(Dis)Enchanting the City: Charles de Lint’s Urban Fantasy Fiction

The aim of this article is to investigate the works of Charles de Lint in order to evaluate their position within the genre of urban fantasy. The theoretical framework is adopted from Stefan Ekman’s article “Urban Fantasy: A Literature of the Unseen” (2016) which investigates the genre’s development and formulates a list of its most distinctive features. While this article uses Ekman’s study to examine de Lint’s fictional cities, it also indicates how de Lint’s works challenge Ekman’s analysis. Moreover, the article demonstrates how de Lint’s concern with problems of urban communities transforms his works into narratives of social inclusion, which are particularly significant in the age of the Anthropocene.

Searching for the Broad Present: The Chronotope in Teju Cole’s Open City

Teju Cole’s Open City provides a suitable springboard for insight into the dynamic ways in which Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of a broad present might relate to the spatial-temporal configurations of a text. More specifically, Open City uses a combination of formal and stylistic approaches to illustrate the instability innate in modern, urban spaces to demonstrate the approaching apocalyptic visions of the future as well as the torrential multiplicity of histories that threaten to subsume the present. Stable notions of time are shown to be paralyzing, and alternatives ought to be sought out in presenting a sense of space-time that is free from the stagnation promised by dominant modes of spatial-temporal configurations.

London and Cloisterham as an Imperial ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The article examines Dickens’s last novel in the context of British imperialism, contraband opium trade in nineteenth-century China under the armed protection of the British government, and the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860). Although Dickens has often been discussed as one of the authors who approved of his country’s imperial domination, his last novel foregrounds a critique of colonial practices. The atavistic character of imperialism takes its moral and psychological toll not merely somewhere in the dominions, colonies, protectorates, and other territories but also ‘at home’ on the domestic ground. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood London has the face of a dingy and dark opium den or the ominous headquarters of the Heaven of Philanthropy with the professing philanthropists in suits of black. Moreover, the article seeks to discuss deep-rooted evil and darkness associated in the novel with an ecclesiastical town in connection with Protestant missionaries’ close collaboration with opium traders in the Celestial Empire. Portraying John Jasper’s moral degradation enhanced by the drug and the corruption of the ecclesiastical town, Dickens gothicises opium, and by implication, opium trade pointing to its double-edged sword effect: sullying and debasing both the addict and the trafficker. The symbolic darkness of the opium den and the churchly Cloisterham reflects the inherent evil latent in any unbridled colonial expansion and Dickens’s anti-colonial purpose.

Measured Life: Making Live, the “Modern System of Science,” and the Animated Bodies of Frankenstein

This article considers Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein through what Sara Guyer calls “biopoetics,” hybridizing biopolitical and romantic reading strategies, and positing that romantic writing arises in temporal, theoretical, and political parallel with the movement of power from the reign of the sovereign to the realm of biopower. I focus on how Frankenstein imagines the flesh of Victor as animated and directed forward through biopower, by way of the novel’s juxtaposed medico-scientific and romantic discourse of life. Through close readings of the creation scene and Victor’s final breaths aboard Walton’s exploratory Arctic ship, I conclude that Frankenstein at last offers itself both as artifact and archaeology of modern power—or what Guyer calls “literature as a form of biopower.”

Horror and the Holocaust: ‘Prestige Horror’ and Frank Pierson’s Conspiracy (2001)

In an article published in 2004, Picart and Frank examined the use of stylistic and thematic elements Holocaust cinema can borrow from the horror film. Their argument at the time was constrained by the availability and their choice of primary texts, but the recent emergence of what has been called ‘prestige horror’ invites viewers to revisit their critical arguments and positions. Since ‘prestige horror’s’ aesthetic strategies tend to challenge conventional definitions of the horror genre, revisiting Picart and Frank’s argument proves most productive in the context of a Holocaust film, Frank Pierson’s Conspiracy (2001), which, in turn, operates in creative dissonance with some of the conventions of Holocaust cinema.

Between Causative and Passive: Agentivity in the Affactive Construction

This brief discussion paper is concerned with the sequence [have NP Vpp] and its distinction into a causative and a passive construction, which hinges on the (non-)agentivity of the subject participant, so that the sequence can be seen as ambiguous in that respect. Instead of analyzing these uses as two different constructions, I propose a unified analysis as instances of the affactive construction. This construction has the functional potential of putting primary focus on secondary participants, so-called afficiary participants. The potential ambiguity with regard to the agentivity of these participants is not an issue in usage, as it is only evoked as part of the conceptual content in the background.

Exploring the Effect of Conversion on the Distribution of Inflectional Suffixes: A Multivariate Corpus Study

Lexical ambiguity in the English language is abundant. Word-class ambiguity is even inherently tied to the productive process of conversion. Most lexemes are rather flexible when it comes to word class, which is facilitated by the minimal morphology that English has preserved. This study takes a multivariate quantitative approach to examine potential patterns that arise in a lexicon where verb-noun and noun-verb conversion are pervasive. The distributions of three inflectional suffixes, verbal -s, nominal -s, and -ed are explored for their interaction with degrees of verb-noun conversion. In order to achieve that, the lexical dispersion, context-dependency, and lexical similarity between the inflected and bare forms were taken into consideration and controlled for in a Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS; Stasinopoulos, M. D., R. A. Rigby, and F. De Bastiani. 2018. “GAMLSS: A Distributional Regression Approach.” Statistical Modelling 18 (3–4): 248–73). The results of a series of zero-one-inflated beta models suggest that there is a clear “uncanny” valley of lexemes that show similar proportions of verbal and nominal uses. Such lexemes have a lower proportion of inflectional uses when textual dispersion and context-dependency are controlled for. Furthermore, as soon as there is some degree of conversion, the probability that a lexeme is always encountered without inflection sharply rises. Disambiguation by means of inflection is unlikely to play a uniform role depending on the inflectional distribution of a lexeme.