TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2012
López-Calvo has written several excellent studies of diasporic literatures within Latin America s... more López-Calvo has written several excellent studies of diasporic literatures within Latin America such as Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (008) and Written in Exile: Chilean Fiction from 1973-Present (2001). Here, he turns to the literature of and about the Latino/a population of the greater Los Angeles area. As in his other books, López-Calvo's methodology, while focusing on readings of literary texts, branches out to many cultural and sociological aspects of the bodies of work surveyed, as well as focusing on underlying historical currents. He is not only an advocate, one with emancipatory intent, but also a scholar who will not cut intellectual corners in proceeding to that goal. The diligence, comprehensiveness, interpretive zest, and argumentative stamina so much in evidence in this critic's previous work are in ample evidence here. The "of and about" in terms of the Latino subject is important; López-Calvo analyzes not just works by Latino authors but looks at novels by Kate Braverman, Danny Santiago, and T. Coraghessan Boyle and a film by Allison Anders, all European-American artists who undertook more or less seriously to represent the Latino population as a major signifier in their Los Angeles-set works. Though López-Calvo points out stereotypical aspects of some of these works, he does not see them as inherently inauthentic because of the origin of their creators; instead using them to show that, even as demographic realities demand Latinos actually be represented in treatments of los Angeles rather than being marginalized or effaced, the opportunity to take a full view of their culture is often missed. In general, the works by Anglos are seen as insightful but possessing a comfort level with the status quo. Some may be more critically self-aware than others, but there is a gap-though not, López-Calvo indicates, a total one-between them and writers from the barrio who do not possess this sort of mobile social capital. The same is true, in a different way, of Latinos with an exceptional relationship to the region, such as the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, who in his Las películas de mi vida (2003) depicts a childhood in the Los Angeles of both film and reality which he evokes as both idyllic and essentially, though not unqualifiedly, admirable. Danny Santiago-an Anglo who wrote about Latinos with a Latino pseudonym, is seen as a bit more of an insider by López-Calvo, who grants that he was "born in Kansas City" (13) but sees his depiction of Latino Los Angeles as basically done from an internal rather than external perspective. Identity does not have to be purely biological or linguistic; but it does have to emanate from a felt cultural affinity. The writers from outside, however well intentioned, are trapped within certain paradigms. López-Calvo points out the limiting effects of these paradigms in his analysis of
In its mixture of the personal and the political, its concentration on an individual making diffi... more In its mixture of the personal and the political, its concentration on an individual making difficult moral choices, and its wide historical lens, Mario Vargas Llosa's El sueño del celta (2010), published only weeks after he garnered that year's Nobel Prize for Literature, is reminiscent of many of his earlier novels. I wish to contend that, even more, it is an effective sequel to his 1981 novel La guerra del fin del mundo, not only treating many of the same themes but also providing a contrast between Vargas Llosa in the wake of his disillusionment with left-wing radicalism and the Peruvian writer after more or less thirty years being on the center-right. Whereas the Brazil-set novel seemed aimed at the errors of leftist utopianism, the more recent work indicts imperialism in Africa, Latin America, and Europe. This essay will show how this "tricontinental" agenda is complemented by a "modernity" that, for Vargas Llosa, is both ideological and stylistic. The Celt of El sueño del celta is Roger Casement, the British government official, imperial muckraker, and, ultimately, committed Irish nationalist revolutionary. But Casement is not the first Celt (a category that includes, among others, both the Scots and the Irish) in Vargas Llosa's oeuvre. Galileo Gall, the chronologically inclined anarchist in La guerra del fin del mundo was a Scotsman as well. Furthermore, Gall was originally intended to be, like Casement, an Irishman, only, as Efraín Kristal points out, becoming a Scotsman in the "final version" (125). Clearly, Vargas Llosa meant to point to the Celtic aspects of the character and to link his political reformism with some inherent qualities of Gall as Celt. He does the same with Casement. Gall was mocked as just the sort of superficial enthusiast attracted by revolutionary unrest. Casement, though hardly unequivocally lauded, is seen as a complex individual worthy of thought and serious consideration. This, in itself, measures the distance between the Vargas Llosa of 1981 and of 2010. 1 One assumes that Vargas Llosa images the Celt principally through the prism of the thought of Matthew Arnold. The name of Vargas Llosa's biweekly column, Piedra de toque, is a direct translation of the "touchstones" that were Arnold's favored approach in appreciating great literary texts, and Vargas Llosa's explicit agenda-to preserve the best of Western culture in a time of tumultuous change and reassessment-is indeed very Arnoldian. Arnold was very aware of the fact that, though the English were the numerically and culturally dominant race in the kingdom of Great Britain, the Celtic-speaking peoples were an important and under-addressed part of the cultural mix. Arnold's vision of the Celtic was that of the sensitive soul, the gifted and inspired poet. Speaking of the early medieval Welsh bard Taliesin, Arnold says, "the Welshman shows much more fire and imagination than the Anglo-Saxon" (53). We are not talking here about individual cases-where an individual Welshman may, in a given situation, show more imaginative fire than an individual Anglo-Saxon; in another situation involving two different individuals, the result would be obverse.
Eve Langley's The Pea-Pickers is often seem as a quaint artifact of a now-vanished Australia.... more Eve Langley's The Pea-Pickers is often seem as a quaint artifact of a now-vanished Australia. This article seeks to rescue the contemporary relevance of this novel of two young women who go into the rural areas of Gippsland to pick peas, showing its pioneering attention to transgender concerns, the polyphonic panoply of its style and soundscape, and its portrayal of a settler culture not anchored in a perilous identity but dynamically on the move. As so often in settler colony literature, though, blindnesses on the issue of race-particularly the portrayal of the Muslim migrant Akbarah Khan-mar the canvas, and make Langley's novel as emblematic of the constitutive problems of Australian literary history as of its artistic achievements. Just as Langley's gender variance and personal nonconformity made her an outlier in the Australia and New Zealand she lived in, so is her contribution to Australian literature an unfinished project.
Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr ... more Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention. This article argues that much of this neglect proceeds from assumptions that the book is nostalgic for a sovereign magic, when in fact its historicity is a way of shaking up time itself. I argue Clarke is looking to the early nineteenth century as the earliest possible modernity, a time in which magic is intertwined with the world much as it would be today if magic arose now. Examining the sociable magician Norrell, the questionably resurgent medieval king John Uskglass and the African-descended manservant Stephen Black provide different models of what the interrelationship between magic and reality can be and serve to destabilize any sense of a sovereign past in the book. The book’s plural magical modernity’s counter any atavistic sovereignty. By taking the reading of Clarke’s novel beyond nostalgic sovereignty, one...
for their kind and understanding advice and to Australian writers in general for being patient wi... more for their kind and understanding advice and to Australian writers in general for being patient with critical scrutiny. I hope this is the book Vivian Smith envisioned when he and I discussed the outlines of this project at Circular Quay in January 2010. Essays of mine adjacent to this book though not part of it shed light on some figures undertreated here. David Malouf is given a full overview in my essay for the 2014 special issue of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) on his work, while there is more on Tim Winton in my essay in Tim Winton: Critical Essays, edited by Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O'Reilly (University of Western Australia Press, 2014). Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap and Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars, as well as their precedents in D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, are examined in my 2009 JASAL article "Something to Keep You Steady". Patrick White's relationship to late modernity is examined in "The Solid Mandala and Patrick White's Late Modernity" in Transnational Literature, November 2011. Other work of mine on Gerald Murnane's recent fiction is to be found in my reviews of A History of Books in Antipodes and Southerly, both published in 2013. More on Stead's For Love Alone is to be found in my article in the first issue of the Chinese Journal of Australian Cultural Studies, edited by Wang Guanglin of Songjiang University in Shanghai. Shirley Hazzard's United Nations short stories, mentioned with respect to Frank Moorhouse in Chapter 7, are examined in my essay in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays, Contemporary Australian Literature x xi communication are among them, as well as, necessarily, the greater viability of democratic institutions in the post-Cold War world. Stephen Greenblatt wisely urges us to avoid a "sentimental pessimism" that "collapses everything into a global vision of domination and subjection". 1 But, like all periods of history, the current one involves forms of injustice and dogma that writers must defy, evade or circumvent. The assumption behind this book is that writers always have to struggle against their cultural context, or, in Greenblatt's words, to "make imaginative adaptations" in their work, no matter their manifest cultural position or the apparent benignity of the ruling forces. 2 This era's writers have a unique challenge, and this book tells the story of how, in Australia, they have responded to this challenge. I am not saying that these are the only contemporary Australian writers who can provide this testimony, nor that those Australian writers who cannot be read in this way are either not worth reading or not of aesthetic value. This book offers one map of what is going on today; other critics would draw other maps. Furthermore, Australian literature is different from that of the UK and USA in that it has never had a set canon. As important as figures such as Henry Lawson, Judith Wright, Patrick White and Peter Carey have been, the reader who does not wish to engage with these writers has always been able to navigate around them. In turn, no one person can read all of Australian literature or be conversant with its full range: it is too large and too diverse for that. Australian poetry has had more of a set canon than Australian fiction-certainly in the mid-twentieth century no anthology of Australian poetry could exclude Kenneth Slessor, David Campbell or R. D. Fitzgeraldbut today of those three only Slessor still plays a central role in the national literary conversation. The fortunes of Adam Lindsay Gordon-the Australian poet in the nineteenth century, but ranked below his contemporaries Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall by the late twentieth century-testify to the openness of the Australian canon, an openness that has only increased as Indigenous, migrant and expatriate writers, as well as those working in languages other than English, have more recently stretched the very definition of what it is to be Australian. Meanwhile, the contemporary availability of digital and print-on-demand technologies has expanded the mathematical possibility of what can be canonical and, along with a more tolerant cultural agenda, has meant we have more books to choose from than ever before. Australian literature, because of its traditional pluralisms, is well equipped to handle this new contingency. I attribute part of this to the fact that Australia has had no single dominant metropolitan area. Whereas London and New York have defined British and American literature far more than any other city in those countries, Sydney and Melbourne have kept up with each other, while Perth and Brisbane have held their own in a smaller compass. Canberra plays a key role in this book, not just as site of much of its composition (while I was a visiting fellow at the Canberra campus of the University of New South Wales), but as a potential ground of re-emergent Australian idealism-reflecting the fact that there is no single metropolitan space for the artificially built national capital to rival. The plurality of Australian literature is its great joy, and one of the qualities that enable it to be resilient against the threats to the imagination with which this book is so concerned.
Journal of the Association For the Study of Australian Literature, Apr 23, 2014
In The Happy Life (2011) Malouf sees the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet's belief in progress as ... more In The Happy Life (2011) Malouf sees the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet's belief in progress as Faustian (28). But does looking to history offer any more certainty than looking to the future? Although Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman say Malouf is the author of 'a number of historical novels' (66), Malouf's fiction suggests that, though looking at history may yield wisdom and insight, the past itself can offer no more inherent satisfaction than can the future. In other words, his fiction concludes that placing our large-scale hopes in the past rather than the future is likely to be no less disappointing. It is my argument that Harland's Half-Acre (1984) and The Great World (1990), though set in the past, end up being not-so-historical in that they do not see the past as a solution the way fiction simply or naively predicated on history might.
who of course set significant portions of their work in Asia and other then-colonized regions of ... more who of course set significant portions of their work in Asia and other then-colonized regions of the globe. Finding the hidden colonial echoes and traces in books such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park has become a cottage industry. 1 And there have been wider-ranging studies such as Gauri Viswanathan's assertion that the entire existence of English as a literary discipline owes itself to Indian colonial institutions. In all this activity, though, the name of Anthony Trollope has seldom been heard, even though he devoted several works to countries that were at the time part of the British Empire. The reasons for this are fairly clear: first, Trollope is seen as the epitome of beefy Englishness and has so been used to buttress British patriotism in times of stress and more generally appropriated as a synecdoche for British national identity (Wolfreys 152). Second, Trollope's imperial fictions have largely to do with what are now (Australia, New Zealand) or have been until recently (South Africa) largely white-dominated settler colonies; thus his works do not address questions of racial subjugation the way, for instance, Conrad's are seen as doing. And third, Trollope's colonial works are given short shrift by traditionally conservative Trollope scholars, and thus lack the visibility that would draw them to the eyes of critics involved in the postcolonial project. This neglect is regrettable, though, because several of Trollope's later novels, especially Harry Heathcote of Gangoil and
... broadviewpress.com uk, europe, central asia, middle east, africa, india, and southeast asia E... more ... broadviewpress.com uk, europe, central asia, middle east, africa, india, and southeast asia Eurospan Group, 3 Henrietta St., London ... Bisla, Harold Bloom, the late Maddalena Raimondi Capasso, Jules Chametzky, Mia Chen, Donna Coates, George Dickerson, Millicent Dillon ...
ABSTRACT Though little of the material contained in The Children of Húrin will be a revelation to... more ABSTRACT Though little of the material contained in The Children of Húrin will be a revelation to longtime students of Tolkien, its publication is nonetheless a welcome event. The story of Túrin Turambar is one of Tolkien's strongest. It has languished for too long in incomplete versions in various installments or samples of the legendarium. Moreover, it has been overshadowed, even within the published "Silmarillion" tales, by the Lay of Leithian, the tale of the matchless love of Beren and Lúthien, because of that story's inherent nobility and grace as well as for its important role in the thematic backbone of The Lord of the Rings. But the story of Túrin, as Elrond makes clear in his acclamatory comments to Frodo after the council, is no less important among the tales of the Elder Days, or, as these days would be called after The Lord of the Rings was written, the First Age. In The Children of Húrin, Christopher Tolkien has put together a full, orderly narrative account of the story of Túrin Turambar, based on the iteration of the "Narn i Chîn Húrin" provided in Unfinished Tales. Christopher (with the assistance of his son Adam, who seems an adept of Middle-earth studies in his father's tradition) has made this piercing and riveting tale available to a far wider audience. The book is compact, with large print, and copiously illustrated, with eight full-color, glossy pictures and numerous small black-and-white illustrations before and after chapters. Yet it is not a coffee-table book or an enhanced livre de luxe. Those interested in a deluxe edition have available for them such a work, offered by Houghton Mifflin in the US and HarperCollins in the UK. This comes with a slipcase and special binding, and color frontispiece (of the Alan Lee dust-wrapper image) and color illustrations. The UK trade edition is also of larger dimensions than the US trade version, and gives the reader less of a cramped sensation than the reader of the US edition occasionally feels. (The deluxe UK and US editions are the same size.) The illustrations aside, the US trade edition looks and handles like any other book on the bestseller list. This is perhaps an aesthetic detriment but a help to those who want to get Tolkien read as literature and not merely as a publishing and marketing phenomenon. Advocates of Tolkien in literary terms have long had the problem that his writing about Middle-earth is really one giant work. But when described in publishing terms, Tolkien's Middle-earth writings consist of one complete work of narrative fiction, The Lord of the Rings, accompanied by a prequel written originally for children, The Hobbit, and supplemented by a vast array of posthumously published and heterogeneous background material possessing various degrees of narrative unity. The Children of Húrin solves the quandary of the casual reader who is interested in Tolkien's vision but who is, to put it bluntly, fatigued by hobbits, as no less an aficionado of Tolkien than the young Rayner Unwin once admitted to being. It gives the hobbit-averse somewhere to go. It also perhaps tells the hobbit-friendly just what their preferences as readers are. The readers who like the hobbits, find their absence lamentable, and find the Túrin story too depressing and the characters unlikable, are at least potentially more novel-readers than epic or tragedy-readers; their expectations of narrative situations are closer to Middlemarch or David Copperfield than the Aeneid, the Theban Plays, or for that matter Beowulf. It is good in general for Tolkien to have a short, accessible work in circulation, one that is part of the overall legendarium yet is not The Lord of the Rings; it will provide people an alternative complete work by which one can enter the oeuvre aside from the magnum opus. This is an option lacking, for instance, in the oeuvre of as great a writer as Marcel Proust. The respectful reviews the book has received so far—even the negative ones are not totally dismissive of Tolkien the way they would have been in...
It's known from [11, 10, 2] that in a contact manifold equipped with either a nondegenerate or Mo... more It's known from [11, 10, 2] that in a contact manifold equipped with either a nondegenerate or Morse-Bott contact form, a finite-energy pseudoholomorphic curve will be asymptotic at each of its nonremovable punctures to a single periodic orbit of the Reeb vector field and that the convergence is exponential. We provide examples here to show that this need not be the case if the contact form is degenerate. More specifically, we show that on any contact manifold (M, ξ) with cooriented contact structure one can choose a contact form λ with ker λ = ξ and a compatible complex structure J on ξ so that for the associated R-invariant almost complex structureJ on R × M there exist families of embedded finite-energỹ J-holomorphic cylinders and planes having embedded tori as limit sets.
Part 1, Geography, centers on West Africa, a site that Lemon calls proximal emotional challenges... more Part 1, Geography, centers on West Africa, a site that Lemon calls proximal emotional challenges for him as an African-American. For this piece, Lemon recruited Guinean and Ivorian performers and explored the reverberations of the African diaspora. Part 2, Tree, focuses ...
... Dante, Paradiso ... 10 Chretien weaves gossamer threads of crafted interpretation of the past... more ... Dante, Paradiso ... 10 Chretien weaves gossamer threads of crafted interpretation of the past as self-consciously as any postmodern metahistorian; yet his bravura has been supposed, at least until quite recently, to be effete, privileg-ing nonsensical derring-do over that more ...
Australian Critical Race ad Whiteness Studies …, 2009
The Chinese Canadian writer Larissa Lai's futuristic novel Salt Fish Girl imagines a mythic ... more The Chinese Canadian writer Larissa Lai's futuristic novel Salt Fish Girl imagines a mythic femininity that persists even amid its attempted suppression by transnational globalisation. Lai uses myth as a redemptive layer of experience, but does not do so in a modernist way that would ...
1. Patrick White and Late Modernity This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick Whit... more 1. Patrick White and Late Modernity This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-1990) presents, in his novel The Solid Mandala (1966), a prototypical evocation of late modernity that indicates precisely why and how it was different from the neoliberal and postmodern era that succeeded it. Late modernity is currently emerging as a historical period, though still a nascent and contested one. Robert Hassan speaks of the 1950-1970 era as a period which, in its ‘Fordist’ mode of production maintained a certain conformity yet held off the commoditisation of later neoliberalism’s ‘network-driven capitalism’. 1
The author's conclusion demonstrates that the rise of religious toleration, especially in the cas... more The author's conclusion demonstrates that the rise of religious toleration, especially in the case of John Henry Newman's life, did not necessarily mean that bigotry had disappeared from British society. Anti-Catholicism continued to persist throughout the nineteenth century. Sidenvall's description of the decline of anti-Catholic prejudice and the gradual softening of attitudes towards Newman is an important aspect of Victorian religious history, but his statement that around 1860 'Britain had rather reluctantly begun to come to terms with Catholicism' (p. 79) is a bit misleading. Anti-Catholicism continued to remain a strong force in British society throughout the nineteenth century, and the prejudice against Catholics only began to disappear during the 1890s. Erik Sidenvall's book is an important addition to Newman scholarship and British religious history. His insights into public opinion, the issue of religious conversion, and the relationship of prejudice and toleration are important elements in appreciating the dynamics of Victorian religion and the challenges of today's world where bigotry and intolerance still exist.
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2012
López-Calvo has written several excellent studies of diasporic literatures within Latin America s... more López-Calvo has written several excellent studies of diasporic literatures within Latin America such as Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (008) and Written in Exile: Chilean Fiction from 1973-Present (2001). Here, he turns to the literature of and about the Latino/a population of the greater Los Angeles area. As in his other books, López-Calvo's methodology, while focusing on readings of literary texts, branches out to many cultural and sociological aspects of the bodies of work surveyed, as well as focusing on underlying historical currents. He is not only an advocate, one with emancipatory intent, but also a scholar who will not cut intellectual corners in proceeding to that goal. The diligence, comprehensiveness, interpretive zest, and argumentative stamina so much in evidence in this critic's previous work are in ample evidence here. The "of and about" in terms of the Latino subject is important; López-Calvo analyzes not just works by Latino authors but looks at novels by Kate Braverman, Danny Santiago, and T. Coraghessan Boyle and a film by Allison Anders, all European-American artists who undertook more or less seriously to represent the Latino population as a major signifier in their Los Angeles-set works. Though López-Calvo points out stereotypical aspects of some of these works, he does not see them as inherently inauthentic because of the origin of their creators; instead using them to show that, even as demographic realities demand Latinos actually be represented in treatments of los Angeles rather than being marginalized or effaced, the opportunity to take a full view of their culture is often missed. In general, the works by Anglos are seen as insightful but possessing a comfort level with the status quo. Some may be more critically self-aware than others, but there is a gap-though not, López-Calvo indicates, a total one-between them and writers from the barrio who do not possess this sort of mobile social capital. The same is true, in a different way, of Latinos with an exceptional relationship to the region, such as the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, who in his Las películas de mi vida (2003) depicts a childhood in the Los Angeles of both film and reality which he evokes as both idyllic and essentially, though not unqualifiedly, admirable. Danny Santiago-an Anglo who wrote about Latinos with a Latino pseudonym, is seen as a bit more of an insider by López-Calvo, who grants that he was "born in Kansas City" (13) but sees his depiction of Latino Los Angeles as basically done from an internal rather than external perspective. Identity does not have to be purely biological or linguistic; but it does have to emanate from a felt cultural affinity. The writers from outside, however well intentioned, are trapped within certain paradigms. López-Calvo points out the limiting effects of these paradigms in his analysis of
In its mixture of the personal and the political, its concentration on an individual making diffi... more In its mixture of the personal and the political, its concentration on an individual making difficult moral choices, and its wide historical lens, Mario Vargas Llosa's El sueño del celta (2010), published only weeks after he garnered that year's Nobel Prize for Literature, is reminiscent of many of his earlier novels. I wish to contend that, even more, it is an effective sequel to his 1981 novel La guerra del fin del mundo, not only treating many of the same themes but also providing a contrast between Vargas Llosa in the wake of his disillusionment with left-wing radicalism and the Peruvian writer after more or less thirty years being on the center-right. Whereas the Brazil-set novel seemed aimed at the errors of leftist utopianism, the more recent work indicts imperialism in Africa, Latin America, and Europe. This essay will show how this "tricontinental" agenda is complemented by a "modernity" that, for Vargas Llosa, is both ideological and stylistic. The Celt of El sueño del celta is Roger Casement, the British government official, imperial muckraker, and, ultimately, committed Irish nationalist revolutionary. But Casement is not the first Celt (a category that includes, among others, both the Scots and the Irish) in Vargas Llosa's oeuvre. Galileo Gall, the chronologically inclined anarchist in La guerra del fin del mundo was a Scotsman as well. Furthermore, Gall was originally intended to be, like Casement, an Irishman, only, as Efraín Kristal points out, becoming a Scotsman in the "final version" (125). Clearly, Vargas Llosa meant to point to the Celtic aspects of the character and to link his political reformism with some inherent qualities of Gall as Celt. He does the same with Casement. Gall was mocked as just the sort of superficial enthusiast attracted by revolutionary unrest. Casement, though hardly unequivocally lauded, is seen as a complex individual worthy of thought and serious consideration. This, in itself, measures the distance between the Vargas Llosa of 1981 and of 2010. 1 One assumes that Vargas Llosa images the Celt principally through the prism of the thought of Matthew Arnold. The name of Vargas Llosa's biweekly column, Piedra de toque, is a direct translation of the "touchstones" that were Arnold's favored approach in appreciating great literary texts, and Vargas Llosa's explicit agenda-to preserve the best of Western culture in a time of tumultuous change and reassessment-is indeed very Arnoldian. Arnold was very aware of the fact that, though the English were the numerically and culturally dominant race in the kingdom of Great Britain, the Celtic-speaking peoples were an important and under-addressed part of the cultural mix. Arnold's vision of the Celtic was that of the sensitive soul, the gifted and inspired poet. Speaking of the early medieval Welsh bard Taliesin, Arnold says, "the Welshman shows much more fire and imagination than the Anglo-Saxon" (53). We are not talking here about individual cases-where an individual Welshman may, in a given situation, show more imaginative fire than an individual Anglo-Saxon; in another situation involving two different individuals, the result would be obverse.
Eve Langley's The Pea-Pickers is often seem as a quaint artifact of a now-vanished Australia.... more Eve Langley's The Pea-Pickers is often seem as a quaint artifact of a now-vanished Australia. This article seeks to rescue the contemporary relevance of this novel of two young women who go into the rural areas of Gippsland to pick peas, showing its pioneering attention to transgender concerns, the polyphonic panoply of its style and soundscape, and its portrayal of a settler culture not anchored in a perilous identity but dynamically on the move. As so often in settler colony literature, though, blindnesses on the issue of race-particularly the portrayal of the Muslim migrant Akbarah Khan-mar the canvas, and make Langley's novel as emblematic of the constitutive problems of Australian literary history as of its artistic achievements. Just as Langley's gender variance and personal nonconformity made her an outlier in the Australia and New Zealand she lived in, so is her contribution to Australian literature an unfinished project.
Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr ... more Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention. This article argues that much of this neglect proceeds from assumptions that the book is nostalgic for a sovereign magic, when in fact its historicity is a way of shaking up time itself. I argue Clarke is looking to the early nineteenth century as the earliest possible modernity, a time in which magic is intertwined with the world much as it would be today if magic arose now. Examining the sociable magician Norrell, the questionably resurgent medieval king John Uskglass and the African-descended manservant Stephen Black provide different models of what the interrelationship between magic and reality can be and serve to destabilize any sense of a sovereign past in the book. The book’s plural magical modernity’s counter any atavistic sovereignty. By taking the reading of Clarke’s novel beyond nostalgic sovereignty, one...
for their kind and understanding advice and to Australian writers in general for being patient wi... more for their kind and understanding advice and to Australian writers in general for being patient with critical scrutiny. I hope this is the book Vivian Smith envisioned when he and I discussed the outlines of this project at Circular Quay in January 2010. Essays of mine adjacent to this book though not part of it shed light on some figures undertreated here. David Malouf is given a full overview in my essay for the 2014 special issue of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) on his work, while there is more on Tim Winton in my essay in Tim Winton: Critical Essays, edited by Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O'Reilly (University of Western Australia Press, 2014). Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap and Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars, as well as their precedents in D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, are examined in my 2009 JASAL article "Something to Keep You Steady". Patrick White's relationship to late modernity is examined in "The Solid Mandala and Patrick White's Late Modernity" in Transnational Literature, November 2011. Other work of mine on Gerald Murnane's recent fiction is to be found in my reviews of A History of Books in Antipodes and Southerly, both published in 2013. More on Stead's For Love Alone is to be found in my article in the first issue of the Chinese Journal of Australian Cultural Studies, edited by Wang Guanglin of Songjiang University in Shanghai. Shirley Hazzard's United Nations short stories, mentioned with respect to Frank Moorhouse in Chapter 7, are examined in my essay in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays, Contemporary Australian Literature x xi communication are among them, as well as, necessarily, the greater viability of democratic institutions in the post-Cold War world. Stephen Greenblatt wisely urges us to avoid a "sentimental pessimism" that "collapses everything into a global vision of domination and subjection". 1 But, like all periods of history, the current one involves forms of injustice and dogma that writers must defy, evade or circumvent. The assumption behind this book is that writers always have to struggle against their cultural context, or, in Greenblatt's words, to "make imaginative adaptations" in their work, no matter their manifest cultural position or the apparent benignity of the ruling forces. 2 This era's writers have a unique challenge, and this book tells the story of how, in Australia, they have responded to this challenge. I am not saying that these are the only contemporary Australian writers who can provide this testimony, nor that those Australian writers who cannot be read in this way are either not worth reading or not of aesthetic value. This book offers one map of what is going on today; other critics would draw other maps. Furthermore, Australian literature is different from that of the UK and USA in that it has never had a set canon. As important as figures such as Henry Lawson, Judith Wright, Patrick White and Peter Carey have been, the reader who does not wish to engage with these writers has always been able to navigate around them. In turn, no one person can read all of Australian literature or be conversant with its full range: it is too large and too diverse for that. Australian poetry has had more of a set canon than Australian fiction-certainly in the mid-twentieth century no anthology of Australian poetry could exclude Kenneth Slessor, David Campbell or R. D. Fitzgeraldbut today of those three only Slessor still plays a central role in the national literary conversation. The fortunes of Adam Lindsay Gordon-the Australian poet in the nineteenth century, but ranked below his contemporaries Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall by the late twentieth century-testify to the openness of the Australian canon, an openness that has only increased as Indigenous, migrant and expatriate writers, as well as those working in languages other than English, have more recently stretched the very definition of what it is to be Australian. Meanwhile, the contemporary availability of digital and print-on-demand technologies has expanded the mathematical possibility of what can be canonical and, along with a more tolerant cultural agenda, has meant we have more books to choose from than ever before. Australian literature, because of its traditional pluralisms, is well equipped to handle this new contingency. I attribute part of this to the fact that Australia has had no single dominant metropolitan area. Whereas London and New York have defined British and American literature far more than any other city in those countries, Sydney and Melbourne have kept up with each other, while Perth and Brisbane have held their own in a smaller compass. Canberra plays a key role in this book, not just as site of much of its composition (while I was a visiting fellow at the Canberra campus of the University of New South Wales), but as a potential ground of re-emergent Australian idealism-reflecting the fact that there is no single metropolitan space for the artificially built national capital to rival. The plurality of Australian literature is its great joy, and one of the qualities that enable it to be resilient against the threats to the imagination with which this book is so concerned.
Journal of the Association For the Study of Australian Literature, Apr 23, 2014
In The Happy Life (2011) Malouf sees the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet's belief in progress as ... more In The Happy Life (2011) Malouf sees the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet's belief in progress as Faustian (28). But does looking to history offer any more certainty than looking to the future? Although Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman say Malouf is the author of 'a number of historical novels' (66), Malouf's fiction suggests that, though looking at history may yield wisdom and insight, the past itself can offer no more inherent satisfaction than can the future. In other words, his fiction concludes that placing our large-scale hopes in the past rather than the future is likely to be no less disappointing. It is my argument that Harland's Half-Acre (1984) and The Great World (1990), though set in the past, end up being not-so-historical in that they do not see the past as a solution the way fiction simply or naively predicated on history might.
who of course set significant portions of their work in Asia and other then-colonized regions of ... more who of course set significant portions of their work in Asia and other then-colonized regions of the globe. Finding the hidden colonial echoes and traces in books such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park has become a cottage industry. 1 And there have been wider-ranging studies such as Gauri Viswanathan's assertion that the entire existence of English as a literary discipline owes itself to Indian colonial institutions. In all this activity, though, the name of Anthony Trollope has seldom been heard, even though he devoted several works to countries that were at the time part of the British Empire. The reasons for this are fairly clear: first, Trollope is seen as the epitome of beefy Englishness and has so been used to buttress British patriotism in times of stress and more generally appropriated as a synecdoche for British national identity (Wolfreys 152). Second, Trollope's imperial fictions have largely to do with what are now (Australia, New Zealand) or have been until recently (South Africa) largely white-dominated settler colonies; thus his works do not address questions of racial subjugation the way, for instance, Conrad's are seen as doing. And third, Trollope's colonial works are given short shrift by traditionally conservative Trollope scholars, and thus lack the visibility that would draw them to the eyes of critics involved in the postcolonial project. This neglect is regrettable, though, because several of Trollope's later novels, especially Harry Heathcote of Gangoil and
... broadviewpress.com uk, europe, central asia, middle east, africa, india, and southeast asia E... more ... broadviewpress.com uk, europe, central asia, middle east, africa, india, and southeast asia Eurospan Group, 3 Henrietta St., London ... Bisla, Harold Bloom, the late Maddalena Raimondi Capasso, Jules Chametzky, Mia Chen, Donna Coates, George Dickerson, Millicent Dillon ...
ABSTRACT Though little of the material contained in The Children of Húrin will be a revelation to... more ABSTRACT Though little of the material contained in The Children of Húrin will be a revelation to longtime students of Tolkien, its publication is nonetheless a welcome event. The story of Túrin Turambar is one of Tolkien's strongest. It has languished for too long in incomplete versions in various installments or samples of the legendarium. Moreover, it has been overshadowed, even within the published "Silmarillion" tales, by the Lay of Leithian, the tale of the matchless love of Beren and Lúthien, because of that story's inherent nobility and grace as well as for its important role in the thematic backbone of The Lord of the Rings. But the story of Túrin, as Elrond makes clear in his acclamatory comments to Frodo after the council, is no less important among the tales of the Elder Days, or, as these days would be called after The Lord of the Rings was written, the First Age. In The Children of Húrin, Christopher Tolkien has put together a full, orderly narrative account of the story of Túrin Turambar, based on the iteration of the "Narn i Chîn Húrin" provided in Unfinished Tales. Christopher (with the assistance of his son Adam, who seems an adept of Middle-earth studies in his father's tradition) has made this piercing and riveting tale available to a far wider audience. The book is compact, with large print, and copiously illustrated, with eight full-color, glossy pictures and numerous small black-and-white illustrations before and after chapters. Yet it is not a coffee-table book or an enhanced livre de luxe. Those interested in a deluxe edition have available for them such a work, offered by Houghton Mifflin in the US and HarperCollins in the UK. This comes with a slipcase and special binding, and color frontispiece (of the Alan Lee dust-wrapper image) and color illustrations. The UK trade edition is also of larger dimensions than the US trade version, and gives the reader less of a cramped sensation than the reader of the US edition occasionally feels. (The deluxe UK and US editions are the same size.) The illustrations aside, the US trade edition looks and handles like any other book on the bestseller list. This is perhaps an aesthetic detriment but a help to those who want to get Tolkien read as literature and not merely as a publishing and marketing phenomenon. Advocates of Tolkien in literary terms have long had the problem that his writing about Middle-earth is really one giant work. But when described in publishing terms, Tolkien's Middle-earth writings consist of one complete work of narrative fiction, The Lord of the Rings, accompanied by a prequel written originally for children, The Hobbit, and supplemented by a vast array of posthumously published and heterogeneous background material possessing various degrees of narrative unity. The Children of Húrin solves the quandary of the casual reader who is interested in Tolkien's vision but who is, to put it bluntly, fatigued by hobbits, as no less an aficionado of Tolkien than the young Rayner Unwin once admitted to being. It gives the hobbit-averse somewhere to go. It also perhaps tells the hobbit-friendly just what their preferences as readers are. The readers who like the hobbits, find their absence lamentable, and find the Túrin story too depressing and the characters unlikable, are at least potentially more novel-readers than epic or tragedy-readers; their expectations of narrative situations are closer to Middlemarch or David Copperfield than the Aeneid, the Theban Plays, or for that matter Beowulf. It is good in general for Tolkien to have a short, accessible work in circulation, one that is part of the overall legendarium yet is not The Lord of the Rings; it will provide people an alternative complete work by which one can enter the oeuvre aside from the magnum opus. This is an option lacking, for instance, in the oeuvre of as great a writer as Marcel Proust. The respectful reviews the book has received so far—even the negative ones are not totally dismissive of Tolkien the way they would have been in...
It's known from [11, 10, 2] that in a contact manifold equipped with either a nondegenerate or Mo... more It's known from [11, 10, 2] that in a contact manifold equipped with either a nondegenerate or Morse-Bott contact form, a finite-energy pseudoholomorphic curve will be asymptotic at each of its nonremovable punctures to a single periodic orbit of the Reeb vector field and that the convergence is exponential. We provide examples here to show that this need not be the case if the contact form is degenerate. More specifically, we show that on any contact manifold (M, ξ) with cooriented contact structure one can choose a contact form λ with ker λ = ξ and a compatible complex structure J on ξ so that for the associated R-invariant almost complex structureJ on R × M there exist families of embedded finite-energỹ J-holomorphic cylinders and planes having embedded tori as limit sets.
Part 1, Geography, centers on West Africa, a site that Lemon calls proximal emotional challenges... more Part 1, Geography, centers on West Africa, a site that Lemon calls proximal emotional challenges for him as an African-American. For this piece, Lemon recruited Guinean and Ivorian performers and explored the reverberations of the African diaspora. Part 2, Tree, focuses ...
... Dante, Paradiso ... 10 Chretien weaves gossamer threads of crafted interpretation of the past... more ... Dante, Paradiso ... 10 Chretien weaves gossamer threads of crafted interpretation of the past as self-consciously as any postmodern metahistorian; yet his bravura has been supposed, at least until quite recently, to be effete, privileg-ing nonsensical derring-do over that more ...
Australian Critical Race ad Whiteness Studies …, 2009
The Chinese Canadian writer Larissa Lai's futuristic novel Salt Fish Girl imagines a mythic ... more The Chinese Canadian writer Larissa Lai's futuristic novel Salt Fish Girl imagines a mythic femininity that persists even amid its attempted suppression by transnational globalisation. Lai uses myth as a redemptive layer of experience, but does not do so in a modernist way that would ...
1. Patrick White and Late Modernity This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick Whit... more 1. Patrick White and Late Modernity This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-1990) presents, in his novel The Solid Mandala (1966), a prototypical evocation of late modernity that indicates precisely why and how it was different from the neoliberal and postmodern era that succeeded it. Late modernity is currently emerging as a historical period, though still a nascent and contested one. Robert Hassan speaks of the 1950-1970 era as a period which, in its ‘Fordist’ mode of production maintained a certain conformity yet held off the commoditisation of later neoliberalism’s ‘network-driven capitalism’. 1
The author's conclusion demonstrates that the rise of religious toleration, especially in the cas... more The author's conclusion demonstrates that the rise of religious toleration, especially in the case of John Henry Newman's life, did not necessarily mean that bigotry had disappeared from British society. Anti-Catholicism continued to persist throughout the nineteenth century. Sidenvall's description of the decline of anti-Catholic prejudice and the gradual softening of attitudes towards Newman is an important aspect of Victorian religious history, but his statement that around 1860 'Britain had rather reluctantly begun to come to terms with Catholicism' (p. 79) is a bit misleading. Anti-Catholicism continued to remain a strong force in British society throughout the nineteenth century, and the prejudice against Catholics only began to disappear during the 1890s. Erik Sidenvall's book is an important addition to Newman scholarship and British religious history. His insights into public opinion, the issue of religious conversion, and the relationship of prejudice and toleration are important elements in appreciating the dynamics of Victorian religion and the challenges of today's world where bigotry and intolerance still exist.
Uploads
Papers by Nicholas Birns