PERIPHERAL PUBLISHING: THE POSSIBILITIES OF MARGINAL MODELS

There is considerable interest in independent publishing models that operate at or on the periphery of our industry, beyond the ‘centre’ of commercial publishing—from ‘litmags’ (Edmonds 2015) to ‘prosumers’ (Stinson 2016); self-publishers, to digital-first and open access examples. There is less discussion of established ‘literary’ writers producing ‘peripheral’ works, which may be significant in the current context, when publishing faces the challenge of technological developments ‘orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type’ (Epstein 2010). As an author and publisher—working in both roles across distinct categories—I am interested in creative projects that mis/use aspects of generic forms to re/make (a)new literary fiction. In this paper, I consider David Mitchell’s latest novel/la, Slade House (2015), in light of its first appearance as a Twitter ghost story released at midnight on All Hallows’ Eve: a tale-in-instalments that gothic readers and fanfic communities alike would be familiar with, but was and still is more novel for mainstream trade publishers. Mitchell’s avant-garde example may work to illustrate the direction and fluidity of literary fiction at a point in publishing history when traditional practices are being challenged by writers via alternative models of production, which may exhibit a capacity to move between genres that might, in earlier times, have seemed exclusive.

THE UNSPEAKABLE: TRAUMA AFFECTED NARRATIVES

This paper explores questions for writers who are depicting traumatised characters in their creative practice. As a literary trope, ‘the unspeakable’ has been relied on as a shorthand for traumatic experience and the ongoing affects of trauma. This paper asks whether the unspeakable is adequate to convey the lived experience of trauma, or does it minimise or sideline trauma? Does recourse to the notion of the unspeakable prevent misappropriation of stories or does it lead instead to other kinds of misrepresentation and marginalisation? How can writers, appreciating the complexities raised by the notion of unspeakability, still convey truth and inspire empathic readings when speaking about trauma?

INSIDER RESEARCH: REPRESENTING PERIPHERAL VOICES AND MULTIPLE IDENTITIES WHEN WRITING ABOUT PERSONAL TRAUMA

As an ‘insider’ researcher writing about personal trauma, I sought to reconcile my multiple identities in my doctoral thesis: scholar/researcher, creative writing practitioner, and trauma survivor evolving from the process of writing about trauma. Concerns arose about how I could insert these peripheral voices and multiple identities into my creative thesis, while paying attention to the tenets of scholarly rigour and my desire for creativity. This article presents a case study of the design of my thesis, where my research endeavour was to ‘re-story’ my self-narrative through ficto-memoir: a creative writing process whereby my personal experiences were fictionalised, but carried the same emotional affect and benefits as writing about real experiences. This article contends that creativity could still be achieved in a conventional academic thesis structure with a slightly modified format that allows for the insertion of an author’s parallel voices into the research and alignment with the creative work.

SCAPEGOATS AND TRAGIC HEROES: USING ARCHETYPAL PATTERNS IN SHORT STORIES

Literary motifs such as archetypes can be very defining in short stories, since they provide the patterns that both authors and readers can easily resonate with. Studies have shown that archetypes are useful elements in the process of narrative patterning in literature. This paper explores the use of the Scapegoat and the Tragic Hero archetypes in my two short stories, ‘Her Tale on Earth’ (2014) and ‘The Day She Walked Out of the Gates’ (2014), to show how experimenting with these archetypes helped determine the shape of the each story’s structure, genre, and eventually the final form of each piece. While I was not immediately aware of my preferred character patterns, communicating my purpose through the stories led me to discover the right archetypes for my intentions. These stories are about characters who face adversity because of their complex parentage or heritage: themes which fuel my PhD research

WRITING BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

Biographical fiction narratives—often of famous artists—have, claims David Lodge (2014), become ‘a fashionable form of literary fiction’. Yet in writing about famous people, the novelist is most often faced with countless biographies and archival materials in letters, literary notes, diaries, and in the works (and reviews) of the subject author/artist themselves, to say nothing of the academic scholarship surrounding the subject and their work. The problem for the novelist then in researching their subject, is where to draw the line. This paper examines the challenge for biographical fiction writers in imagining the lives of their subjects beyond that which has been documented—the ‘what is left over’, after reading the extant literature. The paper’s focus is on my own work in progress: a biographical novel about the life of the South African writer and social theorist, Olive Schreiner.

A FEATHER

Featured fiction.

THE 'REALIST' GOTHIC

From the moment historical fiction became defined as a genre of literary ‘realism’, it was positioned as the opposite of the Gothic. The Gothic, it was considered, could not be historical because its supernatural elements meant that it did not measure up to the standards of realism required. In this article, I argue that it is possible for the Gothic and literary realism to co-exist: that it is possible, even perhaps more powerful, to write a ‘realistic’ Gothic not made up of the supernatural, but of things that are real. I use as a case study the novel that was the creative artefact of my PhD, which is an example of a Gothic novel written in a traditional ‘realist’ style, and plays with the conventions of the Gothic, particularly in relation to the depiction of queer women and the monstrous Other.