not been a military man, though he consorted with officers often enough. Beginning with The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, which was serialized first and then appeared as a single volume in 1839, Lever produced a string of popular novels about the army, with young officers as their heroes. The novels of this subgenre concentrated on officers, though there are amusing rankers, that is, enlisted soldiers, as well in Lever's novels likely to be clever Irishmen. For the most part, though, rankers are background figures and have largely stereotypical lower class ways. There are obligatory romance and inheritance plots in these narratives, with the hero usually ending up married and with an estate of his own, either through direct inheritance, or the discovery of a hitherto unknown fortune. This genre lasted about fifteen years, petering out by mid-century.

Virtue in Silence: Voice and Femininity in Ling Shuhua's Boudoir Fiction

New Culture intellectuals avidly promoted new narratives and models of femininity as the cornerstone of a new culture; the gender discourse they advocated, however, continued to be refracted through traditional notions of femininity and writing. This paper examines the means by which one woman writer, Ling Shuhua, attempted to navigate the contradictions of this discourse, to forge her identity as a modern woman writer. The shifting nature of Ling Shuhua's literary negotiations is particularly salient when her portrayals of traditional femininity and use of voice in Temple of Flowers (1928) are contextualized against her lesser-known works—her early stories published in 1924 in Chenbao and her later fictionalized autobiography in English, Ancient Melodies (1953). Unlike her lesser-known works, which are deeply sympathetic to the plight of boudoir women and critical of New Culture discourse, the stories in Temple of Flowers are often framed with a sense of ambiguity in relation to both feminist and New Culture agendas. While these disparities may reflect a resourcefulness on Ling Shuhua's part in her bid to carve out public writing spaces, they also suggest the kinds of negotiations and self-effacing gestures that her literary endeavors may have entailed.