Waldef

This first English translation of Le Roman de Waldef makes a significant representative of the French literature of medieval England accessible for the first time. Its wide-ranging content provides an ideal introduction to a number of themes in medieval literature, making it suitable for a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. The fast-moving romance plot of this early thirteenth-century tale recounts the ancestry and exploits of Waldef and his two sons, set against a history of pre-Conquest England. The narrative shares themes and incident types with other important insular romances, including the Lai of Haveloc, Boeve de Haumtone, and Gui de Warewic. Waldef’s scope, interest in battle, and political stratagems bear reading alongside medieval chronicles, while secret love affairs connect it with other romance literature of the period, and adventures across a wide area of the known world provide affinities with medieval travel narrative.

The Ambivalence of Testimony in Elizabeth Bowen’s

Ana Ashraf’s exploration of Bowen’s novel demonstrates how, in the post-war milieu, ambivalent narratives of testimony and witnessing challenged the ideology of war and the machinery of propaganda. The novel’s metafictional style emphasizes the self-reflexive nature of witness and testimony. Interweaving personal and political spheres in an experimental form that juxtaposes the classic romance plot and the traditional spy novel, The Heat of the Day offers a feminine view of the masculine world of intelligence. In its presentation of the conflict between love and patriotism, the novel’s treatment of treachery appears unstable and unusual. It also highlights the role of literary testimony in challenging the dominant narrative of war. Demonstrating the ‘intermodern’ preoccupation with political commitment during periods of war, the novel exemplifies an ‘interfeminist’ awareness of the notion of ‘women’s time’, the marginalisation of women’s experience of war and the binary division between fact and fiction.

Different Kinds of Silence: Revisions of Villette and the ‘Reader’s Romance’

This article presents an alternative reading of Lucy Snowe’s silences in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Instead of interpreting silence as submission or antagonistic ‘evasions’, I suggest that it operates as a productive mode. This is emphasized by Brontë’s markings and excisions on the fair copy manuscript. Revisions render parts of the text intentionally ambiguous; I provide extended close readings of the manuscript that demonstrate how Lucy Snowe makes the fact that she has withheld something explicit to the reader. Villette draws attention to its own composition and reception to such an extent that it is the very act of non-narration – and the way it engages the reader – that produces meaning. Approaching this through the lens of the romance plot addresses some of the overtly unnarratable aspects of female selfhood in the mid-nineteenth century. As a female autobiographer, Lucy Snowe makes her struggle to express her sexuality explicit. Brontë crafts this self-reflexivity to form a relationship with the reader that is akin to Bakhtin’s description of the ‘activating reader’. It is only the act of reading, he suggests, that makes discourse possible. However, revisions show how Brontë attempts to influence the types of meaning that are gleaned by the reader; the ‘reader’s romance’ clarifies how she suggestively places the onus on the reader to resolve their expectations about the narrative’s events for themselves. This narrative mode allows the protagonist to reclaim power and use the very means of her oppression as a mode of meaning production.

Consuming and Being Consumed

The article explores how Margaret Atwood demystifies the romance plot in her first novel The Edible Woman by exposing the world of consumerism as artificial and threatening to the point of cannibalism. This is revealed through references to fairy tales and myths with cannibalistic undertones such as ‘Snow White’, ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. It is also highlighted in the reference to the theme of the eaten heart in Boccaccio’s Decameron and to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In the tempting world of advertisements and commercials, women are objectified and traded and their roles are diminished. In this realm, Marian, the protagonist, is in search of her identity but first tries to ‘adjust’ to society’s artificial and delusional narrative. The advertisements dictate a behaviour, objectify her body and force her to comply with preformed roles. She consciously tries to defend herself from this consumerist mentality by allowing her body to ‘speak’ for her. Her body starts to refuse food and she feels it is alive, until it cuts itself off. Therefore, showing how she refuses to ‘adjust’ to the consumerist society. The narrative points out the inherent cannibalistic quality of the consumerist society in which human beings are commodities and their roles are dictated by commercials and the ferocious rules of profit.

THE ROMANCE FORMULA IN CECELIA AHERN’S LOVE, ROSIE

This research analyzes the romance formula presented in Love, Rosie by discussing the standard convention of the novel. The romance formula analysis tends to prove what is the sociocultural background in 20th century of Ireland society which becomes the cultural background of the novel. We discuss the issues among popular culture and also finding out the dominant components of the story which builds the story into a romance story. The discussion is employed the Cawelti’s concept and supported by Radway’s theory of romance. This study discusses Romance formula in Love Rosie is presented by the two dominant elements, those are the romance plot formula and the characters. The inventions of the romance formula in Love Rosie is found in the writing style of the novel. The novel is written in the form of instant messages and letters that are sent between the hero and heroine. The results of this study indicate that Love, Rosie has two dominant elements that built the story into a romance story. The first element is the story plot and the second is the main characters of the story whom develops the love relationship in the story, which are the hero and the heroine. The story plot of Love, Rosie can be classified into four stages, those are the first meeting of Alex and Rosie, Alex and Rosie fall in love to each other, Obstacles which contain the internal and external conflicts of the hero and heroine, and the ending of the story.

Playing With Tempests

Current adaptations of Shakespeare’s Tempest invariably tend to focus on the postcolonial. Despite the indubitable contemporary political relevance of the postcolonial in Shakespeare’s play, this article argues that a much larger receptional impact of it lies in its aesthetic structure. Drawing on the Tempest’s comedic nature, it contends that the play’s ‘romantic’ content (or syntagmatic romance plot) is secondary only in relation to its primary point of enabling, and staging, funny and/or metafictional inventions and ideas (i. e. paradigms), thus displaying and corroborating the play’s elaborate polyperspectivity. This ‘open perspective structure’ (M. Pfister) finds itself in particular taken up in the cinematographic Tempest adaptations by Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, who use the well-known plot to foreground, and celebrate, the possibilities and options of the multimedium ‘film’. But where Greenaway tends to re-harmonise this unleashed plurality again by synchronising all the different paradigms back into a unified (and at times rather lengthy and monotonous) celebration of art as art, Jarman takes the play’s enabling structure much more seriously in opening up his movie to a well-nigh endless inclusion of ever more unexpected, and new, paradigms of pleasure.

Crossing genre boundaries: H. J. Golakai's Afropolitan chick-lit mysteries

Crime fiction by women writers across the globe has in recent years begun to explore the position of women detectives within post-feminist cultural contexts, moving away from the explicit refusal of the heterosexual romance plot in earlier feminist ‘hard-boiled’ fiction. In this article, I analyse Hawa Jande Golakai's The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) as part of the tradition of crime fiction by women writers in South Africa. Joining local crime writers such as Angela Makholwa, Golakai not only questions orthodox conceptions of gender and sexuality in traditional iterations of the crime novel, but also combines elements of chick-lit with the crime plot. Reading the archetypal quest structure of the two genres against the background of Sara Ahmed's cultural critique of happiness, I argue that Golakai inventively recasts the recent sub-genre of the chick-lit mystery from the perspective of an Afropolitan detective. Her detective tenaciously undercuts the future-directed happiness script that structures conventional chick-lit and detective novels with their respective focus on finding a fulfilling heterosexual, monogamous romantic relationship, and the resolution of the crime and restoration of order. In this way, the novels defy the frequently assumed apolitical nature of chick-lit texts and also allow us to reimagine the idea of Afropolitanism, outside of its dominant consumerist form, as a critical Afropolitanism that emerges from an openness to be affected by the unhappiness and suffering of others.

“The world…seen from this angle undoubtedly looks queer”: History, Heritage, and the Queer Domesticity of Between the Acts

The paper reads Woolf’s last work as a queerly domestic novel: centered on the space of Pointz Hall and the history of England and simultaneously decentering the heterosexual romance plot and the British Army, rewriting the English home and English heritage. Woolf crafts her revision by connecting the creative work of Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver, whose particular expressions turn the queer and queering gaze of the female outsider onto the two faces of domesticity—private and national—and demonstrate their inextricable links to each other. In Three Guineas, Woolf repeatedly describes the queerness of the vantage point available to the daughters of educated men: the view of the world seen through the filter of domesticity, queer in that it renders strange the accepted order of the patriarchal world. Woolf draws together the reluctantly domesticated Isa’s private poetry, hidden in the family accounts book, and the lesbian, quasi-foreign La Trobe’s publicly performed play about English national history to produce a queer revision of domestic inheritance on personal and national levels. Isa’s and La Trobe’s creative efforts and their domestic lives are marked with incompleteness, dissatisfaction, and failure, which suggests that a queerly domestic viewpoint cannot be an end in itself, particularly on the brink of war. But the novel also insists that women’s queering perspectives on domestic life provides a necessary counterpoint to personal and national stories of violence and patriotism.