Brian W. Shaffer. The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction

Editor
Brian W. Shaffer is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for Faculty
Development at Rhodes College, USA. His previous publications include Understanding Kazuo
Ishiguro (1998), and Reading the Novel in English 19502000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2006). He is the
co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Conrads Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (2002),
and Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (2008), and the editor of A Companion to the British and
Irish Novel 19452000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2005).
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

www.literatureencyclopedia.com
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature is a comprehensive, scholarly, authoritative, and
critical overview of literature and theory comprising individual titles covering key literary genres,
periods, and sub-disciplines. Available both in print and online, this groundbreaking resource
provides students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in literature and
literary studies.
Published:
The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, General Editor: Michael Ryan
The Encyclopedia of the Novel, General Editor: Peter Melville Logan
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, General Editor: Brian W. Shaffer
Forthcoming:
The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, General Editors: Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.
and Alan Stewart
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, General Editor: Frederick Burwick
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, General Editors: William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew
Smith
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, General Editors: Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz
The Encyclopedia of
Twentieth-Century Fiction
General editor: Brian W. Shaffer
Volume I
Twentieth-Century
British and Irish Fiction
Volume II
Twentieth-Century
American Fiction
Volume III
Twentieth-Century
World Fiction
This edition first published 2011

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwells publishing program has
been merged with Wileys global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.
Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom
Editorial Offices
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for
permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.
The right of Brian W. Shaffer, Patrick ODonnell, David W. Madden, Justus Nieland, and John Clement Ball to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by
the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be
available in electronic books.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names
and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This
publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered.
It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional
advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The encyclopedia of twentieth-century fiction / general editor, Brian W. Shaffer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-9244-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. English fiction20th centuryHistory and criticismEncyclopedias. 2. American fiction20th
centuryHistory and criticismEncyclopedias. 3. Commonwealth fiction (English)History and
criticismEncyclopedias. 4. Authors, English20th centuryBiographyDictionaries. 5. Authors, American20th
centuryBiographyDictionaries. 6. Authors, Commonwealth20th centuryBiographyDictionaries. I. Shaffer,
Brian W., 1960- II. ODonnell, Patrick, 1948- III. Ball, John Clement, 1960- IV. Title: Encyclopedia of
20th-century fiction.
PR881.E48 2011
823.910903dc22
2010016469
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 9.5/11.5 Minion by Thomson Digital, Noida, India
01 2011
To Rachel, Hannah, and Ruth
Contents
Volume I: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction
Edited by Brian W. Shaffer
List of entries
Preface to The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction
Acknowledgments
Notes on contributors to volume I
Introduction to volume I
British and Irish Fiction: AZ
ix
xv
xix
xxi
1
7
Volume II: Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Edited by Patrick ODonnell, David W. Madden, and Justus Nieland
List of entries
Acknowledgments
Notes on contributors to volume II
Introduction to volume II
American Fiction: AZ
vii
xiii
xv
421
427
Volume III: Twentieth-Century World Fiction

Edited by John Clement Ball
List of entries
Acknowledgments
Notes on contributors to volume III
Introduction to volume III
World Fiction: AZ
Index
vii
xiii
xv
937
942
1400
List of Entries
Volume I: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction
Ackroyd, Peter 7
Aldington, Richard 8
Amis, Kingsley 10
Amis, Martin 13
Angry Young Man Fiction 15
Awards and Prizes 19
Bainbridge, Beryl 24
Ballard, J. G. 26
Banville, John 28
Barker, Pat 29
Barnes, Julian 31
Beckett, Samuel 34
Bennett, Arnold 39
Berger, John 40
Bolger, Dermot 42
Bowen, Elizabeth 44
Boyd, William 46
Brooke-Rose, Christine 47
Brookner, Anita 49
Byatt, A. S. 51
Campus Novel 54
Carswell, Catherine 57
Carter, Angela 58
Cary, Joyce 62
Censorship and the Novel 63
Chicklit and Ladlit 68
Childrens and Young Adult Fiction 71
Coe, Jonathan 75
Colonial Fiction 77
Compton-Burnett, Ivy 82
Conrad, Joseph 83
Crace, Jim 88
Critical Theory and the Novel 90
Doyle, Roddy 98
Drabble, Margaret 99
Durrell, Lawrence 102
Edwardian Fiction 106
Fantasy Fiction 113
Farrell, J. G. 117
Feminist Fiction 119
Figes, Eva 123
The Film Industry and Fiction 125
Firbank, Ronald 129

Fitzgerald, Penelope 130
Ford, Ford Madox 132
Forster, E. M. 136
Fowles, John 140
Frayn, Michael 143
Galloway, Janice 146
Galsworthy, John 147
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 151
Globalization and the Novel 152
Golding, William 156
Graves, Robert 159
Gray, Alasdair 161
Green, Henry 162
Greene, Graham 165
Gunn, Neil M. 170
Hamilton, Patrick 172
Historical Fiction 174
Hollinghurst, Alan 178
Huxley, Aldous 180
Irish Fiction 184
Isherwood, Christopher 189
Ishiguro, Kazuo 192
James, P. D. 195
Jenkins, Robin 196
Jewish Fiction 198
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 202
Johnson, B. S. 203
Joyce, James 205
Kelman, James 211
Kennedy, A. L. 213
Kiely, Benedict 214
Kureishi, Hanif 217
Lawrence, D. H. 219
Lehmann, Rosamond 225
Lewis, Wyndham 227
Lively, Penelope 230
London in Fiction 232
Lowry, Malcolm 237
Macaulay, Rose 241
Manning, Olivia 242
Mantel, Hilary 244
LIST OF ENTRIES
Maugham, W. Somerset 246

McCabe, Patrick 249
McEwan, Ian 250
McGahern, John 253
McLiam Wilson, Robert 254
Mo, Timothy 256
Modernist Fiction 257
Moore, Brian 262
Murdoch, Iris 264
Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction 267
OBrien, Edna 272
OBrien, Flann 275
OConnor, Frank 278
OFlaherty, Liam 279
Orwell, George 281
Phillips, Caryl 287
Politics and the Novel 288
Postcolonial Fiction of the African
Diaspora 294
Postcolonial Fiction of the British South
Asian Diaspora 298
Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/
Caribbean Diaspora 303
Postmodernist Fiction 308
Powell, Anthony 313
Priestley, J. B. 314
The Publishing Industry: The Rise of the
Paperback 316
Pym, Barbara 320
Queer/Alternative Sexualities in
Fiction 322
Richardson, Dorothy 328

Science Fiction 332
Scott, Paul 337
Scottish Fiction 339
Self, Will 344
Sinclair, Iain 346
Sinclair, May 348
Smith, Zadie 350
Spark, Muriel 352
Storey, David 355
Swift, Graham 357
Thomas, D. M. 359
T
oibn, Colm 361
Trevor, William 364
Upward, Edward 367
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
Warner, Alan 374
Waugh, Evelyn 376
Weldon, Fay 380
Wells, H. G. 382
Welsh Fiction in English 385
Welsh, Irvine 390
West, Rebecca 392
Wilson, Angus 394
Winterson, Jeanette 397
Wodehouse, P. G. 398
Woolf, Virginia 401
Working-Class Fiction 406
World War I in Fiction 412
World War II in Fiction 416
Volume II: Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Acker, Kathy 427
Agee, James 428
Alexie, Sherman 430
Algren, Nelson 432
Anaya, Rudolfo 434
Anderson, Sherwood 435
Auster, Paul 438
The Avant Garde Novel 439
Baker, Nicholson 445
Baldwin, James 446
Banks, Russell 449
Barnes, Djuna 451
Barth, John 454
Barthelme, Donald 458
Bellow, Saul 459
Berger, Thomas 464
Border Fictions 465
Boyle, Kay 469

Brautigan, Richard 471
Buck, Pearl S. 472
Bukowski, Charles 474
Burroughs, William 476
Butler, Octavia 479
Cain, James M. 481
Canfield, Dorothy 482
Carver, Raymond 484
Castillo, Ana 486
Cather, Willa 487
Chabon, Michael 491
Chandler, Raymond 493
Cheever, John 494
Chesnutt, Charles W. 496
Cisneros, Sandra 499
The City in Fiction 500
368
LIST OF ENTRIES
Coover, Robert 505

Dahlberg, Edward 508
Danticat, Edwidge 509
Davenport, Guy 511
Delany, Samuel 513
DeLillo, Don 514
Dick, Philip K. 517
Didion, Joan 519
Dixon, Stephen 520
Doctorow, E. L. 522
Dos Passos, John 524
Dreiser, Theodore 528
Du Bois, W. E. B. 531
Ducornet, Rikki 534
Dybek, Stuart 536
Elkin, Stanley 538
Ellison, Ralph 540
Ellroy, James 544
Erdrich, Louise 545
Ethnicity and Fiction 547
Eugenides, Jeffrey 552
Everett, Percival 553
Expatriate Fiction 555
Farrell, James T. 560
Faulkner, William 561
Fauset, Jessie Redmon 566
Ferber, Edna 568
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 569
Foer, Jonathan Safran 574
Ford, Richard 575
Frank, Waldo 576
Franzen, Jonathan 578
Gaddis, William 581
Gaines, Ernest J. 584
Gardner, John 585
Gass, William H. 587
Gender and the Novel 590
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 594
Glasgow, Ellen 597
Gold, Mike 599
Gordon, Mary 600
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 603
Hagedorn, Jessica 604
Hammett, Dashiell 606
The Harlem Renaissance 607
Harrison, Jim 612
Hawkes, John 613
Heller, Joseph 615
Hemingway, Ernest 616
Herbst, Josephine 620
Highsmith, Patricia 622
Himes, Chester 624

Historiographic Metafiction 626
Howard, Maureen 630
Hughes, Langston 631
Hurston, Zora Neale 633
Irving, John 637
James, Henry 639
Johnson, Charles 643
Johnson, Denis 644
Jones, Edward P. 646
Jones, Gayl 647
Kennedy, William 650
Kerouac, Jack 651
Kingston, Maxine Hong 654
Kosinski, Jerzy 656
Larsen, Nella 658
Lee, Chang-rae 659
Le Guin, Ursula K. 661
Lethem, Jonathan 662
Lewis, Sinclair 664
The Little Magazines 666
London, Jack 671
Mailer, Norman 676
Major, Clarence 680
Malamud, Bernard 681
Markson, David 684
Marshall, Paule 686
Maso, Carole 688
Mathews, Harry 689
Maupin, Armistead 691
McCarthy, Cormac 692
McCarthy, Mary 695
McCullers, Carson 697
McElroy, Joseph 698
McKay, Claude 700
Miller, Henry 702
Millhauser, Steven 705
Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction 706
Modern Fiction in Hollywood 710
Modernist Fiction 715
Momaday, N. Scott 719
Moore, Lorrie 721
Morris, Wright 722
Morrison, Toni 724
Nabokov, Vladimir 729
Naturalist Fiction 733
Naylor, Gloria 738
Noir Fiction 739
Norris, Frank 743
The Novel and War 745
Oates, Joyce Carol 750
xi
xii
LIST OF ENTRIES
OConnor, Flannery 753

Olsen, Tillie 756
Ortiz, Simon J. 757
Ozick, Cynthia 759
Paley, Grace 761
Parker, Dorothy 762
Percy, Walker 764
Petry, Ann 765
Phillips, Jayne Anne 767
Piercy, Marge 768
Porter, Katherine Anne 770
Postmodernist Fiction 773
Powell, Dawn 777
Powers, Richard 779
Price, Reynolds 780
Proulx, Annie 782
Purdy, James 783
Pynchon, Thomas 785
Queer Modernism 790
Rand, Ayn 795
Rechy, John 796
Reed, Ishmael 798
The Road Novel 799
Robinson, Marilynne 804
Roth, Henry 805
Roth, Philip 808
Russ, Joanna 812
Salinger, J. D. 815
Schuyler, George S. 816
Scott, Joanna 818
Selby, Hubert, Jr. 819
Silko, Leslie Marmon 821
Sinclair, Upton 823
Singer, Isaac Bashevis 824
Smiley, Jane 826
Social-Realist Fiction 827
Sontag, Susan 832
Sorrentino, Gilbert 833
The Southern Novel 835
Speculative Fiction 840
Spiegelman, Art 844

Stegner, Wallace 846
Stein, Gertrude 847
Steinbeck, John 852
Stephenson, Neal 855
Stone, Robert 856
Styron, William 858
Tan, Amy 862
Television and Fiction 863
Thompson, Jim 868
Toomer, Jean 869
Traven, B. 872
Tyler, Anne 873
Updike, John 876
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction 879
Van Vechten, Carl 884
Vidal, Gore 885
Viramontes, Helena Mara 887
Vizenor, Gerald 888
Vollmann, William T. 890
Vonnegut, Kurt 892
Walker, Alice 894
Wallace, David Foster 895
Warren, Robert Penn 897
Welch, James 899
Welty, Eudora Alice 900
West, Nathanael 903
West, Paul 906
Wharton, Edith 908
White, Edmund 912
Whitehead, Colson 913
Wideman, John Edgar 915
Wilder, Thornton 916
Wolfe, Thomas 918
Wolfe, Tom 921
WPA and Popular Front Fiction 922
Wright, Richard 927
Wright, Stephen 930
Yezierska, Anzia 933
Young, Marguerite 935
Volume III: Twentieth-Century World Fiction

Abrahams, Peter 942
Achebe, Chinua 943
Aidoo, Ama Ata 948
Ali, Ahmed 949
Amadi, Elechi 950
Anand, Mulk Raj 952
Anderson, Jessica 955
Anthony, Michael 956
Antoni, Robert 958

Arasanayagam, Jean 959
Armah, Ayi Kwei 961
Aslam, Nadeem 963
Astley, Thea 964
Atwood, Margaret 965
Australian Fiction 970
Awards and Prizes 973
LIST OF ENTRIES
Awoonor, Kofi 977

Bail, Murray 980
Baratham, Gopal 981
Bissoondath, Neil 983
Black British Fiction 985
Boyd, Martin 986
Brand, Dionne 988
Brink, Andre 989
Brodber, Erna 991
Callaghan, Morley 995
Canadian Fiction 996
Carey, Peter 1000
Censorship and Fiction 1002
Chandra, Vikram 1007
Chaudhuri, Amit 1008
Childrens and Young Adult Fiction 1010
The City in Fiction 1014
Clarke, Austin 1017
Cliff, Michelle 1020
Coetzee, J. M. 1022
Collins, Merle 1026
Coupland, Douglas 1027
Critical Theory and Fiction 1029
Dabydeen, David 1034
Dangarembga, Tsitsi 1035
Davies, Robertson 1037
de Lisser, Herbert G. 1040
Desai, Anita 1041
Desani, G. V. 1044
Detective/Crime Fiction 1046
Duggan, Maurice 1048
Duncan, Sara Jeannette 1050
East African Fiction 1052
East Asian Fiction 1055
Ekwensi, Cyprian 1057
Emecheta, Buchi 1058
English Studies, the Academy,
and Fiction 1061
Fantasy, Science Fiction, and
Speculative Fiction 1066
Farah, Nuruddin 1070
Feminism and Fiction 1071
Fernando, Lloyd 1074
Fictional Responses to Canonical
English Narratives 1076
Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction 1081
Findley, Timothy 1085
Frame, Janet 1088
Franklin, Miles 1092
Gallant, Mavis 1094
Gee, Maurice 1097
Ghose, Zulfikar 1099

Ghosh, Amitav 1100
Gibson, William 1103
Gilroy, Beryl 1105
Gooneratne, Yasmine 1107
Goonewardene, James 1108
Gordimer, Nadine 1110
Grace, Patricia 1114
Grenville, Kate 1115
Grove, Frederick Philip 1117
Gunesekera, Romesh 1118
Harris, Wilson 1121
Head, Bessie 1124
Heath, Roy 1126
Herbert, Xavier 1127
Historical Fiction 1129
Hodgins, Jack 1134
Hosain, Attia 1135
Hospital, Janette Turner 1137
Hulme, Keri 1138
Humor and Satire 1140
Ihimaera, Witi 1145
Indian Fiction 1146
Indigenous Fiction 1149
James, C. L. R. 1154
Jin, Ha 1155
Joaquin, Nick 1157
Johnston, Wayne 1158
Jolley, Elizabeth 1160
Jose, F. Sionil 1163
Joshi, Arun 1164
Keneally, Thomas 1167
Kincaid, Jamaica 1170
King, Thomas 1173
Kogawa, Joy 1174
Kroetsch, Robert 1176
La Guma, Alex 1180
Lamming, George 1181
Laurence, Margaret 1183
Leacock, Stephen 1186
Lessing, Doris 1187
Lim, Catherine 1192
Lim, Suchen Christine 1194
Lovelace, Earl 1196
MacLennan, Hugh 1198
MacLeod, Alistair 1200
Mais, Roger 1201
Malgonkar, Manohar 1202
Malouf, David 1204
Maniam, K. S. 1207
Mansfield, Katherine 1209
xiii
xiv
LIST OF ENTRIES
Maracle, Lee 1212

Marechera, Dambudzo 1213
Markandaya, Kamala 1215
Marlatt, Daphne 1218
Melville, Pauline 1219
Migration, Diaspora, and Exile
in Fiction 1221
Miller, Alex 1225
Min, Anchee 1227
Mistry, Rohinton 1229
Mitchell, W. O. 1231
Mittelholzer, Edgar 1233
Montgomery, L. M. 1235
Moorhouse, Frank 1238
Mphalele, Eskia 1239
Mudrooroo 1241
Mukherjee, Bharati 1244
Munro, Alice 1247
Naipaul, V. S. 1252
Narayan, R. K. 1256
New Zealand Fiction 1260
Ng~
ug~ wa Thiongo 1262
Nkosi, Lewis 1266
Nwapa, Flora 1267
Okara, Gabriel 1270
Okri, Ben 1271
Ondaatje, Michael 1273
Pakistani Fiction 1277
Paton, Alan 1279
Politics/Activism and Fiction 1280
Postcolonialism and Fiction 1284
Prichard, Katharine Susannah 1289
The Publishing Industry and Fiction 1291
Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction 1296
Rao, Raja 1300
Realism/Magic Realism 1303
Reid, V. S. 1305
Rhys, Jean 1307
Richards, David Adams 1310
Richardson, Henry Handel 1311
Richler, Mordecai 1313
Riley, Joan 1316

Ross, Sinclair 1317
Roy, Arundhati 1318
Rushdie, Salman 1320
Sahgal, Nayantara 1325
Salkey, Andrew 1326
Sarachchandra, Ediriwira 1328
Sargeson, Frank 1329
Saro-Wiwa, Ken 1331
Scott, Kim 1333
Sealy, I. Allan 1334
Selvon, Sam 1336
Senior, Olive 1338
Seth, Vikram 1340
Shadbolt, Maurice 1342
Shields, Carol 1343
Sidhwa, Bapsi 1345
Singh, Khushwant 1348
South Pacific Fiction 1349
Southeast Asian Fiction 1351
Southern African Fiction 1353
Soyinka, Wole 1356
Sri Lankan Fiction 1360
Stead, Christina 1361
Stow, Randolph 1363
Tharoor, Shashi 1365
Tlali, Miriam 1366
Tutuola, Amos 1368
Urquhart, Jane 1370
Vanderhaeghe, Guy 1373
Vassanji, M. G. 1374
Vera, Yvonne 1376
Wendt, Albert 1378
West African Fiction 1379
West Indian Fiction 1382
White, Patrick 1385
Wiebe, Rudy 1390
Wilson, Ethel 1391
Winton, Tim 1393
Wiseman, Adele 1396
Zameenzad, Adam 1398
Preface to The Encyclopedia of

Salman Rushdie, that most international of novelists, has famously remarked that the novel has never been
a more international form.1 This is particularly true of fiction written in the
English language within the last several
decades. Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way
Dasenbrock elaborate upon this point:
The single most important development
in literature written in English over the
past century has been its increasingly
international indeed, global nature.
Once the language of a few million people
on a small island on the edge of Europe,
English is now spoken and written on
every continent and is an important language inside at least one-quarter of the
worlds one hundred sixty countries.
As English has become an important
international language, it has also become
an important international literary
language.2
It is no mystery why this shift occurred.

World War II helped accelerate the
break-up of the British Empire (and further rise of American prestige), and
Britains abortive intervention in the
Suez crisis of 1956 marked the decline of
British imperial standing. If London
dominated 25 percent of the earths surface at the turn of the nineteenth century,
with control of nearly four million square
miles, this dominance, in the three decades following World War II, would
shrink to a tiny fraction of that figure.
As one observer remarked, Britains
major historical experience in the
twentieth century, other than the two
World Wars, was the final flourishing,
later decline and eventual loss of the

Empire.3
Britains political empire in Africa,
South Asia, and the West Indies may be
gone, but its linguistic empire is stronger than ever. As Jussawalla & Dasenbrock
observe, The Sun may now have set on
the British empire, but that empire, in
establishing English as a language of trade,
government, and education in that sizable
part of the world ruled by the British,
helped create what may be a more enduring empire of the English language.4
Rushdie casts this linguistic dominance
in yet more favorable terms. While it is
true that English is the global language as
a result of the physical colonization of a
quarter of the globe by the British, Rushdie eschews viewing this language as an
unwanted imposition of formerly colonized peoples, instead regarding it as a
gift of the British colonizers, a legacy that
in any case ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago.5
Rushdies point, coupled with the reality of a globalized world in which
English-language authors on different
continents so readily read and respond
to each others works, provides the rationale for a major reference text such as The
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, which brings together the major
English-language fiction, figures, debates, rubrics, and movements of the
period from around the world. Novelists
and short story writers are currently
transcending geographical boundaries in
their work; research tools are therefore
called for which transcend these
xvi
PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION
same boundaries. The Encyclopedia of

Twentieth- Century Fiction, with its total
of more than 550 entries, accomplishes
this very goal. The work provides a convenient and authoritative point of departure for undergraduate and graduate
student research, teachers and scholars
preparing course syllabi, and general
readers in search of reliable, up-to-date
bibliographies
and
filmographies.
Indeed, The Encyclopedia of TwentiethCentury Fiction, which in separate volumes covers British and Irish fiction; US
fiction; and world fiction in English
(from Africa, Australia/New Zealand,
Canada, South Asia, the West Indies, and
East and Southeast Asia) is the most
comprehensive single-resource mapping
of this vast, rich, spectacularly heterogeneous field yet undertaken. The three
volumes treat not only key authors and
texts from the period but also crucial
aesthetic and cultural, socioeconomic
and political, and national and supranational contexts out of which the novels,
novellas, and short fictions emerged. Put
simply, The Encyclopedia of TwentiethCentury Fiction aims to elucidate the
most important texts and contexts of
twentieth-century fiction novels, novellas, and short fiction in English. It is
also the most technologically sophisticated work of its kind in that it is being
published both in print and in electronic
formats, the latter of which allows for
advanced cross-referencing between and
among entries and for the periodic updating of entries.
A word on the division of twentiethcentury fiction in English into three volumes is merited. The authors have been
divided up across the volumes of the
encyclopedia, with very few exceptions,
based on their place of geographical origin rather than on their national and
ethnic affiliations, cultural influences, or
place(s) of residence (as practicing writers of fiction). Without this guiding

principle of organization, it would have
been difficult to decide where to place the
large number of authors of the last century who traversed standard cultural,
geographic, and/or ethnic boundaries
(Kazuo Ishiguro, Jean Rhys, Henry
James, V. S. Naipaul, Malcolm Lowry,
and Salman Rushdie, for example, might
have fitted in either of two volumes). The
three volumes of the encyclopedia are
nevertheless designed to speak to each
other and be consulted together; the
boundaries between them as they are
between the various authors and movements covered within are porous rather
than absolute. In this spirit, entries in all
three volumes are cross-referenced, as
appropriate, to entries both within their
own volume and in the other two
volumes of the encyclopedia. Crossreferenced entries are designated as either
(BIF), (AF), or (WF) corresponding to
British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, or World Fiction in order to make
it instantly clear to readers in which
volume the listed entry can be found.
As far as the content of the volumes
entries are concerned, those entries devoted to individual authors address the
authors life, literary milieu, influences,
key prose works, and reception. These
entries conclude with a bibliography of
major primary texts, critical works, and,
where appropriate, film and video adaptations of the fictions in question. Entries
on broad topics movements, debates,
rubrics, and the like by necessity must
be even more surgical in focus. They are
nevertheless intended to provide a substantial, reliable, engaging overview of the
topic in question and to point the reader
in the direction of major primary works
and recommended secondary reading.
Many of these broader subject entries
PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION
also implicitly advance an argument

about the topic in question, although
never at the expense of coverage and
balance. All of the entries strive to communicate the richness and depth of their
subjects as fully and clearly as possible
given the necessary constraints of
space.
Contributors to these volumes come
from both sides of the Atlantic and be-
xvii
yond and have been chosen in accordance

with their expertise. It is logical that an
encyclopedia with a genuinely global
scope would attract a global scholarly
authorship. Collectively, the contributors
demonstrate the vitality and diversity of
the critical and contextual lenses through
which the field of twentieth-century fiction in English is being explored and
mapped today.
Notes
1 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991 (London: Granta, 1991), p. 20.
2 Feroza Jussawalla & Reed Way Dasenbrock, Introduction, in Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial
World (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), p. 3.
3 Randall Stevenson, A Readers Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1993), p. 126.
4 Jussawalla & Dasenbrock, Introduction, p. 4.
5 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, pp. 64, 70.
Acknowledgments
A project of this magnitude could not possibly
have come to fruition without the input and
efforts of many people over a number of years.
My debts are as great as they are numerous. At
Wiley-Blackwell, Emma Bennett and Isobel
Bainton nurtured this project from its earliest
through its final stages. Without their experience, wisdom, and patience these volumes
would not have materialized. Four anonymous readers for Wiley-Blackwell helped me
hone the conception and design of these
volumes and refine the entries list. Special
thanks are also due the project manager of the
Encyclopedia, Amy Clark, whose intelligence,
professionalism, and technical savvy kept
things humming along through thick and
thin; and Barbara Duke, Janey Fisher, Jacqueline Harvey, and other members of the production and editorial teams for their invaluable input. My fellow volume editors John
Ball, Patrick ODonnell, David Madden, and
Justus Nieland turned what might have been
a tedious editorial process into a welcome

voyage of intellectual discovery: I learned
much from them about the fiction we all prize
during the preparation of these volumes. At
Rhodes College, my capable research assistant,
Molly Ryan, provided much appreciated organizational and editorial assistance. I am
grateful as well to many faculty colleagues, in
particular Jennifer Brady, for their friendship
and encouragement during my work on this
project, and to the Dean of the Faculty, Michael Drompp, for his support. Members of
my family my wife Rachel, daughters Hannah and Ruth, and mother Dorothy make
everything possible and worthwhile, and so I
wish to thank them, as always, for their inspiration and example. Finally, a word of thanks
to my brother-in-law and fellow malt advocate
David for talking books with me during the
years in which this project was taking shape.
Brian W. Shaffer
The Encyclopedia of
Volume I
Twentieth-Century
British and Irish Fiction
Volume editor:
Brian W. Shaffer
Notes on Contributors to Volume I

Fiona Becket is a senior lecturer at the University of Leeds. She has written widely on the
work of D. H. Lawrence and her publications
include a study of the language of his major
novels and his books on the unconscious,
D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (1997),
as well as a critical guide to D. H. Lawrence
(2002). Other publications include studies of
twentieth-century and contemporary fiction,
poetry, and drama.
Nick Bentley lectures in English literature at
Keele University. His main research interests
are in post-1945 British literature and literary
and cultural theory, and especially in intersections of postmodernism, postcolonialism,
and contemporary fiction and culture. He is
author of Contemporary British Fiction (2008)
and Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the
1950s (2007), and editor of British Fiction of
the 1990s (2005). He has also published
essays on Julian Barnes, Doris Lessing, Colin
MacInnes, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Alan
Sillitoe, and the representations of youth in
British New Left writing. He is currently
working on a book on Martin Amis.
Christine Berberich is senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Portsmouth. She is the author of The Image of the
English Gentleman: Englishness and Nostalgia
(2007), and has published extensively on
Englishness and national identity, as well as
on George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony
Powell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, and W.
G. Sebald.
Stephen Bernstein is professor of English at
the University of MichiganFlint. His publications include the book Alasdair Gray
(1999), and articles and book chapters on
Gray, James Kelman, Samuel Beckett, Don
DeLillo, and a variety of other writers.
Nicholas Birns is the author of Understanding Anthony Powell (2004) and coeditor of A
Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900
(2007). He teaches literature at Eugene Lang
College, The New School for Liberal Arts.
Howard J. Booth teaches English Literature at
the University of Manchester. He is the author
of articles on male homosexuality in John
Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, Compton
Mackenzie, and D. H. Lawrence. The coeditor
of Modernism and Empire (2000), he has
edited New D. H. Lawrence (2009) and The
Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling
(2010).
Martine Watson Brownley is Goodrich C.
White Professor of English and Director of
the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic
Inquiry at Emory University, where she works
in eighteenth-century English literature and
womens studies. Her eighteenth-century
publications include Clarendon and the
Rhetoric of Historical Form, an edition of
Clarendons Dialogues, and numerous articles.
In the field of womens studies, in addition to
her book Deferrals of Domain: Contemporary
Women Novelists and the State, she has
coedited two essay collections and published
articles on women writers ranging from Aphra
Behn to Christina Rossetti.
Bradley W. Buchanan is associate professor
of English at California State University, Sacramento. His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Twentieth Century Literature,
the Journal of Modern Literature, the Seattle
Review, and Fulcrum. He also edits the Tule
Review and is the founder of Roan Press.
Gerard Carruthers is reader and head of the
Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. His publications include
Robert Burns (2006), (as editor) The Devil to
xxii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (2007), and

(as coeditor) Beyond Scotland: New Contexts
for Twentieth Century Scottish Literature
(2004). He has recently been appointed general editor of the new Oxford University Press
multivolume edition of the works of Robert
Burns.
Ian Carter is professor of sociology at the
University of Auckland, New Zealand. Ruthlessly exploiting university teachers dwindling academic freedom, he has spent 40 years
indulging personal interests by writing books
about the eclipse of peasant agriculture in
Victorian and Edwardian northeast Scotland;
British university fiction; railways, culture,
and amateur enthusiasm in Britain; and New
Zealands first director of broadcasting.
Deborah Cartmell is a reader in English and
director of the Centre for Adaptations at De
Montfort University. She is editor of Shakespeare and Adaptation and has published in
Shakespeare on screen and adaptations. She is
currently writing a monograph of Pride and
Prejudice on Screen for the Methuen Screen
Adaptations Series for which she is a general
editor.
Winnie Chan teaches colonial and postcolonial Anglophone literatures at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she recently
completed her second book, Imperial Gastronomy, which examines relationships among
eating, empire, and literary representation.
Peter Childs is professor of modern English
literature and dean of research at the University of Gloucestershire where he teaches twentieth-century and postcolonial literature. He
has published widely in the areas of modern
writing, British culture, and critical theory,
specializing in the English novel post-1900.
Michael Copp is an independent scholar and
former tutor at the Institute of Continuing
Education, Cambridge University. He is the
author/editor of Cambridge Poets of the Great
War: An Anthology (2001), An Imagist at War:
The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington
(2002), and The Fourth Imagist: Selected
Poems of F. S. Flint (2007). He has also
contributed the entry on F. S. Flint for The
Literary Encyclopedia. He is currently editing

the letters of Richard Aldington and F. S.
Flint.
Michael Cotsell is the author of Barbara Pym
(1989) and of books on Charles Dickens and
American drama. He was associate editor of
the Dickens Companions and general editor
of the series English Literature and the Wider
World. He teaches at the University of
Delaware.
Ralph Crane is professor of English and
head of the School of English, Journalism
and European Languages at the University
of Tasmania. He has published widely
in the areas of Indian and Anglo-Indian
literatures. His recent books include scholarly editions of four Raj novels Charles
Pearces Love Beseiged, Maud Divers Lilamani, Margaret Wilsons Daughters of
India, and A. E. W. Masons The Broken
Road all published by Oxford University
Press India.
Sara Crangle is a lecturer at the University of
Sussex, and a former research fellow of
Queens College, Cambridge. She has published work on Hardy, Woolf, and Christine
Brooke-Rose, among others. She is currently
completing a book entitled Prosaic Desires:
Modernist Knowing, Boredom, Laughter, and
Anticipation, which focuses on intersections
between high modernist writers and philosophical thought. She is also coediting an
essay collection on bathos.
Alice Crawford wrote her PhD thesis on Rose
Macaulay at the University of Glasgow, and
her book, Paradise Pursued: The Novels of Rose
Macaulay was published in 1995. She is academic liaison librarian for arts and divinity at
the University of St. Andrews.
Paul Crosthwaite is lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University. He has published on topics including the postmodernist
novel, fictions of globalization, trauma theory, and the significance of speed and acceleration in contemporary culture. His book,
Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath
of World War II, is published by Palgrave
Macmillan.
Alison Cullingford is special collections librarian at the University of Bradford, home to

the archives of J. B. Priestley, Jacquetta
Hawkes, and other collections on peace,
Yorkshire history, and archaeology.
Elke DHoker is assistant professor at the
Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She
has written a critical study on the works of John
Banville (2004) and has published widely in the
field of Irish and British fiction. Her articles have
appeared in Contemporary Literature, Modern
Fiction Studies, Critique, Journal of the Short
Story in English, and Irish University Review.
She is currently writing a book on the short story
by Irish women writers.
Alistair Davies teaches English literature at
the University of Sussex. He has coedited,
with Alan Sinfield, British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society
19451999 (2000).
Damon Marcel Decoste is associate professor
of English at the University of Regina, where
he teaches twentieth-century British and
American literature. He has published essays
on Ford Madox Ford, Richard Wright, Evelyn
Waugh, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry,
and Graham Swift. Author of The Literary
Response to World War II, in Blackwells
Companion to the British and Irish Novel,
19452000, DeCoste has recently completed
a book-length manuscript on British wartime
fiction and is currently at work on a detailed
study of Waughs postwar writings.
Brian Diemert is a full professor of English at
Brescia University College in London, Ontario. He is the author of Graham Greenes
Thrillers and the 1930s (1996) and of several
articles. He specializes in modern British and
American literature, especially the 190050
period, and is interested in detective fiction
and popular studies.
Paul Edwards is professor of English and
history of art at Bath Spa University. Besides
writing extensively on Wyndham Lewis, he
has published articles on Tom Stoppard, Ian
McEwan, and World War I fiction and literary
memoirs, and has contributed to the Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English
xxiii
Literature. He co-curated the National Portrait Gallerys exhibition, Wyndham Lewis

Portraits, in 2008 and wrote the accompanying catalogue.
John Eustace is an associate professor in
English at Acadia University in Wolfville,
Nova Scotia, where he teaches postcolonial
literature and theory. He has published articles on Joyce Cary, Peter Cary, Margaret
Lawrence, Rohinton Mistry, and Australian
culture.
Chris Ferns is a professor of English at Mount
Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova
Scotia. He is the author of Aldous Huxley:
Novelist (1980) and Narrating Utopia (1999),
as well as numerous articles on utopian literature and the historical novel.
Lisa Fluet is an assistant professor of English
at Boston College, specializing in twentiethcentury literatures in English. She is currently
working on a manuscript, Brilliant Career:
Modernism, Class and Knowledge-Work in
the Twentieth Century, and has published
articles in Novel, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the collection Bad Modernisms
(2006).
Dennis A. Foster has published two books
with Cambridge University Press: Confession
and Complicity in Narrative (1987) and Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in
American Literature (1997). In addition he
has edited a collection of essays with Molly
zek, Perversion and
Rothenberg and Slavoj Zi
the Social Relation (2003), and a dozen essays
on literary theory and contemporary fiction.
He is currently the D. D. Frensley Professor of
English at Southern Methodist University.
Oona Frawley lectures in English at the
National University of Ireland, Maynooth,
and has held positions at Trinity College
Dublin and Queens University Belfast. She
is the author of Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia in
Twentieth Century Irish Literature (2005), and
the editor of A New and Complex Sensation:
Essays on Joyces Dubliners (2004), New
Dubliners (2005), and Selected Essays of Nuala
N Dhomhnaill (2005). She is currently
editing a four-volume project for Syracuse
xxiv
University Press, Irish Cultural Memory

(201011) and completing a book on Edmund Spenser, Spensers Trace.
Ariela Freedman is an associate professor at
the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include
memory studies, World War I, James Joyce,
and postcolonialism. She has published
articles in numerous journals, including
Modernism/Modernity and Journal of Modern Literature, and her book Death, Men, and
Modernism appeared in 2003.
Hedda Friberg-Harnesk is associate professor of English at Mid Sweden University,
Harn
osand. She is coeditor of Recovering
Memory: Irish Representations of Past and
Present (2007). She has contributed to ReMapping Exile (2005) and to publications
such as Nordic Irish Studies (NIS) and, with
pieces on Banville, to the Irish University
Review and An Sionnach, in 2006 and 2005,
respectively. A monograph, tentatively entitled The Fleetingly Real: Simulation in John
Banvilles Work 19972007, is in the pipeline
and she is coeditor of a forthcoming collection on cross-culturality in Irish writing.
James Gifford is assistant professor of English
and Director of the University Core at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Vancouver. He
edited critical editions of Lawrence Durrells
first novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic
Spring, and has published widely on twentieth-century British and American literature.
He is equally active in opera and chamber
music performance.
David Goldie is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University
of Strathclyde. He is the author of A Critical
Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton
Murray in English Literary Criticism,
19191928 (1998); and, with Gerard Carruthers and Alastair Renfrew, the editor of
Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for TwentiethCentury Scottish Literature (2004) and of
the forthcoming Scotland in the NineteenthCentury World.
Sebastian Groes is lecturer in English literature at Roehampton University, London. He
specializes in modern and contemporary culture and literature, and representations of

cities. He is the author of The Making of
London (2011), the editor of Ian McEwan
(2009), and the coeditor of Kazuo Ishiguro
(2009), Julian Barnes (2009), and Kazuo
Ishiguro: Critical Visions of the Novel (2010).
Dave Gunning lectures in English literature at
the University of Birmingham. He is
the author of the forthcoming books Race
and Antiracism in Black British and British
Asian Literature (Liverpool University Press)
and Postcolonial Literature (Edinburgh University Press).
Scott Hames lectures on Scottish literature at
the University of Stirling. He is the editor of
the Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman
(2010) and has published articles on Kelman,
William McIlvanney, Don Paterson, and
Robert Louis Stevenson. He coedits the International Journal of Scottish Literature.
Tracy Hargreaves is a senior lecturer in the
School of English, University of Leeds where
she teaches twentieth Literature. She has written on Donna Tartts The Secret History
and published a critical study, Androgyny in
Modern Literature (2004). She is currently
researching the twentieth English family
saga and has also published on Woolf and
Galsworthy.
Graeme Harper is professor of creative writing and director of the National Institute for
Excellence in the Creative Industries at Bangor University, UK. Chair of the International
Centre for Creative Writing Research
(ICCWR), he is also editor-in-chief of New
Writing: The International Journal for the
Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. His
latest works are the novel Moon Dance (2008),
published under his pseudonym, Brooke
Biaz, and The Creative Writing Guidebook
(2008).
Sara Haslam is lecturer in English at the Open
University. She is the author of Fragmenting
Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and
the Great War (2002), and editor of Fords
England and the English (2003), as well as Ford
Madox Ford and the City (2005), the fourth
volume of International Ford Madox Ford

Studies. She has published a number of articles on Ford, Henry James, and modernism.
Current projects include a book, Victims of
Time and Train: From Victorian Invention to
Modernist Novel and an essay for the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to TwentiethCentury English and American War Literature.
Janis Haswell is a professor of English at
Texas A&M UniversityCorpus Christi,
where she teaches British literature and composition and directs the honors program. She
has published monographs on W. B. Yeats
and Paul Scott, along with numerous articles
on teaching literature and composition.
M. Hunter Hayes is an assistant professor at
Texas A&M UniversityCommerce, where he
specializes in contemporary and twentiethcentury British literature. The author of
Understanding Will Self (2007), he has also
published articles on Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and other British writers. He is currently
working on a book about Elmore Leonard, the
American crime novelist.
Elaine Yee Lin Ho has published articles on
Renaissance literature, Anglophone world literatures, and Hong Kong literature and culture in journals including SEL, Literature and
History, Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
Wasafiri, Ariel, PMLA, and contributed chapters to edited collections of essays by Rodopi,
University of Minnesota Press, and Hong
Kong University Press. Besides the monograph on Timothy Mo, she is author of Anita
Desai (2006), and has just finished editing a
collection of essays China Abroad: Travels,
Subjects, Spaces, to be published by Hong
Kong University Press.
Philip Holden is associate professor in the
Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. He is
the author of several books and many articles
on colonial and postcolonial fiction. His most
recent book is Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the NationState (2008).
Chris Hopkins is professor of English studies
at Sheffield Hallam University, and head of
xxv
the Humanities Research Centre there. He has

published Thinking about Texts: An Introduction to English Studies (2001, rev. edn. 2009)
and English Fiction of the 1930s: Language,
Genre and History (2006), and contributed
chapters to a number of books, including,
most recently, Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist 18931978
(2006) and New Versions of Pastoral (2009).
Robert Ellis Hosmer, Jr. has been a member
of the English faculty at Smith College since
1989. He teaches courses on Muriel Spark,
Virginia Woolf, and contemporary British
women writers. His work has been published
in the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, and
London Magazine. His most recent book,
Shall We Say I had Fun with My Imagination: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark, is
due to be published in 2010.
Alex Houen is a university lecturer in the
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
He has published numerous articles on modern political literature, critical theory, and
avant-gardism, and is the author of Terrorism
and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to
Ciaran Carson (2002).
William Hutchings is a professor of English
at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
He is the author of The Plays of David Storey: A
Thematic Study (1988) and the editor of
David Storey: A Casebook (1992). His most
recent book, Samuel Becketts Waiting for
Godot: A Reference Guide was published by
Praeger in 2005.
Simon J. James is senior lecturer in Victorian
literature at Durham University. He is the
author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and
Narrative Form in the Novels of George Gissing
(2003) and of articles on Charles Dickens and
H. G. Wells. He has edited Gissings Charles
Dickens: A Critical Study (2004) and four H.
G. Wells novels for Penguin Classics.
Rosemary Erickson Johnsen is associate professor of English at Governors State University. She publishes in the areas of twentiethcentury British and Irish literature, crime
fiction, and publishing history. Her book,
Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime
xxvi
Fiction, was published in 2006. She is currently working on a book project on non-modernist British literature between the wars,
supported by research in the Mass Observation Archive (Sussex) and the Penguin
Archive (Bristol).
William A. Johnsen is professor of English at
Michigan State University and editor of Contagion and the Michigan State University
Press series Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and
Culture. Recent publications include Violence
and Modernism. Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf
(2003); To My Readers in America: Conrads
1914 Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus,
Conradiana (2003); Freres amis, Not Enemies: Serres between Prigogine and Girard,
in N. Abbas (ed.), Mapping Michel Serres
(2005); The Religious Turn: Rene Girard,
in English Language Notes (2006).
Richard A. Kaye is associate professor of
English at Hunter College and the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. He
is the author of The Flirts Tragedy: Desire
without End in Victorian and Edwardian
Fiction (1992).
Aaron Kelly is a lecturer at the University of
Edinburgh. He is author of The Thriller and
Northern Ireland Since 1969 (2005), Irvine
Welsh (2005), Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (2008), and James Kelman: Politics and
Aesthetics (2010). He is guest editor of a
special issue of the Irish Review entitled
Contemporary Northern Irish Culture
(2009) and coeditor, with Alan Gillis, of
Critical Ireland (2001) and, with Nicholas
Allen, of Cities of Belfast (2003).
Gavin Keulks is professor of English and
director of the honors program at Western
Oregon University, where he specializes in
contemporary British and Irish literature. His
scholarly books include the monograph Father
and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and
the British Novel Since 1950 and the edited
collection Martin Amis: Postmodernism and
Beyond. He has also published essays on
Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, and
other twentieth-century writers, and is the
webmaster for the Martin Amis Web.
Stephen Knight is distinguished research

professor at Cardiff University. He has published widely on medieval and modern literature, notably on Robin Hood and on crime
fiction. In 2004 he published the first full
study of Welsh fiction in English, One Hundred Years of Fiction, initiating the Writing
Wales in English series of the University of
Wales Press.
Kurt Koenigsberger is associate professor of
English and director of writing programs at
Case Western Reserve University, where he
teaches courses in twentieth-century British
literature, postcolonial literatures, and research methods. He has written a book-length
study titled The Novel and the Menagerie:
Totality, Englishness, and Empire (2007) and
edited a special issue of Genre: Forms of
Discourse and Culture on Globalization and
the Image. He has published essays and
articles on Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf,
Henry James, and William Hazlitt. From 2001
to 2008 he served as associate director of the
Society for Critical Exchange.
Brooke Lenz is an assistant professor of English at Saint Marys University of Minnesota,
where she teaches contemporary literature,
womens literature, and writing. Her book
John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur (2008)
employs feminist standpoint theory in its
investigation of cinematic conventions and
point of view in the works of John Fowles. Her
next scholarly project will explore the relationship between narrative theory and feminist standpoint theory.
Barry Lewis earned his BA (Hons.) at Kings
College, Cambridge, and his doctorate at the
University of Sunderland. A senior lecturer at
the University of Sunderland, he has also held
posts at the University of Newcastle, the
University of Trondheim, and Stavanger College in Norway. Lewis is the author of Kazuo
Ishiguro (2000) and My Words Echo Thus:
Possessing the Past in Peter Ackroyd (2007).
Marina Mackay is associate professor of
English at Washington University in St. Louis.
She is the author of Modernism and World
War II (2007), coeditor of British Fiction After
Modernism (2007), and editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World
War II (2009).
Eamon Maher is director of the National
Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in Institute of
Technology Tallaght (Dublin). He is the author of a number of monographs and is editor
of two series with Peter Lang: Reimagining
Ireland (Oxford) and Studies in Franco-Irish
Relations (Frankfurt am Main).
David Malcolm is professor of English literature and chair of the Department of Literary
Studies at the University of Gdansk. He is the
author of studies of Ian McEwan (2002),
Graham Swift (2003), and John McGahern
(2007), and co-author of a study of Jean
Rhyss short fiction (1996). He is coeditor
of British and Irish Short-Fiction Writers,
19452000 (2006) and the Blackwell Companion to the British and Irish Short Story
(2008).
J. Edward Mallot is an assistant professor of
English at Arizona State University. His current book project focuses on memory, nationalism, and narrative in contemporary
South Asian literatures in English. His forthcoming research examines British Asian literature and culture. Mallot earned his doctorate
from the University of Iowa.
Kevin Mccarron is reader in American Literature at Roehampton University, London. He
has published numerous articles in scholarly
journals and has contributed chapters to
nearly 50 books on subjects including tattooing, cyberpunk, popular music, horror fiction, dystopian literature, drug addiction,
alcoholism, and blasphemy. He is the author
of William Golding (1995; 2nd edn. 2006), The
Coincidence of Opposites: William Goldings
Later Fiction (1996), and he co-authored
Frightening Fictions (2001), a study of adolescent horror narratives.
Dermot Mccarthy is a professor of English
language and literature at Huron University
College, University of Western Ontario and
the author of Roddy Doyle: Raining on the
Parade and A Poetics of Place: The Poetry of
Ralph Gustafson.
xxvii
Patrick A. Mccarthy is professor of English

and chair of the English department at the
University of Miami. His recent publications
include a scholarly edition of Olaf Stapledons
classic science fiction novel, Star Maker
(2004); Modernisms Swansong: Malcolm
Lowrys Under the Volcano, in B. Shaffer
(ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish
Novel 19452000 (2005); Joyce, Family,
Finnegans Wake (2005); and Making
Herself Tidal: Chapter I.8, in L. Crispi &
S. Slot (eds.), How Joyce Wrote Finnegans
Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide
(2007).
Scott Mccracken is professor of English literature at Keele University. He is the author of
Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (1998), Masculinities, Modernist Fiction, and the Urban Public Sphere (2007), and, with Peter Buse, Bertrand Taithe, and Ken Hirschkop, of
Benjamins Arcades: An Unguided Tour
(2006). He is secretary of the Dorothy Richardson Society.
Margery Palmer Mcculloch is senior research fellow in Scottish literature at the
University of Glasgow. Her most recent
books include Modernism and Nationalism:
Literature and Society in Scotland 19181939
(2004) and her Scottish Modernism and Its
Contexts 19181959 is forthcoming from
Edinburgh University Press. She is currently
coediting a Hugh MacDiarmid Companion
to be published by Edinburgh University
Press.
Roderick Mcgillis is a professor of English at
the University of Calgary. He is the author
most recently of Les Pieds Devant (2007) and
He Was Some Kind of a Man (2008). He was
one of the senior editors of the four-volume
Oxford Encyclopedia of Childrens Literature
(2006).
Matthew Mcguire has published widely on
both Scottish and Irish literature. His work
has appeared in the Edinburgh Review and
Scottish Studies Review, as well as The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish
Literature (2007). He is the author of The
Essential Guide to Contemporary Scottish
xxviii
Literature (2008) and coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish

Poetry (2009).
Dorothy Mcmillan is an honorary senior
research fellow in English literature, former
head of the School of English and Scottish
Language and Literature, University of Glasgow, and past president of the Association for
Scottish Literary Studies. She currently works
mainly on writing by women, especially Scottish women. With Douglas Gifford she has
edited A History of Scottish Womens Writing
(1997). Her most recent publications include
the anthology Modern Scottish Women Poets
(2003) and, with Richard Cronin, an edition of
Emma for the Cambridge Edition of Austens
works (2005).
Kaye Mitchell is lecturer in contemporary
literature at the University of Manchester.
She is the author of A. L. Kennedy (2007)
and Intention and Text (2008), and of numerous articles on twentieth-century and
contemporary literature, critical theory,
gender and sexuality, and popular culture.
Her current research addresses questions of
desire, signification, and intelligibility in
the representation of female sexuality in
contemporary literature and theory.
Michael Valdez Moses is associate professor

of English at Duke University. He is the
author of The Novel and the Globalization of
Culture (1995), editor of The Writings of J. M.
Coetzee (1994), and coeditor of Modernism
and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature,
18991939 (2007). He is coeditor of the journal Modernist Cultures, published in electronic and print formats by Edinburgh University
Press.
Alex Murray is a lecturer in English at the
University of Exeter. He is the author of
Recalling London (2007) and Giorgio Agamben
(2009); the editor, with Justin Clemens and
Nick Heron, of The Work of Giorgio Agamben
(2008) and, with Phil Tew, of The Modernism
Handbook (2009).
Bran Nicol is reader in modern and contemporary literature at the University of
Portsmouth. His publications include
The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern
Fiction (2009), Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (2nd edn. 2004), D. M. Thomas
(2004), Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (2002).
Robert Morace teaches at Daemen College in

Amherst, New York. His publications include
John Gardner: Critical Perspectives, coedited
with Kathryn VanSpanckeren (1982), John
Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1984), The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm
Bradbury and David Lodge (1989), Irvine
Welshs Trainspotting (2001), and Irvine
Welsh, a study of the Welsh phenomenon
(2007). His Life and Times of Death and the
Maiden won the 1997 Berger Prize for best
theater essay.
Margot Norris is Chancellors Professor at

the University of California, Irvine, where she
teaches modern literature. Her books include
The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake
(1976), Beasts of the Modern Imagination:
Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence
(1985), Joyces Web: The Social Unraveling of
Modernism (1992), Writing War in the Twentieth Century (2000), Suspicious Readings of
Joyces Dubliners (2003), and a monograph
on the 1967 Joseph Strick film of Joyces
Ulysses (2004). She has also edited or coedited
a number of volumes including the Norton
Critical Edition of James Joyces Dubliners
(2006).
Merritt Moseley is professor of literature at

the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
He has written critical books on Michael
Frayn, Julian Barnes, Kingsley Amis, and
David Lodge and edited four volumes of the
Dictionary of Literary Biography on British
Novelists Since 1960 and one on Booker Prize
Novels, 19692005.
Joseph Nugent has presented papers in English and Irish on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Irish literature. His articles appear in
Victorian Studies, The Senses and Society, and
Eire-Ireland. His current project is a cultural
history of smell in nineteenth-century Ireland. He is currently an adjunct assistant
professor of English at Boston College.
Thomas OGrady is a professor of English at

the University of Massachusetts Boston, where
he has been director of Irish studies since 1984.
His essays and reviews on Irish literary and
cultural matters have been published in a wide
variety of journals, including Eire-Ireland,
James Joyce Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Irish
University Review, Canadian Journal of Irish
Studies, New Hibernia Review, An Sionnach: A
Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts,
Studies in Short Fiction, Studies in the Novel,
and Poetry Ireland Review.
Kirby Olson is an associate professor of humanities at State University of New York at
Delhi. He is the author of three book-length
critical studies: Comedy after Postmodernism
(2000); Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist
(2002); and Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of
America (2005). He has been the editor of
To Wit: Newsletter of the American Humor
Studies Association since 2003. He has also
published a novel entitled Temping (2006)
and many poems, and has been the recipient
of the SUNY Chancellors Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.
Adam Parkes is an associate professor of
English at the University of Georgia, where
he teaches modern British and American
literature. He has two books in print, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (1996)
and Kazuo Ishiguros The Remains of the
Day (2001), as well as various articles on
modern fiction and poetry. His forthcoming
book Literary Impressionism in Its Time: From
James to Bowen examines a range of British
impressionist writers in historical context.
Other research interests include modernism
and the aristocracy and modernism and
forensics.
Daphne Patai is a professor at the University
of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author
and editor of numerous books, including The
Orwell Mystique (1984) and What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism,
and Academic Affairs (2008).
Allison Pease is chair of gender studies and
associate professor of English at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice, City University
xxix
of New York. She is the author of Modernism,

Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity
(2000) and writes about late Victorian and
modernist literature and culture.
John G. Peters is the author of Conrad and
Impressionism (2001) and The Cambridge
Introduction to Joseph Conrad (2006) and the
editor of Conrad in the Public Eye (2008) and
the Oxford Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad
(2009). He has also published a number of
scholarly articles on Conrad and other literary figures and has translated the Japanese
poet Takamura K
otar
os book The Chieko
Poems (2007). He is currently an associate
professor of English at the University of
North Texas.
Martin Priestman is a professor of English at
Roehampton University in London, and edited The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (2003). Other works on crime fiction
include Detective Fiction and Literature: The
Figure on the Carpet (1990) and Crime Fiction
from Poe to the Present (1998). Works on
romantic period literature include Cowpers
Task: Structure and Influence (1983) and
Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought,
17801830 (1999).
Bryony Randall is lecturer in English literature at the University of Glasgow. She is the
author of Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (2007), and has also published on
Imagist poetry, Gertrude Stein, life writing,
and the proto-modernist writer George Egerton. She is coediting a collection of essays
entitled Woolf in Context, and working on a
monograph provisionally entitled The Working Woman Writer 18801920.
Virginia Richter is chair of modern English
literature at the University of Berne. She
wrote her doctoral dissertation on the eighteenth-century novel and her second dissertation (Habilitation) on Darwinism in
English literature. She taught English and
comparative literature at the universities of
Munich and G
ottingen, and was a visiting
fellow at the University of Kent and the
University of Leeds. Her research interests
include Victorian and modernist fiction,
xxx
gender studies, literature and science, and

animals in literature.
Jeffrey Roessner serves as dean of the arts and
humanities at Mercyhurst College, where he is
an associate professor of English. His scholarly interests include cultural studies, contemporary British historical fiction, and creative writing. He has published essays on
works by John Fowles, Angela Carter, Jeanette
Winterson, and the Beatles, among others.
Nancy Rosenfeld teaches in the English Studies Unit, Max Stern College of Jezreel Valley,
and is a researcher in the Department of
English Language and Literature, University
of Haifa. Her areas of scholarly interest are
seventeenth-century English literature and
the British soldier-poets of World War I.
Rosenfeld is the author of The Human Satan
in Seventeenth-Century English Literature:
From Milton to Rochester (2008). She has
published journal and book articles on the
writings of John Milton, John Bunyan, John
Wilmot, earl of Rochester, John Keats, and
Robert Graves.
Elodie Rousselot is a senior lecturer in English
literature at the University of Portsmouth,
where she has been teaching contemporary
literature and postcolonial writing since 2006.
Her main research interests are womens writing, historical fiction, the neo-Victorian novel,
and postcolonial studies. She is currently researching the function of history in the work of
contemporary postcolonial women writers.
Her monograph entitled Re-Writing Women
into Canadian History: Margaret Atwood and
Anne Hebert is to be published by Editions de
Linstant même.
Nicholas Ruddick is a professor of English at
the University of Regina, where he teaches
courses on science fiction, horror fiction, and
fairy tales. He is the author or editor of nine
books; his most recent works include The Fire
in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles
Darwin to Jean M. Auel (2009) and a new
edition of Jack Londons The Call of the Wild
in the Broadview series (2009).
Richard Ruppel is a professor of English at
Chapman University in Orange, California.
Most of his writing has been devoted to the

life and work of Joseph Conrad. His most
recent publication, Homosexuality in the Life
and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love between the
Lines (2008), was published by Routledge. He
is currently at work on a book on Conrads
politics and a hypertext version of Heart of
Darkness.
Lorena Russell received her PhD in English
from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill and is an associate professor in
the Literature and Language Department
at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Her interests include feminist, queer,
and postcolonial theories. She has published
articles on Fay Weldon, Angela Carter,
Michael Ondaatje, and J. M. Coetzee as well
as on the HBO series Six Feet Under and The
Sopranos.
Randi Saloman is a Mellon Post-Doctoral
Fellow and visiting assistant professor of English at Cornell University. She has previously
taught at Wesleyan University and at Yale
University, where she received her PhD in
2006. She has published articles, notes, and
reviews on Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett,
and modern literature. She is currently completing a book, Virginia Woolf, Essayism, and
the Question of Genre, and working on her
upcoming project, a study of hotels in modern literature.
Margaret Scanlan is professor of English at
Indiana University South Bend. Her books
include Traces of Another Time: History and
Politics in Postwar British Fiction (1990), Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (2001), and Culture and
Customs of Ireland (2006).
Bernard Schweizer is associate professor of
English at Long Island University, Brooklyn
Campus. Among his publications are two
monographs, Radicals on the Road (2001) and
Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the
Female Epic (2003); two essay collections,
Approaches to the Anglo and American Female
Epic (2006) and Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches (2007); a special
issue of Studies in the Humanities (December
xxxi
2008); and an edition of a primary text,

Survivors in Mexico by Rebecca West
(2003). Schweizer is president of the International Rebecca West Society.
Women (1990), Rosamond Lehmann (1992),

and (with Shirley Foster) What Katy Read:
Feminist Re-readings of Classic Stories for
Girls (1995).
Charity Scribner has held teaching and research positions at Columbia University,
Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut NRW,
Humboldt University, University of Oxford,
and Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
where she was granted the Class of 1954
Career Development Professorship in
2005. Scribner is currently assistant professor of English at LaGuardia Community
College, City University of New York and
a faculty fellow at the CUNY Graduate
Center. Her scholarship examines modern
European literature, art, and intellectual life,
and her first book, Requiem for Communism
(2003), analyzes the aesthetic response to the
collapse of communism in Europe.
Claire Squires is professor of publishing

studies and director of the Stirling Centre
for International Publishing and Communication at the University of Stirling. She is
author of Marketing Literature: The Making
of Contemporary Writing in Britain (2007)
and Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A
Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials
(2006). She is volume editor of volume 7
(19142000) of the Cambridge History of the
Book in Britain (forthcoming) and associate
editor for the Twentieth Century Book in
Britain for the Oxford Companion to the Book
(2010).
W. A. Senior has a PhD in medieval and

Renaissance literature from the University of
Notre Dame. A past president of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts
and the editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in
the Arts from 1998 to 2007, he is also the
author of scholarly articles on medieval literature, modern fantasy, and science fiction and
of Stephen R. Donaldsons Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Variations on the Fantasy Tradition (1995).
James Sexton is adjunct professor and Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada Fellow at the University of Victoria.
He has published numerous articles on Huxley, and is the editor of Selected Letters of
Aldous Huxley (2007) and Graham Greenes
No Mans Land (2005), and coeditor of the
six-volume Complete Essays of Aldous Huxley
(20002). He has taught at the University of
Toulon as a visiting associate professor
(20025), and continues to lecture in the
English Department of Camosun College,
Victoria during fall terms.
Judy Simons is emeritus professor of English
at De Montfort University, Leicester. She has
published widely on womens writing. Her
books include Diaries and Journals of Literary
Axel StAhler
is lecturer in comparative literary studies in the School of European Culture
and Languages at the University of Kent,
Canterbury. He is the editor of Anglophone
Jewish Literature (2007) and the coeditor of
Writing Fundamentalism (2009).
Theodore L. Steinberg is distinguished teaching professor in the English Department at the
State University of New York at Fredonia.
Although his primary interests lie in the Middle Ages, he has published in a number of
areas. His most recent books are Reading the
Middle Ages, Twentieth-Century Epic Novels,
and Jews and Judaism in the Middle Ages.
Michael L. Storey is the Sister Maura Eichner
Professor of English at the College of Notre
Dame of Maryland in Baltimore. He is the
author of Representing the Troubles in Irish
Short Fiction (2004) as well as articles and
reviews on Frank OConnor, Sean OFaolain,
Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, William
Trevor, Bernard MacLaverty, and other Irish
writers.
John J. Su is associate professor of contemporary Anglophone literature at Marquette
University. He is the author of Ethics and
Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (2005).
Philip Tew is professor of English (post-1900
literature) at Brunel University, the elected
xxxii
director of the UK network for Modern Fiction

Studies, director of the Brunel Centre for
Contemporary Writing (BCCW), coeditor of
Critical Engagements and Symbiosis: A Journal
of Anglo-American Literary Relations, a fellow
of the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of
the Royal Society of Literature. He has published B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (2001),
The Contemporary British Novel (2004; rev.
edn. 2007), and Jim Crace: A Critical Introduction (2006).
Timothy Weiss is a professor at the Chinese

University of Hong Kong; his books include
Translating Orients: Between Ideology and
Utopia (2004), English and Globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Mainland China, coedited with Kwok-kan Tam (2004), and
On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S.
Naipaul (1992). He has been a Peace Corps
Volunteer in Liberia, West Africa, and a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco.
Pamela Thurschwell is a senior lecturer in

English at the University of Sussex. She is the
author of Sigmund Freud (2000) and Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking,
18801920 (2001), and coeditor, with Nicola
Bown and Carolyn Burdett, of The Victorian
Supernatural (2004) and, with Leah Price, of
Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (2005).
Juliette Wells, an assistant professor of English at Manhattanville College, is the author

of the entry on Eva Figes in British and Irish
Novelists Since 1960. She contributed a chapter on chicklit and womens literary history to
Chick Lit: The New Womans Fiction (2006)
and has published articles on postmodern
reworkings of the novels of Jane Austen and
Charlotte Bronte. She coedited The Brontes in
the World of the Arts (2008).
Richard Todd is professor of British literature

after 1500 at the University of Leiden. His
books include a monograph on A. S. Byatt
(1997) and two on Iris Murdoch (1984, 1979).
His Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and
Fiction in Britain Today was published in
1996. In 2007 he was elected a member of
the International Association of University
Professors of English (IAUPE).
Kathleen Wall is professor of English at the
University of Regina. Her books include The
Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood (literary
criticism), and Without Benefit of Words and
Times Body (poetry). She has published on
Virginia Woolf in the Journal of Narrative
Theory and Texas Studies in Literature and
Language. She is working on a book about
Woolfs use of aesthetic form to articulate a
practice that is fully engaged with her society
and her historical moment.
Patricia Waugh is a professor in the Department of English Studies, Durham University.
She has written numerous books and essays
on modern fiction, literary theory, modernist
and postmodernist aesthetics. She is currently
completing two monographs, Humanising:
English Literary Studies and the Biologisation
of Culture and History of the British and Irish
Novel: 1945 to the Present.
Lynn Wells is an associate professor of English

at the University of Regina, where she specializes in contemporary British fiction and contemporary culture. Her first book, Allegories of
Telling: Self-Referential Narrative in Contemporary British Fiction, was published by
Rodopi in 2003 and her book on Ian McEwan
will be published by Palgrave Macmillan. She
is currently associate vice president (academic) at the University of Regina.
Imelda Whelehan is professor of English and
womens studies and director of the Centre
for Adaptations at De Montfort University in
Leicester. She is coeditor of Adaptation and
has published extensively on feminism, chicklit and adaptations. Her co-authored book,
Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema is due to be
published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Anne Whitehead is senior lecturer in the
School of English at Newcastle University.
She is the author of Memory (2008) and
Trauma Fiction (2004). She has also coedited
Theories of Memory: A Reader (2007) and W.
G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (2004).
Peter Wolfes shorter work has appeared in
the New York Times Book Review, the Chicago
Tribune, the Nation, Modern Fiction Studies,
the New Zealand Listener, the Calcutta Statesman, and the Weekend Australian. A Fulbright
lecturer in India and Poland, he has also
served as a visiting professor in Canada,
New Zealand, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, and
Australia. His twentieth book, Havoc in the
Hub: A Reading of George V. Higgins, was
published in 2007.
xxxiii
Sue Zlosnik is professor of English and head

of the English Department at Manchester
Metropolitan University. Her publications
include three books co-authored and one
coedited with Avril Horner on womens writing and Gothic fiction. She is currently copresident of the International Gothic
Association.
Introduction to Volume I
The subject of the British and Irish volume of The

Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction is as
vast as it is rich and heterogeneous. I will therefore
resist the temptation, in my introductory remarks, of summing up or surveying all of what
follows; the bringing together of the field of
twentieth-century British and Irish fiction is, after
all, the task of the volumes 140 entries. Instead, I
will offer a few remarks intended merely to set the
stage for a portion of what follows. The years
following the start of the twentieth century saw
the rise of what in due course would come to be
called literary modernism a transatlantic cultural phenomenon that impacted early twentiethcentury fiction and that engaged with myriad
extraliterary developments of its day. Features of
high modernist fiction, in particular the novel,
that predominated between the turn of the century (Conrads Lord Jim of 1900) and the late
1940s (Malcolm Lowrys Under the Volcano of
1947) included radical experiments with point of
view and with the representation of time and
space; the shattering of the illusion of a unified,
omniscient narrator; linguistic pyrotechnics, textual self-referentiality, and literary allusiveness;
narrative fragmentation, replete with disorienting
stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue
narration; and the frank (arguably Freudian)
treatment of human sexuality. In comparison to
the late nineteenth-century novels of Thomas
Hardy, the mature works of Conrad, Joyce,
Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson,
and Woolf seemed not a few years but rather lightyears away.
The impetus for modernist fictions radical
experimentation with language, form, and point
of view had less to do with the joys of aesthetic
innovation for its own sake than with a particular
frustration, as the antihero of George Bernard

Shaws Major Barbara (1905) puts it, that the
world at present . . . scraps its obsolete steam
engines and dynamos yet wont scrap its old
prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions.1
George Orwell was by this light misguided to
associate literary modernism with art-for-arts
saking, with the worship of the meaningless,
with the mere manipulation of words in the
service of an art divorced from the urgent problems of the moment.2 Orwell, who penned this
accusation in 1940, was probably thinking of
James Joyce, who had a year earlier published
Finnegans Wake, a supremely modernist work
that parades, indeed fetishizes, its arcane linguistic and narrative dimensions.
Joyces sui generis 1939 text notwithstanding,
modernist fiction was less about the joys of experimentation and iconoclasm for its own sake
what Orwell calls the frivolous notion that art is
merely [about] technique3 than it was about
overthrowing novelistic forms and structures,
and by extension social forms and structures, that
were felt to be repressive and outmoded. Novelty
and innovation per se were less important than
making the new fiction faithful to contemporary
social, technological, psychological, epistemological, and aesthetic currents. Put another way,
modernist novelists such as Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Lewis, Woolf, and, to a lesser extent, Ford
and Forster, were less interested in art for arts
sake than they were in creating works of fiction
that comported with their new understanding of
the world around them. What T. S. Eliot in
1921 argued of present-day poets also applied
to novelists: they must be difficult because
Our civilization comprehends great variety and
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
complexity, and this variety and complexity,

playing upon a refined sensibility [that of the
literary artist of merit], must produce various
and complex results.4 In other words, modernist
fiction should not be dismissed as an autotelic or
narcissistic retreat from modern life so much as an
attempt to face and depict it unflinchingly.
Perhaps the most important influences on
modernism in the novel were a series of revolutionary ideas in European thought that contributed to a heady zeitgeist. The principal idea was a
crisis lamented by Matthew Arnold in his midVictorian poem, Dover Beach: the retreat of the
Sea of Faith and the seeming disappearance of
God,5 an anxiety that emerges full-blown in
Yeatss celebrated 1919 poem The Second
Coming, with its theologically resonant title.6
Three seminal modern intellectuals Karl Marx,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud all
speculated that humans created God out of their
need for a protecting father and to explain an
otherwise inexplicable, threatening, chaotic
world. Marx saw religion as the sigh of the
oppressed, the opium of the people7 as a
means for the haves of society to keep the havenots mystified and downtrodden; Nietzsche
famously asserted that God is dead. God remains
dead. And we have killed him;8 and Freud likened our devotion to the fairy-tale of religion to
a childhood neurosis, and, following Marx,
likened the effects of religious consolations to
a narcotic.9 While some found the prospect of a
godless universe liberating, others found the absence of transcendental meaning and teleological
human history to be frightening prospects.
Unsurprisingly, this shift in thinking had important implications for the ways in which novels
were written; many novelists now took it for
granted that the traditional view of the world
one subject to a single overarching interpretation,
corresponding to Gods intention was obsolete.
Objectivity was an illusion; subjectivity reigned.
Many legitimate truths and perspectives replaced
the notion of a single Truth; reality was
supplanted by a series of competing realities. In
short, how one saw things now was determined by
ones unique perspective, put in dialogue with
other individuals and their unique perspectives.
This notion informed many modernist novels
among these, Conrads Nostromo, Joyces Ulysses,
Woolfs The Waves, and Lowrys Under the
Volcano in which multiple narrators and shifting perspectives force readers to reconstruct
events by negotiating between the various possible ways in which those events can be understood.
Put another way, the multiple points of view in
these modernist texts are offered not to impede
our grasp of the novels meaning so much as they
are the very point of it. As Orwell argues, seemingly contradicting his above indictment of the
modernists for their escapist avoidance of politics:
Ulysses could not have been written by someone
who was merely dabbling with word-patterns; it
is the product of a special vision of life, the vision
of a Catholic who has lost his faith. What Joyce is
saying is Here is life without God. Just look at
it! and his technical innovations, important
though they are, are there primarily to serve this
purpose.10
Another development that influenced the modernist novel and that which followed in the
second half of the twentieth century was the late
Victorian emergence of the discipline of psychology, which further eroded traditional faith in
objective norms of perception, knowledge, and
certainty. The year 1890 marked the appearance
of William Jamess Principles of Psychology, a work
that reoriented our purchase on reality. Rather
than being something objectively given, reality
was to be understood as something subjectively
perceived through the stream of human consciousness. If Jamess terrain was consciousness
and perception, Freuds, more radically, was the
unconscious, which he defined as that area of the
mind that is inaccessible to conscious scrutiny,
the refuge of repressed wishes too dangerous for
us to acknowledge consciously.11 Although such
novelists as Joyce and Lawrence expressed skepticism about Freudian thought Lawrence declared
in 1914, I am not Freudian and never was and in
1916, following the publication of psychoanalytic/oedipal readings of Sons and Lovers, I think
that complexes are vicious half-statements of the
Freudians;12 and Joyce in 1921 referred to Jung
and Freud as, respectively, the Swiss Tweedledum
and the Viennese Tweedledee13 Freuds impact
upon the modernist novel was nevertheless considerable and obvious. (It is surely relevant that Virginia Woolf published Freud in English at her and
Leonard Woolf s Hogarth Press.) One critic even
went as far as to attribute the shift in the basis of

characterization in fiction after about 1900 largely
to the revolutionary impact of Freudian concepts
of the unconscious.14
It is against this background that British and
Irish fiction of the second half of the twentieth
century took shape. The response in particular to
modernism took two divergent paths, resulting
in the flourishing of two conflicting fictional
modes: anti-modernist realism and postmodernist experimentation. In the 1950s and early
1960s, the novel in Britain and Ireland tended
to reject literary modernist innovations (notable
exceptions included Flann OBrien, Samuel
Beckett, and B. S. Johnson), reacting against the
modernist novels conspicuous, overly precious,
complexity. Kinglsey Amis, Iris Murdoch, Angus
Wilson, and many others countered in their
novels with an anti-modernist, anti-avant-garde
neo-realism. As Malcolm Bradbury characterizes the mood between 1945 and 1960:
Modernism was over, even tainted; the deaths
of Joyce, Woolf, Yeats and Freud had reinforced
the feeling. In critical circles, it was already being
historicized, defined, monumentalized, given its
name and structure; it was no longer avant . . .
but arriere.15 While realistic novels continued to
be written over the next few decades and of
course prevail today (consider, for example, the
work since 1980 of Anita Brookner, Margaret
Drabble, John McGahern, Iris Murdoch, and
Muriel Spark), a second and divergent response
to modernism and its anti-modernist wake in the
British and Irish novel the postmodernist
novel evolved between the early 1970s and the
present. Indeed, as divergent in their formal,
linguistic, and thematic dimensions as the novels
of Martin Amis, J. G. Ballard, John Banville,
Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, John
Fowles, Ian McEwan, and Graham Swift may be,
it is reasonable to group their fictions under the
banner of the postmodern novel. This novel
rejects the anti-modernist backlash; indeed, it
internalizes many of the attitudes and perspectives
of modernism, yet also takes further and revises a
number of modernisms tenets. As Gerald Graff
argues, postmodernism should be seen not as
breaking with romantic and modernist assumptions but rather as a logical culmination of the
premises of these earlier movements.16 The
American novelist John Barth puts the relationship
between modernism and postmodernism similarly: the ideal postmodernist author has the
first half of the [twentieth] century under his belt
[even if] not on his back.17
Allow me to consider the responses to modernist fiction in the British and Irish novel of
19502000 in a bit more detail. The first reaction
was blazed in England in the 1950s by the prickly,
anti-modernist backlash of traditionalist novelists
such as Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Iris Murdoch
(early in her career), C. P. Snow, John Wain, and
Angus Wilson, who rejected both the narrative
and stylistic experiments associated with Joyce
and the refined literary aesthetics associated with
Virginia Woolf, either on the grounds that these
were arcane and mystifying or that they had been
worthwhile experiments in a now exhausted vein
(interestingly, a number of these figures wrote
campus novels). For example, John Wain, writing
in 1963, insisted that the experimental novel
died with Joyce. Since Ulysses, Wain argued,
there has been very little experimental-writing
that strikes one as serious, or motivated by anything more than faddishness or the irritable
search for new gimmicks.18 According to C. P.
Snow, Joyces way was at best a cul-de-sac,19
and the literary doctrine of Virginia Woolf and
others culminated in the novel becoming totally
meaningless in a very short time.20
If there was an anti-modernist movement in
the English novel of the time it was to be found
in the so called angry young men comprised
of Wain, Braine, Kingsley Amis, and others
whom Amis deemed reactionaries rather than
rebels because they sought a return to the
pre-Joycean tradition21 of broadly accessible
and relevant literary works. Amis was at his
most strident and outspoken in this regard in a
1958 piece in The Spectator. There, he famously
argued:
The idea about experiment being the life-blood
of the English novel is one that dies hard.
Experiment, in this context, boils down pretty
regularly to obtruded oddity, whether in construction multiple viewpoints and such or in
style . . . Shift from one scene to the next in
midsentence, cut down on verbs or definite
articles, and you are putting yourself right up in
the forefront, at any rate in the eyes of those who
were reared on Joyce and Virginia Woolf . . . 22
However differently Amiss Lucky Jim, Murdochs

Under the Net, and Wilsons Hemlock and After
(all from 1952 or 1953) respond to literary modernism, each of these works represents a desire to
return the novel to an earlier, more realistic and
chronologically linear model.
The anti-modernist reaction to modernism
in the British and Irish novel was followed by
another reaction, beginning in the early 1970s
(though, again, presaged most importantly in
the work of Samuel Beckett and Flann
OBrien). Born of what David Lodge characterized as the pressure of skepticism on the
aesthetic and epistemological premises of literary realism,23 the postmodern novel of the
final three decades of the twentieth century
continued and furthered the modernist critique of traditional realism.24
Just as Amis and other traditionalists of the
1950s and 1960s registered their frustration with
the modernist novels lack of accessibility and
relevance, so the early postmodernists, in an
anti-antimodernist backlash, registered their
frustration with the realistic, chronologically linear novels lack of artistic courage and innovation.
The English avant garde novelist B. S. Johnson, for
example, writing 10 years after John Wain argued
that the experimental novel died with Joyce,
lamented that while Joyce was the Einstein of
the novel,25 very few novelists in Britain now
followed his lead. For Johnson, It is not a question of influence, of writing like Joyce. It is a
matter of realizing that the novel is an evolving
form, not a static one, of accepting that for
practical purposes where Joyce left off should
ever since have been regarded as the starting
point.26 Why then, Johnson demanded, do
so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses had never happened . . .?27
Johnson concluded by quoting the French author
Natalie Sarrautes description of literature as a
relay race, the baton of innovation passing from
one generation to another, and then by accusing
the vast majority of British novelists today with
having dropped the baton.28 Johnsons reference to Sarraute here is telling, as many avant
garde English novelists of the 1970s gained their
inspiration from French writers and intellectuals
specifically from Sarraute, Samuel Beckett (born
in Ireland but living in Paris and writing in French
and English), and Alain Robbe-Grillet (theorist of
le nouveau roman) rather than from British

ones. John Fowles, for example, the author of
one of the earliest important English postmodernist novels, The French Lieutenants Woman
(1969), admits to finding himself much more
at home in French than in English literature.29
Be this French connection as it may, British
and Irish postmodernist novels among them
Fowless French Lieutenants Woman, Goldings
Darkness Visible (1979), Grays Lanark (1981),
Swifts Waterland (1983), Barness Flauberts
Parrot (1984), Martin Amiss Money (1984), A.
S. Byatts Possession (1990), McCabes Butcher Boy
(1992), and Angela Carters Nights at the Circus
(1994) built upon many modernist novelistic
innovations. While postmodernism as a theoretical construct defies easy definition Malcolm
Bradbury has called the term a moveable
feast,30 and Hans Bertens has characterized it as
exasperating for being several things at
once31 it is clear that postmodern novels, in
practice, deliberately blur categories that were
formerly thought to be antithetical. That is, they
blur elite and demotic narrative forms, author and
reader, fiction and fact, and they attack realistic
conventions of representation, notions of generic
purity, and the feasibility of a unified subject.
In his exhaustive The Idea of the Postmodern
Hans Bertens observes that postmodernism
has meant different things to different people at
different conceptual levels, rising from humble
literary-critical origins in the 1950s to a level of
global conceptualization in the 1980s. . . . If there
is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a
deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent
the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether
they are aesthetic, epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used
to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.32
This crisis of representation that representations create more than they reflect reality is
discernible in the work of the most important
French theorizers of the postmodern, JeanFrancois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Although
these French theories of the postmodern had little
direct influence on the British novels of the period, they nevertheless contributed to a postmodernist intellectual and artistic climate out of
which the novels evolved. And they impacted
conversations in critical theory, which also, at

least indirectly, influenced as well as reflected
developments in postmodernist fiction.
It is also worth emphasizing that postmodernist
narrative experimentation in the novel, like that of
modernist experimentation before it, was undertaken not in the spirit of absurdist or fabulist antirealism, as many assumed, but in the spirit of
hyperrealism, one which accounts for the new
theories of perception, knowledge, and consciousness alluded to above. What Virginia Woolf argued
of the modernist Joyce and other authors of his ilk is
also true of the postmodernist Fowles and other
authors of his ilk: they all attempt, in their fictions,
to come closer to life, and to preserve more
sincerely and exactly what interests and moves
them, even if to do so they must discard most
of the conventions which are commonly observed
by the [realist] novelist. Let us record the atoms as
they fall upon the mind in the order in which they
fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected
and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or
incident scores upon the consciousness.33
Woolf s point is clear: Joyce and other modernists wrote out of a sense of fidelity to things as they
are subjectively and fragmentarily experienced
rather than out of an unfeasible stance of objectivity
and omniscience. As Woolf hints here, Joyces use
of interior monologue narration worked as a means
of plumbing the depths and shallows of character
as never before, a device allowing for the direct
representation of the psyche in action. However,
one important difference between the modernism
of Joyce and Woolf and the postmodernism of
Fowles and Swift is that whereas the Modernist
aimed at providing a valid, authentic, though
strictly personal view of the world in which he
lived, the Postmodernist appears to have abandoned the attempt toward a representation of the
world that is justified by the convictions and
sensibility of any single individual consciousness34
or historical account. Indeed, such observably
postmodern novels as Fowless French Lieutenants

Woman, Swifts Waterland, Grays Lanark, and
Byatts Possession deconstruct traditional notions
of subjectivity and history, and problematize the
distinction between fact and fiction, in ways that
go beyond what Joyce and other modernists envisioned. Another clear difference is that postmodernist novels tend to be far more demotic and less
elitist in orientation than their modernist forerunners. John Careys observation that the literary
intelligentsia in the years leading up to 1939 was
distinctly elitist and anti-democratic hostile to the
large reading public that came into being following nineteenth-century educational reforms35
no longer holds sway in recent years, as the postmodernist novels abundant use of popular cultural
discourse suggests. It is difficult, given the postmodern novels demotic orientation, to imagine
its practitioners defining their art in the terms
hazarded by D. H. Lawrence: [B]eing a novelist,
I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist,
the philosopher, and the poet . . . The novel is the
one bright book of life.36
One could elaborate further about twentiethcentury British and Irish fiction along these aesthetic and philosophic lines. Alternately, one
could approach the field through the prism of
national (English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh) literatures; from the perspective of supranational considerations that account for patterns of immigration, colonialism, war, and globalization; through
the lens of gender and sexuality, class, ethnicity, or
religion; via a consideration of the business of
publishing, filmic adaptation, and literary prizes;
and in a host of other ways. Which is the very
point and purpose of the British and Irish volume,
and indeed its two companion volumes, of The
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction: to offer readable, authoritative, illuminating assessments of twentieth-century fiction, figures, debates, rubrics, and movements that point readers
in the direction of further avenues by which to
explore this fertile, heterogeneous literary terrain.
Notes
1 George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara [1905] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), pp. 1401.
2 George Orwell, Inside the Whale, in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1954), pp. 2289.
3 Orwell, Inside the Whale, p. 245.
4 T. S. Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets, in Selected Prose, ed. F. Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1975), p. 65.
5 Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, in M. H. Abrams (gen. ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edn.,
vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 1492.
6 W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, in Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 184.
7 Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right: Introduction, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.),
MarxEngels Reader, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 54.
8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 181.
9 Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 53, 49.
10 Orwell, Inside the Whale, p. 228.
11 For more on this see Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 1827.
12 Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 2 vols., ed. Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1962), pp. 291, 475.
13 Letters of James Joyce, 3 vols., ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957), vol. 1, p. 166. For more on the
JoyceFreud connection see Brian W. Shaffer, Joyce and Freud: Discontent and Its Civilizations, in Vincent J.
Cheng & Timothy Martin (eds.), Joyce in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 7388.
14 Kenneth Graham, Conrad and Modernism, in J. H. Stape (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 211. Interestingly, Woolf says something similar in her essays
of the period. In Modern Fiction (1919) she makes the case for the new novels focus on the interior, not
exterior, lives of its characters; and in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) she famously quips that, in or about
December, 1910, human character changed (105). Both are reprinted in Peter Faulkner (ed.), The English
Modernist Reader, 19101930 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986).
15 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 268.
16 Gerald Graff, The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough, in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today:
Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 219.
17 John Barth, The Literature of Replenishment, in Michael Hoffman & Patrick Murphy (eds.), Essentials of the
Theory of Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), p. 430.
18 John Wain, quoted in Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 19501960 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 8.
19 C. P. Snow, quoted in Randall Stevenson, A Readers Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1993), p. 96.
20 C. P. Snow, quoted in Frank Kermode, The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven Novelists, in Bradbury
(ed.), The Novel Today, p. 129.
21 Kingsley Amis, quoted in Michael Barber, The Art of Fiction LIX, Kingsley Amis (interview), Paris Review, 64
(1975), 46.
22 Quoted in Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment, pp. 401.
23 David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1971), p. 19.
24 David Lodge, Postmodernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism (published lecture) (Birmingham: University
of Birmingham, 1977), p. 10.
25 B. S. Johnson, Introduction to Arent You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? in Bradbury (ed.), The
Novel Today, p. 152.
26 Johnson, Introduction, p. 152.
29 John Fowles, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, in Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today, p. 147.
30 Bradbury, Modern British Novel, p. 408.
31 Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 3.
32 Bertens, Idea of the Postmodern, pp. 1011.
33 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, in Faulkner (ed.), English Modernist Reader, pp. 1089.
34 Douwe W. Fokkema, Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1984), p. 40.
35 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligensia, 18801939 (New
York: St. Martins, 1992), p. vii.
36 D. H. Lawrence, Why the Novel Matters, in Faulkner (ed.), English Modernist Reader, p. 145. For a fuller
discussion of these and related concerns, see the Introduction to my Reading the Novel in English, 19502000
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 134.
A
Ackroyd, Peter
BARRY LEWIS
Peter Ackroyd is a prolific writer whose novels,

biographies, and works of non-fiction have attracted a wide audience and sustained acclaim. He
started out as a poet and a critic, but soon found
his niche as a novelist who delights in ransacking
the past and rewriting its literary and cultural
histories in a manner associated with postmodernist fiction. The majority of his novels center on
London, as does most of his other work. The
English capital is the site for delving into a number of recurring themes: the influence of place
upon the psyche, the spiral nature of time, impersonation and imitation, the Catholic heritage of
England, Englishness, occult beliefs, and strained
fatherson relationships. His characters are often
transformations of real-world figures such as the
poet Thomas Chatterton, the music hall performer
Dan Leno, and the essayist Charles Lamb.
Ackroyd was born on October 5, 1949 and
brought up on a modest East Acton council estate
in west London. His parents separated not long
after he was born and his maternal grandmother
played an important role in his upbringing.
A precocious child, he excelled at school and
entered Clare College, Cambridge in 1968 to
study English literature. There he was exposed to
the Cambridge poets group (J. H. Prynne and
others) whose experimental approach toward
language was later to inform his own poetry and
fiction. His year of postdoctoral study in 1972 as a
Mellon Fellow at Yale University furthered these
interests. Here he came into contact with the poet
John Ashbery and drafted an aesthetic manifesto

(Ackroyd 1976).
It is London, though, that has had the biggest
impact upon his writings. He often refers to it as
the landscape of his imagination and it functions
like a character in its own right in his work. Many
of the subjects of his biographies have London in
common, too. He has dealt with Cockney visionaries such as Dickens (1990) and Blake (1995);
writers to whom the capital is significant, such as
T. S. Eliot (1984) and Shakespeare (2004b); and
the city itself (2000). Ackroyd is one of a number
of contemporary British writers among them
Iain Sinclair, J. G. Ballard, and (to a lesser extent)
Martin Amis who focus upon London as a
source of inspiration. These novelists follow in
the footsteps, sometimes literally, of their literary
ancestor Charles Dickens. They bring to their
explorations of London a sense of the capital as
a labyrinth of possibility as it stretches infinitely
through space and time. Ackroyds first novel,
The Great Fire of London (1982), picks up on the
citys historical echoes and artfully deploys
Dickenss Little Dorrit as an intertext. His later
substantial biography of Dickens merges factual
and imaginative material to examine its subject.
Ackroyds novels show a fascination with the
wide range of English discourses that have existed
in history. A good example of his mastery of
mimicry is Hawksmoor (1985). This compares
and contrasts the opening decades of the eighteenth century, when the rational procedures of
science began to supersede the more ancient
forces of animistic magic, with the urban squalor
of 1980s London. The chapters narrated in the

ALDINGTON, RICHARD
first person by Nicholas Dyer, loosely modeled on

the historical figure of the architect Nicholas
Hawksmoor, present a convincing pastiche of the
prose of the earlier period. Ackroyd spent six
months in the British Library reading texts relevant to his setting. He recorded phrases and
sentences into his notebooks until their language
became second nature. In doing so, he followed
the method established in his previous novel, The
Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), of building
upon a specific literary style as a template for his
own inventions. It is a technique associated with
T. S. Eliot. Eliots influence is particularly noticeable in Hawksmoor as events from the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century are juxtaposed
with a series of murders in the present day.
Subsequent fictions expand Ackroyds thematic and stylistic concerns. Several probe the subject of fakes, forgeries, and plagiarism (1987,
2004a). Some focus on the occult and the paranormal (1989, 1993, 1994). Other novels excavate
the past to present alternate histories (1996, 1999,
2003, 2006, 2008). Perhaps his keynote novel,
though not the most successful artistically or
commercially, is English Music (1992). This novel
features chapters that imitate the styles of many
English writers, such as Bunyan, Defoe, Blake, and
Carroll. It, too, is set in London, the source of
Ackroyds vibrant muse. With unflagging vitality,
he continues to celebrate the capital in his numerous books, reviews, television series, and
plays for both radio and the stage.
Ackroyd, P. (1990). Dickens. London: SinclairStevenson.

Ackroyd, P. (1992). English Music. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Ackroyd, P. (1993). The House of Doctor Dee. London:
Hamish Hamilton.
Ackroyd, P. (1994). Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.
London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
Ackroyd, P. (1995). Blake. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
Ackroyd, P. (1996). Milton in America. London:
Sinclair-Stevenson.
Ackroyd, P. (1999). The Plato Papers. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Ackroyd, P. (2000). London: The Biography. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Ackroyd, P. (2003). The Clerkenwell Tales. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Ackroyd, P. (2004a). The Lambs of London. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Ackroyd, P. (2004b). Shakespeare: The Biography.
London: Chatto and Windus.
Ackroyd, P. (2006). The Fall of Troy. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Ackroyd, P. (2008). The Casebook of Victor
Frankenstein. London: Chatto and Windus.
Lewis, B. (2007). My Words Echo Thus: Possessing the
Past in Peter Ackroyd. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Onega, S. (1999). Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of
Peter Ackroyd. New York: Camden House.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); London in

Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
Richard Aldington (18921962) left an extensive

literary legacy. As poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, anthologist, critic, editor, and translator
(from Greek, Latin, French, and Italian), he wrote
assiduously for five decades. His breakthrough as
a man of letters started with his association with
Ezra Pound, H.D. (his first wife, to whom he was
married for 25 years), and F. S. Flint. Under
Pounds leadership Imagism was launched, with
Aldington contributing to all four of the Imagist
anthologies published between 1914 and 1917.
His army service in World War I interrupted
his writing career, and he took time to readjust
to civilian life. Aldington wrote biographies
on, among others, Voltaire (1925), Remy de
Gourmont (1928), the duke of Wellington
(1946), D. H. Lawrence (1950), T. E. Lawrence
(1955), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1957).
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Ackroyd. P. (1976). Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on
Modernism. London: Vision.
Ackroyd, P. (1982). The Great Fire of London. London:
Hamish Hamilton.
Ackroyd, P. (1983). The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde.
London: Hamish Hamilton.
Ackroyd, P. (1984). T. S. Eliot. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Ackroyd, P. (1985). Hawksmoor. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Ackroyd, P. (1987). Chatterton. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Ackroyd, P. (1989). First Light. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Aldington, Richard
MICHAEL COPP
ALDINGTON, RICHARD
Between 1929 and 1946 Aldington wrote eight

novels and three collections of short stories. With
the exception of the first novel, Death of a Hero
(his greatest commercial success), less critical
attention has been paid to these than to his poetry.
In the Prologue to Death of a Hero Aldington
informs of us of the outcome his hero, George
Winterbourne, dies at the end of the novel. It is
through a fellow officers voice that we follow the
causes that lead up to that death. The Prologue
and Parts I and II constitute a wide-ranging attack
on the values of Edwardian society. Georges
parents, his fellow officers, his wife Elizabeth, his
mistress Fanny, and various literary personalities
are subjected to a fierce satirical assault. Part III
concentrates on the front-line experience of Winterbourne, and is written in a more restrained
mode, much of it strictly controlled documentary
narrative. There is general agreement that this is
the most successful part of a novel that is one of
the outstanding fictions of World War I.
Aldington continued the war theme in his
collection of 13 stories, Roads to Glory (1930).
He used the form to experiment with technique,
for example, interweaving prose poems and
realistic narrative.
Much of Aldingtons fiction is satirical caricature. In The Colonels Daughter (1931a), Georgina
Smithers, constrained by Victorian rules of conduct, wishes to marry, but convention prevents
her from seeking a husband. Her lowly station in
life, her dullness, and her plainness serve further
to condemn her to spinsterhood, a social reality
for so many young women who heavily outnumbered the eligible war survivors. The various
subplots are treated by Aldington in a less angry
manner than in Death of a Hero. Instead of
interjecting his furious condemnation he allows
the failings of his characters to be self-evident. The
epilogue, a conversation between two Beckettian
characters, Bim and Bom, provides an abrupt shift
of tone, from romance to the absurd.
All Men are Enemies (1933) and Women Must
Work (1934) are also novels of social satire. In All
Men are Enemies Antony Clarendon struggles
to achieve a finer, more fulfilled life. Part 1
(190014) is firmly pastoral, as Aldington sets
the natural cycle of organic growth against
the hectic artificiality of a machine-mad society.
The war years are represented by a fragmented
collage of verse snippets, one for each year of the
war (taken as a whole they comprise Aldingtons

most formally modernist poem). Part 2, starting
in 1919, and depicting the passing of the old
order, is in sharp contrast. Antony, finding the
contemporary world senseless, attempts to rediscover his youthful idealism, and his first love.
Parts 3 and 4 continue this theme, but, with their
surfeit of detail, dialogue, and authorial comment, are weaker than Parts 1 and 2.
In Women Must Work, Etta Morrison, unlike
Georgina in The Colonels Daughter, is an emancipated woman. When she moves to London she
pretends that her illegitimate childs father died in
the war. She marries, is successful financially, and
dominates her husband. Aldingtons message is
that her success is illusory, based as it is on the
deceptive goals of emancipation and a hollow
supremacy.
For many years Aldington lived abroad, mainly
in America and France. His later years were
blighted by the hostile reception of his biography
of T. E. Lawrence in which Aldington sought to
lay bare the truth as he saw it about this overmythologized hero figure. Toward the end of his
life he achieved considerable success in the
Soviet Union where a number of his books were
translated in substantial editions. In February 1962
he was feted by the Soviet Writers Union on the
occasion of his seventieth birthday. He died soon
after this visit and was buried in Sury-en-Vaux.
SEE ALSO: H.D. (AF); Lawrence, D. H. (BIF);
Modernist Fiction (BIF); World War I in
Fiction (BIF)
Aldington, R. (1929). Death of a Hero. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Aldington, R. (1930). Roads to Glory. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Aldington, R. (1931a). The Colonels Daughter. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Aldington, R. (1931b). Last Straws. Paris: Hours.
Aldington, R. (1932). Soft Answers. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Aldington, R. (1933). All Men are Enemies. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Aldington, R. (1934). Women Must Work. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Aldington, R. (1937). Very Heaven. London:
Heinemann.
10
AMIS, KINGSLEY
Aldington, R. (1938). Seven against Reeves. London:

Heinemann.
Aldington, R. (1939). Rejected Guest. London:
Heinemann.
Aldington, R. (1946). The Romance of Casanova.
London: Heinemann.
Blayac, A., & Zilboorg, C. (eds.) ( [1993] ). Richard
Aldington: Essays in Honour of the Centenary of His
Birth. Montpellier: Universite Paul Valery.
Cecil, H. (1995). The Flower of Battle: British Fiction
Writers of the First World War. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Doyle, C. (1989). Richard Aldington: A Biography.
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Fitzmaurice, G. (dir.) (1934). All Men are Enemies
(script by S. Hoffenstein & L. Coffee). Fox.
Kelly, L. (ed.) (1987). Richard Aldington: Papers from the
Reading Conference. Reading: University of Reading.
Kempton, D., & Stoneback, H. R. (eds.) (2003). Writers
in Provence: Proceedings of the First and Second
International Richard Aldington Conferences. SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer: Gregau.
Kempton, D., & Stoneback, H. R. (eds.) (2005). New
Places: Proceedings of the Third International Richard
Aldington Conference. Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer:
Gregau.
Kempton, D., & Stoneback, H. R. (eds.) (2008).
Locations and Dislocations: Proceedings of the Fourth
International Richard Aldington Conference. SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer: Gregau.
Klein, H. (ed.) (1976). The First World War in Fiction.
Parfitt, G. (1988). Fiction of the First World War: A
Study. London: Faber and Faber.
Amis, Kingsley
GAVIN KEULKS
One of Englands most popular, controversial,

and versatile writers, Sir Kingsley Amis was born
in London on April 16, 1922. From his earliest
publication Bright November (1947) to the last
during his lifetime The Biographers Moustache
(1995) Amis functioned as a moral barometer
for the rapidly shifting mores of his time. His
more than 40 books include 24 novels, seven
editions of poetry, four short story collections,
and hundreds of reviews and essays; and his
opinions were often central to post-World War
II debates, ranging from university expansion and
political correctness to the vitality of the comic
and realistic novel.
Although Amis remained skeptical of the critical labels with which he was associated (Movement poetry; angry young men), his literary
values confirmed the traditional realist precepts
of these groups. Throughout his life he condemned narrative indulgence, taking special
issue with such celebrated stylists as James Joyce,
D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and Vladimir
Nabokov. In his article Communication and the
Victorian Poet (1954a) he explained that an
orderly contract exists between reader and writer
a pact that must be preserved at all cost. He
consequently faulted most modernist (and certainly postmodernist) authors for linguistic exhibitionism, for elevating technique over plot,
tone of voice over characterization. Given the
significance of the modernist and postmodernist
periods to the publishing and higher education
industries, Amiss comments threatened to obscure his own artistry, detracting from the fact
that he remains the greatest satirist since Evelyn
Waugh and one of the most successful comic
writers in history.
Amiss career can be effectively grouped into
three periods. The first period encompasses the
early work from Lucky Jim (1954) until the mid1960s. Beginning with The Anti-Death League
(1966), however, Amiss work becomes increasingly dark and meditative. Controversy deepens
during this period as well, culminating in the
furor surrounding Stanley and the Women
(1984b), which struggled to find an American
publisher because of its anti-feminist overtones.
The last period of Amiss career is distinguished
by his most critically acclaimed novel The Old
Devils (1986) and includes The Biographers
Moustache and all posthumous publications.
Throughout each of these periods Amis challenged himself to write in different genres, ranging from comic and satirical novels to more
fantastical forms such as alternative world fictions, detective stories, murder mysteries, and
ghost tales. Under two pseudonyms William
Tanner and Robert Markham Amis wrote a
critical study of the James Bond novels (The Book
of Bond; or, Every Man His Own 007, 1965) as well
as his own contribution to the series (Colonel Sun:
A James Bond Adventure, 1968a). Among his nonfiction writing, he published a critical survey of
science fiction (New Maps of Hell, 1960a); a
handful of political pamphlets (Socialism and the
AMIS, KINGSLEY
Intellectuals, 1957; Lucky Jims Politics, 1968; An

Arts Policy, 1979); a childrens book (We are All
Guilty, 1992); and numerous light-hearted monographs on drinking (On Drink, 1972; Every Day
Drinking, 1983; Hows Your Glass?, 1984a). While
it is true that Amis wrote much that fell below
his usual level of achievement, no one can deny
his productivity or his influence, despite the
critical reappraisals that haunted him from the
mid-1980s until his death.
Although Amis began his career as a poet in the
late 1940s, fame would have to wait until 1954,
when Lucky Jim was released. Over the course of
his life, this novel would never go out of print, be
translated into over 20 languages, and elevate him
to the status of chief literary spokesman for his
generation. As David Lodge and others noted, the
novel perfectly depicts the conflicting values that
suffused English culture during the 1950s. Due
to the expanded opportunities afforded by the
Education Act of 1944, scores of people, often
from lower-middle-class upbringings, found
themselves newly appointed to the professions.
These people remained skeptical of the cultural
values from which they were traditionally excluded, and in many ways Lucky Jims denunciation
of snobbery, pretension, and hypocrisy crystallized their attitudes. A half-century after its release,
the novel continues to receive mention as the
greatest comic novel of the twentieth century,
and its hero Jim Dixon ranks among the most
popular antiheroes in contemporary literature.
The four novels that followed Lucky Jim continued Amiss assault on intellectual pomposity
and affectation. Appealing to a form of middlebrow common sense, That Uncertain Feeling
(1955), I Like It Here (1958), Take a Girl Like
You (1960b), and One Fat Englishman (1963)
satirized conventional platitudes regarding foreign travel, religion, immigration, and shifting
gender relations, especially sexuality. Stylistically
similar to Lucky Jim, these novels feature numerous verbal jokes, cultural puns, and situational
humor, usually invoking dialects or accents.
Many critics have come to recognize that such
stylistic mimicry is one of Amiss greatest achievements, but at the time some reviewers wondered
whether Amis wasnt simply recasting Lucky Jim
with different characters and voices. Even more
troubling, Amiss satirical skills seemed to have
grown diffuse: whereas the targets of Jim Dixons
11
ire were clearly rendered and defined, the attitudes of lead characters like Patrick Standish
(in Take a Girl Like You) and Roger Micheldene
(in One Fat Englishman) led to speculation that
Amis had started to champion the intellectual
traits that Lucky Jim would have leveled.
Discussions of artistic decline would plague
Amis throughout his career, as critics continually
questioned whether his satirical skills had devolved into misanthropy. Despite his comic brilliance, Amis certainly proved he could dive into
the dark, as the works of his middle period
confirm. The Anti-Death League is a deeply meditative inquiry into the potential meaninglessness
of life, death, and faith. Ending Up is a poignant
tale of friendship, aging, and loss, and netted Amis
his first Booker nomination. The Alteration,
which followed in 1976, was arguably the bleakest
of Amiss books to date.
As Amiss equally famous, equally controversial son, Martin, has noted, anger would continue
to afflict Kingsley Amiss subsequent novels,
especially Jakes Thing (1978) and the infamous
Stanley and the Women. Both novels offer extended masculinist critiques of the shifting gender
relations inspired by womens liberation and the
feminist movement. More worrisome, many felt
the sexism of its characters had started to mirror
Amiss attitudes. Amiss biographers Eric
Jacobs, Richard Bradford, and Zachary Leader
record the underlying reasons: during the composition of Stanley and the Women, Amiss marriage to fellow writer Elizabeth Jane Howard
dissolved, souring him on love. Separated since
1980, the couple made their divorce final in 1983,
as the novel neared completion.
As Martin Amis suggests in his memoir Experience (2000), Stanley and the Women functioned
as a literary catharsis, exorcising Amiss bitterness
toward romance. Two years later he would publish his most acclaimed novel, The Old Devils,
which garnered him the Booker Prize in 1986.
Significantly, the book is dedicated to his first
wife, Hilary (Hilly), whom Amis had married in
1948 and who was at the time married to Alastair
Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock. When Amiss marriage
to Howard collapsed, the Kilmarnocks took him
in, a surprising arrangement that he comically
spoke of as something out of an Iris Murdoch
novel. Triumphantly, the novel depicts the most
constructive loving relationships in Amiss canon,
12
AMIS, KINGSLEY
and its tonal and structural refinements remain

without equal among his other works.
No other work in this concluding period
of Amiss career ever equaled the quiet grandeur
of The Old Devils. The Russian Girl (1992), a
consideration of reconcilable differences in marriage, literature, and love, stands as the finest
other novel of this period. Reflecting back upon
a 40-year career, Amis also published numerous
non-fiction works in the final decade of his life,
reconfirming his staunch opinions. From 1988 to
1992 three anthologies appeared. Two assembled
his essays and reviews (The Amis Collection,
1991a; The Pleasure of Poetry, 1990b); the
other collected his personal favorites in poetry
(The Amis Anthology, 1989). Amis was knighted in
1990, and in 1991 he published his Memoirs,
inflaming some new controversies. Amis died on
October 22, 1995, leaving behind two sons, Philip
and Martin. A daughter, Sally, was later revealed
to be another mans child.
Over the course of his lengthy career, Amis
helped return the English novel to its realist roots,
opposing the heavily allusive, technically complex
work that defines the modernist and postmodernist periods. His comic satires remain among the
most incisive and lively in twentieth-century literature, for they capture the contemporary world
as it wished never to be seen: with its fragmented
ideals and smug complacencies exposed.
SEE ALSO: Amis, Martin (BIF); Angry Young
Man Fiction (BIF); Campus Novel (BIF)

Amis, K. (1954a). Communication and the Victorian
Poet. Essays in Criticism, 4, 38699.
Amis, K. (1954b). Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz.
Amis, K. (1955). That Uncertain Feeling. London:
Gollancz.
Amis, K. (1957). Socialism and the Intellectuals. London:
Fabian Society.
Amis, K. (1958). I Like It Here. London: Gollancz.
Amis, K. (1960a). New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science
Fiction. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Amis, K. (1960b). Take a Girl Like You. London:
Gollancz.
Amis, K. (1963). One Fat Englishman. London: Gollancz.
Amis, K. (1965). The James Bond Dossier. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Amis, K. (1966). The Anti-Death League. London:

Jonathan Cape.
Amis, K. (as Markham, R.) (1968a). Colonel Sun:
A James Bond Adventure. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, K. (1968b). I Want It Now. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Amis, K. (1969). The Green Man. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Amis, K. (1970). What Became of Jane Austen? And
Other Questions. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, K. (1971). Girl, 20. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, K. (1972). On Drink. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, K. (1974). Ending Up. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Amis, K. (1976). The Alteration. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Amis, K. (1978). Jakes Thing. London: Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1980). Russian Hide and Seek. London:
Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1983). Every Day Drinking. London:
Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1984a). Hows Your Glass? A Quizzical Look at
Drinks and Drinking. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Amis, K. (1984b). Stanley and the Women. London:
Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1986). The Old Devils. London: Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1988). Difficulties with Girls. London:
Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1989). The Amis Anthology: A Personal
Collection of Verse. London: Arena.
Amis, K. (1990a). The Folks that Live on the Hill.
London: Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1990b). The Pleasure of Poetry: From His Daily
Mirror Column. London: Cassell.
Amis, K. (1991a). The Amis Collection: Selected NonFiction 19541990. London: Penguin.
Amis, K. (1991b). Memoirs. London: Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1992). The Russian Girl. London:
Hutchinson.
Amis, K. (1995). The Biographers Moustache. London:
Flamingo.
Amis, K. (1997). The Kings English: A Guide to Modern
Usage. London: HarperCollins.
Amis, M. (2000). Experience: A Memoir. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Bradford, R. (2001). Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley
Amis. Chester Springs, PA: Peter Owen.
Fussell, P. (1994). The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man
of Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jacobs, E. (1995). Kingsley Amis: A Biography. London:
Hodder and Stoughton.
Keulks, G. (2003). Father and Son: Kingsley Amis,
Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
AMIS, MARTIN
Leader, Z. (ed.) (2000). The Letters of Kingsley Amis.

London: HarperCollins.
Leader, Z. (2006). The Life of Kingsley Amis. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Lodge, D. (1966). The Modern, the Contemporary, and
the Importance of Being Amis. In Language of Fiction.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 24367.
McDermott, J. (1989). Kingsley Amis: An English
Moralist. New York: St. Martins.
Moseley, M. (1993). Understanding Kingsley Amis.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Salwak, D. (ed.) (1990). Kingsley Amis: In Life and
Letters. New York: St. Martins.
Salwak, D. (1992). Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist.
Lanham, MD: Barnes and Noble.
Amis, Martin
GAVIN KEULKS
Born on August 25, 1949, the second son of writer

Kingsley Amis and wife Hilary, Martin Amis has
long lived a life of literary celebrity. Spanning
three and a half decades, 11 novels, seven works
of non-fiction, two short story collections, and
nearly 400 reviews and essays, his career has been
prolific, hugely profitable, and consistently controversial. His awards include the Somerset
Maugham Award and the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize for biography, and his work is
routinely shortlisted for other awards, most
notoriously the annual Man Booker Prize for
Fiction. From the appearance of his first novel,
The Rachel Papers (1973), to his most recent book,
The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (2008), Amis has inflamed some of the most
incendiary debates of the contemporary era.
His words have prompted new considerations of
realism, feminism, politics, and culture, and his
personal life has provided fodder for gossip and
tabloid journalism. As is true of anyone whose life
has careened into fame, such assessments have not
always been cordial. They have, however, always
been lively, always been edifying, and easily confirm Amiss status as one of Englands most
important living writers.
From the bleak satires of his early period
through the sweeping epics of the 1980s,
which solidified his reputation, to the ongoing
evolution of his latest work, Amis routinely attracts international attention sometimes for the
13
wrong reasons. His well-publicized divorce and

remarriage and the late discovery of an illegitimate daughter have sometimes overshadowed his
novels. When he changed literary agents in the
mid-1990s, securing a massive financial advance,
he was accused of selfishness and greed by some
prominent English writers. Such petit scandals
aside, few writers can match the spectacle of
Amiss literary ascension throughout the 1980s.
After establishing his name with a series of dark
comedies and satires that centered upon hip,
sarcastic, urban youths The Rachel Papers, Dead
Babies (1975), Success (1978), and Other People: A
Mystery Story (1981) Amis expanded his stylistic
and thematic repertoire to produce his masterpiece, Money: A Suicide Note, in 1984. Twentiethcentury literary history stills bears the imprint
of this work, which represents for many scholars
the commencement of Amiss middle and decidedly major period. Through the voice of its
charming antihero narrator, John Self, the novel
exposes the intricate betrayals and falsehoods that
support a culture enslaved to money. The novel
succeeds by blending the idiosyncratic with
the universal: John Self s miscalculations and
illusions are exponentially manifest in the wealthobsessed mindsets of England and America
during this decade.
Following a collection of essays (The Moronic
Inferno and Other Visits to America, 1986) and a
book of short stories grouped around the theme
of nuclear weapons (Einsteins Monsters, 1987),
London Fields appeared in 1989, joining Money as
two of the decades most incisive portraits of
apocalyptic anxieties, nuclear fear, and egocentric
individualism. Indeed, Amis considers these
works to form with The Information (1995)
an informal trilogy. Literary scholars have largely
agreed, ranking this triptych of novels among
Amiss major achievements, a showcase for his
distinctive themes, influences, and techniques.
Of course such classifications obscure the intervening Times Arrow; or, The Nature of the
Offence (1991), a taut yet forceful novel that
examines Nazi atrocities through the structural
lenses of reverse chronology and split consciousness. Such a work also exemplifies the grounds
upon which Amiss detractors have often congregated: some objected to Amiss subjugation of
history to style, labeling his efforts artistically
callous or indulgent. Like Money, Times Arrow
14
AMIS, MARTIN
is a tour de force of technique, a showcase for

reimagining literary frameworks and forms.
A highly influential, often imitated stylist, Amis
has engendered more than his share of literary
rivalry, and as is true of most authors, he has
struggled to maintain the momentum of his
middle, major period. Literary history features
relatively few W. B. Yeatses or Saul Bellows,
perennial producers of exceptional work, literary
longevitists. Indeed the author of Yellow Dog
(2003) bears little resemblance to the author of
The Rachel Papers as one would expect or hope,
given the weight of experience. After refining his
trademark characteristics and assuming the pinnacle of literary celebrity, Amis took a semi-hiatus
from fiction after 1995, inaugurating a transitional period that would ultimately produce his best
non-fiction writing. Although two works of fiction appeared Night Train (1997) and Heavy
Water and Other Stories (1998) the triumph of
this most recent period remains his memoir,
Experience (2000), a poignant rumination upon
the most pressing relationships in his life: those
with his father, his mentors and friends, wives and
children, and perhaps most important his own
aging. Significantly, his authorial perspective is
divided in Experience. Often he peers at the specter
of literary immortality; other times he languishes
upon lower terrain mortality, celebrity, feuds.
Of course, it is tempting to argue that there
remains only one unsettled feud in Experience,
and that is Amiss quarrel with death.
Besides Experience, the early years of the twentyfirst century witnessed the publication of two
additional non-fiction books: a collection of previously published work The War against Cliche:
Essays and Reviews, 19712000 (2001) and the
controversial political memoir Koba the Dread:
Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002). In 2003
Amis returned to fiction with Yellow Dog, an
ambitious and at times sprawling novel that many
people consider his least successful work. Fueling
the controversies that his work always seems to
inflame, the novel spawned new debates regarding
the evolution of Amiss career, his prodigious
talent, and his literary reputation. Perhaps in time
Yellow Dog will undergo a critical revaluation, but
it remains for now the nadir of Amiss career.
Any lingering questions about the state of
Amiss talent were silenced with the appearance
of House of Meetings (2006), a succinct political
novel that is also in many ways a companion text

to Koba the Dread. It depicts the contrasting
experiences and recollections of two half-brothers
imprisoned in a Soviet gulag. As with many of
Amiss novels, the complexities of love suffuse
the narrative, but whereas earlier works such as
London Fields once sought to depict the symbolic
death of love, later novels such as Yellow Dog
and House of Meetings work to resuscitate it as a
force of healing, equally personal and political.
This is not to say that Amis has softened or
mellowed as hes aged satirists in general do
not. Rather, the author who once so gleefully
discredited sentimentality and emotional cliche
now sought to refine the moral and humanist
imperatives of his writing.
This reinvigorated moral humanism also
figured more prominently in his non-fiction writings after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United
States and the 7/7 bombings in England. A series
of essays Fear and Loathing, The Voice of
the Lonely Crowd, The Palace of the End, The
Age of Horrorism, Terrorisms New Structure,
among others described Amiss conviction that
Islamic extremism (or Islamism, as he termed it)
ranked as the greatest threat in global politics.
A smattering of book reviews and short stories
appeared on similar topics, highlighted by
The Last Days of Muhammad Atta and The
Unknown Known.
As with most of Amiss writings, reactions to
this overt politicizing were divided. Some people
argued that it should be seen as extending the
political commentary in his earlier work, when
the recurring subjects were nuclear weapons and
the shifting balance of power in the post-Cold
War era. Other people lamented the swerve in
Amiss thinking from liberal castigator of greed,
corruption, and hypocrisy to reactionary neoconservative alarmist, who often seemed to minimize the crucial distinction between Islamic faith
and Islamic extremism.
The strengths that serve Amis so well in his
fiction he is an exceptionally inventive stylist,
following the tradition of James Joyce and
Vladimir Nabokov sometimes work against him
in these essays. Islamism and Horrorism are
two such examples, as are more elaborate phrasings like sourly mineral incredulity. In 2008, the
best of these writings were assembled in his
most opinionated collection The Second Plane:
ANGRY YOUNG MAN FICTION
September 11: Terror and Boredom, which was

poorly received, especially in the US. Regardless
of ones political leanings, these writings did serve
to confirm one inescapable fact: in addition to
being viewed as one of Englands greatest living
novelists, Amis now had to be considered one of
its foremost men of letters too. Amiss next major
publication a novel titled The Pregnant Widow
was published in 2010.
Now that Martin Amis has assumed his position
amid the established orders, the older guard of
contemporary literature, it has become easier to
regard him as a literary father in his own right,
someone against whom younger writers are compelled to react or inveigh. It has also become easier
to contextualize his achievements within literary
genres and movements. After more than three
decades of controversial, critically acclaimed, and
popular work, Amis remains a writer who is not
afraid to leverage his reputation and integrity by
speaking his mind. In this regard, he remains also a
writer in transition, one whose risk-taking has
never failed to captivate readers interest and imaginations. Beneath the clamoring of controversy
and the triumphalism of prizes that interest alone
ensures an audience and, possibly, fame. Although
he has written much that has fallen below his best
efforts, he has remained a force in the literary
vanguard for nearly four decades. As he continues
to refine his legacy, one thing seems certain to
persist: his words will be closely considered and
debated. Few writers are afforded that luxury, and
fewer still would ask for anything more.
SEE ALSO: Amis, Kingsley (BIF); Chicklit and
Ladlit (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
15
Amis, M. (1987). Einsteins Monsters. London: Jonathan

Cape.
Amis, M. (1989). London Fields. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (1991). Times Arrow; or, The Nature of the
Offence. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (1993). Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other
Excursions. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (1995). The Information. London: HarperCollins.
Amis, M. (1997). Night Train. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (1998). Heavy Water and Other Stories.
London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (2000). Experience: A Memoir. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (2001). The War against Cliche: Essays and
Reviews, 19712000. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (2002). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the
Twenty Million. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (2003). Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (2006). House of Meetings. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Amis, M. (2008). The Second Plane: September 11: Terror
and Boredom. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (2010). The Pregnant Widow. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Dern, J. A. (2000). Martians, Monsters, and Madonnas:
Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis. New
York: Peter Lang.
Diedrick, J. (2004). Understanding Martin Amis.
Finney, B. (2008). Martin Amis. New York: Routledge.
Keulks, G. (2003). Father and Son: Kingsley Amis,
Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Keulks, G. (ed.) (2006). Martin Amis: Postmodernism
and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tredell, N. (ed.) (2000). The Fiction of Martin Amis: A
Readers Guide to Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Angry Young Man Fiction
NICK BENTLEY
Amis, M. (1973). The Rachel Papers. London: Jonathan

Cape.
Amis, M. (1975). Dead Babies. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (1978). Success. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (1981). Other People: A Mystery Story.
Amis, M. (1982). Invasion of the Space Invaders.
London: Hutchinson.
Amis, M. (1984). Money: A Suicide Note. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Amis, M. (1986). The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits
to America. London: Jonathan Cape.
The term angry young man refers to a loose

grouping of British writers, mainly dramatists and
novelists, who emerged in the mid- to late 1950s.
As the term suggests, most of the writers associated with the group were relatively young
and male, and their anger was generally directed
toward what they perceived as the establishment
or the prevailing ideologies of British society in
the 1950s. That most of them (and their fictional
heroes) came from working- or lower-middleclass backgrounds suggests that class distinction
16
was one of the main causes of the anger they

presented in their work. The term also refers to
some of the characters that appeared in the texts
they produced. Therefore, it assumed a wider
cultural significance and was applied, often uncritically, to any young, predominantly white,
male figure who had some sense of grievance
against his parents generation, or the establishment, or both.
The term was coined in 1956 after the opening
of John Osbornes play Look Back in Anger at the
Royal Court Theatre and has been attributed by
Harry Ritchie to the theaters press officer at the
time, George Fearon (Ritchie 26). The term related to the main protagonist in the play, Jimmy
Porter, and was quickly taken up by the media to
refer to those whose frustration and annoyance
was perceived as symptomatic of a common
feeling in certain quarters in the 1950s. Although
it was never an organized group, several writers
found themselves associated with the term, including the novelists Stan Barstow, John Braine,
William Cooper, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, and
Keith Waterhouse; the dramatists John Arden,
Harold Pinter, John Osborne, and Arnold
Wesker; and the existential philosophers and
cultural commentators Stuart Holroyd, Bill
Hopkins, and Colin Wilson. Although the term
was coined in the mid-1950s many writers became
attached in hindsight to the new group, including
those associated with the Movement poets and
novelists that had emerged in the early 1950s such
as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Wain.
An early collection of essays under the title
Declaration, edited by Tom Maschler (1957),
brought together ideas by many in the group
including Osborne, Holroyd, Hopkins, Wilson,
and Wain, as well as others such as the filmmaker
Lindsay Anderson, the theater critic Kenneth
Tynan, and the novelist Doris Lessing.
The anger expressed had complex causes but
was linked by a general sense of disillusionment
that many young, working- or lower-middle-class
writers felt with the failure of the 1945 Clement
Attlee Labour government to deliver its promise
of establishing a more egalitarian and democratic
society. Many in the late 1950s felt that the old
class prejudices, which reserved the best jobs
in government, industry, and public life for a
privileged few, were still entrenched in British
society. Although the general trend among the
angry young men was toward a resistance to

dominant society, politically they were more diverse than one might expect. Many, like Kingsley
Amis, had flirted with the Communist Party
during their university days, and many in the
group were associated with the rise of the British
New Left in the second half of the 1950s. This was
a group of intellectuals who coalesced (in a British
context) around the academic journal Universities
and Left Review (which later became the New Left
Review) and included figures such as Raymond
Williams, E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart,
Ralph Samuel, and Stuart Hall. They were influenced by Marxist theory but tended to focus more
on the cultural than the economic aspects of social
class. It is unfair to say, however, that the group
was wholly left-leaning politically. Many in the
group tended, especially as they got older, to move
to the right politically. Kingsley Amis, for example, became a supporter of the Conservative Party
in the 1970s, and Philip Larkin claimed to be a fan
of Margaret Thatcher.
In the 1950s, the work produced by the angry
young men tended toward realism as a literary
(and filmic) mode. The settings of the plays and
novels they produced tended to be urban, often
Northern, and distinctly working class. In the
theater, the term kitchen-sink drama was
coined to express something of the tawdry domestic environment in which much of the action
took place. Many of the angry writers adopted
realism as a form that they felt best expressed the
political commitment they wanted their writing
to convey. This return to realism was in fact often
articulated as a reaction against the modernist
experimentalism of the pre-World War II literary
establishment. After its initial radical experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s many of the angry
writers felt modernism was too elitist and esoteric
to communicate directly with a popular readership. Modernism was seen to be too closely associated with the established literary scene, which
was often felt to be conservative and allied with
establishment views of society. William Cooper,
for example, regarded modernism as an attack
from the inside on intellect in general, made by
intellectuals so decadent that they no longer mind
if intellect persists in fact some of them sound as
if they would be happier if it didnt (1959, 36).
The identification, however, of a return to
realism in the angry texts is often complicated,
especially upon close analysis of some of the

writers works. For example, in his 1950s texts
Alan Sillitoe often uses interior monologues and a
mode of narration called free indirect discourse
which was more associated with modernist than
realist conventions; and the use of fantasy and
dream narratives in Keith Waterhouses Billy Liar
offers an alternative imaginative location to the
gritty, Northern, working-class environment in
which the character is placed.
It is a mark of the fluid nature of the term that
in the popular imagination angry young men
was understood to refer not only to writers but
also to the emblematic set of male heroes and
antiheroes they produced: Arthur Seaton in Alan
Sillitoes Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1958), and the unnamed borstal boy of his short
story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(1959); Joe Lampton, the ambitious lowermiddle-class hero of John Braines Room at the
Top (1957); Arthur Machin, the hard-playing and
hard-drinking rugby player in David Storeys This
Sporting Life (1960); the jazz trumpeter Jimmy
Porter in Osbornes Look Back in Anger (1957);
and Billy Liar, the eponymous hero of Keith
Waterhouses 1959 novel. Jim Dixon in Kingsley
Amiss Lucky Jim (1953) and Charles Lumley
in John Wains Hurry on Down (1953) were
retrospectively associated with this group of antiheroes. As can be seen by this range of characters
Alan Sillitoes borstal boy is a far remove from Jim
Dixon, the disillusioned university lecturer their
differences are often as great as their similarities,
even if they share a distrust of authority and the
old order.
As well as the anger, it is important to contextualize the angry young men with respect to
gender and age. Although the term clearly refers
mainly to male writers, a few women writers were
also associated with the group. Doris Lessing, for
example, because of her association with left-wing
politics, and works such as In Pursuit of the English
(1960) that concentrated on working-class life in
the Britain in the 1950s, were associated with the
group. Shelagh Delaneys play A Taste of Honey
(1956) also became identified as angry writing,
as did Lynne Reid Bankss The L-Shaped Room
(1960). The concentration in these novels
of exploring the female experience of British
working-class culture made them closely allied
to the angry ethic, while at the same time
17
identifying aspects of patriarchy and misogyny

within working-class culture and the male writers
who were recording it. Indeed, women were often
seen as simply wives and mothers by the male
writers, and thus allied to the forces of society that
threatened to contain the potentially radical
stances taken by the male protagonists. Lynne
Segal, in Look Back in Anger: Men in the Fifties
(1990), argues convincingly that the barely
concealed misogyny in much angry writing was
part of a resistance to changing models of masculinity, which sought to domesticate a generation of men who had been brought up to believe in
the manliness and excitement of war. Women
were too often presented as prizes for what Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (27) calls the homosocial
competition between rival male characters from
different classes. The model for this is established
in Lucky Jim, where Jim Dixon succeeds, eventually, in wresting the affections of the beautiful
Christine away from his class enemy Bertrand
Welch. This theme is repeated often enough
to show the importance of gender in angry
writing. Joe Lampton, in Braines Room at the
Top, for example, sees his conquest of Susan
Brown, the daughter of a wealthy businessman,
as part of his process of climbing the class ladder.
Much of the most interesting recent research
on the angry young men has concentrated on
the representation of masculinity in the texts,
especially in relation to the way it was being
redefined during this period, suggesting that
much of the anger can be attributed to men trying
to reassert their manhood as a consequence of the
perceived feminization of a postwar society.
Brook (2007), for example, is interested in the
way masculinity becomes a complex subject in
fiction in the 1950s and centered on the male body
as a site for feeling and vitality; and Ferrebe (2005)
explores the cultural and philosophical contexts
informing the representation of masculinity in
the angry novels.
In terms of age, the phenomenon of the angry
young men connected in the 1950s with an
emerging sense of a youthful and rebellious
cultural consciousness that was felt to be invading
Britain, especially from America. Richard
Hoggart (1957), for example, wrote of what he
called the shiny barbarism (193) of American
popular culture and its effect on the Juke-Box
boys (246). He lamented an older sense of the
18
organic working class that he felt was under threat

from the new attractions of (Americanized) consumerism. Rock n roll and other new musical
styles such as jazz were sweeping Britain and
attracting youth in the late fifties. The concentration on fashion and looking good is a key feature,
for example, of Arthur Seaton, the young rebellious character in Alan Sillitoes Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning. Colin MacInnes, a writer
not always associated with the angry young
men, but clearly emerging from the same contexts and with a similar disgruntled attitude
toward the establishment, focused on youth,
homosexuality, and emerging black culture in his
trilogy of London novels that included Absolute
Beginners (1959) and City of Spades (1957). For
MacInnes youth represented an oppositional and
potentially radical voice that challenged the
dominant ideologies and beliefs of 1950s Britain.
As with gender, much recent critical work has
been done on the place of youth and subcultures
in the angry writing of the 1950s. Bentley
(2007), for example, has identified British youth
culture, with its gaze on America, as one of the
ways in which frustration with the British establishment sought alternative cultural forms and
values.
MacInness book also relates to another recent
direction taken in the research done on the
angries: the way in which race and ethnicity
were represented. Although the dominant image
of the angry young men is white British, the
establishment of immigrant communities in Britain in the 1950s begin to interest those writers
associated with the group. Sillitoe in Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning, for example, introduces a black character as the friend of one of
Arthur Seatons brothers; and despite the racial
banter that occurs, theres a clear attempt to show
the connections between the working classes
across a racial divide. One of the most important
1950s writers in this context is Sam Selvon, a black
Caribbean writer who came to Britain in the 1950s
and, in his novel The Lonely Londoners (1956),
attempted to articulate the experiences of the first
generation of (usually male) immigrants that
came to Britain during this period. His focus on
urban working-class life in 1950s Britain has
affinities with much of the angry writing of the
period, although, like MacInnes, he has only
recently been associated with the group.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics

and the Novel (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
Amis, K. (1953). Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz.
Banks, L. R. (1960). The L-Shaped Room. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Bentley, N. (2007). Radical Fictions: The English Novel
in the 1950s. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Bergonzi, B. (1993). Wartime and Aftermath: English
Literature and Its Background 19391960. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Bradbury, M. (2001). No, Not Bloomsbury? 19541960.
In The Modern British Novel 18782001, rev. edn.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 313360.
Braine, J. (1957). Room at the Top. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Brannigan, J. (2002). Literature, Culture, and Society in
Postwar England, 19451965. Lewiston, NY: Edwin
Mellen.
Brook, S. (2007). Literature and Cultural Criticism in the
1950s: The Feeling Male Body. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Carpenter, H. (2002). The Angry Young Men: A Literary
Comedy of the 1950s. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Cooper, W. (1959). Reflections on Some Aspects of the
Experimental Novel. In J. Wain (ed.), International
Literary Annual, no. 2. London: John Calder, pp.
2936.
Delaney, S. (1956). A Taste of Honey. London: Methuen.
Ferrebe, A. (2005). Masculinity in Male-Authored
Fiction 19502000: Keeping It Up. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Head, D. (2002). Class and Social Change. In The
Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction,
19502000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 4982.
Hewison, R. (1981). In Anger: Culture in the Cold War
194560. London: Methuen.
Hill, J. (1986). Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema
19561963. London: BFI.
Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of
Working-Class Life with Special Reference to
Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Kalliney, P. J. (2006). Cities of Affluence and Anger:
A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Laing, S. (1986). Representations of Working-Class Life
19571964. London: Macmillan.
Lessing, D. (1960). In Pursuit of the English. London:
MacGibbon and Kee.
MacInnes, C. (1957). City of Spades. London:
MacGibbon and Kee.
AWARDS AND PRIZES
MacInnes, C. (1959). Absolute Beginners. London:

MacGibbon and Kee.
Maschler, T. (ed.) (1957). Declaration. London:
MacGibbon and Kee.
Morrison, B. (1980). The Movement: English Poetry and
Fiction of the 1950s. London: Methuen.
Osborne, J. (1957). Look Back in Anger. London: Faber
and Faber.
Rabinovitz, R. (1967). The Reaction against Experiment
in the English Novel 19501960. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Ritchie, H. (1988). Success Stories: Literature and the
Media in England, 19501959. London: Faber and
Faber.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Segal, L. (1990). Look Back in Anger: Men in the Fifties.
In Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing
Men. London: Virago, pp. 125.
Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London: Alan
Wingate.
Sillitoe, A. (1958). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
London: W. H. Allen.
Sillitoe, A. (1959). The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner. London: W. H. Allen.
Storey, D. (1960). This Sporting Life. London:
Longman.
Wain, J. (1953). Hurry On Down. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Waterhouse, K. (1959). Billy Liar. London: Michael
Joseph.
Wilson, C. (2007). The Angry Years: The Rise and the
Fall of the Angry Young Men. London: Robson.
Awards and Prizes

RICHARD TODD
In his 2005 study of todays prize culture, The

Economy of Prestige, James F. English argues that
even if literary prizes (in the sense of the
Greek drama and arts competitions in the sixth
century BC) seem always to have been with us,
their stunning rise . . . over the past hundred
years is one of the great untold stories of modern
cultural life (2005b, 1). This is certainly true
when one considers fiction awards and prizes in
Britain and what is customarily known as the
Booker-eligible world since about 1980. The rise
and increasing complexity of this cultural phenomenon during the past 30 years has, it may be
argued, proved even more stunning.
19
To illustrate this claim, a mark of the change

that has taken place in the first decade of the
twenty-first century is that a subgenre of academic
discourse on literary prizes has evolved. In 2003
Oxford Brookes University acquired the Man
Booker archive from Booktrust, a symbolic move
in which the academic environment became part
of the prize worlds hitherto cultural establishment and commercial space.
A conference was held to mark the event, and a
selection of essays from that conference later
appeared (G
ortschacher & Klein 2006). In 2006
a conference was held at the Sorbonne in Paris,
under the auspices of the ERCLA research center

(Ecritures
du Roman Contemporaine de Langue
Anglaise), the purpose of which was to try to
understand the impact of literary prizes on the
market of literature in Great-Britain [sic] and
Commonwealth countries (Guignery 11).
In the British book trade the term Bookereligible has for some years been preferred to
Commonwealth in an attempt to avoid any
sense of Anglocentrism. Whatever the preferred
terminology, the explanation for its existence as a
category may be sought in a longstanding feature
of the Anglophone publishing world, where for
many years US fiction was specially copyrighted,
and as a result was excluded from the terms of
eligibility of the Booker Prize when it was first set
up in 1969. Since 2002 it has been known as the
Man Booker prize, but the Booker label has
tended to stick (Turner 596). Although, as has
been noted, the past century has seen a striking
series of developments, until about 1975 the
actual handing over or bestowal of a given
award was a fairly low-key affair.
For those readers accustomed during the 1980s
and 1990s to the high-profile televised celebratory
dinner, in the case of the Booker culminating in
what was usually a cliff-hanging speech at the end
of which the winner is announced, this low-key
approach may seem strange. Although throughout the past century prizes have been awarded for
particular categories of writing, the rise and rise of
the Booker during the 1980s prompted a more
politicized approach to prize-giving, and the rise
of what may be called special interests or even
logrolling may be noted here. Literary prizes
have been marked since the 1980s by sums of prize
money that (even adjusted to the values of the
time) could not have been dreamed of before
20
AWARDS AND PRIZES
1950, and what is more, the effect on sales can be

(but has not consistently been) staggering, with
revenues to publishers, and thus royalties due to
prize-winning authors, exceeding by several times
the monetary value of the award itself. More
recently still, the real winners, since the abolition
of retail price maintenance on books in the UK in
1996, have been neither authors nor publishers,
but booksellers.
A painful event occurring in the ceremony of
the 2008 Wales Book of the Year, transmitted by
the BBC on July 2, 2008, serves to indicate the
plethora of awards now available, as well as illustrating what has come to be a format pioneered by
the Booker panel in the late 1970s. A dinner is
enjoyed by scores of invited guests. Unlike the
Academy Awards, the setting is not theatrical but
convivial, united with the Oscars only in the
tension that builds up as a series of shortlisted
authors is revealed, the speech from the chair
sometimes reaching agonizing lengths for the
participants (shortlisted writers, entourage, publishers, agents, and those who have bet on the
outcome). Whereas the Oscar award ceremony is
diluted by the baffling variety of awards, a
typical ceremony such as the Welsh one (apparently not the only one to go horribly wrong) is
possibly still more fraught with tension because
in the vast majority of cases only one person
will leave as winner. In this event, the Welsh
culture minister Rhodri Glyn Thomas inexplicably read out the name of the runner-up instead of
the winner. The duped Tom Bullough left the
ceremony in a huff, without waiting to see
the 10,000 cheque going to Dannie Abse for
The Presence or, apparently, claiming his 1,000
consolation cheque for The Claude Glass.
As the description of the format of the Wales
Book of the Year ceremony indicates, it is the Man
Booker ceremony format that is the big daddy of
them all. To paraphrase James English (2005b,
1978), the annual dinner and award ceremony
has long been predicated on finding a prestigious
location (for many years Londons Guildhall,
more recently the British Museum). It is customarily televised live in prime time: indeed the very
phenomenon of televising the ceremony, and the
concomitant media and global interest, is crucial
to todays prize culture. Recent Man Booker
sophistications include what English calls a roving floor reporter covering the live action. Ex-
tracts from and expert commentary on each

shortlisted title are presented by a studio team,
often also set up in the chosen location. English is
anxious to stress that a meta-commentary of the
television coverage of the event has itself apparently
become a cultural product worthy of critical
scrutiny (198; emphasis original).
In this context it is worth taking note of one of
Robert McCrums observations in an article
marking his standing down as The Observers
literary editor in May 2008 after more than 10
years on the job, which is the increasing use, and
even intermittent reputability, of the blogosphere:
commentators who are not professional critics
have an increasingly greater say on all aspects of
literary fiction, and such a say is not limited to
professional journalists and/or critics. Some
doomsayers even foresee, if not actually the
end of the culture of professional criticism, then
certainly an era in which what they consider unprofessional blogs are increasingly given authority.
The early days (the early 1980s) are now largely
remembered by single televised moments, such as
(in 1983) the very telegenic Selina Scotts asking
the chair of the Booker judges, Fay Weldon,
whether she had read all the shortlisted books
all the way through and attempting to solicit an
opinion from the late Angela Carter, another
judge; or (in 1985) Hermione Lees astonishing
coup in tracking down the one-off winner Keri
Hulme to Salt Lake City, Utah, for a brief live
telephone interview (Todd 1996, 74). The evanescence of these moments, and of the whole ceremony and the meta-ceremonies surrounding it,
has of course been made retrievable by the increasingly professional and creative use of television and the Internet. The one constant feature of
the Booker ceremony, and the events leading up
to it, has been crisply summarized: its purpose,
from its foundation by Tom Maschler and Martyn
Goff, has been not only to promote the cause of
serious fiction but, at the same time almost by
definition, to provoke rows and scandals, which
may, in due course, promote the cause of serious
fiction (Lawson 12, quoted in English 2005b,
213), and its the rows that keep the Booker
going (Lawson 12, quoted in Todd 1996, 64
n. 10). (Updates from this era are recorded in
Todd 2006, 819 and Norris 2036.)
There can have been little public ceremony
attending the prizes established in the first half
AWARDS AND PRIZES
of the twentieth century. The James Tait Black

Memorial Prize (1918) and Hawthornden Prize
(1919) are early twentieth-century examples of
low-key ceremonies, although the prize money
(20,000 and 10,000 respectively) has soared to
dizzying heights in the twenty-first century. Postwar (and increasingly less low-key ceremonial
award) examples include: the John Llewellyn Rhys
Prize, which is awarded to fiction or poetry (it was
founded in 1942 by the widow of the eponymous
war victim; now 5,000); the Somerset Maugham
Award (1947: stipulates an age limit of 35, may be
awarded to more than one person, and is to be
used for travel the total fund is now 12,000);
and the W. H. Smith Literary Award (1959:
operated initially according to Booker-eligible
criteria but is now open to world fiction and
fiction in translation). (See English 2005b: 201
and the exhaustive catalogue in Turner 573613
which shows the exponential rise in the number of
prizes over the past decade, and how prize award
money has been increased to match the Man
Bookers 50,000.) The Booker also began (in
1969) modestly in terms of ceremony and prize
money (then a tenth of what it is now). It is
generally accepted (Todd 1996; English 2005b; etc.)
that the Booker was founded because of Maschler
and Goffs perception that no high-profile literary
award such as Frances Prix Goncourt (1903) and
Italys Premio Strega (1947) existed in Britain, an
award in which national literary prestige was intended to take pride of position over prize money;
and it is true that although the prize money for
these awards ranged from the unspectacular to the
nugatory, the effect on sales was staggering. The last
40 years have shown how variable the relationship
between prize money and sales can be where the
Booker is concerned. It cannot be doubted that the
Booker initiative (applicable to a much wider,
Booker-eligible, reading constituency, although
the early winners were almost invariably British)
is probably the single most significant cause of the
unprecedented levels to which the Anglophone
reading public now reads quality fiction.
Certain literary prizes in the early twentieth
century stipulated conditions to be met by the
winner. Thus the prize money of the Somerset
Maugham Award, as already indicated, is intended to enable the winner to travel abroad
(Turner 570). An innovative award, the David
Cohen Prize for Literature, was founded in 1993;
21
it is made every two years and amounts to

40,000. The beneficiary is a distinguished senior
writer (the first was V. S. Naipaul, and in 1995 the
prize went to the late Harold Pinter; the 2009
winner was Seamus Heaney). The winner of the
David Cohen Prize for Literature chooses the
recipient of the Clarissa Luard Award, which is
worth 12,500. This award is funded by Arts
Council England and is given to a literature
organization that supports young writers or an
individual writer under the age of 35. These
remarkably philanthropic terms contrast with
what may be termed the special interests lobby.
Two special interest lobbies in particular may be
noted here: the Orange Prize for Fiction and the
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
The Orange Prize (briefly renamed the Orange
Broadband Prize for Fiction) was first awarded in
1996 to Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter. It has
since spawned several subcategories, such as the
Harpers Bazaar Orange Broadband Short Story
Competition, the Penguin/Orange Readers Group
Prize, and the Reading Group Book of the Year.
Subsequent high-profile winners of the Orange
Prize have included Rose Tremains The Road
Home (2008), Zadie Smiths On Beauty (2006),
and Anne Michaelss Fugitive Pieces (1997). There
is a six-title short list, and a long list (the procedure is similar in nature to, and may even have
contributed to, a recently introduced feature of
the Man Booker) is announced some weeks previously. The two obvious differences from the
Man Booker are that the Orange is an all-women
prize, and the terms of eligibility extend to the US.
It was set up in response to a sense among a
number of senior figures in the book trade that
women were underrepresented in Britains prize
culture as it then was, and that there was room for
a prize that recognized English-language fiction
from all over the world, not just the Bookereligible parts of it. An earlier web page distanced
the ceremony from the by then traditional blacktie dinner, and described the award ceremony as
funky, informal, and accompanied by lots of
finger food a glorified reception rather than a
glorified dinner (Todd 2006, 14). The prize money remains at 30,000. The Orange Prize gained
notoriety from its initiation, with a minority of
women writers, most notably A. S. Byatt, refusing
to have their work considered, on the grounds
that the main message sent out by the conditions
22
AWARDS AND PRIZES
of eligibility was ghettoization. This has proved

a legitimate argument but not one generally
subscribed to.
A year before the Orange Prize was set up, the
most lucrative prize in the English-speaking world
was launched, not from London but from Dublin.
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award,
however, is open to writers from all over the world,
providing the title has been translated into English.
The winners since the inception of the award have
been predominantly novelists. The website is extremely informative and interactive, and since this
prize stands rather at the edge of the remit Fiction
Awards and Prizes in Britain, little more will be
said here, other than that nominations are made
mainly by public libraries worldwide, and that
the prize money is D 100,000.
There is no doubt that winners and shortlisted
writers benefit financially from literary prizes:
even such a high-profile fiasco as humiliated Tom
Bullough at the beginning of July 2008 was within
a month being reported in The Bookseller as
having enhanced sales of The Claude Glass significantly. This prompts the question who is actually
the winner in an apparently winwin situation,
and the answer must be the retail sector itself.
The same issue of The Bookseller reported that
Borders in Cardiff saw a huge increase in sales of
The Claude Glass, with the stores David Hughes
actually attributing the commercial success of
the paperback version to Rhodri Glyn Thomass
gaffe. In other words, large though prize money
amounts have become (many are now five-figure
sums in sterling), they can be and sometimes are
perversely dwarfed by sales, and thus royalties.
One of the (Man) Booker awards of which this
was true is probably the 1993 win by Roddy Doyle
for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which within a year
had sold 360,000 copies in hardback and within
the calendar year 1994 355,000 in paperback, a
gross revenue by the end of 1994 of 6 million
(Todd 1996, 20). Doyle would have netted well
over 750,000 in 1994: a conservative estimate
assuming the standard hardback and paperback
royalties, and their so-called escalators (royalty
percentages rise by up to 5 percent when a certain
threshold of sales is reached). That is around 50
times the amount of the award money itself by
1994 standards. And this doesnt take account of
subsidiary rights such as translations, radio and
television adaptations, and even film rights. Other
notable commercial successes include Salman

Rushdies 1981 winner Midnights Children, and
A. S. Byatts 1990 win Possession.
However, with the abolition of retail price maintenance in Britain in 1996, everything began to
change, first slowly, then dramatically. By the first
decade of the twenty-first century, retail chains
such as Waterstones were offering 30 to 40 percent
discounts on prize-winning and/or shortlisted
titles (more often in paperback) or grouping them
together in a 3 for 2 offer; and the online supplier
Amazon was following suit. As a result, the picture
that is now emerging is that the real power which
has always tended to be with the retailer has
become entrenched as never before. While it is still
possible for individual authors who win or are
shortlisted for literary prizes to earn enormous
amounts, in a more average or conventional situation their income through royalties has decreased
considerably (Todd 2005).
SEE ALSO: Awards and Prizes (WF);
Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF); The Publishing Industry and
Fiction (WF)
Most if not all of the prizes mentioned here have

their own websites. However, as their contents
change from year to year, website references are
given only in instances where the URL may be
considered stable.
BBC News (2008). Error as Book Award Announced
(July 2). At http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/
wales/7485572.stm, accessed July 3, 2008.
English, J. (ed.) (2005a). Companion to Contemporary
British Literature. Oxford: Blackwell.
English, J. (2005b). The Economy of Prestige: Prizes,
Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
G
ortschacher, W., & Klein, H. (eds.) (2006). Fiction and
Literary Prizes in Great Britain. Vienna: Praesens.
Guignery, V. (2006). Introduction: The Infinite Journey
of Books. In Guignery & Gallix (2006), pp. 1119.
Guignery, V., & Gallix, F. (eds.) (2006). Pre- and PostPublication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in

English. Paris: Editions
Publibook.
Lawson, M. (1994). Never Mind the Plot, Enjoy the
Argument. Independent, p. 12 (Sept. 6).
McCrum, R. (2008). A Thriller in Ten Chapters.
Observer, ch. 8 (May 25). At www.guardian.co.uk/
AWARDS AND PRIZES
books/2008/may/25/fiction.culture, accessed
Jan. 24, 2010.
Norris, S. (2006). Recontextualising the Booker. In
G
ortschacher & Klein (2006), pp. 2036.
Todd, R. (1996). Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize
and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury.
23
Todd, R. (2005). Literary Fiction and the Book Trade.

In English (2005a), pp. 1938.
Todd, R. (2006). How Has the Booker Prize Changed
Since 1996? In G
ortschacher & Klein (2006), pp. 818.
Turner, B. (ed.) (2007). The Writers Handbook 2008.
London: Macmillan.
B
Bainbridge, Beryl
VIRGINIA RICHTER
Beryl Bainbridges fiction centers on crisis, ranging from private incidents teenage rebellion
leading to incest or murder (An Awfully Big
Adventure, 1989; Harriet Said, 1972), twisted love
relationships (Sweet William, 1975), disintegrating families suddenly confronted with violence
and death (The Dressmaker, 1973; Injury Time,
1977) to highly public and even national
disasters such as Robert F. Scotts doomed Antarctic expedition (The Birthday Boys, 1991) or the
sinking of the Titanic (Every Man for Himself,
1996). Bainbridges work can be divided into
roughly two groups. The first, which includes
most of her earlier fiction, draws on workingclass life in her native Liverpool. These texts are
partly based on autobiographical experience,
but they also incorporate historical characters
transposed into the Bainbridge universe of stifling
working-class domesticity, such as Hitler in
Young Adolf, depicted on a spurious visit to his
relatives living in Liverpool in 1910. Bainbridges
interest in historical characters and events deepened in the second group of her novels, written
mostly from the 1990s onwards and including, in
addition to the books on Scott and the Titanic,
Master Georgie (1998), set during the Crimean
War, and According to Queenie (2001), about the
relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester
Thrale, viewed through the eyes of Thrales
daughter Queenie. Her latest novel, The Girl in
the Polka Dot Dress (2008), is the first to move
beyond an exploration of Englishness and to turn
to an American topic, the assassination of Robert

Kennedy.
Born in Liverpool on November 21, 1933,
Bainbridge disclosed early the two aspects of her
talent that would dominate her career: an aptitude for performing and for writing. Aged 15, she
ran away from home and joined the Liverpool
Repertory Theatre (the setting for An Awfully Big
Adventure). Her career as an actress included an
appearance in the popular television series Coronation Street. In the 1960s, Bainbridge decided to
focus on her literary work. After experiencing
initial rejection by publishers, critics, and the
public alike mostly because her characters were
considered repellent her third novel Harriet
Said, in fact the first to be written, was accepted by
Duckworth, initiating a successful publishing
partnership which lasted into the late 1990s.
Harriet Said introduces a typical Bainbridge configuration: two adolescent girls bent on collecting
Experience begin to stalk a middle-aged neighbor; their growing obsession with his far from
glamorous sexual life culminates, unexpectedly
and chillingly, in his wifes murder at the hands
of the naive narrator. Repression, neurotic sexuality, self-deception, the desire to break free, and
the unpredictability of life are leitmotifs in
Bainbridges work.
At first sight, her novels follow a trajectory from
marginalized, troubled characters to figures occupying major positions in British intellectual history, such as Samuel Johnson, or embodiments
of heroism, such as the explorer Captain Scott.
However, by consistently adopting the perspective
of subaltern characters, for example young

BAINBRIDGE, BERYL
Queenie Thrale or the crew members of Scotts

Antarctic voyage, the shortcomings of these
great British heroes are disclosed, their respective claim to fame debunked as the effect of a selfserving, neurotic personality. In all her writings,
the British class system is regarded from a dispassionate, ironically subversive position. This critical concern for the iniquities of British society and
history is carried over into Bainbridges non-fiction, as in her travelogue English Journey in which
she retraces J. B. Priestleys classic Depression-era
journey. Apart from her fiction, her non-fictional
explorations of contemporary England, and her
theater reviews (now collected in Front Row,
2005), Bainbridge is also known for her work for
television, both as a presenter and a scriptwriter.
Over the years, Beryl Bainbridge has established
herself as a leading English novelist, achieving
both critical and commercial success. Five of her
books were shortlisted for the Booker Prize; for
Every Man for Himself she received the Whitbread
Novel Award, and for Master Georgie she was
awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize,
the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the W. H.
Smith Literary Award. In 2000, Bainbridge was
made a Dame of the British Empire. Her novels,
unostentatious and economical in style, and often
bleak in their outlook, capture their readership
by the authors sharp, unflinching observation,
her precise rendering of dialogue, and, last but not
least, her (often black) humor.
SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical
Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)

Bainbridge, B. (1967). A Weekend with Claude
(Rev. edn. 1981). London: Hutchinson.
Bainbridge, B. (1968). Another Part of the Wood
(Rev. edn. 1979). London: Hutchinson.
Bainbridge, B. (1972). Harriet Said. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1973). The Dressmaker. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1974). The Bottle Factory Outing.
London: Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1975). Sweet William. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1976). A Quiet Life. London:
Duckworth.
25
Bainbridge, B. (1977). Injury Time. London:

Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1980). Winter Garden. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1984a). English Journey; or, The Road to
Milton Keynes. London: Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1984b). Watsons Apology. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1985). Mum and Mr. Armitage. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1986). Filthy Lucre; or, The Tragedy of
Andrew Ledwhistle and Richard Soleway. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1987). Forever England: North and
South. London: Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1989). An Awfully Big Adventure.
London: Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1991). The Birthday Boys. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1993). Something Happened Yesterday.
London: Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1994). Collected Stories. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1996). Every Man for Himself.
London: Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (1998). Master Georgie. London:
Duckworth.
Bainbridge, B. (2001). According to Queeney.
London: Little, Brown.
Bainbridge, B. (2005). Front Row: Evenings at the
Theatre. London: Continuum.
Bainbridge, B. (2008). The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress.
London: Little, Brown.
Becket, F. (2005). Singular Events: The As If of Beryl
Bainbridges Every Man for Himself. In N. Bentley
(ed.), British Fiction of the 1990s. London: Routledge:
pp. 17991.
Grubisic, B. J. (2008). Understanding Beryl
Bainbridge. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Marsh, H. (2008). Lifes Nasty Habit: Time, Death and
Intertextuality in Beryl Bainbridges An Awfully Big
Adventure. Critical Engagements: A Journal of
Criticism and Theory, 2, 85110.
Newell, M. (dir.) (1995). An Awfully Big Adventure.
Portman Productions/BBC Films.
OBrian, J. (dir.) (1988). The Dressmaker. Film Four
International.
Richter, V. (1996). Grey Gothic: The Novels of
Beryl Bainbridge. In I. Maassen & A. M. Stuby (eds.),
(Sub)versions of Realism: Recent Womens Fiction
in Britain. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter,
pp. 15972.
Walker, C. (dir.) (1998). Beryl Bainbridge. The South
Bank Show. London Weekend Television.
26
BALLARD, J. G
Wenn
o, E. (1993). Ironic Formula in the Novels of
Beryl Bainbridge. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis
Gothoburgensis.
Whatham, C. (dir.) (1980). Sweet William. Boyds
Company/ITC.
Ballard, J. G
SEBASTIAN GROES
J. G. Ballard could best be described as a visionary

anthropologist whose fiction explores contemporary social trends by projecting them into extreme
situations. From his reinvention of the science
fiction genre in the early 1960s to his exploration
of sexual perversion in Crash (1973) and his
meditations on meaningless violence in the
twenty-first century, Ballards idiosyncratic, often
controversial, body of work is one of the most
original and powerful to have emerged from the
postwar period.
James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai,
China in 1930, and grew up in a suburban enclave
of wealthy colonial emigrants. Key cultural influences were the American cinema, comic books,
and classic childrens adventure novels, and all
were to have a role in shaping Ballards imagination. In 1942 his comfortable upbringing came
to an abrupt halt when World War II came to
Shanghai and the Ballard family was interned in
a Japanese camp, which formed the basis for
Ballards bestselling and critically acclaimed novel, Empire of the Sun (1984). This experience
made a lasting impression on his imagination,
and the work that was to follow stages obsessive,
repetitive transfigurations of his war ordeal.
When Ballard returned to England after the
war, he felt, and would remain, an outsider, both
in terms of his Englishness and, later, in his
relationship to the literary establishment. Ballard
lived and wrote in Shepperton, a Thames-side
town at a safe distance from Londons literary
circles. After abandoning his medical studies and
a brief career in the Royal Air Force, he started
publishing science fiction stories in New Worlds,
an avant garde magazine for speculative fiction.
In 1962 the magazine published Ballards manifesto, Which Way to Inner Space? in which he
urges writers to explore the complexities and
contradictions of the modern self rather than the
extraterrestrial worlds of traditional science fiction. Ballard himself put this into practice in
short story collections such as The Voices of Time
(originally published as The Four-Dimensional
Nightmare, 1963) and (post-)apocalyptic disaster
novels such as The Drowned World (1962), a
prophetic work set after the polar ice caps have
melted.
In 1964, Ballards wife died suddenly of pneumonia during a holiday in Spain, forcing him to
bring up their three children on his own. He
produced three more short story collections during the decade but the publication of the radically
experimental exploration of modern life in 15
condensed novels (on pornography, American
imperial power, sexual perversion, Vietnam, and
dead American idols such as JFK and Marilyn
Monroe), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), brought
the author greater literary acclaim and renown:
the first American edition was banned by court
order and pulped by Doubleday. Ballards reputation as an important if controversial author was
cemented with the cautionary novel Crash (1973),
a work now regarded as a postwar classic, which
explores the disturbing sexual power of the car
crash. The novel is symbolic of the decentering of
anthropocentric thinking in postmodernity,
while foregrounding the death of affect, the
Ballardian notion that we have become desensitized through the overwhelming sensory violence
inflicted on us by mass media. Ballards characters
no longer distinguish between the human body
and the car, and between body fluids and engine
coolant. This is part of an increasing inability to
distinguish between the real and fiction in a
postwar period shaped by technologies that
fuse (military) violence, science and technology,
Hollywood, advertising, and pornography into a
complex and surreal world.
Crash also mythologizes Londons peripheral
areas, and Heathrow Airport in particular. In an
interview Ballard states: In the suburbs you find
uncentred lives. The normal civic structures are
not there. So that people have more freedom to
explore their own imaginations, their own obsessions. . . . Theres a sort of airport culture with its
transience, its access to anywhere in the world.
Social trends of various kinds tend to reveal
themselves first in the suburbs (Sinclair 84).
Concrete Island (1974), in which an architect
becomes trapped in a slice of no mans land
BALLARD, J. G
wedged in between Londons motorways, continues Ballards meditation on modernity by rewriting Robinson Crusoe. The wealthy residents of
a hypermodern tower block regress into violence
and anarchy in High-Rise (1975), which forms
both a criticism of utopian experiments in postwar town planning and housing, and of the
decline in spirituality in the postmodern world.
In the surreal novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) the deranged pilot Blake crashes an
airplane into the Thames and wakes to finds
himself possessing divine powers, which allow
him to transform Shepperton from a consumerist
hell into a Blakean utopia.
Ballard reached a mainstream audience with
the bestselling and critically acclaimed novel Empire of the Sun (1984), which concerns how the
comfortable Shanghai life of the fictional character Jim is dismantled by World War II when he
gets separated from his parents and needs to fend
for himself in a Japanese internment camp. In
1987 this novel was turned into a Hollywood
blockbuster film by Steven Spielberg. Ballard
continues this semiautobiographical mode in The
Kindness of Women (1991), which chronicles his
life following his wartime experiences in China.
Running Wild (1988) investigates why a group
of children in a gated community murder their
parents and is the first of a series of quasi-detective
novels that explore how the contemporary culture
of leisure and boredom leads to random eruptions
of meaningless violence. Ballards parodies of
airport novels, Cocaine Nights (1996a) and SuperCannes (2000), both explore the Mediterranean
scene of the nouveau riche, whose amoral, desensitized culture leads to racism, adultery, and
murder. This dark undercurrent within late capitalism comes home to Britain in Millennium
People (2003), which depicts the revolt of residents in a bourgeois gated community, and in
Kingdom Come (2006), which connects random
violence to the globalized consumer culture.
Although at first his reputation as a science
fiction writer hampered his critical reception by
the academe, the late 1990s and, in particular, the
early 2000s have seen an increased and serious
critical appreciation of Ballards work, with the
publication of several monographs and edited
collections, and a conference, on the authors
work. In 2008, Ballard published the memoir
Miracles of Life, which gives us yet another version
27
of the life of one of the most fascinating and

original literary imaginations present in English
postwar fiction. Ballard died from prostate cancer
on April 19, 2009.
SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF);
London in Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF); Science Fiction (BIF); Sinclair,
Iain (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
(BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)

Ballard, J. G. (1962). The Drowned World.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ballard, J. G. (1963). The Four-Dimensional Nightmare.
London: Gollancz. (Subsequently published as The
Voices of Time.)
Ballard, J. G. (1970). The Atrocity Exhibition.
Ballard, J. G. (1973). Crash. London: Jonathan Cape.
Ballard, J. G. (1974). Concrete Island. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Ballard, J. G. (1975). High-Rise. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Ballard, J. G. (1979). The Unlimited Dream Company.
Ballard, J. G. (1984). Empire of the Sun. London:
Gollancz.
Ballard, J. G. (1988). Running Wild. London:
Century Hutchinson.
Ballard, J. G. (1991). The Kindness of Women.
London: HarperCollins.
Ballard, J. G. (1996a). Cocaine Nights. London:
Flamingo.
Ballard, J. G. (1996b). A Users Guide to the Millennium:
Essays and Reviews. London: HarperCollins.
Ballard, J. G. (1996c). Which Way to Inner Space?
[1962] In Ballard (1996b), pp. 1958.
Ballard, J. G. (2000). Super-Cannes. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Ballard, J. G. (2001). The Complete Short Stories.
London: Flamingo.
Ballard, J. G. (2003). Millennium People. London:
HarperCollins.
Ballard, J. G. (2008). Miracles of Life: Shanghai to
Shepperton: An Autobiography. London: Fourth
Estate.
Baxter, J. (2009a). J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical
Perspectives. London: Continuum.
Baxter, J. (2009b). J. G. Ballards Surrealist Imagination:
Spectacular Authorship. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Gasiorek, A. (2005). J. G. Ballard. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
28
BANVILLE, JOHN
Luckhurst, R. (1997). The Angle between Two Walls:

The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Pringle, D. (1979). Earth is the Alien Planet: J. G.
Ballards Four-Dimensional Nightmare. San
Bernadino, CA: Borgo.
Sinclair, I. (1999). Crash: David Cronenbergs
Post-Mortem on J. G. Ballards Trajectory of Fate.
London: BFI.
Spielberg, S. (dir.) (1987). Empire of the Sun. Amblin
Entertainment.
Banville, John
HEDDA FRIBERG-HARNESK
John Banvilles reputation as one of Irelands

finest prose artists has grown steadily since his
debut in 1970, and few were surprised when The
Sea won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. Banvilles
novels, taking shape in language as elegant as any
written in the transatlantic world today, open up
to paraphrase Banville on Beckett to lifes chaos
and painful comedy. They enact the tension
between art and nature (Imhof 234) and record
the life of the imagination (McMinn 1). Their
cold vision is warmed by humor and intellectual
passion.
Born in 1945 in Wexford in the Irish southeast,
Banville studied with the Christian Brothers and
at St. Peters College there. His parents were
Martin and Agnes Banville. As a boy, John was
taken by Joyces Dubliners, whose grayed-over
tone caught exactly the ennui and paralysis of the
lower-middle class milieu in which he was
struggling to grow up (Banville 2004, 26). Although Banville shuns the overtly autobiographical, a Wexford light filters through novels such as
Birchwood (1973) and Eclipse (2000a) and the
sandy dunes of Rosslare give The Sea (2005b) its
salt-bleached shade.
As a young man, Banville (who did not attend
a university) worked for Aer Lingus, the Irish
airline. Offered cut-rate travel, he could spend
time in Greece, Italy, and the US. In San Francisco
in 1968 he met his wife, American textile artist
Janet Dunham. Back in Dublin, he published his
first book, the short story collection Long Lankin
(1970), and worked for the Irish Press and the Irish
Times, where he became literary editor in 1998.
He has contributed to the New York Review of
Books since 1990. With his wife, Banville has two

grown sons. He also has two daughters from his
relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of
the Arts Council of Ireland.
While some critics have deplored a perceived
lack of Irishness in Banvilles work, others have
praised its European qualities and his affinity
to such writers as Fowles and Nabokov. As for the
high modernists, Banville denies Joyce as a major
influence, but acknowledges indebtedness to
Henry James and Samuel Beckett (Schwall 17).
Banvilles first novel, Nightspawn (1971), is a
psychological spy thriller set in Greece. In Birchwood, he gives the Anglo-Irish big house genre a
postmodernist turn. In a surreal nineteenth-century Irish setting, the narrator, Gabriel Godkin,
tells the history of his family and ancestral house.
As Gabriel leaves home to travel through an
Ireland torn by famine and unrest, an ironically
distorted, disturbing, version of Irish history is
presented.
In his science tetralogy Banville focuses on
the historical figures of Copernicus, Kepler, and,
more indirectly, Newton, and in Mefisto (1986) he
returns, with a Faustian young mathematician
Gabriel Swan, to the realm of pure imagination.
The masterly European novels, Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), are works of
historiographic metafiction which, while reinventing the lives of the two astronomers, raise
epistemological and ontological questions. Returning to a contemporary Irish setting, The
Newton Letter (1982) revisits the big house genre.
Here, a post-peasant Catholic (Banville 2000c,
516) historian, viewing the big house tradition
through a different lens than did Godkin in Birchwood, helps set the scene for a culture clash.
With the art trilogy, Banvilles production
enters a new phase, moving from world pictures to pictureworlds (Berensmeyer 204). In
The Book of Evidence (1989), based on a 1982
Dublin murder, Freddie Montgomery confesses
to having killed a woman because of a failure of
imagination (215). In the dreamy Ghosts (1993),
Freddie reappears, having served his prison term.
Sitting Prospero-like on an island, he controls the
story of a group of shipwrecked actors. In Athena
(1995), where Freddie makes a third appearance,
art and forgery are central concerns.
While Banvilles later novels The Untouchable
(1997), Eclipse, and Shroud (2002) turn inward,
BARKER, PAT
toward singular consciousnesses or voices

(Hand 2006, p. viii), they also turn outward to
engage with twentieth-century figures such as
the Cambridge Five spy Anthony Blunt (The
Untouchable) and critic Paul de Man (Shroud),
and to spin stories of spying, acting, crime, and
betrayal. These novels can be seen to form a new
trilogy, one of guises and simulacra (see Friberg
248 n.). In the first, Victor Maskell negotiates his
many selves in a life of scholarship, homosexuality, and high treason. Eclipse, with its troubled
fatherdaughter relationship, is told by Alex
Cleave, an actor with stage fright; and Shroud,
primarily set in Antwerp and Turin and narrated
by the formidable, protean, impostor Axel Vander, is a self-invented mans tale. With Shroud,
Banville seems to have taken certain narrative
concerns as far as they go, and The Sea signals
a new turn. Set in Wexford, this is a comparatively
straightforward story about memory and grief.
Compared to Axel Vander, Max Morden is an
altogether more human protagonist, inside
whom the past beats . . . like a second heart
(2005b, 13).
Banville also writes for the stage (notably The
Broken Jug, 1994a; Gods Gift, 2000b; and Love in
the Wars, 2005a English versions of plays by
Heinrich von Kleist) and the screen. As Benjamin
Black, he has launched a line of noir crime fiction
including Christine Falls (2006) and The Silver
Swan (2007), both set in the 1950s and centered
on Dublin pathologist Quirke. The Lemur (2008)
is set in contemporary New York.
SEE ALSO: Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Irish
Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF);
Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
Banville, J. (1970). Long Lankin. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Banville, J. (1971). Nightspawn. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Banville, J. (1973). Birchwood. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Banville, J. (1986). Mefisto. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Banville, J. (1989). The Book of Evidence. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Banville, J. (1994a). The Broken Jug. Oldcastle,
Co. Meath: Gallery.
29
Banville, J. (1994b). Seachange. Dublin: Radio Telefs

Eireann.
Banville, J. (1997). The Untouchable. London:
Picador.
Banville, J. (2000a). Eclipse. London: Picador.
Banville, J. (2000b). Gods Gift. Oldcastle, Co. Meath:
Gallery.
Banville, J. (2000c). The Revolutions Trilogy, comprising
Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter.
London: Picador.
Banville, J. (2001). Frames Trilogy, comprising Athena,
The Book of Evidence, Ghosts. London: Picador.
Banville, J. (2002). Shroud. London: Picador.
Banville, J. (2003). Prague Pictures. London:
Bloomsbury.
Banville, J. (2004). [No title.] Bloomsday Magazine,
p. 26.
Banville, J. (2005a). Love in the Wars. Oldcastle,
Co. Meath: Gallery.
Banville, J. (2005b). The Sea. London: Picador.
Banville, J. (as Black, B.) (2006). Christine Falls.
London: Picador.
Banville, J. (as Black, B.) (2007). The Silver Swan.
London: Picador.
Banville, J. (as Black, B.) (2008). The Lemur. London:
Picador.
Berensmeyer, I. (2000). John Banville: Fictions of Order.
Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter.
Dhoker, E. (2004). Visions of Alterity. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Friberg, H. (2007). Sites of Memory in John Banvilles
The Sea. In H. Friberg, I. Gilsenan-Nordin, &
L. Yding-Pedersen (eds.), Recovering Memory: Irish
Representations of Past and Present. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars.
Hand, D. (2002). John Banville: Exploring Fictions.
Dublin: Liffey.
Hand, D. (ed.) (2006). John Banville Irish University
Review, 36(1).
Imhof, R. (1989). John Banville: A Critical Introduction.
Dublin: Wolfhound.
McMinn, J. (1999). The Supreme Fictions of John
Banville. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Schwall, H. (1997). An Interview with John Banville.
European English Messenger, 4(1), 1319.
Barker, Pat
ANNE WHITEHEAD
Pat Barkers writing powerfully explores themes

of trauma and recovery, and the violence that war
has inflicted on individuals throughout the twentieth century is of central importance in her work.
30
BARKER, PAT
Barker addresses the effects of trauma in her

novels through characters whose pasts have not
been laid to rest, and ghosts appear throughout
her fiction to indicate a disturbance of temporality. The history of twentieth-century Britain represents for Barker a history of traumatic experience, which encompasses not only the two World
Wars, and the Falkland, Gulf, and Northern
Ireland conflicts, but also the long-term effects
of economic recession. In this context, the task of
the novelist is to recover from this history the
suffering of those whose lives have been marginalized by official, national narratives. Viewed in
this light, Barker can be located as a leading voice
among a number of contemporary British novelists, including Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, and
Kazuo Ishiguro, whose writing explores the spectrality of history and the local impact of broader
historical changes.
Born Patricia Margaret Drake on May 8, 1943,
Barker grew up near the industrial town of Middlesbrough in northeast England. Barker seems to
have been affected by the history of World War I
from an early age: her grandfather had a bayonet
wound, although he did not talk about the war,
while her stepfather had served in the trenches as
a boy of 15. Another early influence came from
her grandmothers first husband who had been a
spiritualist medium. There were books on spiritualism around the house, which seem to have
made a lasting impact on Barkers imagination
and are felt as an undercurrent in her work in
recurrent motifs of haunting.
Attending a creative writing course at the
Arvon Foundation in Yorkshire in 1979, Barker
was taught by Angela Carter who encouraged her
to write about the topics she knew best. Her early
fiction correspondingly addresses working-class
lives in northeast England. In Union Street (1982),
Blow Your House Down (1984), and Lizas England
(originally published as The Centurys Daughter,
1986), Barker represents an alternative front line
in which women battle against poverty for survival and suffer the traumas of rape, murder,
abortion, and prostitution. Although Lizas England represents Barkers closest tribute to Carter
(Liza, like Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, is a
midnight child), it also marks the distinctiveness of Barkers voice: her novels remain
predominantly realist in style and incorporate
extensive speech and dialogue. Thus they lend
themselves well to film adaptation, most notably

in Gillies Mackinnons Regeneration.
Barkers second group of novels explore the
relation between masculinity and war. The Man
Who Wasnt There (1988) narrates three days in
the life of 12-year-old Colin Harper, who has
never known his father and fills his absence with
fantasies derived from war films. Barker demonstrates that the Hollywood version of war presents
a highly idealized version of masculinity. The
Regeneration trilogy extends Barkers critique of
war and masculinity. Regeneration (1991) focuses
on the relationship between W. H. R. Rivers and
his patient Siegfried Sassoon, and brings to light
the ways in which the traumatic responses to
World War I effected a crisis of masculinity. The
Eye in the Door (1993) examines the mobilization
of gender in the discourse of war, so that pacifism
was aligned with homosexuality and thereby demonized and criminalized. In The Ghost Road
(1995), winner of the 1995 Booker Prize for
Fiction, Riverss memories of his prewar experiences in Melanesia offer him an alternative
model of masculinity and war, allowing him to
challenge dominant narratives of patriotism. Although Barkers shift from womens experiences
to themes of masculinity has been seen as a
break in her writing, it is clear that the themes
of gender, class, and trauma remain constant
across her work.
In her next phase of writing, Barker set her
novels in the present and explored ideas of regeneration in relation to the landscapes of northeast
England. Her work of this period also displays
a fascination with the child murderer. Another
World (1998) is set in Newcastle and Barker
focuses on derelict areas of the cityscape to explore ideas of economic and urban regeneration.
Border Crossing (2001) highlights the question of
accountability in questioning whether Danny
Miller, who murdered an elderly woman when
he was a child, should be deemed responsible
for his actions and stand trial. The setting shifts
to the rural landscape of Northumberland, which
is seen not as a pastoral retreat but as infected with
violence. This is echoed in Double Vision (2003),
in which the war reporter Stephen Sharkey,
haunted by what he has witnessed in Afghanistan,
seeks peace in Northumberland. Again, Barker
makes clear that the region is haunted by its own
violent past and can offer little solace. If Barkers
BARNES, JULIAN
recent fiction draws attention to her as a regional

writer, it is to refigure the border as a site not of
marginality but of dissidence and transgression.
The northeastern landscapes are not distant from
the concerns of the metropolitan center, but
forcibly bring them back into view.
Barkers latest novel, Life Class (2007), returns
to the setting of World War I. Barker pays particular attention to the intersection between art
and medicine and probes the detachment from
suffering that is required in both disciplines.
Although this interest informs both Regeneration
and Double Vision, Barker has intimated that this
focus is also central to her next novel, which
suggests that Life Class marks a new phase in her
writing. Again, however, the novel does not depart from her central interests but remains intimately concerned with gender, class, war, trauma,
and the possibility of recovery or regeneration.
SEE ALSO: Carter, Angela (BIF); Feminist
Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF);
Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World War I in
Fiction (BIF)
Barker, P. (1982). Union Street. London: Virago.
Barker, P. (1984). Blow Your House Down. London:
Virago.
Barker, P. (1986). The Centurys Daughter. London:
Virago. (Reissued as Lizas England, 1996.)
Barker, P. (1988). The Man Who Wasnt There. London:
Penguin.
Barker, P. (1991). Regeneration. London: Penguin.
Barker, P. (1993). The Eye in the Door. London:
Viking.
Barker, P. (1995). The Ghost Road. London: Viking.
Barker, P. (1998). Another World. London: Viking.
Barker, P. (2001). Border Crossing. London: Viking.
Barker, P. (2003). Double Vision. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Barker, P. (2007). Life Class. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Brannigan, J. (2005). Pat Barker. Manchester:
Mackinnon, G. (dir.) (1997). Regeneration.
Artificial Eye.
Monteith, S. (2002). Pat Barker. Plymouth:
Northcote House.
Monteith, S., Jolly, M., Yousaf, N., & Paul, R. (eds.)
(2005). Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press.
31
Barnes, Julian
MERRITT MOSELEY
One of the most celebrated British novelists

from the generation of celebrated novelists born
between 1945 and 1950 (e.g., Amis, McEwan,
Ackroyd), Julian Barnes is noted for his intellectual qualities, his cosmopolitan interests, and his
restlessly inventive approach to fiction. Though
he has written important non-fiction and four
detective novels, his exemplary achievement is
in what the British call the literary novel (by
contrast with the popular novel). Julian
Barness works may well be the defining illustration of the literary novel.
Born on January 19, 1946, in Leicester, he was
the younger son of parents who both taught
French. When he was 10 the family moved to
Northwood, a northern suburb of London. He
commuted by train to the City of London School
and then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford.
He spent one year, 19667, teaching English at a
school in Rennes, France, and in 1968 graduated
with a BA in modern languages.
Barnes then worked first as a lexicographer for
the Oxford English Dictionary, then as a journalist
in London, for the Times Literary Supplement, The
Observer, and the Tatler. Something of a late
starter by contrast with precocious contemporaries like Amis, he published his first novel in 1980;
in fact he published two. One was Metroland
(1980b), a coming-of-age book about a Frenchobsessed, middle-class youth from the north
London suburbs and his adjustment to life. The
author has said that the seven- or eight-year
gestation of this book was the result of lack of
confidence. The other was Duffy (1980a), a detective thriller published under the name Dan Kavanagh. Barnes has said that he used a pseudonym
to avoid confusion with his mainstream fiction
(Smith 74). The Kavanagh name is a tribute to his
wife, Pat Kavanagh, whom he married in 1979 and
to whom most of his books are dedicated. He
eventually published three more Duffy novels
Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985), and
Going to the Dogs (1987) which, by repeating a
main character, sharply diverge from the pattern,
in his mainstream novels, of doing something
quite different with each one.
Between 1980 and 1984 he published another
Duffy book and another mainstream novel, Before
32
BARNES, JULIAN
She Met Me (1982). None of the early books,

though well received, created much of a critical
stir. That changed in 1984 with Flauberts Parrot
(1984), which was an immense critical success and
was on the short list of finalists for the Booker
Prize. Barnes has said its the book that launched
me (Smith 74).
On the strength of his growing achievement in
fiction he largely retired from journalism in 1986,
the year in which Staring at the Sun (1986) was
published. Since then he has published one more
Duffy book, Going to the Dogs (Putting the Boot In
had appeared in 1985); six literary novels; three
books of non-fiction essays; a book of short
stories; and Nothing to be Frightened Of (2008),
which is part autobiography and part philosophical meditation.
Like many first novels the charming Metroland
incorporates autobiography and coming-of-age
themes. First-person narrator Christopher Lloyd
moves through three phases; in the first, youth
and school days, he and his friend Toni mock
middle-class English culture by deploying French
language and culture, seeking to epater le bourgeois; in the second, living in Paris in 1968, he has
an affair with a French girl and meets his future
wife; in the third, now grown up and back in
Metroland, he endures Tonis mockery for selling
out to bourgeois values, but seems to choose
contented acceptance over permanent rebellion.
Metroland won the Somerset Maugham Award
for a first novel.
When Christopher learns that his wife has been
unfaithful, he decides that it is nevertheless all
right (1980b, 163). In Before She Met Me (1982),
by contrast, Graham Hendrick becomes obsessed
with his wifes infidelities peculiar ones, as
these affairs all happened before they met to the
point of mania. Having ended his own first marriage for Ann, an actress, he finds himself driven
to learn more about Anns affairs during her
acting career, including both real and on-screen
ones; finally he seeks out films throughout
London to watch her in flagrante, in celluloid
artifice, and he ends in disaster. Before She Met Me
is a subtle, troubling, and morbidly funny study
of jealousy and the reptilian brain.
Flauberts Parrot was the first of Barness books
to be widely celebrated and the first to attract
the charge that it is not really a novel. Admittedly,
its construction, with chapters on The Flaubert
Bestiary, Braithwaites Dictionary of Received

Ideas, and Examination Paper, gives ammunition to critics who call it a book of essays. It grew
out of a projected biography of Gustave Flaubert,
Barness master; and it developed into a brilliantly
original book that combines facts and speculations about Flaubert, art, love, and the possibilities of finding the truth about the past with the
poignant personal story of the narrator, Geoffrey
Braithwaite, an English widower whose pursuit
of Flaubert is a medicine for, or a device for
forgetting, his own sadness, including a modest
parallel with the events of Madame Bovary.
Staring at the Sun disappointed many reviewers
because it was so different from Flauberts Parrot.
Another triptych like Metroland, it is the story of
Jean Serjeant, covering her 99-year life. Her life is
devoid of world-historical events; its satisfactions
are modest. She demonstrates the kind of courage
that ordinary lives require, living without much
love or consolation, but with resolve and integrity. Jean is briefly married, but comes to think of
marital sex as just part of running the house, and
compares men (favorably, at least) with mosquitoes. The novel avoids any of the self-referential
fabulation of Flauberts Parrot, and the author
has said that he thinks it was underrated because
readers saw it as less adventurous than its
predecessor.
The next novel took many more obvious risks.
A History of the World in 10 12 Chapters (1989) was,
like Flauberts Parrot, accused of not being the
novel it claimed to be. Its 10 chapters are enormously disparate (from the story of a woodworm
on Noahs ark to an account of heaven), and
linked only loosely by persistent themes of the
difficulty of understanding the past, the presence
of reindeer and woodworms, and different versions of the ark. The half chapter is, to all
appearances, in the voice of Julian Barnes and is
a moving celebration of love, particularly as a stay
against history that is, the long parade of
hatred and injustice and a refuge from relativism
and indecidability.
Talking It Over (1991) followed. Another study
of marital stress and infidelity, it was distinguished by its method: three primary voices, those
of Stuart, his wife Gillian, and Oliver, Stuarts
friend and ultimately successful rival for Gillians
love, talk directly to the reader. Reminiscent of the
alternative versions of Flauberts story, these three
BARNES, JULIAN
(and a few minor speakers) give different accounts of what happened and, more importantly,
how it felt and how it should be judged. The story
and its presentation challenge the readers allocation of sympathy in this complex affair.
In 1992 Barnes published his most unexpected
novel yet, The Porcupine. It appeared first in
Bulgaria, in Bulgarian, and is his most overtly
political book. Written when communist regimes
were falling all over eastern Europe, The Porcupine
is the story of a deposed leader, Stoyo Petkanov, in
a country much like, though never identified as,
Bulgaria. What is seems to show is that life and
history are complicated and that, though the end
of communism counts as progress, whatever succeeds it is also compromised. And Petkanov is
a more interesting and larger figure than those
who replace him.
England, England (1998) combines the life
story of Martha Cochrane with a satire on a
larger-than-life tycoon, Sir Jack Pitman, who
launches a tourist venture consisting of an alternative England located on the Isle of Wight.
Building on market research showing the 50
characteristics respondents associated with England (1) Royal Family; (3) Manchester United
Football Club; (17) Shakespeare; (49) Not Washing/Bad Underwear the new England is so
successful it supplants the old one, which reverts
to a rural state under the name Albion. Like
Flauberts Parrot, England, England was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Love, Etc. (2000) is a sequel to Talking It Over,
showing Stuarts growing self-awareness and
growing ruthlessness and his schemes to replace
Oliver as Gillians husband: that is, his plan to
reverse the motion of Talking It Over and return
to the status quo ante. It employs the same documentary style of characters speaking directly to
the reader as its predecessor.
In 2005 Barnes published Arthur and George,
another striking departure, being a historical
novel about the separate lives of a famous man,
Arthur Conan Doyle, and an obscure one, George
Edalji; when George is unjustly accused of a
horrible crime, apparently in part because he is
of mixed race, the famous author intervenes to try
to restore justice, in a role like that of Anatole
France in the Dreyfus affair. The results for Edalji
are ambiguous. Barnes has built the novel on a
basis of fact and documentation, and there is
33
considerable interesting material on Conan

Doyles later infatuation with spiritualism. Like
many of his books, including England, England,
this one investigates the difficulty of establishing
the truth and the real.
Barnes has written two books of short stories:
Cross Channel (1996), all of which are in some
way about encounters between the English and
the French, and The Lemon Table (2004), many of
which are about aging and decline. His elegant
journalism appears in Letters from London (1995),
thoughtful and often very funny dispatches written while he was London correspondent for the
New Yorker, and in Something to Declare (2002).
This is a more miscellaneous collection, including
memoir, book reviews, and reporting (on the
Tour de France, for instance), but all of it about
France, a crucial aspect of Barness life and work.
The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003) is about cooking.
Nothing to be Frightened Of (2008) is an unusual combination of a memoir, in which his
philosopher brother plays an important role;
a revealing discussion of French author Jules
Renard; and most of all a personal meditation
on aging and death and its finality. There is much
here about faith: the book opens with I dont
believe in God, but I miss Him (1). Christopher
Lloyd was thinking about God and death in
Metroland the arrival in my head of the fear of
Big D, and the departure of God (53) and it is
one of the achievements of Nothing to be Frightened Of that it invites the reader to think back over
his career, to reflect on the persistence of this
concern with last things in Barness fiction running alongside his continued exploration of love,
his determined intelligence, and a fluidity of
exploration of the formal possibilities of the
modern novel.
Barnes lives in London, combining the cheerful
pessimism derived from his agnostic fear of death
with a saving dedication to art that is evidenced in
his own appreciation of artists like Flaubert and
his production of original and profound fictions.
SEE ALSO: Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction
(BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
Barnes, J. (as Kavanagh, D.) (1980a). Duffy. London:
Jonathan Cape.
34
BECKETT, SAMUEL
Barnes, J. (1980b). Metroland. London:

Jonathan Cape.
Barnes, J. (as Kavanagh, D.) (1981). Fiddle City.
Barnes, J. (1982). Before She Met Me. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Barnes, J. (1984). Flauberts Parrot. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Barnes, J. (as Kavanagh, D.) (1985). Putting the Boot In.
Barnes, J. (1986). Staring at the Sun. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Barnes, J. (as Kavanagh, D.) (1987). Going to the Dogs.
London: Viking.
Barnes, J. (1989). A History of the World in 10 12 Chapters.
Barnes, J. (1991). Talking It Over. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Barnes, J. (1992). The Porcupine. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Barnes, J. (1995). Letters from London. London: Picador.
Barnes, J. (1996). Cross Channel. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Barnes, J. (1998). England, England. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Barnes, J. (2000). Love, Etc. London: Jonathan Cape.
Barnes, J. (2002). Something to Declare. London:
Picador.
Barnes, J. (2003). The Pedant in the Kitchen. London:
Guardian.
Barnes, J. (2004). The Lemon Table. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Barnes, J. (2005). Arthur and George. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Barnes, J. (2008). Nothing to be Frightened Of. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Gitzen, J. (2001). How to Be Postmodern: The Fiction
of Julian Barnes and Alain de Botton. Essays in Arts
and Sciences, 30(Oct.), 4561.
Guignery, V. (2006). The Fiction of Julian Barnes: A
Readers Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Henke, C. (2003). Remembering Selves, Constructing
Selves: Memory and Identity in Contemporary
British Fiction. Journal for the Study of British
Cultures, 10(1), 77100.
Higdon, D. L. (1991). Unconfessed Confessions: The
Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes. In
J. Achison (ed.), The British and Irish Novel Since
1960. New York: St. Martins, pp. 17491.
Janik, D. I. (1995). No End of History: Evidence from
the Contemporary English Novel. Twentieth Century
Literature, 41(Summer), 16089.
McGrath, P. (1987). Julian Barnes. Bomb,
21(Fall), 203.
Millington, M. I., & Sinclair, A. S. (1992). The

Honourable Cuckold: Models of Masculine Defence.
Comparative Literature Studies, 29(19), 119.
Moseley, M. (1997). Understanding Julian Barnes.
Pateman, M. (2002). Julian Barnes. Tavistock:
Northcote House.
Schiff, J. (2007). A Conversation with Julian Barnes.
Missouri Review, 30(3), 6080.
Sesto, B. (2001). Language, History, and Metanarrative
in the Fiction of Julian Barnes. New York: Peter Lang.
Smith, A. (1989). Julian Barnes. Publishers Weekly,
236(Nov. 3), 734.
Stout, M. (1992). Chameleon Novelist. New York Times
Magazine pp. 29, 6872, 80 (Nov. 22).
Wilson, K. (2004). Julian Barnes and the
Marginalization of Metropolitanism: The Suburban
Centre in Metroland and Letters from London.
In L. Philips (ed.), The Swarming Streets: TwentiethCentury Representations of London. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, pp. 15367.
Beckett, Samuel
PATRICK A. McCARTHY
Samuel Barclay Beckett, the younger son of William Frank and Maria Roe Beckett, was born on
Good Friday, April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, south of
Dublin. He came to regard the date as significant
because it linked his birth with suffering and
death. In Company the narrator, also born on
Good Friday (You first saw the light and cried at
the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the
ninth hour cried and died, 4: 447), conjures up
a scene, described previously in The End and
Malone Dies, in which a small boy walking hand
in hand with his mother asks if the sky is not in
reality much more distant than it appears. She
replies angrily, shaking off his hand and making
a cutting retort [he has] never forgotten
(4: 428). Scenes like this in his works imply that
Becketts childhood, as recalled much later, was
often unhappy. Even so, he was close to his
brother, Frank, and to his father, a quantity
surveyor for a Dublin construction firm. Like his
father, Beckett excelled at sports, including swimming, golf, rugby, tennis, boxing, and above all,
cricket; the two also enjoyed long hikes. Their
shared interests, and Bill Becketts acceptance of
their differences, helped to establish a bond of
BECKETT, SAMUEL
genuine affection between father and son. Becketts relationship with his rigid and devout
mother, however, was riddled with conflict and
guilt. As Malone says of his own mother, We
were not often of the same mind (2: 261).
At age 13 Beckett was sent to the Portora Royal
School, in Enniskillen; four years later he entered
Trinity College Dublin, where he excelled in
French and Italian and became infatuated with
another student, Ethna MacCarthy. The Alba, a
character in Dream of Fair to Middling Women
and More Pricks Than Kicks, is based on Ethna
while another character, the Smeraldina, is
drawn from Becketts first cousin Peggy Sinclair,
whose family lived in Kassel, Germany. In 1928 he
and Peggy fell in love when she visited Ireland.
Unlike his relationship with Ethna, which remained platonic despite his wishes, the relationship with Peggy quickly became sexual. Beckett
characterized their fictional counterparts accordingly: the Alba is chaste and intelligent, the
Smeraldina sensual. He visited Kassel several
times, continuing after the love affair with Peggy
ended on New Years Eve 1929, and was distressed
by Peggys struggle with tuberculosis from 1930
until her death in May 1933. The Alba and the
Smeraldina offer opposing caricatures of women
in the early fiction, but in Krapps Last Tape
(1958) Beckett combines memories of Ethna
MacCarthy with those of Peggy Sinclair in creating Krapps more complex memories of a woman
he once loved.
In November 1928 Beckett moved in Paris to
serve as an exchange lecturer at the Ecole Normale
Superieure. One of his first acquaintances there
was Thomas MacGreevy, the previous lecturer,
who became his closest friend. Through MacGreevy he met James Joyce, who suggested that
Beckett then just 22 contribute an article on
Joyces Work in Progress, installments of what later
became Finnegans Wake, to a book of essays
intended to explain and publicize the project.
When Becketts Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. Joyce
appeared in May 1929, Joyce was impressed with
the essay (although he found the part on Bruno
weak) and asked Beckett to help in translating the
Anna Livia Plurabelle episode of Work in Progress
into French. In 1930, however, Joyce broke off
contact with Beckett for two years after Beckett
told Joyces troubled daughter Lucia that he
was not romantically interested in her. Even so,
35
Beckett regarded Joyce as a role model and began

imitating his mannerisms and style of dress. Yet
his own work is fundamentally different from
Joyces: in a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett
contrasted his dissatisfaction with language with
the apotheosis of the word in Work in Progress
(Beckett 2009, 519). Joyces development of the
full resources of the word and Becketts parsimonious style are two faces of modernist literature.
After publishing an obscure poem about Descartes, Whoroscope (1930), with mock erudite
notes perhaps parodying The Waste Land in that
respect Beckett began writing a critical monograph, Proust, which appeared in 1931. By then he
was a lecturer at Trinity, but he was unsuited for
academic life, and after a year he resigned. For
several years afterwards Beckett suffered from
depression, partly for personal reasons: the rupture in his relations with Joyce; the deaths of
Peggy Sinclair and Bill Beckett; disagreements
with his mother about everything, including his
writing; and debilitating physical ailments. Moreover, despite early success in Paris, his writing
career sputtered when he returned to Dublin. He
could not find a publisher for Dream of Fair to
Middling Women (written 19312), a picaresque
satire in which the protagonist is named Belacqua
after an indolent character in Dantes Purgatorio;
other rejections followed until the 1950s, when
the success of Waiting for Godot helped to secure a
market for his other works. The publication of a
story collection, More Pricks than Kicks, in 1934
might have reassured Beckett if not for the poor
sales and his anxiety about the impression the
book would make on those close to him. (The
portrayal of Peggy Sinclair as the Smeraldina
seems particularly insensitive.) Belacqua is again
the protagonist, and we follow his misadventures
through the penultimate story, Yellow, where
he dies of a heart problem that his doctors had
failed to notice: They had clean forgotten to
auscultate him! (they had not listened to his
heart, 4: 212). In the final story, Draff, we learn
belatedly that Belacquas second wife, Thelma
nee bboggs, had been killed on her honeymoon
at the end of What a Misfortune and that the
widow who is shocked at reading his obituary
in the paper, even though she placed it herself, is
the Smeraldina, the only sail in sight after
Thelmas death (4: 213). Innovative and irreverent, More Pricks had the honor of being banned
36
BECKETT, SAMUEL
in Ireland but did little to establish Beckett as a

fiction writer.
In 1934 Beckett moved to London to undergo
psychoanalysis with Dr. Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic in order to explore the basis of his
abnormally fast heart rate. He told MacGreevy
that his heart problems, narcissism, and isolation
all stemmed from arrogance and feelings of superiority (2009, 2589), and he soon described
such a narcissistic character in Murphy (1938), his
first published novel. The emphasis on Murphys
mind, the little world to which Murphy claims
to belong I am not of the big world, I am of the
little world (1:107) anticipates the inward turn
of Becketts narratives in the 1940s, and chapter 6,
which describes how Murphys mind imagines
itself, is an example of the reflection on the self
that continues through Stirrings Still (1988). In
Murphy, which is set mainly in London and was
composed there in 19356, Beckett also used
minute details (one of the characters calls them
demented particulars, 1:11) with an assurance
not seen before in his fiction.
Beckett returned to Paris in October 1937 and
lived there for virtually the rest of his life. In
January 1938, while recuperating in the hospital
after being stabbed by a pimp who later said that
he didnt know why he had done it, Beckett was
visited by friends, including James and Nora Joyce
as well as Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he
had had a brief affair. Another visitor, Suzanne
Deschevaux-Dumesnil, had met Beckett in 1929
and remembered him when she saw a newspaper
story about the attack. Soon they became a couple,
and they lived together for 50 years, although they
did not marry until 1961. Suzanne was an essential
part of Becketts life, even after they stopped
having sexual relations (he filled the void with
other women). Several years older than Beckett,
she was a mother figure who believed in his work
as May Beckett never had, as well as an independent woman whose opinions he respected.
When World War II began, Beckett was in
Dublin but returned at once to Paris. Two years
later, after his friend Paul Leon was arrested by the
Germans, he joined the Resistance, but eventually
the group was infiltrated and betrayed. In August
1942, warned that the Gestapo would soon arrest
them, he and Suzanne left Paris and spent the next
two years in Roussillon, in Vichy France. There,
Beckett worked on his next novel, Watt, partly to
keep his mind occupied. Watt seems to have been

the most difficult novel for him to write, and the
notebooks show that it only slowly assumed its
published form (the famous Addenda are virtually all remnants of discarded drafts). Watt is not
easily described, but it is among other things a
failed quest for meaning in a world that seems
incomprehensible. Watt himself is a straight man
who observes human behavior as if from the
outside: Watt had watched people smile and
thought he understood how it was done
(1: 187). Completed in the mid-1940s, Watt was
not published until 1953, after the three novels
that constitute Becketts greatest achievement in
fiction: Molloy, Malone meurt (Malone Dies), and
LInnomable (The Unnamable).
Like virtually all his works between Watt and
From an Abandoned Work (composed 19545),
Beckett wrote these novels in French, partly to free
himself from familiar phrases and rhythms in
English: he claimed that en francais cest plus
facile decrire sans style (in French, it is easier to
write without style: Ackerley & Gontarski 206).
Later, he wrote sometimes in English, sometimes
in French, almost always translating the texts
himself, so that each work extends beyond the
bounds of either version. In translating, Beckett
often introduced intriguing differences between
the French and English versions. Molloy, referring
to the sequence of novels of which his narrative is
the first, says either Cette fois-ci, puis encore une
je pense, puis cen sera fini je pense, de ce mondela aussi (1988 [1951] ) or This time, then once
more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think
itll be over, with that world too (2:4). The
passages are almost identical except for the insertion of then perhaps a last time, indicating that
before Beckett translated Molloy into English, the
series that he had planned to end with Malone
meurt had been extended to LInnomable. Another crucial addition appears at the end of the series:
LInnomable concludes, dans le silence on ne sait
pas, il faut continuer, je vais continuer (1953,
262), but The Unnamable ends, in the silence you
dont know, you must go on, I cant go on, Ill go
on (2:407; my emphasis). At times, Beckett
keeps both languages in sight: a phrase in
LInnomable, en faisant bien attention paying
close attention (1953, 118) becomes on the qui
vive in The Unnamable (2:338), and le struggle
for life ou elan vital, in Malone meurt (1951, 130),
BECKETT, SAMUEL
is barely altered to the elan vital or struggle for

life in Malone Dies (2:236). Becketts translation
may introduce a new overtone, as when Malones
Alors je jouerai tout seul, je ferai comme si je me
voyais (Then I shall play all alone, I shall act as if I
saw myself: 1951, 10) becomes Then I shall play
with myself (2:175) or when, in the second part
of Molloy, la vie est une bien belle chose, Gaber,
une chose inoue life is a very beautiful thing,
Gaber, an incredible thing (224) alludes, in
English, to Keatss Endymion: life is a thing of
beauty, Gaber, and a joy for ever (2:158). In
either language, the novels parody narrative progression, the quest for knowledge, even the possibility of saying anything clearly or accurately,
and the existence of two versions of each text
further complicates the readers search for definitive meanings.
Between Malone meurt and LInnomable, Beckett wrote En attendant Godot, a simple play that,
under that title and as Waiting for Godot, became
the most famous play of the twentieth century
(well enough known to be parodied on Sesame
Street) and a major reason for the critical praise
that contributed to Becketts selection for the
Nobel Prize in 1969. Although he thought his
novels and shorter fiction were more important,
the dramatic works including mimes, radio
plays, television plays, and a film presented
Beckett with formal problems that were more
manageable than those of fiction; moreover, directing productions of his own plays allowed him
to maintain control over his work much as selftranslation did. The concern with control may
also be seen in the tendency of his works, dramatic
and otherwise, to become more focused or economical. Of the longer plays, Godot (first performed 1953) has five characters, Endgame (1957)
four, Happy Days (1961) two. Some of the finest of
the later plays are varieties of monologue: Not I
(1972), A Piece of Monologue (1979), Rockaby
(1981), and Ohio Impromptu (1981), for example.
Likewise, the fiction written after The Unnamable,
from Texts for Nothing (composed in French,
1951) through How It Is (published in French,
1961; English, 1964), and on to the second
trilogy of Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said
(1981), and Worstward Ho (1983), is invariably
reduced to a single voice. The focus on voice in
Becketts fiction and drama alike indicates an
overlapping of genres, as does the fact that some
37
of the fictional monologues (especially Company)

have been adapted for the stage, while A Piece of
Monologue, without stage directions, could easily
have been published as fiction.
The pivotal turn in Becketts work came after
the end of the war, when his realization of his own
folly allowed him to write Molloy and the
others. Again, the contrast with Joyce is important: Beckett later said that Joyce went as far as
one could in the direction of knowing more,
[being] in control of ones material. He was
always adding to it, whereas Becketts own way
was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and
in taking away, in subtracting rather than in
adding. Knowlson remarks that for Beckett this
meant embracing a darkness that extended to
folly and failure, impotence and ignorance
(319). Beckett described his concept of art as
failure in an exchange with Georges Duthuit,
Three Dialogues (1949), saying that he preferred the expression that there is nothing to
express, nothing with which to express, nothing
from which to express, no power to express, no
desire to express, together with the obligation to
express (4:556). Failure, fragmentation, weakness, and incomprehension become the norm in
Becketts fiction from the 1940s on, as announced
by such titles as Texts for Nothing, Imagination
Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, Fizzles, Ill
Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, whose narrator
aims to Try again. Fail again. Fail better (4:471).
To put it differently, the prose represents a movement toward what Beckett called the literature of
the non-word (2009, 520). In The Unnamable,
the narrator cannot imagine existence without
words you must say words, as long as there
are any (2:407) and words flow from him as
incessantly as tears. How It Is, Becketts next long
work, reads quite differently, for instead of a voice
that cannot stop speaking we have one that stops
and starts, speaking in bursts of unpunctuated
blocks of words, the white space between blocks
perhaps indicating silence while the narrator
catches his breath. The voice necessarily begins
again and again (the French title, Comment cest,
means how it is but also puns on commencer
and commencez, infinitive and imperative forms
of begin), its clusters of words are never complete, and there is no more than a remnant of
narrative even though one is implied by its tripartite structure, broken into before Pim with
38
BECKETT, SAMUEL
Pim after Pim (2:411); yet the obligation to

speak continues throughout the novel and the
remainder of the Beckettian corpus. The narrator
of The Unnamable surely speaks for Beckett when
he says that he must speak of things of which [he]
cannot speak and that he will never be silent.
Never (2:2856).
S. E. Gontarski has observed that in his later
closed space fiction, Rather than rejecting
language, [Beckett] seems to have continued to
explore its tenacious power to represent even as
it was being reduced, denuded, stripped bare
(1996, p. xvii). Language continued to have a hold
on Beckett, even in Ill Seen Ill Said, where, when he
searches for a word, it is the wrong word, as in
On its what is the wrong word its uptilted face
obscure graffiti (4:465); Flauberts search for le
mot juste long abandoned, the wrong word will
have to do. Yet in a late work such as Company,
when the eye closes and freed from pore the
mind inquires, What does this mean? What finally
does this mean that at first sight seemed clear?
the mind does not shut down altogether: No.
Unhappily no. Pangs of faint light and stirrings
still. Unformulable gropings of the mind. Unstillable (4:4334).
When Beckett died on December 22, 1989, five
months after Suzanne, he left behind a body of
work that is remarkable, and probably unmatched, for its candid examination of the
unformulable gropings of the mind and the
limitations of language. Now that Im entering
night I have kinds of gleams in my skull. Stony
ground but not entirely, says the narrator of
Enough (1967), adding, Given three or four lives
I might have accomplished something (4:366).
What Beckett accomplished in his single life
is considerable. His example influenced other
fiction writers and dramatists, including such
nouveau roman writers as Claude Mauriac and
such playwrights as Harold Pinter; moreover,
beginning in the 1950s, Beckett has been studied
by an ever-growing community of scholars whose
interest attests to his standing as a major writer.
The first book-length study of his writings,
Hugh Kenners Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study,
appeared in 1961 (an updated version with a
supplementary chapter was published in 1967),
and there soon followed studies by Ruby Cohn
(Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, 1964), John
Fletcher (The Novels of Samuel Beckett, 1964;
Samuel Becketts Art, 1967), Raymond Federman

(Journey to Chaos: Samuel Becketts Early Fiction,
1965), Ihab Hassan (The Literature of Silence:
Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, 1967), and
others. The number of books on Beckett, which
now exceeds that on any other twentieth-century
writer apart from Joyce, includes three substantial
biographies, the most thorough and accurate of
which is James Knowlsons Damned to Fame: The
Life of Samuel Beckett (1996). The biannual Journal of Beckett Studies founded in 1967 by James
Knowlson, subsequently edited by John Pilling
and, later, by S. E. Gontarski, and now published
at the University of Edinburgh with Anthony
Uhlmann as chief editor remains the journal
of record for Beckett studies, while the annual
volumes of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui,
founded in 1991 by Marius Buning and now
edited by Sjef Houppermans, feature articles in
French and English on topics of special interest to
Beckett scholars.
SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James
(BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF)
All quotations from Becketts English works are from
Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, 4 vols.,
ed. P. Auster (2006).
Abbott, H. P. (1996). Beckett Writing Beckett: The
Author in the Autograph. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Ackerley, C. J., & Gontarski, S. E. (2004). The Grove
Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove.
Beckett, S. (1951). Malone meurt. Paris: Minuit.
Beckett, S. (1953). LInnomable. Paris: Minuit.
Beckett, S. (1988). Molloy [1951; French text]. Paris:
Minuit.
Beckett, S. (2006). Samuel Beckett: The Grove
Centenary Edition 4 vols. (ed. P. Auster).
New York: Grove.
Beckett, S. (2009). The Letters of Samuel Beckett vol. 1:
19291940 (ed. M. D. Fehsenfeld & L. M. Overbeck).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brater, E. (1994). The Drama in the Text: Becketts Late
Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brienza, S. D. (1987). Samuel Becketts New Worlds:
Style in Metafiction. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Cohn, R. (2001). A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
BENNETT, ARNOLD
Cousineau, T. J. (1999). After the Final No: Samuel

Becketts Trilogy. Newark: University of Delaware
Press.
Gontarski, S. E. (1996). Introduction. In S. Beckett,
Nohow On: Three Novels. New York: Grove.
Gontarski, S. E. (ed.) (in press). A Companion to Samuel
Beckett. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hill, L. (1990). Becketts Fiction: In Different Words.
Knowlson, J. (1996). Damned to Fame: The Life of
Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Locatelli, C. (1990). Unwording the World: Samuel
Becketts Prose Works After the Nobel Prize.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
McCarthy, P. A. (ed.) (1986). Critical Essays on Samuel
Beckett. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Murphy, P. J. (2009). Becketts Dedalus: Dialogical
Engagements with Joyce in Becketts Fiction. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
OHara, J. D. (1997). Samuel Becketts Hidden Drives:
Structural Uses of Depth Psychology. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Pilling, J. (1997). Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pilling, J. (2006). A Samuel Beckett Chronology.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rabinovitz, R. (1992). Innovation in Samuel Becketts
Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Ricks, C. (1993). Becketts Dying Words. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Bennett, Arnold
RANDI SALOMAN
Enoch Arnold Bennett (May 27, 1867March 27,

1931) was a British novelist, critic, essayist, and
playwright. He was born in the town of Hanley,
Staffordshire, in the heart of the Potteries district of northern England a region so named for
its industrial character and preeminence in the
making of ceramics. This area was immortalized
by Bennett as the Five Towns of his best-known
works, which include the novels Anna of the Five
Towns (1902a), The Old Wives Tale (1908b),
Clayhanger (1910a), Hilda Lessways (1911), and
These Twain (1916), along with numerous short
stories. His representations of life in the region
in which he grew up were largely influenced by
the naturalism of the French writers who inspired
Bennett, most notably Balzac, Zola, de Maupassant, Flaubert, and the Goncourt brothers.
39
Bennett was educated in local schools and raised

in the Wesleyan Methodist tradition. His father
qualified as a solicitor late in life, having previously worked as a potter and a schoolmaster. As
an adolescent, Arnold, the eldest of the Bennetts
six children, worked in his fathers office. Bennett
would later use the knowledge he gained from this
apprenticeship to create vivid portraits of solicitors in works like Whom God Hath Joined (1906),
a novel which traces two divorce cases through the
courts. The fixation on parentchild relationships
in Bennetts work, and on the tyranny of overbearing fathers in particular, has been frequently
noted. So too has the concern with and genuine
feeling for the mundane details of everyday life,
which characterizes Bennetts particular strain of
realism, and clearly differentiates him from his
high modernist contemporaries and successors.
At the age of 21, Bennett moved to London and
began work as a solicitors clerk. In 1893 he took
an editorial position at the literary magazine
Woman. He would later become editor-in-chief
of this publication, leaving only after the publication of his first novel, A Man from the North
(1898). This book was largely autobiographical,
following a young would-be author as he moves
from the Five Towns to London and takes up an
office job, struggling for a while to keep up his
writing, but eventually abandoning it. While the
novel met with only moderate critical success, it
was enough to provide Bennett with the means
and the confidence to focus full-time on his
writing. In 1903, Bennett moved to Paris, where
he lived and worked for eight years before returning to England by way of a tour of America,
documented in Those United States (1912b). In
1907, he married Mary Marguerite Soulie
(b. 1874), a French actress. The couple separated
legally in 1921. In 1926, Bennett had a daughter,
Virginia Bennett, with Dorothy Chesterton Bennett (18911978), who took Bennetts name by
deed poll.
Bennett enjoyed widespread popularity along
with significant financial success in the early
decades of the twentieth century, producing over
three dozen novels, along with several volumes
of short stories and essays. The Old Wives Tale,
generally considered his masterpiece, was published in 1908. This book, inspired by
Maupassants Un vie, chronicles the lives of sisters
Constance and Sophia Banes. Constance remains
40
BERGER, JOHN
in the Five Towns family home, eventually taking

over her parents tailoring business with the help
of her husband Samuel, the stores long-time
employee, while Sophia seeks her fate in Paris,
first through marriage, then as a hotel-keeper.
Bennett was also an accomplished journalist,
writing for Academy and other publications, a
prolific book reviewer, being especially known
for the reviews he produced for the Evening
Standards Books and People section, and a
playwright, achieving moderate success with
works such as Milestones (1912a). In addition, he
produced self-help books (How to Live on 24
Hours a Day, 1908a; Literary Taste: How to Form
It, 1910b; and several others) and travel books,
along with five volumes of letters, three of personal journals, and an autobiography.
His professionalism helped Bennett to achieve
the degree of success he did, but also left him open
to charges (which he did little to dispel) of being
a middle-class hack interested only in a paycheck and not in literature per se. This was a
misguided charge, but it stuck, particularly after
Virginia Woolf attacked the Edwardian writer in
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1950 [1924] ).
Declaring Bennett and his contemporaries John
Galsworthy and H. G. Wells to be materialists
unconcerned with the inner lives of their characters, Woolf created a portrait of Bennett and
his writing that was far from the reality. While
Bennett was committed to the exterior of his
characters and to material conditions in a way
that Woolf and her contemporaries were not, it
was because he believed in the need to understand
outside circumstances in order to understand
interiors and because he believed that interiors
were inaccessible to a certain degree (and hence
could be understood only through inference and
surmise) that Bennett insisted on understanding
not only his characters but their surroundings.
Nonetheless, Bennetts popularity took a sharp
dive after Woolfs dismissal, and his reputation
has yet to recover from the unfortunate blow.
There are promising signs, however. Recently
critics such as Kurt Koenigsberger and Randi
Saloman have begun to consider Bennetts work
on its own merits. John Carey declared Bennett
the hero of his study of modernism, Intellectuals
and the Masses (1992). Robert Squillace (1997)
has produced a provocative monograph offering
new insight into Bennetts novels.
SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF)

Bennett, A. (1898). A Man from the North. London:
John Lane.
Bennett, A. (1902a). Anna of the Five Towns. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Bennett, A. (1902b). Grand Babylon Hotel. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Bennett, A. (1906). Whom God Hath Joined. London:
David Nutts.
Bennett, A. (1908a). How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.
London: New Age.
Bennett, A. (1908b). The Old Wives Tale. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Bennett, A. (1910a). Clayhanger. London: Methuen.
Bennett, A. (1910b). Literary Taste: How to Form it.
New York: George H. Doran.
Bennett, A. (1911). Hilda Lessways. London:
Methuen.
Bennett, A. (1912a). Milestones. New York: George
H. Doran.
Bennett, A. (1912b). Those United States. London:
Martin Secker.
Bennett, A. (1916). These Twain. London: Methuen.
Bennett, A. (1918). The Pretty Lady. London: Cassell.
Bennett, A. (1923). Riceyman Steps. London: Cassell.
Bennett, A. (1930). Imperial Palace. London: Cassell.
Carey, John. (1992). Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride
and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia,
18801939. London: Faber and Faber.
Drabble, M. (1974). Arnold Bennett. New York: Knopf.
Hynes, S. (ed.) (1968). The Authors Craft and Other
Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Squillace, R. (1997). Modernism, Modernity and Arnold
Bennett. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Woolf, V. (1950). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown [1924].
In The Captains Death Bed. New York: Harcourt.
Berger, John
CHARITY SCRIBNER
For more than a half century, John Berger has held

a unique position in British and European culture, making his mark in literature, the visual arts,
and mass media. Testing aesthetic models and
advancing a socialist critique, his work establishes
vital links between modernism and some of the
most recent tendencies in performance and
cinema.
BERGER, JOHN
Berger produced several works of fiction and

art criticism in the late 1950s and 1960s, but he
first attracted widespread national and international attention with Ways of Seeing (1972b), a
widely influential project on visual culture that
was broadcast on British television and concomitantly published as a bestselling paperback. Ways
of Seeing investigates the field of vision and especially the masculine gaze in both high art and
commercial advertising. In this project, Berger
was one of the first in Britain or abroad to
engage Walter Benjamins seminal thought on art
and the techniques of mechanical reproduction.
He was also one of the first to bring the early
writings of the Frankfurt School to bear on postwar society.
Despite his interdisciplinary range, Berger can
perhaps best be described as a storyteller, particularly as Benjamin understood it: his essays,
drawings, and screenplays all use narrative techniques to transmit experience and wisdom from
the past into the present. Berger was born in
London in 1926 and came of age during World
War II. After serving in the British Army from
1944 to 1946, he enrolled in art school and began
to exhibit paintings in English galleries. The New
Statesman published much of his early writing
reviews and essays edited with the red thread of
Marxism. From the start, Bergers work demonstrated a commitment to social justice; his first
novels, written in a naturalist style, thematized
problems in public health, labor relations, and
immigration in Britain. The sharp leftist slant of
A Painter of Our Time (1958) was held suspect
by Cold War censors and was briefly withdrawn
from circulation. Later, when his novel G.
(1972a), a postmodern exploration of revolution
and language, was granted the Booker Prize,
Berger donated half of the award to the Black
Panthers.
Although Berger remains a prominent voice in
English literature, he has lived and worked in a
farming village in France since the 1970s. He has
collaborated with filmmakers and photographers
to document vestigial peasant cultures in Europe
and his trilogy Into Their Labors (197990) surveys the passage of generations from the country
to the city. The first of these three novels, Pig Earth
(1979), draws from French oral traditions and is
inflected with elements of magical realism. Once
in Europa (1987) and Lilac and Flag (1990) move
41
out across the continent, uniting the stories of

migrating workers from east and west into complex narratives about recent European history,
up to and beyond the collapse of communism.
Into Their Labors became a rich resource for the
UK-based theatre company Complicite (originally the Theâtre de Complicite), which adapted it
into the multimedia performance The Three Lives
of Lucie Cabrol, which toured in Britain and
abroad from 1994 to 1996.
The series Here Is Where We Meet, held in
London in 2005, staged a major retrospective of
Bergers collaborations and commitments, both
political and aesthetic. The survey spanned his
studies of Picasso and Titian, through his literary
oeuvre, to his influence on younger writers, such
as Michael Ondaatje and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar.
The 2005 series highlighted Bergers later works,
including To the Wedding, the 1995 novel about
love and AIDS that functions as a loose allegory
of the new Europe. New works of creative nonfiction, based in part on his own familys lives,
were collected and published under the series title
Here Is Where We Meet (2005). The stories demonstrate a new level of Bergers creative maturity,
as they imbricate strands of his earlier thought on
narration and art.
Besides his influence on the writers Ondaatje
and Ozdamar, Bergers thought has instilled itself
into a wide range of art and cultural criticism,
including the work of Susan Sontag. His work has
been widely translated; A Seventh Man (1975), for
example, was translated into Turkish, Portuguese,
and Panjabi. In recent interviews Berger has mentioned his own indebtedness to the fiction of
Arundhati Roy, the poetry of Gareth Evans, and
the photography of Sebasti~ao Salgado.
In 2008 Berger followed through with an experimental novel, From A to X, which was nominated for a second Booker Prize, but received
criticism for rehashing material from previous
projects. Like Into Their Labors and Here Is Where
We Meet, the later novel ventures a pastiche of
locations and historical moments; here radical
Islam and Chavezist cynicism are entered into
an experimental fiction that returns to Bergers
favored conflict between brute power and the
oppressed multitudes. Taken as a whole, Bergers
work stands out in twentieth-century and contemporary culture for its aesthetic innovation,
capacity for empathy, and critical vision.
42
BOLGER, DERMOT

Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Politics
and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction
(BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
Berger, J. (1958). A Painter of Our Time. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Berger, J. (1960). Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing.
London: Methuen.
Berger, J. (1972a). G. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Berger, J. (1972b). Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Berger, J. (1975). A Seventh Man. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Berger, J. (1979). Pig Earth. London: Writers and
Readers.
Berger, J. (1980). About Looking. London: Writers
and Readers.
Berger, J. (1987). Once in Europa. New York: Pantheon.
Berger, J. (1990). Lilac and Flag. New York: Pantheon.
Berger, J. (1995). To the Wedding. New York: Pantheon.
Berger, J. (1996). Pages of the Wound. London:
Bloomsbury.
Berger, J. (2005). Here Is Where We Meet. New York:
Pantheon.
Berger, J. (2007). Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on
Survival and Resistance. New York: Pantheon.
Berger, J. (2008). From A to X. London: Verso.
Berger, J., & Bielski, N. (1987). A Question of Geography.
London: Faber and Faber.
Dyer, G. (1986). Ways of Telling: The Work of John
Berger. London: Pluto.
Hitchcock, P. (2001). They Must Be Represented?
Problems in Theories of Working-Class
Representation. PMLA, 155(1), 2032.
McBurney, S. (dir.) (1994). The Three Lives of Lucie
Cabrol. Theâtre de Complicite.
Papastergiadis, N. (1993). Modernity as Exile: The
Stranger in John Bergers Writing. Manchester:
Scribner, C. (2003). Second World, Second Sex, and
Literature on the European Left. Comparative
Literature, 55(3), 21728.
Bolger, Dermot
WILLIAM A. JOHNSEN
Dermot Bolger was 9 years old in 1968 when

universal secondary education finally became the
law in Ireland. This belated upgrade (well behind

other modern nations) perhaps explains his bold
conviction that what he needed to do to become a
writer after secondary school at Beneavin College
was practice, not more school. He worked variously as a factory hand and as a driver/librarian
for a mobile library until he could support himself by writing. It may explain as well his remarkable non-competitive attunement to the hidden
lives of others, especially those who dont go to
university. He writes of and for this new generation, bringing it into the mainstream of Irish
literature. He currently lives in Finglas, the
Dublin working-class suburb where he was born
in 1959.
Night Shift, Bolgers first novel (1985), concerns Donal Flynn, who works the press at a
welding rod factory. He is 18, married, and lives
with his young wife in a caravan at the bottom of
her parents garden. The novel describes Donals
gradual maturing, as he outgrows the night shift
of single males carousing in favor of his marriage.
But Donals growth is too gradual, too late. After
his last night out he returns home to learn that his
wife, anxious for his return, has lost their baby in
a fall down the stairs. At the hospital we find our
own vicarious interest in Donals night life has
also left us unprepared for the realization that
Elizabeth has grown apart from him; and we are
unprepared as well for her resolute gesture of
giving him back his ring, telling him that she is
leaving him to take better care of herself. Unlike
such novels as Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man and Lawrences Sons and Lovers,
where women are viewed as accessories or liabilities to a central male character gratifyingly resembling the author, this first novel so knowing
about young mens lives turns against its own
knowledge to observe that even a decent (and
improving) young man can forfeit the love of a
good woman forever.
The Journey Home (1990), Bolgers second
novel, established him in Ireland and Europe as
the voice of protest against Irish complacency
toward a sordid politics corrupting public life.
The 2008 publication of The Journey Home in
America restores for readers outside the market of
Penguin UK a proper historical perspective on the
fierce national resentment and self-criticism of
the Irish 1980s so muted in Roddy Doyles fiction,
with which Bolgers own is often compared.
BOLGER, DERMOT
Bolgers novels are always formally inventive; this

novel begins with Hano and Katie running from
their murder of a member of a corrupt political
family; we read several concurrent narratives (one
from beyond the grave) in each chapter, which
bring each character up to date on each others
past lives.
Part I and sections of Part III of The Womans
Daughter (1991), Bolgers third novel, first appeared separately in 1987, introducing the
authors lifelong interest in extrasensory experience and his characters hidden lives. The
narratives intricate connection of abused daughters across generations in the same family stands
for a spiritual connection between them, even a
haunting of the present by the past. A proper
reading of Bolger will include his poetry and
drama of this period, which share characters
among them.
A Second Life (1994) is one of Bolgers greatest
novels. Sean Blakes consciousness hovers above
his car accident, but also senses a pained spirit
haunting the nearby Botanical Gardens. Like
many who have experienced near-death, Blake
recuperates reluctantly, feeling haunted by both
his biological mother who gave him up for adoption, and this unknown past spirit. Seans mother
is also haunted, hearing his car crash in Dublin
although she lives in England. As Sean works his
way back to her, the novel brings her story forward: how she was forced into an institution for
unwed mothers and forced to give up her child.
Sean wrests himself away from researching someone elses life to working harder on sorting out
his own. He finds his mother days too late, but
arranges a tender, magnificent reconciliation
scene, taking his family to the graves of his grandparents who had cast his mother out, and releases
his mothers ashes there. Bolger is never afraid of
including strong emotions and strong endings in
his fiction, or of seeming sentimental or to pander
to popular feelings. A Second Life was published
just before a long-delayed 1994 public investigation in Ireland into how women were institutionalized for real or imaginary sins.
The 10 years following A Second Life (Fathers
Music, 1997b; Temptation, 2000; and The Valparaiso Voyage, 2001) have consolidated Bolgers
national and European reputation as a highly
regarded novelist constantly extending his range
of subject and form. The Family on Paradise Pier
43
(2005), a chronicle of twentieth-century Ireland

and its entanglements in European wars and
politics as seen by a disintegrating Irish Protestant
family, is Bolgers most ambitious novel to date.
The main character Eva first appeared as a formative influence on Hano in The Journey Home;
her character is based on a real-life mentor (Sheila
Fitzgerald) of several Irish writers and artists,
including Bolger himself. Bolger is both elucidative and critical in his depiction of the public spirit
of this Protestant family as each member tries to
find a role in a society moving away from them.
A shared memory of the familys recreational
use of Paradise Pier haunts and strengthens each
character.
Bolger has always been dismissive of sectarian
or confessional divisions in Ireland, and hostile to
labels such as working class and Anglo-Irish.
In 1993 he described postcolonial literature as
inappropriate to Irish writing, a decomposing
chicken in search of its head (1993, p. xiii). Yet he
has forthrightly identified himself with an Irishness as inclusive as James Joyces Leopold Bloom.
In his important play In High Germany, an Irishman working abroad finds an authentic national
identity solely in the multinational and multiracial national soccer team.
The public recognition of Bolgers novels for
contributing to a more inclusive identity for Irish
fiction is paralleled by the critical acclaim and
success of his plays; he became a member of
Aosdana (Irelands national academy of artists
and intellectuals) in 1991. He has given tireless,
unselfish support to fellow writers throughout
his career as a publisher and an impresario of
new writing. He founded the influential Raven
Arts Press in 1977 (when he was 18), publishing
first novels by Patrick McCabe and Eoin McNamee, first books by Colm Toibn and Fintan
OToole, and major books by Sebastian Barry,
Anthony Cronin, Paul Durcan, Francis Stuart,
and Michael Hartnett. He devised and edited two
novels, Finbars Hotel (1997) and Ladies Night at
Finbars Hotel (1999), gathering one chapter each
from fellow Irish writers. Attributed to all of
them collectively, these novels do not propose
the parlor game of guessing which author has
written individual chapters, but encourage a
more generous, comradely sense of Irish
writing, thoroughly in spirit with the temper of
Bolgers work.
44
BOWEN, ELIZABETH
SEE ALSO: Doyle, Roddy (BIF); Irish Fiction

(BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); Working-Class
Fiction (BIF)
Bolger, D. (1985). Night Shift. Dingle: Brandon.
Bolger, D. (ed.) (1986). The Bright Wave: Poetry in
Irish Now. Dublin: Raven Arts.
Bolger, D. (1991). The Womans Daughter [1987],
expanded edn. New York: Viking.
Bolger, D. (1990). The Journey Home. New York:
Viking.
Bolger, D. (1992a). A Dublin Quartet (The Lament for
Arthur Cleary; In High Germany; The Holy Ground;
One Last White Horse). London: Penguin.
Bolger, D. (1992b). Emilys Shoes. New York: Viking.
Bolger, D. (ed.) (1993). The Picador Book of
Contemporary Irish Fiction. London: Picador.
Bolger, D. (1994). A Second Life. New York:
Viking.
Bolger, D. (1995). A Dublin Bloom: An Original Free
Adaptation of James Joyces Ulysses. London:
Nick Hern.
Bolger, D. (1997a). April Bright and Blinded by the
Light: Two Plays. London: Nick Hern.
Bolger, D. (1997b). Fathers Music. London:
Flamingo.
Bolger, D. (1998). Taking My Letters Back: New and
Selected Poems. Dublin: New Island.
Bolger, D. (2000). Temptation. London: Flamingo.
Bolger, D. (2001). The Valparaiso Voyage. London:
Flamingo.
Bolger, D. (2004). From These Green Heights. Dublin:
New Island.
Bolger, D. (2005). The Family on Paradise Pier. London:
Flamingo.
Bolger, D. (2009a). The Consequences of Lightning.
Dublin: New Island.
Bolger, D. (2009b). The Townlands of Brazil. Dublin:
New Island.
Bolger, D., Doyle, R., Enright, A., Hamilton, H.,
Johnston, J., OConnor, J., & Toibn, C. (1997).
Finbars Hotel. London: Picador.
Bolger, D., Binchy, M., Boylan, C., Donoghue, E.,
Haverty, A., N Dhuibne, E., ORiordan, K., &
Purcell, D. (1999). Ladies Night at Finbars Hotel.
London: Picador.
Foster, R. F. (2007). Luck and the Irish. London:
Penguin.
Imhoff, R. (2002). The Modern Irish Novel. Dublin:
Wolfhound.
Paschel, U. (1998). No Mean City? The Image of Dublin
in the Novels of Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, and Val
Mulkerns. New York: Peter Lang.
Bowen, Elizabeth
MARGARET SCANLAN
Born in Dublin in 1899, novelist Elizabeth Bowen

died in Kent in 1973; she is buried in Ireland near
the site of the demolished family home, Bowens
Court. Half-orphaned at 13, she lived as she had
grown up, on both sides of the [Anglo-Irish]
hyphen. Educated at English schools, she married an Englishman, Alan Cameron, in 1923; the
couple lived in Oxford until 1935, when Cameron
accepted a position with the BBC in London. After
inheriting Bowens Court in 1930, the author
spent extended holidays at this beloved but financially ruinous big house, where her guests included Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and
Isaiah Berlin. During World War II, Bowen divided her time between London, where her Regents Park house was bombed twice, and neutral
Eire, where she wrote undercover reports on Irish
morale for the British Ministry of Information. At
a time when Churchill debated seizing the Irish
treaty ports lost in 1938, Bowens counsels
about respecting its neutrality reflect her affection
for Ireland and considerable political canniness.
Still, as late as 2004, the question of whether this
English spy counts as an Irish writer was debated in the Irish Times.
Bowens first short story collection, Encounters,
was published in 1923; her first novel, The Hotel,
in 1927; her work of the 1930s and 1940s To the
North (1932), The House in Paris (1935), The
Death of the Heart (1938), The Demon Lover and
Other Stories (1945), The Heat of the Day (1949)
was her most popular and remains her bestknown. After Camerons death in 1952, Bowen
published only three more novels, A World of Love
(1955), The Little Girls (1964), and Eva Trout
(1969); A Day in the Dark and Other Stories
appeared in 1969. From 1950 until her final illness
she taught in American universities and colleges
Vassar and Bryn Mawr, Princeton and Stanford,
the universities of Wisconsin and California,
Berkeley supplementing her income with lectures and magazine articles. Nonetheless she was
forced to sell Bowens Court, razed by its new
owner in 1960.
Like the author, the archetypal Bowen character is an outsider. Portia, a recently bereaved
teenager in The Death of the Heart, reminds
everyone in her half-brothers elegant London
BOWEN, ELIZABETH
house of his late fathers foolish affair with a

young woman from a flower shop. Like 9-yearold Leopold in The House in Paris, born to a young
unmarried Englishwoman of good family some
eight months after the suicide of his French Jewish
father, these aliens are surrounded by well-bred
people with secrets concerning sex and history.
Around them flow the rituals and polite conversations of upper-middle-class life, to which the
outsider listens with desperate attention for answers to questions no one dares ask directly. The
Bowen novel of manners is, in the authors phrase,
about life with the lid on, but cruelty, betrayal,
even violence, seethe just below the decorative
surface (Glendinning 82). Portia falls in love, only
to be devastated at discovering how entangled the
shallow young man is with her sister-in-law;
Leopold, yearning to see the mother from whom
he has been separated since his infancy, travels to
Paris only to receive a last-minute telegram canceling the visit. The Last September (1929) ends as
the IRA burn down the elegant big house in which
it is set; in To the North, a young woman made
homeless by her sister-in-laws decision to remarry kills herself and her estranged lover in a highspeed car crash.
The Heat of the Day, set in wartime London,
may be Bowens most accomplished novel. By
turns love story and documentary, the novel
carries traces of the gothic and spy fiction, as well
as her distinctive novel of manners. The melodramatic question on which the plot turns,
whether Stella Rodney ought to sleep with a
British intelligence agent, Harrison, in order to
postpone the arrest of her lover, Robert Kelway,
a Dunkirk veteran spying for the Nazis, gives
Bowen full scope to explore the uncertainties of
identity, betrayal, and love. In a crucial episode,
Stella visits the Irish estate her son has recently
inherited from his long-dead fathers family. Here
a recurrent Bowen theme, Anglo-Irish alienation,
deepens anxiety that the English who survive the
wartime destruction at home also face the collapse
of values that gave their culture coherence. For
two decades after her death Bowen was largely
forgotten, often dismissed as one more conventional female novelist of manners. However, recent criticism of The Heat of the Day and the later,
more experimental Eva Trout offers a vision of
Bowen as a psychologically complex, stylistically
accomplished, and politically astute writer who
45
deserves to be read in the context of her

contemporaries Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, even as the Other of James Joyce (Bennett &
Royle, p. xv).
SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); London in
Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
World War II in Fiction (BIF)
Bennett, A., & Royle, N. (1995). Elizabeth Bowen and the
Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives. New York:
St. Martins.
Bowen, E. (1923). Encounters. London: Sidgwick and
Jackson.
Bowen, E. (1927). The Hotel. London: Constable.
Bowen, E. (1932). To the North. London: Gollancz.
Bowen, E. (1935). The House in Paris. London:
Gollancz.
Bowen, E. (1938). The Death of the Heart. London:
Gollancz.
Bowen, E. (1945). The Demon Lover and Other Stories.
Bowen, E. (1949). The Heat of the Day. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Bowen, E. (1955). A World of Love. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Bowen, E. (1964). The Little Girls. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Bowen, E. (1965). A Day in the Dark and Other Stories.
Bowen, E. (1969). Eva Trout. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Clifford, B., & Lane, J. (1999). Elizabeth Bowen: Notes
on Eire Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill,
19402. Aubane, Co. Cork: Aubane Historical
Society.
Corcoran, N. (2004). Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced
Return. Oxford: Clarendon.
Ellman, M. (2003). Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow
across the Page. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Glendinning, V. (1979). Elizabeth Bowen. New York:
Knopf.
Halperin, J. (1998). Eminent Georgians: The Lives of
King George V, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby, and
Nancy Astor. New York: St. Martins.
Hoogland, R. C. (1994). Elizabeth Bowen: A
Reputation in Writing. New York: New York
University Press.
Irish Political Review (2004). Martin Mansergh and The
Irish Times: A Polemic. Irish Political Review (June).
At www.atholbooks.org/mansergh_polemic.php,
accessed June 16, 2008.
46
BOYD, WILLIAM
Jordan, H. B. (1992). How Will the Heart Endure?

Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lee, H. (1981). Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation.
London: Vision.
McCormack, W. J. (1993). Dissolute Characters: Irish
Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu,
Yeats and Bowen. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Moynahan, J. (1995). Anglo-Irish: The Literary
Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Walshe, E. (ed.) (1998). Elizabeth Bowen Remembered:
The Farahy Addresses. Dublin: Four Courts.
Boyd, William
CHRISTINE BERBERICH
One of Britains most prolific and successful

contemporary writers, William Boyd was born
in Accra, Ghana, in 1952. His parents were Scottish expatriates, and Boyd grew up in the British
expatriate communities of Ghana and Nigeria.
At the age of 9, his parents sent him to attend
Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland. His
education was completed with a diploma of
French studies from the University of Nice, a BA
and MA in English and philosophy from the
University of Glasgow, and studies toward a DPhil
in English literature at Jesus College, Oxford.
Between 1980 and 1983, Boyd worked as a lecturer
in English literature and critical theory at
St. Hildas College, Oxford.
Boyds career as a novelist and writer took off
in 1981 with the publication of his first novel,
A Good Man in Africa (1981a), which won the
Whitbread Novel Award and the Somerset
Maugham Award. This successful first novel was
followed in 1982 with the publication of An IceCream War (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and
winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars
and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987),
Brazzaville Beach (1990; winner of the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize and the McVities Prize for
Scottish Writer of the Year), The Blue Afternoon
(1993; winner of the Sunday Express Book of the
Year award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
for Fiction 1995), Armadillo (1998a), Any Human
Heart (2002; winner of the Prix Jean Monnet),
Restless (2006; winner of the Costa Book Award:
Novel), and Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009). In

addition to his acclaimed fiction, Boyd has also
produced several volumes of short stories On
the Yankee Station (1981b), The Destiny of Nathalie X (1995), Fascination (2005b), and The
Dream Lover (2008) a memoir of his school
days (School Ties, 1985), the memoir Nat Tate: An
American Artist 19281961 (1998b), and a collection of non-fiction writing, Bamboo, in 2005.
Additionally, Boyd made a name for himself as
a successful screenwriter, adapting not only his
own novels (A Good Man in Africa and Stars and
Bars) but also those of, for example, Mario
Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter)
and Evelyn Waugh (Scoop and Sword of Honour),
as well as writing and directing the film The
Trench.
Boyds success is mainly due to his versatility.
His novels reflect his own international upbringing with a variety of settings ranging from Africa,
to America, and changing British settings. His
largely realist narrative employs varying narrative
strategies to explore a wide variety of political and
social events of the twentieth century. His second
novel, An Ice-Cream War, for example, is a biting
anti-war satire. Additionally, the novel introduces a new stylistic device by focusing on a
variety of central characters rather than on a
single protagonist. Brazzaville Beach sees a departure from Boyds previous approaches by introducing a female protagonist for the first time and
combining two different narrative strands, one
largely set in England, the other in Africa. Hope
Clearwater, the protagonist, leaves England and
a failed marriage behind to study primates in
Africa. The narrative does not only show succinct
insights into the competitiveness of and the
manipulation prevalent in animal research, but
also shows the spiraling violence of the civil war
raging in the African country that eventually ends
up with Hope as a victim of kidnapping. Boyd
thus seems to draw a parallel between human
violence (the civil war) and the escalating violence among the chimpanzees as witnessed by
Hope at the research station. The narrative
strands alternate between a first-person one that
recounts Hopes reasons for leaving England
behind and a third-person one outlining her
African experiences. Boyd similarly employs this
technique of varying narrative levels in Restless,
which also has two female protagonists: the
BROOKE-ROSE, CHRISTINE
first-person narrative of Ruth is firmly set in

1970s Oxford where she is trying to come to
terms with the unraveling second narrative
strand, her mother Eva Delectorskayas memoirs
of her own secret involvement in the British secret
service during World War II.
Armadillo, by contrast, takes Boyd to a new and
diverse topic. The protagonist Lorimer Black has
taken on a new name to hide his east European
gypsy origin. While many of Boyds earlier novels
deal with the figure of the British expatriate,
Armadillo, by contrast, focuses on the experiences
of European immigrants into Britain. Identity
stands at the forefront of this novel, as most of
its characters are trying to be someone they are
not either disguising or trying to forget their
origins or their past.
Boyds work also reflects the influence of a
variety of twentieth-century writers. A Good Man
in Africa, for example, shows the influence of
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kingsley Amis. Any Human Heart, in another stylistic departure written
in the form of a diary that spans the best part of the
twentieth century, pays homage to the literary
elite of the twentieth century. The protagonist,
Logan Mountstuart, records meetings with, for
example, celebrated writers such as Evelyn Waugh
and Anthony Powell (whom Boyd professed himself an admirer of). In the case of Powell, Boyds
diligent attention to research and detail can also
be seen, as the sightings of Powell Mountstuart
referred to in his diary can actually be found in
Powells own memoirs. The sheer breadth and
scope of Any Human Heart, covering social, historical and cultural events of twentieth-century
Britain, also lends itself to a comparison with
Powells own magnus opus, A Dance to the Music
of Time.
Although Boyds work harks back to the realism of the nineteenth century rather than bearing
resemblance to its postmodernist contemporaries, the sheer versatility of the authors themes
and topics as well as his stylistic divergences make
him a truly exciting and immensely readable
contemporary writer who has proven over and
over again that he deserved to be included in
Granta magazines 1983 list of most promising
British novelists (Elices 19).
SEE ALSO: Powell, Anthony (BIF); Waugh,
Evelyn (BIF)
47

Biswell, A. (2001). William Boyd. In M. Moseley (ed.),
British Novelists Since 1960. 4th series. Detroit:
Gale, pp. 3140.
Boyd, W. (1981a). A Good Man in Africa. London:
Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1981b). On the Yankee Station. London:
Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1982). An Ice-Cream War. London: Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1984). Stars and Bars. London: Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1985). School Ties. London: Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1987). The New Confessions. London:
Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1990). Brazzaville Beach. London: Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1993). The Blue Afternoon. London: Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1995). The Destiny of Nathalie X. London:
Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1998a). Armadillo. London: Penguin.
Boyd, W. (1998b). Nat Tate: An American Artist
19281961. Cambridge: 21 Publishing.
Boyd, W. (2002). Any Human Heart. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Boyd, W. (2005a). Bamboo. London: Bloomsbury.
Boyd, W. (2005b). Fascination. London: Penguin.
Boyd, W. (2006). Restless. London: Bloomsbury.
Boyd, W. (2008). The Dream Lover. London:
Bloomsbury.
Boyd, W. (2009). Ordinary Thunderstorms. London:
Bloomsbury.
Dunn, D. (1993). Divergent Scottishness: William
Boyd, Allan Massie, Ronald Frame. In G. Wallace &
R. Stevenson, The Scottish Novel Since the 1970s.
New Visions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 14969.
Elices, J. F. (2006). The Satiric Worlds of William Boyd.
A Case-Study. Berne: Peter Lang.
Ross, T. (1997). High Brow Adapter: Interview with
William Boyd. Creative Screenwriting, 4(2), 3743.
Vitoux, P. (2000). The Uses of Parody in William
Boyds The New Confessions. Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, 42(1),7992.
Brooke-Rose, Christine
GRAEME HARPER
Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born

in Geneva in 1923. A literary experimentalist like
her late, younger contemporary, B. S. Johnson,
she views the writing of fiction as an intellectual as
well as creative exploration. Her English father,
Alfred Northbrook Rose, died in 1934. Her mother, Evelyn Blanche Brooke, was an American of
48
BROOKE-ROSE, CHRISTINE
Swiss parentage, who later became a Benedictine

nun. Raised in Brussels, but traveling frequently,
Brooke-Rose was schooled in Folkestone, Kent.
During World War II she worked in the intelligence branch of the Womens Auxiliary Air Force
(WAAF) at Bletchley Park, Britains primary
code-breaking station. She undertook undergraduate studies at Somerville College, Oxford
(19469), then, from 1950 to 1954, she attended
University College London, where she completed
a doctoral thesis drawing on her interest in philology and literature.
Brooke-Roses first published work, Gold
(1955), is a poem with religious themes. This was
followed by her first novel, The Languages of Love
(1957), a satirical work, written in part to counter
the stress induced by the near-fatal illness of her
then husband, the Polish writer Jerzy Pietrkiewicz. In 1958 she published her second novel, The
Sycamore Tree (1958b), a reasonably conventional
book in which she investigates gender stereotyping. In that year she also published the critical
work A Grammar of Metaphor (1958a), which
looked at the classification of metaphor. These
works encapsulate the combination of creative
and critical interests that have continued
throughout Brooke-Roses career.
The 1960s saw her publish a number of novels,
beginning with The Dear Deceit (1960), in which
the machinations of narrative are questioned,
and ending with Between (1968), a present-tense
narration employing a number of European languages, as the story follows the travels of a female
translator. The notion of being between languages
a fact of Brooke-Roses own life is key here.
Other novels of this period include The Middlemen: A Satire (1961), which garnered suggestions
of smugness in the authors writing, Out (1964),
and Such (1966). Such is the most notable, and
won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It is an
investigation of scientific and literary truth.
Following the 1970 publication of Go When
You See the Green Man Walking, a collection of
short stories, Brooke-Rose published two books
focusing on the work of poet Ezra Pound: A ZBC
of Ezra Pound (1971) and A Structural Analysis
of Pounds Usura Canto: Jakobsons Method
Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976).
Brooke-Rose was by then working in France, as
university lecturer (196975) and, later, professor
(197588), at the University of Paris VIII,
Vincennes. She had not abandoned critical work

during the preceding 10 years and had, in 1967,
published an English translation of Alain RobbeGrillets In the Labyrinth (1959), which won the
Arts Council Translation Prize in 1969.
Thru (1975), a novel about a university classroom, features non-fictional text interspersed
with fictional text, diagrams, and curricula vitae
in its investigation of consciousness, while Amalgamemnon (1984) is a playful novel that mixes the
thoughts of a woman who is about to lose her job
as a professor of literature and history with textual
references to the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus and the burble of callers from a
radio talk-show program.
Amalgamemnon, Xorandor (1986), Verbivore
(1990), and Textermination (1991b) are what
Brooke-Rose considers the Intercom Quartet,
a set of novels that concern media and communications technology. A Rhetoric of the Unreal:
Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the
Fantastic (1981) and Stories, Theories and Things
(1991a) were also published. Remarkably, her
output of fiction appeared only to increase following her seventieth birthday, with the publication, in quick succession, of the novels Remake
(1996), Next (1998), and Subscript (1999).
Remake is an autobiographical novel, exploring
the life of an old lady of seventy-two, with the
narrator (who is Brooke-Rose herself) deciphering messages and interrogating events, and exploring the machinations of memory. As with
much of her fiction, intersections between
humans and science form the basis of Remake,
as it does in Subscript in particular the working
of genetics and human memory. In Next the
author combines a journey into the lives of
Londons homeless with a murder mystery and,
through the use of free indirect speech, an exploration of anonymity.
Brooke-Roses most recent works are Invisible
Author: Last Essays (2002), and Life, End of (2006),
in which her own life and that of the old lady
in the work are not joined by the intrusion of I,
yet are so remarkably close that the book becomes
both constructed fiction and revealed autobiography and an incredibly vibrant conversation
between these positions.
SEE ALSO: Johnson, B. S. (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF)
BROOKNER, ANITA

Birch, S. (1994). Christine Brooke-Rose and
Contemporary Fiction. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1955). Gold. Aldington: Hand and
Flower.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1957). The Languages of Love.
London: Secker and Warburg.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1958a). A Grammar of Metaphor.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1958b). The Sycamore Tree. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1960). The Dear Deceit. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1961). The Middlemen: A Satire.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1964). Out. London: Michael Joseph.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1966). Such. London: Michael Joseph.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1968). Between. London: Michael
Joseph.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1970). Go When You See the Green
Man Walking. London: Michael Joseph.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1971). A ZBC of Ezra Pound. London:
Faber and Faber.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1975). Thru. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1976). A Structural Analysis
of Pounds Usura Canto: Jakobsons Method
Extended and Applied to Free Verse. The Hague:
Mouton.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1981). A Rhetoric of the Unreal:
Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the
Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1984). Amalgamemnon. Manchester:
Carcanet.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1986). Xorandor. Manchester:
Carcanet.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1990). Verbivore. Manchester:
Carcanet.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1991a). Stories, Theories and Things.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1991b). Textermination. Manchester:
Carcanet.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1996). Remake. Manchester:
Carcanet.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1998). Next. Manchester: Carcanet.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1999). Subscript. Manchester:
Carcanet.
Brooke-Rose, C. (2002). Invisible Author: Last Essays.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Brooke-Rose, C. (2006). Life, End Of. Manchester:
Carcanet.
Canepari-Labib, M. (2002). Word-Worlds: Language,
Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine
Brooke-Rose. Oxford: Peter Lang.
49
Friedman, J., & Martin, R. (eds.). (1995). Utterly Other

Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose.
Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive.
Little, J. (1996). The Experimental Self: Dialogic
Subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Brookner, Anita
ROBERT ELLIS HOSMER, JR.
Anita Brookner, born in London on July 16, 1928,

the only child of middle-class Polish Jews, was
educated at James Allens Girls School, Kings
College, London, and the Courtauld Institute,
and first made her mark as an art historian. She
spent three postgraduate years in Paris, her only
extended time out of Britain, researching her
dissertation on Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Her mentor, Anthony Blunt, himself a distinguished scholar of the work of Nicholas Poussin, encouraged
her Francophile leanings. She ascended the academic ladder quickly, moving from the University
of Reading (195964) to the Courtauld Institute,
where she taught from 1964 until her retirement
in 1988. Her tenure at the Courtauld was interrupted only by her appointment to the Slade
Professorship at Cambridge (19678); she was
the first woman to hold the position. Her distinguished work on eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury French artists, particularly Greuze,
David, and Ingres, and her considerable talents
as an instructor earned Brookner a first-class
reputation at the Courtauld and among generations of students, many of whom went on to hold
major appointments at great museums and universities in the UK and abroad.
Challenged by a summer break in her schedule
in 1981, Brookner decided to write a novel. The
result, A Start in Life (1981), is the first of 24
published; she produced one a year until 1999
the year 2000 broke the spell, but five more have
appeared since 2001, the most recent, Strangers
(2009). For her, writing fiction was not far removed from writing art history: both activities
are exercises in problem solving. Intermittently,
collections of her essays appear, mostly on French
writers, painters, or philosophers, and she reviews
fiction frequently for The Spectator. She lives
quietly in an elegant flat in Chelsea, writing in
another flat next door.
50
BROOKNER, ANITA
Brookner grew up in a secular Jewish household with parents who, according to her, were
really not suited for child-rearing. Members of the
extended family as well as refugees from Hitlers
Continental atrocities frequented the Brookner
household, but it was a quiet life. The effect on the
young woman was telling: she has often talked
about her feelings of isolation and alienation, and
attributed them not only to her heritage but also
to her choice of profession. As a Jew and as a
woman she had two strikes against her in making
her way in the world of Protestant white male
privilege. Brookner pursued her graduate work
and career path in the 1950s and 1960s, in the days
before feminism had achieved at least some of its
goals, and in an academic world of considerable
bias and unpleasantness. Notably, though, Brookner has never complained or lamented her lot;
nor does she see herself as a victim quite the
contrary.
Literature, both English and French, was another important influence on Brookners development. Growing up, she read all of Dickenss
novels and believed that the moral universe of his
fiction was an existential reality: the realization
that such was not the case was a profound ontological and intellectual shock, one whose repercussions reverberate not only in her life but in her
fiction as well. Time and again the protagonists
in her novels either fail to recognize that fact of life
or they apprehend it too late to translate it into
everyday life.
French literature eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury masters like Diderot, Stendhal, Constant,
Baudelaire, and Zola has influenced Brookner
to such an extent that describing her books as
French novels may be the most apt characterization. Not so much the substance of the masters
though in a number of cases that does matter,
for example, Zolas concern with what she has
called the heroism of everyday life (1971, 91),
which resonates in her own fiction as the
evocative, chaste precision and purity of the style
that filters into her novels. And the apparently
antithetical, floral elements derived from Collette
and Proust, which grace Brookners prose, demonstrate her indebtedness to that Continental
tradition of letters as well.
Another French element existentialist philosophy gives both structural backbone to characterization and a certain pervasive bleakness to
Brookners fiction; and another English element,

Henry James, haunts her pages, not just the
psychological insight and style of the Master, but
the narrative trajectory he charted for Isabel
Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, which might
also be Brookners: to tell the story of a certain
young woman affronting her destiny (James
1908, p. xii). Brookners women are not often so
young, but nonetheless Jamess trajectory for
Isabel is Brookners for many of her characters.
Brookner is likely best known for her fourth
novel, Hotel du Lac (1984), which established
her reputation as a novelist. Her protagonist, a
romance novelist named Edith Hope, has been
sentenced to exile at a Swiss hotel for an unfortunate lapse: she left her fiance standing at the
register office on their wedding day. After serving
her sentence in the midst of a gallery of other
women, Edith returns home, having rejected the
marriage proposal of a very Jamesian gentleman,
a little wiser for the experience. Edith is very much
a sister to the protagonists of the three novels
that preceded Hotel: a middle-aged woman with a
divided soul and heritage, someone who has lived
according to the dictates of an outmoded code;
disappointed and alienated, but managing to
soldier on. Edith is the savvy sister, though, a
woman who has taken her suitors injunction
(assume your own centrality: 95) to heart, but
not quite as he wished.
Hotel du Lac is in many ways the touchstone for
all of Brookners fiction. As other novels came
out, each amplified and extended the basic concerns of that Booker Prize-winning novel and in
a style that is perhaps unrivaled in contemporary
English prose fiction. The female portrait that is
the subject sometimes became a double female
portrait as in Brief Lives (1990), Falling Slowly
(1998), and Leaving Home (2005); or a male
portrait as in Lewis Percy (1989), The Next Big
Thing (2002), and Strangers (2009). In other cases,
the individual portrait became a group portrait of
both women and men as in Family and Friends
(1985) and A Family Romance (1993).
Brookners most recent novel, Strangers, is the
story of Paul Sturgis, a retired bank manager who
dreams of escape from a sedate life. Two women
disrupt things, one a middle-aged divorcee, the
other an old girlfriend. The novel generated
some familiar response with a number of critics
complaining that Strangers is an altogether too
BYATT, A. S
familiar repetition of the novel she has been

writing from the beginning. Her consistent concern with the existential dilemma created when a
certain kind of person attempts to negotiate life
without compromise in the contemporary world
has produced fictions of elegant fugal variation on
the subject.
Brookner has written an elegant, incisive portrait of a certain person, whether female or male,
from the beginning. Her deepest and most sympathetic concern lies with chronicling the life
story without illusion, without sentiment, without
false comfort. The result is an elegant, often tragic,
fiction of depth, dimension, and resonance.
SEE ALSO: James, Henry (AF)
Alexander, C. M. (2002). Understanding Anita
Brookner. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Brookner, A. (1971). The Genius of the Future: Studies in
French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire,
Zola, the Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans. London:
Phaidon.
Brookner, A. (1980). Jacques-Louis David. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Brookner, A. (1984). Hotel du Lac. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Brookner, A. (1985). Family and Friends. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Brookner, A. (1989). Lewis Percy. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Brookner, A. (1990). Brief Lives. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Brookner, A. (1993). A Family Romance. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Brookner, A. (1994). A Private View. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Brookner, A. (1998). Falling Slowly. London: Viking.
Brookner, A. (2002). The Next Big Thing. London:
Viking.
Brookner, A. (2005). Leaving Home. London:
Viking.
Brookner, A. (2009). Strangers. London: Random
House.
Guppy, S. (1987). The Art of Fiction, No. 98: Anita
Brookner. Paris Review, 104, 123. At www.
theparisreview.org/media/2630_BROOKNER2.pdf,
accessed Mar. 4, 2010.
James, H. (1908). The Novels and Tales of Henry James,
vols. 34: The Portrait of a Lady. New York Edition.
New York: Scribners.
51
Byatt, A. S
LYNN WELLS
A. S. Byatt is one of Britains most accomplished

writers of contemporary fiction, combining postmodern self-consciousness about the ability of
language to represent reality with a vivid sense of
characterization and narrative engagement. Noted for her allusive and intellectual style, Byatt is
nonetheless a bestselling author, her popularity
secure since her 1990 novel Possession: A Romance
won the Booker Prize. Although she is often cited
as a feminist writer owing to her focus on female
characters and issues related to womens lives,
Byatt is openly ambivalent about feminist theory,
which she feels can lead critics to interpret texts too
narrowly, without sensitivity to historical context.
Born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield, England in 1936, Byatt became a self-styled greedy
reader as a child, devouring texts by Jane Austen,
George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Virginia Woolf, and
others. She was educated at Newnham College,
Cambridge in the 1950s where, under the influence of F. R. Leavis, she developed a passionate
belief in the moral importance of literature. When
she married Ian Byatt in 1959, with whom she
would have a son and a daughter, she was no
longer eligible to hold a doctoral fellowship and
left her studies. After her divorce, she was married
in 1969 to Peter Duffy, and had two more daughters. Her son Charles was killed at the age of 11 in
an automobile accident.
Until 1983 when she was able to become a
professional writer, Byatt made her living by
teaching in various universities; her familiarity
with academic settings and the debates surrounding contemporary literary theory since the 1960s
is evident in many of her works. She herself has
written literary criticism, including books on two
of her most important influences, Iris Murdoch
and George Eliot. Impressively prolific, she continues to publish novels, novellas, books of short
fiction, and essays about literature, splitting her
time between her London home and a cottage in
the south of France.
Byatts first two novels, The Shadow of a Sun
(1964) and The Game (1967), received mixed
reviews, and were deemed inferior to the work
of her famous sister, novelist Margaret Drabble.
Her reputation rose, though, with the publication
52
BYATT, A. S
of The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the first novel

in a planned quartet about siblings Stephanie,
Marcus, and Frederica Potter, a circle of related
characters, and their experiences throughout the
1950s and 1960s. The two sisters serve as models
of the choices and barriers facing women of their
generation, as Stephanie chooses domestic responsibility and Frederica pursues a life of intellectual and artistic independence. Both Virgin and
its successor, Still Life (1985), hearken back to the
realist novels of the nineteenth century by incorporating the richness of social life, especially the
family, and psychologically rounded characters.
Yet each of the texts also has elements of postmodern self-reflexivity: the action in Virgin centers around the production of a pageant, while
Still Life abounds with discussions of aesthetic
theory in relation to painting. While critics responded positively to both of these novels, they
also found it difficult to position them clearly in
either the realist tradition or the innovations of
contemporary fiction.
Critics also commented on the conflict between
realism and postmodernism in the final two
novels of the quartet. The third novel, Babel Tower
(1996), deepens Byatts experimentation with
self-conscious fiction: it combines a main narrative about Fredericas life, and particularly her
divorce trial, following the sudden death of her
sister at the end of Virgin, with a second narrative
line constructed around a novel-within-the novel,
Babbletower, a viciously satiric reflection on the
dangers of individual and sexual freedom set
during the Reign of Terror, by a charismatic rebel
named Jude Mason, who is being prosecuted for
obscenity. The final text in the quartet, A Whistling Woman (2002), concludes the series by using
the developing medium of television as an internal mirror of the radical changes taking place in
the late 1960s; Frederica hosts a series entitled
Through the Looking-Glass, designed to challenge
establishment thinking. Seemingly stable and
unquestionable truths of British society come
under siege in scenes about the formation of an
anti-university and of a reclusive cult led by a
psychiatric patient. Both texts were praised for
their ambitious subject matter and complex narratives, but some reviewers were critical of Byatts
overly intellectual and allusive style.
Possession, on the other hand, was enthusiastically received by critics, reviewers, and readers,
who were enamored with Byatts skillful interweaving of self-conscious techniques, historical
detail, narrative suspense, and steamy romance.
The novel is structured around two sets of characters: Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, late
twentieth-century academics steeped in the skepticism of postmodern theory, and Christabel Lamotte and Randolph Henry Ash, Victorian poets
whose clandestine affair is discovered accidentally
by Roland through a series of letters. In the course
of reconstructing the poets relationship, Maud
and Roland find themselves rethinking concepts
that their culture has rejected coherent selfhood,
romantic love, artistic originality, and the power
of language to reflect reality and achieve a
compromise vision that recaptures positive elements from the past while allowing them to
remain conscious of their contemporary worldview. Critics were impressed and sometimes
even deceived by the authentic-sounding Victorian poems and narratives written by Byatt and
included in the text. The Hollywood film version
of Possession, made in 2002, gave the text a more
distinctly American flavor, and renewed Byatts
popularity with a wider audience.
Byatts success with Victorian-based narratives
continued with Angels and Insects, which comprised two novellas, Morpho Eugenia, about an
upper-crust family with a terrible sexual secret,
and The Conjugial Angel, about spiritualism,
seances and Tennysons best friend, Arthur
Hallam. The first novella gained a wider popular
audience through the visually compelling 1995
film, Angels and Insects.
A more recent novel, The Biographers Tale
(2000a), was not a critical success, however. Readers found the elaborate story of Phineas G., a
disgruntled student of literary theory who sets out
to rediscover the world through the reading and
writing of biographies, too dense and intellectual.
Byatts newest novel, The Childrens Book, an
overt response to the fantasy literature fad started
by the popularity of J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter
series, has been praised for its erudition and
evocation of a magical world, yet, like much of
her work, is considered too challenging for many
readers.
Throughout her career, Byatt has turned periodically to the short story genre, producing collections such as Sugar and Other Stories (1987),
The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the
BYATT, A. S
Nightingales Eye (1994), Elementals: Stories of Fire

and Ice (1998), and The Little Black Book of Stories
(2003). While Byatts fame derives primarily
from her novels, her short fiction also receives
high critical praise, demonstrating her literary
versatility and wide-ranging imagination.
SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and the Novel
(BIF); Drabble, Margaret (BIF); Feminist
Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF);
Historiographic Metafiction (AF);

Alfer, A., & Noble, M. J. (eds.) (2001). Essays on the
Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Byatt. A. S. (1964). The Shadow of a Sun. London:
Chatto and Windus. (Reissued with an introduction
as The Shadow of the Sun. London: Vintage, 1991.)
Byatt, A. S. (1967). The Game. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (1978). The Virgin in the Garden. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (1985). Still Life. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (1990). Possession: A Romance. London:
Chatto and Windus.
53
Byatt, A. S. (1991). Passions of the Mind: Selected

Writings. London: Chatto and Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (1992). Angels and Insects. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (1993). The Matisse Stories. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (1994). The Djinn in the Nightingales Eye.
Byatt, A. S. (1996). Babel Tower. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (1998). Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice.
Byatt, A. S. (2000a). The Biographers Tale. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (2000b). On Histories and Stories.
Byatt, A. S. (2002). A Whistling Woman. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (2003). The Little Black Book of Stories.
Byatt, A. S. (2009). The Childrens Book. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Campbell, J. (2004). A S. Byatt and the Heliotropic
Imagination. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press.
Haas, P. (dir.) (1995). Angels and Insects. Playhouse
International Pictures/Samuel Goldwyn.
Kelly, K. C. (1996). A S. Byatt. New York:
Twayne.
La Bute, N. (dir.) (2002). Possession. USA Films.
Todd, R. (1997). A S. Byatt. Plymouth: Northcote
House.
C
Campus Novel
IAN CARTER
In David Lodges Deaf Sentence one professor tells

another that It wouldnt surprise me if we both
turn up lightly disguised in a campus novel one of
these days (2008, 286). This novel must be recent,
for though campus fiction often is used today
to describe imaginative literature set in British
universities, the terms origins are American
(Edemarium 155). Thus its growing presence
against the native descriptor university novels
(Kenyon 1980) signifies changes over time within
British academic life and in novelists responses
to these changes.
Three features mark fictional accounts of British
university life. First, conservative comedy is the
dominant mode (Moseley 1819). Second, some
institutions are massively overrepresented relative
to staff and student numbers. Thus 145 out of 204
novels published between 1945 and 1988 were set
in just two smallish universities Oxford (principally) and Cambridge (Carter 4). Third, most
novels were written by English graduates, and
many authors themselves taught in university
English departments. If they were not members
of English departments, most were in any case
associated with the humanities; fictions written by
natural, life, and social scientists are not common.
Not surprisingly, therefore, and taking succor
from particular readings of Matthew Arnolds
Culture and Anarchy (1869), many fictions conjure
universities as English humanistic cultures inmost keep, with embattled scholars fighting dog-
ged rearguard actions against assaults from proletarians, scientists, women, and foreigners.
Given British societys abiding obsession with
social class, the proletarian threat is prime, with
British university novelists contemplating their
systems grudging movement in the twentieth
centurys second half from small-scale elite recruitment toward mass higher education. Mortimer Proctors (1957) account makes the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian English university
novel celebrate elite undergraduate liberal education in the ancient English universities: in Oxford
particularly, that indispensible nursery of rulers
and administrators (Stewart 29); and in the
other place, Cambridge. Celebrated examples
here include Max Beerbohms delectably macabre
comedy Zuleika Dobson (1911) and Oxford passages in Evelyn Waughs Brideshead Revisited
(1945), that overblown elegy for a dead social
world. Though novels based on authors rosetinted recollections of undergraduate life still
leave the presses in our time, not all recollections
have been rosy. Plots in Philip Larkins Jill (1946)
and Raymond Postgates The Ledger is Kept
(1953) are built around Northern working-class
undergraduates deeply alienated from and by
Oxfords patrician pretension; while Cambridgeeducated Tom Sharpes farce Porterhouse Blue
(1974) settled accounts with a college still hated
in long retrospect.
Recent American critics (Rossen 1993;
Showalter 2005) exclude novels of undergraduate experience from British campus fiction,
restricting this term to novels treating university

CAMPUS NOVEL
teachers joys and troubles. Both take C. P. Snows

The Masters (1951) to have inaugurated this new
form, though his The Light and the Dark appeared
four years earlier. But giving Snow priority raises
issues about genre, for these critics are obliged to
ignore a string of earlier novels Adam Broome,
The Oxford Murders (1929) and The Cambridge
Murders (1936); J. C. Masterman, An Oxford
Tragedy (1933); Michael Innes, Death at the
Presidents Lodging (1936); Dilwyn Rees, The
Cambridge Murders (1945) which examined
university teachers lives: and, for some, their
improbably violent deaths. These books exploited
the Oxbridge colleges advantages for golden age
whodunit writers, as locked gates restricted casts of
suspects and motives for murder fermented among
college fellows attenuated charities. It has been
customary for literary scholars to denigrate whodunits as light fiction; but the historian J. C.
Masterman was a college head who would serve, in
his turn, as Oxfords vice chancellor. His thriller
was built around the issue of Oxbridge hubris
which would be developed not only in C. P. Snows
several Cambridge novels but also in his own halffictionalized warning against his own universitys
academic complacency (Masterman 1952). Clearly
enough, to set a cordon sanitaire around serious
literary fiction is to miss much of interest in novels
about university life.
The same holds for what happened when novelists began to explore life, as student or staff
member, in universities outside Oxford or Cambridge. Fictions set in ancient Scottish and Irish
universities are scarce (though for an account of
bohemian student life in Trinity College Dublin
see J. P. Donleavys The Ginger Man, 1955; and
see Mary Kellys Dead Mans Riddle, 1957, for
Edinburgh). But a stream set in civic (redbrick)
English universities places haunted fictionally
by the essential malaise of a provincial university for Philip Hobsbaum (144) started to
appear at the mid-century. Both Rossen and
Showalter take Kingsley Amiss overrated Lucky
Jim (1954) to be the harbinger here, but Michael
Inness whodunit The Weight of the Evidence
(1944) got there a decade earlier. In Old Hall,
New Hall (1956) almost certainly spurred by his
visit to the precocious Keele University Innes
also produced the first novel about what came to
be called new universities in the wake of the
1963 Robbins Report. Growing from kernels in
55
disgraced gentry mansions, and often located

close to attractive towns and cities as Baedeker
universities, these institutions physically isolated park-like campuses evoke campus fiction in the
American mode. Their most celebrated depiction
remains Malcolm Bradburys sour The History
Man (1975).
The Robbins Report sought to expand significantly the proportion of any age cohort enjoying
university education. From the mid-sixties onward, many novelists accounts of student and staff
life turned on what they thought of this idea,
ranging from crusty reaction in Simon Ravens
Places Where They Sing (1970) to mild celebration
in John Wains Where the Rivers Meet (1988).
(Following Raymond Williamss Second Generation (1964), Wains book is unusual in depicting an
Oxford where car factories bulk no smaller than
colleges.) But by international standards students
in this expanded cohort still were cosseted with low
fees and generous maintenance grants. As expansion continued toward a mass higher education
system, with numerous polytechnics now
upgraded to become new new universities,
humanists halcyon days faded. From 1981 the
first Thatcher government cut university funding
and imposed burdensome new managerial
imperatives. Disaffected novelists responded with
a string of dystopian farces, notably Andrew
Daviess A Very Peculiar Practice (1986) and A
Very Peculiar Practice: The New Frontier (1988),
and Frank Parkins The Mind and Body Shop
(1987). This convulsion past, British university
fiction faded. Born from anti-German sentiment
in World War I (Baldick 1983), the notion that
English literature embodied Englishness dissolved
(Connor 72). And as the British university system
continued to expand, that universities might serve
as English cultures strongest bastion also atrophied. With few novels of note appearing in recent
years among undistinguished whodunits focused
on Oxbridge social privilege rather than academic
issues, today the British university novel is moribund. Only a couple of fine books disturb these
generalizations. The important Spanish writer
Javier Marass All Souls (1992) brought a European perspective to Oxford and found it wanting,
while David Lodges Thinks (2001) conjured
universities particular current purpose to
advance human thought through research-based
teaching in debates among philosophers and
56
CAMPUS NOVEL
developmental psychologists over the nature of

consciousness (and thus of thought) in the fictional new new University of Gloucester.
Whether writing under his own name or as
Michael Innes, Oxford-based J. I. M. Stewart
wrote more twentieth-century British university
novels than any other person; and they still bear
reading today. But David Lodges ability to construct novels of ideas that also satisfy readers
textual pleasure makes him the most important
figure active in British university fiction today,
whether he spends his time striking ironies from
earlier literary work notably Joyces Ulysses
(Lodge 1965) and early Victorian condition of
England novels (Lodge 1988) or using his
professorial practice to embody current critical
controversies over structuralism (Lodge 1975),
linguistics (Lodge 2008), or literary theorys
Tower of Babel (Lodge 1984). He has no peer,
and no challenger looms on the horizon.
Maras brought Spanish experience to the
British university novel, but most fictional comparisons have been drawn with America. Important examples from British writers include Malcolm Bradburys Stepping Westward (1965),
Wilfred Sheeds A Middle-Class Education
(1967), and David Lodges Changing Places
(1975). Most British writers found things
odd and, not infrequently, rebarbative while
exploring American academic difference; though
Lodge was smitten with Euphoria State (the
University of California, Berkeley). But one
sharp contrast between American campus fiction
and British university fiction must strike the
reader. It concerns gender. Over the years, many
women have set fictions in British universities:
Dorothy Sayerss Gaudy Night (1935), A. S.
Byatts Still Life (1985) and Possession (1990),
Barbara Pyms Crampton Hodnet (1985) and An
Academic Question (1986), and Iris Murdochs
The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) provide
examples. What one misses here, by comparison
with work by Alison Lurie, Amanda Cross, and
Valerie Miner for example, is American feminists crusading imperative to identify and assault
structural barriers inhibiting academic womens
progress in the academy. Fictionally at least,
British university feminism is a feeble animal,
seeking change no more radical than individual
womens advancement on mens terms (Carter
15976). Ruth Dudley Edwardss Cambridge-set
Matricide at St. Marthas (1994) is a striking example of this weakness, returning us to twentiethcentury British university fictions misogynous
main line with massed women still conjured as a
barbarous horde threatening cultures citadel.
SEE ALSO: Angry Young Man Fiction (BIF);
Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF)
Baldick, C. (1983). The Social Mission of English
Criticism, 18481932. Oxford: Clarendon.
Bevan, D. (ed.) (1990). University Fiction. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Bradbury, M. (1965). Stepping Westward. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Bradbury, M. (1975). The History Man. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Carter, I. (1990). Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British
University Fiction in the Post-War Years. London:
Routledge.
Connor, S. (1996). The English Novel in History,
19501995. London: Routledge.
Edemarium, A. (2007). Whos Afraid of the Campus
Novel? In M. Moseley (ed.), The Academic Novel:
New and Classic Essays. Chester: Chester Academic,
pp. 15463
Hobsbaum, P. (1964). University Life in English
Fiction. Twentieth Century, 173, 13947.
Kenyon, J.P. (1980). Lucky Jim and After: The Business
of University Novels. Encounter, 54, 814
Lodge, D. (1965). The British Museum is Falling Down.
London: MacGibbon and Kee.
Lodge, D. (1975). Changing Places. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Lodge, D. (1984). Small World. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Lodge, D. (1988). Nice Work. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Lodge, D. (2001). Thinks. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Lodge, D. (2008). Deaf Sentence. London: Harvill
Secker.
Maras, J. (1992). All Souls (trans. M. J. Costa).
London: Harvill.
Masterman, J.C. (1952). To Teach the Senators Wisdom.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moseley, M. (2007). Introduction: Definitions and
Justifications. In M. Moseley (ed.), The Academic
Novel: New and Classic Essays. Chester: Chester
Academic, pp. 319
Proctor, M. (1957). The English University Novel.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
CARSWELL, CATHERINE
Robbins, L. (1963). Report of the Committee on Higher

Education. London: HMSO.
Rossen, J. (1993). The University in Modern Fiction:
When Power is Academic. New York: St. Martins.
Showalter, E. (2005). Faculty Towers: The Academic
Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Snow, C.P. (1951). The Masters. London: Macmillan.
Stewart, J.I.M. (1978). Full Term. London: Gollancz.
Watson, G. (1978). Fictions of Academe: Dons and
Realities. Encounter, 51(5), 426.
Carswell, Catherine
MARGERY PALMER McCULLOCH
Catherine Carswell was one of a number of

women writers who expanded the traditional
boundaries of fiction in the early twentieth century by introducing female perspectives on a
changing modern world and new styles of writing
relevant to female themes and values. She was
born Catherine Roxburgh Macfarlane in Glasgow
in 1879 to a prosperous and deeply religious
family who lived modestly and encouraged their
daughters to become educated and self-supporting. Catherine studied music at the Frankfurt
Conservatorium at the turn of the century
and English literature at Glasgow University,
although as was common at the time she did
not take a degree. Her subsequent life, like the
lives of many contemporaneous female characters in fiction, might be described as a counternarrative in the way it went against conventional
social expectations of women. Having made an
impulsive marriage with a man who was confined
to a mental hospital when he attempted to kill her
upon her becoming pregnant, she made legal
history by fighting successfully to have the marriage annulled. She then supported herself and
her daughter as a journalist, writing fiction reviews for the Glasgow Herald and, later, drama
criticism for The Observer as assistant to St. John
Ervine. D. H. Lawrences early novels were
among the fiction she reviewed and she was
famously dismissed by the Glasgow Herald for
allowing her review of The Rainbow (soon to be
banned as an obscene publication) to be published without the sanction of the editor. While
living in Glasgow she began a relationship with
the painter Maurice Greiffenhagen who had
57
come to Glasgow School of Art as head of the

life class, and in 1912 she left the city for London.
She later married Donald Carswell, a friend from
her Glasgow years.
Carswells two novels Open the Door! which won
the Melrose Prize for fiction when it was published
in 1920, and its epistolary successor The Camomile
(1922), grew out of this early tempestuous personal life. She had been introduced to Lawrence in
1914 shortly before her Rainbow review and dismissal, and they became friends and correspondents until his death in 1930. He was aware of the
autobiographical nature of Open the Door! and
took a particular interest in it, reading and commenting on drafts, urging her to complete it.
Similarly, she commented on his Women in Love
and it was to Carswell that he turned in the later
1920s for help with the typing of Lady Chatterleys
Lover. After Lawrences death she wrote a memoir
of him from the perspective of their friendship and
in refutation of the unflattering Son of Woman by
Middleton Murry, who succeeded in having
Carswells memoir temporarily withdrawn.
In addition to their exploration of female identity and sexuality, Open the Door! and The Camomile are both fine novels of middle-class Glasgow,
something of a rarity in Scottish fiction. Open the
Door! in particular maps the West End of the city
with its neo-gothic university and Kelvingrove
Park and river, the department stores of Sauchiehall Street and the Art School sitting high on the
brow of the street behind. Its narrative is fluid,
with dramatic scenes and lively dialogue between
characters as well as passages of interior narration
focused on the heroine Joanna. The main theme
of The Camomile is its heroines wish to be a writer
and this too is played out through the creation of
an interactive social scene which belies the novels
epistolary form. Although Carswell was not personally involved with the initial stages of the
Scottish literary renaissance initiated by Hugh
MacDiarmid in the post-1918 period, her two
novels and the essay, Prousts Women, she
wrote for C. K. Moncrieffs Marcel Proust: An
English Tribute (1923) are now recognized as
important early contributions to it. The biography of Robert Burns which Lawrence encouraged
her to write and which she published in 1930
brought her into closer contact with the literary
revival and thereafter she became a regular contributor through reviews and articles on Scottish
58
CARTER, ANGELA
literature. Ironically, her novelistic Life of Burns

brought her notoriety as well as a public profile
when pre-publication excerpts were printed in the
Daily Record and readers and Burns Club members were outraged by her characterization of
Burns and the various women he was involved
with as living sexual beings. Such Trash,
Womanhood Degraded, Piece of Fiction
shouted the headlines in the correspondence
pages of the newspaper. She wrote to S. S. Kotelianski that she had received an anonymous letter
containing a bullet, which I was requested to use
upon myself that the world might be left a brighter cleaner and better place (McCulloch 2002).
Because of her barrister husbands lack of
success and her consequent need to keep working
as a journalist, Carswell never did write the further
novel she often mentioned in letters to friends.
Her final work consisted of fragments for an
autobiography, left unfinished when she died in
1946, weakened by the privations of wartime and
illness. Yet this book, published by her son as
Lying Awake, makes its own contribution to the
story of womens lives in the early years of the
century in its collage of interactive reflections on
childhood and the invisibility of female old age;
on the psychological differences between men and
women and the irritability of diffidence in the
struggle to write; on the unreliability of memory:
To be bound for ever by the arbitrary accident of
ones memories, she commented, what an idea
of immortality! (Carswell 1950). Her small but
significant contribution to womens studies and
Scottish writing ensures that she herself will not be
readily forgotten.
SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Lawrence,
D. H. (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF)

Anderson, C. (ed.) (2001). Opening the Doors: The
Achievement of Catherine Carswell. Edinburgh:
Ramsay Head.
Carswell, C. (1920). Open the Door! London: Melrose.
Carswell, C. (1922). The Camomile: An Invention.
Carswell, C. (1930). The Life of Robert Burns. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Carswell, C. (1932). The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative
of D. H. Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus.
Carswell, C. (1950). Lying Awake: An Unfinished

Autobiography and Other Posthumous Papers
(ed. J. Carswell). London: Secker and Warburg.
McCulloch, M. P. (1997). Fictions of Development
19201970. In D. Gifford & D. McMillan (eds.), A
History of Scottish Womens Writing. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, pp. 36072.
McCulloch, M. P. (2002). Catherine Carswell:
Correspondent of D. H. Lawrence, Biographer of
Robert Burns, and Epistolary Novelist. Journal of
European Studies, 32(23), 16575.
Pilditch, J. (2007). Catherine Carswell: A Biography.
Edinburgh: John Donald.
Carter, Angela
KURT KOENIGSBERGER
The richness and capaciousness of Angela Carters

fiction sometimes evokes nothing so much as the
circus ring in her novel Nights at the Circus (1984)
which serves as a microcosm of the world at large.
Indeed, Carter envisioned the capacities of fiction
to be as expansive as the world itself. She contended that fiction can do anything it wants to do.
I think it can do more things than we tend to think
it can. Her idea of the novel in particular was
positively unbounded: anything that wants to call
itself a novel is a novel, by definition (1985b
[1984] ). On the other hand, Carters stories and
novels present models of the world that are frequently intimate and bounded: her work eschews
carefully plotted generic closure in favor of a series
of carefully crafted set pieces and tableaux.
Perhaps the best way to grasp the shape of her
fiction across her career is to understand it as a
series of tightly woven exhibitions strung together
along with significant collections of fragments of
other narratives, poetry, and popular culture
opened to narrative view. Her substantial body of
fiction, written over a span of three decades, evinces
a stubborn resistance to the generic and substantive
bounds of bourgeois fiction, demonstrating that
narrative can display previously unexplored possibilities. To the extent that her writing systematically
breaches norms of genre and decorum, her narrative exhibitions have been understood as subversive, usually of patriarchy, sometimes of Western
capitalism, always of prescriptions for the forms of
fiction. Her picaresque fiction is not about causal
connection and temporal development but rather
CARTER, ANGELA
effected through about synchronic displays from

the gothic puppet show of The Magic Toyshop
(1967) to exuberant music hall performance in
Wise Children (1991).
Carters life was spent substantially in contact
with the written word, and despite her early death
at age 51, it was unusually productive. Born
Angela Stalker in 1940, she began her writing
career as a reporter in 1959. After marrying in
1960 she attended the University of Bristol from
1962 to 1965, where she read English, concentrating on medieval English literature. In 1966 she
published her first novel, Shadow Dance (titled
Honeybuzzard in the US). In 1968 she won the
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Magic Toyshop
(1967) and her third book Several Perceptions
(1968) garnered the 1969 Society of Authors
Somerset Maugham Award both top awards for
work by a writer under 35. The Maugham Award
(the prize for which subvents foreign travel)
served as the impetus to three years (196972)
spent in Japan, during which time she broke off
her marriage, before a formal divorce in 1972.
The years in Japan also served to reorient her
writing. In a 1982 essay on James Joyces Ulysses,
Carter noted the extent to which Britains political
and cultural geocentrism constrained the imagination and its expression in English: we carry our
history on our tongues, she wrote, and the history
of the British empire came to exercise a curious kind
of brake upon our expression in the English
language. She admired Joyce because he
disestablished English, rendering it demotic
(Carter 1997a), and Carters years outside the
British Empire appear to have disestablished
her own narrative practices and brought her to
celebrate lowbrow forms and languages. Having
published six novels in the years 196672, including
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
(1972), conceived wholly in Japan, Carter returned
to Britain where she produced just three more
novels The Passion of New Eve (1977; set in the
US), Nights at the Circus (winner of the 1984 James
Tait Black Memorial Prize), and Wise Children. She
increasingly attended to the form of the short story
and a number of other popular genres, including
radio plays, screenplays (including for Neil Jordans
Company of Wolves), several childrens books,
an operetta libretto adapting Virginia Woolfs
Orlando, a stage play, a raft of journalism, and
edited collections of stories in Wayward Girls and
59
Wicked Women (1986) and The Virago Book of Fairy

Tales (1990). Over these decades, she held a number
of visiting professorships and fellowship and writerin-residence posts in Britain, the United States, and
Australia. She died in February 1992 of lung cancer.
If, particularly after 1972, Carter embraced
lower modes and styles from the gothic and
the grotesque to the scatological and the carnivalesque the ideas she espoused and assailed across
her career were serious indeed, particularly those
surrounding Western capitalism and male privilege. Since 1992, Carter has belatedly come to be
one of the British authors most written about by
students. Her novels have remained continuously
in print, while her journalism, short stories, and
dramatic work have been collected posthumously
in three substantial volumes, all available in paperback. Also published posthumously was The
Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992), edited
by Carter but introduced by Marina Warner.
Carters long association with the Virago Press,
founded in 1973 as a feminist publishing house,
has to a significant extent oriented the attention to
her work especially in the context of publications such as The Sadeian Woman (1979b), a
spirited book-length essay defending pornography from feminist and materialist perspectives.
Carters novels are roughly divisible in three:
(1) the early domestic fiction, including the gothic
Magic Toyshop and the so-called Bristol trilogy of
Shadow Dance, Several Perceptions, and Love (1971);
(2) science fiction and fantasias, including the postapocalyptic Heroes and Villains (1969), the nightmarish The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman,
and The Passion of New Eve, a gender-reassignment
fantasy; and (3) the final two carnivalesque novels,
Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, which along
with her stories helped Carter earn her reputation as a
magical realist. The stories themselves are largely a
product of the period following her residence in

Japan, and show a concerted effort to work over
archetypal stories (Ashputtle; or, The Mothers
Ghost), historical scenes (The Fall River
Axe Murders), and dramatic vignettes (In
Pantoland) to yield fresh nuances, new aspects,
and rich revisions of received narratives. Most
spectacular among these efforts are the revisions
of traditional fairy tales collected as The Bloody
Chamber (1979a), which offer alternative telling of
stories such as Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast,
Red Riding Hood, and Puss-in-Boots.
60
CARTER, ANGELA
Few of Carters novels have strong plotlines that

emphasize causal relations among events or a
movement toward the traditional patterns of New
Comedy. To the extent that the novels share trajectories, they are those that suggest loss and render
plot subordinate to surprise and sensation The
Magic Toyshops gothicism ends with a conflagration and revelation of incest (a theme also evoked in
Wise Children); The Infernal Desire Machines of
Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve are
both structured around mourning for a bizarre and
ambiguously gendered love object (the formers
Albertina explicitly recalls Prousts Albertine) amid
apocalyptic scenes. Even where a conventional
romantic plot seems to be satisfied it is cross-cut
by epistemological uncertainty and existential
ambiguity in Carters novels, even the most
self-aware and confident of protagonists are fundamentally challenged, unmade, and remade by
circumstances. An epigraph to Heroes and Villains,
from Leslie Fiedlers Love and Death in the American
Novel, stands as a marker of Carters approach from
an early period: The Gothic mode is essentially a
form of parody, a way of assailing cliches by
exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness.
It is this emphasis on monstrous excess at the level
of narrative discourse that overruns attention to
story in Carters fiction.
Where Carters fiction offers clear plot lines,
they tend to be borrowed and crammed with
ironically recycled materials, most obviously in
her rewriting of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber.
Across her corpus, Carter displays a vast collection of narrative material much as her characters
compulsively collect and reveal things to view.
Indeed, the dominant narrative mode across
Carters fiction is the presentation of tableaux
that stave off the march of time and the artificial
imposition of closure, which Carter took to be
storytelling in its purest form[:] the strategies
writers have devised to cheat the inevitability of
closure (1992). Carters exhibitions always involve a significant collection of bodies, things, and
energies, and they combine in surprising ways as
the displays unfold serially. In Several Perceptions,
there is a fixation on the zoo and liberating a
badger. In Love, the protagonists temperaments
contrast between a spare aesthetic and one cluttered with found objects. Beyond the Magic Toy
Shops dark puppet shows, there are a stereopticon museum of model desire devices in The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and

a startling collection of wax effigies in The Passion
of New Eve. In readings of her fiction that foreground psychodynamic readings (especially those
emerging from her feminist allegiances), such
collections are indices to individual psychic formations and states, while geopolitical readings
(particularly those responding to Carters socialism and exploration of broad cultural dynamics)
tend to emphasize collections as dramatizations
and displacements of imperial and neocolonial
aspirations and frustrations.
Nights at the Circus might stand as Carters most
dramatic exhibition in these respects, replete with
depictions of a bordello, circus, community of
clowns, assemblage of Faberge eggs, panoptical
prison, anthropological and ethnographic curiosities, and collection of freakish women serving as
fetish objects. The latter, a perverse house of erotic
display, is described by the narrator as a lumber
room of femininity, this rag-and-bone shop of the
heart (Carter 1984). The line borrowed from W. B.
Yeatss poem The Circus Animals Desertion
illustrates a good deal of Carters method: she
transforms the phrase rag-and-bone shop of the
heart a locution literally about a collection of
recycled bits, and in Yeatss usage about his wornout fund of poetic power into a phrase about
women whom male society has used, and used up,
in pursuit of its romantic ideals in support of its
presumed creative authority. She refigures, moreover, the poem of which the line is a part. Nights at
the Circus treats as a serious philosophical question
the premise of Yeatss poem: what happens when
the objects of a collection burst the bounds of the
idea that controls them? What happens when
the circus animals refuse to be bound to the imaginative work of the circus ring, break their chains,
and desert the show? What happens to gender
relations when women break the bounds of their
marriages, prisons, and whorehouses, and tell their
own life stories? What happens when the narrative
of national progress that of the American circus
proprietor Colonel Kearney, who is determined to
drive elephants across Siberia in a patriotic echo of
Hannibals feats and an enactment of the spread of
White History suffers disruption by other
political, cultural, and temporal orders?
While Nights at the Circus is perhaps the
most sustained narrative exhibition posing these
questions, the stories in The Bloody Chamber also
CARTER, ANGELA
work toward these ends, collecting old stories and

re-presenting them by selecting and rearranging
elements to pose new possibilities. In her introduction to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, Carter
faulted nineteenth-century collectors of fairy tales
for their excision of references to sexual and
excremental functions, the toning down of sexual
situations and the reluctance to include indelicate material that is, dirty jokes [which] helped
to denaturize the fairy tale and, indeed, helped to
denaturize its vision of everyday life (1990). One
way of viewing the fractured fairy tales that make
up The Bloody Chamber is as an effort to renaturalize a vision of everyday life that moves beyond
constraining myths of gender or capitalism and
to restore more flexible and accessible forms of
accessing everyday life. Carter argues that The
fairy tale, as narrative, has far less in common with
the modern bourgeois forms of the novel and the
feature film than it does with contemporary demotic forms (1990), and it is not surprising that
her later writing career should have preferred
demotic forms stories, childrens books, screenplays, radio and stage plays to the bourgeois form
of the novel that dominated her early career.
These forms grotesque and carnivalesque displays and exhibitions of cultural materials, designed
precisely to unmake the authority of established
narrative exhibitions are, finally, principled, rich,
and wide-ranging but also risk appearing undisciplined and sometimes overwrought. Ultimately,
where some of Carters contemporaries and friends
Julian Barnes or Salman Rushdie offered playful
revisions of stories and collections of their own
(e.g., Barness ark stories in A History of the World in
10 12 Chapters), Carters work is marked by an
unapologetic revel in the full messiness of the
rag-and-bone shop of Western narrative traditions,
where fiction can do more than we think it can, and
anything can be a novel.
SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Feminist
Carter, A. (1966). Shadow Dance. London: Heinemann.
(Published in US as Honeybuzzard.)
Carter, A. (1967). The Magic Toyshop. London:
Heinemann.
61
Carter, A. (1968). Several Perceptions. London:

Heinemann.
Carter, A. (1969). Heroes and Villains. London:
Heinemann.
Carter, A. (1971). Love. London: Hart-Davis.
Carter, A. (1972). The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman. London: Hart-Davis.
Carter, A. (1974). Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces.
London: Quartet.
Carter, A. (1977). The Passion of New Eve. London:
Gollancz.
Carter, A. (1979a). The Bloody Chamber and Other
Stories. London: Gollancz.
Carter, A. (1979b). The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in
Cultural History. London: Virago.
Carter, A. (1982). Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings.
London: Virago.
Carter,A.(1984).NightsattheCircus.NewYork:Penguin.
Carter, A. (1985a). Black Venus. London: Chatto and
Windus. (Published in US as Saints and Strangers.)
Carter, A. (1985b). Interview with John Haffenden
[1984]. In J. Haffenden (ed.), Novelists in Interview.
New York: Methuen, pp. 7696.
Carter, A. (1990). Introduction. In The Virago Book of
Fairy Tales London: Virago.
Carter, A. (1991). Wise Children London: Chatto and
Windus.
Carter, A. (1992). Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings.
Carter, A. (1993). American Ghosts and Old World
Wonders London: Chatto and Windus.
Carter, A. (1995). Burning Your Boats: The Collected
Short Stories London: Chatto and Windus.
Carter, A. (1996). The Curious Room: Collected
Dramatic Works London: Chatto and Windus.
Carter, A. (1997a). Envoi: Bloomsday [1982]. In Carter
(1997c), pp. 53641.
Carter, A. (1997b). Introduction to Expletives Deleted
[1992]. In Carter (1997c), pp. 6048.
Carter, A. (1997c). Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings
[196492] (ed. J. Uglow). London: Chattoand Windus.
Day, A. (1998). Angela Carter: The Rational Glass
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gamble, S. (1997). Angela Carter: Writing from the Front
Line Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Jordan, N.(dir.) (1984). The Company of Wolves. ITC
Entertainment/Palace Production.
Lee, A. (1997). Angela Carter. New York: Twayne.
Munford, R. (ed.) (2006). Re-Visiting Angela Carter:
Texts, Contexts, Intertexts New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Pitchford, N. (2002). Tactical Readings: Feminist
Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and
Angela Carter Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press.
62
CARY, JOYCE
Sage, L. (1994). Angela Carter. Plymouth: Northcote

House.
Tucker, L. (ed.) (1998). Critical Essays on Angela Carter.
New York: G. K. Hall.
Cary, Joyce
JOHN EUSTACE
Joyce Cary (Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary) was born to

Anglo-Irish parents in Derry on December 7,
1888. Though his family moved to London shortly after his birth, Cary maintained an intimate
connection to Ireland for much of his life, and a
particular connection to Inishowen, where the
Carys had lived as members of the Protestant
Ascendancy from the early seventeenth century
until the Irish Land Act of 1882 led to economic
hardship. Arguably, Carys sense of himself as an
Anglo-Irishman attached to both yet belonging
fully to neither culture contributed to his ability
to identify and empathize with different subject
positions, a characteristic that marks his early
fiction set in Africa as well as his more mature,
multivoiced trilogies. He studied painting in Paris
and Edinburgh during the first decade of the
twentieth century, but eventually resigned himself
to reading law at Oxford. His results were less than
exemplary as his determination to be a professional writer interfered with his studies. After a
stint with the Red Cross in Montenegro and a
failed attempt to secure employment in Ireland,
he enlisted in Nigerian political service as an
assistant district officer. He occupied various
positions in West Africa from 1914 until early
1920, before returning to Oxford to establish
himself as a writer. Aissa Saved, published in
1932, was the first of the 15 novels that followed
until his death in 1957. Two more novels, The
Captive and the Free (1959) and Cock Jarvis
(1974), were published posthumously.
Carys early writing career was dedicated to the
subject of West Africa, informed by his experiences in the Nigerian political service with its
Lugardian imperative of indirect rule. After
Aissa Saved, he published An American Visitor
(1933), The African Witch (1936), and Mister
Johnson (1939). His African fiction, while problematic on some levels, particularly in its oversimplified representations of Africans, is marked
by a characteristic ambivalence to the imperial

project as a whole. Mister Johnson which was
eventually adapted into a film by Bruce Beresford
is particularly successful in this regard, though
Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe felt the need
to respond to its oversimplifications of African
culture by writing his landmark novel, Things Fall
Apart (1959). Informed by his childhood experiences in Ireland, Carys novels Castle Corner
(1938), based on Castle Cary in Inishowen, and
A House of Children (1941b), which won the James
Tait Black Memorial Prize, signaled a shift to the
seemingly less problematic setting of Europe, and
specifically to England in Charlie Is My Darling
(1940). His growing popularity as a writer accompanied the shift.
With the exceptions of The Moonlight (1946)
and A Fearful Joy (1949), Carys remaining novels,
and most significant achievements, make up two
trilogies that explore philosophical and political
issues. In a structure that belies the complexity of
his narrative and thematic vision, each novel in
each trilogy is dedicated to one of three main
characters representing a philosophical or political principle. The first trilogy consisting of
Herself Surprised (1941a), To Be a Pilgrim
(1942), and The Horses Mouth (1944) places
Sara Monday (Herself) in a dialectical love triangle
with conservative Thomas Wilcher (Pilgrim), and
the simultaneously creative and destructive artist,
Gulley Jimson (Horse). It explores through a
dialogical narrative the relationships between
freedom, preservation, and destruction. The second and much darker trilogy consisting of
Prisoner of Grace (1952), Except the Lord
(1953), and Not Honour More (1955) places
Nina Woodville (Prisoner) in a love triangle with
left-wing politico Chester Nimmo (Except) and
the almost fascistically conservative Jimmy Latter
(Honour). Through its dialogical narrative, it
explores the political and moral implications of
all relationships, and, more precisely, the potential human cost of conflicts between the radical
and the reactionary in contemporary England.
Though on many levels the second trilogy is
superior to the first as a cohesive unit, it has not
garnered as much popular or critical attention,
perhaps because it lacks the life-affirming humor
and optimism of its precursor. The Horses Mouth
remains Carys most popular and successful work,
aided in part by Alec Guinnesss very successful
CENSORSHIP AND THE NOVEL
adaptation for the 1958 film directed by Ronald

Neame.
As Alan Bishop noted in the biography published during the centenary year of Carys birth,
critical reception of the authors work has always
been mixed, partly because he does not fit easily
into any literary school. He has not received the
critical attention that some of his contemporaries
have, despite his success and his influences on
prominent writers who followed him. And what
criticalattentionhe does receive continuestowane.
His African fiction receives the majority of the
continued critical output, much, however, following on the heels of the dismissive but highly influential treatment of it as racial romance in Abdul
JanMohameds Manichean Aesthetics (1983).
SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Irish Fiction
(BIF); West African Fiction (WF)

Bishop, A. G. (1988). Gentleman Rider: A Life of Joyce
Cary. London: Michael Joseph.
Cary, J. (1932). Aissa Saved. London: Ernest Benn.
Cary, J. (1933). An American Visitor. London: Ernest
Benn.
Cary, J. (1936). The African Witch. London: Gollancz.
Cary, J. (1938). Castle Corner. London: Gollancz.
Cary, J. (1939). Mister Johnson. London: Gollancz.
Cary, J. (1940). Charlie Is My Darling. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1941a). Herself Surprised. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1941b). A House of Children. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1942). To be a Pilgrim. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1944). The Horses Mouth. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1946). The Moonlight. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1949). A Fearful Joy. London: Michael Joseph.
Cary, J. (1952). Prisoner of Grace. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1953). Except the Lord. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1955). Not Honour More. London: Michael
Joseph.
Cary, J. (1959). The Captive and the Free. London:
Michael Joseph.
Cary, J. (1974). Cock Jarvis: An Unfinished Novel (ed.
A. G. Bishop). London: Michael Joseph.
63
Echeruo, M. (1979). Joyce Cary and the Dimensions of

Order. London: Macmillan.
JanMohamed, A. (1983). Manichean Aesthetics: The
Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Neame, R.(dir.) (1958). The Horses Mouth (screenplay
by A. Guinness). Knightsbridge Films.
Censorship and the Novel

ADAM PARKES
All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle

of invisible censors, Virginia Woolf confided to
her diary in August 1939 (1984, 229). Written on
the eve of World War II, these words summon up
an entire culture of censorship that shaped the
context in which modern British novelists worked
in the first half of the twentieth century. After the
end of World War II in 1945, Britain saw widespread social and political changes, including the
founding of the welfare state, the break-up of the
empire, mass immigration from former colonies,
and a more liberal moral climate, which led to the
relaxation of censorship laws. One significant
literary result of these postwar developments was
the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959, followed by the long-awaited publication of D. H.
Lawrences novel Lady Chatterleys Lover after the
celebrated trial of 1960 (preceded by a similar
verdict in the US in 1959). Before these landmark
events, however, novelists such as Lawrence,
Joyce, and Woolf herself had labored under the
threat of censorship not only by public officials
but by editors, publishers, and printers who
feared inciting government action or harbored
their own moral or political objections to what
they considered offensive or obscene literature.
Censorship was always in the air.
As well-known legal events make clear, however, the forces of censorship surrounding the modern novelist were often far from invisible. Before
Lady Chatterley went to trial, British courtrooms
hosted numerous obscenity cases including those
of Lawrences earlier novel, The Rainbow, in 1915,
and Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness in
1928, while Joyces Ulysses was the subject of
famous court cases in the United States in 1921
(when it was banned) and 1933 (when the ban was
lifted). The British censors had numerous
legal means at their disposal. Novels could be
64
prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of

1857, stopped in the post under the 1908 Post
Office Act, or intercepted by customs officials on
the look-out for illicit publications from abroad.
In 1910, moreover, Britain had signed an International Agreement for the Suppression of
Obscene Publications (1910), aimed at the international trade in indecent materials. The role
played by the customs service was graphically
illustrated in 1923 when 499 copies of Ulysses
were burned at Folkestone. But literary censorship was hardly confined to a few dramatic
incidents. In 1929, British Home Secretary Sir
William Joynson-Hicks boasted that the last six
years had seen 73 prosecutions in connection with
the importation or sale of allegedly indecent
literature. And the grip of literary censorship
in the English-speaking world was tightened by
similar levels of activity across the Atlantic, where
the New York postal authorities suppressed the
serial version of Ulysses three times before the
book went to court in 1921.
What were censors, visible or invisible, afraid
of? Sex, first of all or, more precisely, representations of sexual acts. Sexuality, too, insofar as this
meant frank, troubling, or unusual representations of modern sexual identities and relations,
including homosexuality and lesbianism (the central subject of the Hall trial). To put it another
way, censors were worried about obscenity, defined by Lawrence (1959) as that which belongs
off-stage, and pornography. In the trials of Ulysses
and Lady Chatterley, indecency was central: when,
in 1934, US Attorney Martin Conboy appealed
Judge M. Woolseys 1933 decision permitting the
importation of Ulysses, he spent two days in court
reading aloud passages that he deemed obscene,
including substantial portions of Molly Blooms
celebrated monologue in Penelope.
Sexual obscenity, however, wasnt always the
primary target of official censorship in the modern period. Political sedition (a traditional concern of governments) was a common preoccupation, especially during the two World Wars, as
illustrated in the Defence of the Realm Act of
1914, which was used to suppress writings that
deviated from the official views of the wartime
British government. Indeed, during the first war,
British postal authorities stopped searching for
indecent materials partly in response to the sheer
pressure of work but also because the war had
virtually ended the international trade in such

wares. But even as the search for indecency recommenced after the wars end, sedition would
continue to attract official attention throughout
the 1920s, as recently opened archives make plain.
With the growing threat of class warfare in the
wake of the Russian Revolution (1917), a threat
brought to life by the General Strike (1926), and in
the face of mounting resistance to British rule in
Ireland and India, the authorities responded by
closely monitoring so-called seditious foreign
publications, especially those that linked the
struggle for Indian independence with class struggle. According to a secret Home Office file, the
publications of the Indian Communist Party were
of particular concern, while a similar problem in
Ireland was also noted. Home Office documents
at the National Archives in London include one
file of 74 items referring to a total of 9,708 copies
of books and pamphlets in various languages,
which were stopped in the post from October
1922 to January 1923. Another file, dated October
16, 1922, contains an alphabetized list of 573
items seized under existing warrants against revolutionary publications from numerous countries in Europe and beyond.
The modern censors other major preoccupation was blasphemy, which seems to point away
from the social and political concerns of sex and
sedition but actually leads back to them. Echoing
ancient biblical prohibitions, anxieties about blasphemy reflect the origins of the modern British
state in the religious and political conflicts of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; as far as the
censorship of modern literature is concerned,
however, it took specific institutional forms, incarnated in legislation governing the theater. The
Licensing Act 1737 (amended in the Theatres Act
1843) required all plays to be licensed by the
Office of the Lord Chamberlain before they were
performed. Of the 19,304 plays submitted for
censorship between 1852 and 1912, only 103 were
refused a license (Findlater 1967), but that small
percentage contained some famous names
including that of Oscar Wilde, whose play Salome
was banned in 1892 because it represented biblical
characters. Intriguingly, the Salome case suggests
that blasphemy was inseparable from other moral
and political issues. What made Wildes play seem
especially offensive to official eyes was its imbrication of religious themes with transgressive
sexual material, particularly incest, and dubious

foreign influences. Thus the Examiner of Plays,
Edward Pigott, commented, The piece is written
in French half Biblical, half pornographic by
Oscar Wilde himself: Imagine the average British
publics reception of it (Stephens 112). Here
Pigott articulates a sexually charged xenophobia
that reared its head once again in 1914, in a libel
suit against Wildes lover, Lord Alfred Douglas,
and in 1918, when the actress Maud Allan sued
Noel Pemberton Billing, MP, for attacking her
revival of Wildes play as perverted. For Billing,
staging an immoral play by an immoral author
meant assaulting the British state when its very
survival was at stake. Thus wartime morality was
used to justify sexual persecution and literary
censorship.
This complex of social, political, and religious
forces converged on the two most important
modern British novelists to suffer the direct consequences of censorship: D. H. Lawrence and
James Joyce. As an Irish Catholic whose works
frequently linked sexual themes with politics and
religion, Joyce attracted the suspicion of censors
throughout his career, and not only in England:
Irish censorship laws were even stricter, especially
after the passage of the 1929 Censorship of Publications Bill, and the major legal actions brought
against Joyces works occurred in the US. While
Joyces inability to find a publisher for Ulysses
meant that all but a few early episodes remained
unpublished in Britain until 1936, his entire
career had been dogged by moral and political
censorship, from early skirmishes with academic
officialdom in Dublin to the long struggle to see
his early collection of stories, Dubliners, into
print. Grant Richards, who eventually published
Dubliners in London in 1914, refused it in 1906 on
the grounds of indecency, blasphemy, and antiBritish sentiments; the Dublin publisher Maunsel
& Co. turned it down in 1912 because it seemed
anti-Irish. Joyce, however, developed ever more
creative ways of responding to censorship. Critics
have read both Stephen Dedaluss defense of art in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and
the famous schema for Ulysses, which emphasizes
the novels complexity, as Joycean strategies of
self-defense against official censorship (Marshik
2006; Vanderham 1998). Ulysses itself resists
censorship via formal and stylistic experimentation, as in the Cyclops episode, which trans-
65
forms Joyces earlier exclamation against a oneeyed printer who objected to Dubliners into the
basis of stylistic parody: Joyce counterpoints an
anonymous, one-eyed, first-person narrator to a
third-person voice characterized by hyperbole,
long-windedness, and other forms of stylistic
cyclopism. Indeed much of the second half of
Ulysses seems to have been written with censorship in mind. In Circe, an episode set in a
brothel and featuring a trial in which the hero,
Leopold Bloom, is accused of various sexual
crimes, Joyce responds to the ongoing censorship
of the novel by opening up the text to the full
range of modern eroticism or, to put it another
way, the unconscious. And when Joyce uses a
British soldier named Private Carr as a mouthpiece for obscenity, he combines his assault on
moral and religious censorship with political
satire. Punching Stephens lights out in drunken
fisticuffs, Joyces artist of the obscene (Kenner
127) dramatizes the obscene violence of British
imperialism in Ireland.
Lawrences battles with censorship had also
begun early. Sons and Lovers (1913) was banned
from public libraries in England and The Rainbow
was banned at an obscenity trial in 1915. The
Rainbow ban made it virtually impossible for
Lawrence to publish in Britain until the end of
the war; Lady Chatterleys Lover, published in Italy
in 1928, remained contraband for another 32
years. Lawrence, who regarded Joyces Penelope
episode as pornographic, was considered guilty of
a combination of moral and political offenses. His
novels, with their prominent sexual content,
seemed obscene: in 1915, the authorities were
particularly concerned with a lesbian episode in
The Rainbow, while Lady Chatterleys Lover featured numerous sexual encounters. Lawrences
representation of sex, like Joyces, also seemed
blasphemous and, in the context of World War I,
unpatriotic. Ursula Brangwen, the young heroine
of The Rainbow, explicitly rejects the values of
democracy and imperialism for which the war was
supposedly fought, and tells her soldier-lover,
Anton Skrebensky, that she hates soldiers.
Ursulas and Antons violently charged relationship ends with a moonlit sex scene in which she
annihilates his soul; the novel itself concludes
with a symbolic vision of a rainbow promising
a mystical religion of sexual regeneration at
odds with the purposive ideologies of militarism,
66
imperialism, and capitalism that official censorship was meant to protect. Rather than retreating
from the forces of censorship, Lawrence continued to attack its central premises, writing not only
novels about sex but such essays as Pornography
Propos of Lady Chatterleys
and Obscenity and A
Lover (both written in 1929), which attacked
censorship while promoting his own ideas about
sexual regeneration. Like Joyce, Lawrence engaged in formal experimentation to subvert censorship, exploiting his own polemical tendencies
(for which Joyce and other modernists would
censure him) to open up his novels to vatic
outbursts that violate moral and aesthetic expectations together. Thus Lady Chatterley ends
with a prophetic letter by the gamekeeper,
Mellors, declaring that he and Connie have
recreated reality through sex.
In their different ways, then, Joyce and Lawrence made censorship a crucial theme in the
modern novel. The cases of these two novelists
have also raised important practical and theoretical questions about the social function of literature, precisely because they highlight debates
about what sort of effects literature might have,
how it produces them, and on whom. Judges,
lawyers, editors, publishers, and critics involved
in censorship cases often debated the relation
between art and obscenity, asking, for example,
whether artistic merit might be granted to a work
as a whole if some of its parts were obscene. Thus,
in the context of censorship, a question frequently
posed by literary modernism what is the status
of the part or fragment? could become a matter
of social contestation. Censorship also put pressure on questions of authorial intention and
artistic purpose. Sir Chartres Biron, the judge
who presided over the Well of Loneliness trial in
1928, declared authorial intention immaterial to
the case an uncanny anticipation of the New
Critical dogma that an authors intentions were
irrelevant to the meaning (or merit) of a literary
work. Ironically, it was at the end of the 1950s,
when New Criticism was at the peak of its influence in the Anglo-American academy, that the
British and American bans on Lady Chatterley
were lifted partly in deference to authorial intention: in 1959, US Judge Frederick Bryan argued
that in this case, as in that of Ulysses, the authors
sincerity and honesty of purpose were essential
to the literary and intellectual merit of the work
(Lawrence 1959, 126). By a fine irony, modernism

was now sanctioned partly on the grounds that it
might contribute to the moral improvement of
society.
Most crucially of all, major censorship cases
often revolved around questions of audience. The
Hicklin ruling of 1868, which guided subsequent
court cases in Britain and America, defined
obscenity as the tendency to deprave and corrupt
those whose minds are open to such immoral
influences and into whose hands a publication of
this sort may fall (Parkes 4). What this meant, for
British and US judges in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, was that the courts had
to consider the young reader. The editors of the
Little Review, the New York magazine that serialized the early episodes of Ulysses, landed in court
on just these grounds: the case began when a
lawyer complained that his minor daughter had
received an unsolicited copy of the installment
containing part of Nausicaa, in which a young
woman exhibits her underclothes while the hero,
Bloom, masturbates. Morris Ernst, the lawyer
who defended Ulysses in court in 1933, tried to
redefine the reader in question as the average or
normal man (Vanderham 97), an argument
that Judge Woolsey found persuasive. But, in the
age of growing democracy and freedom from
traditional social constraints, the question of who
counted as normal readers became increasingly
uncertain. When the chief prosecutor asked at the
1960 trial of Lady Chatterley, Is it a book that you
would . . . wish your wife or your servants to
read? (Rolph 17), he unwittingly exposed the
social and political biases of received legal opinion. The courts decision to allow Lawrences
novel into the public domain suggested, among
other things, that previous definitions of the
audience for modern literature had considered
only a part of a much larger socio-political whole.
Was literature for men, or for women? Was it for
the intellectuals, or the masses?
As recent scholarship suggests, the story of
censorship and the novel in modern Britain hardly begins or ends with Joyce and Lawrence. Indeed, these authors have become renewed objects
of suspicion, especially Lawrence, famously denounced by the feminist critic Kate Millett (1970)
as a purveyor of violent misogyny (an accusation
from which Lawrences reputation still hasnt
fully recovered). While recent studies have
deepened our understanding of particular obscenity trials involving Joyce and Lawrence
(Parkes 1996; Vanderham 1998), scholars have
also broadened the scope of inquiry, by examining
a wider range of authors, from the aesthetes and
decadents of the nineteenth century to the New
Critics of the twentieth, and by considering forms
of social and cultural censorship not directly
institutionalized in obscenity law: the circles of
censorship that Woolf called invisible. In my book
(Parkes 1996), I argue that authors from Wilde to
Woolf not only provoked official censorship but
also participated in debates about modern forms
of sexuality and gender, sometimes challenging
and rewriting received scripts for the gendered
and sexualized aspects of British selfhood. Relating censorship to social purity movements and
prostitution debates, Celia Marshik (30) similarly
emphasizes how modernism was decisively
shaped by a censorship dialectic formed by
ongoing negotiations between . . . writer[s] and
resistant audiences. For Allison Pease (83), who
sees modernism as the product of bourgeois
Enlightenment ideology, modern writers made
obscenity safe for the middle classes, and so
defused its subversive potential, by subjecting
pornographic elements to the aesthetic control
of high modernist form. While these accounts
differ in their assessment of modernisms social
and political subversiveness, they all resist or
complicate the received liberal view of the battle
against literary censorship simply as a struggle for
freedom of expression (see, for example, Ernst &
Schwartz 1964; De Grazia 1992). Instead, these
studies consider how modern authors engaged in
sometimes damaging but often fruitful dialogue
with censorship in its different forms, visible and
invisible. Future scholarship is likely to consider
the persistence of traditional religious imperatives, especially when combined with new geopolitical developments, as exemplified by the now
expired Islamic fatwa against Salman Rushdie for
publishing The Satanic Verses (1988). The theoretical dimensions of censorship and obscenity
are likely to receive further attention, as well.
Future studies remain to be written, however, on
the means by which diverse forms of censorship,
legally institutionalized and socially inscribed, are
manifested and resisted in the fiction of the
modern period, which will reveal new information about less well-known authors targeted by
67
official censors, such as the revolutionary feminist

author Naomi Mitchison (whom the authorities
considered prosecuting in June 1935), and which
may also reexamine the ways in which writers like
Jean Rhys, committed to telling the other side of
the story, rewrite inherited narratives about British culture and society.
SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF);
Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel
(BIF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF);
Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF);
Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF)

De Grazia, E. (1992). Girls Lean Back Everywhere:
The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius.
New York: Random House.
Ernst, M., & Schwartz, A. U. (1964). Censorship:
The Search for the Obscene. New York: Macmillan.
Findlater, R. (1967). Banned! A Review of Theatrical
Censorship in Britain. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
Franke, D. (2008). Modernist Heresies: British Literary
History, 18831924. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press.
Hunt, L. (ed.) (1993). The Invention of Pornography:
Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 15001800.
New York: Zone.
Joyce, J. (1990). Ulysses. New York: Vintage.
Joyce, J. (1996). Dubliners: Text and Criticism (ed. R.
Scholes & A. W. Litz). New York: Penguin.
Joyce, J. (2003). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(ed. S. Deane). New York: Penguin.
Kenner, H. (1987). Ulysses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
La Capra, D. (1982). Madame Bovary on Trial. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Ladenson, E. (2007). Dirt for Arts Sake: Books on Trial
from Madame Bovary to Lolita. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1959). Sex, Literature and Censorship
(ed. H. T. Moore). New York: Viking.
Lawrence, D. H. (1989). The Rainbow (ed. M. KinkeadWeekes). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1995). Sons and Lovers (ed. D.
Trotter). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (2002). Lady Chatterleys Lover and A
Propos of Lady Chatterleys Lover (ed. M. Squires).
Marsh, J. (1998). Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and
Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
68
CHICKLIT AND LADLIT
Marshik, C. (2006). British Modernism and Censorship.

Millett, K. (1970). Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Mullin, K. (2003). James Joyce, Sexuality and Social
Purity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parkes, A. (1996). Modernism and the Theater of
Censorship. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pease, A. (2000). Modernism, Mass Culture, and the
Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rolph, C. H. (ed.) (1990). The Trial of Lady Chatterley:
Regina v. Penguin Books Limited. London: Penguin.
Stephens, J. R. (1980). The Censorship of English Drama,
18241901. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vanderham, P. (1998). James Joyce and Censorship: The
Trials of Ulysses. New York: New York University
Press.
Woolf, V. (1984). The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5
(ed. A. O. Bell & A. McNeillie). San Diego: Harcourt
Brace.
Chicklit and Ladlit

IMELDA WHELEHAN
Chicklit and ladlit are two terms that have

become inextricably linked: it could be argued
that chicklit spawned the need for the term
ladlit, but if one looks at representative works
of fiction in each genre, one discovers important
critical distinctions. Chicklit is the descriptive
term used to categorize a highly successful romantic fiction genre that came into being in the
wake of the success of Helen Fieldings Bridget
Joness Diary (1996). Earlier references to chicklit
carried different connotations than those now
associated with the term: in particular Cris Mazza
and Jeffrey DeShells anthology Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction (1995) deployed the term ironically to indicate that the writings in their collection went beyond the normal themes associated
with feminist fiction. Interestingly, this perceived
tension between chicklit and feminism has endured, even while feminism haunts its subtexts
like a guilty conscience. Chick in the context of
chick lit is mobilized as playful and
postmodern; others would take it more literally,
and critics applied it to suggest that such fiction is
retrogressively feminine. Bridget Joness Diary
remains for most the touchstone of what chicklit
is, even though it could be argued to be the
exception to this classification the paradigm in

a genre that almost universally lacks the irony of
tone adopted in Bridget Joness Diary.
That the term chick (dismissed during the
height of second-wave feminism as derogatory
and infantilizing) can be once more applied to
women in the 1990s might be perceived to be a
symptom of the waning of feminisms political
and ideological power: it can certainly be attributed to the rise of the new lad as a media
phenomenon in the UK, reinforced by a celebration of a more adolescent masculinity in the
bestselling mens magazines of the decade, such
as Loaded. Chick is used to suggest that this
postfeminist generation of women are more at
ease with their femininity, less political about
their identity, yet successful in their careers and
able to pursue their ambitions in that arena. As a
readerly label it also announces a resurgence of
women as a targeted separate consumer group
just as chick flick has become attached to
particular film genres, such as romantic comedies
and costume dramas.
The genre not only courts women readers
exclusively, just as mass market romance always
has; more specifically, it was initially directed at
the twenty- to thirty-something market as an
antidote to the rather dated platitudes and whimsical plotting of many Harlequin romances. The
novels favor the first-person confessional narrative, or one whose point of view is channeled
through the central heroine; very often they incorporate varieties of first-person forms such as
diaries, emails, letters, texts, or a combination of
all of these (see Marian Keyes, This Charming
Man, 2008, as an example), using disclosures
about the heroines own frailties and anxieties to
draw in the readers sympathies and sense of
identification. The implied reader is privileged as
a confidante and the character most often comes
across as an emotionally honest woman who lives
in an urban environment (normally a capital city)
and usually works in a media, fashion, publicity,
or PR-related job. The thrust of the romance
narrative takes a contemporary twist: the women
are serial daters and are emotionally nourished by
a close group of friends (often including gay men,
but rarely lesbians, Adele Parkss Tell Me Something, 2008, being one exception). They perceive
themselves to be flawed and therefore unable to
compete on equal terms in the dating market and
CHICKLIT AND LADLIT
for this reason are usually on a prolonged but

rather lacklustre quest for self-improvement, dramatized by abortive diet regimes, neglected gym
membership, and fashion disasters, but also manifested in the quest to acquire cultural capital
to seem to be better informed about serious
matters and an addiction to self-help manuals.
The future Mr. Right is fascinated by the
heroines innate virtues and is able to see through
the falsehoods and caprices of ideal-type femininity and love her in spite of her perceived faults and
in spite of her attempts at self-improvement or
adherence to strict dating rules. Online reader
responses to chicklit suggest that its realism and
authenticity as well as its humor and lighthearted
approach to key relationship dilemmas are valued. Confidently post-feminist in its ideological
appeal, it suggests that feminist truisms have little
application for the new generation of women who
instead turn back to more traditional images of
femininity for affirmation and reject what they see
as have it all feminist brainwashing. If anything,
chicklit heroines are perceived to be burdened by
the choices feminism has won them; there is a
marked, if not always fully articulated, nostalgia
for some natural order of the sexes, which is
perceived as lost and at the heart of many a young
womans dating failures and fear of remaining
single.
Ladlit shares the confessional narrative tendency; but whereas chicklit speaks to a homosocial
readership, ladlit is consumed by both sexes, and
is more likely to gain literary or at least middlebrow status and critical recognition. Ladlit is
associated with texts rather than authors (with
perhaps one exception) and does not impact
upon the reputation or critical reception of the
author in the same way as chicklit; nor does it
condemn work to the genre fiction designation.
Nick Hornby, like Helen Fielding in the case of
chicklit, in some senses represents the purest form
of the ladlit genre, even though his first book Fever
Pitch (1992) is a memoir, and it is his work that is
most commonly used to summarize ladlits distinguishing narrative features. While confessional
writing is often associated with the feminine,
the use of the confessional in ladlit situates a
tension associated with the masculine voice in
this genre. The central characters inability to
express or explore their emotions is the key source
of the books dynamics and yet the first-person
69
narrative represents the protagonists journey

toward honest expression of his feelings and a
clearer understanding of what it is to be a man in
the contemporary world.
Whereas chicklit narratives display emotional
intelligence in abundance, ladlit is about navigating a path through the mystifying process of
growing out of adolescence and into adult
responsibility something it is implied women
do naturally and painlessly. Ladlit is typically
more introspective in this way, its humor sharper,
darker, and rather world-weary; unlike the chicklit heroine who is surrounded by her alternative
family of friends, the ladlit hero is essentially
alone. Hornbys second book, High Fidelity
(1995), features the protagonist dissecting his past
relationships after a recent break-up, and in doing
so recognizing the rituals that he, as a man,
observes and is equally entrapped by. Writers
such as Hornby and Tim Lott exploit both firstand second-person narrative address, as more
direct engagement with the reader; in this way
readers are also sometimes implicated in a mode
of discourse with which they may feel uncomfortable or alienated, but which changes as the narrative progresses. In the case of both Hornbys High
Fidelity and Lotts White City Blue (1999), for
instance, the central character is stuck in a kind of
belated adolescence and defined by his dysfunctional relationship with his closest friends with
whom he shares little of importance, tending to
channel social interaction through shared love of
music or football and through mutual insults. In
Lotts novel this nostalgia for boyhood commonality is emphasized by the friends obsession with a
particular adventure which they celebrate annually and which ritual will threaten Frankie Blues
relationship with Veronica. The climax is reached
when the protagonists begin to verbalize their
emotions and enter coupledom willingly.
Ladlit both explores masculinity and yet shows
it to be an elusive construction; central characters
demonstrate the shortcomings of traditional notions of the masculine, which seem inapplicable
to their own lives or experiences, and masculinity
comes to be defined as a lack a refusal to grow
up, accept responsibility or self-determination.
Yet ladlit protagonists often look to the lives and
attitudes of the previous generation of men and
reflect longingly on their fathers secure sense of
identity, which further emphasizes a disjunction
70
CHICKLIT AND LADLIT
between the two generations and a consciousness

of masculinity in crisis coming to the fore in
1990s popular culture and social criticism. While
feminism supposedly empowered women, increasing their educational and career choices, it
is suggested that men are correspondingly abandoned with the failure of the new man model of
the 1980s, which is discarded as soft and unerotic
only to be replaced provisionally by the new lad.
These characters are lost in the contemporary
world, not only because their male bonds dont
nourish them, but because they seem unable to
satisfy the needs of their lovers or themselves;
generally not successful breadwinners or careeroriented individuals, they lack the direction in
their lives that feminism supposedly provided to a
generation of women.
Ladlit is neither a celebration nor a critique of
traditional masculinity; the male characters confessional testimonies situate, disarmingly, the
flaws of classic masculine qualities of reticence
and emotional constipation by explaining frankly
their causes and the reasons for their perpetuation. The term lad, unlike chick, does suggest
a collective slang term for youngish men, but
specifically a particular type of young man who
celebrates and prolongs the period of carefree
irresponsibility where sports, cars, and the objectification of women comprise the lads worldview,
and where alcohol and drugs, sharing trivia and
lists, enable homosocial male gatherings to exist
without any homoerotic undertones. At a key
point the protagonists dissatisfaction with this
lifestyle will come to the surface and inevitably he
will, at least temporarily, break with his friends,
the better to assess his future. While the chicklit
heroine may lack confidence, she is most often
certain that her future will involve a monogamous
relationship; ladlit heroes have yet to be convinced of this. White City Blue ends with a wedding framed at one and the same time as an
existential leap of faith and a sell-out to a dominant romantic myth; what such texts share with
chicklit, ultimately, is a commitment to the existence of romantic love and monogamy, whether
or not these things last a lifetime.
Chicklit and ladlit are highly compatible with
marketing trends in modern publishing, which
seek a hook on which to hang a number of
thematically linked titles another example
would be the misery memoir (or mislit)
and readers are therefore encouraged to buy a new

title because it is like something that has gone
before. Such category-heavy marketing suits the
Amazon-buying generation, who on purchasing a
single title will find a host of recommendations
offered to them on the basis of shared generic
characteristics as well as on the basis of what other
readers have bought. In the case of chicklit, the
cover designs have become something of a cliche
with the predominance of pastel backgrounds,
drawings of make-up, handbags, and shoes, or
simple line drawings of young women on the
cover. Design solutions such as this allow identification with something emphatically not chicklit
except by association; so, for example, Jane
Austens oeuvre has been repackaged in a
chicklit format by one canny publisher.
While some chicklit authors are known for
regularly writing out of the mold Marian Keyess
inclusion of alcoholism, depression, and more
recently domestic violence and transvestism is a
notable example the category is not defunct but
contains increasing multitudes and subcategories,
such as mumlit or henlit, widowlit or tart noir.
Ladlit has not had the same reach, and perhaps
remains a distinctive characteristic of 1990s male
writing, temporarily linked to chicklit, since such
symmetry is irresistible; but without the concrete
genre associations the term has declined in usage.
Chicklit has come to define contemporary
romance narratives to a large extent, providing
the most robust challenge to the hegemony of
Harlequin mass market books for many decades,
and the brand migrates well to similar productions in film and television. Chicklit, like
the glossy magazines its heroines devour, can be
obsessively brand- and body-aware; it slips
more easily into the category of a product that
may be tied in to other products: sold taped to the
front of a glossy magazine or in conjunction with
chocolate bars and other consumables.
Readers and critics alike, spurred on by Helen
Fieldings appropriation of Pride and Prejudice,
see in chicklit a link with generations of women
who have written romances and who have striven
simultaneously for self-determination and romantic fulfillment. Ladlits history is shorter perhaps, though many identify links with male writing of the 1950s, specifically that of Kingsley Amis.
While Bridget Joness strident Englishness belies
the ability of the genre to travel across the Atlantic
C H I L D R E N S A N D Y O U N G A D U L T F I C T I O N
and beyond, ladlit retains a Britishness that requires another term in the US (dicklit, for
example). National variations aside, these narrative forms have shaped the popular fiction of a
generation. The vexed question of the value of
either chicklit or ladlit will continue, no doubt; in
the meantime one can note that their shared
concerns offer a reflection on the demographic
realities of the increasingly common singleton
navigating a self-conscious path through the confusing landscape of postmodern heterosexual
choices.
SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF)
Ferrebe, A. (2005). Masculinity in Male-Authored
Fiction, 19502000. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Ferris, S., & Young, M. (2005). Chick Lit: Popularizing
Fiction for Women. London: Routledge.
Fielding, H. (1996). Bridget Joness Diary. London:
Picador.
Frears, S.(dir.) (2000). High Fidelity. Dogstar Films.
Gayle, M. (1998). My Legendary Girlfriend. London:
Green, J. (2001). Babyville. London: Michael Joseph.
Head, D. (2005). Modern British Fiction, 19502000.
Hogan, P. J. (dir.) (2009). Confessions of a Shopaholic.
Touchstone Pictures.
Hornby, N. (1995). High Fidelity. London: Gollancz.
Keyes, M. (1995). Watermelon. Dublin: Poolbeg.
Keyes, M. (2008). This Charming Man. London:
Penguin.
Kidron, B. (dir.) (2004). Bridget Jones: The Edge of
Reason. Working Title Films.
Kinsella, S. (2000). Confessions of a Shopaholic. London:
Black Swan.
Knights, B. (ed.) (2008). Masculinities in Text and
Teaching. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lott, T. (1999). White City Blue. London: Penguin.
Maguire, S. (dir.) (2001). Bridget Joness Diary. Little
Bird.
Mazza, C., & DeShell, J. (eds.) (1995). Chick Lit:
Postfeminist Fiction. Tallahassee, FL: Fiction
Collective Two.
Moody, N. (ed.) (2004). Chicklit [special issue].
Diegesis, 8.
OFarrell, J. (2000). The Best a Man Can Get. New York:
Doubleday.
Parks, A. (2008). Tell Me Something. London: Michael
Joseph.
71
Parsons, T. (1999). Man and Boy. London:

HarperCollins.
Showalter, E. (2002). Ladlit. In Z. Leader (ed.), On
Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Smith, C. J. (2007). Cosmopolitan Culture and
Consumerism in Chick Lit. London: Routledge.
Smyczynska, K. (2007). The World according to Bridget
Jones. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Weitz, C., & Weitz, P. (dirs.) (2002). About a Boy.
Universal Pictures.
Whelehan, I. (2002). Helen Fieldings Bridget Joness
Diary: A Readers Guide. New York: Continuum.
Whelehan, I . (2005). The Feminist Bestseller.
Childrens and Young Adult

Fiction
RODERICK McGILLIS
Juliet Dusinberres study of early modernism and

its relation to nineteenth-century childrens literature, Alice to the Lighthouse (1987), argues that
the experimentation in Lewis Carrolls Alice
books informs a liberated literature for children
that in turn informs much of the experimental
sensibility we see in early modernist fiction by the
likes of Woolf and Joyce. Of course, nineteenthcentury childrens literature also paves the way for
much of what we see in twentieth-century writing
for the young. The work of Lewis Carroll, George
MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Mary Molesworth,
Oscar Wilde, and others paves the way for the new
century. Two early twentieth-century texts are
particularly formative for what follows: Kenneth
Grahames The Wind in the Willows (1908) and
E. Nesbits Five Children and It (1902), both of
which owe a debt to Carroll and MacDonald.
Grahames animal fantasy reinscribes themes of
nostalgia and home and national politics that
prepare the way for a range of novels from
A. A. Milnes Winnie-the-Pooh books, to Arthur
Ransomes Swallows and Amazons series, to
Brian Jacquess long-running Redwall series. On
the other hand, Nesbits reality-tinged fantasy
prepares for a whole range of books that look
less nostalgically on the world of childhood.
Nesbit offers preparation for time-slip fantasy by
the likes of Diane Wynne-Jones and C. S. Lewis,
the skewed historical romances of Joan Aiken, and
72
also a wry reflection that results much later in a

focus on the realities of childhood in what we now
term young adult fiction.
The history of British and Irish childrens
literature in the twentieth century is a baggy
monster. But the loosely connected adventures
of Ratty, Mole, Toad, and Badger in Grahames
book focus to a large extent on home, both the
home as a safe and reassuring place for the
individual and also the familiar surrounding of
the community. Home is both nature itself and
the civilized places we fashion from nature, the
communities we build. Grahames emphasis on
nature reverberates in the brilliant animal story
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson (1927).
Until recently, books for children have regularly
celebrated the virtues of fresh air and country life
whether they present the world of animals
or human beings. The work of David Almond
participates in a continuing tradition in English
literature of envisioning nature and humanity as
inextricably connected, so connected that the
world is imbued with spirit fantasy and reality
connect intimately.
The Wind in the Willows is about home, departure from home, and homecoming. As we see in
Badgers dwelling, the places in which we live have
deep connections to history, and history is a
recurring interest of childrens books. Jill Paton
Walshs Goldengrove (1972) and Unleaving (1976)
are two books that differ markedly from
Grahames animal fantasy, but which share an
interest in the past, and in place as situating
identity and stability. Indeed, the interest in place
the Riverbank, the Hundred Acre Wood, the
coast of Cornwall, Green Knowe, Alderley Edge,
Ely Cathedral and the fen land in the east of
England, Narnia, Hogwarts and its environs, and
so on derives from the romantic sense of the
genius loci, the local spirit that invests particular
places with a numinous power. We see this in
Wordsworths poetry and in the many Victorian
childrens books that take sustenance from this
poetry. This interest in the genius loci forms
something of a tradition in British childrens
books, finding its most powerful voice, perhaps,
in the work of Alan Garner. The most prominent
of Garners books is The Owl Service (1967). In
this book, three young teenagers share a strange
adventure in a Welsh valley; they find themselves
re-enacting actions first performed by characters
in the medieval Mabinogion. The connection

between persons and place is formative, testing,
and necessary for any sense of assurance. Homes
and specific places may be uncanny in the Freudian sense; they may be both comforting and
familiar and disturbing and strange. Even picture
books as benign as Beatrix Potters The Tale of
Peter Rabbit (1902), or Graham Oakleys Church
Mice series (19702000) have a doubleness that
situates place as both familiar and strange. Another picture book artist we might include here is
Raymond Briggs, whose Snowman (1978) and
Fungus the Bogeyman (1977) transform the familiar into the unfamiliar. Fungus also begins a
contemporary interest in and acceptance of scatological themes in childrens books that we see in
the Irish writer Roddy Doyle (The Giggler Treatment, 2000), and in the popular picture book, The
Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None
of His Business by Werner Holzwarth & Wolf
Erlbruch (2001). Another example is Roald Dahls
Revolting Rhymes (1982).
Special places serve to ground characters in
ways that are both reassuring and potentially
disorienting. An unusual, but compelling example is Jill Paton Walshs A Parcel of Patterns
(1984), set in seventeenth-century Derbyshire.
A village becomes quarantined after a parcel of
patterns brings the plague, effectively turning the
familiar home into a strange and dangerous place.
The place, in other words, may be comforting and
familiar, a home sweet home, or it may be uncanny and disturbing, a home that dislocates and
defamiliarizes, as in recent books by Neil Gaiman,
Coraline (2002) and Wolves in the Wall (2003).
We expect places in childrens books to be reassuring, and the first half and more of the
twentieth century delivers reassuring places. The
focus on the comforts of home is especially evident in books for younger children, as Milnes
Pooh books (1926 and 1928) make clear. Christopher Robin and his friends play freely in their
benign outdoors where even gorse bushes do not
inconveniently ruffle Winnie when he tumbles
out of a tree, and a flood serves as an occasion for
messing about in boats. And when the day is done,
Christopher has his bath and a story from his
father. The kind of safe environment an environment that may offer adventures but adventures that will deliver happy endings that we see
in Milnes books also forms the chronotope for
Arthur Ransomes Swallows and Amazons (1930)

and its sequels in which the Walker and the
Blackett children explore the Lake District and
have adventures without fear of losing the comforts of home. A working-class version of gentle
adventures and homely virtues is found in Eve
Garnetts stories about the Ruggles family, beginning with The Family from One End Street (1937).
We can also see the importance of home in
Tolkiens The Hobbit, published in the same year
as the first Ruggles book. The darkening sense of
home and the world is apparent in more recent
books such as J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter books
(19972007) and Philip Pullmans His Dark
Materials trilogy (19952001).
Early in the century, Rudyard Kipling began an
exploration of the homeland in his books that take
British history for their subject, Puck of Pooks Hill
(1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910). Thus
began a century of childrens books that investigate British history. The most prominent of the
writers of historical fiction for children are Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff, Leon Garfield, Jill
Paton Walsh, and Kevin Crossley-Holland. These
writers explore the history of Britain from the
time of Beowulf to the near past. Englands experiences of World War II find treatment in Jill
Paton Walshs The Dolphin Crossing (1967) and
Fireweed (1970), Robert Westalls The MachineGunners (1975), and Terry Pratchetts Johnny and
the Bomb (1996). Other writers such as William
Mayne (Earthfasts, 1966) and Jamila Gavin
(Coram Boy, 2000) also treat the past in novel
ways. Gavins Coram Boy reflects what we would
call in critical discourse a postcolonial sensibility.
Historical fiction sometimes connects with that
most elegant of British concerns fantasy. For
example, Alison Uttleys A Traveller in Time
(1939), Philippa Pearces Toms Midnight Garden
(1958), and Penelope Farmers Charlotte Sometimes (1969) use the notion of a time slip to
transport characters into the past. Other books
present the past pervading the present, for example, William Maynes Earthfasts and Penelope
Livelys The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973).
Treatments of history that did not happen, or
alternate history, are the concern of writers such
as Joan Aiken, Peter Dickinson, and Robin Jarvis.
And the origins of modern Britain in the stories of
King Arthur receive both realistic and fantastic
treatment in works such as Sutcliffs The Sword
73
and the Circle (1981) and its sequels, T. H. Whites

The Sword in the Stone (1938) and its sequels, and
Susan Coopers Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) and
its sequels.
Fantasy is one of the strongest aspects of British
childrens fiction. Nineteenth-century writes such
as John Ruskin, Frances Browne, Lewis Carroll,
and George MacDonald established patterns for
childrens fantasy that writers in the twentieth
century continue to expand. Ruskin and Browne
begin the recasting of the fairy tale as established
by Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, and rewritings and reinventions of the fairy tale surface in
such twentieth-century British writers as A. A.
Milne, Walter de la Mare, and Joan Aiken. Picture
books too engage in the revisioning of fairy tales;
two prime examples are Fiona Frenchs Snow
White in New York (1986) and Anthony Brownes
Hansel and Gretel (1981). The influence of the
traditional tales is evident in many childrens
writers from C. S. Lewis to Terry Pratchett.
Following the nineteenth-century practice of collecting traditional tales, represented famously by
Andrew Langs colored fairy books, the twentieth
century gave us many anthologies of folk and fairy
tales, both local to England and Ireland, and
worldwide. Anthologies of strictly local tales, for
example Virginia Havilands Favourite Fairy Tales
Told in Ireland (1961), or the several anthologies
prepared by Alan Garner (e.g., Lad of the Gad and
Fairy Tales of Gold, both 1980), participate in a
celebration of Ireland and England respectively.
Lewis Carroll arguably lies behind all fantasy
literature that comes after the two Alice books,
but he is associated most closely with nonsense
and adventures in alternate worlds or dream
worlds. His influence is evident on such writers
as Mervyn Peake, Spike Milligan, Michael Rosen,
and Jeanette Winterson. Fantasists such as Diana
Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett also evidence
Carrolls influence. C. S. Lewis echoes the E.
Nesbit story, The Aunt and Amabel (in The
Magic World, 1912), when he has Lucy enter
Narnia through a wardrobe, but the entering of
another world through a hole of some sort may
well find its source in the first Alice book (1865).
The influence of George MacDonald is arguably
as pervasive as that of Carroll. MacDonalds
influence is twofold: The Princess and the Goblin
(1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883) inaugurate a secondary world fantasy made famous by
74
Tolkien and his many followers; and his At the

Back of the North Wind (1871) inaugurates a kind
of fantasy tinged with realism that we see in E.
Nesbit and many fantasies that follow by the likes
of Jill Paton Walsh, Penelope Lively, Penelope
Farmer, Peter Dickinson, Susan Cooper, Melvin
Burgess, J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, and
Charles Butler. To take just one example, Melvin
Burgesss Lady: My Life as a Bitch (2001) deals
with adolescent struggles with family, school, peer
pressure, and sexuality, and it does so with both
humor and insistent materiality. Sandra Francy,
the books protagonist, finds her transformation
into a dog more interesting than she could have
imagined.
Burgess is also the author of Junk (1996),
arguably the most powerful example of young
adult fiction in Great Britain. Junk is about heroin
addiction among teenagers; it is Trainspotting
(1993) for younger readers. Young adult fiction
deals with the realities of being a young person in
contemporary times. William Goldings Lord of
the Flies (1954) is often mentioned as an early
British example, but many examples exist of
books that deal with such sensitive subjects as
rape, divorce, racism, drug addiction, delinquency, sexual preference, eating disorders, and so on.
The Irish writer Siobhan Parkinsons Breaking the
Wishbone (1999) tells the story of a group of
homeless teenagers on the streets of Dublin. Perhaps more well known are the novels of Aidan
Chambers. His books Dance on My Grave (1982)
and Postcards from No Mans Land (1999) deal
frankly with matters of sexual orientation. Another novel, Breaktime (1978) experiments with
the form of the novel in ways reminiscent of
Laurence Sterne. As young adult books have
developed, the stuff of everyday reality grows
darker, as a book such as Alan Gibbonss Caught
in the Crossfire (2003) demonstrates. This is a post
9/11 examination of race and racial targeting in
England; its depiction of racial tension between
Muslim and non-Muslim groups is tense and
tragic. In this book, home and the homeland are
no longer comfortable and safe. Another book
that treats the same subject is Richard
MacSweens Victory Street (2004).
The subject of race has become familiar in
childrens literature in these times of postcolonial
self-consciousness and multicultural self-congratulation. As the nineteenth century turned into the
twentieth, books by the likes of G. A. Henty and

Bessie Marchant dealt with the various regions of
the British Empire, but in 1901 Kipling published
Kim, a novel about India and the Russians and
English who maneuver for power in that country.
Four years later, Frances Hodgson Burnett published A Little Princess (an expansion of Sara
Crewe, 1888), in which the Indian servant Ram
Dass figures prominently. Much time would
elapse before Asia and other parts of imperial
Britains colonies or former colonies found their
way into childrens literature. In Britain, the experience of the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas are now available in books for young readers. Jamila Gavins trilogy chronicling the lives of
the Singh family over two generations and from
one continent to another The Wheel of Surya
(1992), The Eye of the Horse (1994), and The Track
of the Wind (1997) is a masterful depiction of the
effects of imperial expansion. The Caribbean diaspora is the subject of books such as Errol Lloyds
Many Rivers to Cross (1995) and Floella
Benjamins Coming to England (1995). These and
many more books about the West Indian experience in England are discussed in Karen SandsOConnors study, Soon Come Home to This
Island: West Indians in British Childrens Literature
(2007). Books dealing with the experiences of
various diasporic groups have complicated the
vision of home and homeland that seemed so cozy
in books by Grahame or Potter or Milne. As SandsOConnor notes, books about West Indians and
Britain are not about making a home in either the
West Indies or Britain, but rather they are about
the homecoming of an idea, the idea that Britain is
not alone in the world and cannot continue to act
as if, like Robinson Crusoe, it is (166).
SEE ALSO: Childrens and Young Adult Fiction
(WF); Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Fantasy, Science
Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical
Fiction (BIF)

Benjamin, F. (1995). Coming to England. London:
Pavilion.
Briggs, R. (1977). Fungus the Bogeyman. London:
Hamish Hamilton.
Briggs, R. (1978). The Snowman. New York: Random
House.
COE, JONATHAN
Browne, A. (1981). Hansel and Gretel. London: Julia

McRae.
Burgess, M. (1996). Junk. London: Anderson.
Burgess, M. (2001). Lady: My Life as a Bitch. London:
Anderson.
Burnett, F. H. (1905). A Little Princess. London:
Frederick Warne.
Chambers, A. (1978). Breaktime. London: Bodley Head.
Chambers, A. (1982). Dance on My Grave. London:
Bodley Head.
Chambers, A. (1999). Postcards from No Mans Land.
London: Bodley Head.
Cooper. S. (1965). Over Sea, Under Stone. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Dahl, R. (1982). Roald Dahls Revolting Rhymes. New
York: Knopf.
Doyle, R. (2000). The Giggler Treatment. New York:
Scholastic.
Dusinberre, J. (1987). Alice to the Lighthouse.
Farmer, P. (1969). Charlotte Sometimes. London:
Bodley Head.
French, F. (1986). Snow White in New York. Oxford:
Gaiman, N. (2002). Coraline. New York: HarperCollins.
Gaiman, N. (2003). Wolves in the Wall. New York:
HarperCollins.
Garner, A. (1967). The Owl Service. London: Collins.
Garner, A. (ed.) (1979). Fairy Tales of Gold. London:
HarperCollins.
Garner, A. (ed.) (1986). A Bag of Moonshine. London:
HarperCollins.
Garnett, E. (1937). The Family from One End Street.
London: Frederick Muller.
Gavin, J. (1992). The Wheel of Surya. London: Methuen.
Gavin, J. (1994). The Eye of the Horse. London: Methuen.
Gavin, J. (1997). The Track of the Wind. London:
Methuen.
Gavin, J. (2000). Coram Boy. London: Mammoth.
Gibbons, A. (2003). Caught in the Crossfire. London:
Dolphin.
Golding, W. (1954). The Lord of the Flies. London: Faber
and Faber.
Grahame, K. (1908). The Wind in the Willows. London:
Methuen.
Haviland, V. (1961). Favorite Fairy Tales Told in
Ireland. Boston: Little, Brown.
Holzwarth, W., & Erlbruch, W. (1994). The Story of the
Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business. St.
Albans: David Bennett.
Kipling, R. (1901). Kim. London: Macmillan.
Kipling, R. (1906). Puck of Pooks Hill. London:
Macmillan.
Kipling, R. (1910). Rewards and Fairies. London:
Macmillan.
75
Lively, P. (1973). The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. London:

Heinemann.
Lloyd, E. (1995). Many Rivers to Cross. London:
Methuen.
MacSween, R. (2004). Victory Street. London: Anderson.
Mayne, W. (1966). Earthfasts. London: Dutton.
Nesbit, E. (1902). Five Children and It. London: T.
Fisher Unwin.
Nesbit, E. (1912). The Magic World. London: Methuen.
Parkinson, S. (1999). Breaking the Wishbone. Dublin:
OBrien.
Pearce, P. (1958). Toms Midnight Garden. London:
Potter, B. (1902). The Tale of Peter Rabbit. London:
Frederick Warne.
Pratchett, T. (1996). Johnny and the Bomb. London:
Doubleday.
Ransome, A. (1930). Swallows and Amazons. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Sands-OConnor, K. (2007). Soon Come Home to This
Island: West Indians in British Childrens Literature.
New York: Routledge.
Sutcliff, R. (1981). The Sword and the Circle. London:
Bodley Head.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937). The Hobbit. London: Allen and
Unwin.
Uttley, A. (1939). A Traveller in Time. London: Faber
and Faber.
Walsh, J. P. (1967). The Dolphin Crossing. London:
Macmillan.
Walsh, J. P. (1969). Fireweed. London: Macmillan.
Walsh, J. P. (1972). Goldengrove. London: Macmillan.
Walsh, J. P. (1976). Unleaving. London: Macmillan.
Walsh, J. P. (1983). A Parcel of Patterns.
Harmondsworth: Puffin.
Westall, Robert. (1975). The Machine-Gunners.
London: Macmillan.
White, T. H. (1938). The Sword in the Stone. London:
Collins.
Williamson, H. (1927). Tarka the Otter. London:
Putnams.
Coe, Jonathan
PAMELA THURSCHWELL
At their most accomplished, Jonathan Coes

novels deftly combine popular sensibility and
avant garde panache, postmodern experimentation and nineteenth-century storytelling, ferocious
political rage with an apparent willingness to do
anything for a laugh. His books are intricately
plotted and have been labeled Dickensian, but owe
76
COE, JONATHAN
at least as much to the digressive brilliance of

eighteenth-century authors such as Henry Fielding
and Lawrence Sterne, who, like Coe, saw the
interconnections between the absurd and the poignant. Perhaps Coes greatest achievement to date
is to have revitalized the nineteenth century
condition of England novel for the twenty-first
century. Novels such as the marvelous What a
Carve Up! (1994b) hit post-Thatcherite England
where it hurt, charting the breakdown of the
postwar social democratic consensus in Britain
and its effect on individual lives. What a Carve
Up! is the story of one filthy-rich and ruthless
family, the Winshaws, who between them manipulate various aspects of 1990s Britain including
politics, banking, battery farming, the National
Health Service, the art world, the media, and the
arms trade. Their stories are told by hapless writer
Michael Owen who is engaged in writing an unauthorized biography of the Winshaws and whose
personal sufferings and defeats are inextricably
linked to the family. With its shifting time frame,
intertextual references, and generic leaps from
social realism to farce to horror, What a Carve
Up! was memorably described by Terry Eagleton
as one of the few pieces of genuinely political PostModern fiction around (12).
There is, however, another, more traditional
side to Coes writings, one that is steeped in
nostalgia for a lost childhood innocence, and
simpler, more sustaining versions of Englishness.
His representations of contemporary life look
back to an idealized pre-World War II version
of English society. Coe has called himself a
provincial novelist, and clearly has a deep attachment to the Midlands where he grew up. A
pervasive sense of loss of community hovers over
his work; Margaret Thatcher famously said
There is no such thing as society, and Coes
politically and emotionally isolated characters feel
the effects of that enforced loss.
Born in Birmingham in 1961, Coe attended
King Edwards School, which is the basis for the
boys school in The Rotters Club (2001). He went
on to Trinity College, Cambridge, and completed
a PhD on Henry Fielding at Warwick University.
He taught English at Warwick, but has also
worked as a musician and composer, and has
written two film biographies (of Humphrey
Bogart and James Stewart). An overview of Coes
works immediately shows that his literary influ-
ences are many and varied, ranging from Greek

mythology, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and European novelists, to modernism
and surrealism. (The final section of The Rotters
Club is written in the form of one long streamof-consciousness sentence in tribute to Molly
Blooms monologue at the end of Joyces Ulysses.)
Coe is undoubtedly a literary writer, yet his
passionate attachment to music and film comes
through in his work at least as loudly as his
exuberant borrowings from the British and European canon. His third novel, The Dwarves of Death
(1990), featured chapter epigraphs from the rock
band The Smiths and is structured in the form of a
popular song, including a hilarious musical middle-eight set piece in which the main character
spends most of one Sunday hopelessly waiting for
a London bus. What a Carve Up! and The House of
Sleep (1997) make extensive use of Coes arcane
knowledge of film and film genre, from Carry On
to Cocteau. Coes compulsive use of cinema in his
works goes far beyond any symptomatic postmodern breakdown between high and popular
culture. Rather, he uses film to stage provocative
arguments about what it means to write novels
that matter in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, suggesting that genre clash may be
the only appropriate way today to encompass the
chaos of modern life. In What a Carve Up! a young
documentary maker deftly takes apart the apparent project of the book, arguing that there is
nothing left for the political novelist to say: any
serious modern artist who wants to use narrative
ought to be working in film (1994b, 276).
Alongside his concern for the structures of
recent history Coe focuses on the clueless individual caught in historys web. His novels feature
unreliable protagonists and narrators who are
only half-aware of the historical or emotional
storm clouds gathering around them. In the final
section of The Rotters Club, for instance, Coe has
his adolescent hero Ben Trotter finally consummate his apparently hopeless love for the theatrical Cicely. The setting for their encounter is
election day, 1979 under a poster of Margaret
Thatcher, which hangs in Bens brothers bedroom. It is clear to the reader, but not to the
ecstatic Ben, that Bens love affair, like the country, is headed for troubled waters. Coe ceaselessly
returns to characters who find intimacy terrifying
or impossible: actually talking to someone means
COLONIAL FICTION
you cant predict how they will respond, whereas a

character such as What a Carve Up!s protagonist
Michael Owen, who obsessively rewatches the
same scene from the same old movie, and tries
to turn off his next door neighbor with his TV
remote control, has no such fears. From Coes
early novels An Accidental Woman (1987) and A
Touch of Love (1989), through his short story 9th
and 13th about a pianist who imagines an entire
relationship with a woman he meets briefly while
playing piano in a bar, to the awkward sleepobsessed misfits of The House of Sleep, Coes
characters only clumsily make contact with
others, or fantasize in disastrously mistaken ways
about the content of others minds and desires.
It is Coes surprising juxtapositions of these
themes the isolated, depressed, barely functioning individual in the face of larger political and
historical forces; the frantic modern mediations
of television, film, or music, as refracted through
complicated semi-Victorian plotlines; the spiraling comedy of the misplaced footnote or badly
written sex scene shading into the tragic unnecessary death or thwarted love that gives Coe his
distinctive brilliance. But the character of Coes
work has also shifted since his 2004 prize-winning
biography of B. S. Johnson, the British modernist
writer of the 1960s and 1970s who resembled Coe
in presenting a paradoxically common sense English version of experimental writing. Johnsons
creed, telling stories is telling lies, leads him, like
Coe, to stop mid-sentence to point out, in disgust,
the sheer unlikeliness of his fictional assertions
(Coe does this in A Touch of Love, 34). Coes most
recent novel, The Rain Before It Falls, a somber tale
of the passing down of family tragedy, was heavily
influenced by the mid-century novels of Rosamond Lehmann, suggesting different rhythms of
writing, a new focus on women, and the possibility of whole new directions for the future.
SEE ALSO: Johnson, B. S. (BIF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)

Coe. J. (1987). The Accidental Woman. London:
Duckworth.
Coe. J. (1989). A Touch of Love. London: Duckworth.
Coe. J. (1990). The Dwarves of Death. London: Fourth
Estate.
77
Coe. J. (1991). Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It.

London: Bloomsbury.
Coe. J. (1994a). James Stewart: Leading Man. London:
Bloomsbury.
Coe. J. (1994b). What a Carve Up! London: Viking.
(Published in US as The Winshaw Legacy.)
Coe. J. (1997). The House of Sleep. London: Viking.
Coe. J. (2001). The Rotters Club. London: Viking.
Coe. J. (2004a). The Closed Circle. London: Viking.
Coe. J. (2004b). Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S.
Johnson. London: Picador.
Coe. J. (2005). 9th and 13th. London: Penguin.
Coe. J. (2007). The Rain Before It Falls. London: Viking.
Coe. J. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. London:
Viking.
Connolly, T. (dir.) (1999). Five Seconds to Spare [film of
The Dwarves of Death]. Scala Wildgaze.
Eagleton, T. (1994). Theydunnit. London Review of
Books, p. 12 (Apr. 28).
Holgate, A. (2007). What a Turn-Up (August 19). At
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
arts_and_entertainment/books/article2265191.ece,
accessed Sept. 2, 2008.
Mengham, R. (2001). Fictions History. Leviathan, 1,
11013.
Thurschwell, P. (2006). Genre, Repetition and History in
Jonathan Coe. In P. Tew & R. Mengham (eds.), British
Fiction Today. London: Continuum, pp. 2839.
Colonial Fiction
RICHARD RUPPEL
Colonial fiction may be defined as fiction set in

what was once the colonial world, the world that
European powers colonized starting in the Age of
Discovery and ending in the mid twentieth century, when Europe divested itself of its colonies. In
this fiction, typically, white, male protagonists
leave Europe as explorers, adventurers, soldiers,
traders, administrators, or, occasionally, exiled
criminals to encounter a foreign world of exotic
jungles, deserts, illnesses, and, especially, peoples
and cultures. These fictions commonly represent
the colonial world in conventional terms, which
may or may not correspond to the colonial world
that can be recovered in letters, newspaper accounts, and other records available both in the
European home country and in the former colony
itself. These conventions were, and continue to be,
influential in shaping perceptions of the lands and
peoples of the former colonies.
78
COLONIAL FICTION
Great Britain began telling itself colonial stories

even before it became a colonial power.
Shakespeares The Tempest, written at the very
beginning of the seventeenth century, before
England had settled colonies in North America
or begun its conquest of India, can be read as a
colonial allegory. Prospero and his daughter,
Miranda, are shipwrecked on an island, where
Prospero frees one of its inhabitants, Ariel, who
agrees to become Prosperos servant. The other
native, Caliban, is less tractable. Although he is
taught English and is well treated, he repays
Prosperos kindness by attempting to rape Miranda, so Prospero keeps him enslaved by force.
Prosperos magic gives him the power to control
the island, just as superior technologies and weapons would give European countries control of
their colonial possessions. Ariel represents the
Westernized natives that appear in later narratives a more or less willing Friday figure who
accepts his servitude with little schooling. Prospero needs only to offer occasional threats to keep
Ariel in line, and he promises to free Ariel once
Prospero accomplishes his plans to regain his
authority back in Italy. Caliban, on the other
hand, represents the treacherous other who must
be subdued by force given his openly expressed
desire to rape a white woman. As in so many later
colonial stories, Prospero brings reason, morality,
and order to the island to his proto-colonial
outpost rewarding the subservient and punishing those who resist his authority.
The next important colonialist work, Oroonoko
(1688) by Aphra Behn, is also one of the earliest
English novels. Unlike the vast majority of colonial
fictions, the protagonist here is an African; and
though the narrator is English, several of the
English characters are introduced as villains. Despite these divergences from the general trends in
colonial fiction, Oroonoko never questions the
institution of slavery, and the two protagonists,
Oroonoko and Imoinda, are so exceptional in their
physical beauty, intelligence, and nobility, that
they cannot be seen as arguments against European imperialism. They cannot, in other words, be
seen as representative, non-European characters.
But Oroonoko does provide the earliest representation of the noble savage in the English novel.
The most influential work of colonial literature, Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719), was
published just as Britain was building its empire in
North America, the Indian subcontinent, and

elsewhere, but it touches upon no English colonial
possessions at all. Crusoe is captured and enslaved
in North Africa, settles in the Portuguese colony
of Brazil, and is shipwrecked on a deserted island
that he eventually claims as his own colonial
possession. Despite its lack of direct concern with
Britains colonies, however, Robinson Crusoe is
the seminal work of colonial fiction. It includes
nearly all of the features we have come to associate
with the genre.
After Crusoe saves Friday from his enemies
who, like Friday, are native to South America and
who are just about to kill and eat him Friday is
given and immediately accepts his status as
Crusoes servant. In what has become its most
famous scene, Friday prostrates himself before
Crusoe and places Crusoes foot on his head.
Crusoe gives him and Friday accepts the name
Friday not a name either of them, or contemporary readers, would have accepted had Friday
been a white man. Crusoe teaches Friday English,
though he never thinks of learning Fridays language, and Friday quickly embraces Christianity.
Friday is distinguished from his peers physically,
morally, and intellectually, and he serves Crusoe
loyally, cheerfully, and amusingly until he is killed
in a sequel novel, The Further Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe (1719). Friday is the original for
a long line of native sidekicks, from Rudyard
Kiplings Gunga Din, to Joseph Conrads Dain
Waris in Lord Jim.
Many other features of Robinson Crusoe became
conventions of colonial fiction. European moral
superiority and, especially, the absolute truth of the
Christianity Crusoe embraces over the course of the
novel remain unquestioned in the colonial works
that follow. When Crusoe escapes captivity early in
the novel and sails along the African coast, the
forbidding landscape and people are represented as
strange, even fantastic. Crusoe domesticates his
island, becomes its lord, and claims it absolutely
as his own practices that are repeated and remain
unquestioned in both the reality and fiction of
colonial conquest. Women have almost no role in
the novel Crusoes relationship with Friday is far
more compelling than his one romantic relationship with a woman. Indeed, the marginalization or
complete absence of women is a key feature of the
vast majority of colonial fiction, which is written by
men for an audience of men and boys.
COLONIAL FICTION
Britains conquest of India in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries fueled popular interest
in the Indian subcontinent. Sir Walter Scotts The
Surgeons Daughter (1827) includes Oriental
despots, a dashing English hero, and a young
Englishwoman who must be saved from being
enslaved by a lustful sultan. Philip Meadows
Taylors Confessions of a Thug (1839), a popular
sensation and a favorite of Queen Victoria, traces
the life of Ameer Ali, a member of the Thuggee
clan who waylays, robs, and kills travelers in
southern India.
The British Empire reached its height at the
end of the nineteenth century, and Rider Haggard wrote the most popular African fiction of
that period. King Solomons Mines (1885) concerns an Oriental despot, King Twala; a superior African servant of the English protagonists,
Umbopa, who gains the kingship of Kukuanaland after the evil King Twala is killed; and a
romance between a white protagonist, Captain
Good, and a beautiful African, Foulata. Like most
such interracial romances in colonial fiction, this
one is doomed Foulata dies in a struggle with
an evil African witch, Gagool. Haggards She
(1887) concerns another doomed biracial romance, this one between the protagonist Leo
Vincey and the African Ustane, a deadly African
landscape, and racist representations of Africans;
but Haggard here introduces a twist on the
Oriental despot: She is an immortal white
woman, Ayesha.
Rudyard Kiplings fiction was even more popular than Haggards. His Plain Tales from the Hills
(1888b), a collection of short stories published
when he was only 22, made him famous. Kiplings
colonial fiction focuses on the expatriate English
community in India its administrators, soldiers,
journalists, and adventurers and includes all the
colonialist conventions: fiercely loyal Indian servants, treacherous Westernized natives, deprecated half-castes, doomed biracial romances,
corrupt Indian rulers, antagonistic landscapes,
and an unshakable faith that the English were
Indias natural rulers. Although Kiplings fiction
is often read as thoroughly pro-imperial and
racist, his representations of Indian culture, especially in his best novel, Kim (1901), are comparatively nuanced and sympathetic.
Many of Kiplings stories, however, and the
hundreds of popular fictions like them, represent
79
the colonial world in the same stereotypical terms:

corrupt native rulers oppress their people, represented as downtrodden, long-suffering, and
trapped in a static culture. Characters of mixed
race, referred to derogatorily as half-castes and
nearly always the subject of ridicule, as well as
characters identified as Westernized natives, are
either mocked for their imperfect efforts to align
themselves with and imitate European culture or
are treated as sinister men whose outward
acceptance of Western language, culture, and
religion masks their treacherous allegiance to
their native culture. The many Friday figures of
colonial fiction represent the opposite of the
Westernized native; they are loyal and happily
subservient. In their most characteristic act, they
die in defense of their white master. Non-white
women are represented as alluring but taboo; love
affairs between white men and non-white women,
though not unusual, are almost never successful.
The nefarious tropical landscape is another trope
of this literature; jungles are poisonous and are
often inhabited by bushmen scarcely differentiated from the jungle itself.
The above tropes, combined with an underlying
confidence in white racial superiority, made colonial fiction a dependable promoter of Britains
imperial conquests. But there were always countertrends. Philip Meadows Taylor was married to
Mary Palmer, whose ancestry was both English and
Indian; and his representations of Indian life in his
novels are well informed and sympathetic. Kiplings
stories contain all the standard colonial tropes, yet
he could also represent India and Indians with great
warmth and, contrarily, English men and women as
strikingly cold.
Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (1902) is
paradoxical in this regard in that it both reproduces and undercuts conventional representations of the colonial world; while several critics
(beginning with the Nigerian novelist Chinua
Achebe) have dismissed it as a racist text, others
have deemed it the greatest work of anti-colonial
English fiction. Although Heart of Darkness
blandly mocks Westernized natives one is described as a dog in a parody of breeches another
as an overfed boy and sometimes represents
Africans as mere accessories of the forbidding
jungle, it also fundamentally undermines all colonial conquests, and its depiction of discarded,
dying African workers is one of the most potent
80
COLONIAL FICTION
anti-colonial scenes in English literature. The

murderous, rapacious Kurtz, the European at the
heart of the novella who rules his bit of the Congo
with extreme brutality, highlights the dubious
nature of the colonial aim of bringing light and
civilization to the dark corners of the world.
Conrads four Malay novels, Almayers Folly
(1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Lord Jim
(1900), and The Rescue (1920) also can be classified as colonial fictions that both promote and
undercut conventional representations of colonial situations. The most important of the four,
Lord Jim, is, like Heart of Darkness, an interrogation of the possibility that even the most wellintentioned, enlightened Englishmen have the
capacity or right to rule in a colonized world.
The protagonist, Jim, who becomes Tuan (or, in
English, Lord) Jim in the fictional Malay village
of Patusan, begins his rule successfully but, like
Kurtz, ultimately brings ruin to his community
and destroys himself.
The conventions of colonial literature persist in
popular novels and, especially, film. But the
counter-trend that treated these conventions with
growing skepticism is prevalent in some of the
most significant fiction of the twentieth century.
Two later modern novels, E. M. Forsters A Passage to India (1924) and George Orwells Burmese
Days (1934), anticipate the end of British rule on
the Indian subcontinent and feature British protagonists caught in a dysfunctional colonialist
web of corruption and racial bigotry. In A Passage
to India, the protagonist Cyril Fielding takes a job
in India as a school headmaster and befriends an
Indian doctor, Aziz, who is accused of assaulting
an Englishwoman, Adela Quested. By taking sides
with Aziz, Fielding finds himself at odds with the
expatriate English community. The novel debates
the possibility of successful friendships between
Indians and Britons, meanwhile debunking various entrenched colonialist tropes. Aziz, scorned
as a spoilt, Westernized native, is a better
surgeon than his English superior, Major Callendar; and the chief of police is convinced of
Azizs guilt because he takes it for granted that all
non-white males lust after white women. In reality, Aziz finds Adela unattractive; and the British
policeman, blinded by his sense of racial superiority, cannot fathom that standards of beauty
differ from one culture to another. Aziz is found
innocent, yet the novel, despite this positive res-
olution, ends on a note of skepticism regarding

the possibility of bridging the British/Indian social and political divide.
Burmese Days, a bleak satire on English rule in
Burma, is far less hopeful. The protagonist, John
Flory, a timber merchant, hates colonial rule in
Burma but does not have the courage to oppose it
openly or to leave the country. He befriends Dr.
Veraswami, who loves all things English and may
become the first Burmese native invited to join the
English Club in the fictional Burmese district of
Kyauktada. The novel mocks the notions of British racial superiority and the benefits of British
rule, and ends darkly, with Florys suicide.
By the last third of the twentieth century, the
colonial era during which European and other
dominant nations took administrative, financial,
military, and social control of countries in Africa,
Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands was
over, as former colonies gained their independence. But the effects of colonialism persist, and
many of those effects were anticipated by Conrads Nostromo (1904), the first important postcolonial novel. Set in the fictional Latin American
nation of Costaguana, Nostromo reveals how
former colonial powers dominate the economies
and politics of former colonies. As in Heart of
Darkness and Lord Jim, the Europeans in Costaguana, who dominate the local economy, believe
they are bringing order and progress. In fact, they
bring only slight material prosperity, do little to
improve the situation of the common people, and
are themselves morally corrupt. In the end, many
destroy themselves. Chinua Achebes Things Fall
Apart (1958), set in Nigeria in the late nineteenth
century and focused on the life of Okonkwo, a
powerful but flawed Igbo warrior, is the first
canonical novel in English to treat the colonial
encounter entirely from the point of view of a
colonized people. Igbo life is portrayed in all its
rich complexity, while the English are represented
as a corrosive power that destroys the balanced
tribal life of Okonkwos people.
Critics who analyze colonial literature (often
identified as working within colonial discourse
theory) have profoundly affected our understanding of colonial literature. By examining historical
records, critics have unearthed the distance between the literary representations of the colonial
encounter and its historical actuality. Drawing on
the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and
COLONIAL FICTION
others, they have revealed the ways colonial literature reflects a particular colonialist psychology,
most often detrimental to both colonizers and
colonized. They have explored gender and sexual
relations, the role played by women and race, and
the many other ways in which the long, complex
history of Great Britains colonial encounters has
been both recreated in and formed by its imaginative literature.
SEE ALSO: Fictional Responses to Canonical
English Narratives (WF); Migration, Diaspora,
and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction
of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial
Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF);
Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism
and Fiction (WF)
Achebe, C. (1958). Things Fall Apart. London:
Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1977). An Image of Africa: Racism in
Conrads Heart of Darkness. Massachusetts Review, 18,
28294.
Brantlinger, P. (1988). Rule of Darkness: British
Literature and Imperialism, 18301914. Ithaca, NY:
Bristow, J. (1991). Empire Boys: Adventures in a Mans
World. New York: HarperCollins.
Conrad, J. (1895). Almayers Folly. London: T. Fisher
Unwin.
Conrad, J. (1896). An Outcast of the Islands. London:
T. Fisher Unwin.
Conrad, J. (1898). An Outpost of Progress. In Tales of
Unrest. London: T. Fisher Unwin. (First published in
serial form in Cosmopolis in 1897.)
Conrad, J. (1900). Lord Jim. Edinburgh: Blackwood.
Conrad, J. (1902). Heart of Darkness. In Youth: A
Narrative and Two Other Stories. Edinburgh:
Blackwood. (First published in serial form in
Blackwoods Magazine, 1899.)
Conrad, J. (1904). Nostromo. London: Harper.
Conrad, J. (1920). The Rescue. London: J. M. Dent.
Fanon, F. (2007). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. R.
Philcox). New York: Grove. (Original work in French
published, 1952.)
Forster, E. M. (1924). A Passage to India. London:
Arnold.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge
(trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith). New York: Pantheon.
(Original work in French published 1969.)
81
Gates, H. L. (ed.) (1985). Race, Writing, and Difference

[special issue]. Critical Inquiry, 12(1).
Green, M. (1979). Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire.
New York: Basic Books.
Greenberger, A. J. (1969). The British Image of India:
A Study of the Literature of Imperialism, 18801960.
Haggard, H. R. (1885). King Solomons Mines. London:
Cassell.
Haggard, H. R. (1887). She: A History of Adventure.
London: Longman. (First published in serial form in
The Graphic 18867.)
Hobson, J. A. (1961). Imperialism: A Study [1902].
London: Allen and Unwin.
Holden, P., & Ruppel, R. J. (eds.) (2003). Imperial
Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature.
Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
JanMohamed, A. R. (1988). Manichean Aesthetics:
The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst:
Kipling, R. (1888a). Plain Tales from the Hills. Calcutta:
Thacker, Spink.
Kipling, R. (1888b). The Story of the Gadsbys. Allahabad:
A. H. Wheeler.
Kipling, R. (1898). The Days Work. London: Macmillan.
Kipling, R. (1901). Kim. London: Macmillan.
Lane, C. (1995). The Ruling Passion: British Colonial
Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lane, C. (ed.) (1998). The Psychoanalysis of Race.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1961). Tristes tropiques (trans. J.
Russell). New York: Criterion. (Original work
published 1955.)
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender,
and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York:
Routledge.
Miller, C. (1986). Blank Darkness: Africanist
Discourse in French. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Orwell, G. (1934). Burmese Days: A Novel. New York:
Harper.
Parry, B. (1998). Delusions and Discoveries:
India in the British Imagination, 18801930.
London: Verso.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Sharpe, J. (1993). Allegories of Empire: The Figure of
Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Singh, B. (1934). A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction.
London: Curzon.
Torgovnick, M. (1990). Gone Primitive: Savage
Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
82
COMPTON-BURNETT, IVY
Compton-Burnett, Ivy
SARA CRANGLE
Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in 1884 and died

in 1969. Her father was James Compton Burnett, a
well-known British homoeopath. One of 13 children, Compton-Burnett spent most of her childhood in Hove in the south of England. She then
moved to London, where she shared a flat for 30
years with Margaret Jourdain, a writer and authority on English furniture.
The author of 20 novels published between 1911
and 1971, Compton-Burnett topped bestseller
lists alongside Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie
in 1937. She was lauded by Arnold Bennett, Vita
Sackville-West, and John Betjeman among others;
in the USA, her popularity throughout the century
is indicated by her mention in New York poet
Frank OHaras Biographia Letteraria. She was
touted by the French nouveau roman movement,
and translated into many European languages. She
received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in
1955, an honorary doctorate at the University of
Leeds in 1960, an OBE in 1967, and was made a
companion of the Royal Society of Literature
in 1968. A renowned London figure, ComptonBurnett was lampooned by cartoonists, photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue, and broadcast
on BBC radio and television.
Almost all of Compton-Burnetts novels are set
at the end of the nineteenth century in remote,
impoverished country houses. Self-absorbed tyrants dominate the insular families therein; rare
visitors are often married, thereby becoming part
of an embittered whole. Although concerned with
marriage and property like most domestic fiction,
Compton-Burnetts stories deliberately undermine the familial bond. As one character states
in Two Worlds and Their Ways, familiarity
breeds contempt, and ought to breed it. It is
through familiarity that we get to know each
other (1949, 21). More spectacularly, her work
features the worst of familial crimes, including
will doctoring and matricide. Perpetrators go
unpunished, while revelations and deaths facilitate new marriages of convenience. ComptonBurnett is sometimes considered camp, and is
incessantly labeled witty. Her books are composed of intractable dialogues in which declarations, platitudes, and offhand statements are
openly and comically interrogated. Hers is the

humor of disproportion: grandiose misdemeanors surface in conversations consumed with
minutiae, and are usually taken in stride.
Compton-Burnetts novels are curiously, rigidly repetitive in style and content. Evading succinct labels, her work is variously compared to
Platos dialogues, Greek tragedies, Anglo-Saxon
minstrels, and the satires of Wilde and Waugh.
Although primarily likened to Austen, ComptonBurnetts writing is most readily perceived as a
product of modernism, particularly due to her
interrogation of language. Furthermore, her
novels eschew traditions such as religion, marital
fidelity, and moral judgment; she insists that
vanity and self-preservation are social norms.
Only the protagonist of her first novel, Dolores
(1911), puts others first. Compton-Burnett later
renounced Dolores; her second novel, Pastors and
Masters (1925), followed a 14-year creative hiatus.
In this book emerged the stichomythic banter and
amoral plotlines that defined her career.
Like Nietzsche, Compton-Burnett explores
subjective truth, the will to power, and aphoristic
statement; as one of her many insightful children
remarks in The Present and the Past, there is no
such thing as truth. It is different in different
minds (1953, 11). Her interest in evolutionary
theory is often manifested as blatant social Darwinism; characters regularly claim they will not
adapt themselves to others. In league with Freudian and Bergsonian theory, Compton-Burnett
extends stream-of-consciousness narration by
exposing and articulating unconscious or repressed desires. Indeed, she unabashedly investigates all aspects of human longing, including
homosexuality and incest. And like the feminists
of her era, Compton-Burnett highlights unequal
gender relations.
Although playing a public role of dated, prim
governess, Compton-Burnett was an avid reader
of contemporaries including Graham Greene,
Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel
Beckett, and Muriel Spark. Critics disagreed
about her writing alternately describing it as
artificially wooden or astutely distilled but
Compton-Burnett clearly sought a place in a
fictional heritage to which she was well attuned.
She describes her books as something between
novels and plays; her narrators rarely delineate
character appearance, setting, or temporality.
CONRAD, JOSEPH
Like Gertrude Stein, Compton-Burnett believes

the present is always the better thing a
statement from her novel Mother and Son
(1955, 182) consistent with the veneration of the
here and now throughout her work.
In Compton-Burnett, meaning is tied to
immediate, ephemeral dialogue, cogently rendered.
Even children and uneducated servants speak with
discerning alacrity. Conversations are brutally
blunt, as when Juliet of Two Worlds and Their
Ways states, People say we should see ourselves
just as others see us . . . But it is better to tell them
how to see us, and save the effort. Especially as they
are looking forward to our making it (75).
Characters scrupulously assess motivation, even as
rare narrative intrusions are heavily qualified, as in
an instance in Elders and Betters where a character
seemed to try to give a smile to her sister (1944,
95). Near paradoxically, this lack of presumption
furthers narrative precision.
Elizabeth Bowen encapsulates ComptonBurnetts sharpness: to read in these days a page
of [her] dialogue is to think of the sound of glass
being swept up one of these London mornings
after a blitz (1941, 84). In a critical work written
during the height of Compton-Burnetts success,
P. H. Newby suggests that following global war,
writers felt bewildered about the world, and
wanted to write about childhood, a time of
limited, insular experience in which moral judgment appeared unnecessary. Compton-Burnett
certainly wrote fiction set in her own formative
years, thereby evading address of both World
Wars. But she also openly acknowledges in interviews that domestic totalitarianism is inextricable
from political machinations. Compton-Burnetts
novels expose how tyranny exists within us all;
she championed the humanity of her most tyrannical characters. While loyalty, meaning, and
truth may be fleeting, for Compton-Burnett wit
sustains.
SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF)
83
Bradbury, M. (1973). Unhappy Families Are All Alike:

New Views of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Encounter,
40(1), 714.
Burkhart, C. (ed.) (1972). The Art of I. Compton-Burnett:
A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Gollancz.
Burkhart, C. (ed.) (1979). Ivy Compton-Burnett Issue
[special issue]. Twentieth-Century Literature, 25(2).
Compton-Burnett, I. (1929). Brothers and Sisters.
London: Heath Cranton.
Compton-Burnett, I. (1944). Elders and Betters.
London: Gollancz.
Compton-Burnett, I. (1947). Manservant and
Maidservant. London: Gollancz.
Compton-Burnett, I. (1949). Two Worlds and Their
Ways. London: Gollancz.
Compton-Burnett, I. (1953). The Present and the Past.
London: Gollancz.
Compton-Burnett, I . (1955). Mother and Son. London:
Gollancz.
Compton-Burnett, I. (1957). A Father and His Fate.
London: Gollancz.
Crangle, S. (2007). Ivy Compton-Burnett and Risibility.
In M. MacKay & L. Stonebridge (eds.), British Fiction
After Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 99120.
Gentile, Kathy Justice. (1991). Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Grieg, C. (1972). Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir.
London: Garnstone.
Kermode, F. (1963). The House of Fiction: Interviews
with Seven English Novelists. Partisan Review, 7(6),
6182.
Kiernan, R. (1990). Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the
Camp Novel. New York: Continuum.
Liddell, R. (1955). The Novels of I. Compton-Burnett.
London: Gollancz.
Liddell, R. (1986). Elizabeth and Ivy. London: Peter
Owen.
McCarthy, M. (1970). The Writing on the Wall and
Other Literary Essays. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Newby, P. H. (1951). The Novel: 19451950. London:
Longmans, Green.
Sackville-West, E. (1949). Inclinations. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Spurling, H. (1984). Ivy: The Life of Ivy ComptonBurnett. New York: Knopf.
Conrad, Joseph
Asoka, R. T. (1995). Ivy Compton-Burnett and the

English Domestic Novel. New Delhi: Prestige.
Bowen, E. (1950). Ivy Compton-Burnett. In Collected
Impressions. London: Longmans, Green, pp. 8291.
JOHN G. PETERS
Joseph Conrad has come to be seen as one of the

most important British novelists of the twentieth
84
CONRAD, JOSEPH
century. His formal innovations and skeptical

view of the world have influenced generations of
subsequent writers, and his work has remained at
the center of numerous critical debates since his
time.
Conrad was born J
ozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in Berdycz
ow, a
largely Polish part of Ukraine, to Apollo Korzeniowski (182069) and Ewa Korzeniowska (nee
Bobrowska, 183365). After the partitions of the
eighteenth century, the previously autonomous
country of Poland was divided between Russia,
Prussia, and AustriaHungary. Conrads parents,
in particular his father, were part of the Polish
resistance movement against Russian rule, and in
late 1861 Apollo was arrested for seditious activities. The following year, Conrads parents were
exiled to Vologda, a remote part of northern
Russia. While in exile, Conrads mother contracted tuberculosis and died. His father also
contracted tuberculosis and was allowed to return
to Poland in 1868, where he died the following
year. Thereafter, Conrad was raised by his
mothers family, especially his maternal uncle,
Tadeusz Bobrowski (182994), who was to have
a particularly strong influence on him. At 15,
Conrad decided that he would like to become a
sailor, and two years later his uncle agreed and
subsequently sent him to Marseilles, France to
train for the merchant marine service. In late 1877
Conrad discovered that he could not join the
French merchant marine as planned without the
permission of the Russian consul, who would not
give his consent. As a result, a few months short of
his twenty-first birthday, Conrad, who spoke no
English, decided to join the British merchant
marine service. His next 17 years were spent as
a member of the British merchant marine, first as
a sailor, then a mate, and eventually a captain. The
experience was to serve as raw material for a
number of his fictions.
In 1889, while on holiday in London, Conrad
took a step that would forever alter his life: he
began writing what would later become his first
novel, Almayers Folly, not in his native Polish nor
even in his second language, French, but in
English. It would take him roughly six years to
complete the novel. In 1895 the simultaneous
publication of Almayers Folly and sudden dearth
of maritime positions pushed Conrad into a new
career as a full-time writer. The reception of his
first novel set a pattern that continued for the

next 20 years: it was well received by reviewers but
did not sell particularly well. During these years,
Conrad often struggled with depression, financial
difficulties, and physical ailments, but at the same
time he also produced no fewer than 10 literary
masterpieces: The Nigger of the Narcissus,
Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim,
Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The
Secret Sharer, and Under Western Eyes. Not until
the publication of his novel Chance (1913) did
Conrad achieve the financial security and popularity he had desired for so long. The latter part of
Conrads life is marked by near-universal acclaim
and at the same time by what many regard as a
decline in the quality of his work. Conrads last
completed novel was The Rover, which was published in late 1923. He was at work on another
novel, Suspense, when he died of a heart attack on
August 3, 1924.
Joseph Conrad wrote during the modernist
period and was one of its innovators. The period
is known for its revisionist view of the nature of
the world and for its formal experimentation. Like
so many other modernists, he questioned many of
the longstanding assumptions concerning the
Western view of the world. He had no confidence
in the Western worlds privileged position and did
not believe the Western worldview was the only
viable one. Like many modernists, Conrad questioned the possibility of transcendental meaning.
Contrary to his literary predecessors, he often
eschewed chronological narrative and instead
represented time as fractured. Similarly, he often
employed multiple narrators. By these means he
was attempting to represent how human beings
typically experience events, that is, via multiple
sources and in an achronological sequence. Calling Conrad a modernist writer is something of an
anachronism, however, as the other modernists
produced their most important works some 10 or
more years after he began writing. Conrad was
thus not only an innovator among the modernists
but also an anomaly among his contemporaries.
He was a friend and admirer of Henry James, and
collaborated with Ford Madox Ford on a number
of fictional projects.
Conrads first novel, Almayers Folly (1895), is
set in the Malay Archipelago. Kaspar Almayer
dreams of wealth and leaving the East to live in
Amsterdam. From the outset, Almayers dreams
CONRAD, JOSEPH
clearly have no basis in reality and have a crippling

effect on him. The novel is unusual for its time in
that Conrad questions the ascendancy of Western
civilization in Nina Almayers rejection of her
fathers Western heritage and in Almayers defeat
at the hands of non-Western forces. Almayers
Folly was the first of a trilogy written in reverse
chronological order. The second was Conrads
next novel, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), set
some years before the action of Almayers Folly. In
this novel, Conrad simultaneously subverts the
romance tradition while once again subverting the
presumed superiority of Western civilization.
Peter Willems, the novels antihero, is caught
embezzling funds from his employer and is subsequently dismissed. After quarreling with his halfcaste wife, he leaves her for a Malay woman, Assa,
who later convinces Willems to betray to Syed
Abdulla the secret passage into Sambir, thus breaking the trading monopoly of Tom Lingard,
Willemss former benefactor. Once again, the
non-Westerners prevail, and Willemss feelings of
superiority due to his European heritage are undermined by his moral degeneracy.
Conrads next novel, The Nigger of the
Narcissus (1897), often considered his first
masterpiece, investigates the necessity of human
solidarity for survival in an indifferent universe.
The crew of the Narcissus must weather a severe
storm as well as the pressure brought to bear on
their solidarity by a black crew member, James
Wait. His race strains bonds of solidarity, as does
his assertion of illness, which prevents him from
performing his fair share of the work. The crew is
torn between resenting him and feeling an obligation to him as a fellow crew member. The storm
brings out the necessity of cooperative effort for
the crews mutual survival and conversely the
danger to the community of those like James
Wait and another character, Donkin, who fail to
cooperate. The storm episode becomes a microcosm of the plight of humanity, which Conrad
feels must demonstrate solidarity in the face of a
universe indifferent to its existence. Conrad then
published a volume of stories, Tales of Unrest
(1898). The gem of this collection is An Outpost
of Progress, a story that looks at Europes
civilizing activity in the Belgian Congo and in
this sense looks forward to Heart of Darkness. Two
traders, Carlier and Kayerts, alone in the center of
Africa, become increasingly de-civilized, until
85
Kayerts accidentally kills Carlier during a dispute

over some sugar. Kayerts then hangs himself just
after hearing the whistle of the arriving company
steamer. Rather than being an outpost of progress, the station becomes an outpost of regress and
thus calls into question the Western civilizing
mission and accompanying view of Western
superiority.
Conrads next work was Youth (first published in Blackwoods Magazine in 1898), which
looks back wistfully at the contrast between
youthful exuberance and mature experience in
the face of the inexorable movement toward the
death of all things. Heart of Darkness (first published in 1899, also in Blackwoods Magazine),
which followed, is probably Conrads best-known
and most widely read work. Set in the Congo,
Conrad again subverts the Western civilizing
mission and Western superiority by showing the
barbarian behavior of his European characters;
but Heart of Darkness goes further and considers
the question of human nature itself. In the end,
the narrator, Marlow (who also appears in
Youth), in his meditation on the larger-thanlife character of Kurtz, discovers that there is no
inherent value in the universe and that all systems
of meaning are merely contingent. Lord Jim
(1900), Conrads next work and a masterpiece of
literary modernist experimentation, once again
takes up and undermines the romance genre. Jim,
who sees himself as a heroic individual, fails to act
heroically when the crucial moment arrives, and
spends the rest of his life trying to recover from his
failure. Marlow, who narrates Lord Jim, is torn
between the realization that romantic ideals are
hopelessly flawed and at the same time
indispensable.
The End of the Tether (1902), which concerns protagonist Captain Whalleys moral fall,
followed. In 1903, Conrad published Typhoon
and Other Stories, which included Amy Foster
and the eponymous title story, among others.
Amy Foster considers the tragic history of
Yanko Goorall, a Pole shipwrecked on the
English coast, who is mistrusted, misunderstood, and mistreated by the local population
only to die alone, even after his marriage to a
local Englishwoman, Amy Foster. Many view
Yankos experience as a gloss on Conrads own
experience, despite his marriage to an Englishwoman, of alienation and otherness within his
86
CONRAD, JOSEPH
adopted British homeland. The collections

centerpiece, Typhoon, follows the actions of
Captain MacWhirr, a man who sees only what is
right before him, and his officer Jukes, who
believes him to be the stupidest of men.
MacWhirrs very obtuseness, however, becomes
a virtue in helping his ship make it through a
powerful storm. The tales descriptions of storm
and sea, along with those contained in Nigger, are
among the greatest in British fiction.
Nostromo, which many consider to be Conrads finest novel, appeared in 1904. In this work,
Conrad explores a South American revolution
and the social, political, and economic issues
surrounding it. Conrad condemns both the revolutionaries and the government, whose actions
destroy friends, foes, and bystanders alike.
Nostromo also explores the damaging effects of
material interests, as the silver from the silver
mine becomes the focus, and primary desire, of
most of the novels characters, ultimately proving to be their moral and physical undoing. At
the same time, the novel demonstrates the damaging effect of fixed ideas, which cloud the
judgment of many of the characters. Conrad
followed Nostromo not with a work of fiction
but with a memoir, The Mirror of the Sea (1906),
a collection of reminiscences of his earlier seagoing adventures.
In 1907 Conrad published The Secret Agent, in
which he once again investigates how political
intrigues, whether revolutionary or conservative,
destroy families and individuals. A detached,
mordantly ironic narrator surveys a collection
of sham revolutionaries who are wholly ineffectual, and a collection of government authorities
who flout the very laws they purport to uphold.
In the foreground of this London political
scene is the double (or perhaps triple) agent,
Adolf Verloc, who is commissioned to blow
up the Greenwich Meridian Observatory by
Mr. Vladimir, a high-ranking Russian embassy
official, in order to cast blame on the revolutionaries and create a more repressive environment for radicals in Britain. Verloc enlists his
intellectually challenged brother-in-law, Stevie,
to deliver the bomb, only to have Stevie inadvertently detonate it, blowing himself up. When
Verlocs wife Winnie discovers what has happened to her brother, she murders Verloc,
and later commits suicide. What begins as politi-
cal satire ends up as the darkest of domestic

tragedies. Conrad next published the collection
A Set of Six (1908), in which the two most
successful stories are Il Conde and The Duel.
Conrads most productive period concluded
in 1911 with the appearance of Under Western
Eyes, a novel that considers the effects of betrayal
and revolution on Razumov, a Russian student.
Razumov returns to his rooms one evening only
to find there Haldin, a fellow student, who
confesses his assassination of a prominent minister that morning. Razumov, fearing he will be
implicated in the murder, decides to turn in
Haldin to the authorities. Afterwards, unable to
concentrate on his studies, Razumov agrees to
work for the authorities as a double agent.
Eventually, he discovers that he cannot live this
life of deception and confesses his role to the
revolutionaries, one of whom deafens Razumov,
who is then run over by an oncoming tram that
he cannot hear. The novel ends with Razumov
living a secluded life in rural Russia, physically
crippled but spiritually at peace, as he discovers
that political ideals have no value without a
commensurate dedication to humanity. Even
more graphically than in Nostromo and The
Secret Agent, Conrad demonstrates here the
extent to which individuals are crushed beneath
the weight of warring political movements and
are victimized by politics in general. Under
Western Eyes was followed by A Personal Record
(1912), an autobiography that focuses primarily
on Conrads decision to pursue a life at sea and
on his decision to write his first novel. That same
year Conrad published Twixt Land and Sea, a
collection of three stories, the most important of
which is The Secret Sharer, which follows the
action of a young captain in his first command,
who discovers a man, Leggatt, hanging onto the
ships ladder. Leggatt has escaped from his ship
after killing an insubordinate crew member during a storm. The young captain secretes Leggatt,
a kind of second self, in his cabin and later allows
him to escape to a nearby island. The captains
experience with Leggatt and his successfully
bringing the ship out of a dangerous maneuver
are milestones in the young captains rite of
passage.
The publication of Conrads wildly popular
novel Chance in 1913 begins the later phase of
Conrads career, which many view as marking a
CONRAD, JOSEPH
decline in his artistic achievement. Chance follows

the romance of Captain Anthony and Flora, the
psychologically damaged daughter of a financier,
who has been convicted of fraud. Victory, which
followed Chance in 1915, and which like it was a
popular, if not a critical, success, considers the
effects of Axel Heysts attempts to pass through
life as a bystander rather than as an actor in events.
After Heyst rescues Lena, an exploited member of
a traveling orchestra, and carries her off, a group
of ruffians arrive on his island. During an ensuing
confrontation, the ruffians are killed, but Lena
also dies during the conflict, and only then does
Heyst despair at his missed opportunity to participate in life and he subsequently takes his own
life. Another collection of stories, Within the
Tides, appeared in 1915. In 1917 Conrad published The Shadow-Line, probably the most successful of his later works, in which the author
investigates once again a male protagonists progress from youth to maturity. A young captain in
his first command must weather the rampant
illness among his crew while his ship is caught
in a deadly calm. By successfully overcoming the
crisis, the captain gains the necessary experience
and confidence in himself to become worthy of
the position he holds. Conrads next novel was
The Arrow of Gold (1919), a romance set during
the Carlist conspiracy.
The following year Conrad completed The
Rescue, a novel he had begun some 23 years
earlier. The novel is the third in his Malay
trilogy, begun with his first two novels. Set before
the time of those novels, it tells of Tom Lingard
who attempts to help his friend and deposed
Malay prince Hassim regain his throne. When
Lingard chooses to come to the aid of a European ship stranded on a sandbar, he sets in motion
a chain of events that ends with the collapse of
his plans and the death of Hassim. In the end,
The Rescue demonstrates the difficulty of any
permanent communion between East and West.
In 1921, Conrad published Notes on Life and
Letters, which brought together a collection of
earlier non-fiction prose pieces. Conrads last
completed novel was The Rover (1923). Set in
Napoleonic France, the novel chronicles a sea
rover, Peyrol, who has returned to France to
retire but is eventually drawn back into connections with those around him. Peyrol ends his life
by taking the place of Lieutenant Real on a
87
suicide mission to deceive the English, thus

sacrificing himself for the sake of the next generation. Four of Conrads works were published
posthumously: Suspense (1925a), an unfinished
novel set in Napoleonic France just prior to
Napoleons return from Elba; Tales of Hearsay
(1925b), a collection of stories; The Sisters
(1928), a short fragment of a novel; and Last
Essays (1926), a collection of miscellaneous essays from the late period of his life. At the time of
his death, Conrad was acknowledged as the most
prominent figure in British letters and he has
since come to be recognized as one of the most
important and influential figures in twentiethcentury literature.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Ford, Ford
Madox (BIF); James, Henry (AF); London in
Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics
and the Novel (BIF)

Baines, J. (1959). Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Berthoud, J. (1978). Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase.
Brooks, R. (dir.) (1965). Lord Jim. Columbia Pictures.
Conrad, J. (1895). Almayers Folly. London: T. Fisher
Unwin.
Conrad, J. (1896). An Outcast of the Islands.
London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Conrad, J. (1897). The Nigger of the Narcissus.
London: Heinemann.
Conrad, J. (1898). Tales of Unrest. London: T. Fisher
Unwin.
Conrad, J. (1900). Lord Jim. Edinburgh: Blackwood.
Conrad, J. (1902). Youth and Two Other Stories.
Edinburgh: Blackwood.
Conrad, J. (1903). Typhoon and Other Stories. London:
Heinemann.
Conrad, J. (1904). Nostromo. London: Harper.
Conrad, J. (1906). The Mirror of the Sea. London:
Methuen.
Conrad, J. (1907). The Secret Agent. London: Methuen.
Conrad, J. (1908). A Set of Six. London: Methuen.
Conrad, J. (1911). Under Western Eyes. London:
Methuen.
Conrad, J. (1912a). Some Reminiscences. London:
Eveleigh Nash.
Conrad, J. (1912b). Twixt Land and Sea. London: J. M.
Dent.
Conrad, J. (1913). Chance. London: Methuen.
88
CRACE, JIM
Conrad, J. (1915a). Victory. London: Methuen.

Conrad,J.(1915b).WithintheTides.London:J. M.Dent.
Conrad, J. (1917). The Shadow-Line. London: J. M.
Dent.
Conrad, J. (1919). The Arrow of Gold. London: T.
Fisher Unwin.
Conrad, J. (1920). The Rescue. London: J. M. Dent.
Conrad, J. (1923). The Rover. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Conrad, J. (1925a). Suspense. London: J. M. Dent.
Conrad, J. (1925b). Tales of Hearsay. London: T.
Fisher Unwin.
Conrad, J. (1926). Last Essays. London: J. M. Dent.
Conrad, J. (19832007). The Collected Letters of Joseph
Conrad (ed. F. Karl, L. Davies, J. Stape, G. Moore, &
O. Knowles). 9 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1901). The Inheritors.
London: Heinemann.
Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1903). Romance. London:
Smith, Elder.
Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1924). The Nature of a Crime.
London: Duckworth.
Coppola, F. F. (dir.) (1979). Apocalypse Now. Omni
Zoetrope.
Ehrsam, T. (1969). A Bibliography of Joseph Conrad.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow.
Fleishman, A. (1967). Conrads Politics. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gillon, A. (1982). Joseph Conrad. Boston: Twayne.
Guerard, A. (1958). Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Hampton, C. (dir.) (1996). The Secret Agent. Fox
Searchlight Pictures/Capitol Films.
Hitchcock, A. (dir.) (1936). Sabotage. Gaumont-British
Picture Corporation.
Hay, E. (1963). The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Karl, F. (1969). A Readers Guide to Joseph Conrad, rev.
edn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Moser, T. (1957). Joseph Conrad: Achievement and
Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Najder, Z. (2007). Joseph Conrad: A Life (trans. H.
Najder). Rochester, NY: Camden House.
Peters, J. (2001). Conrad and Impressionism.
Peters, J. (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph
Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, R. (dir.) (1977). The Duellists. Paramount/
Enigma Productions.
Sherry, N. (1966). Conrads Eastern World. Cambridge:
Sherry, N. (1971). Conrads Western World. Cambridge:
Teets, B. (1990). Joseph Conrad: An Annotated
Bibliography. New York: Garland.
Teets, B., & Gerber, H. (1971). Joseph Conrad: An

Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him. De
Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Watt, I. (1979). Conrad in the Nineteenth Century.
Crace, Jim
PHILIP TEW
Jim Crace is a successful British writer of fiction

who lives somewhat unfashionably for a leading
cultural figure in Birmingham, his adopted
home. Born in 1944, he first came there as a student
in the 1960s and continues to exhibit a fierce
loyalty to the city. After graduating, he traveled
on VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) to Africa,
teaching school on his return; both of these
experiences are reflected in an early short story,
Cross Country. Crace became a journalist working for national newspapers such as The Guardian
and The Telegraph. As part of his creative ambitions of this period, he joined a social group (which
included Melvyn Bragg) of young writers drinking
together in Soho, in whom Ian Hamilton, editor of
the New Review, took a personal interest. Craces
first major publication was an award-winning
story, Annie, California Plates, published in the
New Review. Later anthologized, it charts the
progress of a car as its various drivers take on
board new passengers. In this early piece Crace
introduces the beginnings of an uncanny, fantastical element that stretches and yet acclimatizes the
readers sense of disbelief, a strategy strongly
characteristic of his later fiction.
Known in literary circles for his self-effacing
modesty, Crace staunchly refuses to regard his
own life as either important or central to his
fiction. Nevertheless he draws imaginatively upon
the hinterland of the northern edge of London
close to where he grew up in Enfield, a once highly
industrialized borough whose urban sprawl abuts
the almost idyllic countryside on the borders of
Middlesex, Essex, and Hertfordshire. Here his
father worked as a groundsman, teaching his son
a love of ecology and of all things natural, and, as a
local activist in the Labour Party, passing on his
leftist radicalism.
Craces fiction creates imaginary landscapes,
first seen in his first book, Continent (1986), a
CRACE, JIM
series of interrelated stories all set on an imaginary

sixth continent. This book earned Crace the
Whitbread Award for First Novel, the David
Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian
Fiction Prize, and it features the rhythmic, almost
poetic, and often whimsical prose that would
come to characterize his later work. Craces fictional world is distinctive and its realities interfused with strong elements of the fantastical,
described whimsically as Craceland in Adam
Begleys perceptive profile, A Pilgrim in
Craceland (2002). Cracelands landscapes are
vivid, impacting upon characters who appear to
be victims of a larger physical and emotional
turmoil, often lost in the almost primeval contention of such forces. In describing these Crace
draws variously on his travels to Africa, Cornwall
and the Scilly Isles, and the coast of Americas
eastern seaboard to evoke unfamiliar environments both urban and natural.
Craces subsequent novels are varied. The Gift of
Stones (1988) describes the destruction of a Stone
Age village based on working stone whose productivity is displaced by bronze implements. Disabled after the amputation of an arm, the central,
unnamed storyteller leads his people into the
unknown after discovering his own gift for narrative. Storytellings necessary yet deceptive salvations are a recurrent theme of Craces works.
Arcadia (1992) is concerned with the false idyll
of the rural derived from childhood maternal tales
that seduces aging commercial magnate, Victor, to
create a myth around his country origins from
which his mother escaped. Crace here adapts
various concepts and observations of urban theorist Jane Jacobs concerning the vitality of cities and
their possibilities as environments in which to
explore the anti-pastoral. Crace describes in Arcadia the destruction of the traditional market and
the development of a sterile shopping mall. Quarantine (1997) focuses on spirituality rendered
through Craces agnostic skepticism. The novel
charts the self-sacrifice of Christ who is on a
pilgrimage and far from divine as he encounters
an unscrupulous trader, Musa, who will purvey his
story of being resurrected by an accidental intervention of this unwilling savior. Being Dead (1999)
describes the murder of two academics, and details
the decomposition of their lifeless bodies. Another
part of the narrative recovers both their last day
and their initial anti-romantic encounter as
89
students in the landscape where they will die. Set

in the unnamed City of Kisses, which seems both
eastern European and South American, Six
(2003) entitled Genesis in North America
concerns the life of an actor, who is procreatively
(and therefore Darwinistically) successful, with a
child born to each woman with whom he copulates. However, such apparent success is offset
by his failure in relationships (most of them casual,
brief, or both) and his lack of knowledge about
many of his offspring. The Pesthouse (2007) is
a post-apocalyptic narrative that describes pestilence and an unlikely couples eastward quest
through America, in which modernity has been
abandoned and superstition and violent threat
destabilize any certainties in the protagonists
lives. Quarantine and Signals of Distress (1994)
evoke two historical settings, Judea at the time
of Christ and early nineteenth-century Cornwall,
both of which remain wild, untamed, and always
potentially hostile. In such settings Craces fiction
deals with archetypal situations and characters,
traders and customers, lovers and rivals, fathers
and sons, political oppressor and victim of torture,
idealist anti-slavery campaigner and slaver captain.
In creating all of these locations he clearly draws
upon the intensity of his passion for wildlife,
landscape, and walking, and occasionally demonstrates his personal capacity for impulsive
falsehoods.
Crace offsets his often grandiloquent themes,
such as death, belonging, desire, rivalry, spirituality, and malevolence with an almost compulsive
delight in creating the detail of exotic customs,
lives, and encounters that are transmuted into the
mundane. In a manner unusual in English contemporary writing his fiction synthesizes an
earthy descriptiveness with the implicit concerns
and the symbolic possibilities inherent in quotidian human interaction. Each of his novels revolves
around a conceit or pursues through characters
and events a central conceptual idea. Personally
he is determinedly English in a left-liberal tradition, doggedly maintaining a sense of his working-class roots and proud of his unfashionable
normality. As a consequence, in a homeland still
obsessed with class and celebrity, he is perhaps
regarded more highly in Europe and in America
than in Britain. While in Britain Quarantine was
Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for
the Booker Prize, in America Being Dead was
90
CRITICAL THEORY AND THE NOVEL
awarded the prestigious National Book Critics

Circle Award. In 2007 the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of
Texas at Austin acquired Craces archive and in
spring 2008 he was visiting Distinguished Writerin-Residence at the universitys James Michener
Center for Writers.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF)

Begley, A. (2002). A Pilgrim in Craceland. Southwest
Review, 87(23), 22740.
Constable, J., & Aoyama, H. (2001). Testing for
Mathematical Lineation in Jim Craces Quarantine
and T. S. Eliots Four Quartets. Belgian Journal of
Linguistics, 15, 3552.
Crace, J. (1986). Continent. London: Heinemann.
Crace, J. (1988). The Gift of Stones. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Crace, J. (1992). Arcadia. London: Jonathan Cape.
Crace, J. (1994). Signals of Distress. London: Viking.
Crace, J. (1995). The Slow Digestions of the Night.
London: Penguin.
Crace, J. (1997). Quarantine. London: Viking.
Crace, J. (1999). Being Dead. London: Viking.
Crace, J. (2001). The Devils Larder. London: Viking.
Crace, J. (2003). Six. London: Viking. (Published in
US as Genesis. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.)
Crace, J. (2007). The Pesthouse. London: Penguin.
Fitzgerald, C. A. (2004). Poppy Love: Fathers Find
Salvation in Two New Novels. Gettysburg Review,
17(1), 1517.
Lane, R. J. (2003). The Fiction of Jim Crace: Narrative
and Recovery. In R. J. Lane, R. Mengham, & P. Tew
(eds.), Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge:
Polity, pp. 2739.
Teske, D. (2002). Jim Craces Arcadia: Public Culture in
the Postmodern City. In S. Onega & J. A. Stotesbury
(eds.), London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of
the Metropolis. Heidelberg: Universitatverlag Winter,
pp. 16582.
Tew, P. (2006). Jim Crace. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Tew, P. (2007). A Conversation between Jim Crace and
Philip Tew. Critical Engagements, 1(1), 33356.
Tew, P. (2009). Jim Craces Enigmatical Pastoral. In D.
James & P. Tew (eds.), New Versions of Pastoral: PostRomantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to
the Tradition. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, pp. 23044.
Critical Theory and the

Novel
PATRICIA WAUGH
To try to draw together the broad constellation of

practices known as theory and the loose aggregate of conventions constituting the genre of the
novel is a complex business, but critical theory
helped to shape the work of novelists since 1960,
just as it helped to reshape a sense of the canonical
histories of the novel as a genre. From the late
1960s, there was a pervasive rethinking of the very
foundations and conditions of thought across all
the disciplines of the humanities and social
sciences. In this sense, the theoretical turn was
general, but its manifestations and objects were
diverse, varying in important ways from discipline to discipline, and from one cultural and
national context to another. But as with the
broader theoretical turn of the 1960s, the literary or critical theory that flourished across departments of Anglo-American letters represented
a revolt against positivist and empiricist assumptions in criticism. For poststructuralism, neoMarxism, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory
were all depth models of knowledge that sought
a reorientation toward the a priori as the search
for underlying formal relations that might provide the conditions for grasping and expressing
the phenomena of the world and of human
experience.
First, with the technical linguistics of Chomsky
and, thereafter, with the more easily assimilable
linguistics of Saussure, structuralism began as a
revolt against empiricism through the positing of
a system of logical or formal relations within
language, a system of intellectual and rulegoverned operations that are given priority over
any hypothetical or acclaimed empiricist relation
of word to world. The poststructuralist turn that
erupted out of this prison-house of language was
shaped by the traditions of the discipline of
English studies. This had been laid down in the
1920s within the broadly positivist (and organicist) orientation of the New Critics and I. A.
Richards, the empiricism of F. R. Leavis, and the
eclectic anti-Cartesianism of T. S. Eliot. Specifically, therefore, in English studies, the theoretical
turn constituted a rebellion against what Paul de
Man would refer to in Blindness and Insight (1993
[1983] ) as the aesthetic ideology of modernist

literary criticism, and more specifically, the rule of
New Criticism (in America) and of the Eliot
Leavis hegemony (in Britain). For poststructuralists such as de Man, Marxists such as Terry
Eagleton, and feminists such as Elaine Showalter,
aesthetic ideology is that ethos of the promised
cultural redemption to be effected through the
organicist complexity of the literary text, engaged
through the honed instruments of critical close
reading. The literary aesthetic had been advanced as a potent curative that might redeem a
fallen modernity and provide the means to overcome a crippling post-Cartesian dissociation of
sensibility. In this Fall myth of modernity,
famously adduced in T. S. Eliots essay on The
Metaphysical Poets (1921), an increasingly cerebralized, post-Cartesian orientation toward abstract thinking (theory), is seen to be divorced
from the sensuously experiential, the luminous
detail, and the affective and tactile responsiveness
to the contingencies of the human world of
history.
In Britain, in particular, therefore, the theoretical turn took the form of a revolt against the
Leavisite great tradition: a philosophically naive
mode of expressive realism or Kulturkritik.
Leaviss ideal of a common culture was now seen
as the aesthetic smokescreen for an academic
protection racket designed to safeguard the still
hegemonic values of an increasingly beleaguered
bourgeois class. The theory revolution developed
rapidly via a somewhat strained and temporary
alliance between the linguistic preoccupations
and skeptical ironies of the poststructuralist turn
and an increasingly complex (and politically
activist) left culturalist identity politics, beginning
with the Civil Rights Movement, the womens
movement, and national liberation movements
(soon to be theorized under the umbrella of
cultural theory), to produce that uneasy hybrid:
the postmodern. Expressive realism was understood by academic theorists as the mimetic view
that language delivers up truths about life and the
human condition and that reality is a coherent
whole standing behind its formulation in words.
Within the terms of academic theory, therefore,
fictional realism comes to be seen as a discursive
mode in which there is an attempt to impose on
the text this kind of illusory consensus about the
real by suppressing and disguising the contra-
91
dictions or aporias opened up in all discourses by

the metaphoric and differential nature of a language that can finally never command the subject
matter that it purports to represent. Realism
claims to reflect a world that is, in fact, always
already constructed. However, if it is impossible
to move beyond and outside of our instruments of
interrogation (primarily language), then we are
caught within incommensurable language games
only ever offering a knowledge of the world
relative to the scope of their conceptual frameworks. Delusory too, therefore, is our naive and
logocentric faith in the capacity of language to
mirror nature and our belief that the meaning of
the word somehow has its origin in the nature of
the real and can therefore reflect its structures in
the mind as a metaphysics of presence. Now we
can see that truth is a kind of fiction, reality also an
appearance, depth only ever another surface,
history an endless regress of texts, and reading
always a mode of misreading. We inhabit not the
real, but always our representations of it.
What is evident throughout the period, however, is that theory, despite its more immediate
academic contexts and its often idealist claims to
stand outside of history, is shaped by the very
historical conditions and cultural changes that
also shape the forms and preoccupations of the
novel. The processes of globalization and diversification that provide the historical identity of the
period are equal if not more powerful pressures
on the forms and modes of its fiction. Novelists
are almost never card-carrying theorists; many
sought to assimilate textual self-referentiality into
a fictional tradition where realism tempers romance, and where ethical commitment is allied
with a broadly empiricist tradition: this is as
perceptible in novelists as different as Virginia
Woolf (with her Bloomsbury affiliations with
G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russells Cambridge
realism) and George Orwell (whose work continuously makes a connection between the theory
of intellectuals and a misplaced faith in abstract
argument that is ultimately complicit with totalitarianism). This fictional orientation meshed
with a mainstream intellectual tradition broadly
liberal in ethos; concerned with moral considerations and the ongoing need for contracts that
provide for the protection of human rights; and
requiring the belief that being reasonable requires
assertions to be supported by verifiable evidence
92
that is not simply the property of a particular

language game or cultural group, but is, as far as
possible, universalizable and applicable to all
human beings. In the writing of George Orwell,
there is a skepticism about rationalistic grand
narratives: this tradition already preferred to do
its social theorizing in a piecemeal and tentative
fashion through ordinary language or fiction,
rather than through grand theory and technical
vocabularies, jargon, neologism, and global
pronouncement.
A. S. Byatts work, for example, is a testimony
to the kind of cautious response of writers to the
more academic modes of the theoretical turn:
taught by Leavis at Cambridge, Byatt in her very
first novel, Shadow of a Sun (1964), featured a
central character, a critic, evidently modeled on
the great man, and similarly driven by a puritanical moral ferocity about literature; it is a moral
aesthetic, however, that is depicted in this first
novel as finally destructive of the literary imagination. Yet her later novels, Babel Tower (1996),
Possession (1990), and A Whistling Woman (2002)
are equally skeptical about the effects of the
linguistic skepticism of the theoretical turn that
replaced Leavisism. Academic theory is exposed
for its vanity, blindness, and, in Possession, duplicity and greed. Indeed, Byatts mode of contested and conflicted realism is fairly representative of the literary responsiveness of the majority
of British and Irish novelists to the theory revolution of the last 40 years. Interestingly, too, the
conflicted engagement with literary theory often
runs alongside a similarly complex engagement
with new scientific theories in the period: a pervasive strain is the Darwinist picture of the human as
a stripped down animal, a vulnerable biological
creature, naked and bereft of certain belief. It is a
picture that reflects the growing biologization,
medicalization, and scientization of culture at this
time (a shift first noted in Foucaults works of the
1960s). Samuel Beckett, William Golding, Iris
Murdoch, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Kazuo
Ishiguro, and John Banville, to name but a handful, all mediate such a picture, and their work
serves as a valuable reminder to academic literary
theorists that the other theory revolution of the
period also overturning positivism has been in
the sciences, in the turn away from a strict positivism and a more expansionist return to a biological and naturalist paradigm of knowledge and
values. This has been variously expressed in the

ultra-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary psychology of Stephen Pinker, the neuroscientific constructions of the mind of the 1990s,
and the pervasive preoccupation with the body,
genetics, and the neo-Darwinist understanding of
the mind as the brain. While academic critics have
remained largely preoccupied with the postmodern or textualist turn in the period, writers such as
Byatt, Amis, McEwan, David Lodge, Fay Weldon,
Jeanette Winterson, Ishiguro, and many others
were often as much preoccupied with the new
theories in the life sciences as with theory, as in
literary or critical theory. A major theme of this
writing, indeed, has been the recognition that both
kinds of theory tend to present life through
metaphors of linguistic codes, scriptoral tropes,
and notions of rewriting and re-engineering lifescripts.
So even the linguistic turn in literary studies is
arguably as much an outgrowth of developments
within British society and the broader culture of
knowledge, as of a more narrowly defined academic theory. By the late 1970s, changes brought
about by globalization, subcultural formations,
and shifting cultural identities were giving rise to
new stylistic experiments in the novel and the
forging of new fictional languages: the grotesque
metafictional slapstick of Martin Amis; the exuberant Rabelaisian vulgarity of Angela Carter;
Salman Rushdies unique mixing and mingling
of Hindi, Urdu, and English intonation and phonology to create a hybrid language (Angrezi) and
with it a new mythology of the mongrel. The
linguistic experimentalism of these writers hugely
influenced the next generation of novelists such as
Will Self, Hanif Kureishi, Arundhati Roy, Zadie
Smith, Hari Kunzru, Nicola Barker, and Ian
Sinclair and, after 1980, the British novel began
to look more variegated, hybrid, linguistically
playful, and self-conscious. The impulse came
not only from writers from outside the British
Isles but from those who felt internally colonized
within it. Writers such as James Kelman and
Irvine Welsh began to experiment with Scottish
vernacular and, like Rushdie, to globalize the
local. In the early 1980s, Kelman began experimenting with free indirect discourse, mixing
standard and vernacular languages, without implying the usual hierarchization. By the time of
How Late It Was, How Late, which won the Booker
Prize in 1994, he had developed a unique modernist vernacular that bestowed on the disinherited and the underclass an inner life as real as that
of Joyces Bloom or Becketts tramps and loners.
Either way, the linguistic self-reflexivity is a product of history as much as, if not more so than,
simply academic theorizing.
But theory has always had a complex relation
with the genre of the novel: in significant ways, the
novel developed in part as a response to theory in
the guise of the eighteenth-century obsession with
intellectual explanatory systems, the offspring of
the early Enlightenment marriage of Cartesian
rationalism and Baconian scientific empiricism.
One system, in particular, Adam Smiths Theory of
the Moral Sentiments (1759), was definitively
associated with the novel genre. Sentimentalism
as a systematization of knowledge of the nature
and effects of human affect was increasingly engaged as a means of resisting the machinic
and socio-biological logic of the Hobbesian
scientific theory of human nature. For the
empathetic and the sentimental were seen to
require a heightening and disciplining into a
theoretical system if they were to be elevated
above the contingencies of individual feeling into
a more scientific or metaphysically coherent order
that might provide a substantial enough secular
substitute for the moral practices of the religious
life: one that would also counter the Hobbesian
mechanical picture of the necessity for a Leviathan, providing the foundational planks for a
theory of liberal democracy. The novel as a genre
achieved legitimation as a serious art form in its
perceived function as a significant vehicle for the
investigation of this system of affects and of its
moral and political implications, and of the education of its readers into a more self-conscious,
that is to say, more theoretical awareness, of the
processes and uses of the educated heart and the
feeling brain. But in providing educative interrogation, eighteenth-century novels by Defoe,
Sterne, Richardson, and others both engage and
dissipate the systematic formation of this object as
presented in the writings of the philosophers:
Fielding famously insisting in Tom Jones (1729)
that he was writing a history and not a system.
Indeed, theorization as self-reflexive distance
from and resistance to such abstraction seems
fundamental to fiction from the very first: the
novel genre develops as a dialectical interplay of
93
contingency and abstraction. Caught between an

orientation to the experientially and historically
contingent and the narrative impulse to plotted
causality or formal coherence, novels are inevitably, perhaps inherently, skeptical, and therefore at
some level intrinsically ironic. Weaving worlds of
words, novelists were from the very first selfconscious of that unbridgeable and eminently
ironizable gap between the linguistic and the
phenomenal, between systems of signs and human behaviors, between cultural codes and conventions and essences and universals. The formal
poeticity of the novel, in contra-distinction to the
non-poeticity of the philosophical or purely theoretical tract, arises out of what the formalist
theorists have described as the feeling of the word
as a word, and not simply the naming or representation of an object, the word as a weighty thing
with a value always exceeding its representative
function. Indeed, with reference to the theory of
the moral sentiments, Sternes A Sentimental
Journey (1768), for example, plays brilliantly on
the verbal associations of transport as Yorick
sets off in his carriage on his grand tour of
enlightenment, but also in and as a construct of
that linguistic vehicle for affective and imaginative transport that is the narrative of the text we
are reading. Through the metafictional transgression of levels of ontology and an insistent and
ironic linguistic self-consciousness (handkerchiefs repeatedly substituted for words as language fails to encapsulate feeling), Sterne explores
the limitations and aporias in the overformulated
theorization of the affective and moral imagination, just as his novel Tristram Shandy (1760)
derives its comedy from the unintended consequences of the human pursuit of and obsession
with systems and with theories.
But it is the extent to which the activity of
theorizing in the humanities and social sciences
(at least) has itself become a theoretically selfconscious flight from Theory (as system) that
perhaps most differentiates the positioning of the
novel in and in relation to the current Age of
Theory from its earlier counterpart in the Age of
Systems. Indeed, by the 1980s, both the novel and
theory seemed equally preoccupied with the sense
that one of the cumulative effects of modernity is
that, more and more, knowledge reflexively enters
and shapes experience in the world and is then
shaped by it in an unprecedentedly self-conscious
94
fashion: history might provide the ground for the

rise of particular theories as with feminism and
postcolonialism and postmodernism but history is only ever to be experienced in the disembedded orders of late modernity as already, thoroughly, and irrevocably, theorized: there is no
space outside of theory. The work of philosophy
or systematic theory, the linguistic practices of the
novel, and the movements of history seek a curious intimacy, sharing an intensified linguistic
skepticism and a preoccupation with the setting
up and the concomitant breaking down of delusory systems, plots or fictions. A theoretical selfconsciousness about fictions begins to embed
itself experientially in existential modes of historical and subjective or personal awareness and,
even without the explicit turn to theory in the
academy, to enter and pervade the forms and
preoccupations of fiction, as of historical experience (in the preoccupation with lives as stories or
narratives, disruptable by traumas or available for
liberatory rewriting).
It is perhaps not surprising that Rushdies
tropes of migrancy and hybridity soon became powerful and popular metaphors to describe contemporary experience and were taken
up and extended by novelists and academic theorists alike. The novel, like the nation, becomes
disseminated, no longer parochial or stranded in
this or that ghetto of nation, race, or single
intellectual or literary tradition. The international
and transnational novel becomes a significant
sign of the times: born out of a convergence of
globalized capital, cultural diasporas, and traveling theory, it is perhaps the strongest testimony of
the capacity of the novel to resist the singular and
the systematic and to revel in what Bakhtin celebrates as the polyglot and the polyphonic, the
resistance to the monologic and the reductionisms of intellectual elites. And yet, many novels
even those by migrant writers also stood back
with equal skepticism from the infatuation with
hybridity, intuiting perhaps a continuing exoticization and appropriation of postcolonial experience. Kazuo Ishiguro has brilliantly fictionalized
this controversial debate from the perspective of
the writer in The Unconsoled (1995). He began the
novel after an exhausting promotional world tour
and the novel is a brilliant meditation on the
tension between historical and intellectual ideas
about the creative arts and the varieties of new
external pressures on the contemporary writer in

an internationalized culture market: the conflicting demands of political representation, ethical
obligation, and the commercial implications of
producing creative work within a global
economy.
In Jamesons reading in Postmodernism; or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), all contemporary discourses are caught in a flight from
propositional truth, foundations or origins, affirmative content or closure, and show a pronounced preference for modes of self-reference,
indeterminacy, undecidability, and intertextual
excess as a repudiation of the autonomy of the
individual text or subject or author. Jameson
provided one of the most resonant images of this
cultural condition of late capitalism in his description of the architect and developer John
Portmans Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Las Vegas, viewed as an icon of and testimony to the
incapacity of the human mind to grasp the great
global networks in which we are caught as individual subjects. To walk through the hotel is to
become acutely self-conscious of the disjunctive
relations between body, space, and time in the
contemporary world. Not surprisingly, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the stable maps of the
world shifted, fiction too became self-reflexively
preoccupied with the problematic nature of representation: again this metafictional turn is as
much a product of changing times as of changing
intellectual theories. Numerous writers explored
the connections between the temporally and spatially disorientating experience of the fabricated
worlds of postmodernity, and the ontology of the
novel as a textual world axiomatically constructed
out of other textual worlds. Even before the
appearance of the generation of Peter Ackroyd,
Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, and Martin Amis,
prominent novelists such as Doris Lessing, Muriel
Spark, William Golding, and John Fowles were
playing out textualist anxieties with a plethora of
metafictional devices and motifs: labyrinths, mirrors, mise-en-abyme effects, characters reading
texts in which they appear, authors stepping into
their fictions. By the 1980s, the perception of the
fabricated, constructed, and provisional nature of
the world had become normalized and domesticated and there is hardly a novelist who does not,
in some way, register this change: from conflicted
realists such as A. S. Byatt, John Banville, and
Brigid Brophy to more overt experimentalists

such as Samuel Beckett, J. G. Ballard, and B. S.
Johnson, to transnational and migrant writers
such as Kiran Desai, Ben Okri, and Hanif Kureishi. So-called postmodernism soon manifested
itself as more zeitgeist than theoretical insight.
For as early as the 1970s, the theoretical assault
on metalinguistic foundations was developed into
the postmodern insistence that objects of knowledge are not so much entities on which language
reflects as artifacts actually constructed through
and within language. In such a condition, fiction,
as a world-creating activity, inevitably takes a turn
toward philosophical self-interrogation of its own
epistemological and ontological status, while philosophy and criticism, as metalinguistic discourses, have to confront the demise of any secure
claim to objectivity or validity in interpretation or
evaluation. For if language no longer refers to a
realm that is independent of language, then any
attempt to stand outside, and to offer critique, of a
particular cultural or philosophical perspective is
no longer simply to offer a different version of the
world but actually to construct a wholly alternative one. Each world becomes a construction
comprehensible only within its own terms for, if
there is no independent reality against which to
compare the perspectives, each becomes a discrete
language game and it is no longer possible to
determine the validity of any claim independently
of the cultural or linguistic context in which it is
made. Accordingly, novelists begin to experiment, for example, with effects of infinite regress:
Becketts narrators endlessly telling themselves
stories that are made to correspond, through their
own conceptualizations, with the apparent structures of their lives, which turn out to be simply the
stories they are narrating. Or they may transgress
ontological levels between story and discourse as
in Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman
(1969), which pastiches the style of numerous
Victorian novels through the discourse of an
author who sometimes appears in the novel as
a character, sometimes uses and abuses the omniscience of the implied author of realism, and
sometimes personalizes himself as a narrative
construction of the post-Barthesian age of authorial death. Such techniques continue in the work
of a new generation of writers (many of whom
have been formally taught theory in English degree programs) such as Zadie Smith, David
95
Mitchell, Ali Smith, Nicola Barker, and many

non-British writers such as Arundhati Roy, J.
M. Coetzee, and Paul Auster.
Yet this problematization of representation, of
fictions, of systems, was always already at the heart
of the novel, as we have seen with reference to the
eighteenth century. Even before the academic
turn to theory, an intensified and deconstructive
interrogation of fictionality and of the uses and
abuses of system entered and, arguably, even gave
birth to the novel. Even Derrida famously admitted his inability to write on Becketts already
deconstructionist fictions, fearing exposure of his
own philosophical practice as a platitudinous
metalanguage (Attridge 60). He seems to intuit
that the deconstructive resistance to closure was
all along the definitive feature of the novel. Many
of the concerns of poststructuralist theory were
already explicitly engaged in fictional narratives
that were raising important questions about linguistic self-referentiality, foundationalism, truth,
value, authorial voice, and subjectivity, well
before Continental philosophy began to be
imported and transformed into the so-called
theory revolution of the 1970s. One thinks here
of the complex teleological games of Muriel
Spark, from her very first novel in 1957; of Iris
Murdochs fictionalized critiques of ordinary language philosophies from 1954; of the linguistic
experimentalism of writers such as B. S. Johnson,
Christine Brooke-Rose, Alan Burns, Ann Quin,
and Rayner Heppenstall throughout the 1960s.
Indeed, Johnson, Brooke-Rose, Jonathan Culler,
Shlomith Rimmon, and, on occasion, Roland
Barthes, were all participants in Frank Kermodes
literary theory seminars that ran between 1967
and 1974 at University College London (discussed
in the preface to his Essays on Fiction 197182 of
1983). For the theoretical preoccupation with
fictionality in its proto-theory modes emphatically and self-consciously enters critical thinking
in the writing of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, for
example shortly after World War II, but as a
response to the dangerous aestheticization of
politics in ideologies of fascism. Interestingly, this
preoccupation with fictions was also the starting
point for one of the most influential and imaginative theories of the novel that emerged in
the postwar period, and which, like the earlier
Bakhtinian dialogics and the Lukacsian theorization of realism, profoundly shaped thinking
96
about the genre. This was Frank Kermodes The

Sense of an Ending (1967), which explored the
dangers of an unbridled fictionality as a desire to
project consolatory plots and fictions onto history
in the form of degenerate myths. But Kermodes
influential theory also arose out of his engagement with and support for the fictional writing of
novelists such as Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch
as well as the poetics of Wallace Stevens. Novelists
from the late 1950s for example, Muriel Spark in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Abbess
of Crewe (1974), and Not to Disturb (1971); Iris
Murdoch in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970),
The Black Prince (1973), and The Sea, The Sea
(1978); John Fowles in The French Lieutenants
Woman, The Magus (1966), and Daniel Martin
(1977); William Golding in Free Fall (1959) and
Darkness Visible (1979) are equally concerned
with the recognition that indiscriminate aestheticization facilitates playing God with the real.
Novels such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and
Murdochs A Severed Head (1961), ostensibly
about trivial love affairs, charismatic schoolmistresses, and the adulterous deceptions of the high
bourgeoisie, are also studies of the psychological
and myth-making imperatives of power politics
and totalitarianism. Each of these fictions embodies a theoretical reflection on fictionality that
is in turn theorized by academic theories of
the novel, which also arise out of a shared historical situation that has helped to propel the selfreflexively critical or theoretical turn. For the
emergence of an anti-Theory theory of the novel
from within the novel functions as a reminder that
novels serve an important ethical and interrogative function in a world that increasingly, and
dangerously, neglects to discriminate between
different orders of fictionality. Kermodes theory
of fictions is a theory of the novel for a theoretical
age, where fictional self-consciousness as a
mode of anti-Theory theorizing protects against
dangerous tendencies toward myth-making.
Authentic fiction manages to achieve a balance
between a formal consolation provided by the
illusion of correspondence between desire and
the world, and an ethical refusal of such consolation that reminds us that in the end fictional form
is inevitably a mode of aesthetic seduction.
Kermodes theory of the novel reflects the problematization of positivism that afflicts intellectual thought increasingly by the 1960s (in, for
example, the writing of Karl Popper, Hans-Georg

Gadamer, and Thomas Kuhn) and gives rise to a
fully fledged theoretical turn in the 1970s:
the recognition that there is always an aesthetic
dimension to knowledge. But his theory of the
novel also reflects a longstanding intellectual
and novelistic tradition concerned with the absolute need for ethical and epistemological discrimination of fictions: one that has never been naively
reflectionist, holding up the mirror to nature, but
has always looked inward to the way in which its
own forms mediate and construct the real. The
novel is also a mode of theory, just as theory is a
kind of fictionalizing.
SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF);
Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Migration,
Diaspora and Exile in Fiction (WF);
Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF)

Anderson, B. (1983). Imaginary Communities. London:
Verso.
Attridge, D. (ed.) (1992). Acts of Literature. London:
Routledge.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bhaba, H. (ed.) (1990). Nation and Narration. London:
Routledge.
Brooks, P. (1992). Reading for the Plot: Design and
Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Byatt, A. S. (1964). Shadow of a Sun. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Byatt, A. S. (1990). Possession: A Romance. London:
Chatto and Windus.
de Man, P. (1993). Blindness and Insight: Essays in the
Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn.
London: Routledge.
Eliot, T. S. (1951). The Metaphysical Poets. In T. S. Eliot:
Selected Essays, 3rd edn. London: Faber and Faber,
pp. 28192.
Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and Method, 2nd edn.
London: Continuum.
Genette, G. (1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Halperin, J. (ed.) (1974). The Theory of the Novel: New
Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ishiguro, K. (1995). The Unconsoled. London: Faber and
Faber.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism; or, The Cultural

Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
Kelman, J. (1994). How Late It Was, How Late. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Kermode, F. (1967). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the
Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kermode, F. (1983). Essays on Fiction, 197182.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leavis, F. R. (1948). The Great Tradition: George Eliot,
Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Lukacs, G. (1963). The Meaning of Contemporary
Realism. London: Merlin.
McKeon, M. (ed.) (2000). Theory of the Novel: A
Historical Approach. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
97
Miller, J. Hillis (2001). Deconstruction and Literature.

In T. Cohen (ed.), Deconstruction and the Future of
the Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations.
London: Routledge.
Rushdie, S. (1992). Imaginary Homelands. London:
Granta.
Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York:
Knopf.
Showalter, E. (1999). A Literature of Their Own: British
Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. London:
Virago.
Sterne, L. (2001). A Sentimental Journey (ed. P. Goring).
Waugh, P. (ed.) (2006). Literary Theory and
Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
D
Doyle, Roddy
DERMOT MCCARTHY
Roddy Doyles career and reputation are closely

associated with the new Ireland of the 1990s,
but he has hardly been a cheerleader for the
culture of consumption and indiscriminate
development that his countrys recent economic
prosperity spawned. Doyles writing engages Irish
society and culture at a consistently oblique angle
of reflection. His highly successful entertainments
range from comic realism to historical farce and
magic realism, nostalgia to satire, childrens
fiction, and memoir. Doyles novels, plays, short
stories, and screenplays have provoked a culture
of denial to confront marital breakdown, spousal
abuse, alcoholism, inner-city poverty, social marginalization, and racism.
Born in Dublin in 1958, Doyle focuses on
Dublin and Dubliners in all of his writing. His
first three novels, the highly popular Barrytown
Trilogy (The Commitments, 1988; The Snapper,
1990; and The Van, 1991) brought him immediate
notoriety with their distinctively vernacular
style: short, staccato sentences; vivid, vulgar, as
well as trenchant and comical, dialogue; the
precise notation of social realia, occasionally
evoking subtle emotional or symbolic meaning
from common domestic details; and the use of
pop music as a leitmotif that meshes the publichistoricaldiscursive and personalprivate
inarticulate. With its uncensored presentation
of working-class experience, the trilogy also signaled Doyles abiding moral concern with children and adolescents, married women, the family,
and community; with class divisions and social

coherence; self-esteem and self-understanding;
unemployment and poverty; individual identity,
self-growth, and hope for the future. The Barrytown Trilogys success derived from its cross-over
effect as both popular entertainment and
serious fiction. All three novels eventually
became successful films and their unflinching
engagement with issues of unemployment, globalization, and cultural homogenization, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots in
Irish society, as well as between generations and
genders, and urban and rural sensibilities established Doyle as the preeminent storyteller of
contemporary urban Ireland.
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), for which he
received the Booker Prize in 1993, dispelled any
sense that Doyles writing was confined to the
horizontal axis of social realism. This story of
a young boys coming of age while witnessing his
parents growing disaffection took Doyles combination of pathos and slapstick comedy, verbal
humor and wit, social satire and note-perfect
transcription of the music of everyday to a new
level; the presentation of Paddys perspective,
thoughts, emotions, and language is a masterpiece
of compassionate imagination.
The growth of imagination and narrative technique in Paddy Clarke paid further dividends in
Doyles next novel, The Woman Who Walked into
Doors (1996). Based on the character of Paula
Spencer, the abused, alcoholic wife in Family, his
BBC television docu-drama of 1994, Woman
remains Doyles most daring and experimental
work, a controversial intervention in Irish public

DRABBLE, MARGARET
discourse that threw very cold water on a society

delusional with self-congratulation and social
complacency. The complexity of characterization
resulting from an increasingly sophisticated
manipulation of the first-person narration, in
conjunction with his trademark social realism,
resulted in one of the most important Irish novels
of the period. Doyle adapted Woman into
a successful play in 2003 and Paula Spencer
(2006), his most recent novel, continues her story.
In A Star Called Henry (1999) Doyle began
another trilogy and continued to experiment
with a self-conscious and unreliable narrator, but
with a radical departure in subject matter. This
mild foray into magic realism disappointed many
readers who were loath to see him abandon his
trademark documentary realism; but the real
objection was to his blasphemous treatment of
the Easter Rising and the War of Independence,
modern Irelands nationalist founding myth. But
if Henry is an example of postmodern historiographical metafiction, it also continues Doyles
preoccupation with working-class history and
experience. Henry is Doyles most artfully ambitious work to date. Oh, Play That Thing (2004), its
successor and sequel, takes Henry to jazz age
America, where character and novelist get lost in
a new world that remains alien to both. Returning
to the home ground of his fiction, in the short
stories of The Deportees (2007) Doyle writes about
the new racial and ethnic communities Nigerian, Polish, Romanian, Russian living and working in Dublin, and in Paula Spencer he successfully
braids his longstanding class-based concern with
social inclusion with his new interest in issues of
race and ethnicity.
Doyles total body of work is the most influential by a writer of fiction to circulate in Irish civil
discourse over the past two decades. His writing
coheres around his abiding respect for the dignity
of the individual in the struggle to achieve individuation against all those forces, historical,
ideological, or religious, which attempt to coerce
the individual to accept the way things are or have
been as natural or the way they have to be.
Doyles fiction is the product of the compassionate imagination of one of contemporary Irelands
most important and talented witnesses.
SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Working-Class
Fiction (BIF)
99

Doyle, R. (1988). The Commitments. London:
Heinemann.
Doyle, R. (1990). The Snapper. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Doyle, R. (1991). The Van. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Doyle, R. (1993). Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Doyle, R. (1994). Family [screenplay]. BBC Television.
Doyle, R. (1996). The Woman Who Walked into Doors.
Doyle, R. (1999). A Star Called Henry, vol. 1 of The Last
Roundup. London: Jonathan Cape.
Doyle, R. (2002). Rory & Ita. London: Jonathan Cape.
Doyle, R. (2004). Oh, Play That Thing, vol. 2 of The Last
Roundup. London: Jonathan Cape.
Doyle, R. (2006). Paula Spencer. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Doyle, R. (2007). The Deportees and Other Stories.
Frears, S. (dir.) (1993). The Snapper. BBC Films/
Screen 2.
Frears, S. (dir.) (1996). The Van (screenplay by
R. Doyle). Ireland: Deadly Films/BBC Films/Fox
Searchlight.
McCarthy, D. (2003). Roddy Doyle: Raining on the
Parade. Dublin: Liffey.
Parker, A. (dir.) (1991). The Commitments (screenplay
by D. Clement, I. La Frenais, & R. Doyle). Beacon
Communications/First Film Company/Dirty Hands
Productions.
Wheeler, P., & Newman, J. (2004). An interview with
Roddy Doyle. In S. Monteith, J. Newman, & P.
Wheeler, Contemporary British and Irish Fiction:
An Introduction through Interviews. London:
Hodder and Stoughton, pp. 5470.
White, C. (2001). Reading Roddy Doyle. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press.
Drabble, Margaret
MARTINE WATSON BROWNLEY
Over a long and productive writing career dating from the early 1960s, Margaret Drabble has
been best known for novels that trace the lives of
her generation of educated women and the
different challenges that these women faced
as they matured. Drabble is a distinguished
contemporary woman of letters; in addition to
her 17 novels, she has also produced biography,
literary criticism and scholarship, journalistic
100
DRABBLE, MARGARET
commentary, and other fictional and non-fictional prose.

Born in Sheffield on June 5, 1939, Drabble was
the second daughter in a family of four children.
Her father was a barrister and then a judge, and
her mother an English teacher; the novelist A. S.
Byatt is her elder sister. Educated at The Mount,
a Quaker boarding and day school for girls in
York, she received a scholarship to Newnham
College, Cambridge, where she read English and
graduated in 1960 with a starred first. After
graduation she married and joined the Royal
Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon
with her husband, the actor Clive Swift. When
she became pregnant early in the marriage and
was unable to continue acting, she turned, in
frustration, to novel writing. With the success of
her early novels, she moved to London and
became a full-time writer while taking care of
their three children. Divorced in 1975 after 15
years of marriage to Swift, she married the
biographer Michael Holroyd in 1982.
Drabbles literary career began at a propitious
time for a novelist with her interests. Having
received her Cambridge degree in 1960, she left
acting for writing just as the second wave of the
womens movement was igniting. Since then, her
subjects have followed her own experiences and
her times. From her first novel, A Summer Bird
Cage (1963), Drabble has chronicled the lives of
educated women, mainly middle or upper middle
class (or those who aspired to be such). Beginning
in the 1960s with young university graduates
negotiating conflicts between marriage and career
aspirations and between personal autonomy and
family bonds, her protagonists have grown older
along with Drabble herself, and their problems
personal, familial, social, and political have
changed in accordance with their age and their
era. During the 1970s and 1980s her protagonists
settled into middle age. By 1996, with The Witch of
Exmoor, in which the titular character is a grandmother, she moved to chronicle the difficulties
and the pleasures of old age for women.
In addition to tracing the development of her
own generation of women over the course of
her career, Drabble gradually expanded the scope
of her primarily domestic early novels to address
central cultural, social, and political issues. At
the same time her literary technique changed to
incorporate more sophisticated manipulations of
points of view, and her characteristic humor

sharpened into a more biting irony. Crucial
to her movement in these directions were The
Waterfall (1969), the most formally experimental
novel she has written, and The Needles Eye (1972)
and The Realms of Gold (1975), which expanded
her geographical foci toward African concerns. The
Ice Age (1977) focused directly on the economic
and social disintegration Britain faced during the
mid-1970s. In The Radiant Way (1987) and A
Natural Curiosity (1989), the first two volumes of
a trilogy, she traced the lives of three middle-aged
women friends to present a sweeping panorama of
the English nation in the 1980s. The Gates of Ivory
(1991), which completed the trilogy, in many ways
remains the most ambitious novel Drabble has
produced so far. Although still anchored in
England, this work also employed Southeast Asian
settings to consider Pol Pot and the Cambodian
genocide. Aside from The Red Queen (2004),
which featured eighteenth-century Korean as well
as contemporary materials, Drabbles later novels
have used mainly English locales.
Whether Drabbles focus is the obstacles that
contemporary life presents to intelligent women
or the politics of a disintegrating national or
international order, she has always been a novelist
committed to exploring ideas. She explained in an
interview that, as a writer, she is not interested in
storytelling, but interested in stories as vehicles
for ideas (Kenyon 41). In several of her recent
novels, questions about evolution and natural
selection play a central role. Another constant in
her fiction has been class conflict, which she has
continued to examine from various perspectives.
Finally, she has focused on problems of freedom
and the ramifications of determinism, offering
sophisticated and nuanced analyses of what personal autonomy could actually mean for individuals, particularly, but not exclusively, women.
Traditionally, the works of women novelists
have tended to be overread as autobiography, but
in Drabbles case, interviews and other writings
have highlighted the centrality of autobiographical elements in her novels. Most obviously, her
Afterword to The Peppered Moth (2001) discusses
this work as a novel in which she is attempting to
come to terms with her mother, a difficult woman
who suffered from depression. Bad mothers and
ongoing conflicts between mothers and daughters
recur in Drabbles novels, as do depressives.
DRABBLE, MARGARET
Similarly, her novels often explore complicated

sororal and quasi-sororal relationships in ways
that directly and indirectly reflect the fraught
relationship she and her sister Byatt have maintained throughout their lives. Along with London,
the north of England, where she grew up, has been
a frequent setting for her fiction. A number of
commentators have connected the abiding concern with morality and social justice that marks
her works with the Nonconformist religious outlook characteristic of parts of the north as well as
with the Methodism of her mothers family.
Equally important influences on Drabble as
a novelist have been the tradition of English
literature. Her knowledge of this tradition is wide
and deep, and her novels are filled with allusions
to earlier and contemporary literature. In addition to biographies of Edwardian author Arnold
Bennett (1974a) and her older contemporary
Angus Wilson (1995), she has written about or
edited volumes on figures ranging from Jane
Austen (1974b) and William Wordsworth (1966)
to Thomas Hardy (1976). A Writers Britain: Landscape in Literature (1979) analyzed the importance
of setting to the tradition. Between 1980 and 1987,
she published no novels, instead concentrating for
part of that time on producing a new edition of the
Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985),
which received excellent reviews.
Drabbles early work garnered widespread
popular and critical acclaim relatively quickly.
Recognition of her achievements in various forms
increased during the 1970s, peaked during the
1980s, and declined afterward. Her early novels
received a number of awards, among them the
John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize (1966),
the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1968), and
the E. M. Forster Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters (1973). The bulk of
critical work on Drabble appeared in the 1970s
and the 1980s, with substantially fewer treatments
after those decades. She received her first honorary degree from the University of Sheffield in
1976. Subsequently, such honors for her
cluster in the late 1980s and into the mid1990s: University of Manchester, 1987; University
of Keele, 1988; University of Bradford, 1988;
University of Hull, 1992; University of East Anglia, 1994; University of York, 1995. In 1980 she
was named a Commander of the British Empire.
101
Drabbles first novels were welcomed with enthusiasmandexcitementbymanyyoungwomenof

her generation, especially peers who were delighted
to find novelistic treatments of experiences like their
own. They responded eagerly to Drabbles protagonists, who tended to be survivors who managed
to cope despite sometimes daunting circumstances
or hostile environments. Although these women
have remained faithful readers of Drabble as her
novels tracked the vagaries of mid-life and aging,
neither her early nor her later works seems to have
attracted as substantial an audience among younger
readers. Although some commentators have criticized her novels for being excessively journalistic,
because many of her works so successfully represent
the experiences of one particular generation in such
rich historical detail, they will almost certainly
remain important to social historians of this period.
Their potential for lasting literary impact remains
unclear at this point.
During the early years of Drabbles career,
much critical ink was spilled over her relationship
to feminism. Reluctant to be pigeonholed as
a womens novelist because of the subject matter of her first works, and initially hesitant to claim
feminism, she has now for a long time answered to
both. Critics have long recognized and lauded
Drabbles abilities in writing the novel of manners
as well as her penetrating psychological realism.
However, questions continue to be raised about
the effectiveness of some of her later novels, both
those in which she aims to offer contemporary
panoramas of English society and her rarer
fictional forays into larger cross-cultural concerns. Some find her primary strength to be in
the domestic and predominantly comic novel and
believe that her attempts in mid- and later career
to broaden her literary scope were misplaced.
Another major point of critical disagreement
concerns Drabbles relationships to modernist
and postmodernist fiction. Some critics see her
as a novelist centered in traditional social realism
and limited accordingly, while others find evidence of modernist experimentation in her work.
More recently, still others have analyzed her
intrusive narrators, her refusals of narrative
closure, and related elements in her work as
postmodern in both spirit and execution.
Interviews over many years have shown how
Drabbles literary, social, and political views have
102
DURRELL, LAWRENCE
evolved or changed. Her enormous capacity for

continuing growth and development has made
evaluations of her work date fairly quickly.
In literary assessments, for example, the critical
consensus that she was a novelist of maternity
crumbled as she moved on to chronicle the lives of
middle-aged and older women. Critical work on
her novels now spans almost half a century, and
although this body of work clearly reveals changes
in critical trends and fashions, accurate evaluation
of Drabbles artistic accomplishments remains
elusive.
SEE ALSO: Byatt, A. S. (BIF); Feminist
Fiction (BIF)
Drabble, M. (2004). The Red Queen: A Transcultural

Tragicomedy. London: Viking.
Kenyon, O. (1989). Margaret Drabble. In Women
Writers Talk. New York: Carroll and Graf, pp. 2552.
Myer, V. (1991). Margaret Drabble: A Readers Guide.
London: Vision.
Packer, J. (1988). Margaret Drabble: An Annotated
Bibliography. New York: Garland.
Rose, E. (ed.)(1985). Critical Essays on Margaret
Drabble. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Sadler, L. (1986). Margaret Drabble. Boston: Twayne.
Soule, G. (1998). Four Women Novelists. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow.
Durrell, Lawrence
JAMES GIFFORD
Creighton, J. (1985). Margaret Drabble. London:

Methuen.
Drabble, M. (1963). A Summer Bird Cage. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Drabble, M. (1966). Wordsworth. London: Evans.
Drabble, M. (1969). The Waterfall. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson.
Drabble, M. (1972). The Needles Eye. London:
Drabble, M. (1974a). Arnold Bennett: A Biography.
Drabble, M. (ed.)(1974b). Lady Susan; The Watsons;
Sanditon. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Drabble, M. (1975). The Realms of Gold. London:
Drabble, M. (ed.)(1976). The Genius of Thomas Hardy.
Drabble, M. (1977). The Ice Age. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson.
Drabble, M. (1979). A Writers Britain: Landscape in
Literature. London: Thames and Hudson.
Drabble, M. (ed.)(1985). The Oxford Companion to
English Literature, 5th edn. (6th edn. 2000) Oxford:
Drabble, M. (1987). The Radiant Way. London:
Drabble, M. (1989). A Natural Curiosity. London:
Penguin.
Drabble, M. (1991). The Gates of Ivory. London: Viking.
Drabble, M. (1995). Angus Wilson: A Biography.
Drabble, M. (1996). The Witch of Exmoor. London:
Viking.
Drabble, M. (2001). The Peppered Moth. London:
Viking.
Lawrence Durrell bridged high modernist and

postmodern fiction. His primary contribution to
twentieth-century writing is his lush and experimental prose, which works in tandem with
minimalist plots, carefully planned formal experimentation, and his revisions to the novel form.
He is unique in British fiction for his peculiar
position in between most major movements and
for a style that contradicted predominant aesthetic tastes yet was popular and celebrated.
While terse prose and realism dominated late
interbellum writing, Durrell produced lush and
surreal fiction, marking him as an early English
surrealist and one of the most successful. In
contrast to the surrealists, he immediately abandoned their communist ideology for anarchoindividualism, and his writing remained densely
allusive and highly crafted in the modernist tradition, in many ways akin to the work of Djuna
Barnes and Henry Miller. While he was often
criticized as apolitical, Durrells individualist
politics similar to Herbert Reads Politics of
the Unpolitical led to unique representations
of World War II. The war appears in relation to
the characters and location, rather than the reverse. George Orwell denounced this as a return
to the 20s (1937), meaning that such work failed
to respond to social circumstances. Nonetheless,
Orwells Keep the Aspidistra Flying appears to
borrow from the bohemian section of Durrells
Pied Piper of Lovers, and Durrell responded in his
second novel, Panic Spring (Gifford 2008a).
DURRELL, LAWRENCE
Durrells 16 novels are all set in exotic locations, ranging from India to the Mediterranean
and North Africa. Several others remain unpublished. Yet, he was not pandering to British
colonialist tastes. Nearly all locations in his works,
except Istanbul, are places where he had
extended residences. He integrates a darkly ironic
sense of empire, but his works are often
subjected to postcolonial critiques of imperialism
(Manzalaoui 1962).
Durrells fame peaked with his Alexandria
Quartet, four novels that stylistically rebut the
angry young men. He went on to Hollywood film
projects, which proved incompatible with his
experimental style. His later fiction became less
popular in proportion to its increasing social
critiques and experimental style. His Revolt of
Aphrodite (1974), a pair of science fiction novels,
uses a complex formal structure to critique a Big
Brother-like transnational corporation that
operates independent of politics and the state.
This work demonstrates Durrells admiration for
Orwells 1984 but also his sense of Orwells limitations for focusing on the nation state. Durrells
anarcho-individualism is akin to yet incompatible with the socialist stance Orwell took against
fascism, capitalism, and communism. Durrells
Avignon Quintet (1992), his last major work, uses
a highly complex structure and overtly postmodern aesthetics to integrate his interest in Eastern
philosophy and religion with the destruction
caused by World War II.
Durrell was born in India in 1912 and was sent
home to England in 1923 by parents who had
never been there. He left 12 years later, residing in
Britain infrequently, but served Britain in several
diplomatic capacities. Ubiquitously known as
a British colonial writer, Durrell fell foul of a
migrant law aimed at reducing immigration from
India and Pakistan in 1968, after which he could
not enter Britain without a visa (Ezard 2002). He
was a British non-patrial without the right
to enter or settle. Durrell lived primarily in the
Mediterranean from 1935 until his death in 1990.
Durrell began publishing poetry in 1931, and
his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers (1935),
recounts his Indian childhood and unwanted
relocation to England (Gifford 2008a). He moved
to the Greek island Kerkyra in 1935 and wrote his
next two novels, Panic Spring (1937) and The
Black Book (1938). The latter strongly influenced
103
English surrealism and was banned in Britain

and the United States. Richard Aldington,
D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Oscar
Wilde, and Henry Miller are alluded to heavily in
these first novels; Miller and Eliot praised The
Black Book exceptionally. Durrells lifelong
interest in and deep familiarity with Elizabethan
drama is also evident.
Durrell was in Greece during the German and
Italian invasions in World War II, initially on
Kerkyra, then in Athens as senior press officer to
the British Embassy, Kalamata as director of the
British Institute, and finally evacuated to Crete.
Much of his work involved producing anti-fascist
propaganda (Stephanides 2008). As with his friend
George Seferis, the Nobel Laureate in the Greek
government in exile, Durrell evacuated to Cairo
during the bombardment of Crete. He was senior
press officer during the war in Cairo and relocated
to Alexandria where he served the British Foreign
Office in intelligence and propaganda. There he
knew Olivia Manning, who housed his first wife in
Jerusalem when their marriage failed. In the postbellum period, Durrell rapidly returned to Greece
with the British Foreign Office on Rhodes during
the accretion of the Dodecanese islands to Greece.
He was then in Argentina during Perons first
term, in Yugoslavia under Tito, and on Cyprus
during Enosis, where he finished the preparatory
work for the Alexandria Quartet while working as
the director of public relations for the British
government. He fled Cyprus and abandoned his
home when he became a target of bombings. He
subsequently completed the four books of The
Alexandria Quartet between 1957 and 1960 after
settling in southern France in 1956.
In 1957, Durrells annus mirabilis, he published
Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet; White Eagles over Serbia, a spy thriller set in the
Balkans; Bitter Lemons, his semi-fictional life on
Cyprus; and his first collection of Antrobus stories, a satire of the British Foreign Office. These are
his most famous works, particularly Justine and
Bitter Lemons. The Quartet is set in the years
surrounding World War II in Egypt. Its style is
densely allusive, and the first three volumes repeat
the same scenes from different perspectives with
conflicting senses of truth; the fourth volume
temporally progresses but refuses to resolve the
multiple narratives. The Quartet aimed to redirect
the modern novel form by emphasizing spatial
104
DURRELL, LAWRENCE
and allusive structures, which disjointed the ordering impulse of stream of consciousness and psychologicaldevelopment.Aftersignificantrevisions,
the four books appeared in a final omnibus edition
in 1962. While its allusive and psychoanalytic contents are modernist, its narratological and formal
innovations are linked with postmodernism
(Herbrechter 1999; Skordili 2002). Postcolonial
work on the Quartet began immediately
(Manzalaoui 1962), and it was significant in early
gay and lesbian studies criticism (Boone 1989).
Durrells political context remains overlooked,
and most critical work assumes he was naive with
regard to indigenous cultures and supported
imperialism. Recent scholarship differs. Haag
2004 demonstrates that the Hosnani family in
the Quartet, part of Egypts Coptic minority,
strongly resembles the Jewish family of Durrells
third wife, Claude Vincedon (Menasce), an
Alexandrian Zionist who edited his novels while
writing her own comic novel of wartime Alexandria, The Rum Go, and a Zionist novel, A Chair for
the Prophet. The resemblances are strong with
regard to Zionist support for the creation of Israel,
and Whenever Chaim Weizmann, leader of the
World Zionist Organisation and the eventual first
president of Israel, visited Alexandria, he would
invariably stay at the home of Baron Felix de
Menasce (Haag 2004). This significantly impacts
postcolonial readings, although Durrell shifted
his Zionist sympathies after his wifes death in
1967. After Israels occupation of the West Bank,
Gaza, and Golan Heights in the same year, Durrell
abandoned his Zionist filmscripts and novel, and
did not resume such projects.
In 1968, Durrell published the first volume of
The Revolt of Aphrodite, his second major novel
series, although this was not well received. Like
Orwells 1984, it depicts a world-controlling
international firm that dominates national
governments and mass culture, commodifying
both. The novel series reflects Durrells early
anarcho-libertarian views in relation to Miller
and Herbert Read (Gifford 2008b).
In 1974, Durrell began his most ambitious
novel series, The Avignon Quintet, completing it
in 1985. Although the third volume, Constance,
was nominated for the Booker Prize, the series was
not received as well as his earlier works. The
writing was highly experimental for the time and
is demanding for the reader, during a period of
mainstream return to realism. Nonetheless,

the Quintet marks a major development in
postmodernism (Herbrechter 1999).
Durrell also wrote travel narratives, though
these are typically described as foreign residence
books. Bitter Lemons is the most famous, and
was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.
Despite its opening assertion that this is not
a political book, it is Durrells most political
travel work and was written after he fled Cyprus
and during the Suez crisis while living with
Claude Vincedon. Durrell is notably bitter about
British colonial policy in the book, but his
sympathy for the Turks, Greeks, and British
has made it difficult for any group to accept.
In tandem with Egyptian reactions to The
Alexandria Quartet, Bitter Lemons receives much
postcolonial critique. In both works, the tensions between irony, critique, and colonial bias
are debated and no satisfactory conclusion has
been reached in scholarship (Hitchens 1997
[1989] ).
Durrell was first influenced by the literary
milieu of London, but early trips to France shifted
his focus to European literature. He was also
active as a poet, particularly in the first half of
his career. He read widely and deeply in psychoanalysis, beginning in the early 1930s, which
influenced his plots, themes, and narrative structures (Skordili 2002).
In 1935, Durrell began a 45-year correspondence with the American writer, Henry Miller,
which led to significant interactions with the artists
in the Villa Seurat circle and surrealism. Durrell
developed strong ties with Greek modernists at the
same time and, after moving to southern France,
became active in French literary circles.
Durrells influence is broad. Anthony Burgesss
second wife Liliana Macellari translated Justine
into Italian in 1959, and mutual allusions appear
in their works. Similarly, Julio Cortazars first wife
Aurora Bernardez translated the Quartet into
Spanish while he wrote Rayuela, which incorporates passages from Durrell (Sligh 1998). A. S.
Byatt alludes to the Quartet in Possession, and
Kathy Acker quotes from it in her cut-and-paste
novel Don Quixote. William S. Burroughs also
praised the work at the 1962 International
Writers Conference and used it in his own
cut-up work. M. G. Vassanji borrows several of
Durrells character names in his novels and drew
DURRELL, LAWRENCE
the title for his No New Land (1991) from

Durrells translations of Cavafy. The influence of
Durrells late fiction is less clear, although
allusions to his Avignon Quintet are numerous.
Despite his unique political associations and heavy reliance on psychoanalytical and philosophical
thought, Durrells primary impacts on twentiethcentury literature remain stylistic and formal.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Miller, Henry
(AF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Orwell, George
(BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); World War II in
Fiction (BIF)
Boone, J. (1989). Mappings of Male Desire in Durrells
Alexandria Quartet. South Atlantic Quarterly,
88(1), 73106.
Chamberlin, B. (2007). A Chronology of the Life and
Times of Lawrence Durrell. Kerkyra: Durrell School
of Corfu.
Dasenbrock, R. W. (1987). Lawrence Durrell and the
Modes of Modernism. Twentieth-Century Fiction,
33(4), 515527.
Durrell, L. (1957). Bitter Lemons. London:
Faber and Faber.
Durrell, L. (1962). The Alexandria Quartet. London:
Faber and Faber.
Durrell, L. (1974). The Revolt of Aphrodite. London:
Faber and Faber.
Durrell, L. (1992). The Avignon Quintet. London:
Faber and Faber.
105
Ezard, J. (2002). Durrell Fell Foul of Migrant Law.

Guardian (Apr. 29). At www.guardian.co.uk/uk/
2002/apr/29/books.booksnews, accessed
Feb. 17, 2010.
Gifford, J. (2008a). Preface. In L. Durrell, Pied Piper
of Lovers. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, pp. viixvii.
Gifford, J. (2008b). Surrealisms Anglo-American
Afterlife. Nexus: The International Henry Miller
Journal, 5, 3664.
Haag, M. (2004). Alexandria: City of Memory.
London: Yale University Press.
Herbrechter, S. (1999). Lawrence Durrell,
Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Hitchens, C. (1997). Hostage to History [1989].
London: Verso.
MacNiven, I. (1998). Lawrence Durrell: A Biography.
Manzalaoui, M. (1962). The Curates Egg.
Etudes Anglaises, 15(3), 248260.
Orwell, G. (1937). Back to the Twenties. New English
Weekly, 12(2), 3031.
Pine, R. (1994). Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape. New
York: St. Martins.
Skordili, B. (2002).The Case of the Missing Green
Fingerstall. In C. Alexandre-Garner (ed.), Lawrence
Durrell Revisited. Nanterre: Universite Paris X,
pp. 155166.
Sligh, C. (1998). Reading the Divergent Weave: A Note
and Some Speculations on Durrell and Cortazar.
Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal, NS 6,
118132.
Stephanides, T. (2008). Autumn Gleanings (ed. R. Pine).
Kerkyra: Durrell School of Corfu.
E
Edwardian Fiction
RICHARD A. KAYE
Edwardian fiction remains one of the least critically explored and arguably the most contradictory of rubrics in the study of British literature.
Although the chronological expanse of the category could not be clearer, falling between the
death of Victoria in 1901 and the ascension to
the throne of King George V in 1910, the term
remains elusive. For many commentators Edwardian fiction is a murky interregnum between the
robust heyday of Victorian fiction and the golden
era of modernist innovation, a formally tame
holdover and depreciation of Victorian realist
values. Yet if one includes both realist and modernist texts, the range of achievement in British
fiction in the decade and a half of the twentieth
century is extraordinary, with early peaks represented by Joseph Conrads Lord Jim (1900), Henry
Jamess The Sacred Fount (1901), Rudyard
Kiplings Kim (1901), and Samuel Butlers The
Way of All Flesh (1903), the intervening years
studded by major writing by E. M. Forster and
May Sinclair as well as Galsworthys multivolume
Forsyte Saga, H. G. Wellss series of novels addressing sex and society, and Arnold Bennetts
Five Towns trilogy, then concluding with
Lawrences Sons and Lovers (1913) and if we
follow most literary historians who extend Edwardian fiction until World War I Virginia
Woolf s The Voyage Out (1915) and Ford Madox
Fords The Good Soldier (1915), the latter a selfconsciously metahistorical meditation on the
waning days of the perfect Edwardian idyll and
the first self-consciously Edwardian fictional

work. As if to signal the passing glory of rulingclass authority, this would be the last time in
which a royal name leant itself to a period of
British literature (although the post-Edwardian
term Georgian does identify a school of poetry).
But the shifts in the Edwardian era resonated
at a far deeper level than monarchal changes
in power, while the precise markers of
Edwardianism remain intangible. That a new
historical epoch had begun is suggested by Rebecca Wests comment on the mood in 1900
during the Second Boer War. We were an old
civilization, she reflected, but we had to start
again (72). With memorably precise imprecision, Woolf heralded an ending when she famously declared that on or around December 1910
human character changed, by which she may
have meant the death of King Edward (in which
case she was signaling the end of a historical
Edwardianism) or she may have been referencing
the 1910 opening of the first post-impressionist
exhibition in London (in which case, a distinct
beginning). As this likely allusion to the invasion
of advanced French painting hints, the radical
developments of the period were not confined to
Britain and were not only literary. Nor were such
changes only artistic. And, of course, all pivotal
change did not commence in 1910 in fact, it is
possible to date several crucial intellectual transformations back at least a decade. The year 1900
saw paradigm-shifting work by the philosopher
Bergson, the quantum-theory physicist Max
Planck, and the psychoanalyst Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams (1901) signaled an attempt

EDWARDIAN FICTION
at disseminating psychoanalytic ideas among a

broader reading public. Freuds insights dovetailed with and helped to shape much of the
increasingly psychological fiction of the era.
Einstein began publishing his mathematical
findings in the first years of the century. In much
of the fiction of the period, there is a new emphasis on psychological reality as determining daily
life. Gustav Klimt and Pablo Picasso radically
transformed painting in the centurys first decade,
in works that reflect the divide between realist and
modernist concerns so crucial in British fiction.
Indeed, Picassos early commitment to sentimental naturalism mirrored the techniques of such
novelists as Bennett, Forster, Sinclair, and Galsworthy, while his 1907 Les Demoiselles dAvignon
signaled a revolutionary turn into subjectivist
cubist aesthetics that served as an analogue to
modernist writing.
It is in part the radicalism of the arts throughout Europe in the first decade of the twentieth
century that has led many observers to accentuate
the tameness of Edwardian era fiction in the work
of novelists such as Bennett and Galsworthy. Most
critics have stressed Edwardian fictions earnestly
modest achievements, with Lascelles Abercrombie maintaining that writers of the period offered
a restrained continuation of fundamental realist
conventions but few innovations. For Richard
Ellmann, a key aspect of Edwardian fiction is a
secularist outlook that continues to echo with an
earlier eras religious perspective: The central
miracle for the Edwardians is the sudden alteration of the self (1567) while secular miracles
are evident in insistently invoked material symbols the silver in Conrads Nostromo, the golden
bowl that symbolically unifies Henry Jamess
novel, and even in the full view that actually
and metaphorically opens up for Lucy Honeychurch in Forsters A Room with a View (1908).
For Frank Kermode, the Edwardian stress on
conversion held significant global implications,
revealing a sense that one was entering a new age,
in which some transformation of the British
might be necessary if they were to maintain their
hitherto effortless superiority (36). Evident in
the English novel circa 1907, he contends, is an
increasingly felt need to abandon not only official morality but also cultural isolation (35).
From this perspective Kiplings Kim (1901),
with its white, Indian boy-hero who moves
107
chameleon-like through two cultures, is a paradigmatic text. Jane Eldridge Miller, meanwhile,
argues that in Edwardian fiction we can see the
social, legal, and political forces that prompt
forward-thinking novelists to abandon plots beginning in romance and ending in marriage for
narratives stressing marital discord, divorce, and
female independence. Other observers such as
Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, and David
Trotter, in their compendious Oxford Companion
to Edwardian Fiction (1997) accentuate a new,
benevolent focus on the lives of the suburban
middle class, a group flummoxed by urban life.
A central division in fiction of 190014 lies
between popular realist novelists such as Kipling,
Galsworthy, Sinclair, and Bennett, absorbed in
topicality, and high art experimenters such as
Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, James, and Joyce, with
their focus on the intricate inner lives of their
characters and the subjective nature of experience. Adding to this sense of divergent aspirations
in fiction, writers of modernist leanings were
appalled by the swelling audiences that hungered
for the detective stories, romance fiction, ghost
tales, and spy thrillers that gushed from publishers lists (although modernist writers also dabbled
in these supposedly low genres). The years
190010 witnessed an outpouring of bestsellers
by Marie Corelli, Conan Doyle (whose Sherlock
Holmes returns from the dead in 1905), Rider
Haggard, and the Baroness Orczy, whose Scarlet
Pimpernel (1905) became an enduringly popular
fictional account of a league of English gentlemen
who rescue aristocratic targets of the French
Revolution. Yet a stress on the tensions between
commercially successful realists and coteriedependent modernists simplifies the literary
topography of the period. The genre-crossing
Conrad wrote not only romances such as Lord
Jim and difficult modernist fiction such as Nostromo but Chance (1913) a novel that, with its
theme of female independence and its multiple
narrators, is arguably the work of the period that
most strenuously sought to merge Edwardian
and modernist preoccupations. Furthermore,
many novelists such as May Sinclair and Forster
saw themselves, if not as formal innovators, as
keenly cognizant and even supportive of their
more experimental modernist colleagues.
Sinclairs The Divine Fire (1904) dramatized the
rift between elitist art and mass-market demands
108
EDWARDIAN FICTION
with its tale of a London poet who refuses to

commercialize his classical verse for the marketplace. (The novel itself became a bestseller.)
The divide between the Edwardian realists and
modernist experimenters was never a simple opposition, as novelists of largely realist inclinations
drew on modernist techniques and acted as mediators for ideas basic to modernism. Bennett,
whose fiction Woolf criticized for its dated materialism, wrote appreciatively of Woolfs Jacobs
Room (1922), her first formally experimental
novel, as well as of Joyces Ulysses (1922). In
Rebecca Wests telling, Jamess The Wings of the
Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904) were
among the few novels that are on as aesthetic a
level as the worlds greatest poems, yet she was
unperturbed that the Masters novels were not
popular: They came to have their influence in
another way. They were read by most novelists
who had the ear of the general public (99100).
One common critical mistake is to see Edwardian fiction as fitfully aiming to evolve toward
modernist technique, its artistry at worst an exhausted Victorian doggedness and at best merely
semi-modernistic. Edwardian fiction was distinctive, rather, for the ways in which it registered a
variety of un- or anti-Victorian inventions, ideas,
and social attitudes encompassing all aspects of
Edwardian life, from the way individuals shopped
(the period witnessed the introduction of the
department store) to attitudes about the status
of women in the workforce, marriage, and divorce
(women in greater numbers now demanded the
vote and there was a rise in divorce cases). Even
formally conservative works of fiction were
searchingly absorbed in burning social issues. In
the Edwardian novel there is a recurring concern
with socially marginal groups, utopian political
causes, and more egalitarian social arrangements.
Many of the novels of the period were preoccupied with class conflict and cross-class romance
(Forsters Howards End, 1910), the venality of
capitalist overreaching (Conrads Nostromo,
1904), and marriage as a precarious or limited
institution, especially for women (evident in
hundreds of novels of the period). Although
Kipling and Conrad set their fictions in exotic
locales, even works of fiction set in the customary
Edwardian realm of the country house might
acknowledge a global reality. H. G. Wellss The
Passionate Friends (1913), part of a series of what
Wells called discussion novels dealing with

marriage, moved from a bucolic English countryside to the African veldt and Alpine glaciers in a
tale of a high-born gentlemans infatuation with a
politically engaged young woman.
Edwardian novels calibrated social, historical,
and political crisis in ways ignored or rendered
elliptical in such brilliantly difficult modernist
works as Nostromo or The Golden Bowl. Writers
such as Forster, Bennett, and Galsworthy demonstrated a devotion to sustaining realist conventions, bringing familiar narrative tactics to bear
on troubling social issues and to the predicaments
of marginal groups, from working-class clerks to
alienated artists. To be sure, this concern with
disenfranchised figures was not without elements
of reactionary skepticism. In Howards End, which
focuses on a fissure within Englands middle class
(between the culturally high-minded Schlegel
sisters contrasted with the crassly acquisitive
Wilcoxes), the desperate aspirations of the lowerclass bank clerk Leonard Bast cannot find
fulfillment. Even the twentieth centurys first
great working-class novel, Lawrences Sons and
Lovers (1913), with its meticulous attention to the
daily life of a Midlands family in a coalmining
town, subsumes the possibilities for working-class
solidarity under an absorption in the artistic
independence of its would-be sensualist protagonist Paul Morel. It is a fate that is mirrored in that
of Joyces proudly solitary Stephen at the conclusion of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1914), with his self-exaltation into silence, exile,
and cunning. Unlike their modernist colleagues,
Edwardian novelists fret that the socially marginal
cannot be absorbed, stabilized, or gentrified into
the middle class.
More explicitly than either Victorian or modernist writers, Edwardian novelists explored the
limitations of modern marriage and the concomitant aspirations of women for full social equality,
although, as Miller notes, when it came to
womens writing it was not so much the ideology
or institution of matrimony that was targeted as
particular marriages. A double standard is forcefully accentuated in Howards End when Margaret
Schlegel, distressed that her husband will not
allow her pregnant, unmarried sister to spend a
night at his country house, accuses him of hypocrisy: You have had a mistress I forgave you. My
sister has a lover you drive her from the house.
EDWARDIAN FICTION
Do you see the connection? (300). Adultery

moved center stage as a complicating topos for
fiction, signifying a social dilemma for Edwardian
writers and for modernists a vexing problem of
epistemology, of what can and cannot be known.
The betrayal of Jamess Isabel Archer, trapped in a
prison-like marriage to a sadist in The Portrait
of a Lady (1880), gives way to the difficult to
detect, twinned adulteries of The Golden Bowl, in
which adulterers are not melodramatic sinners
like Portraits diabolical Osmond but morally
nuanced schemers. Edwardian writers such as
Galsworthy and Bennett depicted divorce not
only as a personal misfortune but as a viable
solution. In Galsworthys The Country House
(1907), a mother strenuously seeks to engineer
the divorce of her sons mistress so as to allow for
the womans marriage to her son. More shockingly, his Man of Property (1906) depicted a rape
within marriage. Yet, in keeping with the premium Edwardian fiction placed on an unavoidable
social obligation, The Forsyte Saga refused to
sentimentalize the adulterous Irene, concentrating much of its sympathetic attention on the
baffled, rejected passion of her cuckolded
husband Soames.
Cognizant of these tensions in attitudes about
the status of women, many early twentiethcentury women writers articulated a second
wave of feminist concerns that continued the
new woman experiments of the 1890s in ways
that garnered new audiences. She read all things
that dealt with modern women, observes the
narrator of the heroine of Lawrences The White
Peacock (1985 [1911], 123). In Women and Labour
(1911), the South African feminist Olive Schreiner exhorts women to embrace new technologies
so as to liberate themselves into the workforce. In
fact, a rapidly increasing number of women were
entering industry, a topic that became a popular
theme in the fiction by Edwardian women novelists and a development that threatened a once
rigid gender divide. In Violet Hunts The Workaday Woman (1906), an independent female character is described by another as one of those
women who ought to be a man (3). Modernists
exploited this new blurring of gender roles.
Jamess The Sacred Fount (1901) is a first-person
account of intrigue during a country-house weekend told by a mysterious narrator whose sex is
almost undetectable.
109
Edwardian novelists also explored the thematics of sexual ambiguity. In Jamess fiction,
especially, one finds a new fascination with the
indefinite, keenly observing bachelor type
Strether of The Ambassadors (1903) chief among
them. The single gentleman, so evocative of
gothic homosexual anxiety at the fin de siecle in
the fiction of Stevenson and Wilde, becomes a
more socially viable figure in the Edwardian
period. For while the homosexually inflected
aesthetic and decadent movements were dissipated after the Wilde trials of the 1890s (Forster
spoofed the epigram-dispensing aesthete in the
figure of Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View),
homosexual concerns continued to claim a hold
on the British literary imagination. The socialist
and sexual visionary Edward Carpenter had an
indelible impact on the most remarkable work of
homosexual fiction to be written in the prewar
period, Forsters Maurice, completed in 1914 but
not published until shortly after the authors
death in 1971. When his college lover marries,
the novels hero becomes disgusted with the
betrayals and snobberies of his upper-class
milieu and chooses a working-class male lover.
The bachelor-narrator of Lawrences first novel,
The White Peacock (1911), Cyril Beardsall, described as like one of Aubrey Beardsleys long
lean ugly fellows, is a more sensual descendant
of the 1890s male aesthete (249). Cyril offers
descriptions of hawthorn buds tight and hard
as pearls and tender budded trees that
shuddered and moaned, and partakes of a
homoerotic swimming idyll with the novels
handsome hero (17).
A defining feature of Edwardian fiction is a
keen consciousness of historical transition and
trauma coupled with an ambivalent attitude toward new formal experiments in fiction. Perhaps
the two most representative figures of this outlook
are Forster and Sinclair, whose fictions are poised
between two epochs in literature. Like Bennett,
Forster was especially sensitive to the tensions
between a history-cognizant realism and the incipient experimentalism of modernist writers.
With the exception of A Passage to India
(1924), all of his fiction was composed before
World War I. The humanist faith and relatively
unexperimental formal designs that permeate his
novels, coupled with a hatred of English narrowmindedness and smug class loyalty, make him the
110
EDWARDIAN FICTION
quintessential Edwardian fiction writer. Although

he was a self-described Austenite, Forsters
fiction harbors experimental elements, usually in
disturbances of conventional expectations in
plot. The fifth chapter of his Cambridge novel
The Longest Journey begins with the sentence
Gerald died that afternoon (1962 [1907], 55)
a jarringly early death on a symbolically serene
Edwardian setting (a university playing field) of
what promised to be a decidedly central character.
Howards End begins with a marriage and ends with
the death of a would-be husband (Leonard Bast)
along with an out-of-wedlock birth of his and
Helen Schlegels child. That Forster was both bold
in his choice of subject matter and reliant on the
dated plot contrivances is apparent in the contradictory responses to Helens pregnancy. Edmund
Gosse complained that the book was sensational
and dirty and affected for introducing into
fiction a high-born maiden who has had a
baby (Charteris 323), while Katherine Mansfield
quipped that shecouldnever becertain if Helen had
been impregnated by Leonard Bast or his fatal
umbrella, adding that Forster never gets any
further than warming the teapot. See this teapot.
Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there aint going
to be no tea (81).
Like Forster, Sinclair was a novelist who occupied the literary terrain between a socially aware
(in her case, feminist) realism and the challenge of
modernist experimentation. The author of two
books on the Brontes, an admirer of T. S. Eliot
and Freud, Sinclair supported the suffrage struggle, although she later turned from political commitments to what she considered more total
dedication to literary vocation. (A highlight of
her career was her coining of the term stream of
consciousness in a consideration of new writing
in a review in The Egoist of Dorothy Richardsons
1918 modernist masterpiece Pilgrimage.) Her novels The Helpmate (1907), The Judgment of Eve,
and Kitty Tailleur (both 1908) all courted controversy with their questioning of marriage, a reflection of Sinclairs involvement in the womens
suffrage movement. Like Forster, whose postEdwardian, mystical A Passage to India is his most
formally ambitious work, Sinclairs greatest novel, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), appeared after the
war. As with Forster, her partial embrace of
modernist technique came after a protracted apprenticeship in modernism, particularly through
the work of Joyce, to whose Portrait of the Artist

this novel is often compared.
Both popular and avant garde novelists sought
to infuse new energy into one of the great modes
of the nineteenth-century fiction, the Bildungsroman, a tradition that accentuated the bruising
encounter between personal ideals and social
constraint. H. G. Wellss Tono-Bungay (1909) and
Bennetts Clayhanger (1910) were other notable
novels of education. Wells claimed his novel
followed on DickensThackeray lines, but
while its hero, George Ponderevo, achieves a
characteristically Victorian social rise (from
servant to pharmaceutical genius to battleship
builder), the novel reflects a typically Wellsian
absorption in science in the Einstein era. Bennetts
novel contained a vivid portrait of a young man
confronting an autocratic father whose philistine
values stymie his sons ambitions. The story is
echoed in Hilda Lessways (1911), the heroine of
which is Clayhangers future wife. Compton
MacKenzies Sinister Street (1913) is a similarly
double-gendered Bildungsroman focusing on a
brother and sister. Lawrences Sons and Lovers
and Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916) are novels of education featuring artists
whose conflicts with family and society push
them deeper into an isolation that is depicted as
essential for a searching male artist.
Other literary genres thrived. The theme of
filial rebellion and thwarted youth characterized
not only fiction (as in Butlers assertively antiVictorian The Way of All Flesh, 1903) but autobiographical works as well. Gosses Father and Son
(1907), a corrosively intimate autobiography,
detailed a childhood constricted by fanatical
evangelicalism. Some of the most impressive
achievements in Edwardian fiction lay in the area
of the short story, among them Joyces Dubliners
(1914) and Lawrences The Prussian Officer
(1914). Katherine Mansfields collection of stories
and sketches, In a German Pension (1911), satirized the habitues of a Bavarian watering-hole,
expressing anti-German antipathies that would
explode in the Great War, while the tales of Saki
(Hector Hugh Munro) brought an equally
malicious irony to short fiction. Max Beerbohm
almost single-handedly kept alive the comic novel
with Zuleika Dobson (1911), a satire of Oxford
men smitten with a beautiful temptress. The
Edwardian era was the great age of childrens
EDWARDIAN FICTION
literature, reflecting a burgeoning fascination

with childhood as a separate state, epitomized in
J. M. Barries Peter Pan; or, The Boy who Wouldnt
Grow Up (first staged in 1904), a fantasy of
unending youth that proved so alluring that the
poet Rupert Brooke reported attending the performance 12 times. Other highlights of childrens
literature included Kiplings Just So Stories (1902)
and Puck of Pooks Hill (1906), E. Nesbits The
Railway Children (1906), Kenneth Grahams The
Wind in the Willows (1908), and Frances Hogdson
Burnetts The Secret Garden (1911).
After the war, modernist critics targeted
the crude materialism of Edwardian fiction as
well as its failure to register the complex interiority of fictional subjects. In Woolfs influential
essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1923), the
term Edwardian was deployed derisively so as
to establish a viable modernist credo against
what she considered the excessively superficial
detail of novelists such as Bennett and Wells, who,
Woolf insisted, were so mired in an exhausted
realist tradition that they failed to see that human
character had fundamentally changed. Bennett
responded to Woolfs attack, although he
claimed he had never read what he called her
book on his writing. As Samuel Hynes has
observed, Bennett depicted his dispute with
Woolf in class terms, representing himself as an
unsophisticated writer who had been attacked by
the high-born Mrs. Woolf. Woolfs anti-Edwardian critique was echoed in Lawrences 1928
attack on Galsworthy, whose Man of Property
(1906) Lawrence had admired but whose
subsequent Forsyte volumes Lawrence skewered
as class-bound and nastily sentimental (1950,
2245).
Today, the word Edwardian suggests a brittle
grasp on reality, a fussily quaint faith in realism, a
refusal to surrender the Victorian past, trembling
uncertainty before enormous societal shifts, colonial adventure at the brink, and historical selfdelusion. Edwardianism conjures up cricket
matches on flawless summer afternoons, dancing
past midnight at the Ritz, and the discreet pleasures of Clubland, all accompanied by the selfconfidently nationalistic music of Edward Elgar.
In the unforgiving retrospective comprehension
of later generations, Edwardian writing evinces a
debilitating self-satisfaction, the pastoral preciosities of which are evoked in the last lines of Rupert
111
Brookes poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

(Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And
is there honey still for tea?), just as Brooke
summons up an image of iconically handsome
Edwardian youth bound for self-willed slaughter
in World War I. The title of a recent historical
account of the twentieth century by A. N. Wilson,
After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in
the World (2005), serves as a reminder that
Edwardians were the first generation to live in
the shadow of a towering era of British global
power, technological prowess, and literary splendor. At the same time, literary critics have elevated
the reputations of several Edwardian writers,
rehabilitating Sinclair, mostly forgotten at the
time of her death in 1946, as a serious novelist,
and exonerating Kipling of the charge of simplistic jingoism.
World War I shattered Edwardian certainties.
In Wests The Return of the Soldier (1918), the first
novel to depict shell-shock, an ex-combatant
suffers psychic paralysis and is unable to accept
the country-house world he left behind. A rural
manor is also the setting of Wellss 1916
Mr. Britling Sees It Through (a bestseller on both
sides of the Atlantic), amid honeysuckle and dog
rose as weekend visitors arrive for day-long hockey matches and night-long revelry. Late in the
evening, however, the celebrated writer Britling
lies awake and broods as Germany marches into
Belgium and the perfect English idyll tumultuously ends. Britling struggles to adjust his precarious, privileged perspective to the actualities of
war: He did not really believe with his eyes
and finger-tips and backbone that murder, and
destruction, and agony on a scale monstrous
beyond precedent were going on in the same
world as that which slumbered outside the black
ivy and silver shining window-sill that framed his
peaceful view (207). The country refuge that
had served as a living, undestroyed symbol of a
true England in Howards End the definitive
Edwardian symbol had now became an emblem of anti-pastoralism, the prison-house of an
upper class that cannot grasp a new world of
change, tragedy, and loss. Well before modernist
opinion cast its unforgiving retrospective glare,
Edwardian novelists themselves offered a searing
assessment of the too innocent, fragile world
they had inherited, shaped, and finally chose to
disavow.
112
EDWARDIAN FICTION
SEE ALSO: London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist

Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
Batchelor, J. (1982). The Edwardian Novelists. London:
Duckworth.
Bergonzi, B. (1973). The Turn of a Century: Essays on
Victorian and Modern English Literature. New York:
Barnes and Noble.
Bloom, H. (ed.) (2005). Edwardian and Georgian
Fiction. New York: Chelsea House.
Charteris, E. (1931). The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund
Gosse. London: Heinemann.
Ellmann, R. (1990). The Two Edwards [1959]. In A
Long the River Run. New York: Random House.
Forster, E. M. (1962). The Longest Journey [1907].
New York: Vintage.
Forster, E. M. (1975). Howards End [1910]. London:
Penguin.
Hunt, Violet. (1906). The Workaday Woman. London:
T. Werner Laurie.
Hunter, J. (1982). Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Hynes, S. (1967). The Edwardian Turn of Mind.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kemp, S., Mitchell, C., & Trotter, D. (1997). An Oxford
Companion to Edwardian Fiction. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Kermode, F. (1983). The English Novel, circa 1907. In
The Art of Telling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1950). John Galsworthy. In Selected
Essays. New York: Penguin.
Lawrence, D. H. (1985). The White Peacock [1911].
Mansfield, K. (2006). Journals. London: Persephone.
Miller, J. E. (1994). Rebel Women: Feminism,
Modernism and the Edwardian Novel. Chicago:
Trotter, D. (1993). The English Novel in History,
Wells, H. G. (1986). Mr. Britling Sees It Through [1911].
London: Hogarth.
West, R. (1986). 1900. New York: Crescent.
Wilson, A. N. (2005). After the Victorians: The Decline of
Britain in the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Woolf, V. (1923). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London:
Hogarth.
F
Fantasy Fiction
W. A. SENIOR
The fantasy novel necessarily violates one or more

principles of realism, generally through magic.
Its genesis in the nineteenth century arises from
a reaction against the tenets of the age of reason
and the mechanization of the industrial revolution, both of which combined to deny any
numinous view of the world and to threaten its
ecological health. The rise of fantasy in the mid
twentieth century, reflected in the success of J. R.
R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewiss
Chronicles of Narnia, is a continuation of this
reaction against a worldview based solely on
reason and science. More recently, the popularity
of Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials trilogy
(2001) testifies to a need for a view of life that
endows it with moral and organic significance.
J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter novels (19972007)
and films are credited not only with bringing
a new readership to fantasy but also with inspiring
a whole generation of readers.
In The Fantasy Literature of England Colin
Manlove argues that British fantasys primary
characteristics are its great diversity and the pleasure of making something new and remarkable
(1999, 191). The twentieth-century British and
Irish fantasy novel finds its roots in the earlier
literature, history, folklore, myths, and geography
of the British Isles as well as in the names of places
and people derived from Anglo-Saxon, Celtic,
Latin, and other languages and heritages. Central
to much British fantasy fiction is the Matter of
Britain: the collected legends and tales that deal
with the early history of Britain and different

branches of the Arthurian corpus. Medieval
romances, particularly Sir Thomas Malorys
Morte dArthur, provide such traditional elements
as the quest, the journey to a magic land where
time often runs more slowly than in the primary
world, the importance of landscape, and the
polysemous narrative, all of which are also strongly present in Edmund Spensers Faerie Queene
(15906). John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667) and
Paradise Regained (1671) created a massive Christian cosmogony from which later writers would
borrow. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the supernatural gothic works of Horace
Walpole, Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Maturin,
and others contributed further conventions to
modern fantasy. In the nineteenth century early
forms of modern fantasy penned by authors such
as Mary Shelley, William Morris, George MacDonald, and John Ruskin proved influential. In
the early twentieth century, works such as those by
the Decadent writer Edgar Jepson (18631938),
childrens fantasy by A. A. Milne (18821956), the
adventures of Allan Quatermain by H. Rider
Haggard (18561925), and Hope Mirrleess
Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) established a foundation
for British and Irish fantasy upon which others in
more recent decades have built.
The predominant twentieth-century fantasy
is the quest story, a stepped narrative in which
the hero or heroine, along with a group of
companions, goes on a journey of increasingly
dangerous and challenging adventures and
foes, culminating in a wasteland symbolic of
death. Many take place in a magical secondary

114
FANTASY FICTION
world while others are portal fantasies. The

monomythic protagonist is often a common
person, such as Dorothy in Frank Baums Oz
narratives, who must fulfill a larger purpose, often
adumbrated by an ancient prophecy, by making
crucial choices and acting within an ethical framework while undergoing a series of tests. During
a grueling voyage across an unfamiliar and vast
landscape, quest fantasy heroes acquire magical
talismans, guide figures, protectors, and unexpected aid or information as they approach
a malefic power, or dark lord. After the final
conflict, from which the protagonists emerge
triumphant, often with the help of their companions, they return home to their communities.
However, in addition to the quest structure many
other subgenres, such as sword and sorcery,
animal, humorous, posthumous, commodified,
and urban, expand the fantasy narrative (see Clute
& Grant 1999 and Stableford 2005).
Perhaps the first important fantasist of the
twentieth century is the prolific Irish writer Lord
Dunsany (Edward John Plunkett, 18781957),
whose early contributions to science fiction and
fantasy appear in five collections of short stories:
The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods
(1906), The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories
(1908), The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for
Sacnoth (1910), and A Dreamers Tales (1910).
Dunsany, who greatly influenced Tolkien and
Lewis, drew heavily on such nineteenth- century
writers as Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris,
George MacDonald, William Butler Yeats, and
Celtic mythology and folklore. Various scholars
argue that in Dunsanys work lie the foundations
of much modern fantasy: the development of
a highly articulated secondary world, a celebration of pastoral life, criticism of modern technology, an imaginative twist on the quest structure,
and an intimate attention to names, details, and
language. The King of Elflands Daughter (1924) is
a watershed event in the history of fantasy, and
other of Dunsanys novels (The Charwomans
Shadow, 1926; The Curse of the Wise Woman,
1933) continued to make innovations within the
genre.
J. R. R. Tolkien (18921973), the preeminent
fantasist of the twentieth century and a scholar of
medieval languages at Oxford, asserted two guiding principles behind the creation of his tales of
Middle-earth: the desire to create an English
mythology, and the desire to delve into this

mythology through philology since Tolkien
believed that words contain stories and
glimpses of lost peoples, times, and places. The
Silmarillion (1977) and the other volumes of
The History of Middle-earth relate the creation
of Middle-earth and its history, sourced in the
Finnish Kalevala, Norse mythology, Anglo-Saxon elegiac poetry, and various other medieval
texts. Middle-earth offers an expansive tapestry
of English geography from the pastoral Shire,
which resembles the bucolic west Midlands of
Tolkiens youth; to the great woodlands of the
Old Forest and Fangorn, reminiscent of British
primeval forests; to the wonder and call of
the sea, so central to the literature and life of
the island nations.
The Hobbit (1937), while a childrens book, is
a model secondary world quest fantasy which
offers the structural plan for Tolkiens epic The
Lord of the Rings (19545). Each has as its hero
a hobbit, a figure of the average person, and begins
in a peaceful and stable setting, the Shire. Bilbo
and Frodo must each leave home and pursue
a quest, which begins with the simplest of challenges and enemies and leads to others more
difficult and threatening. Each acquires a guide
(Gandalf), an alter ego (Gollum), and various
companions; and each makes difficult choices
that will affect the fate of all involved. Most
significantly, both Bilbo and Frodo fail in their
attempts to fulfill their quests. Major tensions
explored in these narratives include knowledge
versus ignorance, activity versus passivity, generosity versus greed, the communitarian spirit
versus self-gratification and isolation, courage
versus cowardice, and individualism versus
corporate facelessness.
Much the same could be said of C. S. Lewis
(18981963), Tolkiens friend and fellow member
of the Inklings, an Oxford literary group that also
included Charles Williams and Owen Barfield.
Where Tolkien drew mainly from myth and
language, Lewis is one of the great Christian
apologists of modern fantasy. Best known for the
portal fantasies that make up the Chronicles of
Narnia and the Ransom trilogy, a science-fantasy
amalgam, Lewis, like Tolkien, was an important
scholar, the author of such studies on medieval
and Renaissance literature as The Allegory of Love
(1936) and The Discarded Image (1964).
FANTASY FICTION
The center of Lewiss Narnia is Aslan the lion,

a wisdom and Christ figure that links the various
novels in the series and that provides the denouement of most of the novels. The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe (1950) establishes the model
for the adventures that follow. World War II has
begun, and the four Pevensie children are evacuated from London to escape the Blitz. In the old
country house where they are sheltering, they fall
through a portal in a wardrobe to Narnia, which is
besieged by a seemingly endless winter caused by
the White Witch. Thus, the disturbance afflicting
the primary world is mirrored in a symbolic
fashion in the secondary one. The children begin
a quest through a magical fantasyscape to help
their friends and to end the unnatural winter.
During their travels, they acquire guides, gifts of
magical objects, and knowledge as they meet with
an array of magical and mythical creatures: talking animals, dwarves, tree nymphs, and even
Father Christmas. Edmund, the younger boy, falls
prey to the White Witch and must be rescued by
Aslan, who sacrifices himself but is resurrected
according to an ancient prophecy. In the final
battle, he reappears to turn the tide and leave
Narnia to heal under the rule of the Pevensies.
After many years, they stumble back into the
wardrobe to find that almost no time has passed
and that they are children once again in their own
world.
Prince Caspian (1951) takes place a year later in
the primary world but centuries later in the
secondary, reflecting the fantasy convention that
time runs at a different pace in the secondary
world, and the Pevensies must help Caspian
recapture the prosperity of their past rule. Aslan
reappears to guide the heroes but becomes a more
elusive and mystical character. The other five
books in the series (The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy,
The Magicians Nephew, The Last Battle) introduce other children from the primary world who
pursue their own quests as Lewis explores the
greater geography and history of Narnia.
Another variation in the fantasy novel comes
from Mervyn Peake (191168) in the Gormenghast Trilogy of Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast
(1950), and Titus Alone (1959), which lacks any
actual magic and takes place in a world tangential
to ours. Peake, an important illustrator of such
works as Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island,
115
spent part of his childhood in China, and biographers have noted the influence of the walled
city of Peking in Gormenghast, the massive labyrinthine castle. Although populated by a lengthy
list of dramatis personae, all linked closely to
Gormenghast, the trilogys primary focus on
description, not on sequential action, reflects
Peakes fascination with visual depictions of place
as its protagonist, Titus Groan, struggles to establish his rule. While it contains elements of gothic
conflict and the quest/exile story, the narrative is
often difficult to follow, inconsistent, and often
allusively allegorical (names such as Sourdust,
Sepulchrave, Flay, and Swelter predominate),
even if it is an imaginative tour-de-force compounded of the sublime, the surreal, and the
exotic.
Another contemporary of Tolkien and Lewis
was T. H. White (190664), whose Once and
Future King (1958) retells Malorys Morte
dArthur and is the basis of the musical and film
Camelot (1967). The book has a convoluted
publication history but is composed of three
earlier works written over the previous two decades: The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen
of Air and Darkness/The Witch in the Wood (1939),
The Ill-Made Knight (1940), and The Candle in the
Wind (1958); there is also another conclusion,
The Book of Merlyn (1977), published posthumously. The first book recounts the education
of Arthur, called Wart, under the tutelage of
Merlin, who is aging backwards toward infancy,
and concerns Warts transformation into various
animals and the lessons he learns about
people and power. The second book introduces
Arthur as king and many of the conflicts within
the Arthurian canon with Morgause and Mordred, the Knights of Orkney, and the sundering of
the Round Table. The third recounts Whites
version of the LancelotGuenevere tale. The Candle in the Wind concludes with Arthur, now weary
of war and its destruction, preparing for the final
battle of Camlann, though the text does not relate
the battle or its aftermath.
An Irish fantasy fictionist of note, Morgan
Llywelyn (b. 1937), who wrote more than 30
novels, began primarily as a historical novelist.
It was only in the 1990s that she started to write in
a fantasy vein for children and young adults. In
Celtic fantasies such as The Horse Goddess (1983),
The Isles of the Blest (1989), Finn Mac Cool (1994),
116
FANTASY FICTION
and Red Branch (1989), Llywelyn retells the stories

in The Mabinogion by mixing history and Celtic
myth and featuring figures such as Brian Boru,
Cuchulain, Grania, druids, and Viking warriors.
Similarly, Susan Cooper (b. 1935) re-envisions
the Arthurian tale through a Celtic prism in The
Dark is Rising sequence: Over Sea, Under Stone
(1965), The Dark is Rising (1973), Greenwitch
(1974), The Grey King (1975), and Silver on the
Tree (1977).
Other prominent fantasy writers have injected
humor into their novels. Diana Wynne Joness
(b. 1934) output cannot be categorized except by
its experimental and whimsical nature. The Dalemark Quartet is a conventional quest fantasy; the
Chrestomanci sequence, however, takes place in
nineteenth-century England and a world parallel
to it. The two novel series Howls Moving Castle
(1986) and Castle in the Air (1990) play with the
standards of the portal fantasy while Archers
Goon (1984) might be considered a hybrid
science-fantasy. Another humorous fantasist is
Terry Pratchett (b. 1948), whose Discworld series
begins with The Colour of Magic (1983) and The
Light Fantastic (1986) and encompasses more
than 25 titles that satirize and undercut the standard elements of quest and sword and sorcery
fantasy.
The darker side of fantasy appears in the Elric of
Melnibone series of Michael Moorcock (b. 1939),
a massively prolix writer associated with the rise
of New Wave science fiction in the 1960s and the
editor of the British science fiction magazine New
Worlds. Moorcock here revises the tenets of sword
and sorcery fantasy: instead of being a decent
average person, the protagonist Elric is a weak
and tortured albino who is dominated by his
magical sword, Stormbringer (which drinks the
souls of those it slays), and who is unable to
remain anything but an untrustworthy loner.
Elric becomes the model for similarly conflicted
heroes such as Corum, Hawkmoon, and Von Bek
in Moorcocks multiverse.
Another grim voice comes from Robert Holdstock (19482009), who earned an MSc in medical zoology and whose most renowned work, the
Mythago Cycle consisting of Mythago Wood
(1984), Lavondyss (1988), The Hollowing (1993),
and Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997) is
informed by the magical properties of the English
heartwood. In Ryhope Wood the past lives
through the creation of myth-imagoes generated

by the collective unconscious of those who can
find their way into the wood. Mythago Wood
introduces Steven Huxley, who has just returned
home from World War II. Gradually he becomes
entranced by the wood and begins to explore it as
he searches for Guiwenneth, a mythago he has
raised. As he passes through portals within the
wood, he encounters a savage world peopled with
beings from English prehistory and history: Neolithic tribes, Saxon peasants, Norman knights,
Robin Hood figures, and traditional nature figures. Ryhope is a mindscape, limited physically to
a square mile, but within its mythic borders
without physical bounds.
As the twenty-first century begins, authors such
as Neal Gaiman (b. 1960) and Susannah Clarke
(b. 1961) look back to older models and works to
write transformative fantasies, while others such
as China Mieville (b. 1972) and the New Weird
movement open new venues and worlds for readers of fantasy fiction.
SEE ALSO: Childrens and Young Adult
Fiction (BIF); Childrens and Young Adult
Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and
Speculative Fiction (WF); Science Fiction (BIF);
Speculative Fiction (AF)
Attebery, B. (1992). Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1981). The Rhetoric of the Unreal:
Studies in Narrative and Structure, especially of
the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Clute, J., & Grant, J. (eds.), (1999). The Encyclopedia of
Fantasy, 2nd edn. London: Orbit.
Dunsany, Lord A. (1905). The Gods of Pegana. London:
Elkin Matthews.
Dunsany, Lord A. (1924). The King of Elflands
Daughter. London: Putnams.
Holdstock, R. (1984). Mythago Wood. London:
Gollancz.
Hume, K. (1984). Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to
Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen.
Irwin, W. R. (1975). The Game of the Impossible.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Jackson, R. (1981). Fantasy: The Literature of
Subversion. New York: Methuen.
Jones, D. W. (1986). Howls Moving Castle. New York:
Methuen.
FARRELL, J. G.
Jones, D. W. (2006). The Tough Guide to Fantasyland:

The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel [1996], rev. edn.
London: Puffin.
Lewis, C. S. (1998). The Chronicles of Narnia. London:
Collins.
Llywelyn, M. (1983). The Horse Goddess. London:
Macdonald.
Manlove, C. N. (1975). Modern Fantasy: Five Studies.
Manlove, C. N. (1983). The Impulse of
Fantasy Literature. Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press.
Manlove, C. N. (1999). The Fantasy Literature of
England. New York: St. Martins.
Mendlesohn, F. (2008). Rhetorics of Fantasy.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Moorcock, M. (1972). Elric of Melnibone. London:
Hutchinson.
Moorcock, M. (1987). Wizardry and Wild Romance:
A Study of Epic Fantasy. London: Gollancz.
Peake, M. (1946). Titus Groan. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Peake, M. (1950). Gormenghast. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Peake, M. (1959). Titus Alone. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Pratchett, T. (1983). The Colour of Magic. Gerrards
Cross: Smythe.
Prickett, S. (2005). Victorian Fantasy, 2nd edn. Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press.
Pullman, P. (2001). His Dark Materials Trilogy
[19952000]. London: Scholastic.
Rabkin, E. (1976). The Fantastic in Literature.
Schlobin, R. (ed.), (1982). The Aesthetics of Fantasy
Literature and Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press.
Stableford, B. (2005). Historical Dictionary of Fantasy
Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.
Swinfen, A. (1984). The Defence of Fantasy. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Todorov, T. (1973). The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre (trans. R. Howard).
Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve
University.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937). The Hobbit. London: Allen
and Unwin.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1965). The Lord of the Rings. 3 vols.
New York: Ballantine.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1966). On Fairy Stories. In The Tolkien
Reader. New York: Ballantine, pp. 3399.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1977). The Silmarillion. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
White, T. H. (1958). The Once and Future King.
London: Collins.
117
Yolen, J. (1981). Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie, and

Folklore in the Literature of Childhood. New York:
Philomel.
Farrell, J. G.
RALPH CRANE
James Gordon Farrell was born in Liverpool,

England on January 25, 1935, and grew up in
Lancashire and Ireland. He began writing at an
early age, contributing to the school magazine
while at Rossall School in Lancashire, and the
Oxford Opinion as an undergraduate at Brasenose
College, Oxford.
In 1963 Farrells first novel, A Man from Elsewhere, was published by New Authors, an imprint
of the Hutchinson Group, to generally favorable
reviews. Set in the summer of 1961, the book
portrays the intellectual disillusionment of the
postwar communist journalist Sayer, sent on
a mission to discredit the elderly and dying Regan,
a famous writer who had previously defected from
the Communist Party. Although Farrell later disowned this book, which has strong echoes of
Camus and Sartre, it is a good first novel, deserving of critical attention in its own right, as well as
in the context of Farrells larger oeuvre. His
second novel, The Lung (1965), published two
years later, is a Beckettian black comedy which
draws on Farrells own experiences in an iron
lung. The failed hero of the novel, Martin Sands,
temporarily confined by polio to a hospital, confronts the misunderstandings of his past, lost
opportunities, and the question of his own sanity.
On the strength of his first two novels Farrell was
awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1966 and spent
the next two years in New York.
Farrells third novel, A Girl in the Head (1967) is
an under-appreciated masterpiece . . . at least the
equal of the magnificent fiction which came after
it (Ackerley 26). It recounts the bizarre adventures of Boris Slattery during one summer as he
wanders around Maidenhair Bay, musing on the
past and the apparently random contingencies
that caused him to alight from a train in this
seaside town many years earlier.
In the fiction that followed A Girl in the Head
Farrell moved away from the contemporary
118
FARRELL, J. G.
settings of his first three novels to the past and to

a historical form of the novel he would make his
own. Troubles (1970), which won the Geoffrey
Faber Memorial Prize, The Siege of Krishnapur
(1973), which won the Booker Prize, and The
Singapore Grip (1980) commonly referred to as
Farrells Empire Trilogy are the novels that
brought him commercial success in the 1970s and
the works on which his critical reputation has
largely rested since. Each is concerned with
a particular moment in the decline of the British
Empire the Irish Civil War of 191921, the
Indian Mutiny of 1857, and the fall of Singapore
to the Japanese in 1942 and explores the effects
of those events on the characters who are caught
up in the course of history.
Troubles tells the tragicomic tale of Major
Brendan Archers extended visit to the decaying
Majestic Hotel after World War I where, having
traveled to Ireland in order to claim his bride,
Angela, he finds himself caught up in the Irish
struggle for independence and a witness to the
collapse of British rule in Ireland. In The Siege of
Krishnapur Farrell turned to another significant
moment in the decline of the British Empire,
which chronologically precedes Troubles. The
action of this novel, set during the Indian Mutiny of 18578, takes place in the fictitious town
of Krishnapur where a group of British administrators, members of the local military garrison,
and their families, are besieged in the Residency
compound. Under the command of the Collector, Mr. Hopkins, they hold out for three
months against repeated sepoy attacks before
a relief force arrives to rescue them. Farrell
shows that while the British may have survived
this particular skirmish, they have already begun
to lose the ideological war that would continue
for almost a century, before being brought to a
sharp conclusion by the fall of Singapore in
1942. In The Singapore Grip, through the concerns of Matthew Webb, who arrives in Singapore having inherited his fathers business interests, and the Major (from Troubles, who returns
as a minor character in this novel), considerable
emphasis is placed on the way Blackett and
Webb Ltd. treat their native workforce, and.
more generally, the way the colonial enterprise
exploits its colonies. In this final novel of his
Empire Trilogy, the naive zeal that had characterized the representatives of the Empire in The
Siege of Krishnapur and Troubles gives way to the

ruthless economic exploitation of businessmen
like Walter Blackett, who, unlike the Collector
or the Major, are immune to the suffering of the
colonized.
Farrell accidentally drowned in 1979, at the age
of 44, while fishing off rocks near the home he had
recently bought on the Sheeps Head peninsula on
Irelands west coast. He left an unfinished novel,
which was prepared for publication under the title
The Hill Station (1981) by his friend John Spurling. Though evidently sketched on a smaller scale
than the three volumes of his Empire Trilogy,
this novel, set in Simla, the summer capital of the
British Raj, in 1871, would undoubtedly have
brought fresh dimensions to Farrells treatment
of Empire. Instead, Farrells early death robbed
contemporary fiction of one of its most promising
novelists.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Historical
Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF)

Ackerley, C. (1999). A Fox in the Dongeon: The
Presence of Malcolm Lowry in the Early
Fiction of J. G. Farrell. In R. J. Crane (ed.), J. G.
Farrell: The Critical Grip. Dublin: Four Courts,
pp. 1935.
Binns, R. (1986). J. G. Farrell. London: Methuen.
Crane, R. J. (ed.) (1999). J. G. Farrell: The Critical Grip.
Dublin: Four Courts.
Crane, R. J., & Livett, J. (1997). Troubled Pleasures: The
Fiction of J. G. Farrell. Dublin: Four Courts.
Farrell, J. G. (1963). A Man from Elsewhere. London:
New Authors.
Farrell, J. G. (1965). The Lung. London: Hutchinson.
Farrell, J. G. (1967). A Girl in the Head. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Farrell, J. G. (1970). Troubles. London: Jonathan Cape.
Farrell, J. G. (1973). The Siege of Krishnapur. London:
Farrell, J. G. (1978). The Singapore Grip. London:
Farrell, J. G. (1981). The Hill Station: An Unfinished
Novel and an Indian Diary, with two appreciations
and a personal memoir (ed. J. Spurling). London:
Greacen, L. (1999). J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer.
London: Bloomsbury.
McLeod, J. (2007). J. G. Farrell. Tavistock: Northcote
House.
FEMINIST FICTION
Morahan, C. (dir.) (1988). Troubles. London Weekend

Television.
Prusse, M. C. (1997). Tommorrow is Another Day: The
Fictions of James Gordon Farrell. T
ubingen: Francke.
Feminist Fiction
IMELDA WHELEHAN
The term feminist fiction is extremely difficult

to delimit or define. It can mean the work of
a woman writer who identifies herself and her
work as feminist; it can refer to fiction that
directly challenges the social and political status
quo, particularly as it affects womens access to
opportunity. Equally, it can be a term applied
to work by a writer who either does not declare her
politics or denies her feminist credentials, but is
read by critics to be feminist in intention, either
at the time of publication or retrospectively.
Feminist fiction is associated primarily with the
emergence of the second wave of feminism (or
womens liberation movement) in the mid-1960s,
when the term was used with critical approbation;
while not used extensively in the earlier part of the
twentieth century, the term also applies to earlier
writers, especially those aligned with the suffrage
and other left-leaning political movements, which
were producing work that could be seen to be
politically aligned with the struggle for womens
rights and for equal access for women to education and the professions.
The notion that literature is inherently political is carried through into second-wave thinking,
and critics such as Judith Fetterley, in The Resisting Reader (1978), insist upon this. Although
Fetterleys text is largely about reading maleauthored texts against the grain, the model of
reading as a political act transfers to criticism
itself so that the feminist critic becomes deeply
self-conscious about her place in the academy
and very much aware of her responsibility to read
and write about womens writing from discovering neglected classics of previous centuries to
providing a model with which to analyze contemporary literature. From this perspective feminist fiction can be regarded as being in the eye
of the beholder the critic or general reader
rather than being defined by the specific intentions of the author.
119
The most famous British feminist writer of the

first half of the twentieth century is undoubtedly
Virginia Woolf. Her most overt feminist statements on the social and moral position of women
are to be found not in her fiction, however, but in
her essays, A Room of Ones Own (1929), a series of
lectures she delivered to female students at Girton
College, Cambridge, and Three Guineas (1938).
At the heart of A Room of Ones Own is the
argument that women must have money and
a room of their own if they are to write at all;
this materialist analysis of the process of creativity
insists that whether or not one can write is
a political matter as much as it is about talent
or creative drive. Further, Woolfs description
of both the literal and metaphorical exclusion of
women from seats of learning comprises an early
critique of the ways in which ideologies of male
dominance and privilege operate to reinforce
perceptions that women make lesser writers. Anticipating the work of later critics such as Mary
Ellmann, she identifies the ways in which women
writers work is often denigrated as trivial or
narrow in scope because it often focuses on the
domestic and personal. Looked at another way,
given the history of social and ideological constraints upon women, the association of womens
writing in particular with the domestic and with
personal relationships is entirely logical and inevitable. From this perspective, feminist critics
examined the positive and political impact of
women writers scrutiny of the domestic, married,
and family life.
Rebecca West, Woolfs contemporary and the
author of the novel The Return of the Soldier
(1918), identified with the staunchly feminist
voice in A Room of Ones Own. West, herself
a contributor to the feminist weekly The Freewoman (191112), was profoundly influenced by
the suffrage movement; other writers in this camp
include Vera Brittain, a novelist and activist,
perhaps best known for her memoir Testament
of Youth (1933), and Winifred Holtby. Other
writers of the period, among them Storm Jameson, were passionately socialist and pacifist in
their politics, and their work was profoundly
affected by their generations experience of World
War I.
Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness (1928)
was radical in its assertion of the biological origins
of lesbian sexuality, and the novel was a plea for
120
FEMINIST FICTION
acceptance of the invert, a categorization of the

homosexual designated in the sexology of KrafftEbing, which Hall embraces in order to portray
Stephen Gordon, her central character, as essentially a male soul trapped inside a womans body,
who is given masculine physical characteristics
and desires for feminine women, rather than
inverts like herself. Although neither a radical
nor a political text in other ways, the book was
prosecuted for obscenity in its year of publication,
a ban that lasted for 20 years in Britain. A landmark lesbian text, though rarely studied now, it
contributed to a significant lesbian tradition in
British writing.
Virginia Woolf had a profound impact on the
development of feminist criticism, and on the
direction of feminist fiction in the twentieth
century. By the time feminisms second wave had
begun to filter into the academy, critics recognized that womens writing was still deemed to be
generally of lesser aesthetic quality and as having
a narrower, more parochial focus than mens
writing, and this encouraged the tendency to
engage with womens writing in its own terms,
as a category in its own right. Womens fiction
courses increased in popularity at universities and
authors were correspondingly given more critical
attention than they might have received in broader contemporary fiction courses, with a number
of positive effects, including the identification of
recurring tendencies and themes in writing by
women, which prompted a swell in critical monographs and anthologies devoted to such topics. In
the 1970s and 1980s, establishing such courses
and generating feminist readings was regarded as
a political act in itself, a redressing of perceived
patriarchal imbalances in the study of English
literature in the academy. Feminist presses, such
as Virago (established in 1973) and the Womens
Press (established in 1978) provided rich pickings
for such study; and while their feminist intentions
did not guarantee those of the author, the practice
of feminist criticism became more sophisticated
and influential in the context of literary studies as
a whole.
Angela Carter is an example of one writer who
began her career just before the rise of feminist
politics in the UK, but who seemed to be nourished by this wave of activism. Always happy to
acknowledge the politics implicit in her fiction,
Carter viewed her challenge as to communicate
her feminism in such a way as not to compromise

her creative energies. Carters strategies of appropriation, subversion, and narrative experimentalism have been revealed to be particularly effective
and provocative a famous example is her
rewriting of popular fairy tales in The Bloody
Chamber (1979a). Carter was in some ways ahead
of her time, particularly in her deployment of
devices associated with magical realism, a form
that had not been much in evidence in AngloAmerican writing at the time.
Carter is also a useful exemplar of the conflicts
and pitfalls in dubbing any writer a feminist
writer, in that her book The Sadeian Woman
(1979b), which explores the erotics of Sades work
in an attempt to appropriate positive sexual
expression for women, landed her at the center
of heated pornography debates during the 1980s
on both sides of the Atlantic. Some feminist
commentators of the time saw her work as
a betrayal of feminism, particularly in its portrayal
of violence against women, despite her own
political and ideological declarations.
The anthology Tales I Tell My Mother (1978),
by Zoe Fairbairns, Sara Maitland, Valerie Miner,
Michele Roberts, and Michelene Wandor, was
a project dedicated to producing feminist short
stories that grew out of their own writing collective and is an example of one way feminist strategies are used to creative as well as political ends.
Michele Roberts, who began her writing career
with the publication of the novel A Piece of the
Night (1978), is an author whose feminism comes
through the pages of her books as she explores
images of sisterhood, sexuality, domesticity, and
religion. More recently she has offered her own
ironic intervention into the genre of chicklit in
Reader, I Married Him (2005). Pat Barker, who
began her writing career at around the same time
as Roberts, was encouraged by Angela Carter to
write fiction; and while she is best known for her
Regeneration trilogy (and won a Booker Prize for
the final novel in the series, The Ghost Road,
1995), her early novels were gritty socialist-realist
accounts of womens lives set in an urban northern English landscape. Union Street (1982) is
a series of connecting stories rather than a novel
per se, covering womens experiences from rape
and childbirth to prostitution, illness, and
death across the ages; women in this work are
portrayed as trapped within their bodies and
FEMINIST FICTION
within a patriarchal system that assigns them the

role of care-giver in an environment where material means of support are always unstable and
irregular.
Other women writers feared that the category
of woman or feminist writer would pigeonhole or
even ghettoize them. Doris Lessing is a notable
example of a novelist who disliked the retrospective association of her Golden Notebook (1962)
with feminism; other important writers such as
Iris Murdoch also disavowed feminism, even
though in her case her admiration for Simone de
Beauvoir rendered her disavowal questionable.
Fay Weldons early work showed a marked engagement with the themes of early second-wave
feminism and yet she has often been quoted in the
broadsheet press as being critical of feminism;
novels such as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
(1983) both challenge and recreate the ideal feminine form in Ruths attempt to refashion herself
in the likeness of her husbands lover. Big Women
(1997) is in part a roman-a-clef: its description of
the rise of the feminist publishing house Medusa
has clear links with the history of the Virago Press.
The experience of otherness or displacement in
Britain and Ireland is recorded by many writers of
diverse ethnicities and backgrounds. Irish writer
Edna OBriens first novel The Country Girls
(1960) described the struggles during the 1950s
of two rural Irish girls who, after a spell in
a convent boarding school, end up in Dublin
eager to experience life. Its sexually charged content and irreverence toward the Roman Catholic
Church was enough to get it, and the subsequent
two books in the trilogy, banned, and even burnt,
in 1960s Ireland. Buchi Emechetas work seems to
echo her own experiences as a Nigerian woman
bringing up a large family on an estate in urban
Britain, particularly in her semi-autobiographical
In the Ditch (1972). Suniti Namjoshis Feminist
Fables (1981) offers a feminist fusion of tales from
numerous cultural sources, while her Conversations of Cow (1985), in a magic-realist vein, details
the travels of an Indian lesbian named Suniti and
a Brahmini lesbian cow. Joan Rileys The Unbelonging (1985) is a starkly realist novel that
details fatherdaughter incest when an 11-yearold girl is transported from Kingston, Jamaica to
live with a parent she barely knows. Comedian,
actor, and writer Meera Syals first novel, Anita
and Me (1996), in common with Emecheta, uses
121
semi-autobiographical sources to describe the life

of a young Asian girl growing up in the Midlands.
Landmark lesbian publications from the latter
part of the twentieth century include Jeanette
Wintersons Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
(1985), which follows the childhood and early
adulthood of Jeanette, whose confidence and
determination to thrive beyond her domineering
mother and a suffocating religious upbringing
provide an antidote to more traditional coming-out stories. Scottish author Ellen Galford,
meanwhile, rewrote and embellished history in
novels such as Moll Cutpurse (1984) to create
a lesbian historical romance. At the centurys end,
Sarah Waterss Tipping the Velvet (1999) offered
a queering of the increasingly popular neoVictorian novel genre in its account of young
oyster girl Nan Kings love for a male impersonator and her subsequent adventures in 1890s London. In common with Galford, she inserted the
figure of the lesbian into historical writing as
a way of asserting her presence, however suppressed, in history. The challenges these latter
texts offer to perceptions of lesbian identity lend
themselves to feminist, and lesbian-feminist,
readings and interpretation.
Asking the question Are Womens Novels
Feminist Novels? Rosalind Coward (1980)
associates feminist novels most specifically with
the bestselling consciousness-raising novels
produced in the US and mainly published during
the 1970s, although she writes with some skepticism about the fusion of politics and entertainment in such books. Writing in 1980, Coward
does not see feminist politics as coexisting with
books selling thousands of copies to people who
might be reading them for any number of reasons;
in this critique she raises the issue of purpose and
intent, and also implicitly reveals a bias toward
high literary art. Latterly, readerly engagement
and interpretation have come to the fore, and the
strict boundaries between high and low literature
have softened to show the numerous ways in
which womens writing can negotiate feminist
politics.
As feminist criticism matured so it widened its
purview to that of genre and popular forms of
writing: from being openly dismissive of massmarket forms such as the romance, critics reevaluated such texts from the point of view of
audience intervention and appropriation. More
122
FEMINIST FICTION
overtly feminist writers also intervened in historically male genres, such as science fiction and
crime fiction; and in creating a womans voice,
often through central female characters, the
boundaries of such genres have shifted to encompass the dominant concerns of womens writing:
human reproduction, the patriarchal ordering of
the workplace, forging a female identity beyond
marriage, sexuality, and personal choice. This
allowed for utopian and dystopian imaginings of
a different social arrangement or, in the case of
crime fiction, a renewed scrutiny of the justice
system and its treatment of women on both sides
of the law. Zoe Fairbairnss Benefits (1979) is
a dystopian novel in which the government
attempts to return women to their reproductive
role (anticipating some of the themes of
Canadian novelist Margaret Atwoods novel The
Handmaids Tale, 1985); it expresses ambivalence
toward the welfare state, which can be a key
support to women but, equally, can dictate norms
that repress. Crime fiction and romance are two
other genres upon which feminism has had an
impact, with writers such as Sarah Dunant in her
early fiction and P. D. James (in An Unsuitable Job
for a Woman, 1972) showing how the insertion of a
woman at the heart of a crime narrative transforms
its shape and concerns. Scottish writer Emma
Tennant is an example of one who rewrites the
romance for a twentieth-century audience, and is
most well known for her literary sequels, such as
Pemberley (1993) and Emma in Love (1996).
It is important to acknowledge how profoundly
feminism has affected the way we read, just as it
has impacted upon the fate of women writers
previously suppressed or pushed to the margins of
literary study. And twentieth-century writers have
themselves contributed to a rethinking of the
literary canon; we need think only of Jean Rhyss
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which acts as a postcolonial counterpoint and critique of Jane Eyre in
giving voice to the madwoman Bertha Mason.
Jane Eyre is channeled by Daphne Du Maurier in
Rebecca (1938); more recently Sally Beaumans
Rebeccas Tale (2001) gives voice to the first wife of
Maxim De Winter. Both Jane Eyre and Rebecca (in
common with Pride and Prejudice for the chicklit
genre), remain fluid and malleable ur-texts for
contemporary womens writing.
As feminism waned as a political force, postfeminist perspectives questioned the need to
segregate women writers or to study them as

a category: at its worst womens writing as
a category did not always provide nourishment
for lesbian or working-class writers or for women
of color. For many commentators the time for
overtly feminist fiction is past, but the legacy of
feminist criticism and its transformation of literary study remains. Equally, its impact on the
literary industry and on women-only literary
prizes such as the Orange Prize for Fiction suggests a continuing awareness that women writers
do not enter an even playing field, even though
somewriters, such asA.S.Byatt,donotpermittheir
work to be entered for such awards. The woman as
author continues to figure as a character in novels
by women, examples being Fleur Talbot in Muriel
Sparkss Loitering with Intent (1981) and Maud
Bailey in A. S. Byatts Possession (1990), suggesting
a continuing engagement with and concern for the
status of the women writer in twentieth-century
culture, and a covert acknowledgment that even
now gender remains an important feature in publishing and literary scholarship. Despite major
social advances in the economic and social position
of women, Virginia Woolfs account of the very
different experiences of the women writer has
continuing resonance today.
SEE ALSO: Chicklit and Ladlit (BIF); Feminism
and Fiction (WF); Gender and the Novel (AF);
Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF);
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF); Utopian
and Dystopian Fiction (AF)

Atwood, M. (1985). The Handmaids Tale. Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart.
Barker, P. (1982). Union Street. London: Virago.
Beaumanm, S. (2001). Rebeccas Tale. London: Little,
Brown.
Brittain, V. (1933). Testament of Youth. London:
Gollancz.
Carter, A. (1979a). The Bloody Chamber. London:
Gollancz.
Carter, A. (1979b). The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in
Cultural History. London: Virago.
Clay, C. (2006). British Women Writers 19141945.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Coward, R. (1980). Are Womens Novels Feminist
Novels? Feminist Review, 5, 5364.
FIGES, EVA
Cranny-Francis, A. (1990). Feminist Fiction. London:

Polity.
Du Maurier, D. (1938). Rebecca. London: Gollancz.
Dunant, S. (1991). Birth Marks. London: Penguin.
Eagleton, M. (1996). Working with Feminist Criticism.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Eagleton, M. (2005). Figuring the Woman Author in
Contemporary Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Ellmann, M. (1979). Thinking about Women [1968].
London: Virago.
Fairbairns, Z. (1979). Benefits. London: Virago.
Fairbairns, Z., Maitland, S., Miner, V., Roberts, M., &
Wandor, M. (1978). Tales I Tell My Mother. London:
Journeyman.
Felski, R. (2003). Literature After Feminism. Chicago:
Fetterley, J. (1978). The Resisting Reader: A Feminist
Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Galford, E. (1984). Moll Cutpurse: Her True Story.
Edinburgh: Stramullion.
Hall, R. (1928). The Well of Loneliness. London:
Jonathan Cape.
James, P. D. (1972). An Unsuitable Job for a Woman.
Joannou, M. (2000). Contemporary Womens Writing:
From The Golden Notebook to The Color Purple.
Lessing, D. (1962). The Golden Notebook. London:
Michael Joseph.
OBrien, E. (1960). The Country Girls. London:
Hutchinson.
Rhys, J. (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Deutsch.
Riley, J. (1985). The Unbelonging. London: Womens
Press.
Roberts, M. (1978). A Piece of the Night. London:
Womens Press.
Roberts, M. (2005). Reader, I. Married Him. London:
Little, Brown.
Russ, J. (1984). How to Suppress Womens Writing.
London: Womens Press.
Tennant, E. (1993). Pemberley; or, Pride and Prejudice
Continued. London: Sceptre.
Tennant, E. (1996). Emma in Love. London: Fourth
Estate.
Wandor, M. (ed.), (1983). On Gender and Writing.
London: Pandora.
Waters, S. (1998). Tipping the Velvet. London: Virago.
Watkins, S. (2001). Twentieth-Century Women
Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Weldon, F. (1983). The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.
London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Weldon, F. (1997). Big Women. London: Flamingo.
123
West, R. (1918). The Return of the Soldier. London:

Nisbet.
Winterson, J. (1985). Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
London: Pandora.
Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of Ones Own. London:
Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1938). Three Guineas. London: Hogarth.
Figes, Eva
JULIETTE WELLS
Eva Figes has had a distinguished career as a writer

of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism. As
a novelist, she is best known for exploring
the quotidian aspects of womens experience
throughout history and for her tendency toward
experimentalism in narrative, qualities that have
led to comparisons with Virginia Woolf. Figess
background as a child refugee from the Holocaust, to which she has repeatedly returned in her
non-fiction writings, resulted in a lifelong concern with the expressiveness of language, as well as
an interest in representing in fiction collisions
between identities and the guilt experienced by
survivors of great tragedy.
Eva Unger was born in 1932 in Berlin, the first
child of prosperous and assimilated German
Jews who sheltered her effectively from the
anxieties and horrors of the era. Her father was
interned in Dachau in 1938 but released the same
year; his professional connections made possible
the familys emigration to England in 1939. A
sensitive and literary child, Figes endured antiGerman and anti-Semitic prejudice at school,
while at home she coped with her parents
suffering of uncertainty about their relatives fates.
She took refuge in reading and literary composition, pursuits that led to a scholarship to attend
Queen Mary College of the University of London.
She graduated with a BA with honors in English
literature in 1953 and remained in London.
Married to John George Figes from 1954 until
their divorce in 1963, she has two children who are
both noted writers: Orlando Figes specializes in
Russian history, while Kate Figes has written
extensively on the experience of motherhood.
Figess literary career began as an editor and
then an author of childrens books; she also
worked as a translator, primarily of contemporary
124
FIGES, EVA
German literature. Several of her early novels

combine aspects of her own experience with tone
and techniques inspired by her reading, particularly of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. Equinox
(1966) depicts a womans gradual disintegration
as her marriage falls apart, while Konek Landing
(1969) portrays a devastated survivor of the
Holocaust. The theme of authorship is central to
B (1972), a novel that foregrounds Figess characteristic interest in metafiction. Less overtly
autobiographical are Winter Journey (1967; recipient of the Guardian Fiction Award) and Days
(1974), each of which centers on the interplay
between present time and memory for a single
character.
Figess concern with the oppression of women,
which she examined in her celebrated polemic
Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (1970)
and returned to in Sex and Subterfuge: Women
Novelists to 1850 (1982), is crucial to nearly all her
fiction from the late 1970s onward. Yet Figes has
resisted the label of feminist, commenting that in
her fiction she is more concerned with womens
emotions. Women dont stop feeling vulnerable
because of feminism (Graeber 9). Nellys Version
(1977), one of her most enduringly popular
novels, takes its main characters amnesia as
a starting place for exposing the constraints imposed on women by convention. Waking (1981),
Ghosts (1988), and The Knot (1996) each offers
a fragmentary portrait of a contemporary
womans life and consciousness, while historical
women feature in The Seven Ages (1986) and in
The Tree of Knowledge (1990), the narrator of
which is one of Miltons daughters. Gender issues
are more muted in Light (1983), Figess most
critically acclaimed novel, which depicts a day in
the life of Claude Monet, and in The Tenancy
(1993), a novel of suspense.
As a novelist, Figes stated early in her career,
she considers herself to be European rather than
English: I am a European survivor, wrestling
with a different reality [than Englands]. A piece
of shrapnel lodges in my flesh, and when it
moves, I write (1978b, 29). Figes has returned
to her personal history in three memoirs: the
acclaimed Little Eden: A Child at War (1978a),
which treats her difficult adjustment to England
as a young emigre; Tales of Innocence and
Experience: An Exploration (2003), in which
grandmotherhood causes her to reconsider her
own childhood as well as the literary status of

grandparents; and Journey to Nowhere: One
Woman Looks for the Promised Land (2008), which
incorporates a polemic about the present-day
Middle East.
Both Figess fiction and non-fiction are distinguished by her resistance to conventions, whether
literary or social. In style, her writing often blurs
the boundary between prose and poetry, most
effectively in Light, where her impressionistic
prose ideally suits her subject matter. She has
experimented extensively with fictional structures
and scope, sometimes containing a novel in a
single day (as in Winter Journey and Light) or year
(Equinox) of a protagonists life, sometimes spanning a lifespan (Waking and Winter Journey) or
millennia (Seven Ages and The Tree of Knowledge).
Her steady interest in representing the experience
of both ordinary and extraordinary women places
her among the most important feminist novelists
of the late twentieth century.
Fiction (BIF); Jewish Fiction (BIF);

Figes, E. (1966). Equinox. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Figes, E. (1967). Winter Journey. London: Faber and
Faber.
Figes, E. (1969). Konek Landing. London: Faber and
Faber.
Figes, E. (1970). Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in
Society. London: Faber and Faber.
Figes, E. (1972). B. London: Faber and Faber.
Figes, E. (1974). Days. London: Faber and Faber.
Figes, E. (1977). Nellys Version. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Figes, E. (1978a). Little Eden: A Child at War. London:
Faber and Faber.
Figes, E. (1978b). The Long Passage to Little England.
Observer (London), p. 29 (June 11).
Figes, E. (1981). Waking. London: Hamilton.
Figes, E. (1982). Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to
1850. London: Macmillan.
Figes, E. (1983). Light. London: Hamilton.
Figes, E. (1986). The Seven Ages. London: Hamilton.
Figes, E. (1988). Ghosts. London: Hamilton.
Figes, E. (1990). The Tree of Knowledge. London:
Sinclair-Stevenson.
THE FILM INDUSTRY AND FICTION
Figes, E. (1993). The Tenancy. London: SinclairStevenson.

Figes, E. (1996). The Knot. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
Figes, E. (2003). Tales of Innocence and Experience: An
Exploration. London: Bloomsbury.
Figes, E. (2008). Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks
for the Promised Land. London: Granta.
Graeber, Laurel (1988). New Beginnings in Middle Age.
New York Times Book Review, p. 9 (Sept. 25).
The Film Industry

and Fiction
DEBORAH CARTMELL
The most obvious manifestation of the coming

together of fiction and the film industry is in the
film adaptation of a literary work. From its very
beginnings, film turned to literature for both
stylistic features and for actual stories, which led
to big box office returns but received few artistic
or academic plaudits. Prominent among the very
first films were adaptations of literature, such as
King John (1899), Alladin and the Wonderful
Lamp (1900), Scrooge; or, Marleys Ghost
(1901), Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (1902), and
Uncle Toms Cabin (1903). However, the film
industrys reliance on literature was seen by many
as a major weakness. On the whole, cineastes in
the first half of the twentieth century were deeply
suspicious of film adaptations of literature (or the
narrative film). It was felt that films, rather than
borrowing or desecrating wholesale narratives,
should not copy, but should extend and translate
narrative and other literary devices. For example,
Sergei Eisenstein, in his often quoted essay,
Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today, demonstrates the indebtedness of D. W. Griffith to
Dickens in the directors use of optical quality,
frame composition, close-up, and the alteration of emphasis by special lenses (213).
While it is true to say that film borrowed
extensively from the novel, especially the nineteenth-century novel, critics were concerned that
an overreliance on another art form would condemn film as inferior, merely a copy of what was
overwhelmingly regarded as an infinitely superior
medium. In order for film to be esteemed as the
new literature it was imperative that it sever itself
from literature, so as to be an art form in its own
125
right. Snobbery about literary and/or narrative

films prevailed throughout the twentieth century,
and, while film gradually was welcomed into the
pantheon of art, the literary adaptation was excluded. The art historian Erwin Panofsky (1974)
is regarded as the first critic to claim film as an art
form (Levin 1996). In Style and Medium in the
Moving Pictures (first published in 1937 and last
revised in 1947), presupposing the subservience
of sound to visuals, Panofsky found the literary
film the most distasteful of all genres, insisting
that the greater the literary text used, the worse the
film. Similarly, adaptations are unworthy of mention in Arnold Hausers final volume of The Social
History of Art (1951), in spite of the last section
being entitled The Film Age.
Nonetheless, there were some admirers of the
film adaptation of literature in the first half of
the twentieth century. Surprisingly, among the
first is the Renaissance critic, Allardyce Nicoll,
who not only suggested that film was the new
Shakespeare but that Shakespeare on film potentially could be more Shakespearean than
a production in Shakespeares own time. Film
critic Andre Bazin, writing almost 20 years before
Roland Barthess influential essay The Death of
the Author (1977 [1968] ), saw the refusal to
regard adaptations as serious films or as serious
readings of literary texts as due to an unwillingness to let go of the romantic idea of the author, of
an individualist conception of the author and
the work that, he points out, became legally
defined only at the close of the eighteenth century
(2000 [1948] ).
While literary and film intellectuals were
condemning film adaptations as belittling the
potential of cinema, some promoters and producers took the opposite approach, that adaptations
of literature by such figures as Shakespeare,
Dickens, or Tolstoy elevated cinema to a higher
cultural plane. For example, Frank L. Dyer, in
1910, then president of the Motion Pictures
Patents Company, encouraged the adaptation of
works of classic writers such as Charles Dickens,
Victor Hugo, and Robert Browning, as a way of
lifting the cultural status of the cinema to the level
of art (Uricchio & Pearson 48). This populist
approach, which clearly saw cinema as mass
entertainment with little or no artistic merit,
clearly fuelled attacks on literary adaptations.
Criticism came from both writers on film as well
126
as writers on and of literature. Virginia Woolf,

who like other modernist authors was influenced
by film techniques in her own writing, was
appalled by cinematic adaptations of literature.
In her essay, The Cinema (1950 [1926] ), she
writes of the barbaric, predatory, and male
cinema preying upon and destroying the infinitely
superior, delicate, and female literary text. Significantly, the first issue of the influential literary
journal, Scrutiny, edited by F. R. Leavis, features
an article on film which referred to it as The Art
Form of Democracy? The author, William Hunter, who enlarged the essay into a short book in the
same year (1932), argued that the narrative film
(and even more so with the advent of talking
pictures), appeals to the lowest common denominator, threatening what he refers to as the efficacy of words (11). The articles placement in
the first issue of Scrutiny serves as a warning to
literary scholars to beware of narrative film. Unsurprisingly, any discussion of film adaptation
of literature was banned from subsequent issues
of the journal, indeed from literary studies as
a whole, for most of the twentieth century.
Disgust for the literary adaptation reaches its
apex in Aldous Huxleys diatribe on the feelies
(the thinly disguised talkies) in Brave New
World, in which Othello is totally unrecognizable
in the adaptation entitled Three Weeks in
a Helicopter, AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY. WITH SYNCHRONIZED
SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT (1988
[1932], 145). Hostility to adaptation was, on one
level, rooted in artistic elitism, fearful of a form of
entertainment that is genuinely socially leveling in
its affordability and accessibility. Films reductio ad
absurdum of literature is a frequent theme in the
rising genre of the Hollywood novel, such as F.
Scott Fitzgeralds The Last Tycoon (1941) and
Nathanael Wests The Day of the Locust (1939), in
which Hollywood becomes the new Babylon (see
Richardson 1973 for a discussion of this genre).
Many established writers, such as William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, and even Aldous Huxley,
actually worked as adapters; but for the most part
(with the exception of some writers, for instance
Graham Greene), in the first half of the twentieth
century, the majority did it with a feeling of
embarrassment and self-loathing, admitting to
mercenary rather than artistic motives.
There is no doubting the popularity, influence,

and long shelf life of film adaptations of canonical
literature. For instance, Alfred Hitchcocks Rebecca (1940), Laurence Oliviers Henry V (1944),
David Leans Great Expectations (1946), and Robert Mulligans To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) are
among the numerous adaptations valued today as
great cinema. Equally, adaptations such as ITVs
Brideshead Revisited (1981) or the BBCs Pride
and Prejudice (1995) are among the most memorable programs for television. However, in spite
of its continued popularity with cinema goers,
literature on screen or literary adaptations have
remained in what Timothy Corrigan (2007) has
identified as the gap for most of the twentieth
century. The reasons for the exclusion of screen
adaptations from both literary and film studies
are various. First, early twentieth-century champions of film saw adaptations as impure
cinema; the mixture of two art forms was seen
to be to the detriment of films potential. Additionally, writers and literary critics considered
film adaptations to be abominations, crude usurpations of literary masterpieces that threatened
both literacy and the book itself. Another reason
for the lack of critical acceptance of adaptations is
that there were a number of examples, then as
today, that were poor and deserved a bad press.
Furthermore, until the twenty-first century, much
of the criticism was woefully predictable, judging
an adaptations merit by its faithfulness to its
literary source or, even more vaguely, to the
spirit of the book. Prejudice that money and
art cannot mix prevailed, primarily in literary
studies, accounting for another reason why films
(or pure cinema) and film adaptations of literary works (impure cinema) were excluded from
the curriculum. Film adaptation called attention
to the absence of a single artist; and the belief that
art cannot be art if it is mass produced also
accounts for its exclusion, particularly in literary
studies. Logocentricism, a belief that the word is
primary and that literature is more authentic than
film, also prevented adaptations from receiving
serious critical attention. A tendency to regard
adaptation as appropriation has led to emotive
words such as violation, vulgarization, and
betrayal bedeviling criticism, emphasizing what
has been lost rather than what has been gained.
Finally, the study of literature on screen has
largely concentrated on canonical texts that make
a screen adaptation a very difficult act to follow.

Adaptations that have usurped their originals in
the minds of their audience films like The
Wizard of Oz (1939), from the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, or To Have
and Have Not (1941), adapted from an Ernest
Hemingway novel of the same name (1937) have
failed to receive critical attention as adaptations.
As a result, bad adaptations receive more
coverage than good ones.
In the midst of this mood of hostility, George
Bluestone produced the first full-length study of
literature on screen, Novels into Film, in 1957. The
book begins by considering similarities between
literature and film and ends by insisting that they
must be judged as separate entities. While Bluestone has done much to raise awareness of the
field, his focus is primarily on canonical authors
and his perspective is, accordingly, heavily
weighted on the side of literature. Referring to
adaptations as mutations, he betrays his preference for the literary over the filmic, confidently
asserting that modern literature and film cannot
cross over and claiming that it would be as absurd
to translate Proust or Joyce to film as it would be
to convert Charlie Chaplin to print (63). The
assumption that fiction and film studies must be
concerned with canonical writings has generated
an approach to the subject that taxonomizes
adaptations, categorizing them in terms of their
proximity to the source text. For instance, Jack
Jorgens divides Shakespeare adaptations into
theatrical, realist, and filmic (735), while
Geoffrey Wagner divides adaptations into
transposition, which involves minimum interference with the original; commentary, in
which a text is altered for new emphasis; and
analogy, where a film departs substantially from
a novel or play in order to produce another work
of art (227). Kamilla Elliott has introduced six
categories or ways of approaching adaptation:
psychic (seeing films as endeavoring to capture
an authorial spirit); ventriloquist (regarding
an adaptation as propping up a novel); de(re)
composing (considering the films changes to its
literary source in an appeal to new audiences);
genetic (looking at common features between a
film and a book, in particular, narrative);
incarnational (maintaining that a film brings
a book to life); and trumping (examining the
ways in which an adaptation tries to outdo the
127
novel). These categories, however useful, are

acknowledged by their authors to be critical constructs, and, as such, are open to reorganization.
Elliotts work has been especially helpful in calling
attention to the evolution of screen adaptation in
earlier inter-art affinities and inter-art analogies,
with especial attention to the illustrated novel of
the nineteenth century.
Recently, Robert Stam (2005) has replaced
fidelity criticism with the employment of
Gerard Genettes five types of transtextual relations, reading adaptations as palimpsests, films
in which older texts can be read or seen beneath
the new. Intertextuality refers to quotations,
allusions to other texts; paratextuality to the
texts surrounding the work, such as illustrations, epigraphs, DVD extras, credits, and
the merchandise associated with a film;
metatextuality to the readings or critiques of
the source novel or play in the film; and
architextuality to the relation of a text to
a genre or genres that frame the text. Stam
finds Genettes final category, hypertextuality,
to be the most relevant to adaptation.
Hypertextuality is the relation of one text, the
hypertext, to an earlier hypotext, which is
transformed (via, for instance, parody, spoof,
sequel, or translation) by the hypertext. Liberating the concept of the adaptation by acknowledging that there can be no indisputable point of
origin, Stam argues that, as texts, screen adaptations should be regarded within an ongoing
whirl of intertextual reference and transformation (Stam & Raengo 2005, 31). While
canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Austen,
and Dickens have their place within the canon of
literature on screen studies, Thomas Leitch (2007)
widens the field from the simple case study to
include illustrations, comic strips, video games,
and true stories. Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of
Adaptation (2006), argues that film adaptation is
only the tip of the iceberg and that, as a central
mode of storytelling, it can be traced across other
media, from roller-coasters to opera. Hutcheon
points out that an adaptation, by its very nature,
makes explicit that all art is based on other art.
Clearly, the advent of cinema transformed the
novel. Equally clearly, fiction has dictated
the direction of Hollywood cinema. However, at
the beginning of the twenty-first century, there
are still many who, fresh from the agony of
128
viewing a film that has desecrated a favorite novel,

regard film and literature as parasites that eat away
at each other. The argument that fiction is being
dictated to and diluted by the lure of movie rights
(or that novelists are writing to be viewed rather
than read) is much more apparent now than it was
a century ago. And it is still argued that, as long as
film is regarded as a subcategory of literature, it
can never fulfill its potential (see Patterson 2008).
The late twentieth century and early twenty-first
have witnessed the rise of adaptation studies in
academia, but also the growing phenomenon of
the author biopic in Hollywood. From Shakespeare in Love (1996) and the Doctor Who episode
The Shakespeare Code (2007), to Finding
Neverland (J. M. Barrie, 2004), Miss Potter (Beatrix Potter, 2006), Becoming Jane (Jane Austen,
2007) and Miss Austen Regrets (2008), it seems
that authors are not just authors; one by one, they
are becoming rising stars of television and film.
SEE ALSO: Film/Television Adaptation and
Fiction (WF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood
(AF); Television and Fiction (AF)

Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author [1948]. In
Image, Music, Text (ed. and trans. S. Heath). London:
Fontana, pp. 1428.
Bazin, A. (2000). Adaptation; or, The Cinema as Digest
[1948]. In J. Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation.
London: Athlone, pp. 1927.
Bluestone, G. (1957). Novels into Film: The
Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Cartmell, D., & Whelehan, I. (eds.), (1999). Adaptations
from Text to Screen, Screen;1; to Text. London:
Routledge.
Cartmell, D., & Whelehan, I. (eds.) (2007). The
Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen.
Corrigan, T. (2007). Literature on Screen, a History:
In the Gap. In Cartmell & Whelehan (2007)
pp. 2943.
Eisenstein, S. (1963). Dickens, Griffith, and the Film
Today [1944]. In J. Leyda (ed.), Film Form. London:
Dennis Dobson.
Elliott, K. (2003). Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1941). The Last Tycoon. New York:
Scribners.
Hauser, A. (1951). The Social History of Art, vol. 4:

Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hunter, W. (1932). Scrutiny of Cinema. London:
Wishart.
Hutcheon, L. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New
York: Routlege.
Huxley, A. (1988). Brave New World [1932]. London:
Random House.
Jorgens, J. (1977). Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington:
Leitch, T. (2007). Film Adaptation and Its Discontents:
From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of
the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Leitch, T. (2008). Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads.
Adaptation, 1(1), 6377.
Levin, T. Y. (1996). Iconology at the Movies:
Panofkys Film Theory. Yale Journal of Criticism,
9(1), 2655.
McFarlane, B. (1996). Novel to Film: An Introduction to
the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Nicoll, A. (1936). Film and Theatre. London: Harrap.
Panofsky, E. (1974). Style and Medium in the Moving
Picture [1937]. In G. Mast, M. Cohen, & L. Braudy
(eds.), Film Theory and Film Criticism:
Introductory Essays, 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Patterson, J. (2008). By the Book. Guardian (Mar. 15).
At www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/mar/15/fiction,
accessed Feb. 17, 2010.
Philips, G. D., & Tibbetts, J. C. (2005). Appendix:
Scenes from a Hollywood Life: The Novelist as
Screenwriter. In J. C. Tibbetts & J. M. Welsh (eds.),
Novels into Film, 2nd edn. New York: Facts on File,
pp. 51721.
Richardson, R. (1973). Literature and Film.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sanders, J. (2006). Adaptation and Appropriation.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Stam, R. (2005). Literature through Film: Realism,
Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Stam, R., & Raengo, A. (eds.) (2004). A Companion to
Literature and Film. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Stam, R., & Raengo, A. (eds.) (2005). Literature and
Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film
Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Uricchio, W., & Pearson, R. E. (1993). Reframing
Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films.
Wagner, G. (1975). The Novel and the Cinema.
Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press.
FIRBANK, RONALD
West, N. (1939). The Day of the Locust. New York:

Random House.
Woolf, V. (1950). The Cinema [1926]. In The Captains
Death Bed and Other Essays. London: Hogarth,
pp. 16071.
Firbank, Ronald
DAVID MALCOLM
Ronald Firbanks writings are neither fully canonical nor uncanonical. He often appears in literary
histories in footnotes to discussions of the modernist period. Yet in the 1920s his novels sat next
to Joyces on the shelves of Shakespeare and
Company in Paris, and he has always had important admirers. In 1929 Evelyn Waugh wrote that
he was a figure of essential artistic integrity and
importance (176). In the same year E. M. Forster,
despite reservations about his work, declared,
Yes, he has genius (118). In 1949 Edmund
Wilson wrote of his novels: They are extremely
intellectual and composed with the closest attention. . . . They have to be read with care, and they
can be read again and again (492). In Prancing
Novelist (1973), her long examination of
Firbanks life and work, the experimental novelist
Brigid Brophy insists that Firbank is a very good
writer, and, equally importantly, a major figure
in the development of twentieth-century fictions
abandonment of realist aspirations and conventions: Firbank saw straight when contemporaries
of his, even talented ones, were circling in a fog
(pp. xiixiv). Frequently compared to a range
of major writers Ben Jonson, Jane Austen,
Edward Lear, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, and
Waugh Firbank has recently been taken up by
writers on homosexual fiction, and his work is
seen as an important forebear of the modern gay
novel. Allan Hollinghurst (2000), who includes
extensive references to him and his fiction in his
novel The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), insists
that his novels are works of remarkable economy,
brilliant humor, and disconcerting pathos
(p. vii).
Ronald Firbank was born in 1886 into a
wealthy London family, although his grandfather had risen from coalminer to wealthy railway
contractor in the mid nineteenth century.
Ronald Firbank attended Cambridge University,
129
where he led a life reminiscent of the aesthetes of

the 1890s, and converted to Catholicism in 1907.
He spent the years of World War I in Oxford,
alienated from the militarized Britain around
him. Both before and after the war Firbank spent
much time abroad (in Spain, Italy, France, and
the Middle East). He was also a noted figure in
bohemian London, cultivating an outrageously
effeminate persona. His novels were mostly
published at his own expense. His work met
with the enthusiasm of the American man of
letters Carl Van Vechten, who arranged for the
publication of Firbanks seventh novel, under
the title of Prancing Nigger, in the USA in 1924.
For the British edition, Firbank reverted to the
original title Sorrow in Sunlight. In poor health
for most of his life, Firbank died of pneumonia,
or debility brought on by heavy drinking, in
Rome in 1926.
The story materials of Firbanks fiction are
varied, comic, and deliberately offensive of conservative norms. His characters (often female) are
frequently outsiders and deviant, both by standards within the worlds of the texts, and by those
of contemporary cultural norms. Miss
OBrookomore in Inclinations (1916) desires to
live a lesbian idyll with Miss Collins. Miss Sinquier
in Caprice (1917) is a provincial clergymans
daughter who wants to make a career as an actress.
The driving force of much of the action in
Valmouth (1919) is a black masseuse, Miss
Yaj~
navalkya, and much of that action centers on
an interracial mesalliance in a world of languid
centenarians. The eponymous figure in Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926)
baptizes a dog (much to the hierarchys dismay)
and is an overt homosexual. Indeed, heterosexual
and homosexual irregularities permeate Firbanks
texts, and the sexual orientation of his characters
is often flexible. His settings are either documented and almost probable, as in Inclinations, or
highly improbable and undocumented, as with
the orientalist Pisuerga of The Flower beneath the
Foot (1923) and the lascivious Cuna-Cuna of
Sorrow in Sunlight.
Critics frequently point to the technical innovations of Firbanks fiction. These are threefold: an
extensive use of dialogue at the expense of narrative exposition; an extreme degree of narrative
elision; and an attempt to bring the language of
prose close to the language of poetry. Inclinations
130
FITZGERALD, PENELOPE
and Valmouth, for example, contain long passages

of meandering and, in terms of the novels action,
irrelevant dialogue. V. S. Pritchett (1953, 229)
admired Firbanks innovations in this matter,
arguing that he laid down the pattern for contemporary dialogue by giving an impression of
unshaped conversation. The elliptical nature of
Firbanks narratives is also extensively discussed by
critics (for example, Potoker 1969, 367). In Valmouth, the reader must infer Niri-Esthers liaison
with and marriage to Dick. In Sorrow in Sunlight,
Charlie Mouths corruption in Cuna-Cuna, the
Mouth familys social rejection, and Ednas seduction by Vittorio are exiguously recounted.
Firbanks fiction, too, is full of passages that are
not narrative but lyric in mode. Thus, the narrator
of Sorrow in Sunlight exclaims, The strange sadness of evening, the detresse of the Evening Sky!
Cry, cry, white Rain Birds out of the West, cry . . .!
here language itself and its phonological organization are foregrounded, and narrative function is
attenuated.
Despite neglect, Firbank is an important
twentieth-century novelist. Like many of his
contemporaries, he takes the conventions of the
nineteenth-century novel and breaches them
continually and intelligently; this is why he appeals
to later experimentalists such as Brophy. It must
be emphasized, too, that he is a comic writer. The
bending of conventions, the shameless lubricity,
and the outrageous improbability of Firbanks created worlds are very funny. In addition, he continually putsthe traditionally subaltern,the female, the
homosexual,andthenon-European,atthecenterof
his work. As Brophy remarks, Firbanks fictions
emancipate both women and proletarians (406).
In 1951, Leslie A. Fiedler was adamant: We need all
the Firbank we can get (381).
SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Forster,
E. M. (BIF); Hollinghurst, Alan (BIF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in
Fiction (BIF)

Benkovitz, M. J. (1969). Ronald Firbank: A Biography.
New York: Knopf.
Brophy, B. (1973). Prancing Novelist: A Defence of
Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise
of Ronald Firbank. London: Macmillan.
Davies, G., Malcolm, D., & Simons, J. (eds.) (2004).

Critical Essays on Ronald Firbank, English Novelist,
18861926. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen.
Fiedler, L. A. (1951). The Relevance of Irrelevance.
Nation, pp. 3812 (Apr. 21).
Firbank, R. (1905). Odette DAntrevernes: A Fairy Tale
for Weary People and A Study in Temperament.
London: Elkin Matthews.
Firbank, R. (1915). Vainglory. London: Grant Richards.
Firbank, R. (1916). Inclinations. London: Grant
Richards.
Firbank, R. (1917). Caprice. London: Grant Richards.
Firbank, R. (1919). Valmouth. London: Grant Richards.
Firbank, R. (1920). The Princess Zoubaroff. London:
Grant Richards.
Firbank, R. (1921). Santal. London: Grant Richards.
Firbank, R. (1923). The Flower beneath the Foot.
London: Grant Richards.
Firbank, R. (1924). Sorrow in Sunlight. New York:
Brentano.
Firbank, R. (1926). Concerning the Eccentricities of
Cardinal Pirelli. London: Grant Richards.
Forster, E. M. (1936). Ronald Firbank. In Abinger
Harvest. New York: Harcourt Brace, pp. 11521.
Hollinghurst, A. (2000). Introduction. In R. Firbank,
Three Novels. London: Penguin, pp. viixxiv.
Horder, M. (ed.) (1977). Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and
Critiques. London: Duckworth.
Potoker, E. M. (1969). Ronald Firbank. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Pritchett, V. S. (1953). Firbank. In Books in General.
London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 22934.
Waugh, E. (1929). [Untitled critique.] In Horder (1977)
pp. 1759.
Wilson, E. (1950). A Revival of Ronald Firbank. In
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the
Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus, pp. 486502.
Fitzgerald, Penelope
PETER WOLFE
Penelope Knox Fitzgerald (19162000) has

been attracting readers for many reasons, the
most basic of which is her family of origin.
Both of her grandfathers were bishops (of
Manchester and of Lincoln, Penelopes birthplace). This eminence carried forward. After
spending some years writing parodies and theater reviews for Punch, her father, Edmund
Valpy Knox, became the magazines editor,
a post traditionally honored by the unofficial
title King of Fleet Street.
FITZGERALD, PENELOPE
The years drained some glory from this distinguished legacy. But even though Penelope had to
scramble for scholarships to finish her degree, she
graduated from Oxford in 1938 with honors. The
tenacity that helped steer her through university
held up. In 1944 she married Desmond Fitzgerald,
a major in the Irish Guards. She needed all her
mettle to keep the marriage afloat. An alcoholic
who drifted from job to job until he stopped
working altogether, Desmond left Penelope with
the chores of raising three children and supporting the family.
Apart from telling an interviewer that Desmond didnt have much luck in life, Penelope
said little about her sad marriage. But Desmond
pervades her fiction in the likeness of the many of
those born to be defeated who win our admiration for their courage in the face of failure and
loss. Penelope Fitzgerald has a great gift for imagining herself in other peoples shoes without
patronizing them.
This great gift might have been lost to us had
Mariner Books, a paperback division of the
Houghton Mifflin Company, not republished The
Blue Flower (1995) in a modest run of 13,000
copies in 1997. In 1998, Flower became the first
novel written by a foreigner to win Americas
National Book Critics Circle Award, beating
works by native-born headliners such as Philip
Roth and Don DeLillo. The book also did well
commercially, selling 100,000 copies and building
a market for her earlier work.
This success was no fluke. Flower reimagines
the life of Friedrich, or Fritz, von Hardenberg
(17721801), the romantic poet from Germany
later known as Novalis. The book contains biographical data. But it is no biography. Nor was it
intended to be one. Flower is more than a collection of facts, insights, and ideas. Its epigraph, from
von Hardenberg, Novels arise from the shortcomings of history, points to a lesson that goes to
the heart of Fitzgeralds artistry: that every true
tale needs a jolt of fiction, usually in the form
of imaginative energy or narrative design; no
historian can imagine a single turn of human
inconsistency. The genre Fitzgerald often used to
lead our sympathies to exciting new places is the
historical novel.
Thus Fitzgerald set her 1986 novel Innocence in
the mid-1950s because its Italian characters,
who now move about freely, can still remember
131
German troops taking over the public offices of

their cities and setting curfews. Most of the traumas of postwar reconstruction have waned but
only to give way to new ones. Though Mussolini is
mentioned, the Italy of Innocence faces anxieties
caused by the Cold War. A characters reference to
a third world war stands as just one example of
the impact of Soviet imperialism. Yet the book
unfolds during the years of the Italian economic
miracle. By 1949, the year Italy joined NATO, the
Marshall Plan had already helped the country
recover from the havoc of war but at a high
cost; Italians of all political persuasions were
grumbling that their country had become a client
state of America.
The Gate of Angels (1990) finds Fitzgerald on
familiar turf a shaky, ill-defined border between
a vanishing world and one groping to be born. Set
in 1912 England, it straddles the lost Victorian
world of earnestness and the clash of World War I.
Victorian propriety, though maligned as prudish
and philistine, had created a mood of timelessness, the sense of a safe, self-regulating world. The
transfer of faith from religion to science in
the early years of the twentieth century, one
of the chief events in all of British history, pervades the action of Fitzgeralds 1990 novel. Later
in the century, it would lead to both chaos theory
and Werner Heisenbergs uncertainty principle.
Fitzgerald references these developments not because she wants to write philosophy. Rather, shes
describing the intellectual firestorm that blazed
around Cambridge in 1912, where the novel,
a love story as well as a period piece, both begins
and ends.
Along with Gate, The Beginning of Spring
(1988), Fitzgeralds personal favorite among her
books, comprises her brilliant, barbed farewell to
the new-old century she was born into. The novel
carries forward from Innocence a growing interest
in foreign cultures, one that would crest in The
Blue Flower (1995). Among other things, Spring
reframes a question that has been puzzling Westerners for centuries: is Russia part of Europe, or
does it have its own unique identity? Fitzgerald
poses this question thoughtfully. While referring
to Russias simplicity and inherent goodness, she
also describes the impact of change upon these
virtues. Her nuanced, historically correct portrait
also shows business crossing international frontiers. Her main character, Frank Reid, owner of
132
FORD, FORD MADOX
a Moscow print works here in 1913, not only

deals with firms in Finland and Japan; he even
has to hire the companys first cost accountant to
keep pace with innovations in bookkeeping. But
his stiffest challenges come from elsewhere.
While reeling from the sudden, unannounced
departure of his wife, he must deal with Moscow,
a manufacturing hub, a capital city, and a metropolis that feels like a village. Lacking fixed
edges, Moscow is always on the go, toward
spring, toward communism, and toward some
new problem that even fast thinking and a wad of
rubles cannot always fix.
Fitzgeralds maturity of style and emotional
range are clearly displayed in Spring, as in her
other historical novels. Though often scorned as
a branch of gothic romance, historical fiction can
deliver the rewards of both fiction and nonfiction. When well done, it illuminates history
and transcends it (Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history). Some writers today see
history as fiction and adopt the attitude that
because we cant always know what happened
we can invent it. Any historical setting can be
imagined into existence. What counts, as Henry
James enjoyed saying, is the quality of the
imagining.
Bolstering the historians analytic flair with
a journalistic awareness of the story shes telling,
Penelope Fitzgerald meets Jamess requirement
with much to spare.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF)
Acocella, J. (2000). Assassination on a Small Scale. New
Yorker, pp. 808 (Feb. 7).
Brookner, A. (2000). Moscow Before the Revolution.
Spectator, pp. 2930 (Oct. 16).
Byatt, A. S. (2001). Introduction. In P. Fitzgerald, The
Means of Escape. Boston: Mariner, pp. ixxxx.
Fitzgerald, P. (1979). Offshore. London: Collins.
Fitzgerald, P. (1980). Human Voices. London: Collins.
Fitzgerald, P. (1982). At Freddies. London: Collins.
Fitzgerald, P. (1986). Innocence. London: Collins.
Fitzgerald, P. (1988). The Beginning of Spring. London:
Collins.
Fitzgerald, P. (1990). The Gate of Angels. London:
Collins.
Fitzgerald, P. (1995). The Blue Flower. London:
Flamingo.
Fitzgerald, P. (2000). The Means of Escape. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin.
Fitzgerald, P. (2008). So I Have Thought of You: The
Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. London: Fourth Estate.
Himmelfarb, G. (2000). A God-Haunted Family. New
Republic, pp. 5969 (Oct. 16).
King, N. (1992). The Heart Has Its Reasons. Washington
Post Book World, p. 1 (Feb. 23).
Lesser, W. (2002). Penelope. In Z. Leader (ed.), On
Press, pp. 10725.
Penelope Fitzgerald Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of TexasAustin.
Raban, J. (1999). The Fact Artist. New Republic, pp.
3942 (Aug. 2).
Wolfe, P. (1997). Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald.
Ford, Ford Madox

SARA HASLAM
Ford Madox Ford is known, in the main, for his

two acknowledged masterpieces, The Good Soldier
and the four novels that, together, make up
Parades End: Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades,
A Man Could Stand Up , and Last Post. The Good
Soldier is counted among the classics of modernism. Rebecca West cited the wonders of its
technique in her contemporary review. Students
of the period read the novel at first for these
wonders, contending with its quintessentially unreliable narrator, John Dowell, as well as his tale of
social disintegration, sexual intrigue, and violent
death. Anthony Burgess called Parades End the
finest novel about the First World War. Its
perfectly weighted opening sentence introduces
a text that is now familiar to many. Fords oeuvre
includes a further nearly 80 books, however, and
spans a great range of genres. Born in 1873, Ford
was first published in 1891. He wrote fiction, fairy
tales, poetry, and biography at the start of his
career, caught and inspired by an extraordinary
combination of late nineteenth-century influences. Most notably, this early work revealed
a dedicated attention to his Pre-Raphaelite beginnings; Fords grandfather Ford Madox Brown
illustrated his first publication, a fairy tale called
The Brown Owl (1891), and Edward Burne-Jones
the later The Queen Who Flew (1894).
Within little more than a decade, Ford became
an editor, critic, and memoir writer too. His circle
FORD, FORD MADOX
of interest widened quickly, owing to the range of

influences on which he could draw, but more
particularly to the writers Joseph Conrad preeminent among them that he soon met. (While
Fords best-known books are populated in the
main by lonely protagonists, with loose, or disintegrating, ties to the world, his writing life is
characterized by its strong, though shifting, networks of artists who had, as he put it, studied
their Flaubert.) The volumes of his trilogy England and the English were boomed from 1905.
His kaleidoscopic London is a long way from
fairy tales, and was called by the Daily Mail the
latest and truest image of London, built up out of
a series of negations, that together are more
hauntingly near to a composite picture of the city
than anything we have seen before. Both The
Good Soldier (1995 [1915] ) and Parades End
(2002b [1950] ) display similar series of multiple,
fragmented perspectives, and the landscape of war
becomes prominent in Fords work after 1915
an effective context, or metaphor, for his explorations of individual psychology, as well as of
relationships between individuals and nations. It
is his rendering of this landscape that prompts
judgments like Graham Greenes there is no
novelist of this century more likely to live than
Ford Madox Ford; yet it never quite replaces the
jeweled vision of the early fairy tales, or the
historical romances like Ladies Whose Bright Eyes
(1911), in which William Sorrell travels back to
the Middle Ages and finds his soul eased by the
comparative simplicity and freedom of life. Indeed, those early notions are themselves longlived, reworked into poems like On Heaven,
published in 1913 and much admired by Ezra
Pound he called it the most important poem in
the modern manner or Latin Quarter (1936),
and the lovers precious velvet blackness found
there.
Ford Madox Ford was called Ford Hermann
Hueffer when he was born, in Merton, Surrey, on
December 17, 1873. On that day, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti prophesied that he would bring glory to
whichever of his two countries he may choose
to adopt . . . His father, Francis H
uffer before he
anglicized his name, was German, a music critic
for The Times; his mother Catherine was Ford
Madox Browns daughter, and a painter herself.
Ford first traveled when he was very young to visit
his H
uffer relations in Europe; this route (London
133
and Paris, through to the Rhine and Alsace-Lorraine) became one he would love, and was also
one that, perhaps, sowed the seeds for his ideas
about relationships in literature for the rest of his
life. He believed in a Republic of Letters, and
always stressed the special nature of the association between writers, and between European and
trans-European literatures. The critic Vita Fortunati offers a different model for Fords statement between the two wars that wherever there
were creative thinkers was my country: the community of artists that was the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. Ford published a book about Rossetti in 1902, and one about the Brotherhood in
1907. The familial links with the Brotherhood
began early: Madox Brown was Dante Gabriels
mentor and friend; and Fords aunt had married
William Michael Rossetti the families would
holiday together when the children were young.
This became his first, strong, creative network.
But while it helped him to develop a visual
technique that would be with him until the
1930s (A. S. Byatt has recently examined his use
of color words, starting with the simple, pure
tones of the fairy tales), as well as his ideas about
artistic republics, there was an emotional cost to
this kinship that would affect him as strongly
to the end of his life. His childhood identification
of his Rossetti cousins as horrible monsters of
precocity, and marvels of genius, when compounded by the tragic early death of his demanding and judgmental father, contributed to a severe
lack of self-confidence. The most serious effects of
this particular family romance can be witnessed in
his agoraphobic breakdowns in the early years of
the twentieth century. A late chapter of Return to
Yesterday, Fords memoir of the years 1894 to
1914, describes some of the resultant cures, and
the wickedly unskilful doctoring, to which he
was subjected at the time.
When his father died in 1889 there was no
money (Ford would struggle with financial insecurity for most of his life). He went to live with his
beloved Madox Brown. The strength of the bond
he shared with his grandfather is shown in the
name Ford eventually took, with surprising delay
considering the one he was born with and the
cultural climate postwar, in 1919. Madox Brown
remained the most significant force in Fords
creative life until, in 1898, he met and soon began
to collaborate with Conrad. By this time, Ford had
134
FORD, FORD MADOX
also married, in somewhat dramatic fashion. He

had eloped with Elsie Martindale and was living in
Romney Marsh, the hub of the most productive
of his literary networks, which would come to
include, as well as Conrad, the American writer
Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. But
it was his meeting of Conrad that has been called
the crucial event in both mens literary lives.
Ford learned much of his craft from this great
writer, and developed an impressionist technique
alongside him. He later said that his literary
friendship with Conrad had been for its lack
of jealousy a very beautiful thing. This is not to
say the relationship with Conrad was easy. They
wrote The Inheritors together (1901), then Romance (1903), but quarreled too, and broke with
each other in 1909. (Ford nevertheless published
a memoir of Conrad in 1924.) When Ford fell out
with his fellow writers and friends, as he also did
with Henry James, and with his great friend
Arthur Marwood upon whom he based Christopher Tietjens, the protagonist of Parades End
it was generally about one of two things: money,
or the socially complicated (and emotionally
painful) relationships Ford had with the women
in his life.
The first of Fords editorial ventures, the English Review, emerged from discussions with Marwood, Conrad, Edward Garnett, and H. G. Wells
when Ford and Elsie spent time in London in
1904. Ford wanted to become involved more
widely in the literary scene, and also wanted to
promote exciting modern writing. Though this
review, which Ford founded in 1908, having
moved back to London, has been described as
one of the best literary magazines ever to appear
in these islands (publishing new writers like
Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis as well as established figures such as Hardy), for the period of his
editorship from December 1908 to February 1910
it was a financial disaster. That he met and began
an affair with the writer Violet Hunt at the same
time, though his marriage had by this time failed,
put too big a strain on his relationships with Wells
and Garnett, and then with Conrad, Marwood,
and James too. And I used the phrase socially
complicated deliberately. Literary London may
not have been ready for his attempts to divorce
Elsie (with whom he had two daughters, Christina
and Katharine), or for his long affairs with Hunt
and others, but his relationships with what Joseph
Wiesenfarth (2005) has termed the regiment of

his women formed the other most significant of
Fords creative networks. These relationships
must be taken seriously in artistic, as well as
biographical, or even moral, terms. Though it
was partly the case that a new love affair seemed
to stimulate the desire to write a lover was often
also a muse this was not the whole truth of the
matter. Ford worked tirelessly to support the
work of those in whom he believed (as those
writers he edited knew, this was not restricted to
lovers). Even as his relationship with Violet Hunt
disintegrated, he wrote to Lucy Masterman about
how good Hunts latest novel was as he corrected
its proofs. And Ford also learned from Hunt, and
from novelist Jean Rhys, as well as from Stella
Bowen and Janice Biala, the latter both important
artists who rejuvenated his style. Bowen and Biala,
in their turn, acknowledged an extensive debt to
him; Hunt (1926) and Rhys (1928), on the other
hand, published accounts of their lives with Ford
that nearly destroyed his reputation.
By the time Ford began work on the first of the
books that would make his name, The Good
Soldier, his relationship with Violet Hunt was
starting its decline. The novels opening chapters
came out in the Vorticist magazine, Blast, on June
20, 1914. Less notably, he was also soon busy
writing (somewhat idiosyncratic) propaganda for
his good friend C. F. G. Mastermans wartime
propaganda bureau. He believed in the cause at
first, and joined up, at the age of 41, in July 1915.
But like most others, Ford had a miserable and
tragic experience of war. He got his commission as
a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment (Special Reserve). Here I am and hard at it 6 a.m. to
7 p.m. everyday . . . Literature seems to have died
out of a world that is mostly interesting from its
contours, he wrote from Cardiff, where he
trained before leaving for France on July 13,
1916. As might be expected on this date, his
destination was the Somme. His age meant that,
although he asked to be at the front and was for
about two months he was stationed mainly with
the battalion transport. This did not mean that he
avoided bombardment. Such positions were regularly shelled, and only a few days after he arrived
he was blown up by one such shell; he landed on
his face, suffering concussion and mouth injuries.
In an impressive section of Parades End, Christopher Tietjens is also blown up. His experience is
FORD, FORD MADOX
a curious and liberating one. He finds that, surprisingly, he is still alive, and, full of adrenaline
and feelings of indestructibility he rescues those
men of his who lie around him, carrying them,
pulling them from the disgusting viscous mud like
an avenging angel. The indulgence of his physicality leads, by the end of the tetralogy, to a sexual
fulfillment unavailable to him (but enjoyed elsewhere by his taunting, vicious, and stunning wife)
before the war. This is how Tietjens is moved into,
and begins finally to inhabit, the modern, postwar
world. It was not so for Ford.
In Sussex, postwar, Ford was haunted. It Was
the Nightingale (1934) records that Red Ford
(the house he shared with Bowen), was filled
with a horde of minor malices and doubts. Ford
feared that the shadows were alive . . . and that
the dark, gleaming panes of the window hid other,
whispering, beings that jeered behind his back.
In the earlier, and important, stylistic essay On
Impressionism (1914), glass works very differently from the way it does in this memoir. In 1914
it is brightly, cheerfully, reflective, and, as a symbol, denotes the active and creative minds
capabilities of being in two different places at
once places of time as well as of space. The
clouded window panes of Red Ford are a postwar
mutation, torturing the shell-shocked writer with
what he does not, any longer, know about himself.
Ford lost portions of his memory in the war, some
of which never came back. (His hearing was also
damaged, and he cannot quite catch what the
ghosts are saying either.) Fords doubts about his
failing memory, and thus his ability to reflect and,
ultimately, to write, are a terror. Parades End
helped to exorcise them, as did the country to
which he went for succour. His instinct was to
grow vegetables, cook good and simple food, and
to merge in some way with the nourishing soil a
crucial stage in the journey to his beloved
Provence.
By the time Parades End appeared in print,
things were better for Ford (unlike most of the
great books about World War I, it took less than
10 years to produce). Biographer Max Saunders (1996) writes that he was back in the thick
of contemporary literature, partly as a result of
editing the Transatlantic Review in Paris, publishing Hemingway, Stein, and Carlos Williams, for
example. As the tetralogy appeared Ford was truly
feted in New York in particular. (New York Essays
135
and the travel book New York is Not America were

both published in 1927.) For a while his money
troubles went away. He never, however, lived in
England again. His long and fulfilling relationship
with Stella Bowen survived an affair with Jean
Rhys while they were all living in Paris in the mid1920s, but then he traveled to the USA in 1926 and
1927 without her and their daughter, Esther Julia,
and it was destroyed by the distance and by
further liaisons abroad. Until Ford met the last
great love of his life, Janice Biala, on May Day,
1930, marking the start of the decade that induced
most of his memoirs, he moved between Paris,
Provence, and America, always writing (he published poetry, fiction, and criticism in this period
alone), always finding and often becoming a hub
of artistic conversation and endeavor wherever he
was based.
Ford and Bialas home became Villa Paul, on
Cap Brun, for much of the remainder of his life.
He was happy here, cooking, writing, and tending
his garden, but he was suffering periods of painful
and debilitating heart trouble. His illnesses did
not prevent further travel to work at Olivet College, Michigan he met the young Robert Lowell,
who became an influential admirer, during one
trip and in New York. Ford completed one of his
most important critical books, The March of
Literature (1939), while he was at Olivet, and
remained with Biala in New York for the autumn
and winter of 1938. True to form, a new literary
group was begun in the city early the next year at
his suggestion, to promote William Carlos Williams, and serious creative Literature in
America. The group came to include Ezra
Pound, e. e. cummings, Allen Tate, Sherwood
Anderson, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood,
and Williams himself, and there was talk about
turning it into another review. In what James
Joyce called possibly the last public act of Fords
life, he wrote on May 10 to the Saturday Review
to celebrate Finnegans Wake, and protest against
the tone of the review the editor had published.
Ford died at Deauville, having just reached France
from America, on June 26, 1939. He is buried on
the cliffs above the town.
SEE ALSO: Conrad, Joseph (BIF); London in
Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Rhys,
Jean (WF); Wells, H. G. (BIF); World War I in
Fiction (BIF)
136
FORSTER, E. M.

Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1901). The Inheritors.
London: Heinemann.
Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1903). Romance. London:
Smith, Elder.
Ford, F. M. (1891). The Brown Owl. London: T. Fisher
Unwin.
Ford, F. M. (1894). The Queen Who Flew. London: Bliss,
Sands and Foster.
Ford, F. M. (1896). Ford Madox Brown. London:
Longmans, Green.
Ford, F. M. (1902). Rossetti. London: Duckworth.
Ford, F. M. (1906). The Fifth Queen. London: Alston
Rivers.
Ford, F. M. (1907a). The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
London: Duckworth.
Ford, F. M. (1907b). Privy Seal. London: Alston Rivers.
Ford, F. M. (1908). The Fifth Queen Crowned. London:
Alston Rivers.
Ford, F. M. (1910). A Call. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Ford, F. M. (1911). Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. London:
Constable.
Ford, F. M. (1924). Joseph Conrad: A Personal
Remembrance. London: Duckworth.
Ford, F. M. (1927). New York is Not America. London:
Duckworth.
Ford, F. M. (1930). The English Novel: From the Earliest
Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad. London:
Constable.
Ford, F. M. (1933). The Rash Act. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Ford, F. M. (1934a). Henry for Hugh. Philadelphia:
Lippincott.
Ford, F. M. (1934b). It Was the Nightingale. London:
Heinemann.
Ford, F. M. (1938) Provence. London: Allen and Unwin.
Ford, F. M. (1939). The March of Literature. London:
Allen and Unwin.
Ford, F. M. (1965). The Letters of Ford Madox Ford
(ed. R. Ludwig). Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Ford, F. M. (1995). The Good Soldier [1915] (ed. M.
Stannard). New York: Norton.
Ford, F. M. (2002a). No Enemy [1929] (ed. P. Skinner).
Manchester: Carcanet.
Ford, F. M. (2002b). Parades End [1950] (ed. M.
Saunders), comprising Some Do Not . . . [1924], No
More Parades [1925], A Man Could Stand Up [1926], and The Last Post [1928]. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Ford, F. M. (2003). England and the English [1907] (ed.
S. Haslam), comprising The Soul of London [1905],
The Heart of the Country [1906], and The Spirit of the
People [1907]. Manchester: Carcanet.
Haslam, S. (2002). Fragmenting Modernism: Ford

Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War.
Hunt, V. (1926). The Flurried Years. London: Hurst and
Blackett.
Rhys, J. (1928). Postures. London: Chatto and Windus.
(Reprinted as Quartet. London: Deutsch 1969.).
Saunders, M. (1996). Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. 2
vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saunders, M. (ed.) (1997) Ford Madox Ford: Selected
Poems. Manchester: Carcanet.
Saunders, M. (gen. ed.) (2002 ). International Ford
Madox Ford Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Saunders, M., & Stang, R. (eds.) (2002). Ford Madox
Ford: Critical Essays. Manchester: Carcanet.
Wiesenfarth, J. (2005). Ford Madox Ford and the
Regiment of Women. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Forster, E. M.
PETER CHILDS
Edward Morgan Forster is most well known for

the handful of novels he published in his lifetime
but he was also successful as a short story writer,
biographer, critic, librettist, and travel writer.
His four early novels situated him as an astute
observer of contemporary manners and mores,
which he chiefly portrayed in social comedies that
have a lineage from the fiction of Jane Austen to
the plays of Oscar Wilde. He shared with the latter
a frustration over the unacceptability of writing
openly about homosexuality and his early work
concerned the restrictions placed on personal
freedom by English sensibilities. However, his
later work, especially his last novel A Passage to
India (1924), has much in common with the
experimentations of modernism in its use of
symbolism and what Forster calls rhythm in
his book on fiction Aspects of the Novel (1927).
Forster, who lived most of his later life at Kings
College, Cambridge, was one of the less prominent figures in the Bloomsbury Group, a lifelong
member of the Labour Party, and an agnostic.
He was also an avowed liberal humanist who
believed strongly in personal relationships,
famously writing in What I Believe (1939) that
he would sooner betray his country than his
friend. His early novels and stories use Italy, and
to a lesser extent Greece, as a vibrant, life-affirming antithesis to the stultifying repression of
FORSTER, E. M.
Edwardian England. His homosexual novel,

Maurice (1971), written in 191314, was published only posthumously.
Born in London on January 1, 1879, the year
before his fathers death, Forster was educated at
private schools in Eastbourne and Tunbridge
Wells. Raised by his mother, with whom he
remained close up to her death in the mid1940s, Forster inherited 8,000 in 1887 from his
great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, about whom he
later wrote a domestic biography. From 1897,
he attended Kings College, Cambridge where he
read classics and history, partly under the supervision of the paganist and political activist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a fellow Bloomsbury
set member and long-term friend of whom
Forster also wrote a biography. At Cambridge,
Forster similarly came under the influence of the
philosopher G. E. Moore and the aesthetic belief
that the highest purpose of living is to contemplate beauty in art and to cultivate friendships in
life. Forster was elected to the Apostles circle of
Cambridge intellectuals and through them met
members of what was to become the Bloomsbury
Group, which included Roger Fry, Virginia
Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. After Cambridge, he undertook a one-year
tour of Italy and Austria with his mother in 1901,
and around this time he also began writing. The
next year he taught at the Working Mens College
and subsequently at the extra-mural department
of the Cambridge Local Lectures Board, teaching
Italian art and history.
His first story Albergo Empedocle appeared
in Temple Bar in December 1903 and in the
following year he started contributing stories to
the Cambridge-based journal Independent Review, but Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) was
Forsters first published novel. It is a narrative
revolving around Anglo-Italian contrasts that sets
the passionate world of Italy Forster had seen on
his travels against the cool, reserved values of
suburban England. A social comedy for most
of its length, it ends as a tragedy with death and
frustrated love as the English, briefly taken out of
themselves, return to their unadventurous lives in
the southern counties. In the year of its publication, Forster spent several months in Nassenhalde, Germany, as tutor to the Countess von
Arnim: an experience that, like his friendship
with Virginia and Vanessa Stephen (later Virginia
137
Woolf and Vanessa Bell), would inform his portrait of the Schlegel sisters in Howards End. In
1907 he worked as a private tutor for an Indian
Muslim, Syed Ross Masood, with whom he
developed a close, loving friendship and to whom
A Passage to India is dedicated. Also in 1907,
Forster published the novel of his Cambridge
days, The Longest Journey, which remained his
favorite novel despite its comparatively low critical standing. It tells the story of an orphaned
undergraduate and then struggling writer, Rickie,
who abandons his close friend Ansell for a loveless
marriage but is then partially enlightened by
the free spirit of his wayward, pagan Wiltshire
half-brother Stephen. At this time, Forster also
associated more often with the Bloomsbury
Group, becoming a close friend of the Woolfs,
Strachey, and Fry.
The following year Forster published his second Anglo-Italian novel, A Room with a View
(1908): a story of misunderstandings and English
snobbery which this time ends happily as the
heroine Lucy Honeychurch realizes in time her
love for the impulsive George Emerson over the
effete intellectual Cecil Vyse. While mocking
the romantic novel, Forster here adheres to its
conventions. The story clearly centers on a young
woman whose passions are aroused by a holiday
abroad, where she meets the man she will eventually marry after certain hurdles, social and
personal, have been overcome. The book therefore has its tongue in its cheek much of the time
and it is the social comedy of the characters and
situations that are of chief interest rather than the
romance. Forsters narrator sits above the characters and recounts events in a consistently ironical tone. The novels title plays with the sense of
a view as an opinion or prejudice, which may be
poor and partial or generous and open. English
interiors are contrasted with Italian exteriors, just
as in Lucys surname the sweet taste of honey is
contrasted with the constraint and sobriety of
the church. Lucys surname is a portmanteau
word and represents her choice between Cecil
and George, England and Italy, convention and
passion. The novel has been considered Forsters
finest, because it appears a perfectly drawn study
of manners and morals, class and social comedy.
It is just as arguably a slight work and its charms
cannot perhaps compensate for its lack of ambition or its literary conservatism.
138
FORSTER, E. M.
However, Forsters early novels did not sell well

and it was in 1910 that he had his first considerable success with the book that secured his
reputation: Howards End. Concerning sections of
the middle classes, this is a condition of England
novel that focuses on the question: who will
inherit Howards End, Forsters metonym for
England based on his childhood home of Rooks
Nest. The story centers on the relationship between the intellectual German Schlegel sisters and
the practical, male-dominated, business-oriented
Wilcox family. The Wilcoxes are a thriving but
none too cultured unemotional middle-class
family with a successful domestic and imperial
business. They stand for industry and finance,
commerce and capital: an outer life of telegrams
and anger that embodies the Protestant work
ethic and masculine endeavor. The Schlegels,
Margaret, Helen, and Tibby, are young intellectual Londoners of German descent. They stand
for the inner world of personal relationships
and humane liberal culture. Forster suggests in
the novel that while he prefers and values more
highly the life of the Schlegels, it cannot subsist
without that of the Wilcoxes. In the novel,
ambitiously if not wholly convincingly, Forster
attempts to find a way for Wilcox money to
become the support for Schlegel culture, and also
for the future of rural England to be wrested from
urban, commercial interests and placed once
more in the hands of the yeomanry.
Howards End has partly become famous for its
epigraph, Only connect, which stands as a call
across Forsters writing to seize the day and unite
the spiritual and the material sides to life. A novel
of the bourgeois and bohemian classes with little
to say about the upper and lower sections of
society, Howards End nevertheless remains an
important study of the death of Liberal England
and of the twilight years before the Great War. It is
a successful anatomy of the red rust and portable
luggage of industrial Englands slide through
change and transition, comparable to other
contemporary works by Wells and Lawrence for
example, but it is also a novel intimately and
illuminatingly concerned with the connections
between private and public worlds.
Now an established novelist, the hitherto prolific Forster was to publish only one more novel in
the rest of his life, though he remained an active,
thoughtful, and highly admired writer. The year
1911 saw the release of a collection of his short

stories as The Celestial Omnibus. In 191213 he
made his first visit to India, with R. C. Trevelyan,
Dickinson, and G. H. Luce, and soon after Forster
began writing an early draft of A Passage to India.
He also worked on the homosexual novel that was
not published until after his death, Maurice: A
Romance. This novel, circulated privately at the
time, is a story of cross-class love that for the only
time in Forsters long fiction explicitly eschews the
traditional orthodoxy of heterosexual romantic
encounters for the homosexual love that Forster
himself desired.
Forster did find love, after the war started when
he began working for the International Red Cross
in Alexandria and fell for a young man called
Mohammed El-Adl, with whom he had his first
sexual experiences. In Egypt, Forster also became
a stronger supporter of the Greek poet C. P.
Cavafy. He returned to England in 1919, after
the war, but set off traveling again in 1921. On this
trip to India he worked as the private secretary to
the Maharajah of Dewas Senior, and his letters
home from the two Indian trips were later published as The Hill of Devi (1953). In 1922 he
published Alexandria: A History and a Guide, but
copies were burned before distribution and the
book was not republished until 1938. Pharos and
Pharillon, Forsters essays on Alexandria, together
with some translations of Cavafys poems, was
published in 1923.
Over this time, Forster had been reworking
his Indian novel, which was finally published in
1924, 14 years after Howards End. A Passage to
India begins as the story of Adela Quested and
Mrs. Moores journey to India to visit Adelas
betrothed, Ronny, who is also Mrs. Moores son.
There they meet a college teacher Mr. Fielding, to
some extent Forsters surrogate in the novel, the
Brahman Hindu Dr. Godbole, and the Muslim
Dr. Aziz, whose alleged assault on Adela is the
fulcrum of the narrative. A Passage to India
makes extensive use of the technique of
rhythm by which Forster, and his critics, denote the structural use in fiction of leitmotifs or
repetition with variation. Rhythm depends
upon reiterated words and phrases that accumulate resonances through the repeated use of
expressions, incidents, or characters to create
a pulsating effect in the evolution of a texts
themes. It is apparent in the use made of the
FORSTER, E. M.
echo that haunts Adela and Mrs. Moore after

their visit to the Marabar Caves.
The entire book is in fact highly structured to
create patterns, repetitions, and symbolic impact.
For example, it foregrounds a tripartite structure
of Mosque, Caves, and Temple: three Indian spaces representing Islam (a monotheistic
religion), Jainism (atheistic), and Hinduism
(polytheistic). The book also follows a seasonal
pattern in its three parts, from cold weather to hot
weather to the rains. The other key element to the
books construction is the central symbol of the
Marabar Caves, which has been interpreted in
many ways. First, they appear as hollow, empty
spaces to match Forsters perception of metaphysical emptiness in a godless universe. Second, they
arguably express Forsters view of India as a place
of mystery and nullity to the British Raj. Third,
the hollow caves can be read as a symbol of the
main textual absence in the book, its missing
center: the enigma of what happened to Adela.
A Passage to India was widely acclaimed but
Forster gave up extended fiction because he felt
he could not write openly and honestly about
(homo)sexual relations. In 1927 he gave the Clark
Lectures at Cambridge University that were published as Aspects of the Novel the same year. He was
also offered a fellowship at Kings College, Cambridge on the strength of them. In 1928, a new
assembly of short stories was published, The
Eternal Moment: a second collection of six stories
that turn away from realism toward the styles of
fantasy and romance.
In 1934, the year he published his first biography, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Forster became the first president of the National Council
for Civil Liberties, an unsurprising decision for
someone who had argued against the suppression
of Radclyffe Halls lesbian novel The Well of
Loneliness in 1928 and later spoke in defense of
the overturning of the ban on D. H. Lawrences
Lady Chatterleys Lover in 1960. Two years after
the Dickinson biography, in 1936, he published
his first assembly of essays and occasional pieces,
Abinger Harvest. His mother died in 1945 and in
the same year he was elected an honorary fellow at
Kings, which entitled him to live at the college, as
he did for the rest of his life. In 1947 he embarked
on lecture tours in the United States, and two
years later he refused a knighthood from the king.
The same year he wrote the libretto for Benjamin
139
Brittens opera Billy Budd, based on Hermann

Melvilles novel.
The year 1948 saw the publication of the assembly of his two short story volumes as Collected
Short Stories, while 1951 saw the release of
Forsters second collection of essays and articles,
Two Cheers for Democracy, and 1953 the important publication of The Hill of Devi. This is
Forsters account of the visits he made to the
small Indian princely state of Dewas Senior in
191213 and, more importantly, 1921. It is
composed primarily of letters sent home but is
supplemented by later commentary. On his first
visit, Forster went as a guest but on his second he
served as private secretary to the maharajah, for
which on his departure he was awarded the highest honor of the state: the reigning Princes Tukoji
Rao III Gold Medal. The book is principally
concerned with the day-to-day activities of the
court, the way in which the state was ruled and
administered. Never that sure what he was doing,
Forster likened it to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.
Devi, Residence of the Goddess, is the sacred
mountain that looms over the capital city of
Dewas Senior. At its summit, inhabited by an
ancient object of great significance if not power,
like the Kawa Dol at the Marabar, is the cave of
Chamunda. As this detail implies, the book is an
intriguing exercise in cultural difference as well as
travel writing but for many readers its foremost
interest will lie in the light it sheds on Forsters
final novel. For example, he writes: I began
[A Passage to India] before my 1921 visit, and
took out the opening chapters with me, with the
intention of continuing them. But as soon as they
were confronted with the country they purported
to describe, they seemed to wilt and go dead and I
could do nothing with them. I used to look at
them of an evening in my room at Dewas, and felt
only distaste and despair. The gap between India
remembered and India experienced was too wide.
When I got back to England the gap narrowed,
and I was able to resume. The opening chapter of
the third section of A Passage to India, Temple,
is also illuminated by reading Forsters account in
The Hill of Devi of the Gokul Ashtami festival that
he attended in Dewas in August 1921 and used as
a model for Godboles ceremony.
Forsters final book in his lifetime was
Marianne Thornton (1956), a biography of
the great-aunt whose gift of 8,000 had allowed
140
FOWLES, JOHN
Forster to afford to go to Cambridge and subsequently to become a writer. In 1969 Forster was
awarded the Order of Merit. He died the following
year in the home of friends on June 1. The years
1971 saw the publication of his Maurice and 1972
the release of his remaining, largely unpublished,
short stories in The Life to Come. Forsters unfinished novel Arctic Summer was published in
1980 and his selected letters were released in two
volumes in 1983. He remains one of the best
regarded English novelists of the twentieth century despite effectively ceasing to write fiction
halfway through his life.
Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Modernist
Woolf, Virginia (BIF)

Beauman, N. (1993). Morgan: A Biography of E. M.
Forster. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Beer, J. (ed.) (1985). A Passage to India: Essays in
Interpretation. London: Macmillan.
Bradshaw, D. (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion
to E. M. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Childs, P. (ed.) (1999). Post-Colonial Theory and English
Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Das, G. K. (1977). E. M. Forsters India. London:
Macmillan.
Forster, E. M. (1905). Where Angels Fear to Tread.
Forster, E. M. (1907). The Longest Journey. Edinburgh:
Blackwood.
Forster, E. M. (1908). A Room with a View. London:
Edward Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1910). Howards End. London: Edward
Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1911). The Celestial Omnibus. London:
Edward Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1922). Alexandria: A History and a
Guide. London: Whitehead Morris.
Forster, E. M. (1923). Pharos and Pharillon. London:
Hogarth.
Forster, E. M. (1924). A Passage to India. London:
Edward Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the Novel. London:
Edward Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1928). The Eternal Moment and Other
Stories. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Forster, E. M. (1934). Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

London: Edward Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1936). Abinger Harvest. London: Edward
Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1939). What I Believe. London: Hogarth.
Forster, E. M. (1951). Two Cheers for Democracy.
Forster, E. M. (1953). The Hill of Devi. London: Edward
Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1956). Marianne Thornton. London:
Edward Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1971). Maurice. London: Edward
Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1972). The Life to Come and Other
Stories. Edward Arnold.
Forster, E. M. (1980). Arctic Summer and Other Fiction.
Furbank, P. N. (1978). E. M. Forster: A Life. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Herz, J. S. (1993). A Passage to India: Nation and
Narration. Boston: Twayne.
Jay, B. (1998). E. M. Forsters A Passage to India.
Harmondsworth: Icon.
Royle, N. (1999). E. M. Forster. Plymouth: Northcote
House.
Stape, J. H. (1998). E. M. Forster: Critical Assessments.
Robertsbridge: Helm Information.
Tambling, J. (ed.) (1995). E. M. Forster. London:
Macmillan.
Trotter, D. (1993). The English Novel in History.
Fowles, John
BROOKE LENZ
Renowned for his erudition, his experimentation

with literary form, and his exceptional storytelling
abilities, John Fowles was unique in his generation
ofEnglish authors for achieving (andmaintaining)
both popular success and critical acclaim. Though
his work peaked in critical reputation by the early
1990s, Fowles remains one of the most popular and
important authors of postwar British fiction.
Born March 31, 1926, in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex,
England, Fowles felt suffocated by the suburban
conformity of his early life with his parents Robert
John Fowles and Gladys May (Richards) Fowles,
much preferring the quiet life of rural Devon,
where his family evacuated during World War II
and where he would discover his abiding reverence for nature. He attended Bedford School,
served two years compulsory service in the Royal
FOWLES, JOHN
Marines, and briefly attended the University of

Edinburgh. Fowles then attended New College,
Oxford, where he discovered the French literature
(particularly Celtic romance) and existentialist
philosophy that would influence all his writing.
After leaving Oxford, he accepted teaching posts
at the University of Poitiers, France, and then at
a boarding school in Spetsai, Greece. Deeply
moved by Greek landscape and culture, Fowles
also met his future wife, Elizabeth (Whitton)
Christy, at the school. This tumultuous affair
weathered several difficult years while Fowles
taught at Ashridge College and then at St. Godrics
College, London. Elizabeth and John Fowles were
married on April 2, 1954. The publication of his
first novel allowed Fowles to write full-time, and
the couple eventually moved to Lyme Regis,
Dorset, where he would write most of his major
work. Although he was always conscious of his
Englishness and became absorbed in the history of
the town, serving as curator of the Lyme Regis
Philpot Museum for a decade, Fowles felt himself
an exile in England and considered his ideas
more consistent with European values. After
Elizabeths sudden death from cancer in 1990,
Fowles married family friend Sarah Smith in 1998.
He died on November 5, 2005, after a long illness.
Throughout his career, Fowles wrote fiction
that explored profound questions of human existence and relationships. Especially intrigued by
the work of Sartre, Camus, and Jung, he created
situations in which his characters personal and
cultural values would be tested, especially in their
interactions with mysterious women. In The
Collector (1963), his first published novel, this
interaction occurs between butterfly collector
Frederick Clegg and art student Miranda Grey.
Having admired Miranda from afar, Clegg decides to kidnap her and keep her in a basement after
suddenly winning the football pools. A psychological thriller inspired by both the Bluebeard
legend and a newspaper clipping of a similar
kidnapping, The Collector offers both Cleggs and
Mirandas version of events, highlighting the
differences in the social, political, and aesthetic
environments of the two characters and emphasizing their inability to communicate across these
boundaries. Although Miranda begins to develop
some existential awareness, both characters opinions and actions are ultimately determined by
their social locations, and Mirandas developing
141
authenticity is abruptly halted with her death

from pneumonia and neglect.
As his most conventional novel, The Collector
introduces some of Fowless most consistent concerns, most notably with social conditioning
versus individual authenticity, free will, and personal integrity. Yet The Magus (1977 [1965] ),
published as his second novel but begun a decade
earlier and revised and republished a decade later,
offers a much more complex investigation of
these existential concerns. The novel details the
experiences of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman of Fowless generation who, like his author,
takes a teaching position at a boarding school on
a Greek island. There he enters the mysterious
world of Bourani, a villa owned by the enigmatic
Maurice Conchis. Under Conchiss direction,
Nicholas negotiates a series of bizarre episodes,
most of which revolve around the intoxicating
Lily (also called Julie, and based on Sanchia
Humphreys, a student Fowles encountered at
Ashridge College), whom Nicholas covets despite
his commitment to his Australian girlfriend,
Alison (based, like most of Fowless heroines, on
his wife Elizabeth). This godgame radically
destabilizes Nicholass affected principles, forcing
him to confront his own lack of personal authenticity. Inspired by a variety of sources and experiences, including Richard Jefferiess Bevis, Henri
Alain-Fourniers Le Grand Meaulnes, Charles
Dickenss Great Expectations, and Fowless own
experiences on Spetsai, The Magus puzzled many
readers and critics familiar with The Collector,
particularly because of its ambiguity, complexity,
and indeterminate ending. However, the revised
version, with its clarified themes and enhanced
eroticism, remains one of his most popular works.
Fowless most successful work was his next
novel, The French Lieutenants Woman (1969).
Inspired by a persistent vision of a woman staring
out to sea, The French Lieutenants Woman combines a story set in Victorian Lyme Regis with an
intrusive modern narrator, who comments on the
action, questions the nature of fiction, occasionally inserts himself into the story as a character,
and constructs alternative endings. The story
chronicles the existential awakening of Charles
Smithson, an amiable but unremarkable gentleman, who is seduced out of his conventional
existence by the alluring Sarah Woodruff. With
its implicit comparison of historical mores and
142
FOWLES, JOHN
values and its metafictional concerns, the novel

flustered the literary establishment in England,
but became wildly popular in the United States. It
won several awards, and was made into an Oscarnominated film in 1981, featuring a screenplay by
Nobel laureate Harold Pinter.
Fowless subsequent novels, while less provocatively seductive, focus even more crucially on the
hazard of existence, the burdens of social conditioning,thechallengesofexistentialawareness, and
the importance of personal authenticity and meaningful relationships. Written under the working
title Variations, Fowless next published work,
The Ebony Tower (1974), includes the title novella,
a Breton lai translated from Marie de France, and a
number of shorter stories that resonate thematically with one another and with his earlier works.
The most obvious resonances occur in the title
novella, in which art critic David Williams travels
to France to interview exiled artist Henry Breasley,
a kind of inarticulate Conchis figure who presides
over a mysteriously erotic domain that challenges
David, through his interactions with Breasleys
assistant Diana, to live authentically. David
fails to rise to the challenge, and returns to his
comfortable but inauthentic existence. The collections other stories catalogue similar failures of
imagination but gesture toward more authentic
possibilities; however, the obscurity of these tales
has both intrigued and frustrated readers and critics.
Likewise, Fowless next novel, Daniel Martin
(1977a), has drawn both praise for its social
consciousness and ambition, and criticism for its
comparatively stolid and lengthy explication. As
his most personal work, the novel follows the
development of its eponymous protagonist, a
Hollywood screenwriter summoned to his native
England by the impending death of an old friend.
Dissatisfied with his empty accomplishments,
Dan decides to write a novel exploring the forces
that have shaped his life in order to find a more
fulfilling and authentic path. Critical in this enterprise are two romantic interests, Dans actress
girlfriend Jenny and his former lover and sisterin-law, Jane. As both Fowles and Dan pursue
whole sight, the novel investigates how various
forces contribute to the perception of experiences
and considers the ways in which an individual
might achieve personal and artistic authenticity.
Fowless next novel, Mantissa (1982a), offers
a stark contrast to Daniel Martin. A parody of
poststructuralism, Mantissa takes place entirely

within the head of its protagonist, author Miles
Green, as he debates the nature of fiction with his
muse, Erato. As a playful attack on literary criticism and a defense of Fowless highly eroticized
views on writing, Mantissa received predictably
negative reviews, but offers his most overtly postmodern and mischievous investigation into the
nature of fiction and freedom.
Inspired by a persistent vision of silhouetted
travelers and set inthe eighteenth century, Fowless
last published novel, A Maggot (1985), follows the
investigation of a mysterious gentlemans disappearance by lawyer Henry Ayscough. A historical
novel informed by the perspective of its modern
narrator and the conventions of detective novels
and science fiction, A Maggot includes historical
texts both real and invented, along with the depositions of several characters. The most important of these comes from Rebecca Lee, a former
prostitute who in the novel becomes the mother of
historical Shaker leader Ann Lee. Combining elements of all Fowless earlier fiction, A Maggot
investigates problems of perception, social consciousness, creativity, and authenticity.
Though he secured his literary reputation as
a novelist, Fowles worked in a number of forms,
and his non-fiction and occasional writings provide important insights into his popular and
influential fiction. The most significant of these
writings include The Aristos (1964), a philosophical treatise inspired by Heraclitus; Wormholes
(1998), a collection of essays; The Tree (1979),
a reflection on nature; and his critically acclaimed
Journals (2003, 2006). He has also published
a number of shorter works, often accompanied
by photography, and a collection of poetry. His
voluminous papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University
of Texas, Austin, and posthumous publication of
new work remains a possibility.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Mystery/
Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF); Science Fiction (BIF)
Acheson, J. (1998). John Fowles. New York: St. Martins.
Aubrey, J. (1991). John Fowles: A Reference Companion.
Westport, CT: Greenwood.
FRAYN, MICHAEL
Aubrey, J. (ed.) (1999). John Fowles and

Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape.
Madison, NJ. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Barnum, C. (1988). The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth
for Our Time. Greenwood, FL: Penkevill.
Conradi, P. (1982). John Fowles. New York: Methuen.
Cooper, P. (1991). The Fictions of John Fowles. Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press.
Fawkner, H. W. (1984). The Timescapes of John Fowles.
Press.
Foster, T. C. (1994). Understanding John Fowles.
Fowles, J. (1963). The Collector. Boston: Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1964). The Aristos. Boston: Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1969). The French Lieutenants Woman.
Boston: Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1973). Poems. New York: Ecco.
Fowles, J. (1974). The Ebony Tower. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Fowles, J. (1975). Shipwreck. Boston: Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1977a). Daniel Martin. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Fowles, J. (1977b). The Magus [1965], rev. edn. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1978). Islands. Boston: Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1979). The Tree. New York: Ecco.
Fowles, J. (1980). The Enigma of Stonehenge. New York:
Summit.
Fowles, J. (1982a). Mantissa. Boston: Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1982b). A Short History of Lyme Regis.
Fowles, J. (1984). Thomas Hardys England. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1985). A Maggot. Boston: Little, Brown.
Fowles, J. (1990). Lyme Regis Camera. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Fowles, J. (2003, 2006). The Journals, 2 vols. (ed. C.
Drazin) London: Vintage.
Garard, C. (1991). Point of View in Fiction and Film:
Focus on John Fowles. New York: Peter Lang.
Green, G. (dir.) (1968). The Magus. Blazer.
Huffaker, R. (1980). John Fowles. Boston: Twayne.
Knights, R. (dir.) (1984). The Ebony Tower. Granada
Television.
Lenz, B. (2008). John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Loveday, S. (1985). The Romances of John Fowles. New
York: St. Martins.
Olshen, B. N. (1978). John Fowles. New York: Ungar.
Onega, S. J. (1989). Form and Meaning in the Novels of
John Fowles. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.
Palmer, W. J. (1974). The Fiction of John Fowles:
Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
143
Pifer, F E. (ed.) (1986). Critical Essays on John Fowles.

Boston: G. K. Hall.
Reisz, K. (dir.) (1981). The French Lieutenants Woman.
Juniper Films.
Relf, J. (ed.) (1998). Wormholes. New York: Henry Holt.
Salami, M. (1992). John Fowless Fiction and the Poetics
of Postmodernism. London: Associated University
Presses.
Tarbox, K. (1988). The Art of John Fowles. Athens:
University of Georgia Press.
Vipond, D. L. (ed.) (1999). Conversations with John
Fowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Warburton, E. (2004). John Fowles: A Life in Two
Worlds. New York: Viking.
Wilson, T. M. (2006). The Recurrent Green Universe of
John Fowles. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Woodcock, B. (1984). Male Mythologies: John Fowles
and Masculinity. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble.
Wyler, W. (dir.) (1965). The Collector. Collector
Company.
Frayn, Michael
MERRITT MOSELEY
Michael Frayn is a man of letters best known as

a playwright and a novelist. He began his writing
career, though, as a much admired author of
topical satirical essays and was credited as one of
the fathers of the satire boom of the 1960s; he
has won fame as a translator, particularly of
Anton Chekhov, and two of his books, including
one published in 2006, are works of philosophy.
Frayn was born on September 8, 1933, in Mill
Hill, a northern suburb of London, in a family he
places somewhere between lower-middle and
middle-middle class. He received his secondary
education first in a fee-paying school and then at
the Kingston Grammar School. There he wrote
poetry, edited a school magazine, and was, like
many writers of his generation, a youthful communist. He earned a state scholarship to study at
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but deferred his
entry to do his required national service, which
proved a boon, since he was taught Russian as
a military translator (a study which prepared him
for his translations of Chekhov).
Entering Cambridge in 1954, he studied moral
sciences, or philosophy. He wrote for the literary
magazine and for Footlights!, the annual Cambridge student review. Upon graduation in 1957
144
FRAYN, MICHAEL
he began to write for the Guardian, first reporting

and soon writing humorous columns. He ceased
to write a regular column in 1968, though he has
since returned to it occasionally. By that time he
had begun to publish fiction, his first novel, The
Tin Men (1965), being followed quickly by
The Russian Interpreter (1966), Towards the End
of the Morning (1967), and A Very Private Life
(1968).
His first plays were performed in 1970 and for
several years he wrote steadily and successfully for
the theater, his first really sensational hit coming
in 1982 with Noises Off. There were translations of
Chekhov and his first philosophical work, Constructions (1974), during the late 1970s and 1980s;
then, in 1989, he returned to fiction with The Trick
of It. He has continued this versatile career. Late
Frayn would include his play Copenhagen (1998),
which won the US Tony Award for best play, and
the novels Headlong (1999), shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize, and Spies (2002), the Whitbread Novel of the Year.
Frayns novels cannot be easily or neatly
summed up, as they differ so strongly from one
another, though they are usually inventive, intelligent, and predominantly comic, and they show a
continuing interest in how ordinary people do
their work. The Tin Men is a farcical treatment of
advertising and market research, casting an early
sardonic look at cybernetics; a misunderstood visit
by the queen triggers the hectic action. It won the
Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden
Prize. The Russian Interpreter, a thriller about an
Englishman over his head in Russia, obviously
relies on Frayns Russian language skills and his
disillusioning Russian visits. Paul Manning, the
innocent abroad, is easily manipulated both by
Russians and by an amoral Englishman who
claims to be his old university friend.
Towards the End of the Morning (published in
the US as Against Entropy) takes a gently jaundiced look at the newspaper business, revealing an
office full of idle and not very competent journalists, getting through their day, and the disruption
that ensues when a new man arrives and works
with ambition and drive. A Very Private Life
begins strikingly: Once upon a time there will
be a little girl called Uncumber. Frayn goes on to
depict a dystopian future of human alienation in
which the privileged people live hermetically
sealed lives, connected by something like the
Internet, and shows that efforts to make contact

with a wider world, like Uncumbers, are doomed.
Sweet Dreams is a fantasy about the afterlife,
suggesting that heaven is a modest improvement
on the earthly life the departed character Howard Baker can now speak foreign languages and
revise embarrassing moments of his life but is
otherwise like New York except populated by
earnest social liberals of the sort Howard has
known in England.
The Trick of It (1989), published after a long
fictional hiatus mostly devoted to the theater, is a
darkening campus comedy about a literary critic
who marries the author who has been his subject.
Far from helping his research program, his marriage disrupts it, produces marital rivalry in
which he tries to become a novelist, and ends
in career disaster. A Landing on the Sun (1991) is
an engrossing and touching exploration of the
mysterious death of a civil servant. An investigator assigned to learn the truth about a civil
servants suicide learns of a secret love affair and
his own relationship to the dead mans family
and their sadness. Now You Know (1992) is more
political than most of Frayns books. It turns on a
campaign for transparency in public life waged
by a brash man, uncouth but irresistible, called
Terry Little, and the complications that sexual
desire, with its privacy and secrecy, introduces
into a demand that everything be publicly
known.
Headlong is the richest of Frayns novels. It was
criticized by some as difficult, because it includes much art history and Flemish history; it
focuses on a lost Brueghel painting and the
machinations of an academic who believes he has
found it. The farcical account of how he attempts
to acquire it includes the vortex of lying, then
lying more to cover the original lies, that Frayn
sees in most farce. Spies is simultaneously a nostalgic study of youth in a London suburb during
World War II, a thriller about suspected spies
and multiple forms of betrayal, and a subtle
investigation of identity.
Frayns newspaper columns have been published in five collections. His book The Human
Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe
(2006) is philosophy. But most of his output is in
the form of stories many for the theater, but
including 10 of the sharpest and most satisfying
novels of the past 40 years.
FRAYN, MICHAEL
SEE ALSO: Campus Novel (BIF); Fantasy Fiction

(BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF);
Frayn, M. (1965) The Tin Men. London: Collins.
Frayn, M. (1966) The Russian Interpreter. London:
Collins.
Frayn, M. (1967) Towards the End of the Morning.
London: Collins. (Published in US as Against
Entropy.)
Frayn, M. (1968) A Very Private Life. London: Collins.
Frayn, M. (1973) Sweet Dreams. London: Collins.
Frayn, M. (1974) Constructions. London: Wildwood
House.
Frayn, M. (1982) Noises Off: A Play in Three Acts.
London: Methuen.
Frayn, M. (1989) The Trick of It. London: Viking.
Frayn, M. (1991) A Landing on the Sun. London: Viking.
Frayn, M. (1992) Now You Know. London: Viking.
Frayn, M. (1998) Copenhagen. London: Methuen.
Frayn, M. (1999) Headlong. London: Faber and Faber.
Frayn, M. (2002) Spies. London: Faber and Faber.
145
Frayn, M. (2006) The Human Touch: Our Part in

the Creation of the Universe. London: Faber and
Faber.
Hitchens, C. (2002) Between Waugh and Wodehouse:
Comedy and Conservatism. In Z. Leader (ed.), On
Press, pp. 4559.
Kahan, M. (2000) Michael Frayn. Bomb, 73, 549.
Lyall, S. (1999). Enter Farce and Erudition: Ambiguity
Fires a Novelist and Playwright. New York Times,
pp. EI, 3 (Oct. 25). At www.nytimes.com/1999/10/
25/theater/enter-farce-and-erudition-ambiguityfires-a-novelist-and-playwright.html?
pagewanted1, accessed Mar. 4, 2010.
Moseley, M. (2006) Understanding Michael Frayn.
Page, M. (1994) File on Frayn. London: Methuen.
Page, M. (1998) Michael Frayn (8 September 1933 ). In
M. Moseley (ed.), British Novelists Since 1960. 2nd
series. Detroit: Gale, pp. 12837.
Wilders, J. (2002) Michael Frayn (1933 ). In J. Parini
(ed.), British Writers, supplement VII. New York:
Scribners, pp. 5165.
Worth, K. (1983) Farce and Michael Frayn. Modern
Drama, 26 (March), 4753.
G
Galloway, Janice
DOROTHY McMILLAN
Janice Galloway, born in 1955, was brought up in

Saltcoats, Ayrshire, by her mother, whose life was
a constant struggle after she left her destructive,
drunken husband. Galloways childhood was
dominated by a much older sister who returned,
having left her own husband and child, to tyrannize the household. Yet, love of reading and music
provided freedoms in the midst of emotional and
material deprivations. At her secondary school,
Ardrossan Academy, she was encouraged intellectually and musically by a charismatic teacher,
Ken Hetherington. She studied music and English
at Glasgow University and taught in Ayrshire for
10 years before The Trick is to Keep Breathing kickstarted her writing career in 1990. Since then
Galloway has made herself into an impressively
professional woman of letters, indeed of more
than letters for her repertoire includes short stories; poems; theatrical, operatic, and sculptural
collaborations; editing and music reviewing, as
well as four novels, The Trick, Foreign Parts, Clara
and This Is Not About Me in which the various
interests converge. Literary, visual, and musical
experiments inform the techniques of the four
long fictions; and the long and short fictions assist
each other, since Galloway often suggests that
womens lives are best represented as a series of
short stories or vignettes with repeated epiphanies
or clarifications, rather than as plot-driven toward definitive closure. She exploits the visual
possibilities of the page, and the structure of Clara
roughly follows Robert Schumanns song cycle
Frauen Liebe und Leben (Womans Life and Love).

Galloways determination to transform rather
than be limited by conventions, whether literary,
typographical, political, or sociological, characterizes her feminism which may, given the depressing nature of some her subject matter, at
times seem down, yet is never out. Galloway
refuses to be limited by fixed categories Scottish
novelist, Glasgow novelist, woman novelist. In
various interviews she insists that she simply gets
on with it if critics find schools and patterns that
is their affair. She admits the significance for her
work of Alasdair Gray and Marguerite Duras,
admires Catherine Carswell and Jessie Kesson,
but insists that nothing that a writer reads or
experiences is ever wasted.
The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) deals with
the breakdown, hospitalization, and possible recovery of schoolteacher Joy Stone after her married lover and colleague, Michael Fisher, drowns
in a hotel pool during their holiday in a foreign
resort. Joy teaches in a secondary school, and
having abandoned her cottage to dry rot, lives in
a depressed Glasgow overspill council estate on
the outskirts of an unnamed Ayrshire town. Her
existence is ignored by the minister officiating at
her lovers funeral and this precipitates a crisis of
identity. The novels typographical tricks (Sterne
filtered through Alasdair Gray) figure the fragmentation of the self, but even more daringly
Galloway forces Plathian confessional fiction to
accommodate social and political critique.
Foreign Parts (1994) charts the driving holiday
in France of Cassie and Rona, single women in
their late thirties. Cassies life with Chris, her

GALSWORTHY, JOHN
former partner, is invoked through holiday snapshots, the more distant past of World War I by a
visit to a war cemetery and by two letters home by
Ronas grandfather from the trenches where he
died. This novel too revivifies convention as
memorials of men and the male form of the road
novel are pressed into celebration of the resilience
of female friendship.
Clara (2002b) follows the nineteenth-century
pianist and composer, Clara Wieck Schumann,
from her childhood, dominated by her musicteacher father who vows to make her famous, to
the death in a lunatic asylum of her husband
Robert, the now celebrated composer. Galloway
focuses on the struggle of Robert and her father to
possess Clara, forcing her to negotiate the conflicting demands of music and love, work and
motherhood. Thus revisionist biography allows
examination of the history of female creativity.
Galloways short stories in Blood (1991) and
Where You Find It (1996) are also experimental,
often disturbingly so. Generically the stories are
slippery, veering from realism to the creepy fantasy of After the Rains, a story of transformations of human to inhuman a flower, a washing
machine, and worse, after a period of ceaseless
rain. But even the realist stories teeter on the brink
of the surreal, as if our lives require constant effort
to keep them this side of normality. There is the
couple whose love is controlled by the kind of
shop they live above bliss above the bakers,
revulsion above the butchers; the girl who makes
heart-shaped ham sandwiches for her lovers
piece on Valentines day. The narrating voice
is unsettling, usually but not always female; some
sympathy is allowed to male positions: in Hope
the narrator shuts his eyes against the oppressive,
cloying presence of his partner, Hope: Sooner or
later I will have to open my eyes (1996, 83).
This Is Not About Me (2008) is another transformational novel, more than a memoir in its
exploration of the forces that constrain talent and
ambition, although it offers a modestly hopeful
account of the survival of creativity against the
odds. The title disclaims autobiographical truth,
insisting on the constructedness, the fictionality
of the account. Yet the vulnerability and the feisty
resilience of Janice Galloway are the primary
characteristics of her creators writing and it is
impossible not to feel that we are admiring the girl
and the writer simultaneously. Galloway has nev-
147
er caught better the distinctive Scottish English of

her upbringing with the terrible, inescapable
cliches that the old use to reduce the self-esteem
and expectations of the young: I wish I didny have
you trailing my heels all the time (59); You thats
supposed to be clever (115), you and your fancy
ideas (308). The whole of Galloways work insists
that these fancy ideas are just what we should be
holding on to.
SEE ALSO: Carswell, Catherine (BIF);
Feminist Fiction (BIF); Gray, Alasdair (BIF);
Scottish Fiction (BIF)
Galloway, J. (1989). The Trick is to Keep Breathing.
Edinburgh: Polygon.
Galloway, J. (1991). Blood. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Galloway, J. (1994). Foreign Parts. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Galloway, J. (1996). Where You Find it. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Galloway, J. (2002a). Boy Book See. Glasgow: Mariscat.
Galloway, J. (2002b). Clara. London: Jonathan Cape.
Galloway, J. (2008). This Is Not About Me. London:
Granta.
Jackson, L. (ed.) (2004). Exchanges: Reading Janice
Galloways Fictions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review.
Janice Galloway: A Web Archive. At www.
galloway.1to1.org, accessed Jan. 28, 2010.
McGlynn, M. (2001). Janice Galloway. Review of
Contemporary Fiction, 21(2), 739.
Metzstein, M. (1993). Of Myths and Men: Aspects
of Gender in the Fiction of Janice Galloway.
In The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. Edinburgh:
Galsworthy, John
TRACY HARGREAVES
John Galsworthy owes what he termed his

passport . . . for the shores of permanence
(Marrot 497) to two trilogies, The Forsyte Saga
(1922) and A Modern Comedy (1929). Through
his Forsytes, Galsworthy observed the feuding
dynamics of the intergenerational middle-class
family to explore and symbolize the cultural and
moral dynamics of England from the late Victorian to the modern period (1886 to the late 1920s).
148
GALSWORTHY, JOHN
Aesthetics, sexual desire, the location of home,

and a number of class-based issues percolate
through the two trilogies, marking the boundaries
of transitional cultural change.
Galsworthy was born on August 14, 1867 into a
wealthy middle-class family. He was educated at
Harrow School and, with the intention of entering
his fathers profession, went on to read law at
New College, Oxford. Although he was called to
the Bar, Galsworthy realized that the law was not
his vocation and, following a fortuitous meeting
with Joseph Conrad (the pair remained lifelong
friends), and with the encouragement of his wife,
Ada, he began writing. Galsworthys output was
prolific and varied: poetry, essays, short stories,
plays, and fiction. His naturalistic drama was well
received: his first play, The Silver Box (1906), was
produced by the influential VedrenneBarker
partnership at the Court, later the Royal Court
Theatre. Galsworthys compassionate commitment to prison reform was explored in Justice
(1910). The play prompted a correspondence and
series of meetings with Winston Churchill, then
Home Secretary, who later announced reforms
for the treatment of prisoners in solitary confinement (Gindin 2067). But it is as the creator of
the Forsytes that Galsworthy really distinguished
himself.
The Forsyte Saga comprised The Man of Property (1906), Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1915),
In Chancery (1920), Awakening (1920), and
To Let (1921). A Modern Comedy comprised
The White Monkey (1924), A Silent Wooing
(1927), The Silver Spoon (1926), Passers By
(1927), and Swan Song (1928). Galsworthy followed the trilogies with a collection of stories
outlining the fates and quirks of minor Forsyte
characters, On Forsyte Change, published in
1930, before completing a final trilogy of novels,
Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, and
Over the River, devoted to the Cherrells, the
older type of family with more tradition and sense
of service than the Forsytes (Marrot 630) the
kind of family that Virginia Woolf explored in The
Years (1937), which was written with the express
intention of rejecting Galsworthys popular
example.
Galsworthys first Forsytes were created in a
short story, The Salvation of Swithin Forsyte in
A Man of Devon (1901) and in an unfinished play,
The Civilized (19012), which features James
Forsyte and his wife Emily. While writing The

Man of Property in 1905, Galsworthy mooted the
idea of at least two more volumes. In any event, he
did not return to the Forsytes until 1915 when,
during his profound despair about World War I,
he wrote his rustic Indian Summer of a Forsyte,
first published in Five Tales (1918) and eventually
included as a connecting interlude between The
Man of Property and In Chancery in The Forsyte
Saga in 1922. Galsworthys hitherto celebrated
reputation had been suffering something of a
decline during World War I; his contemporary,
Hugh Walpole, thought that Galsworthy was
shrivelled up like a pea (Hart-Davis 152),
though he would change his mind, telling Galsworthy a decade later, I dont expect you realise
what a help your quietness and dignity is to many
of us (Marrot 610). Katherine Mansfield, reviewing his World War I novel Saints Progress,
thought he had come to a standstill (Gindin
392). But Galsworthys instincts were different
and prescient: The idea of making The Man of
Property the first volume of a trilogy cemented by
Indian Summer of a Forsyte and another short
episode came to me on Sunday, July 28th, and I
started the same day. This idea, if I can ever bring
it to fruition, will make The Forsyte Saga a volume
of half a million words nearly; and the most
sustained and considerable piece of fiction of
our generation at least (Marrot 443). Though
he declined to read the novels as a study in
transition, through both form and content,
Galsworthy nonetheless maintained a dialogue
between late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
sensibilities, morality, and taste in his Forsyte
novels, describing them in his Preface to
Heinemanns 1925 edition of the novels as an
intimate incarnation of the disturbance that
Beauty effects in the lives of men (p. xi). And
yet, Soames, once the villain of the piece in The
Man of Property, does come to maturity as the
upholder of late Victorian certainty and clarity
through the volatility and nihilism of postwar
modernity. Though parodied for their snobbish
middlebrow appeal in George Orwells Keep the
Aspidistra Flying (1936), the Forsyte novels were
among the most popular bestsellers of the 1920s,
selling in six figures on both sides of the Atlantic.
They came to be associated with a very particular
notion of Englishness, as Siegfried Sassoon wrote
to Galsworthys wife Ada: I take my hat off to him
GALSWORTHY, JOHN
and all his Forsytes; that that family is becoming

part of national consciousness, I am surer than
ever (Marrot 511).
The Man of Property was conceived, according
to Galsworthy, in satiric mood, as a scathing
indictment of materialism and the propertyowning classes, fuelled, he told Edward Garnett,
by a desire to defeat Forsyteism (Marrot 169).
The focus of Galsworthys sharp critique was the
apparently impregnable property-worshipping,
materialistic Forsyte family, a formidable unit
of society, so clear a production of society in
miniature (1987a, 11). Soames Forsyte, a solicitor and art collector, is really at the center of this
first novel, and it is his delusional and hubristic
belief that he could possess his wife, the arrestingly beautiful Irene, that is the driving force of
the novel and, indeed, of the first trilogy. The
vulnerable Irene is coerced into marrying Soames
who, with his possessive instinct, turns out to be
incapable of feeling love; he collects and displays
Irene as though she, too, were a work of art. His
tragedy, Galsworthy said, was that Soames was
essentially unlovable, but it also lies in his realization that Irene is simply not his to possess and
what he most wants is precisely what he cannot
have. In order both to control and to better
display her, he commissions a new architect, the
fiance of his cousin June Forsyte, to design and
build a house in the country for her. Bosinneys
costs escalate in the pursuit and purity of his
vision, much to the abstemious Soamess irritation; when its clear that Irene and Bosinney are
in love, Soamess jealousy reaches its peak and he
rapes Irene, an act then legal within marriage.
Distraught, Irene leaves Soames and tells Bosinney who, distracted by his grief and anger, is
killed (or commits suicide Galsworthy wanted
it to remain vague) in a collision with a hansom
carriage. Irene then leaves Soames for good. In
the subsequent novels she is rehabilitated in the
family through her connection with Soamess
uncle, Old Jolyon, and his cousin, Young Jolyon,
Soamess free-spirited artist cousin who understands the aesthetic rather than commercial appeal of art. No respecter of class, Young Jo leaves
his first unhappy marriage and sets up home with
his childrens governess, Helene, fathering two
illegitimate children. When Helene dies, Young
Jo and Irene begin a courtship and they, too,
marry for love, while Soames makes a cynical
149
second marriage to the equally cynical and socially

aspirant Annette. Both couples have children:
Irene and Young Jo the innocent, trusting Jon;
Soames and Annette the modish, selfish Fleur.
This next generation fall in love when they meet
in their cousin Junes art gallery. Every effort is
made to keep them apart and, in the end, the
family secret Soamess marriage to, and rape of,
Irene is exposed. Jon dutifully marries a rather
ill-defined character, Ann Wilmot, Fleur an aristocratic philanthropist, Michael Mont. It was,
Conrad wrote to Galsworthy following the publication of In Chancery in 1920, A great Saga!
(Marrot 496). Hardy wrote to congratulate
Galsworthy following the publication of To Let
that this was one of the best of the Forsyte
chronicles, telling him, you have made me feel
very sorry you have finished with the family
(Marrot 510). But he had not. A Modern Comedy
(1929) sustains an interest in the Forsyte family,
particularly the brittle and brilliant Fleur and her
relationships with Michael and with Soames, but
the impulse to social justice that Galsworthy had
explored in his dramatic works is also evident in
this trilogy, which makes excursions outside the
Forsyte and Mont families to consider the fate of
an unemployed working-class couple the Bickets,
the General Strike of 1926, slum housing, insider
share dealing, and womens sexual morality, which
is literally put on trial in the court case that Fleur
brings against a bohemian aristocrat, Marjorie
Ferrar.
Galsworthy had a vexed and difficult relation
with modernism, which he diagnosed as a nihilistic culture in the second trilogy, A Modern
Comedy; even his desire to resurrect the threedecker novel suggests a wish to recuperate the
Victorian novel against modernisms search for
new forms to document new experience. What
began as satire turned to sentiment and this, for a
disappointed D. H. Lawrence, marked a failure of
nerve as it all fizzled out (1967, 122); his nostalgic celebration of an unchanging pastoral suggests the desire to see an unchangeable England
tenanted by the Forsytes: Winifred Forsytes son
Val limps back from the Boer War wounded by his
arrogant skirmish but is eventually redeemed by
his work on the land; the thoroughly decent Jon
Forsyte, product of a thoroughly decent marriage,
returns from his troubled traveling to farm in
Sussex with a sense of rightful possession: What
150
GALSWORTHY, JOHN
an air of having been there forever! (1987b, 573).

Balanced against this is Galsworthys impulse to
use the novel as a force that might prompt social
change, particularly in A Modern Comedy: better
housing and the need for slum clearance, and
justice for the working class. At the height of
modernism, he remained faithful to his sense of
his own strengths, as he had written to Edward
Garnett in 1905: my strength if any lies in
writing to a polemical strain through character
(Marrot 175). But it was also his earnest polemicist strain (tempered, perhaps, by his belief in
philanthropic intervention) that earned him Virginia Woolfs acerbic dismissal, in 1923, of his
clumsiness (for her) as a writer: A sensitive man
like Mr Galsworthy could scarcely step out of
doors without barking his shins upon some social
iniquity (386).
He was, though, a figure of great humanity and
compassion, supporting abolition of the censorship of plays, the minimum wage, womens
suffrage, divorce law reform, prison reform,
slaughterhouse reform, and the humane treatment of animals (Gindin 1987). Galsworthy was
elected the first president of the International
PEN Club in 1921. In 1929 he was awarded and
accepted the Order of Merit (he had turned down
a knighthood in 1918) and, in 1932, was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature. Too ill to collect it
in person, Galsworthy died from a suspected
brain tumor on January 31, 1933. His obituary
notices claimed him as an English institution
with the Forsytes representing to future generations . . . the best evidence of what, in a certain
age, a certain class and type of Englishman was
(Gindin 5). The Forsyte Saga was adapted and
broadcast by BBC Radio in 1945, 1968, and 1990.
MGM produced That Forsyte Woman, starring
Greer Garson and Errol Flynn in 1949. The
popularity of The Forsyte Saga enjoyed a stunning
renascence in 1967 when the BBC screened a
massively popular and award-winning 26episode adaptation of the novels (now available
on DVD); a third of the British nation tuned
in when the series was repeated on BBC 1 in
1968 when, famously, church services and pub
opening times were rescheduled to accommodate viewing. According to Audience Research
Reports, the series produced the second highest
levels of satisfaction in the BBCs television
history; in the first six months of its screening,
it was easily the most consistently highly rated

program on the BBC. A Granada Television adaptation in 2002 was inevitably less favorably compared to this earlier, iconic adaptation.
SEE ALSO: Conrad, Joseph (BIF); Edwardian
Fiction (BIF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF); World War I
in Fiction (BIF)

Barker, D. (1963). A Man of Principle: A View of John
Galsworthy. London: Allen and Unwin.
Batchelor, J. (1982). The Edwardian Novelists. London:
Duckworth.
Du Pre, C. (1976). John Galsworthy: A Biography.
London: Collins.
Frechet, A. (1982). John Galsworthy: A Reassessment
(trans. D. Mahaffey). London: Macmillan.
Galsworthy, J. (1934). Letters from John Galsworthy
19001932 (ed. E. Garnett). London: Jonathan
Cape.
Galsworthy, J. (1935). End of the Chapter. London:
Heinemann.
Galsworthy, J. (1987a). The Forsyte Saga [1922].
Galsworthy, J. (1987b). A Modern Comedy [1929].
Galsworthy, J. (1999). Five Plays (ed. B. Nightingale).
London: Methuen.
Gindin, J. (1987). John Galsworthys Life and Art:
An Aliens Fortress. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Hargreaves, T. (2007). Nostalgic Retrieval: Sexual
Politics, Cultural Aesthetics and Literary Form in
John Galsworthys The Forsyte Saga. English, 56(215),
12746.
Hart-Davis, R. (1985). Hugh Walpole: A Biography.
Lawrence, D. H. (1967). John Galsworthy. In Selected
Literary Criticism, ed. A. Beal. London:
Heinemann.
Marrot, H. V. (1935). The Life and Letters of John
Galsworthy. London: Heinemann.
McDonald, J. (1986). The New Drama 19001914:
Harley Granville Barker, John Galsworthy, St. John
Hankin, John Masefield. London: Macmillan
Education.
Morris, M. (1967). My Galsworthy Story. London: Peter
Owen.
Mottram, R. H. (1956). For Some We Loved: An Intimate
Portrait of Ada and John Galsworthy. London:
Hutchinson.
Reynolds, M. E. (1936). Memories of John Galsworthy by
His Sister. London: Robert Hale.
GIBBON, LEWIS GRASSIC
Sauter, R. H. (1967). Galsworthy the Man. London:

Peter Owen.
In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3
(ed. A. McNeillie). London: Hogarth.
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pen name adopted

by James Leslie Mitchell for the Scottish fiction he
published between Sunset Song in 1932 and his
untimely death from peritonitis on February 7,
1935. He was born into a farming family in
Aberdeenshire on February 13, 1901 and spent
his childhood from the age of 8 in Arbuthnott in
the neighboring Howe of the Mearns. He himself
did not wish to work on the land, and left home to
train as a journalist in Aberdeen. He had strong
socialist commitments, and when sent to cover the
formation of an Aberdeen soviet after the Russian
Revolution in 1917, his enthusiasm resulted in him
being (temporarily) elected to the new committee.
Later, he again became involved with communist
sympathizers when working in Glasgow. He left
journalism in 1919 and joined the Royal Army
Service Corps, serving in the Far East. When this
engagement came to an end and employment
opportunities in civilian life were few, he entered
the Royal Air Force in a clerking capacity, eventually setting up home in Welwyn Garden City.
Gibbon was already developing a reputation as a
writer under his own name of Mitchell when his
first Scottish novel appeared in 1932, astonishing
and puzzling its readers. This was the period of the
interwar revival in Scottish writing, popularly
known as the Scottish Renaissance, a movement
initiated in the early 1920s by the poet Hugh
MacDiarmid. Writers associated with the revival
were in regular contact with each other, but this
new arrival although clearly from the northeast of
the country was entirely unknown. One reviewer
wrote to a friend: get hold of a novel Sunset Song
by L. G. Gibbon, whoever he or she may be. It seems
to me the pioneer of something new and interesting
in Scottish letters. Perhaps the first really Scottish
novel (McCulloch & Dunnigan 2003).
Sunset Song was the first book of Gibbons
ideological trilogy A Scots Quair, followed by
151
Cloud Howe in 1933 and Grey Granite in 1934.

With its evocative narrative of Chris Guthrie, a
young woman torn psychologically between her
love of her land and the Scots language, and the
English education that stimulates her mind, it has
remained the most popular book of the trilogy
(and in a recent poll, the most popular Scottish
book of all time). Yet the trilogy needs to be read
as a whole if the true scale of Gibbons achievement is to be appreciated. One outstanding quality is his development of a narrative medium
adapted from the stream-of-consciousness technique associated with the fiction of James Joyce
and Virginia Woolf, while at the same time
transforming the basic English language used by
adding Scots-language vocabulary and idioms
from northeast speech; and, most importantly,
by allowing the rhythms of that northeast speech
to interact with the adapted Joycean stream of
consciousness. James Kelman was later to talk
about giving equality of dialogue to the urban,
working-class characters in his fiction by removing the standard English narrative voice. Gibbons
achievement, half a century earlier, was to convince his readers that they were hearing the
thoughts and experiences of his northeast Scottish
characters told by themselves in their own language. In this first book he succeeded in revitalizing vernacular Scots for use in modernist
fiction as MacDiarmid had done previously in
relation to modernist poetry.
The achievement of A Scots Quair, however,
goes beyond narrative form. Gibbon believed in
the Marxist view of the historical process as
twofold: on the one hand, it was deterministic,
not subject to human control. Yet, as he wrote in
his essay Religion, he believed also that men
are not merely the victims, the hapless leaves
storm-blown, of historic forces, but may guide
if they cannot generate that storm (Gibbon &
MacDiarmid 1934). While A Scots Quair is in
some respects a chronicle trilogy, documenting
the decline of farming in the northeast, the move
of the people from the land into small factory
towns in the countryside, then into the large
industrial city, it is not a descriptive account of
this movement, but one that brings out its inevitability in the context of the historical process
while at the same time showing the ways in
which individual characters intervene to shape it
and themselves in positive or negative ways. The
152
GLOBALIZATION AND THE NOVEL
intrusion of World War I into the community

is an important determining episode of this
kind in Sunset Song, while in Cloud Howe, which
contains a section relating to the General Strike
of 1926, industrial relations and religion
both come under scrutiny. Narrative form and
political ideology come together in a particularly
innovative way in the final book Grey Granite,
where Gibbon succeeds in transferring his
stream-of-consciousness narrative and Scottish
linguistic medium from the countryside to the
urban context, communicating in their own
voices the thoughts of the slum people of PaldyParish and the unemployment marchers from the
factories. The conclusion of the trilogy is openended, with Ewan, the son of Chris and her first
husband (who was shot as a deserter in the war)
setting out on the Hunger March to London.
Despite his early death, Gibbon left a lasting
contribution to twentieth-century writing. A
Scots Quair is both a work of living history,
and, in its last book in particular, an unusually
strong proletarian novel. It also demonstrates
that modernist fiction need not be incompatible
with ideological commitment.
SEE ALSO:
Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the
Novel (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); WorkingClass Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)

Campbell, I. (1985). Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press.
Gibbon, L. G. (1932). Sunset Song. London: Jarrolds.
Gibbon, L. G. (1933). Cloud Howe. London: Jarrolds.
Gibbon, L. G. (1934). Grey Granite. London: Jarrolds.
Gibbon, L. G. (1946). A Scots Quair: A Trilogy of Novels,
comprising Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite.
London: Jarrolds.
Gibbon, L. G., & MacDiarmid, H. (1934). Scottish Scene;
or, The Intelligent Mans Guide to Albyn. London:
Jarrolds.
Gifford, D. (1983). Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic
Gibbon. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.
Malcolm, W. K. (1984). A Blasphemer and Reformer:
A Study of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
McCulloch, M. P., & Dunnigan, S. M. (Eds.) (2003).
A Flame in the Mearns: Lewis Grassic Gibbon:
A Centenary Celebration. Glasgow: Association for

Scottish Literary Studies.
McCulloch, M. P. (Ed.) (2004). Modernism and
Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland
19181939: Source Documents for the Scottish
Renaissance. Glasgow: Association for Scottish
Literary Studies.
Munro, I. S. (1966). Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic
Globalization and the Novel

MICHAEL VALDEZ MOSES
When applied to twentieth-century fiction, the

term globalization denotes, among other
things, the diminishing importance of the cultural, generic, and linguistic boundaries that have
traditionally demarcated national literatures. The
globalization of the novel describes a prolonged and ongoing historical process in which
a new kind of world literature emerges, one in
which the cosmopolitan, international, or global
novel assumes a central place. While the globalization of the novel is a particularly notable
feature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
literary history, it should be noted that the
increasing hybridization and cross-fertilization
of the novel as a literary form begins well before
1900. Literary history has always been characterized by the frequent and productive exchanges of
literary genres and styles across cultural and
linguistic borders. In the fourteenth century, for
example, Geoffrey Chaucer borrowed many of
his literary models from French and Italian
sources, including the works of Guillaume de
Loris, Jean de Meun, Dante, and Petrarch. And in
the nineteenth century, the publication of Walter
Scotts Waverley in 1814 launched an international craze for a new genre, the historical novel,
which by centurys end had been widely imitated
and adapted by writers throughout Europe, the
Americas, the Middle East, and even Asia. The
twentieth-century globalization of the novel thus
marks not a unique or unprecedented phenomenon, but rather a significant acceleration of the
processes of literary and cultural exchange between different cultures, peoples, and national
literatures, as well as a notable expansion of the
international networks of cultural and artistic
transmission.
While the globalization of the novel is understood to be primarily a literary and artistic phenomenon, it is often related to and considered
part of a more general process of political,
economic, and cultural Westernization. The
worldwide popularity of Hollywood films and
television programs, American fast food, popular
music, and styles of dress in the developing and
non-Western worlds, and the increasing prevalence of the English language in international
commerce, science, electronic media, and entertainment, provide some of the more noteworthy
and controversial instances of an alleged hegemony of contemporary Western culture. Those
critics hostile to the considerable influence of
modern Western cultural norms throughout the
world have frequently described globalization
as a form of cultural imperialism. Other critics
and social commentators, especially those more
favorably disposed toward Western culture, have
countered that the exchanges between Western
and non-Western, modern and traditional societies have been reciprocal (if not entirely symmetrical), and that globalization signals not only the
impact of modern Western societies on their nonWestern and traditional counterparts, but also the
influence of the latter on the former.
When viewed not simply as a contemporary
phenomenon, but instead as a slowly unfolding
cultural process that has taken place over several
centuries, globalization appears to be a crucial
aspect and cultural consequence of modernization. Globalization is closely associated with and
dependent upon several key historical changes
that typify modernity. Among these critical developments are: the rise of modern theoretical
science (and its attendant application in the form
of new technologies); the increasing delegitimation of non-democratic forms of political life and
the growing international acceptance of universal
norms of human rights (slavery, aristocracy,
monarchy, and theocracy become ever rarer as
well as theoretically and practically indefensible);
the gradual secularization of political life (religions continue to thrive and proliferate, but
modern regimes grant that belief is a matter of
private conscience, that political authority no
longer rests solely on a revealed truth or divine
right, and that the ruler is no longer sacred);
and the increasing role of market economies
(which displace forms of commercial life crucially
153
dependent upon slavery, manorialism, mercantilism, or centrally planned economies). Social

theorists have also associated globalization with
other significant features of modernity, for example the shift from rural and agricultural societies
to urban and industrial (or post-industrial) ones,
the development of mass literacy, and the rise of
increasingly powerful, centralized, sovereign, and
often imperialistic nation states.
The relationship between the novel and globalization is necessarily a very complicated one, if
only because globalization is itself such a complex
of unpredictable, sometimes conflicting, and diverse social phenomena. But at the very least, the
twentieth-century novel has served as a culturally
important means of representing the often traumatic and frequently violent transitions that mark
the historical shift from traditional societies to
modern life. From at least the time of Walter Scott
to the present day, the novel has provided one of
the most culturally influential means by which
writers have imagined and represented the process of the global spread of modern culture, a
process that has frequently entailed the destruction of premodern or anti-modern forms of
human existence. Scott dramatized the historical
disappearance of the seventeenth-century Scottish Covenanters (radical Protestant dissenters)
and the decline of the Highland clans of
eighteenth-century Scotland in Old Mortality
(1816) and Waverley. And Scotts twentiethcentury Anglophone heirs have often relied upon
his basic narrative formula even while drastically
reshaping the form and style of the novel to
suit their own needs. In The Last September
(1929), Elizabeth Bowen chronicled the decline
and destruction of the Anglo-Irish Protestant
Ascendancy during the years of the Irish War for
Independence. In his Alexandria Quartet, Justine
(1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and
Clea (1960), Lawrence Durrell told the story of the
decay and final collapse of an increasingly archaic
and politically corrupt, if artistically and culturally alluring, Mediterranean culture rooted in a
mix of ancient cultural and religious practices,
prior to, during, and immediately following
World War II. Chinua Achebe, in Things Fall
Apart (1958), chronicled the destruction of Ibo
tribal society in the face of incursions by Christian
missionaries and British imperialists in Nigeria at
the beginning of the last century, while Brian
154
Moore, in his novel, Black Robe (1985), portrayed

the unintentional annihilation of Huron society
that accompanied the proselytizing efforts of
seventeenth-century Jesuits eager to convert New
World tribes to the Catholic faith. And in
An Artist of the Floating World (1986), Kazuo
Ishiguro dramatized the destruction of the cultural and social world of imperial Taisho Japan
that followed in the wake of World War II. Scotts
nineteenth-century generic innovation has in fact
decisively influenced a diverse array of modern
novelists from around the world, including
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Naguib Mahfouz
(Egypt), Shusaku Endo (Japan), Halld
or Laxness
(Iceland), and Ng~ug~wa Thiongo (Kenya), whose
novels have been composed in Spanish, Arabic,
Japanese, Icelandic, and English and G~k~
uy~
u
respectively. And yet despite the considerable
aesthetic, cultural, and ideological differences
between these various writers, they are united by
a common desire to movingly portray both the
attractions and defects, the consolations and
pitfalls of many different forms of premodern life
that have been swept away in the course of the
seemingly universal and irreversible triumph of
global modernity.
We soon discover that narrowly national
categories of literature, which were generated and
institutionalized by nineteenth-century literary
critics and historians (many of whom were influenced by the ideals of romantic nationalism),
fail to provide a helpful matrix in which to place
many of the most prominent English or
British novelists of the twentieth century.
Their lives, careers, and even their works turn
out not to epitomize an essential or invariable
Englishness, but instead the vagaries and unpredictable consequences of cultural globalization. Joseph Conrad was born J
ozef Teodor
Konrad Korzeniowski in what had formerly been
Poland, but which in 1857 (the year of his birth)
was part of the Russian Empire. His first language
was Polish, his second French, and many years
after he had achieved international literary fame
as a naturalized British subject, the English
novelist spoke his third language in unidiomatic
fashion and with such a pronounced accent
that he routinely avoided giving public speeches.
Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland (at the time
still part of the United Kingdom), and though he
began his career writing in English, turned to
writing primarily in French after moving permanently to Paris in the late 1930s. Arthur Koestler
was born in Budapest and educated in Austria;
although he eventually became a naturalized
British subject and was named a Commander of
the British Empire, he wrote his most famous
novel, Darkness at Noon (1940), in German
(though it was first published in English translation
in London) and its predecessor, The Gladiators
(1939), in Hungarian. Salman Rushdie was
born and educated in Bombay before attending
Cambridge University and settling in England, only
to relocate to the United States later. Like his
contemporary, V. S. Naipaul, who has drawn upon
his Trinidadian upbringing for much of his early
fiction, Rushdie is one of Britains most famous
writers, and also like Naipaul, has made much
of his non-English (Indian) upbringing and
cultural background in his novels, which have only
occasionally been set in the United Kingdom.
While the translation from one language into
another has for several centuries helped to increase the circulation of literary works, in the
twentieth century the success of major world
novels has depended more than ever on their
appealing to a global audience of readers, and
thus on their translation into one or more major
world languages. Even a writer such as Ng~
ug~,
who in the 1970s announced that he would
henceforth cease to compose his works in English
in order to resist what he regards as Western
cultural imperialism and the colonization of
the African mind, has allowed his fiction to be
translated into English. The critical success and
international visibility of his translated G~k~
uy~
u
novels, such as Caitaani mutharabi-Ini (1980),
which appeared as Devil on the Cross in 1982, and
Matigari ma Njiruungi (1986), which was published in English in 1989 as Matigari, have in turn
helped him obtain academic appointments and
allowed him access to an international circuit of
literary and academic conferences, festivals, book
fairs, publishing events, creative writing workshops and MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs,
guest lectures, professional and literary associations, writers colonies and retreats that provide
critical, commercial, and artistic support for the
itinerant set of world novelists and writers to
which he belongs. In short, contemporary writers
of the global novel, who hail from almost every
geographical region and language group, do not
move from one country to another, or change

languages only as a consequence of political persecution, unwanted social upheavals, or economic earthquakes (although this is indeed often the
case); they also become transient intellectuals and
cosmopolitan artists in the course of doing their
jobs, meeting their public, pleasing their agents
and publishers, and cultivating a global network
of academic and journalistic critics.
The globalization of the novel should thus be
understood as the consequence of an ever wider
and ever more rapid circulation of writers and
literary forms through a complex transnational
network of cultural exchanges that characterizes
modernity. Social theorists have described globalization in terms of flows the increasingly rapid
movements of people, capital, information,
idioms, technologies, commodities, and cultural
products across national and political borders. To
be sure, throughout recorded history, writers,
especially insofar as they have often come from
the political, economic, and cultural elites of their
respective societies, have tended to be more mobile, more cosmopolitan, and more open to foreign influences than the great mass of people
who have enjoyed less privileged lives. Chaucer
and Milton, for example, traveled extensively in
Europe, and were instrumental in introducing
non-British literary and cultural influences into
England. But what was once the distinctive prerogative of a cosmopolitan elite has increasingly
become the commonly shared experience of inhabitants of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including millions of ordinary people whose
lives have by no means been advantaged. Accordingly, modern novelists have had to reimagine
their readerships, to conceive of their audiences as
no longer firmly bounded by national or even
linguistic borders. Their targeted readership is
receptive to the global novel in part because their
everyday experience of transplantation, displacement, exile, expatriation, immigration, and cultural disorientation often mirrors that of the
authors who appeal to them, and because those
experiences are also represented vividly and dramatically in works of imaginative fiction.
The twentieth-century world novel thus not
only serves to depict the globalized realities of
daily existence for millions of people around the
planet, but it also provides a kind of guide, a literary
globalpositioningsystemthatinsomelimitedbut
155
nonetheless important way helps people immersed in the international flows of world culture
to orient themselves and to make sense of their
individual and collective predicaments. But if the
global novel has served as a kind of cultural GPS, it
is in part owing to the fact that it has simultaneously
proved a vehicle by which the globalization of
culture has been forwarded and accelerated. One
might say that the invention of the compass has
proved invaluable for those who might become
lost, but it has also served as inducement for
individuals to wander away from home and explore places entirely unknown to them. The global
novel likewise marks a technical advance that
allows individuals to imagine for themselves ways
of life, modes of existence that are foreign or
alien. (Because the novel is a relatively old literary
form, the technical advances required for its success are easily forgotten; at the very least the rise of
the global novel has depended upon advances in
printing, mass literacy and education, transportation, communication, advertisement, and distribution that are themselves conspicuous features of
global modernization.) Though less influential
than modern world cinema, the global novel has
proved a means by which people could become
globalized; the experience of reading about exotic
places, foreign peoples, and alien cultures has had
the effect of making them less firmly wedded to
and less bounded by their own indigenous cultures or traditional ways. It has encouraged them to
become, if only in a virtual sense, more cosmopolitan, more worldly, more modern.
Defenders of indigenous cultures, who fear that
minority languages and unique forms of traditional cultural life will be overwhelmed by the
forces of globalization, are understandably suspicious and often highly critical of the homogenizing cultural effects of the world novel. In their
view, the erosion of the boundaries between
distinctive national (or local) traditions poses a
serious threat to the diversity of world culture. By
contrast, defenders of cultural globalization note
that the rise and spread of the global novel
simultaneously decreases and increases cultural
diversity: the differences between different national literary cultures declines, but the diversity and
variants within each national culture grows. The
homogenization of culture on a global scale must
thus be seen as part of the same process by
which local cultures become ever more diverse,
156
GOLDING, WILLIAM
hybridized, and heterogeneous. Finally, apologists for globalization point out that the global
novel has become a means by which minority
cultures might salvage their distinctive values,
beliefs, narrative traditions, and cultural achievements in at least some form from complete cultural irrelevance, marginalization, or even annihilation. Just as Scott attempted to preserve (if
only for posterity) the distinctive ways of life of
the Scottish Highland clans, contemporary novelists such as James Welch, Keri Hulme, and Zakes
Mda have attempted to capture for an international audience the unique history, manners,
and tales of, respectively, the Blackfeet and Gros
Ventre, Maori, and amaXhosa peoples. Critics
of globalization counter that such acts of
preservation are necessary only when a culture
is on the verge of extinction and that to represent a
vanishing people by means of novelistic representation is tantamount to turning their endangered
cultures into objects in a literary museum. Defenders of globalization in turn suggest that it is
the foes of cultural globalization who want to
freeze distinctive minority cultures at a certain
moment of their history, and thus to prevent
them from evolving or interacting with foreign
peoples and exotic cultures in new and productive
ways. For the advocates of cultural globalization,
that the introduction of the world novel could
alter the traditional ways of a minority culture is
only to permit the creative genius of its people to
modify, transform, and renew their culture in
unpredictable and inspiringly novel ways.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Expatriate
Fiction (AF); Fictional Responses to Canonical
English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (BIF);
Irish Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and
Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the
African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of
the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF);
Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF)

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
New York: Verso.
Appiah, A. (1993). In My Fathers House: Africa in the

Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Cantor, P. A. (2001). Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in
the Age of Globalization. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Casanova, P. (2004). The World Republic of Letters.
Cowen, T. (2002). Creative Destruction: How
Globalization is Changing the Worlds Cultures.
Friedman, T. L. (1999). The Lexus and the Olive Tree:
Understanding Globalization. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Garca Canclini, N. (1995). Hybrid Cultures: Strategies
for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Garca Canclini, N. (2001). Consumers and Citizens:
Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts.
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY:
Moretti, F. (1996). Modern Epic: The World System from
Goethe to Garca Marquez. London: Verso.
Moses, M. V. (1995). The Novel and the Globalization of
Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Moses, M. V. (2001). Magical Realism at Worlds End.
Literary Imagination, 3(1), 10537.
Ng~
ug~wa Thiongo (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The
Politics of Language in African Literature. London:
James Currey.
Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 19811991. London: Granta.
Tomlinson, J. (1991). Cultural Imperialism: A Critical
Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Tomlinson, J. (1999). Globalization and Culture.
Walkowitz, R. L. (2006). Cosmopolitan Style:
Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Golding, William
KEVIN McCARRON
William Goldings literary career is clearly divisible into three distinct phases. The first of these
begins with Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall
(1959) and ends with the publication of The
Spire in 1964. The second phase incorporates
the volume of essays The Hot Gates (1965), the
novel The Pyramid (1967) and the three short
GOLDING, WILLIAM
stories collected as The Scorpion God (1971).

With the exception of the collection of essays
A Moving Target (1982) and the travel book An
Egyptian Journey (1985), the third phase comprises novels alone, beginning with the publication of Darkness Visible (1979). These were
followed by Rites of Passage (1980), The Paper
Men (1984), Close Quarters (1987), Fire Down
Below (1989), and then the posthumously
published The Double Tongue (1995).
Golding was born on September 19, 1911 in
St. Columb Minor, Cornwall. In 1930 he entered
Brasenose College, Oxford, to read science, which
he studied for two years before switching to
English literature. After leaving Oxford in 1935,
Golding moved to London, where he wrote, acted,
and produced for a small, non-commercial theater. In 1939 he met Ann Brookfield whom he
married September 30 that year. Shortly after the
wedding, he took up a post as schoolmaster at
Bishop Wordsworths School, Salisbury, teaching
English and Greek literature in translation. After
the outbreak of World War II, Golding joined the
Royal Navy. The war was certainly Goldings most
important education. He later wrote in his essay
Fable:
Before the Second World War I believed in
the perfectibility of social man; that a correct
structure of society would produce goodwill;
and that therefore you could remove all social
ills by a reorganisation of society . . . but after
the war I did not because I was unable to.
I had discovered what one man could do to
another . . . I must say that anyone who moved
through those years without understanding
that man produces evil as a bee produces
honey, must have been blind or wrong in the
head. (1965, 87)
In 1945 Golding returned to Bishop
Wordsworths School to teach English and classics. While teaching he wrote several novels, all of
which were rejected, and, in Goldings later opinion, deservedly so. The book that was to make
him a household name was itself rejected by 21
publishers, before being published by Faber on
September 17, 1954. In Lord of the Flies a group of
boys, the oldest of whom is 12 and the youngest 6,
are marooned on an idyllic desert island, and
almost immediately a battle for supremacy takes
place between the principal characters. Violence
157
and death follow. Lord of the Flies was as fine an

adventure story as any published in the second
half of the century, demonstrating an impressive
ability to employ language that both provided
narrative impetus while also evoking profounder,
more theological implications. Lord of the Flies
effectively rewrote R. M. Ballantynes The Coral
Island (1858), offering a grim rejoinder to
Ballantynes Christian optimism. Lord of the Flies
was well received by the reviewers, and several
very influential writers, including E. M. Forster,
C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, were highly enthusiastic about the novel. In America the paperback
edition attracted a huge cult following among
university students, and from there it moved
rapidly into the mainstream. Over the next
30 years the novel became a set text at secondary
and tertiary level in America and Europe, and by
the end of the twentieth century it had been
translated into over 30 languages, including
Russian, Icelandic, Japanese, Serbo-Croat, and
Catalan, with worldwide sales estimated at over
10 million copies.
Lord of the Flies is usually read as Goldings
commentary upon human evil, and almost certainly it would not have been written had Belsen
and Auschwitz never existed, or indeed had Dresden never been bombed by the Allies, but a crucial
aspect of the novel, and of the majority of its
successors, was its indebtedness to an earlier
literary source. Golding was always a literary
writer with a somewhat austere and elevated sense
of the writers responsibilities, and he was unashamed about writing literature, a deeply unfashionable stance in literary studies from the late
1960s onwards. All of Goldings early novels, in
particular, are rewritings of earlier texts, and
Golding is actually closer in spirit to the iconoclastic cultural revisionism of later women writers
such as Jean Rhys and Angela Carter than he is to
his male peers such as John Braine, Kingsley Amis,
and Allan Sillitoe. War is one of Goldings central
subjects and he invariably uses it to address
questions of gender; indeed Goldings searching
evaluation of masculinity throughout his 1950s
novels makes him one of the most radical writers
of the immediate postwar years. Strikingly, the
telos of Goldings fiction is centered in revelation,
not attainment or acquisition. In Goldings fiction success for his male protagonists is always
presented as a moment of revelation, an epiphany,
158
GOLDING, WILLIAM
never as a material acquisition, or as a favorable

advance in society. His novels consistently imply
the existence of a spiritual power, external to
humanity, which in its numinous intangibility is
directly opposed to a rational, scientific worldview that is conventionally gendered in our culture as masculine. Throughout Goldings early
fiction he suggests that the supernatural forces at
the center of existence that his protagonists are
eventually compelled to recognize are capricious
and irrational, generating horror and fear as much
as joy and peace. Although religion is a central
issue in Goldings fiction, it rarely manifests itself
as conventional, contemporary Christianity.
Goldings primary religious concern is the nature
of evil and, in particular, its often ambivalent
causes and manifestations.
During the period 195464, Goldings five
published novels are all densely textured, fablelike narratives, employing brutally limited and
strikingly unconventional narrative perspectives.
He demonstrated throughout this period an unmatched ability to infuse pragmatic and minutely
observed detail with a visionary significance. In
these novels Golding depicted isolated man
stripped of social encumbrances, indeed usually
in extremis, while alluding throughout to, and
usually subverting, his literary predecessors
who included H. G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, and
Dante. While his peers were describing parochial
communities of considerable limitations, Golding was writing aggressively bold fables, which
claimed for themselves a universal and an eternal
applicability underpinned by Greek myths
and legends, echoing their harsh, primitive tone.
Particularly during this period Goldings was an
art of essences; he strove to depict what lay
beneath, or above, the observable surface of life.
If contemporary society had no fictional interest
for him it was because, unfashionably, he prioritized what he perceived as humanitys eternal
spiritual struggle, its craving for religious enlightenment, over its desire for social cohesion. Goldings principal achievement in his early fiction
was to develop innovative formal techniques
that enabled him to incorporate his unique religious vision into the traditional forms of the
English novel.
While his earlier fiction often suggests that
humanity is composed equally of good and evil,
the later fiction implies that existence itself is
similarly constructed. Goldings fictional modalities, therefore, move from fable to fantasy, and
his emphasis shifts from psychology to ontology.
In his later novels, particularly Rites of Passage,
The Paper Men, Close Quarters, and Fire Down
Below, he demonstrated a previously unsuspected
gift for comedy, but to the end of his career his
mythic and allegorical universe remained one
where damnation and salvation are still possible,
and where the actions of a single individual have
an effect on the world.
Having published five novels in 10 years, over
the next 15 years Golding published only one
book, a volume of short stories, The Scorpion
God, and a collection of essays. In 1979, however,
he published the bleak and disturbing fantasy
Darkness Visible. Unpredictable as ever, he immediately followed this with Rites of Passage, a
lively and often comic novel, although not without a characteristically tragic dimension, which
recounted the sea voyage of the arrogant young
Edmund Talbot as he sailed to Australia in 1815.
The novel was immensely successful with both the
critics and the public, winning the Booker Prize,
and giving Golding the largest readership he had
enjoyed since Lord of the Flies. This novel can be
read as both Bildungsroman and Kuntslerroman,
as Talbot becomes both a better man and a better
writer. It gave rise to two sequels, and all three
novels were published in 1991 as the single
volume To the Ends of the Earth.
Golding was made a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature in 1955. His first and only play, The
Brass Butterfly, received its first performance in
Great Britain at the New Theatre, Oxford, on
February 24, 1958. In 1961, Golding resigned as
a schoolteacher, a job he claimed never to have
enjoyed and, after spending the 19612 academic
year at Hollins College in Virginia, America, left
teaching forever. He was made an honorary
fellow of Brasenose College in 1966, and an
Honorary DLitt by Sussex in 1968. He was made
a CBE in 1966. In 1983 Golding was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1988 he was
knighted, becoming Sir William Golding. He
died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 81, on the
morning of June 19, 1993. He was buried in the
churchyard at Bowerchalke, Cornwall. In 1995,
The Double Tongue, set in Delphi during the first
century BC, the second draft of which Golding
had just completed at the time of his death, was
GRAVES, ROBERT
posthumously published to generally favorable

reviews.
In its extraordinary control and ingenious use
of narrative perspective Goldings early fiction
extended the formal boundaries of fiction, and
made a significant contribution to Britains literature. Golding returned to the past in search of the
stories that still reverberate through our culture,
which he then used to create myths for a modern
age. His characters are never helpless victims of
socio-economic forces beyond their control. They
live in a world where tragedy is not just present,
but actively inscribed in the nature of things, a
world in which one must choose, and where the
consequences of the wrong choice can be fatal. For
all its tragedy and pessimism, therefore, it can be
seen as a world that has meaning, one that affirms
and celebrates the unique humanity of every
individual.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF);
Wells, H. G. (BIF)
Boyd, S. J. (1988). The Novels of William Golding.
Brighton: Harvester.
Brook, P. (dir.) (1963). Lord of the Flies. Two Arts.
Crompton, D. (1985). A View from the Spire. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Dick, B. (1987). William Golding. Boston: Twayne.
Gindin, J. (1988). William Golding. London:
Macmillan.
Golding, W. (1954). Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and
Faber.
Golding, W. (1955). The Inheritors. London: Faber and
Faber.
Golding, W. (1956). Pincher Martin. London: Faber and
Faber.
Golding, W. (1959). Free Fall. London: Faber and Faber.
Golding, W. (1964). The Spire. London: Faber and
Faber.
Golding, W. (1965). Fable. The Hot Gates. London:
Faber and Faber.
Golding, W. (1979). Darkness Visible. London: Faber
and Faber.
Golding, W. (1980). Rites of Passage. London: Faber and
Faber.
Golding, W. (1984). The Paper Men. London: Faber and
Faber.
Hodson, L. (1969). William Golding. Edinburgh: Oliver
and Boyd.
Hook, H. (dir.) (1990). Lord of the Flies. Castle Rock.
159
Johnston, A. (1980). Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels

of William Golding. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press.
Kinkead-Weekes, M., & Gregor, I . (1984). William
Golding: A Critical Study. London: Faber and Faber.
McCarron, K. (1995). The Coincidence of Opposites:
William Goldings Later Fiction. Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press.
Redpath, P. (1986). William Golding: A Structural Study
of His Fiction. London: Vision.
Tiger, V. (1974). William Golding: The Dark Fields of
Discovery. London: Calder and Boyars.
Graves, Robert
NANCY ROSENFELD
Robert von Ranke Graves, born July 24, 1895,

grew up in Wimbledon, England; as a result of his
experiences and injuries in the trenches of the
Western Front in World War I, he chose to leave
England and seek a rural way of life. In 1929
Graves moved to the small mountain village of
Deya, Mallorca, which was his home until his
death on December 7, 1985.
Graves is best known as the author of historical
novels. His I, Claudius (1934), produced as a BBC
television series in the 1970s, and its sequel Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina (1956) made
his name a household word. Yet Graves was a
twentieth-century Renaissance man: his body of
work includes poetry (Graves viewed himself as a
poet first and foremost), more than a dozen
historical novels, autobiography, studies of mythology and ethnography, writing guides, translation, social commentary, literary criticism.
Gravess autobiography Good-Bye to All That
(1929) is one of the most influential memoirs to
come out of World War I. His Greek Myths (1955)
remains a basic text in comparative literature
studies. Generations of aspiring poets have sought
guidance in The White Goddess: A Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948).
As a writer of historical novels, Graves believed
that one possible version of an event should be
privileged above another, not necessarily because
it can be proven true via the historians tools, but
because it is truer in spirit. In his 1938 poem The
Devils Advice to Story-Tellers he argues that
Nice contradiction between fact and fact/Will
make the whole read human and exact (ll. 212).
160
GRAVES, ROBERT
Graves himself contended that the border between autobiography and fiction is not always
clear; in Good-Bye to All That he notes: The
memoirs of a man who went through some of
the worst experiences of trench-warfare are not
truthful if they do not contain a high proportion
of falsities (1929, p. vi). Gravess novels may be
said to reflect a blurring of boundaries between
fiction, autobiography, and historiography.
Prior to the composition of I, Claudius Graves
posited the project as an interpretive biography,
according to a 1929 diary entry. Graves biographer Miranda Seymour notes that he was first
drawn to the character of a possible hero or
heroine by sensing the presence of a mystery.
How, for example, could one explain Claudiuss
metamorphosis from a mild, kindly man into a
bloody-minded tyrant? (1996, 214). This was the
pattern for Gravess composition of historical
novels: upon sensing the presence of a historical
puzzle, he would immerse himself in all available
writings from and about the personage and period. (Indeed, the fact-checker employed by Graves
to search out classical errors in the manuscript of
I, Claudius found almost none.) Having studied
the personage and period as only a polymath can,
Graves then felt justified in creating a character
and telling his or her story via solving the mystery
that had originally awakened his interest.
In his depiction of Claudius and of Belisarius
(Count Belisarius, 1954) Graves clearly aimed
to revise earlier historiography. Seneca, Stoic
philosopher and politician (4 BCE65 CE), had
satirized the deification of Claudius. While the
sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius had
effectively destroyed Belisariuss reputation as a
military leader in the eyes of his contemporaries,
Winston Churchill is said to have studied
Gravess Belisarius as a source of strategy during
World War II.
Gravess experience of trench warfare on the
Western Front during the Great War permanently
impaired his health and shaped his view of current
and historical events for the rest of his life: he did
not believe that the injury and death of millions of
young people in the war to end all wars had been
justified. Yet Graves was proud of his regiment,
the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and retained a lifelong
admiration for and love of combat soldiers, those
who bear the brunt of the fighting bravely and
uncomplainingly. Gravess evocation of military
life in his novels is convincing, whether in the

story of Belisarius or of a British soldier in the
American Revolutionary War. As were all of
Gravess novels, Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth
(1940) and Proceed, Sergeant Lamb (1941) were
based upon copious reading of history and
literature.
In The White Goddess Graves explicated a theory of poetics according to which the source of
true poetry, that is Muse poetry, is the relationship of the poet with a woman in whom the
Goddess currently resides she who is mother,
lover, and layer-out, and thus presides over birth,
love, and death. This theme, central to his poetic
practice, shapes two of his better-known novels.
Wife to Mr. Milton: The Story of Marie Powell
(1944) tells of the life and times of John Milton
during the English Civil War period from the
viewpoint, not of the bard, but rather of his first
wife. King Jesus (1947), based on a plethora of preChristian and biblical sources, is a controversial
retelling of Jesuss life and death, in which the
conflict between patriarchal power and ancient
matriarchal traditions is played out; with Jesuss
death, the victory of the patriarchal tradition is
said to be complete.
Among the general public, Robert Gravess
readers perceive his novels as convincing, unorthodox, and a good read. Scholars number his
historical novels among the most erudite representatives of this genre composed during the
twentieth century.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
Arnold.
Fussell, P. (2000). The Great War and Modern Memory.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Graves, R. (1929). Good-bye to All That: An
Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape. (Rev. edn.
New York: Doubleday, 1957.)
Graves, R. (1934). I, Claudius. London: Barker.
Graves, R. (1940). Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth. London:
Methuen.
Graves, R. (1941). Proceed, Sergeant Lamb. London:
Methuen.
Graves, R. (1944). Wife to Mr. Milton: The Story of Marie
Powell. New York: Creative Age.
GRAY, ALASDAIR
Graves, R. (1947). King Jesus. London: Cassell.

Graves, R. (1948). The White Goddess: A Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth. London: Faber.
Graves, R. (1954). Count Belisarius. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Graves, R. (1955). The Greek Myths. London: Penguin.
Graves, R. (1956). Claudius the God and His Wife
Messalina. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Graves, R. (1965). Mammon and the Black Goddess.
London: Cassell.
Graves, R. (2000). The Complete Poems (ed. B. Graves &
D. Ward). Manchester: Carcanet.
Graves, R. P. (1986). Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic
18951926. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Klein, H., (ed.) (1976). The First World War in Fiction:
A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan.
Seymour, M. (1996). Robert Graves: Life on the Edge.
London: Doubleday.
Gray, Alasdair
STEPHEN BERNSTEIN
A key figure in the late twentieth-century rejuvenation of Scottish fiction, Alasdair Gray has exhibited his diverse talents in novels, short stories,
poetry, drama, criticism, polemic, painting,
drawing, and book illustration and design. Grays
writing is notable for its mixture of literary genres;
its focus on politics at all levels, from personal
relationships to governments; and its constant
attention to the consequences of human efforts
to achieve a utopian reality. Several of Grays
novels also feature various metafictional elements. He is fond of appending explanatory
notes, acknowledgments, postscripts, and sections of self-conscious Critic-Fuel itemizing
sources. Many of his books end with the word
goodbye, a habit Gray appears to have observed
in Flann OBriens At Swim-Two-Birds. As these
features coalesce, Grays strongest works are
nearly encyclopedic in sweep, compendia of wit,
analysis, and wild invention.
Born in Glasgow in 1934, Gray has lived in the
city virtually his entire life, and it provides a key
setting for many of his works. His interest in art
and writing date from a very early age and he
published his first fiction in a school magazine as a
teenager. In the 1950s he attended the Glasgow
School of Art and then embarked upon the multifaceted creative career he has pursued ever since,
taking other work as necessary along the way.
161
Gray was variously employed as an artist during

the 1960s and 1970s, a period during which his
literary output was limited to television and radio
plays while he worked on his first novel. Lanark
appeared in 1981 and soon garnered him international attention. The epic narrative is divided
into four books, two recounting the life of a
frustrated and disturbed Glaswegian art student
named Duncan Thaw, the other two (which
bookend the Thaw narrative) telling the story of
his posthumous alter ego Lanark in Unthank, a
dystopic city of the future. The volume is replete
with footnotes, running titles, illustrations, and
even a hostile author figure.
In his second novel, 1982 Janine (1982), Gray
would take his experimentation even further. The
first-person narrative recounts the life of Jock
McLeish, a bitter alcoholic in the security business, as he spends a night in a hotel room. To
balance his self-loathing McLeish fantasizes about
Janine, an alter ego subjected to various pornographic humiliations. At his nadir McLeishs
competing thoughts are represented typographically to dazzling effect. If Lanark was ultimately an
account of bemused exhaustion, 1982 Janine ends
with encouraging renewal and affirmation.
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s Gray
published several shorter novels largely based on
the scripts he had written a couple of decades
earlier. The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) and
McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990a) are political satires demonstrating the consequences of overreaching, while Something Leather (1990b) is a
not wholly successful account of several contemporary Glasgow women linked through sadomasochism. A History Maker (1994) is a more
complex comic work examining the problems
inherent in a future utopia where technology has
eliminated most work. Set on a much smaller
scale, Mavis Belfrage (1996) employs its melancholy realism to tell the story of the ultimately
unhappy relationship between a staid Scottish
college instructor and one of his less inhibited
students.
In the midst of the decade during which Gray
published these novels he also published a third
major work, Poor Things (1992). The book poses
as the memoirs of a nineteenth-century Scottish
doctor, edited by Alasdair Gray, who provides
an introduction, footnotes, and illustrations. At
the heart of the resultant collection of documents
162
GREEN, HENRY
is the wildly ambiguous story of a Frankensteinlike brain transplant that may or may not have
actually occurred. Gray uses this inventive framework to focus on many of his usual concerns: the
roles of men and women, problems of equality,
the responsibilities of governments, the plight of
the colonized, and the meaning of war.
Gray repeats several of Poor Things tactics in
his most recent novel, Old Men In Love (2007). In
this case the found narratives are authored by
John Tunnock, a retired schoolteacher who has
died under mysterious circumstances. Gray
again poses as editor and interpolates Tunnocks
diary with his unfinished attempts to dramatize
the worlds of Socrates, Fra Lippo Lippi, and
Henry Prince (a rogue Victorian minister). The
volume closes with an epilogue by Sidney Workman, a Gray-hating pedant who argues that the
volumes contents are explained by Grays own
paucity of ideas and his resultant publication
of unfinished work. While not exhibiting the
exhilarating freshness of Grays best work, the
novel nonetheless displays nearly all of his
strengths as a writer.
Grays literary career also includes two poetry
collections, a play, a volume of literary history, a
literary anthology, three books of political writing, and five collections of short stories. His
approach to fiction has always been so inclusive
of different genres that his other work, even the
non-fiction, is thematically, if not always stylistically, consonant with his novels.
SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Historical
Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Science Fiction
(BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); Utopian and
Dystopian Fiction (BIF)
Bernstein, S. (1999). Alasdair Gray. Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press.
Crawford, R., & Nairn, T. (eds.) (1991). The Arts of
Alasdair Gray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Gray, A. (1981). Lanark. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Gray, A. (1983). Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Edinburgh:
Canongate.
Gray, A. (1984). 1982 Janine. London: Jonathan Cape.
Gray, A. (1985). The Fall of Kelvin Walker. Edinburgh:
Canongate.
Gray, A. (1990a). McGrotty and Ludmilla. Glasgow: Dog

and Bone.
Gray, A. (1990b). Something Leather. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Gray, A. (1992). Poor Things. London: Bloomsbury.
Gray, A. (1993). Ten Tales Tall and True. London:
Bloomsbury.
Gray, A. (1994). A History Maker. Edinburgh:
Canongate.
Gray, A. (1996). Mavis Belfrage: A Romantic Novel with
Five Shorter Tales. London: Bloomsbury.
Gray, A. (2000). The Book of Prefaces. London:
Bloomsbury.
Gray, A. (2003). The Ends of Our Tethers: Thirteen Sorry
Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Gray, A. (2007). Old Men In Love: John Tunnocks
Posthumous Papers. London: Bloomsbury.
Gray, A., Kelman, J., & Owens, A. (1985). Lean Tales.
Miller, G. (2005). Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of
Communion. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Moores, P. (ed.) (2002). Alasdair Gray: Critical
Appreciations and a Bibliography. London: British
Library.
Green, Henry
MARINA MAcKAY
Henry Green began his career only in the aftermath of modernisms canonical achievements,
producing most of his major work between the
late 1930s and the early 1950s. This belatedness
means that he does not fit easily into conventional
narratives of literary modernism, which tend not
to look beyond the 1910s and 1920s, and helps to
explain his relative obscurity. For the same reason, though, he is potentially a significant figure
because his powerfully idiosyncratic fiction helps
to show how English literary modernism survived
the deaths of its most famous practitioners. His
characteristic prose style is instantly recognizable
but hard to generalize about, moving as it does
with artful unpredictability between romantic
cadenzas and comic bathos, between extreme
authorial self-effacement and blurting revelation.
His subject matter is easier to describe: Living is
the title of one of his best-known and most
experimental novels, but it could stand for all his
novels, with their reverential attention to the
unlikely poetry of everyday life.
I was born a mouthbreather with a silver
spoon in 1905, he wrote in the opening line of
GREEN, HENRY
his 1940 memoir Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait

(1940, 5). Henry Vincent Yorke, as Green was
christened, was indeed born with a silver spoon in
his mouth, the third child of an aristocratic
mother and a father who was both country squire
at the family estate and a successful industrialist
with business interests at home and abroad.
Among Vincent Yorkes assets was the Birmingham factory where the young Henry Green would
undertake two years of manual work. In an era of
economic recession, this was an act of social
slumming with political implications from which
Green would distance himself with comic selfmockery when he retrospectively accounted for
the motivations that had brought him to
Birmingham. I had a sense of guilt whenever I
spoke to someone who did manual work, he
wrote in Pack My Bag: As was said in those days
I had a complex and in the end it drove me to go to
work in a factory with my wet podgy hands (195).
This move to the blighted industrial Midlands
followed a conventionally elite education at Eton
and Magdalen College, Oxford, where Green had
enjoyed friendships that would survive long beyond university with his future fellow novelists
Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. However
ironically Green treated his youthful class consciousness when he wrote about it after the fact,
what makes him entirely distinctive among major
mid-twentieth-century British novelists, and
what the contrast with Waugh and Powell helps
to make starkly explicit, is his extraordinary social
range. So, for example, although the protagonist
of his precocious first novel Blindness (1926) a
novel about a schoolboy blinded in a freak train
accident on his way home from a posh public
school to his familys country house shares his
privileged social background with his author,
Green soon demonstrated his extraordinary sensitivity to the texture of working-class life as seen
from the inside in Living (1929), a novel based on
the time he had spent in Birmingham.
In a telling reversal of the English novels
traditional priorities, the main characters in Living are working-class men and women, whose
economic, romantic, and familial aspirations and
apprehensions are regarded with total seriousness, even as the novels semi-comic interludes are
supplied by the faintly preposterous lives of their
upper-class employers. In his next novel, Party
Going (1939), Green wrote with a more predict-
163
able intimacy about the bright young things of his

own social circle. Party Going describes a group of
rich friends on their way to a vacation in the south
of France: the descent of fog traps them in a
London railway station where they flirt and
squabble their way through an afternoon and
evening, until the fog lifts at the end of the novel
and they finally get away. Even when judged by
Greens own standards, Party Going is extremely
opaque: it is full of insistently recurrent images
that invite symbolical readings but which lead
nowhere; it is an unmistakably death-haunted
and almost metaphysically ominous novel
about the trivial concerns of uncompromisingly
shallow people.
In Loving (1945) Green returned again to the
conditions and concerns of working-class people,
in a novel centered on the lives of the servants in an
Anglo-Irish big house during World War II.
This, and the two other novels Green wrote around
the same time, Caught (1943) and Back (1946), are
perhaps the most compelling British novels to
come out of World War II. In view of the 10 years
that separated his prewar novels Living and Party
Going, the war represented a time of unusual
productivity for Green, despite the addition to
the ongoing demands of the family business of
his duties as an auxiliary fireman in London: a
suicidally dangerous job during the Blitz.
Directly out of this war work came Caught, set
during the first year of the war, from the so-called
Phoney War through the London Blitz. The
novel tells the story of two psychologically damaged firemen, the working-class regular Pye and
the upper-class auxiliary Roe, and, through its
temporal distortions, its emphasis on the subjectivity and unreliability of perception, and its
dislocating, hallucinatory atmosphere, it puts
what are recognizably modernist formal techniques into the service of conveying the crushing
psychic costs of war. The still more disturbing and
defamiliarizing Back is about a shell-shocked
amputee who, newly repatriated from a German
prisoner-of-war camp, becomes convinced that
his dead lover whose death coincided with his
being taken prisoner is still alive. Green had seen
shell-shock at first hand as a boy when, during
World War I, his familys country house was
converted into a convalescent home for traumatized officers. He described this episode with
painful vividness when he completed Pack My
164
GREEN, HENRY
Bag at the end of the 1930s, as if preparing for the

Second World War by recalling the tragedies of
the First. Underscoring the continuities of violence that span the first half of the century, for the
characters in Back the two World Wars continually merge into one another.
The more high-spirited Loving and Concluding
(1948) formally and thematically form something
of a pair. These two novels are set in country
houses usurped from their traditional masters: in
Loving, the servants run the house in every sense
the aristocratic owners, the aptly named Tennants, are kept continually in the dark about the
erotic and larcenous goings-on of their supposed
subordinates; in the semi-futuristic Concluding,
the owners of the country estate have been evicted
by a totalitarian government that has appropriated the manor house for use as a girls school.
Both novels, too, are whimsically fantastical and
otherworldly: all the girls in Concludings school
have names beginning with M, for example, while
the opening and ending of Loving explicitly recall
the traditional fairy tale bookends of once upon a
time and happily ever after.
Nonetheless, through their timely address to
the overthrow of the prewar economic elite to
which Green belonged, Loving and Concluding
anticipate the social concerns of his final two
novels, which are set in Greens immediate
present of the postwar settlement. The social
comedies Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952) are
in their way as wittily observed as any of Greens
earlier novels, but they present a bleak picture of
life in Britain in the years of postwar austerity.
This was the period of Clement Attlees Labour
government, elected in 1945 on the wartime
promise of a more equitable society, and committed in principle and practice to the redistribution of wealth. In Nothing, the generational
gap between those who came of age before the
war and the welfare state and those who came
of age afterwards becomes unbridgeable: the
young look down contemptuously on their
useless elders, with their tangled and promiscuous erotic lives and their habitual complaints
about a government intent on depleting their
unearned wealth; the old are appalled by the
priggish youngsters, with their sexless seriousness and their office jobs in the vastly expanded
government sector. A failed effort to bridge the
gap between the prewar and postwar eras comes
in Doting when a middle-aged man develops a

crush on a beautiful young woman. With its
connotations of senile dotage as well as of
passionate attachment, the title gives away
Greens bleak sense of how futile and misguided
are all efforts to connect with postwar life and
with those young people for whom this age of
austerity is the only reality imaginable.
Isolated by his growing deafness and debilitated
by chronic alcoholism, Green ended his career as a
writer prematurely. He lived more than another
20 years after the publication of Doting, but
completed no significant further work before his
death in 1973. Although admired immensely in
his own lifetime, he has never enjoyed a stable
posthumous critical reputation, and, despite his
idiomatic narrative voice, his extraordinary ear
for the nuances for speech, and a talent for social
comedy no less brilliant than those of Waugh and
Powell, he never commanded a wide audience to
start with. His works drift into and out of print as
they get periodically rediscovered by new generations of critics, but even in a purely academic
context he is a troubling figure, the kind of writer
who challenges rather than confirms conventional reading strategies. In the end, what makes him
critically seductive is also what makes him critically challenging: that his books are, as Treglown
writes of the baffling Party Going, well protected
against tidy explication (109). But if Greens
resistance to interpretation suggests his obscurity
and complexity, it also helps to explain why those
profoundly original novels he wrote have never
entirely disappeared.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Powell,
Anthony (BIF); Waugh, Evelyn (BIF); WorkingClass Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
Green, H. (1926). Blindness. London: J. M. Dent.
Green, H. (1929). Living. London: J. M. Dent.
Green, H. (1939). Party Going. London: Hogarth.
Green, H. (1940). Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait. London:
Hogarth.
Green, H. (1943). Caught. London: Hogarth.
Green, H. (1945). Loving. London: Hogarth.
Green, H. (1946). Back. London: Hogarth.
Green, H. (1948). Concluding. London: Hogarth.
Green, H. (1950). Nothing. London: Hogarth.
GREENE, GRAHAM
Green, H. (1952). Doting. London: Hogarth.

Green, H. (1992). Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of
Henry Green (ed. M. Yorke). London: Chatto and
Windus.
Holmesland, O. (1985). A Critical Introduction to Henry
Greens Novels: The Living Vision. London:
Macmillan.
Mengham, R. (1982). The Idiom of the Time: The
Writings of Henry Green. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
North, M. (1984). Henry Green and the Writing of His
Generation. Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia.
Odom, K. C. (1978). Henry Green. Boston: Twayne.
Treglown, J. (2000). Romancing: The Life and Work
of Henry Green. London: Faber and Faber.
Greene, Graham
BRIAN DIEMERT
Born October 2, 1904, Graham Greene was, before his death on April 3, 1991, hailed by English
reviewers as our best living novelist. The epithet
is debatable, but Greenes prolific career in
fiction, journalism, criticism, cinema, even drama
(eight plays), and poetry (Babbling April, 1925, is
his first book) undoubtedly made him a
leader in British letters and fundamentally defined
a particular milieu commentators dubbed
Greeneland, a seedy world of ambiguous corruption through which redemptive possibilities
are obscurely felt. Greene scoffed at the notion of
Greeneland, arguing his descriptions reflected
his reality, but an inclination to write about
politically and religiously troubled locations,
which he often visited with uncanny timing, gave
his work an undeniable stamp. Greene is often
identified with Catholicism and leftist politics,
but his place in both camps is debatable.
The fourth of six children, Greene was marked
in his youth by his experience at Berkhamsted
School where his father was headmaster. A recurring image in Greenes fiction is a green baize
door: just such a door separated his familys
domestic abode from the school and its dormitories where Greene lived with the other boys (1971,
11). As the headmasters son, he was never fully
accepted by his peers, so the normal indignities
of school life were compounded by bullying and
his deep feeling of separation from his family.
His unhappiness reached such proportions that
165
suicide Russian roulette is mentioned in his

autobiographical work The Revolver in the
Corner Cupboard and in A Sort of Life (1971)
seemed a reasonable option. Through his older
brother Raymonds intercession with his parents,
Greene was sent to Kenneth Richmond, a London
psychoanalyst. While in London, Greene developed an appreciation for Londons culture and a
lifelong interest in dream analysis (evident in the
posthumously published, Dream Diary, 1992). He
went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he
read history, before he embarked on a career in
journalism at the Nottingham Journal and then at
The Times.
Journalism remained Greenes greatest source
of income until the late 1940s, but the most
significant experience of his twenties was meeting
Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, a Roman Catholic
with whom he fell desperately in love. Greene
converted to Catholicism so he could marry
Vivienne, but by the end of the 1930s and with
two children, Lucy Caroline and Francis, the
marriage was all but over (as Catholics, they never
divorced). Later regular romantic partners were
Dorothy Glover, Catherine Waleston (whose story is told in William Cashs The Third Woman,
2000), and Yvonne Cloetta, who lived with
Greene from the mid-1960s to the end of his life.
Cloetta and many of Greenes friends have
published memoirs of Greene, but the broader
story, or rather, stories, are told by Norman
Sherry, Michael Sheldon, and, to a lesser extent,
A. J. West. Sherrys three volume Life (1989, 1995,
2004) is the authorized biography because
Greene, impressed by Sherrys work on Joseph
Conrad, asked him to write the biography and
granted him unique access to papers, letters, and
interviews. Quoting heavily, Sherry made full use
of his privileges and produced a thorough, largely
uncritical, biography. Sheldons (1995) book, on
the other hand, is deeply problematic, and one
wonders why he devoted so much time to an
author he so obviously dislikes. Wests (1997)
briefer text doesnt pretend to be a complete
biography, but is highly readable and even
useful. No consideration of Greenes life and
career, however, can do without his occasionally dubious autobiographical writings, which
include two books, A Sort of Life and Ways of
Escape (1980, but cobbled from previous journalism and introductions to his collected works),
166
GREENE, GRAHAM
journals, and several essays, most notably

The Lost Childhood and The Revolver in the
Corner Cupboard.
That Sherrys work on Conrad excited Greenes
interest is telling because Greenes work shares
much of Conrads sensibility. Other influences are
abundant, including T. S. Eliot, but Greene never
aspired to the high modernism of writers such as
Joyce, Woolf, or Dorothy Richardson, who, he
felt, produced two-dimensional characters. Like
others of his generation, he preferred realism and
the old dictatorship, the detached and objective
treatment (1969a, 116). He drew on Henry
James, Ford Madox Ford, and Conrad for his
models, but his book reviews also reveal his love of
popular romance writers such as Robert Louis
Stevenson, Rider Haggard, and James Buchan.
Marjorie Bowens The Viper of Milan (1906),
which Greene credits with introducing him to
adventure romance, is little read now (except
perhaps by Greene scholars), but Greene felt it
explained his schooldays miseries, and, indeed,
Greenes lasting affection for nineteenth-century
romance fiction is evident throughout his work.
As a young writer, Greene had no intention of
addressing issues of religious faith or politics. In
the late 1920s and 1930s, he just wanted to be
successful. And through much of his career he
dealt with the old problem of trying to reconcile
fictions popular genres with serious literature.
For more than 30 years Greene sought to keep
these two separate in his work by calling several
books An Entertainment. With Travels with My
Aunt (1969b) he acknowledged the labels futility
and abandoned it. Nonetheless, the distinction
proved a boon to critics. For example, R. W. B.
Lewis (1957), a fine critic of American literature,
argued that Greenes entertainments were rehearsals for his more serious Catholic novels.
Hence, A Gun for Sale (1936) looked toward
Brighton Rock (1938), The Confidential Agent
(1939) led to The Power and The Glory (1940),
and The Ministry of Fear (1943) anticipated The
Heart of the Matter (1948). The later texts formed
a kind of Catholic trilogy, Lewis argued, that
developed the concerns introduced in their corresponding predecessors. The notion of a
trilogy soon collapsed as Greenes career developed, but Lewiss essay helped establish the
vocabulary for serious comment on Greenes
fiction that was echoed by A. A. De Vitis and
other critics to cement the view that Greenes

fiction fell into two camps lesser and more
important work. The novels that engaged Catholicism (though they all do to varying degrees) were
regarded for much of Greenes lifetime as superior; consequently, he was, and occasionally still is
despite his dismissal of the idea, often treated as a
Catholic novelist. This perception pushed him
to the heights of literary and popular fame when
Time magazine featured him on the cover of
the October 29, 1951 issue: the occasion was the
appearance of The End of the Affair (1951), one of
his most highly regarded novels.
The End of the Affair is Greenes first novel to
feature first-person narration and recalls in tone,
if not plot, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford,
whose work Greene admired greatly and later
edited for the Bodley Head. The novel combines
the realism of the Blitz with the magical aspects of
Catholicism (something, Greene speculated in
The Lawless Roads, his 1939 travel book about
Mexico, that the church had sadly lost), but it also
offers one of Greenes few successful female characters. Indeed, it is something of a cliche among
critics to say that Greenes female characters
function largely as wide-eyed innocents, waif
is the often-used term, in the midst of tormented
male characters: why cant you go back home for
ever and let me be? (1970 [1938], 179), Pinkie
records as a message for Rose in Brighton Rock.
That novel ends with Rose about to play the
record the now dead Pinkie made for her the
worst horror but John Boultings film is evasive
and preserves Roses innocence at the end with, it
is implied, divine intervention. Greene accepted
this cinematic travesty because he thought viewers
would realize that Rose would eventually hear
Pinkies curse. Whether Greene would accept the
ending of the 1999 otherwise fine adaptation of
The End of the Affair is another matter. (Not
surprisingly, because Greene worked as a film
critic and screenwriter, many of his books have
been adapted to the screen, but few, with the
exception of Carol Reeds The Third Man and
The Fallen Idol, based on The Basement Room,
have been wholly successful.)
Any reading of Greenes fiction reveals the
limitations of his female characters Elizabeth
in The Man Within, Rose from Brighton Rock,
Helen from The Heart of the Matter, Phuong in
The Quiet American the list goes on and back
GREENE, GRAHAM
through Greenes canon. The fact is that Greene

does not usually handle women well, so Sarah in
The End of the Affair stands apart from his normal
sketching of women characters. Still, Greenes
fiction, like Conrads, explores the multiple ambiguities of mens choices in a masculine environment. In some ways, his first published novel
offers a template. The Man Within (1929) embodies themes of betrayal, especially between fathers
and sons, and self-torment. Andrews and Carlyon
form the figurative sonfather pair while Elizabeth completes the triangular structure Greene
so often used (another female character, Lucy,
provides an archetypal contrast to Elizabeth).
Greene might have prevented The Man Within
from being reprinted except for its status as his
first published novel, but its successors, The Name
of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931),
remain rare finds because Greene did prohibit
their reprinting. Neither is awful, but they reflect
their young authors stylistic weaknesses clearly,
and neither was commercially successful. Consequently, Stamboul Train (1932) was a deliberate
bid for popularity. With the Orient Express as a
container for his characters, Greene employed the
strategy used by Vicki Baum in Grand Hotel and
others in the 1930s; that is, several disparate
characters become a microcosm of the larger
society, but their stories seldom intersect. The
book also reflects the 1930s preoccupation with
frontiers and the difficulty of entering foreign
space. Stamboul Train gives us several characters
who are germinal to Greenes later fiction, the best
of whom is his Dr. Czinner a Balkan revolutionary returning, Lenin-like, to his homeland.
His vaguely Marxist ideals arouse our sympathy,
but Czinner is stopped at the border and, after the
confessional scene that Greene often employed
(that is, Czinner and Anne, a fellow passenger,
find themselves hiding in a small barn exchanging
confidences), executed.
Stamboul Trains real importance lies in the fact
that its success encouraged Greene and, though it
came to be viewed as a minor novel within the
larger oeuvre, it helped define him as a novelist. Its
successor, Its a Battlefield (1934), also employs an
array of characters none of whom can be
considered central to examine current political
and social conditions, as Conrad did in The Secret
Agent (whose influence here is especially obvious). Politics are never far from Greenes work,
167
but this novel was consciously political, for the

Depression showed capitalism in crisis. Fascism
was on the rise in Europe, and communism
seemed successful in Russia: between these two
ideological structures, there seemed little room
for compromise, so British culture in the 1930s
was permeated by ideological division, most visible in debates about the Spanish Civil War
(19369). Characteristically, Greene preferred
not to commit himself to either ideological position and sought a third position which he linked
to the church. It may be ungenerous to describe
Greene as a man of the 1930s, as Roger Sharrock
does (17), but there can be no doubt that ideological conflicts (political and religious) are the
bedrock of Greenes plots throughout his career.
After his frantic prewar pace (nine novels, two
travel books, a biography of the earl of Rochester
(unpublished until 1974), scads of film reviews,
and even more book reviews), Greenes writing
career slowed in the 1940s, but three of his best
novels were published then (The Power and the
Glory; The Ministry of Fear, 1943; and The Heart of
the Matter, 1948). Naturally, the war substantially
deterred creative work, and Greene, like many
writers, initially worked in the Ministry of Information, but he was soon recruited by his sister
Elizabeth to British Intelligence and stationed in
Sierra Leone, West Africa, from which he reported
on coastal shipping. This tedious experience,
however, offered time to write The Ministry of
Fear, and to gather material for one of his most
acclaimed novels, The Heart of the Matter, which
features a Catholic policeman, Scobie, whose
feelings of pity blur with love to lead him into
moral, ethical, and religious crises because he is
drawn into an adulterous affair with the waif-like
Helen. Unable to extricate himself from the dilemma and, aware that his failure to participate in
the eucharist will give him away, Scobie clumsily
plans for a death that wont appear to be suicide.
The central importance of Catholicism in the
novel confirmed Greenes status as a serious
novelist, but the book has not aged well and
Scobies torment, at least its religious component,
now seems ridiculous.
Greenes work with intelligence ended when he
abruptly resigned from his post, now in the
Iberian section, prior to D-Day in 1944, and,
because his supervisor and friend Kim Philby was
later exposed as a spy, Greenes departure has led
168
GREENE, GRAHAM
to speculation that he had intuited Philbys

compromised status and chose not to betray his
friend. Greene often referred in fiction and essays
to E. M. Forsters piece, What I Believe if I
had to choose between betraying my country and
betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts
to betray my country (1965 [1938], 76) and the
reference seems telling because Greene offered the
same thought in The Spy, his preface to Philbys
1968 memoir, My Silent War (Greene 1969a, 311).
In the 1980s, Greene visited Philby in Moscow
prior to the latters death in 1988. That these visits
occurred on the eve of perestroika and glasnost,
like his previous and equally fortuitous visits
to Kenya, Vietnam, Cuba, the Congo, Haiti,
South America, and elsewhere, in moments of
heightened political tension, fed speculation that
Greenes resignation from intelligence lacked the
sharp break he often claimed. Hard evidence in
the matter is unavailable, but it seems reasonable
to assume that Greene had numerous acquaintances, if not friends, in the service with whom he
kept in touch.
After the war, Greenes status with the public
and academics grew. The first book on his work,
by Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris, was published in 1951 but scholarly articles on aspects of
his fiction had been appearing since the early
1940s. His successful collaboration with Carol
Reed, especially on The Third Man, stimulated
Greene to produce stories for film, some of which,
while not intended as novels, have appeared.
Among these, The Third Man (1950) is the most
successful, but The Tenth Man, published in 1985,
and more recently, No Mans Land (2004) are
important additions to Greenes canon. In the
1950s, he continued to produce exceptional work.
The End of the Affair has been mentioned, but The
Quiet American (1955) and Our Man in Havana
(1958) are remarkable for different reasons. The
first, growing out of several visits to Vietnam in
the early 1950s (nicely documented for Paris
Match and reprinted in Judith Adamsons collection of Greenes journalism, Reflections, 1990), is
prophetic of American fortunes in Vietnam. As in
The End of the Affair, a first-person narrator, the
cynical British journalist Fowler, is used to tell the
story of the callow American Pyle, whose faith in
Cold War rhetoric proves fatal for him and,
implicitly, his country. Fowler, however, is not
without blame because Pyles relationship with
Fowlers Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, encourages a jealousy in Fowler that taints both his
actions and the narration. Our Man in Havana, on
the other hand, in contrast to the popular, but
two-dimensional, work of Ian Fleming, gives us
the comical story of Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner
salesman and would-be spy in late-1950s Cuba
who, once recruited, sends his supervisors diagrams, based on vacuum-cleaner parts, that are
meant to describe missiles and their installations.
Impressed, his bosses want more, and, anxious
for the extra income so he can send his daughter
to private school, Wormold develops a complicated fictional network of spies that becomes all
too real when the Soviets take his intercepted
reports seriously.
In the 1960s, Greene wrote novels set in the
Congo (A Burnt-Out Case, 1961), Haiti (The
Comedians, 1966), and Latin America (Travels
with My Aunt), while also publishing two volumes
of short fiction. He remained as productive in the
1970s, offering his memoir, A Sort of Life, The
Honorary Consul (1973), and perhaps his last
great novel, The Human Factor (1978), which,
recalling Philby, deals with the life of a double
agent, Maurice Castle, working in South Africa.
After the The Human Factor, Greene produced
only one novel of note, Monsignor Quixote (1982),
a kind of picaresque dialogue between Father
Quixote and his friend Sancho a former communist mayor of El Toboso. The two journey
through post-Franco Spain in an old car named
Rocinante. Shadowing Cervantess tale, Greene
explores territory he had probed since the 1930s
the complex relationship between politics and
religion, between Catholicism and communism.
After Monsignor Quixote, Greenes publications
seemed increasingly the leftovers of a vibrant
career. His last, short novel, The Captain and the
Enemy (1988), deals with Nicaragua in the 1970s;
and The Last Word and Other Stories (1990)
ranges from the 1920s to the 1980s. Since Greenes
death several useful collections of occasional
writing have appeared.
Greene was remarkably productive: he claimed
500 words a day to be his routine, though in later
years this number dropped (Donaghy, p. xi). To
say he was always a man of the 1930s may not be
fair, but certainly his preoccupations politics,
religion, commitment, betrayal, travel arise out
of a thirties sensibility. Greene was not a technical
GREENE, GRAHAM
innovator and, after some brief experiments in the

thirties, largely rejected the modernist play with
form and language, but his work embodies his era,
and his life makes him, as it does for Paul Theroux
in Picture Palace, suitable for fiction.
Early criticism focused on Greenes religious
preoccupations and his relation to Catholicism
has been the subject of several fine discussions
such as Lewiss essay (1959), Lodges essay (1986
[1966]), and Philip Stratfords book (1964).
Many studies review Greenes entire career, and
several are notable, especially A. A. De Vitiss
(1986), Judith Adamsons (1990), and Roger
Sharrocks (1984). Maria Coutos fine book on
politics and religion (1988), Adamsons work on
Greene and film (1984), and Brian Diemerts
book on Greenes thrillers and 1930s are narrower
in focus (1996).
SEE ALSO: Conrad, Joseph (BIF); The Film
Industry and Fiction (BIF); Ford, Ford Madox
(BIF); James, Henry (AF); Politics and the Novel
Adamson, J. (1984). Graham Greene and Cinema.
Norman, OK: Pilgrim.
Adamson, J. (1990). Graham Greene: The Dangerous
Edge: Where Art and Politics Meet. London:
Macmillan.
Allain, M.-F. (1981). The Other Man: Conversations
with Graham Greene by Marie-Francoise Allain
(trans. G. Walman). London: Bodley Head.
Allott, K., & Farris, M. (1951). The Art of Graham
Greene. New York: Russell and Russell.
Cloetta, Y. (2005). In Search of a Beginning: My Life with
Graham Greene (as told to M.-F. Allain). London:
Bloomsbury.
Couto, M. (1988). Graham Greene: On the Frontier:
Politics and Religion in the Novels. New York: St.
Martins.
De Vitis, A. A. (1986). Graham Greene, rev. edn. Boston:
Twayne.
Diemert, B. (1996). Graham Greenes Thrillers and the
1930s. Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queens University
Press.
Donaghy, H. J. (ed.) (1992). Conversations with
Graham Greene. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Forster, E. M. (1965). What I Believe [1938]. In Two
Cheers for Democracy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
169
Greene, G. (1929). The Man Within. London:

Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1932). Stamboul Train. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1934). Its a Battlefield. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1935). England Made Me. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1936). A Gun for Sale. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1939). The Confidential Agent. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1940). The Power and the Glory. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1943). The Ministry of Fear. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1948). The Heart of the Matter. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1950). The Third Man and The Fallen
Idol. London: Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1951). The End of the Affair. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1955). The Quiet American. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1958). Our Man in Havana. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1961). A Burnt-Out Case. London:
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1966). The Comedians. London: Bodley
Head.
Greene, G. (1969a). Collected Essays. London: Bodley
Head.
Greene, G. (1969b). Travels with My Aunt. London:
Bodley Head.
Greene, G. (1970). Brighton Rock [1938].
Greene, G. (1972). A Sort of Life [1971].
Greene, G. (1978). The Human Factor. London: Bodley
Head.
Greene, G. (1980). Ways of Escape. Toronto: Lester and
Orpen Dennys.
Greene, G. (1982). Monsignor Quixote. Toronto: Lester
and Orpen Dennys.
Greene, G. (1990). Reflections (sel. and intro. J.
Adamson). Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys.
Greene, G. (2007). Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (ed.
R. Greene). London: Little, Brown.
Lewis, R. W. B. (1959). Graham Greene:
The Religious Affair [1959]. In The Picaresque
Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction.
Philadelphia: Lippincott, pp. 22074.
Lodge, D. (1986). Graham Greene [1966].
New York: Columbia University Press. Repr. in
The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays
170
GUNN, NEIL M.
on Fiction and Criticism [1971]. London: Ark,

pp. 87118.
Sharrock, R. (1984). Saints, Sinners and Comedians:
The Novels of Graham Greene. Tunbridge Wells:
Burns and Oates.
Sheldon, M. (1995). Graham Greene: The Enemy
Within. New York: Random House.
Sherry, N. (1989, 1995, 2004). The Life of Graham
Greene. Vol. 1: 19041939. Toronto: Lester and
Orpen Dennys. Vol. 2: 19391955. New York: Viking.
Vol. 3: 19551991. New York: Viking.
Smith, G. (1986). The Achievement of Graham Greene.
Brighton: Harvester.
Stratford, P. (1964). Faith and Fiction: Creative Process
in Greene and Mauriac. Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press.
West, W. J. (1997). The Quest for Graham Greene.
Gunn, Neil M.
Neil M. Gunn was one of the writers associated

with the Scottish literary revival in the post-1918
period, initiated by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid
and popularly known as the Scottish Renaissance.
He was born on November 8, 1891 in Dunbeath, a
small fishing and crofting village on the Caithness
coast of northeast Scotland. One of a family of
nine children, including seven sons, his early
childhood was spent in Dunbeath until, at the
age of 13, he was sent south to Galloway to live
with his sister and her husband. Later he joined
the Civil Service and spent several years in London
and Edinburgh before returning to Caithness as
an excise officer in 1922.
Gunns childhood in the straths and fishing
coasts of Caithness left a powerful impression
on his imagination, and his fiction is alive with
a boys sense of the richness of his environment,
and with the daring and skill of the fishermen
who (like the scientists and heroes Gunn
considered them to be) guided their boats
through sea storms to the safety of harbor. In
adulthood, his new experience as excise officer
of conditions in Caithness provided him with
the additional economic and social information
he would need to form him as a novelist of the
Highlands.
Gunns serious writing career began in the early
1920s. His early short stories were published in the
little magazines edited by MacDiarmid who also

described his first novel The Grey Coast (1926) as
something new, and big, in Scottish literature
(Grieve 269). One of the notable beliefs of the
revival movement was that artistic renewal must
be accompanied by renewal in the life of the
country as a whole; and among its objectives
was the regeneration of the Highlands and their
culture, for long an area of emigration and economic and social decline. As a Highlander, Gunn
was therefore an important member of the movement, and his fiction, and the many articles on
conditions in the Highlands that he published in
the Scots Magazine in the 1930s, helped raise
the profile of this neglected area in public perception. His own public profile was heightened when
his novel Morning Tide (1929) became a Book
Society choice for 1931; and the success of
Highland River (1937), which won Edinburgh
Universitys James Tait Black Memorial Prize,
enabled him to resign from the Civil Service and
become a full-time writer.
Highland River is the novel in which Gunn
shows most overtly his relationship with modernist fiction, and especially with the presentation
of time and memory as found in the fiction of
Marcel Proust and the philosophical writings of
Henri Bergson. Its narrative is structured anachronistically, with the experiences of the boy Kenn
and his adult self flowing backwards and forward
into each other without formal demarcation. In a
related way, the influence of Jungs writings on
race memory and the collective unconscious is
seen in the way the boy intuitively learns the
history of his people through his attachment to
his river (which becomes for him the river of life),
through the evidence of their existence in the
natural world around him, and in his instinctive
sense of the special nature of certain ancient sites.
As the narrative shows how boy and adult are one,
so Kenn grows to realize his at-oneness with the
people of his past.
Gunn followed Walter Scott as novelist of the
Highlands, but his approach to his subject was
very different from Scotts romantic period fiction and was rooted in the Scottish modernist
belief in renewal. For Gunn, Scotts fiction was
storytelling or romance set in a void (McCleery
123), while his own belief was that a secure future
could be built only on an understanding of the
past and a revitalization of the link between past,
GUNN, NEIL M.
present, and future. This belief is given form in the

three linked novels Sun Circle (1933), Butchers
Broom (1934), and The Silver Darlings (1941),
which explore historical events that resulted in
the scattering of the Highland people and the
destruction of their Celtic culture: the coming of
the Vikings and of Christianity in the ninth
century, and the notorious Sutherland Clearances
in the early nineteenth. The epic Silver Darlings
(probably his most famous book) dramatizes
the triumph of the people over the disaster of
the Clearances as a result of their success in the
new herring fishing industry, while at the
same time portraying the growth to maturity of
its young hero Finn not only through his mastery
of the sea but, significantly, through his rediscovery of the culture of his Celtic ancestors,
thus restoring a broken link in the chain of his
identity.
Gunn published 20 novels between 1926
and 1954. Although the most significant deal
explicitly with the reimagining of Highland
life, he also explored conditions of urban life in
sections of Wild Geese Overhead (1939), The
Serpent (1943), The Drinking Well (1946), and
The Lost Chart (1949). The Green Isle of the
Great Deep (1944) is a dystopian fable set, ironically, in the Gaelic paradise of Tir-nan-og.
Gunns post-World War II fiction increasingly
explored the search of the individual for
philosophical integration and his final book, a
philosophical autobiography The Atom of Delight,
was published in 1956. He died on January 15,
1973.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF)
171

Gifford, D. (1983). Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic
Grieve, C. M. ( MacDiarmid, H.) (1926). Contemporary
Scottish Studies. London: Leonard Parsons.
Gunn, N. M. (1929). Morning Tide. Edinburgh:
Porpoise.
Gunn, N. M. (1926). The Grey Coast. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Gunn, N. M. (1933). Sun Circle. Edinburgh: Porpoise.
Gunn, N. M. (1934). Butchers Broom. Edinburgh:
Porpoise.
Gunn, N. M. (1937). Highland River. Edinburgh:
Porpoise.
Gunn, N. M. (1941). The Silver Darlings. London: Faber
and Faber.
Gunn, N. M. (1944). The Green Isle of the Great Deep.
Gunn, N. M. (1952). Bloodhunt. London: Faber and
Faber.
Hart, F. R., & Pick, J. B. (1981). Neil M. Gunn:
A Highland Life. London: John Murray.
McCleery, A. (ed.) (1987). Landscape and Light: Essays
by Neil M. Gunn. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University
Press.
McCulloch, M. (1987). The Novels of Neil M. Gunn:
A Critical Study. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.
McCulloch, M. P. (2004). Modernism and Nationalism:
Literature and Society in Scotland 19181939: Source
Documents for the Scottish Renaissance. Glasgow:
Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
McCulloch, M. P. (2009). Scottish Modernism and Its
Contexts 19181959: Literature, National Identity and
Cultural Exchange. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Pick, J. B. (ed.) Neil M. Gunn: Selected Letters.
Edinburgh: Polygon.
Price, R. (1991). The Fabulous Matter of Fact: The Poetics
of Neil M. Gunn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
H
Hamilton, Patrick
ROSEMARY ERICKSON JOHNSEN
Patrick Hamilton, novelist and playwright, was an

important voice of the interwar period. He shared
the interest in leftist politics common to writers of
the time, but he gave expression to a distinctive
group of people on the margins of English society,
eschewing coal miners and the middle classes alike
to focus on those he called the semi-proletariat.
The enduring interest of Hamiltons novels resides
in his distinctive prose style and in his characteristic settings of pubs, boarding houses, and cafes
populated by lower-middle-class characters trying
to maintain their respectability. Although he is
perhaps most widely known for his stage plays
Rope and Gas Light, Hamilton thought of himself
primarily as a novelist. His fiction has enjoyed
periodic bursts of renewed interest since his last
novel, published in 1955; his place in the early
twenty-first century seems secure on three fronts:
as a chronicler of lower-middle-class London, as a
leftist novelist, and as an author with keen insights
into the obsessive, often alcoholic, personality.
Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton was born
March 17, 1904, at Hassocks, Sussex, the last of
three children. The large fortune his father inherited was largely squandered by the time Hamilton was born, and his childhood was spent in a
series of short-let houses and respectable boarding houses, the kind in which residents were
referred to as paying guests. These early experiences, along with his exposure to the theater
through his sisters acting career, inform his first
three novels; his theater contacts gave him the
sharp grasp of dramatic construction that made

his stage and radio plays so successful.
Hamiltons first novel, Monday Morning
(1925), was accepted by Constable when he was
only 20 years old. That novel and Craven House
(1926) were based on his experiences in an Earls
Court residential hotel and a Kew boarding house,
respectively. The final novel of his early period,
Twopence Coloured (1928), followed the fortunes
of a young actress. The last of these, along with his
Marxist dystopia of 1939, Impromptu in Moribundia (1939b), are the least-studied of his novels;
this may be because they depart from his usual
formula of richly materialist presentations of the
lives of ordinary lower-middle-class characters.
The 1926 publication of The Midnight Bell
marked the arrival of Hamiltons major period.
His work enjoyed commercial and critical success,
although he himself continued to inhabit the
milieu of his fiction: cheap hotels, boarding houses, undistinguished pubs, cheap cafes. Following a
1932 traffic accident in which he, as a pedestrian,
suffered life-threatening injuries, and his mothers
suicide in 1934, Hamiltons drinking tipped over
into alcoholism, which he would fight until his
death in 1962. The pub trilogy, Twenty Thousand
Streets under the Sky (1935), chronicles the lives of
three characters whose paths intersect in the pub
that gives its name to the first novel of the trilogy.
The first novel tells the story of waiter Bob; the
second that of the prostitute Jenny, with whom
Bob becomes obsessed; and the third that of the
good but plain barmaid Ella. The trilogy offers a
minutely observed subsection of London, political
commentary on the lives of the respectable (and

HAMILTON, PATRICK
not so respectable) working poor, and insight into

patterns of alcohol consumption.
Following the trilogy, Hamilton published his
two masterpieces, Hangover Square (1941) and
The Slaves of Solitude (1947). The first is set in the
period leading up to Britains declaration of war
against Germany, and features a cast of drifters
and filmstar wannabes in Earls Court and Brighton. The schizophrenic protagonist plans to murder the woman who torments him, but his mental
illness (exacerbated by his heavy drinking) mean
that the crime is almost endlessly deferred. Finally
he acts, just as Chamberlains declaration of war is
being broadcast on the radio; he reaches his
sought-after haven of Maidenhead only to find
that it is no good. His suicide rates no headline,
given world events. The Slaves of Solitude is a
remarkable novel of life on the home front,
featuring middle-aged Enid Roach stranded in
a boarding house in Thames Lockdon (modeled
on Henley-on-Thames) because she has been
bombed out of her London flat. Her encounters
with the fascist-inclined boarding-house bully
Mr. Thwaites, the German expat Vicki Kugelmann, and the American Lt. Pike all provide a
way for Hamilton to explore World War II as it
was experienced by ordinary people living far
away from the main action.
Hamiltons final project was a series of novels
about the psychopathic criminal Ralph Ernest
Gorse; the series was intended to take readers
from Gorses school days to his end on the
gallows. The concept was ahead of its time, and
the first two novels generated unenthusiastic reviews from critics and friends who could not
accept the motiveless crimes portrayed, and
Hamiltons advanced alcoholism made it difficult
for him to sustain quality work on the project. The
first novel of the trilogy received praise for its
portrait of Brighton, but few reviewers seem to
have grasped the overall plan Hamilton had for
examining the modern psychopath. The second
novel, Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), was
made into a highly successful television series by
London Weekend Television in 1994. The final
published piece, Uknown Assailant (1955), was a
dispiritingly skimpy end to Hamiltons writing
career. The author died in 1962.
Scholarly work on Hamilton includes three
doctoral theses (two in the UK, one in the USA),
several book chapters and journal articles, and
173
many general-audience reviews and appreciations. Hamiltons supporters include Doris Lessing and Graham Greene. The success of the 2005
BBC adaptation of the pub trilogy, plus recent
reissues of several titles in the USA, suggest that
Hamiltons work may finally be on the verge of
receiving the canonical status it deserves.
SEE ALSO: Politics and the Novel (BIF);
Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World War II in
Fiction (BIF)
French, S. (1993). Patrick Hamilton: A Life. London:
Faber and Faber.
Hamilton, B. (1972). The Light Went Out: A Biography
of Patrick Hamilton. London: Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1925). Monday Morning. London:
Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1928). Twopence Coloured. London:
Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1929a). The Midnight Bell. London:
Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1929b). Rope: A Play, with a Preface on
Thrillers. London: Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1932). The Siege of Pleasure. London:
Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1934). The Plains of Cement. London:
Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1935). Twenty Thousand Streets under the
Sky: A London Trilogy, comprising The Midnight Bell,
The Siege of Pleasure, and The Plains of Cement.
London: Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1939a). Gas Light: A Victorian Thriller in
Three Acts. London: Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1939b). Impromptu in Moribundia.
London: Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1941). Hangover Square. London:
Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1943). Craven House [1926], rev. edn.
London: Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1947). The Slaves of Solitude. London:
Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1951). The West Pier. London: Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1953). Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse.
London: Constable.
Hamilton, P. (1955). Unknown Assailant. London:
Constable.
Harding, J. (2007). Patrick Hamilton: A Critical Study.
London: Greenwich Exchange.
Jones, N. (1991). Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of
Patrick Hamilton. London: Scribners.
Rattenbury, A. (1996). Literature, Lying and Sober
Truth: Attitudes to the Work of Patrick Hamilton
174
HISTORICAL FICTION
and Sylvia Townsend Warner. In J. Lucas (ed.),

Writing and Radicalism. London: Longman,
pp. 20144.
Thomas, D. (1987). The Dangerous Edge of Things.
Encounter, 69(2), 3240.
Historical Fiction
ELODIE ROUSSELOT
Historical fiction is a subgenre of fiction that is

set in a recognizable historical period and which
presents a fictionalized account of key historical
events or figures of that period. Early instances of
the genre include some of the founding works of
Western literature, such as Homers Iliad and
Odyssey, but it is in the nineteenth century, in the
work of British and European authors, that
historical fiction would be most prominently
developed. Sir Walter Scott, for instance, appropriated the form and used it to promote a sense
of Scottish national and cultural identity in the
nineteenth century, as is visible in his Waverley
novels (1814). In the twentieth century, however,
important political events in the wake of both
World Wars and the dismantling of the British
Empire complicated the need to develop a common set of cultural images on which to establish
a national identity; as a result, the place and
function of historical fiction in British literature
also became more complex. The returns to the
past in literary works of the period partly had to
do with a fascination with previous eras of
uncontested British cultural and political superiority, but they also indicated a wish to understand the changed state of affairs in the present.
These narratives tend to highlight parallels
throughout history between tragic events of the
past and those of the present by focusing on the
role and responsibility of mankind in both. This
is visible in such works as William Goldings The
Spire (1964), which returns to fourteenth-century England to narrate the construction of the
spire of Salisbury Cathedral; the tale emphasizes
the destructive nature of one mans singlemindedness and the disregard for the cost of
human lives involved in the building of the
religious monument. Iris Murdochs The Red
and the Green (1965) is set in early twentiethcentury Ireland and recounts the events of the
Easter Rebellion of 1916. Both texts return to
well-established events in British history to illuminate little-known aspects of their development, or to adopt a lesser-known perspective
on those events. This is also the case of Barry
Unsworths Sacred Hunger (1992), which is set in
the mid eighteenth century and revisits the slave
trade from the perspective of a surgeon on board
a slave ship.
More recently, however, and since the advent
of postmodernism in the 1960s in art, literature,
cultural and historical studies, the traditional
divide between historical fiction as dramatized
representation of the past and history as its
true depiction has been thoroughly challenged.
In historical studies, Hayden White (1978) has
emphasized the need for historians to recognize
the literariness of their work, its dependence on
principles of narration and utterance, and therefore the ideological implications underpinning
their representation of the past. In parallel to
this, historical fiction has attempted to deviate
from its tacit requirement to respect historical
authenticity: instead of abiding by the known
facts about key historical events or figures, recent
historical fiction has shown a keener interest in
probing the very concept of historical truth
and its mechanics of representation. The impact
of postmodernism on the writing of historical
fiction in the 1970s and 1980s has been commented upon by literary critic and theorist Linda
Hutcheon (1988), who coined the expression
historiographic metafiction to describe this
particular kind of postmodern historical novel.
In total contrast to the historical fiction produced in the earlier part of the twentieth century,
historiographic metafiction is a self-conscious,
or self-reflexive, type of historical novel: the
process of historical research and writing is often
key to its concerns and centrally staged in the
plot of the novel, but it rarely leads to any clear
historical finding or conclusion. This is due in
part to the nature of the historical documents
under examination: typically, the novel reveals
how some of these have been in some way
falsified or tampered with, while others, often
of a more personal nature (such as letters, diaries, testimonies), are visibly foregrounded as
biased, and therefore unreliable, sources of information. Consequently, any attempts at historical resolution are clearly discouraged, a
stance that is also in line with postmodernist
HISTORICAL FICTION
fiction more generally and its refusal of fundamental, or essential, truths.

The metafictional nature of that kind of historical fiction is visible in its fascination with texts,
documents, and narratives as fictional constructs.
Historiographic metafiction therefore places a
great emphasis on the discursive practices intrinsic to the writing of history, often at the expense of
more conventionally teleological historical approaches (where the expected outcome influences
and shapes the organization of the sequence of
events leading up to that outcome). As a result,
history is shown to be just as discursively constructed, or constructed through writing, as any
other type of historical narrative, thus challenging
once again the gap between history and historical
fiction. Indeed, both history and historiography
(the study of the writing of history) have become
sites of predilection for postmodern interrogation, while historiographic metafiction has
greatly contributed to destabilizing received notions about both history and fiction (Hutcheon
1988). This is visible in such texts as John Fowless
The French Lieutenants Woman (1969), a precursor of the genre in British literature, which evokes
the historical and social mores of the nineteenth
century in a self-conscious effort to highlight the
narrative devices and authorial bias underpinning
the writing of any story, and therefore the impossibility of ever achieving historical authenticity.
In this respect, historiographic metafiction, like
postmodernist fiction more generally, relies extensively on intertextuality and parody, in terms
of its fascination both with its own status as a piece
of fiction, but also with that of other texts and
discourses, particularly those of a historical nature. Through parody and irony, historiographic
metafiction returns to and draws from those
historical texts and discourses in an endeavor to
emphasize their problematic representation of the
past; parody and irony thus become powerful
narrative devices that allow the text simultaneously to return to, and to distance itself from,
those traditional historical narratives it attempts
to question (Hutcheon 1988). The authority of
the latter is therefore both acknowledged and
subverted: irony enables historiographic metafiction to appear to be endorsing the historical
approaches promoted in those narratives, while
at the same time undermining them. Furthermore, as this subversion takes place from within
175
the parodied text/discourse, historiographic

metafiction can address the latter effectively but
without losing its distance from it. Parody and
ironic intertextuality are also representative of the
paradoxical nature of postmodern historical fiction, which draws from the very thing it seeks to
contest, all the while refusing to adopt a clear
discursive position. Here again John Fowless
novel is a good example of such parodic intertextuality in its reliance on, and critical attitude
toward, the narrative conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction; Ian McEwans
Atonement (2001) also uses intertextuality and
metafiction in its return to World War II, and
raises similar questions regarding the role of
novelistic writing and subjective memory in the
rendering of any historical event.
Historiographic metafictions concern with
contesting accepted notions of historical truth
and historical representation has also found a
natural affinity with twentieth-century feminist,
Marxist, and postcolonial literary theories. The
rejection of definitions of absolute truths,
which is endemic to these theoretical approaches,
is in keeping with the wish to challenge traditional
narratives of the past and their patriarchal, capitalist, and Eurocentric constructions of history.
Historiographic metafiction highlights the misogynistic, racist, and class bias within these historical discourses, and enables the views and
perspectives of previously unheard minorities to
be taken into consideration. Good examples of
such fiction include Salman Rushdies Midnights
Children (1981), which merges the personal with
the political in its attempt to encompass Indias
twentieth-century history through the unlikely
perspective of, among others, an illegitimate child
born on the night of Indias independence in
1947; and Jeanette Wintersons Sexing the Cherry
(1989), which returns to seventeenth-century
London to narrate the Civil War from the point
of view of a fearsome, but ultimately forgotten,
female character.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, a
new trend within historical fiction has come to
critical attention: the neo-Victorian novel, with
authors such as A. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Alasdair
Gray, Peter Ackroyd, and Beryl Bainbridge. Typically, neo-Victorian fiction presents a fascination
with reimagining the nineteenth century in its
literary, artistic, socio-political, and historical
176
HISTORICAL FICTION
contexts, often in a self-conscious attempt to play

with the narrative conventions and social/cultural values prevalent at the time. Neo-Victorian
novels thus concentrate on a period of British
history which in recent years has come to be
perceived as particularly significant in the construction of the nations sense of self and cultural
identity; this is visible for instance in A. S. Byatts
Possession (1990), which re-examines the politics
of nineteenth-century national cultural identity
and canon formation in a tour de force work that
challenges preconceived ideas about both academic research and the Victorian literary legacy.
Similarly, Alasdair Grays Poor Things (1992)
reconsiders the significance of nineteenth-century Darwinian theory in an attempt to question its
persisting cultural presence in the present. More
often than not, however, the Victorian ideological definitions of race, class, gender roles, and
sexuality come under strict scrutiny, and are
opened to parody through ironic intertextuality,
in neo-Victorian fiction. As with historiographic
metafiction, therefore, the neo-Victorian novel
returns to the past to adopt some familiar postmodern tropes, and is similarly informed by
contemporary gender, queer, and postcolonial
theoretical discourses. This is the case in Fred
DAguiars return to the legacies of slavery and
nineteenth-century imperial discourses on race
in his novel The Longest Memory (1994); and in
Sarah Waterss novels Affinity (2000) and Fingersmith (2002), which attempt to re-inscribe the
lesbian experience into the nineteenth century,
and to redefine accepted notions of female sexual
identity.
Most critical approaches to twentieth-century
historical fiction therefore emphasize its formal
links with postmodernism, and draw from recent
literary theory in the examination of its content.
Recently, however, the postmodern tradition has
been criticized for failing to deliver the expected
social and political change it had at first seemed
to promise (Jameson 1991). Historiographic
metafiction has come under similar criticism for
lacking the subversive edge it had primarily
claimed to possess, and for ultimately reinscribing, rather than challenging, the resistance of
historical discourses to both rereadings and
change (Kohlke 2004). This lack of transgressive
drive is linked to what critics perceive as the
failure to successfully challenge the mechanics of
historical representation, but also to what they

describe as the irrepressible nostalgia of postmodern historicity, and ultimately its defense of
traditionalist, rather than subversive, values. The
neo-Victorian, or retro-Victorian (Shuttleworth 1998), trend is particularly targeted in this
context, as it draws from a historical period still
seen by many as the Golden Age of British arts
and literature: attempts to revisit this period, even
if motivated by a will to undermine or satirize the
latter, indicate for some the recognition by contemporary authors of their Victorian predecessors literary superiority. Consequently, this
also signifies the influence the Victorian era still
holds over contemporary British cultural and
national consciousness, and therefore re-establishes its importance. Similarly, the controversial
perspective of the oppressed minorities adopted
in such fiction has been dismissed as mere
political correctness, a concept which by now
is hardly considered revolutionary or rebellious,
as it has informed much recent fiction. Critics
have also identified an opportunistic drive in
neo-Victorian fiction in what they see as the
trends exploitation of its readerships nostalgia
and popular interest in all things Victorian; for
this reason, once again, neo-Victorian fiction is
deemed to be failing to fulfill its potential for
radical subversion (Gutleben 2001).
These claims of nostalgia and traditionalism
need, however, to be considered in light of the
paradoxical nature of postmodernism: indeed,
the celebration, to an extent, of the Victorian
tradition, together with its commercial reappropriation by the contemporary neo-Victorian novel, may be linked to the contradiction inherent in
postmodern works which use and abuse the very
structures and values they criticize. The return to
the discourses of the past, and to those of the
Victorian era in particular, could thus be far more
complex and ambiguous than simply driven by
nostalgia or traditionalism. It becomes clear in
this context that the postmodern refusal to fully
adopt or dispel either side of the contradiction,
together with its willingness to exploit both, is key
here, and reasserts the importance of the postmodern as a site of transgression and contestation
(Hutcheon 1988). Current and future directions
in the research in the field of historical fiction have
confirmed this and indicated that contemporary
historical novels go beyond nostalgia in their
HISTORICAL FICTION
returns to the past by showing an interest in the

implications of the latter for the present, and by
challenging the claim that the past is not worth
retrieving (Shiller 1997). Other critics have established the double process involved in contemporary historical fiction, whereby the relationship
between a historical period and its postmodernist
revisiting is seen to be affecting our perception of
both elements: this moderates somewhat the
claim of nostalgia, and replaces it with the concept
of refraction in terms of historical knowledge
and experience (Onega & Gutleben 2004). This
idea is also developed in relation to contemporary
historical fiction informed by a feminist sensibility: the latter enables the bridging of past and
present in terms of definitions of femininity and
gender roles, and the identification of the ideological pressures still at play on gender identity in
the present (King 2005).
Most importantly, however, recent political
and cultural configurations have meant that the
boundaries of national identity and national literature have been thoroughly redefined, mainly to
include the artistic production of a culturally
diverse society in a globalized age. In this respect,
historical fiction takes on a new urgency in offering the possibility precisely to transcend those
nationalistic and cultural boundaries: this is visible for instance in the development of the trend of
neo-Victorian fiction in the work of non-British
authors, and in texts not specifically set in Great
Britain (such as Margaret Atwoods Alias Grace
and Peter Careys Oscar and Lucinda). Conversely, recent works by British authors find historical
fiction a convenient means of addressing concerns about identity construction and cultural
legacy in a society no longer solely defined by its
nation-state status. This the case of British Caribbean author Andrea Levys Small Island (2004),
which describes the immigrant experience in
post-World War II Britain from the multiple
points of view of Jamaican settlers and British
residents; the novel considers issues of race, war,
and post-imperial politics in a way that is relevant
to both 1940s London and a contemporary cultural and political reality. Historical fiction therefore reinscribes the past as an important means of
defining the present, while its constantly evolving
form and subject matter are reflective of the
changing nature of the age, both past and present,
it seeks to address.
177
SEE ALSO: Globalization and the Novel (BIF);

Historical Fiction (WF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Postcolonial Fiction of the
African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of
the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF);
Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF)
Byatt, A. S. (1990). Possession. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Connor, S. (1996). English Novel in History, 19501995.
London: Routledge.
DAguiar, F. (1994). The Longest Memory. London:
Vintage.
Fowles, J. (1969). The French Lieutenants Woman.
Golding, W. (1964). The Spire. London: Faber and Faber.
Gutleben, C. (2001). Nostalgic Postmodernism: The
Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British
Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism:
History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism; or, The Cultural
Jenkins, A., & John, J. (eds.) (2000). Rereading Victorian
Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Jenkins, K.(ed.) (1997). The Postmodern History Reader.
London: Routledge.
King, J. (2005). The Victorian Woman Question in
Contemporary Feminist Fiction. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Kohlke, M. L. (2004). Into History through the Back
Door: The Past Historic in Nights at the Circus and
Affinity. Women: A Cultural Review, 15(2), 153166.
Kucich, J., & Sadoff, D. F. (eds.) (2000). Victorian
Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth
Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Levy, A. (2004). Small Island. London: Headline
Review.
Lukacs, G. (1962). The Historical Novel (trans. H.
Mitchell & S. Mitchell). London: Merlin. (Original
work published 1920.)
McEwan, I. (2002). Atonement. London: Vintage.
Murdoch, I. (1965). The Red and the Green. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Nicol, B. (2002). Postmodernism and the Contemporary
Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Onega, S., & Gutleben, C. (eds.) (2004). Refracting the
Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
178
HOLLINGHURST, ALAN
Reisz, K. (dir.) (1981). The French Lieutenants Woman.

Juniper Films.
Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnights Children. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Shiller, D. (1997). The Redemptive Past in the NeoVictorian Novel. Studies in the Novel, 29, 538560.
Shuttleworth, S. (1998). Natural History: The RetroVictorian Novel. In E. S. Shaffer (ed.), The Third
Culture: Literature and Science. Berlin: W. de Gruyter,
pp. 25368.
Unsworth, B. (1992). Sacred Hunger. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Waters, S. (2000). Affinity. London: Virago.
Waters, S. (2002). Fingersmith. London: Virago.
White, H. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Winterson, J. (1989). Sexing the Cherry. London:
Vintage.
Wright, J. (dir.) (2007). Atonement. Universal Pictures.
Hollinghurst, Alan
KAYE MITCHELL
Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire on May 26, 1954. He studied English at
Oxford University, and worked at the Times
Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995 (latterly
as deputy editor). After publishing a poetry collection, Confidential Chats with Boys in 1982,
Hollinghurst switched to prose and, although he
has published only four novels to date, has already
established himself as one of the most acclaimed
prose stylists of his generation, with frequent
comparisons to illustrious literary forebears (and
key influences) such as Henry James and E. M.
Forster. In 1993 Hollinghurst was selected as one
of Grantas Best of Young British Novelists, and
in 2004 he won the Booker Prize for The Line of
Beauty.
The Jamesian influence is evident in
Hollinghursts preoccupation with aesthetic and
social judgment. That is to say: with beauty as a
value in itself, with the precariousness of social
status, and the subtle dynamics of wealth, class,
ambition, and morality (in a secular sense). His
educated, aspirational protagonists frequently
display their rarefied tastes in architecture, classical music, and literature; and the self-conscious
elegance of his prose emulates those with whom
he is compared.
All of Hollinghursts novels represent homosexuality candidly and sometimes graphically. As

he says: from the start Ive tried to write books
which began from a presumption of the gayness of
the narrative position (Moss 2004). If his representations of cruising and public sex update the
homophile tradition of literature to which he is
indebted (Wilde, Firbank, Forster, et al.), his
sexualizing of the aesthete is always also an aestheticizing of sexuality.
In addition to his interest in the 1890s, Hollinghurst had a particular fascination with 1980s
hedonism and consumption, with the politics
(and, again, aesthetics) of Thatcherism. This is
most evident in The Swimming-Pool Library and
The Line of Beauty; and in both cases his depiction
of the decade exhibits an interesting tension
between admiration and critique.
Hollinghursts first novel, The Swimming-Pool
Library (1988), is set in the summer of 1983, and
follows events in the life of its protagonist, Will
Beckwith: My life was in a strange way that
summer, the last summer of its kind there was
ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteem
it was my time, my belle epoque but all the
while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames
around a photograph, something seen out of the
corner of the eye (3).
This revealing passage shows us at once Wills
self-absorption, his casual irresponsibility, his
keen sense of the aesthetic (the future danger
rendered in a resonantly pictorial metaphor), his
education, even snobbery (the casual use of the
French expression), and the emphasis on sexual
hedonism and youth; it discloses the key themes
of the novel and of Hollinghursts subsequent
fiction. We are left to construe for ourselves,
through the course of the novel, why this is the
last summer of its kind there was ever to be: we
watch Will gradually come to an awareness of the
gay history of which he is a product and a beneficiary, and the gay lifestyle that may bring responsibilities as well as pleasures. We know, as he does
not, that a new disease, AIDS, is about to be
diagnosed; AIDS is never mentioned here, but its
shadow falls across the whole book. Hollinghurst
produces an intriguing insight into the individualism of the 1980s and the hedonism and excess of
the gay scene before AIDS, but the novel is also
riven with questions of class and race as it examines the colonial history of Charles Nantwich,
HOLLINGHURST, ALAN
the old man whose life Will unexpectedly saves,

and whose life story he begins to research.
Hollinghurst resists the urge to make overtly
political points (as David Alderson has written,
there is a sense in which politics are vulgar for
Hollinghurst (42)): Will doesnt become a gay
liberationist and there is little indication of his
reaction to the knowledge that his own grandfather was responsible for the prosecution of gay
men in the 1950s; ultimately he decides not to
author Nantwichs biography. Nevertheless, there
is a creeping sense of the connectedness of everything and everyone, of the positive and negative
effects of social and sexual networks, and the
overlapping of the gay and straight worlds.
The Folding Star (1994) won the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the
Booker. It focuses on Edward Manners who, while
teaching English in a Flemish city, falls in love
with one of his pupils, 17-year-old Luc. Clear
parallels are made between Edward and a Belgian
symbolist painter of the 1890s, Edgard Orst, with
whom he becomes obsessed, and a notable emphasis on scopophilia and voyeurism emerges as
Edward spies on Luc, seeks to frame and contain
him, as Orst did his mistress. Against a background of museums, art history, and somewhat
incongruous gay bars, Edward becomes the struggling artist trying to control his subject, the elusive
Luc, whose upper lip looks as if it were finished
off impatiently with a palette-knife (29).
The Spell (1998) is the slightest of Hollinghursts
novels, a kind of comedy of manners of the gay
life. Through its focus on the relationships between Alex, his ex-lover Justin, Justins new
boyfriend Robin, and Robins gay son, Danny,
it examines questions around cruising, the difficulties of relationships between men of different
ages and classes (Robin realizes, uncomfortably,
the class sense which tinted or tainted all his
dealings with the world (7)), the death of a lover
from AIDS, and the differences between urban
and rural life, heterosexual world and homosexual scene.
It was followed by the book that brought Hollinghurst to public prominence, The Line of Beauty
(2004), whose Booker Prize win garnered some
unexpected tabloid attention; the novel was
adapted for television in 2005. The Line of Beauty
reprises Hollinghursts key themes of aestheticism
(the protagonist is doing a PhD on James and
179
style, and the word beauty is repeated throughout), homosexuality, and class, and marks a return
to the 1980s setting of The Swimming-Pool Library.
Reviewers tended to read its depiction of Thatcherism as satirical, yet the relationship of Nick
Guest, a young gay man, with the family of a Tory
MP, Gerald Fedden, is more ambiguous than that
suggests. His fantasy of belonging in their world
evinces a complex mixture of envy and criticism,
despite his ultimate disillusionment, and confirms
Hollinghursts talent in creating characters who
teeter on the brink of complicity with the systems
that seek to exclude or destroy them.
SEE ALSO: Forster, E. M. (BIF); James, Henry
(AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Queer/
Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)

Alderson, D. (2000). Desire as Nostalgia:
The Novels of Alan Hollinghurst. In D. Alderson &
L. Anderson (eds.), Territories of Desire in Queer
Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
pp. 2948.
Brooker, J. (2005). Neo Lines: Alan Hollinghurst and
the Apogee of the Eighties. Literary Criterion,
40(34), 10416.
Chambers, R. (1993). Messing Around: Gayness and
Loiterature in Alan Hollinghursts The SwimmingPool Library. In J. Still & M. Worton (eds.), Textuality
and Sexuality. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, pp. 20717.
Hollinghurst, A. (1988). The Swimming-Pool Library.
London: Vintage.
Hollinghurst, A. (1994). The Folding Star. London:
Vintage.
Hollinghurst, A. (1998). The Spell. London: Vintage.
Hollinghurst, A. (2004). The Line of Beauty. London:
Picador.
Mitchell, K. (2006). Gay Book Wins Booker: Alan
Hollinghurst and the Narrative Construction of
Homosexual Identity. In R. Mengham & P. Tew
(eds.), British Fiction Today. London: Continuum,
pp. 4051.
Moss, S. (2004). I Dont Make Moral Judgments
[interview]. Guardian (Oct. 21). At http://books.
guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2004/story/
0,14182,1332083,00.html, accessed Jan. 29, 2010.
Sinfield, A. (2000). Culture, Consensus and Difference:
Angus Wilson to Alan Hollinghurst. In A. Davies &
A. Sinfield (eds.), British Culture of the Postwar.
London: Routledge, pp. 83102.
180
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
Huxley, Aldous
JAMES SEXTON
Aldous Huxley was descended from two eminent

Victorian families he was grandson of noted
biologist and writer on science, Thomas Henry
Huxley, and a great-nephew of Matthew Arnold.
His Christian name commemorates a major character, Aldous Raeburn, in Marcella, a novel published by his aunt, Mary Ward, in the year of
Huxleys birth, 1894. Huxleys father, Leonard,
was editor of Cornhill, the venerable magazine
once edited by Thackeray.
Born in Godalming, Surrey, Huxley attended
Eton, then took a first in English at Balliol College,
Oxford in 1916. Two early blows the death of his
mother in 1908, poignantly alluded to in Antic
Hay (1923) and an attack of keratitis while a
student at Eton, which left him nearly blind for
the rest of his life may have sharpened his
tendency to rely overmuch on his own inner
resources, effectively cutting him off from others.
In 1919, his patroness, Lady Ottoline Morrell,
prevailed over John Middleton Murrys objections against taking on any young Oxfords at
his review The Athenaeum, and soon Huxley was
writing middles under the pen name Autolycus,
Shakespeares snapper-up of unconsidered
trifles. Between 1920 and 1923 the young polymath served as chief staff writer and editorialist
for the British House and Garden magazine, art
critic for the Bloomsbury-influenced Vogue
(dubbed Brogue to distinguish it from the
American edition), as well as music and drama
reviewer for the Westminster Gazette.
His first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), is a country-house symposium in the manner of Thomas
Love Peacock, replete with antiquarian references
and all too easily recognizable caricatures of Garsington regulars such as Bertrand Russell and the
painters Dora Carrington, Dorothy Brett, and
Mark Gertler. These portraits so offended
Huxleys patroness that several years passed before she again corresponded with him. The character Scogan, based partly on Russell and partly
on H. G. Wells, approvingly describes a future
sunlit Rational State, which has abolished democracy, the family, and viviparous birth. Before the
mid-1930s, Huxley was attracted to the elitist state
modeled on Wellss versions of Platos Republic;
and under the influence of H. L. Mencken, he

grew increasingly receptive to the idea of a state
run by an intellectual aristocracy. Scogans strictures on architecture and painting also reveal him
as an early version of Dostoevskys Euclidean
mind, which advocates the tyranny of instrumental reason. He praises the architect of Crome for
creating aggressively a work of art. It makes no
compromise with nature, but affronts it and
rebels against it (100). Similarly, cubist paintings, which are exclusively of the human mind,
win his approval because they banish Nature
from Art (252); and his comment on the superiority of the London Underground with its iron
riveted into geometrical forms and straight lines
of concrete prepares the way for the broader
critique of American and Soviet industriolatry in
Point Counter Point (1928), Music at Night (1930),
and Brave New World (1932).
His second novel, Antic Hay (1923), depicts the
postwar world he described elsewhere at this time
as socially and morally wrecked. Between them
the war and the new psychology have smashed
most of the institutions, traditions, creeds, and
spiritual values that supported us in the past
(Huxley 1922). Myra Viveash, one of the denizens
of this fictional wasteland, is the prototype of
vamps such as Lucy Tantamount (Point Counter
Point) and Mary Amberley (Eyeless in Gaza), as
well as Hemingways similarly named epitome of
the lost generation, Lady Brett Ashley, in The Sun
Also Rises (1926). Although few of the characters
in Antic Hay have any ideals, one at least Emily
elicits in the sensitive yet cynical protagonist,
Gumbril, an openness to spiritual values. He
briefly imagines a refuge from the jazz and foxtrot-distracted world of Viveash in the crystal
world of Emilys country cottage, where he
experiences a mystical annunciation, described
as a faint sound of footsteps, something inexpressibly lovely . . . [yet] terrifying (187). But
Huxleys early receptiveness to mysticism appears
to have been nipped in the bud after his visit to
India, for in 1926 he informs Mencken that this
rigmarole of Light from the East . . . is genuinely
nonsense (Bradshaw 1994, 21).
The ideas of Huxleys next guru, the science
writer J. W. N. Sullivan, probably influenced the
characterization of Calamy, the world-weary sensualist turned mystic, in his next novel, Those
Barren Leaves (1925). Sullivans journalistic
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
demonstration of the compatibility of the new

physics with philosophical idealism made a significant, if brief, impression on Huxley, but the
vitalist ideas of D. H. Lawrence soon gained a
greater hold on his imagination. Mark Rampion,
the character who embodies Lawrences lifeworship in Point Counter Point, accuses all political parties of savoring the stink of industrialism, and his protest against it in his painting of a
nude family in a pastoral landscape, reinforces the
attack on cubism, first seen in Crome Yellow.
Huxleys alter-ego, Philip Quarles, mordantly
suggests a more fashionable portrait of life in the
civilized world: the same family clothed in massproduced garments, sitting on an asphalt-covered
bank and all painted in the cubist manner
which prompts Rampions observation that such
modern art is unparalleled for sterilizing the life
out of things (420). Not until 1936 did Huxley
again seriously explore the salutary possibilities of
the perennial philosophy for which Sullivans
elucidations of relativity and quantum theory,
both in Londons highbrow press and in person
with Huxley, had helped prepare the way.
During his long literary career, Aldous Huxley
published poetry collections, plays, essays, short
fiction, travel narratives, and biography, but, like
George Orwell, he is best remembered as the
author of a hugely influential utopian satire. Brave
New World began as a response to H. G. Wellss
utopia, Men Like Gods (1923), although, unlike
Orwell, he was not indebted to Zamyatins We
(1924), a novel he never read. However, in 1929 he
reviewed Rene F
ul
op-Millers The Mind and Face
of Bolshevism (1927), a work whose description of
Soviet machine-worship may have contributed as
much as Dickenss Hard Times to his portrait of
reified workers in Brave New World.
Huxley became an innovative fictional stylist,
effectively using the cinematic technique of montage for the purpose of exposition in the third
chapter of Brave New World, thereby avoiding
that major defect of most utopian novels the
tedious guided tour of utopian institutions. Using
montage and intertextuality, Huxley did for the
novel what Eliot had done for modern poetry in
The Waste Land 10 years earlier, deliberately
juxtaposing excerpts from, say, Shakespearean
tragedy with the utopians behaviorist jingles in
order to emphasize, in Bakers phrase, the erosion of cultural hierarchies (259).
181
In October 1931, Huxley confided to an interviewer that the main purpose of his writing was
the desire . . . to clarify a point of view to myself. I
do not write for my readers; in fact, I dont like
thinking about my readers . . . I am chiefly interested in making clear a certain outlook on life.
He then summarized his entire literary output as
provisional work toward a definitive and comprehensive outlook on the world (Huxley 1931,
15, 16). The provisional nature of most of the
novels after 1925 is reflected in what becomes a
structural staple in his middle and final periods.
Each novel presents characters with opposing
outlooks on the world. In each novel from Point
Counter Point onward, a guru-figure becomes a
spokesman for Huxleys provisional philosophy.
Taking a cue from Huxleys often hostile assessment of Wellss aseptic utopianism the adjective is used by Mercaptan in Antic Hay most
critics have emphasized the anti-Wellsian quality
of Brave New World. Firchow convincingly shows
how the characterization of World-Controller
Mustapha Mond owes as much to Dostoevskys
Grand Inquisitor as to Wellss Samurai (334).
However, critics have recently called attention to
the congruence of Huxleys and Wellss views
especially during the height of the worldwide
economic crisis around 1931. Bradshaw even calls
Huxley a card-carrying open conspirator and
suggests that, although Huxleys original purpose
in writing his famous utopia may well have been to
travesty Men Like Gods, parody soon gave way to
hesitant prescription, and that Mustapha Mond
acts as Huxleys ideological spokesman (1995,
161). That Huxleys latest provisional outlook
on the world became distinctly more Wellsian at
this time is clear. Both advocated Soviet-style
planning, rationalization, and greater authoritarianism, including measures to guard against the
lowering of general intelligence caused by
differential birthrates. Not surprisingly, one
communist critic labeled both Huxley and Wells
Liberal Fascists because of their support for
organized capitalism . . . Mondism (Mirsky 34).
Still, Huxleys commitment to what he mockingly called the great god Plan (1994, 177) was
fairly short-lived. In late 1935 he joined the Peace
Pledge Union, producing in 1936 the anti-war
tract What are You Going to Do about It? The
Case for Constructive Peace. His most autobiographical novel, Eyeless in Gaza (1936), confirms
182
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
his adoption of a committed, socially active position. Another guru emerges, the Buddhist, Dr.
James Miller, whose ideas owe much to the
kinesthetic re-education model of Huxleys
teacher, F. M. Alexander, who, according to
Huxleys wife Maria, had soon made a new and
unrecognizable person of Aldous . . . not physically only, but mentally and therefore morally
(Bedford 315). Dr. Millers pacifist platform is
based on that of Canon Dick Sheppard, the
Anglican cleric and founder of the Peace Pledge
Union. Influenced by their ideas, Huxley can been
seen to have entered a new phase: that of polemicist-prophet. Huxleys protagonist and autobiographical alter-ego, Anthony Beavis (A.B.), rejects
his past aesthetes life and moves toward an ethical
one, embodying the struggle between the two
antithetical outlooks of the detached sensualistaesthete A and the ethical judge B in the
main source for this novel, Kierkegaards Either/
Or (Wasserman 142).
In After Many a Summer (1939), protagonist
William Propter functions as a mouthpiece for
the decentralist ideas of Ralph Borsodi, whose
experiments at his School for Living convinced
Huxley that decentralized production could be a
viable alternative to mass production. Echoing F.
M. Alexander, Propter insists that Good exists, on
the physical level, as the proper functioning of
the organism, and on the higher level, . . . as the
experience of eternity . . . the transcendence of
personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego (120).
By the time Huxley came to write what he
considered his best novel, Time Must Have a Stop
(1944), he believed that in order to gain access to
the Divine Ground, one must abandon the ego.
The novels title signals Huxleys by now consistent mystical position. The protagonists scapegrace uncle, Eustace Barnack, another sensualist
aesthete, is presented with an opportunity to
escape from his ego, but he fails what Huxley
calls the immensely stringent intelligence test
(2007, 386) that he describes in a tour de force
chapter recounting his immediate after-death
experience. The metaphor of the divine intelligence test conveys the main theme of Time Must
Have a Stop.
As Baker says in his essay on Huxleys critique of
Enlightenment reason, The inevitable outcome of
Huxleys sweeping indictment of temporality and
desire [in the 1940s] . . . is the gradual displacement of narrative by . . . critical prose (259). Late
in his career, Huxley confessed to a television
interviewer that he was not a born novelist, but
an essayist who writes novels (1957).
Huxley died on the day President Kennedy was
assassinated, November 22, 1963. In an acceptance speech for an honor bestowed on him by the
American Academy of Arts and Letters only six
months earlier, Huxley, recalling Montaigne, refers to Island (1962) as an essay in positive
Utopianism (2000, 1). It serves as the culmination of his writings from the socially committed,
American period of 1937 onward. Yet few critics
would disagree with Bakers assessment of the
work after 1939:
by the early forties Huxleys novels had become pretexts for discursive analyses of contemporary socio-economic, political, and religious issues. Narrative desire was, as a component of Utopian desire, partially recovered
in Island, but Huxleys creative energies as a
novelist seemed to collapse into irretrievable
decline ironically at the moment in which his
critique of the Enlightenments faith in scientific thought had reached its clearest and most
penetrating formulation. Once all human desire was construed as Sadean craving, anarchic and insatiably egoistic, Huxleys novel of
social history . . . was simply displaced by the
desire to transcend the ego, art, and history
itself. (25960)
SEE ALSO: Lawrence, D. H. (BIF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF); Orwell, George (BIF); Politics
and the Novel (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian
Fiction (BIF); Wells, H. G. (BIF)
Baker, R. (1995). The Nightmare of the Frankfurt
School: The Marquis de Sade and the Problem
of Modernity in Aldous Huxleys Dystopian
Narrative. In B. Nugel (ed.), Now More than Ever:
Proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centenary
Symposium, Munster 1994. Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
pp. 22645.
Bedford, S. (1973). Aldous Huxley: A Biography, vol. 1.
London: Collins.
Bradshaw, D. (1994). The Hidden Huxley. London:
Faber and Faber.
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
Bradshaw, D. (1995). Huxleys Slump. In J. Batchelor

(ed.), The Art of Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford
Dunaway, D. (1991). Huxley in Hollywood. New York:
Harper and Row.
Firchow, P. (1984). The End of Utopia. Lewisburg, PA:
Hemingway, E. (1926). The Sun Also Rises. New York:
Scribners.
Huxley, A. (1921). Crome Yellow. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Huxley, A. (1922). The Modern Spirit and a Family
Party. Vanity Fair, 18, 55 (Aug.).
Huxley, A. (1923). Antic Hay. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Huxley, A. (1925). Those Barren Leaves. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Huxley, A. (1928). Point Counter Point. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Huxley, A. (1931). Interviews with Great Scientists
(VII): Aldous Huxley. Observer, pp. 1516 (Feb. 1).
Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Huxley, A. (1936). Eyeless in Gaza. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Huxley, A. (1939). After Many a Summer. London:
Chatto and Windus.
183
Huxley, A. (1944). Time Must Have a Stop. New York:

Harper and Row.
Huxley, A. (1957). [Interview.] Look Here (dir. D.
Feldman). NBC Television Network.
Huxley, A. (1962). Island. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Huxley, A. (1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley (ed. G.
Smith). New York: Harper.
Huxley, A. (1994). Political Plans. In Aldous
Huxleys Hearst Essays (ed. J. Sexton).
New York: Garland.
Huxley, A. (2000). Utopias, Positive and Negative.
Aldous Huxley Annual, 1, 15.
Huxley, A. (20002). Complete Essays (ed. R. Baker & J.
Sexton). 6 vols. Chicago: Ivan Dee.
Huxley, A. (2007). Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley
(ed. J. Sexton). Chicago: Ivan Dee.
Meckier, J. (1971). Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure.
Mirsky, D. (1935). The Intelligentsia of Great Britain.
New York: Covici, Friede.
Murray, N. (2002). Aldous Huxley: An English
Intellectual. Boston: Little, Brown.
Wasserman, J. (1996). Huxleys Either/Or: The Case
for Eyeless in Gaza. In J. Meckier (ed.), Critical
Essays on Aldous Huxley. New York: G. K. Hall,
pp. 132148.
I
Irish Fiction
OONA FRAWLEY
Irish fiction writers played important roles in

major literary movements of the twentieth century. In the centurys early decades, Irish fiction
moved away from the influence of a late Victorian,
colonial sensibility and, in tandem with the dramatic movement prominent during this period of
the Irish Literary Revival, toward the establishment of an Irish national literature. A preoccupation with nationhood, Irish identity, and the politics of independence was to provide ideological
fodder not only for Irish fiction of those early
decades, but also for writers of the latter half of
the century, whose fiction often considered the
impact of Irish history and the crises of identity
that had resulted from it. Despite the prevalence of
these preoccupations, however, the course of the
twentieth century saw Irish fiction change directions, adopting and responding to international
literary and ideological movements, most notably
from modernism to postmodernism, and from
colonialism to postcolonialism.
The nineteenth century in Ireland had been a
period of linguistic, political, and cultural flux,
marked by severe famine and high levels of emigration; these factors inevitably marked the literature of the period most obviously the big
house novel and the tradition of Irish gothic
fiction and left a lasting legacy for the twentieth
century.
In the first decades of the twentieth century,
while the period known as the Irish Literary
Revival was still under way, poetry and drama
were the most prominent modes for Irish literature, with the Abbey Theatre providing a vehicle
for playwrights such as Lady Augusta Gregory,
W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Sean OCasey. Prose
fiction of the period received less attention until
recently, though the work of George Moore in
story collections like The Untilled Field (1903) and
in novels such as The Lake (1905) demonstrated
the shift that Irish fiction was undergoing from its
nineteenth-century foundations: Moores work,
even his late nineteenth-century novels, displays
the influence of French realist fiction (particularly
Flaubert and Zola), indicating an outwardlooking, internationalist trend for Irish fiction.
Moores work also demonstrated the power of
fiction to convey the stasis and moral servitude
that hung over Ireland as a result of years of
colonial oppression and control by the Catholic
Church. Fiction, like other literature of the
period, was seen to play an important role in
providing political and social commentary, as
well as in retrieving neglected Irish-language
literary traditions.
While dissociating himself from the revival,
James Joyce wrote the stories that would comprise
Dubliners, some of which appeared in the Dublin
publication the Irish Homestead, in 19045. After
a protracted battle with a London publisher,
Dubliners was eventually published in 1914, followed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in
1916. Joyces influence on Irish literature from
this period is so significant that the publication of
his stories can be seen to mark a turn in Irish
literary studies toward prose. Dubliners presented
a challenge to the relatively young genre of the

IRISH FICTION
short story, as well as providing stark analyses of

an urban Ireland that had been ignored in favor of
idealized versions of rural Ireland in the literature
of many of his contemporaries; while Portraits
delineation of an early modernist aesthetic
marked Joyces work as different from much of
the writing being done by his peers in Ireland, and
provided indications of the direction his fiction
was to take.
Even in his early years while he remained in
Ireland, Joyce was not working in isolation, however; in addition to George Moore, James Stephens, Gerald ODonovan, and Daniel Corkery
produced noteworthy fictions in the first two
decades of the century. Stephenss The Crock of
Gold (1912) in particular was stylistically innovative, uniting Irish mythological traditions and
folklore with a mock philosophic quest tale. In
its comic use of Irish material, Stephenss novel
distances itself from the seriousness with which
such material had been treated by early revivalists,
and represents another voice offering a challenge
to nineteenth-century novel traditions while continuing to reclaim neglected Irish material.
It was with the publication of Ulysses in 1922
that Irish fiction found its international reputation
consolidated; Joyces epic was almost immediately
regarded as the quintessential modernist text.
Radically experimental and determinedly international in its allusions and outlook, Ulysses was also
an inescapably Irish novel, with its Dublin setting
and characters and its astute and often irreverent
embodiment of Irish cultural, political, and religious life. Joyces reputation for stylistic experimentation, word play, and complexity was heightened by Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, which
ensured his position as the most prominent Irish
novelist, and arguably as the most important
novelist of the twentieth century.
While Joyces novels are very often considered
within the context of an international modernism
peopled by writers such as Woolf, Pound, and
Eliot, the capacity of his work to embody modernism is mirrored in the work of fellow Irish
writers as well. The most notable of these is Nobel
Prize winner Samuel Beckett, whose early prose
fiction owes direct debts to Joyce. Murphy (1938),
Becketts first published novel, is experimental
and allusive in form and style, full of puns and
marked by a playful engagement with literary
tradition. Even in Murphy, however, Beckett
185
shows signs of the work that he would later

produce; the novel is marked by philosophical
crises of its protagonist and a concern with the
absurd, with repetition, and with the workings of
the mind between sanity and insanity.
Conscious of the shadow cast over his work by
Joyce, Beckett began a process of movement away
from the full, all-inclusive prose style exhibited in
Murphy; in his stories, in Mercier and Camier
(1970), and in Watt (1953) we see a distinctive
voice emerge that is cerebral it is as if the battle
enacted in Murphy between body and mind has
ended, and the mind has won. Becketts representation of mind reaches its pinnacle in three
novels often referred to as a trilogy: Molloy (1951),
Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953).
Over the course of these three texts we see Beckett
move progressively farther away from the trappings of the novel form, dispensing with characterization, dialogue, and plot so that by the time
we reach The Unnamable, we are in a realm
radically different from Becketts earliest prose.
Significantly, too, we have moved away from a
focus on specifically Irish-based themes and
settings.
Like Joyce and Beckett, Brian ONolan also
straddled the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Under the name of Flann OBrien,
ONolan published his masterpiece, At SwimTwo-Birds (1939); under the name of Myles na
Gopaleen, ONolan wrote a long-term column for
the Irish Times, collected in several volumes including The Best of Myles (1968). At Swim-TwoBirds remains a startlingly original novel, an
explorative metafiction that entwines figures
from medieval Irish myth and folklore with a
plethora of other recycled characters; the wandering narrative sees characters rebelling against their
author. ONolan remained in Ireland for his
lifetime, unlike Joyce and Beckett in their selfdeclared exiles; but despite this difference he
aligns himself with Joyce and Beckett in his radical
experimentalism, mining a unique vein in Irish
fiction prior to the mid-century.
The formal experiment that distinguished
Joyce, Beckett, and ONolan was not always
mirrored in other Irish fiction of the same period,
which nonetheless committed itself to often radical exposures of Irish culture and society: Frank
OConnor, Sean OFaolain, and Liam OFlaherty
all produced notable fiction in this mid-century
186
IRISH FICTION
period. This type of exposure was particularly

apparent among several women writers whose
work remains important in creating and delineating a space for women in the Irish literary
tradition. Among these are, notably, Kate
OBrien, whose The Land of Spices (1941) can be
seen in useful contrast to Joyces Portrait as a
consideration of the limited possibilities for a
sensitive and bright young woman in Ireland.
Mary Lavin and Molly Keane (publishing under
the name of M. J. Farrell until 1981) were also
significant story and novel writers who mapped
out the frequent restrictions imposed by church,
state, and social convention on womens positions in twentieth-century Ireland. Elizabeth
Bowens masterly short stories and novels capture
the declining world of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy
class of which she herself was a part, as in The Last
September (1929), which chronicles a young
womans final summer at an Irish estate as British
rule ends and the Civil War erupts. Other of
Bowens works are more international in scope,
such as the haunting The House in Paris (1935)
which, like all of Bowens best work, peers intently
beneath the surface of characters experience and
reveals intensely felt and lived emotional lives.
Bowens attention to and innovative use of the
short story form and her acute ability to focus on
the interior consciousness of her characters sees
her develop her own brand of modernism, with
particular focus on the lives of women.
If the period up until World War II was dominated by the experiments of Joyce and Beckett and
the international significance of modern writing
more generally, the postwar period in Ireland was
dominated by a very different set of preoccupations and themes that reflected the changing
concerns of the fledgling Irish state. Where earlier
novels and stories mirrored the movement away
from the colonial dynamic and also a breaking
away from traditional stylistic and aesthetic
forms, the postwar period presented new challenges to novelists. There was a sense, for many
writers, of having to confront the legacy of Joyce,
who seemed to many to have so mastered the
novel form that there was little left that it could
do. Instead of stylistic or formal experiment, this
period was marked by a more considered and
cautious realism; it was also marked by a more
critical, less celebratory analysis of the Irish Free
State and its perceived failures.
Edna OBrien serves as an apt example of the

shift in Irish fiction after the mid-century.
OBrien has acknowledged debts to Joyce (even
publishing a biographical study of Joyce in 1999),
and her work, when it emerged in the 1960s,
provoked controversy for its sexual explicitness
and its critiques of the Irish society. The Country
Girls trilogy (1987 [19604]) was rooted in several
themes of relevance to the period: the divide
between rural and urban Ireland, as well as the
position of women in those different societies. It
also shattered certain myths upheld about
romantic Ireland, particularly in relation to the
family: OBrien exposed a male-dominated culture in which women were abused, repressed and
subject to violence, and unable sometimes by
law to support themselves. Banned in Ireland for
a time, The Country Girls was important in raising
awareness of the plight of Irish womanhood as a
construction of patriarchy, in literature as well as
in reality. OBriens work has continued to court
controversy, as with the 1996 Down by the River,
modeled on true events in which a young girl was
raped, became pregnant, and was dragged into the
spotlight when she was briefly prevented by the
state from traveling to England for an abortion.
Of other mid-century writers to emerge from
the shadow of Joyce and to develop his own
particular style, John McGahern was among the
most prolific; McGahern produced six novels and
five collections of short stories, as well as the
remarkable Memoir (2005) published just before
his death. McGaherns realism and quiet exposure
of Irish family and private life led to both great
controversy and great acclaim. His second novel,
The Dark (1965), was banned. A semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel which considered
the claustrophobic tensions in a family home as
well as layers of abuse, it caused a furore that
forced McGahern to resign his position as a
teacher and he subsequently left Ireland for a
period of several years. The ban of The Dark
lapsed in 1972, and McGaherns work continued
to garner acclaim, witnessed in the awards
received by the 1990 publication of Amongst
Women, which presented a study of an Irish
father, a veteran of the war for Irish independence,
and his relationship to his five children and their
stepmother. Vividly drawn, Amongst Women,
along with other of McGaherns work such as his
final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun
IRISH FICTION
(2002), combines the sharp criticality of Joyces

early realism with a tone that owes something to
elegy; McGahern captures the intimacies and simple interactions of Irish rural life as well as its
drawbacks, its claustrophobia, and its violences.
McGaherns legacy is witnessed in the work of fine
short story writers such as Claire Keegan, whose
collections (Antarctica, 1999, and Walk the Blue
Fields, 2007) owe a great debt to the subtleties of
McGahern and his focus on rural Ireland.
While very different in tone and aesthetic aim,
OBrien and McGaherns work share in a process
of exposing unseen, unacknowledged or vanishing Irish realities through fiction. Indeed, critics
of Irish literature in recent decades have detected a
confessional strain, mirrored in the international
fiction markets preoccupation with memoir, and
witnessed at its zenith in Frank McCourts bestselling (and, some critics have argued, fictionalized) memoir of his poverty-stricken Limerick
childhood, Angelas Ashes (1996). This strain
remains apparent in a diverse range of prominent
writers. Novelists such as Patrick McCabe (particularly in The Butcher Boy, 1992, and Breakfast
on Pluto, 1998) have used black comedy to describe the legacies of domestic, state, and church
abuse and the social ostracism cultivated by conventional Irish society in the mid twentieth century, while Colm Tobn challenged the Irish
canon to accommodate the abortion debate in
Ireland (The Heather Blazing, 1992), homosexual
love stories (The Story of the Night, 1996) and the
AIDS crisis (The Blackwater Lightship, 1999).
Tobns international reputation soared after the
turn of the century with the success of the 2004
multiaward-winning novel The Master, a fictional
account of a period in Henry Jamess life. Emma
Donoghues breakthrough novel, Hood (1995),
inserted Irish lesbian experience into the literary
canon, and announced the arrival of another
major author whose promise was confirmed by
the historical novel Slammerkin (2000) and by a
rash of impressive publications after the turn of
the century.
If authors such as McGahern found a way of
negotiating with the shadow cast by Joyce and
Beckett by returning to a more recognizably
realistic tradition in story and novel, other writers
such as Aidan Higgins, Desmond Hogan, and
John Banville have grappled more directly with
the legacy of their experimental forebears. Booker
187
Prize winner John Banvilles work is, like Becketts, cerebral, and focuses on male protagonists
with a precise narrative style that has echoes of
both Joyce and, importantly, Nabokov; Banville
has frequently demurred at the title of Irish
novelist, preferring to situate his work and aesthetic in an international literary context. An
acclaimed tetralogy constructed fictional lives of
scientists Doctor Copernicus: A Novel (1976),
Kepler: A Novel (1981), The Newton Letter: An
Interlude (1982), and Mefisto (1986); other important novels are The Book of Evidence (1989)
and Athena (1995). More recently Banville has
begun writing crime fiction, under the name of
Benjamin Black.
Banvilles tendency to move away from Irish
subject matter is seen in other late twentieth
century work. This marks a significant shift for
Irish writing, which had spent so much of the
early part of the century grappling with issues of
Irish identity and statehood. That late twentiethcentury writing has gone in this direction is
perhaps an indication that Ireland has entered
into a truly postcolonial phase. The work of
authors such as the New York-based Colum
McCann and, after the turn of the century, Joseph
ONeill, embraces a global, postnational concept
of identity, with characters experiencing multiple
countries and time periods, often in the course of
one novel. Joseph OConnor reflects this international strain in novels such as the Nicaraguan-set
Desperadoes (1993).
OConnors more recent novels embody another significant movement within late twentiethcentury Irish fiction, which examines critical
periods in Irish history and challenges accepted
versions of that history. Star of the Sea (2002) was
groundbreaking in its attention to the period
of the Famine of the 1840s; unlike OFlahertys
Famine (1940), Star of the Sea employs multiple
linguistic, formal, and stylistic registers to construct a moving image of the world of 1840s
Ireland. The sequel to Star of the Sea, Redemption
Falls (2007), followed the lives of characters after
emigration to the United States, thus examining
another significant element of Irish cultural life
largely unexamined in fiction. The fiction of Roddy Doyle also partakes of this historical reconsideration. While Doyle is best known for his hilarious, fast-talking protagonists of inner city Dublin
(as in The Commitments, The Snapper, and The
188
IRISH FICTION
Van), his 2000 novel A Star Called Henry reassessed the foundational myth of the Irish state,
implicitly critiquing the state for instituting a
system of government that replicated the colonial
regime and suppressed socialist elements that had
contributed to the Easter Rising. Doyles commitment to representing in fiction ignored or repressed classes of Irish life continues in work that
gives voice to recent immigrants to Ireland and
comments on urban Celtic Tiger Ireland, and the
racism and class biases to be found there.
Among the most prominent of late twentieth
century authors is Anne Enright, whose work
captures the internationalist strain in Irish literature and the legacies of abuse and paternalism
in Ireland in the twentieth century. From The
Portable Virgin (1991) on, Enrights voice has
offered an acerbic and blackly comical look at
sexuality, male and female relationships, and at
the often bleak family structures of Irish life. In a
field that has a tendency to be dominated by
bestselling male authors from Banville and
OConnor to Tobn and Doyle Enright is not
the only recent woman author to achieve aesthetic and critical success. Mary Morrisseys
Mother of Pearl (1996) addressed itself to sectarianism, Catholicism, and myth, while Deirdre
Maddens searing One by One in the Darkness,
published in the same year, similarly dealt with
these legacies of colonialism and the consequences of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Irish women authors have had particular success
internationally with chicklit and romance novels. Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, and Deirdre
Purcell are notable examples.
While Seamus Heaneys achievements have
meant that Northern Irish poetry has received
more attention than prose, fiction that addresses
the situation from the 1960s onward became
more readily available and found wider markets
after the Good Friday Agreement (1998). Jennifer
Johnston and Bernard McLavertys fiction, popular for several decades, raised the profile of
Northern Irish fiction writers, while, more
recently, authors such as the already mentioned
Madden, Sean OReilly, and Eoin McNamee (in
Resurrection Man, 1994) have broadened the type
of literature available on this topic and begun to
address the legacies of the period.
The end of the twentieth century saw a diverse
field of Irish authors with diverse literary com-
mitments, reflecting Irelands shift over the

course of the century from an occupied colony
to an independent state that, by centurys end, was
experiencing an economic boom. The fiction
produced over the course of the century reflects
these major shifts, and continues to be seen as an
important site for the discussion and debate about
Irish identity, as well as a fruitful site for formal
and aesthetic experiment.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics
and the Novel (BIF); Queer/Alternative
Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)

Banville, J. (1989). The Book of Evidence. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Banville, J. (2000). The Revolutions Trilogy, comprising
Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter.
London: Picador.
Beckett, S. (1938). Murphy. London: Routledge.
Beckett, S. (1953). Watt. London: Grove.
Beckett, S. (1994). The Trilogy: Molloy, Molone Dies, The
Unnamable. London: Calder.
Bowen, E. (1929). The Last September. London:
Constable.
Brown, T. (2004). Ireland: A Critical and Social History,
2nd edn. London: Harper Perennial.
Cahalan, J. M. (1988). The Irish Novel: A Critical
History. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
Cronin, J. (1990). The Anglo-Irish Novel, vol. 2:
19001940. Belfast: Appletree.
Deane, S.(ed.) (19912002). The Field Day Anthology of
Irish Writing. Derry: Field Day.
Donoghue, E. (1990). The Snapper. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Donoghue, E. (1991). The Van. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Donoghue, E. (1995). Hood. London: HarperCollins.
Donoghue, E. (2000). Slammerkin. London:
HarperCollins.
Doyle, R. (1988). The Commitments. London:
Heinemann.
Eagleton, T. (1995). Heathcliff and the Great Hunger:
Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso.
Enright, A. (1991). The Portable Virgin. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Foster, J. W. (1993). Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Foster, J. W. (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge Companion to
the Irish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
ISHERWOOD, CHRISTOPHER
Joyce, J. (1976). Finnegans Wake [1939]. London:

Penguin.
Joyce, J. (1986). Ulysses [1922]. London: Vintage.
Joyce, J. (1992). A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man
[1916]. London: Penguin.
Joyce, J. (1996). Dubliners [1914]. London: Viking.
Keegan, C. (1999). Antarctica. London: Grove.
Keegan, C. (2007). Walk the Blue Fields. London:
Grove.
Kelleher, M., & OLeary, P. (2006). The Cambridge
History of Irish Literature, vol. 2. Cambridge:
Kiberd, D. (1995). Inventing Ireland. London:
Vintage.
Kiberd, D. (2001). Irish Classics. London: Granta.
Lloyd, D. (1993). Anomalous States: Irish Writing and
the Post-Colonial Moment. Dublin: Lilliput.
Longley, E. (1994). The Living Stream: Literature and
Revisionism in Ireland. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Bloodaxe.
Madden, D. (1996). One by One in the Darkness.
McCabe, P. (1992). The Butcher Boy. London: Picador.
McCabe, P. (1998). Breakfast on Pluto. London:
Picador.
McCourt, F. (1996). Angelas Ashes. London:
HarperCollins.
McGahern, J. (1965). The Dark. London: Faber and
Faber.
McGahern, J. (1990). Amongst Women. London: Faber
and Faber.
McGahern, J. (2005). Memoir. London: Faber and
Faber.
McNamee, E. (1994). Resurrection Man. London:
Picador.
Moore, G. (1903). The Untilled Field. London: T. Fisher
Unwin.
Moore, G. (1905). The Lake. London: Heinemann.
Morrissey, M. (1996). Mother of Pearl. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OBrien, E. (1987). The Country Girls Trilogy. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OBrien, E. (1996). Down by the River. London:
OBrien, F. (1939). At Swim-Two-Birds. London:
Longman.
OBrien, K. (1941). The Land of Spices. London:
Heinemann.
OConnor, J. (2003). Star of the Sea. London: Secker and
Warburg.
OConnor, J. (2007). Redemption Falls. London: Harvill
Secker.
Smyth, G. (1997). The Novel and the Nation: Studies in
the New Irish Fiction. London: Pluto.
189
Stephens, J. (1912). The Crock of Gold. London:

Macmillan.
Toibn, C. (1992). The Heather Blazing. London:
Picador.
Toibn, C. (2004). The Master. London: Picador.
Isherwood, Christopher
CHRIS HOPKINS
Christopher Isherwood was a significant twentiethcentury literary figure in his own right and as a
member of the Auden group. In his association
with this group, Isherwood is strongly linked to a
particular literary period, the 1930s, and its
concerns. However, his own career as a writer
falls into two periods: his work of the 1930s and
his work after his move to the United States in
1939. W. H. Auden also moved from England to
America in 1939 and both he and Isherwood
then replaced political commitment with religious belief. While Auden returned to the Anglican belief in which he had been brought up,
Isherwood discovered the Hindu spiritual tradition of Vedanta, which influenced much of his
American writing. Two themes do, however, run
clearly through both of Isherwoods periods: his
fascination with autobiography and the nature
of the self, and a related desire to explore freely
his identity as a homosexual.
A concise account of his biography is thus
particularly helpful to an understanding of his
fiction. Isherwood was born on August 26, 1904.
His father, a professional soldier, was posted to
France in 1914, and killed a year later at Ypres.
Thereafter, Isherwood was brought up by his
mother, with whom he had a close yet antagonistic relationship. His fathers death in battle was
often referred to, at home and school, as an
absolute standard of heroic manliness. In 1918,
Isherwood went to a public school, Repton, where
he met another important influence and collaborator, Edward Upward. Here the two developed
their shared sense of opposition to social convention. Isherwood later analyzed his rebellion as
having begun there: by denying your duty towards the Hero-Father, you deny the authority of
the Flag, the Old School Tie . . . [and] the Land
that Bore You (Parker 2004b, 64).
190
After Repton, Isherwood went to Corpus

Christi College, Cambridge, where he joined Upward. Isherwood paid little attention to his official
studies, instead developing further with Upward
their identities as social outsiders. This contributed to their invention of the alternative world of
Mortmere and to each writing stories set there.
The collaboration confirmed the literary ambitions of both. Isherwood left Cambridge without a
degree in 1925. His friendship with Auden led to
his decision in 1929 to live in Berlin, where Auden
was then living. Isherwood became a published
author before his departure with All the Conspirators (1928). This was followed by The Memorial: A
Portrait of a Family (1932), and by his first Berlin
novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935). Isherwood went to Berlin partly because he had heard
from Auden about the sexual freedom possible in
the Weimar Republic, especially for homosexuals.
Berlin also offered escape of several kinds from his
family and his Englishness, and possessed a culture of artistic experimentation. Isherwoods period in Berlin coincided with the collapse of the
Weimar Republic and the rise to power of Hitler
and the once marginal Nazi party. His representation of this period in Mr. Norris Changes Trains
and Goodbye to Berlin (1939a) is undoubtedly
regarded as his major achievement in fiction, one
further magnified by the successful play and film
adaptations by other writers, I am a Camera
(1951, 1955) and Cabaret (1972). After 1933,
when Berlin became riskier, Isherwood wandered
Europe trying to establish a secure base for himself
and his German lover Heinz Neddermeyer. This
phase ended when Heinz was arrested by the
Gestapo in 1937. In January 1938, Isherwood and
Auden set off for the Far East to collaborate on a
book, Journey to a War, about the Sino-Japanese
war in Manchuria. In 1938 Isherwood also published Lions and Shadows, a fictionalized autobiography of his life during the 1920s. By 1939, with
war between Britain and Germany inevitable,
Isherwood and Auden left Europe for the US (a
decision that led to much criticism, given their
reputation as leftist and anti-fascist activists).
Isherwood settled in Los Angeles and became
a disciple of the Vedanta guru, Swami
Prabhavananda. He also worked as a Hollywood
scriptwriter, though not on many films of abiding
interest. In 1946 he published Prater Violet. His
subsequent novels were largely Vedantist and
consciously American in focus. These included

The World in the Evening (1954), A Single Man
(1964), and A Meeting by the River (1967). He also
published a number of prose works that revisited
his earlier autobiography in various forms: Down
There on a Visit (1962), Exhumations (1966),
Kathleen and Frank (1971), and Christopher and
His Kind (1976). In 1953, Isherwood met Don
Bacchardy, an artist, with whom he lived until his
death on January 4, 1986.
Stephen Wade rightly observes that the boundaries between autobiography and fiction in
Isherwoods work are [comprehensively] blurred
(1) and that different ways of representing the self
are the focus of much of Isherwoods work. All the
Conspirators is, like many first novels, about a
young aspirants attempt to become an artist, but
also deals with conflict between pre- and postWorld War I generations. The result of several
revisions, the novel is uncertain in its attitude to its
protagonist and its use of irony. Isherwood later
thought it was overburdened by the influence of
E. M. Forster, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
Nevertheless, that very uncertainty of viewpoint
formed the basis for the complex narration, irony,
and exploration of moral ambiguity in his more
mature fictions. His next novel, The Memorial: A
Portrait of a Family, is a family saga centered on
differing attitudes toward a war memorial. However, while still influenced by Forster, it is a much
more assured novel than its predecessor and the
two generations in conflict are each imagined with
greater objectivity (though the thumb is still put
on the scales on the side of the young). With these
two novels also belongs the later, sophisticated
fictionalized autobiography Lions and Shadows,
which again deploys artful narration and irony
to explore the interwoven fantasies and genuine
discontents of a young Englishman of the 1920s
called Christopher Isherwood.
Next came Mr. Norris Changes Trains (US title,
The Last of Mr. Norris). The protagonist is again a
version of Isherwood, bearing the authors middle
two names, William Bradshaw. In fact, though,
this seemingly blatant autobiographical gesture is
actually a sign of greater artistry and there is more
narrative distance between protagonist and author than in either of the two earlier novels.
Bradshaw (the novels interest in trains and travel
is surely not coincidental given that a Bradshaw
was then a widely used guide to train timetables in
Britain) is an extremely naive and often quite

passive first-person narrator who does not show
great understanding of much of what he witnesses. The novel is partly a parody of a political
or spy thriller (a popular genre that fascinated
many intellectuals in the 1930s) and partly a
political allegory, following the fortunes of the
frivolous, charming and entirely untrustworthy
Mr. Norris. Apparently a communist, he is extremely nervous of borders and identity papers
and, as it turns out, is a double agent involved
both with the French secret service and the Nazi
Party. At times, he is compared to Hitler (it may
be that he is, following contemporary leftist analysis, a representation of fascism in that he flirts
with a form of socialism but is in the end a
servant of capitalism). Bradshaw finally sees
through Norris, partly with the help of the heroic
communist leader Ludwig Bayer (before Bayer is
murdered by the Nazis). The complex narration
and moral ambiguity here (which does not always
obviously match the readers sympathy to the
righteous characters) no doubt partly stems from
Isherwoods attitudes toward conventional heterosexual hero figures and partly from his doubts
about an absolute political commitment that
might tend to reduce the complexity, nuance,
and even playfulness to which his conception of
art gave a high value. Thus the novel in part enacts
a debate over politics and aesthetics. These veins
are developed with further complexity in Goodbye
to Berlin, which is focused through another version of Isherwood, again called Christopher
Isherwood. In fact, the narration employs brilliantly several different Isherwoods as character, diarist, character-narrator, and authorial
narrator. This allows a set of layered commentaries about experiencing and, indeed, at the
time, not experiencing the gradual domination
of Berlin and Germany by Nazism. The novel
includes a whole cityful of displaced, decentered
fantasists whose grip on reality is slight: these
include communists, Nazis, and impoverished
middle-class Germans, but also many English and
American expatriates, notable among whom is
the would-be filmstar Sally Bowles. In the Berlin
of 19303 the allure of purposeless pleasure and
the difficulty of finding any clear and solidly
grounded purpose leads, as the novel imagines
it, to the possibility of Nazi fantasies contaminating the entire nations view of reality.
191
Prater Violet shares some themes with the

Berlin novels, but is more conventionally serious:
the protagonist Friedrich Bergmann, a film director, is kept sane in the mad Europe of the late
1930s by commitment to his art. There was a
considerable pause before Isherwood published
The World in the Evening, which uses some of the
allegorical techniques of his 1930s novels, but
with a new emphasis on inner and religious
understanding. The protagonist, fittingly called
Stephen Monk, explores his dissatisfactions with
life and with conventional ways of understanding
the relation of the self to others and to external
reality. Isherwood was not happy with this
novel and most critics agree; Wade, for example,
judged it too clumsily allegorical (70). How-ever,
the novel signaled a new kind of spiritual inquiry in
Isherwoods fiction and opened the way to the more
highly regarded A Single Man and A Meeting by the
River. A Single Man, recently filmed by Tom Ford
has as its central figure a gay college lecturer named
George, a single man in several senses: unmarried
. . . homosexual [and] an outsider (Parker 2004b,
714). Isherwoods final novel, A Meeting by the
River, has similar interests and is written in the
form of letters and a diary that compare the lives of
two brothers, one living a secular life, the other
about to become a Hindu monk.
Isherwood was an important writer in several
respects. In the 1930s he contributed to the enduring work of the Auden group and created an
influential picture of prewar Berlin, while in the
postwar period he pioneered the serious exploration of gay identity in his fiction and also sought
to put the exploration of Vedantist spirituality at
the center of his writing.
SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); Forster,
E. M. (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
Upward, Edward (BIF)
Finney, B. (1979). Christopher Isherwood: A Critical
Biography. London: Faber and Faber.
Ford, T. (dir.) (2009). A Single Man. Weinstein/Fade to
Black.
Hynes, S. (1979). The Auden Generation. London: Faber
and Faber.
Isherwood, C. (1928). All the Conspirators. London:
Jonathan Cape.
192
ISHIGURO, KAZUO
Isherwood, C. (1932). The Memorial: A Portrait of a

Family. London: Hogarth.
Isherwood, C. (1935). Mr. Norris Changes Trains.
London: Hogarth. (Published in US as The Last of Mr.
Norris.)
Isherwood, C. (1938). Lions and Shadows. London:
Hogarth.
Isherwood, C. (1939a). Goodbye to Berlin. London:
Hogarth.
Isherwood, C. (1939b). Journey to a War. London:
Faber.
Isherwood, C. (1946). Prater Violet. London: Methuen.
Isherwood, C. (1954). The World in the Evening. New
York: Random House.
Isherwood, C. (1962). Down There on a Visit. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Isherwood, C. (1964). A Single Man. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Isherwood, C. (1966). Exhumations. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Isherwood, C. (1967). A Meeting by the River. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Isherwood, C. (1971). Kathleen and Frank. London:
Methuen.
Isherwood, C. (1976). Christopher and His Kind. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Page, N. (1989). Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years.
Parker, P. (2004a). Christopher Isherwood. In Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (online edn.).
Parker, P. (2004b). Isherwood. London: Picador.
Summers, C. J. (1980). Christopher Isherwood. New
York: Ungar.
Wade, S. (1991). Christopher Isherwood. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Ishiguro, Kazuo
LISA FLUET
The Anglo-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is

perhaps best known for his protagonists who
devote themselves completely to a chosen professional role as artist, butler, pianist, or detective
and whose first-person, confessional narratives
paradoxically conceal more than they reveal about
their past lives. Born in Nagasaki, Japan on
November 8, 1954, Ishiguro moved with his
family to Britain in 1960, and was educated in
Surrey, at Stoughton Primary School and Woking
County Grammar School. He later read English
and philosophy at the University of Kent, in
Canterbury, graduating in 1978, and worked both

as a community worker and a residential social
worker in Glasgow and London. He then went on
to study creative writing at the University of East
Anglia under the guidance of Malcolm Bradbury
and Angela Carter.
In 1981, Ishiguro published three short stories
in Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. The
following year he published his first novel, A Pale
View of Hills (1982), which won the Winifred
Holtby Memorial Prize. Together with his next
work, An Artist of the Floating World (1986),
winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year award
and a shortlisted candidate for the Booker Prize,
these two early novels featured Japanese protagonists who exemplify the formal aspects of firstperson narration from a position of cosmopolitan
displacement and curiously detached affect:
Etsuko, a Japanese widow living in England after
the suicide of her elder daughter, Keiko, in A Pale
View of Hills; and Masuji Ono, the artist of An Artist
of the Floating World, living in Japan after World
War II with conflicting memories of the hedonistic, floating world of prewar bohemian life, and
of the propagandist role he played for imperial
Japan during the war. The presence of an intriguingly unreliable first-person narrator is a narrative
device that that Ishiguro would return to, albeit in
altered form, in each of his subsequent novels.
In 1983 Ishiguro was featured in Grantas Best
of Young British Novelists issue; he would be
featured again in Granta 10 years later, after the
publication of his third novel, The Remains of the
Day (1989). This novel which won the Booker
Prize for Fiction and was subsequently made into
a film by Merchant Ivory from a screenplay by
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is set in post-World War
II England; its narrator, an elderly English butler
named Stevens, is engaged, like Etsuko and Masuji Ono, in recalling his wartime past spent, in
his case, in domestic service in England, working
for an employer whose well-intentioned internationalism during the interwar period slowly but
surely veered into sympathy for fascist Germany.
The novel and film solidified Ishiguros growing
reputation in the English-speaking world.
Ishiguros most openly experimental novel to
date, The Unconsoled (1995), followed. Winner of
the Cheltenham Prize, this work depicts a concert
pianist who arrives in an unnamed central European city ostensibly to give a lecture and a concert
ISHIGURO, KAZUO
that will somehow save the city from an unspecified cultural crisis. Once there, he continually
attempts to rehearse for the big event, yet
is constantly drawn away from his agenda by
errands and other demands on his time. As with
the unreliability found in the earlier novels, here
too the protagonist may, or may not, be accounting for his past life decisions and motivations
accurately; and, as in the earlier novels, the trials
and tribulations of many minor characters reflect
and are an extension of the protagonists own. The
Chekhovian subtleties of the earlier novels are
here jettisoned for absurdities more likely to be
encountered in works by Kafka or Dostoevsky.
Ishiguros fifth novel, When We Were Orphans
(2000), was shortlisted for both the Whitbread
Novel Award and the Booker Prize for Fiction. In
this novel Ishiguro revisits, as well as revises, the
Victorian examples of both Charles Dickenss
Great Expectations and the detective fiction of
Arthur Conan Doyle, in that his orphaned detective protagonist, Christopher Banks, works to
determine in the blinkered fashion of all of
Ishiguros protagonists the whereabouts of his
parents, both allegedly kidnapped in Shanghai
years earlier. Bankss investigative efforts coincide
with the early years of the Sino-Japanese War, a
circumstance that strangely remains in the background of his perceptions as he discovers the
unexpected ways in which he is connected, via
money and early family history, to Shanghai. The
novel shares a setting, and some circumstances of
plot and character, with Ishiguros later original
screenplay for the film The White Countess (2005).
Ishiguros most recent novel, Never Let Me Go
(2005), depicts an alternative 1990s Britain in
which human clones have been created for the
purpose of harvesting organs for privileged humans. Here the dystopian aspects of the narrative
of Kathy H., a clone carer who looks after other
clones engaged in the donation process until they
can complete, are merged with the more prosaic
attributes of a boarding school novel. Kathys role
as carer in the novel is arguably a reflection of a
neglected aspect of Ishiguros biography: his early
job as a social worker. For all of its differences
from the earlier fiction, Never Let Me Go shares
many attributes with the previous novels: a protagonist focused on a particular form of knowledge work, unreliability in narration, and a
detached, displaced perspective that, in this in-
193
stance, arises from the organ donors disenfranchised situation in the novel. At the same time, in
its invocations of George Eliots Daniel Deronda
and depiction of a specifically female, careeroriented protagonist after an array of chronically busy career men Never Let Me Go presents a
remarkably nuanced depiction of the consolations, however fleeting, of the peculiar role that
Kathy H. has chosen for herself.
In 2009, Ishiguro published a short story collection, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, bringing his career back full circle to the short
story form with which it began. Ishiguro lives in
London with his wife and daughter and divides
his time between writing fiction and original
screenplays.
SEE ALSO: The Film Industry and Fiction (BIF);
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer (BIF); World War II in
Fiction (BIF)

Fluet, L. (2007a). Immaterial Labors: Ishiguro, Class,
and Affect. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 40(3),
26588.
Fluet, L.(ed.) (2007b). Ishiguros Unknown
Communities [special issue]. Novel: A Forum on
Fiction, 40(3).
Ishiguro, K. (1981a). Getting Poisoned. In Introductions
7: Stories by New Writers. London: Faber and Faber,
pp. 3851.
Ishiguro, K. (1981b). A Strange and Sometimes
Sadness. Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers.
London: Faber and Faber, pp. 1327.
Ishiguro, K. (1981c). Waiting for J. Introductions 7:
Stories by New Writers. London: Faber and Faber, pp.
2837.
Ishiguro, K. (1982). A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber
and Faber.
Ishiguro, K. (1983). Summer After the War. Granta, 7,
12037.
Ishiguro, K. (1986). An Artist of the Floating World.
Ishiguro, K. (1988). A Family Supper. In M. Bradbury
(ed.), The Penguin Book of Modern British Short
Stories. London: Penguin.
Ishiguro, K. (1989). The Remains of the Day. London:
Faber and Faber.
Ishiguro, K. (1993). The Gourmet. Granta, 43,
89127.
Ishiguro, K. (1995). The Unconsoled. London: Faber and
Faber.
194
ISHIGURO, KAZUO
Ishiguro, K. (2000). When We Were Orphans. London:

Faber and Faber.
Ishiguro, K. (2005). Never Let Me Go. London: Faber
and Faber.
Ishiguro, K. (2009). Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and
Nightfall. London: Faber and Faber.
Ivory, J. (dir.) (1993). The Remains of the Day
(screenplay by R. P. Jhabvala). Columbia.
Ivory, J. (dir.) (2005). The White Countess (screenplay
by K. Ishiguro). Merchant Ivory.
Lang, J. M. (2000). Public Memory, Private History:
Kazuo Ishiguros The Remains of the Day. Clio, 29(2),
14365.
Lewis, B. (2000). Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester:
Luo, S.-P. (2003). Living the Wrong Life: Kazuo
Ishiguros Unconsoled Orphans. Dalhousie Review,
83(1), 5180.
Maddin, G. (dir.) (2003). The Saddest Music in the
World (screenplay by K. Ishiguro & G. Maddin).
Buffalo Gal.
Matthews, S., & Groes, S. (eds.) (2009). Kazuo Ishiguro:
Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London:
Continuum.
McCombe, J. P. (2002). The End of (Anthony) Eden:
Ishiguros The Remains of the Day and Mid-Century
Anglo-American Tensions. Twentieth Century
OBrien, S. (1996). Serving a New World Order:
Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguros The
Remains of the Day. Modern Fiction Studies, 42(4),
787806.
Petry, M. (1999). Narratives of Memory and Identity:
The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Puchner, M. (2008). When We Were Clones. Raritan,

27(4), 3449.
Reitano, N. (2007). The Good Wound: Memory and
Community in the Unconsoled. Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, 49(4), 36186.
Robbins, B. (2001b). Very Busy Just Now: Globalization
and Harriedness in Ishiguros The Unconsoled.
Comparative Literature, 53(4), 42641.
Robinson, R. (2006). Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo
Ishiguros The Unconsoled and Central Europe.
Critical Quarterly, 48(4), 10730.
Shaffer, B. W. (1998). Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro.
Shaffer, B. W., & Wong, C. (eds.) (2008). Conversations
with Kazuo Ishiguro. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Su, J. J. (2002). Refiguring National Character: The
Remains of the British Estate Novel. Modern Fiction
Studies, 48(3), 55280.
Tamaya, M. (1992). Ishiguros Remains of the Day: The
Empire Strikes Back. Modern Language Studies, 22,
4556.
Trimm, R. S. (2005). Inside Job: Professionalism and
Postimperial Communities in The Remains of the
Day. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 16(2),
13561.
Walkowitz, R. L. (2001). Ishiguros Floating Worlds.
ELH, 86, 104976.
Wong, C. F. (2005a.). Kazuo Ishiguro, 2nd edn.
Tavistock: Northcote House.
Wong, C. F. (2005b). Kazuo Ishiguros The Remains of
the Day. In B. W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the
British and Irish Novel, 19452000. Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 493503.
J
James, P. D.
MARTIN PRIESTMAN
P. D. James holds an important place in the

postwar repositioning of British crime fiction as
serious literature, engaging convincingly with the
contemporary world and filling out the classic
whodunit formula with detailed psychological
explorations of suspects and investigators alike.
Born Phyllis Dorothy James in 1920, married in
1941 to Connor Bantry White and ennobled under
Margaret Thatchers government as Baroness
James of Holland Park in 1990, she published her
first novel, Cover Her Face, in 1962. This established the series detective with whom her name
is most associated: Detective Chief Inspector
(subsequently Superintendent and Commander)
Adam Dalgleish, who to date (2008) has featured in
14 of her 18 novels.
The choice of a career policeman as her detective hero was not unprecedented, but helped to
move the genres center of gravity away from the
gentrified prewar world of acknowledged precursors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers,
and Margery Allingham, whose well-bred sleuths
are either amateurs or in somewhat tangential
relations with the official police. Dalgleish retains
some of his predecessors special status in being
the man from Londons New Scotland Yard called
in on investigations around the country, as well as
a respected poet; this contrasts with the more
locally based heroes of Ruth Rendell, Colin
Dexter, Reginald Hill, and Ian Rankin, who take
her step toward egalitarianism further. Also unlike most of these heroes, Dalgleish at first lacked a
regular foil for his idiosyncrasies, until A Taste for

Death (1986) allowed the working-class Inspector
Kate Miskin to introduce a sometimes angry
counter-perspective in ways later echoed by
Elizabeth George.
The milieu typically explored by Dalgleish
moves from Cover Her Faces classic stately home
to an isolated workplace, where suspects and
victim are often professionally linked. Thus her
second novel, A Mind to Murder (1963), is set
partly in a psychiatric clinic, Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) in a nurses training school, The
Black Tower (1975) in a home for the disabled,
Death of an Expert Witness (1977) in a forensic
laboratory, Devices and Desires (1989) in a nuclear power station, Original Sin (1994) in a publishing house, A Certain Justice (1997) in legal
chambers, Death in Holy Orders (2001) in a
theological college, and The Murder Room
(2003) in a museum. The medical connections
of the earlier settings reflect Jamess own work for
the National Health Service from 1949 to 1968,
after which she became a Home Office civil
servant and took on several other public service
commitments. These parallel careers may account for her relatively light output of three or
four novels per decade, but have also kept them
grounded in a convincingly portrayed world
where apparently high-minded professionalism
regularly confronts more sordid realities. Another recurrent element is the coastal setting of
Unnatural Causes (1967), The Black Tower, The
Skull beneath the Skin (1982), Devices and Desires,
Death in Holy Orders, and The Lighthouse (2006).
Like the church crime scene in A Taste for Death,

196
JENKINS, ROBIN
such settings facilitate the firmly Christian meditations on death and human fallibility also implied in several titles derived from the Bible or
high literature.
Jamess departures from the Dalgleish series
are few but important. Most studies of the 1980s
female private-eye subgenre dominated by
American writers such as Sara Paretsky and
Sue Grafton give honorable mention to An
Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) featuring
Cordelia Gray, whose struggles against male
power and gender prejudice established many
of the subgenres ground rules. However, in its
sequel The Skull beneath the Skin Cordelia becomes a more conventional kind of detective and
disappears thereafter, perhaps to draw a firm line
under her potential cooption to militant feminist causes which James rejected. Something of
Cordelias lonely grit reappears in the heroine of
Innocent Blood (1980), whose odyssey into her
past made this one-off psychological thriller a
massive success in the USA. Finally, The Children
of Men (1992) marks Jamess single venture into
dystopian science fiction, though set near enough in the then future (2021) for its horrified
vision of a complete collapse of human fertility
to blend believably with its traditional Oxford
setting.
Apart from her fiction, James co-authored
(with T. A. Critchley) The Maul and the Pear Tree
(1971), a study of the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway
murders, and published her narratively intricate
Fragment of Autobiography, Time to be in
Earnest, in 1999. The most successful film of her
work is Children of Men (2006), directed by
Alfonso Cuar
on and starring Clive Owen; An
Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982), directed by
Chris Petit and starring Pippa Guard, has a cult
following. On television, Death of an Expert Witness (Anglia ITV 1983) inaugurated a series of
adaptations starring Roy Marsden as Dalgleish,
replaced by Martin Shaw in Death in Holy Orders
(2003) and The Murder Room (2004). An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Ecosse Films 1997) inaugurated a 19972001 series starring Helen Baxendale as Cordelia Gray, though James withdrew her
support when Cordelia became pregnant outside
marriage (James 1999, 199).
(BIF)

Gidez, R. B. (1986). P. D. James. New York: Twayne.
James, P. D. (1962). Cover Her Face. London: Faber and
Faber.
James, P. D. (1971). Shroud for a Nightingale. London:
Faber and Faber.
James, P. D. (1972). An Unsuitable Job for a Woman.
James, P. D. (1977). Death of an Expert Witness.
James, P. D. (1980). Innocent Blood. London: Faber and
Faber.
James, P. D. (1986). A Taste for Death. London: Faber
and Faber.
James, P. D. (1989). Devices and Desires. London: Faber
and Faber.
James, P. D. (1992). The Children of Men. London:
Faber and Faber.
James, P. D. (1994). Original Sin. London: Faber and
Faber.
James, P. D. (1997). A Certain Justice. London: Faber
and Faber.
James, P. D. (1999). Time to be in Earnest: A Fragment of
Autobiography. London: Faber and Faber.
James, P. D. (2001). Death in Holy Orders. London:
Faber and Faber.
Klein, K. G. (1988). The Woman Detective: Gender and
Genre. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Priestman, M. (2002). P. D. James and the
Distinguished Thing. In Z. Leader (ed.), On Modern
British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 23457.
Rowland, S. (2001). From Agatha Christie to Ruth
Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and
Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Siebenheller, N. (1981). P. D. James. New York: Ungar.
Jenkins, Robin
GERARD CARRUTHERS
Robin Jenkins, Scotlands most celebrated novelist

of the 1950s and 1960s, had a career that spanned
four decades. Predominant themes across his work
include the difficulty of moral discernment, the
deceptive priorities of the human world, and the
challenges posed by large-scale cultural forces to
individuals.
Born on September 11, 1912 in Cambuslang,
Lanarkshire, and educated at the University of
Glasgow, Jenkins began his career in 1936 as a
primary school teacher. During World War II he
registered as a conscientious objector and left
JENKINS, ROBIN
Scotland in 1957 for most of the next decade.

During this time he held teaching posts in Afghanistan, Spain, and Borneo, locations that provide
the backdrop for a number of politically charged,
arguably underappreciated novels. Some Kind of
Grace (1960) seems to be a gripping thriller until
this form gradually and cleverly turns into something else. It follows the quest for the central
characters friends, who have been murdered,
seemingly, by supposedly wild tribesmen. Suspense is built as their possible fate is considered
but then the novel changes direction to become a
critique of the way in which Afghanistan historically has been a colonial football among competing major powers. The revelation of the suffering
of the Afghans is eventually brought into focus as
being more important than a few missing Westerners. An equally powerful novel, Dust on the
Paw (1961), features a protagonist who combines
huge affection for the Afghan people and land
alongside a deep-seated Western racism that is
only painfully and partially overcome through an
exquisitely intense love story. Among a dozen of
Jenkinss foreign novels, The Sardana Dancers
(1964) is a noteworthy performance in its fierce
comparison of injustice toward the Catalans by
the central Spanish government with the situation
of Scotland within the United Kingdom.
Jenkinss Scottish fiction has garnered the
most critical attention. His first published novel,
So Gaily Sings the Lark (1950), is one of a number
of works where the plot sees an urban setting
exchanged for the idyllic Scottish wilderness, as a
miner and his sweetheart find contentment living
and working in a Highland forest. A couple of
succeeding books are similarly and ferociously
contemptuous of the literally unhealthy and
equally cramped cultural condition of the central
Lowlands of Scotland. The Thistle and the Grail
(1954) is particularly iconoclastic as it pours acid
over the national, male obsession with soccer. The
Cone-Gatherers (1955) is Jenkinss most celebrated novel. Here he moves toward a much more
mythical kind of writing, albeit replete with irony,
where the Scottish countryside, because of its
human presence, is as darkly nefarious as anywhere in the city. Fairly obviously reprising
Steinbecks Of Mice and Men, the text also
replays a number of other narratives, in a kind
of virtuoso juggling act, including the supernatural legend of the green man, the Arthurian quest
197
for the Holy Grail, and the sacrifice of Christ to

frame the story of the pathological slaying of
Calum, a vulnerable man with the intellect of a
child who is gathering cones in the woods of
Argyllshire during World War II as part of the
home-front effort. The Calvinist-minded, though
atheistic, gamekeeper murderer wishes to purge
his woods of the imperfection of the handicapped
man. Even as this represents a horrifically clear
vision of purpose, the surfeit of reference to other
stories suggests that human narratives are glibly
plentiful while never actually confronting the
crooked, primal instincts that drive the worst
excesses of human action. The Changeling
(1958) is the harrowing story of a Glaswegian
slum kid, Tom, taken on holiday to a Clyde island
retreat by a well-intentioned teacher with his
family. In the standard folk tale, a child is snatched
by the fairies and replaced with a troublesome
one. Toms teacher hopes briefly to remove his
obstreperous pupil and return him reformed. The
boy, however, does not alter in this new atmosphere but remains truculent and vulnerable,
playing to type amid the growing, bourgeois
distaste of the family, with the most tragic
consequence.
Fergus Lamont (1979) is Jenkinss most extensive
condition of Scotland novel, a superbly managed
first-person Bildungsroman that concerns the difficulty of individualism, the long national decay of
Scotland, and recent post-industrial decline. The
Awakening of George Darroch (1985) is Jenkinss
only historical novel, though one of the most
powerful produced in later twentieth-century
Scotland. Centered on the Disruption of the
Church of Scotland in 1843, it is the intense
portrait of a man struggling with mortifying religious principle and his own opportunityadvancing charm and talents. Just Duffy (1988) is
a modern-day, Glasgow-based version of Hoggs
Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Lunderston Tales
(1996) features 13 loosely connected tales that
reveal Jenkinss strength as a short story writer
and that revisit his persistent terrain of a claustrophobic social setting combined with large moral
issues for the characters who inhabit it. Jenkins
died in 2005.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Politics

and the Novel (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF)
198
JEWISH FICTION

Carruthers, G. (2004). Creation Festers in Me:
Calvinism and Cosmopolitanism in Jenkins, Spark
and Gray. In G. Carruthers, D. Goldie, & A. Renfrew
(eds.), Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for TwentiethCentury Scottish Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Gifford, D. (2002). Scottish Fiction Since 1945 I. In D.
Gifford, S. Dunnigan, & A. MacGillivray (eds.),
Scottish Literature in English and Scots. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Hart, F. R. (1978). Novelists of Survival. In The Scottish
Novel: From Smollett to Spark. Cambridge, MA:
Jenkins, R. (1950). So Gaily Sings the Lark. Glasgow:
William MacLellan.
Jenkins, R. (1954). The Thistle and the Grail. London:
Macdonald.
Jenkins, R. (1955). The Cone-Gatherers. London:
Macdonald.
Jenkins, R. (1958). The Changeling. London: Macdonald.
Jenkins, R. (1960). Some Kind of Grace. London:
Macdonald.
Jenkins, R. (1961). Dust on the Paw. London: Macdonald.
Jenkins, R. (1964). The Sardana Dancers. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Jenkins, R. (1979). Fergus Lamont. Edinburgh:
Waterfront.
Jenkins, R. (1985). The Awakening of George Darroch.
Edinburgh: Waterfront.
Jenkins, R. (1988). Just Duffy. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Jenkins, R. (1996). Lunderston Tales. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Morgan, E. (1974). The Novels of Robin Jenkins. In
Essays. Cheadle: Carcanet.
Murray, I., & Tait, B. (1984). Robin Jenkins: Fergus
Lamont. In Ten Modern Scottish Novels. Aberdeen:
Aberdeen University Press.
Norquay, G. (1993). Disruptions: The Later Fiction of
Robin Jenkins. In G. Wallace & R. Stevenson (eds.),
The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. Edinburgh:
Sellin, B. (1992). Histoire personelle et histoire

collective dans les romans de Robin Jenkins. Etudes

Ecossaises,
1, 31522.
Smith, I. C. (1995). Robin Jenkinss The ConeGatherers. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish
Literary Studies.
Jewish Fiction
AXEL STAHLER
The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen

what has been described as a dazzling show of
productivity in British Jewish fiction. Moreover,
recent British Jewish writing appears to have

developed a quality of its own which, to some
extent, distinguishes it from its antecedents. The
apologetic strain that has characterized much of
the secular writing of British Jews since the early
nineteenth century has given way largely to a new
confidence which, in terms of postcolonial theory,
has been called a form of writing back. Contemporary British Jewish writers are being credited
with an attitude (Cheyette 1998) and their
fiction is perceived to celebrate the anarchic
potential of the Jewish voice (Weber 2007).
There remains, however, a lingering doubt as to
the reach and the resilience of this new-found
freedom; a sense of exclusion from the mainstream of British cultural life seems to prevail,
even if perhaps only subliminally.
The resurgence of British Jewish literature appears to be very much a product of the debates on
multiculturalism and the concomitant focus on
religious and ethnic identities that have entered
the British social and cultural agenda in various
phases since the 1950s and that, especially for the
last three decades, have shaped much of British
literature. More recent policies of community
cohesion which reaffirm notions of integration
and, as some fear, of assimilation, monoculturalism, and nativism have reintroduced an element
of uncertainty and antagonism that, once again,
impresses on ethnic writers the ambiguity inherent in negotiating in their fiction conceptions
of Englishness, or even Britishness, in relation to
their own ethnic identities.
In addition, recent perceptions of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict have impinged on attitudes
toward Jews in Britain and have, to some extent,
conditioned the literary response of Jewish writers
who may feel their moral integrity to be challenged
by finding themselves implicated in the controversial politics of Israel. Since the creation of the
state of Israel in 1948, and previously in the period
of the British Mandate for Palestine (191848), the
notion and then the actuality of the Jewish state
have had a significant impact on Jewish life in
Britain. For British Jews the increasingly violent
anti-colonial struggle of the Zionists in Palestine
was as acute an embarrassment as the contentious
politics of the state of Israel have been. It tested
their loyalty severely at least in the minds of their
fellow British, a minority of whom responded with
outbursts of anti-Semitism in 1947.
JEWISH FICTION
In addition to external pressure, the foundation

of Israel has also produced unease internally.
With the establishment of the Jewish state, theoretically at least, galut was no more. Jewish exile
was no longer a necessity, as indicated by the
Hebrew word, but of choice. The Law of Return
offers any Jew Israeli citizenship and indeed, for a
while after the foundation of the Jewish state,
shlilat ha-galut, the negation of the diaspora
advocated by the new Israeli Jews, and their
claims to the exclusive authenticity of their
Jewish identity, were issues that severely
strained the relationship between Israel and the
diaspora that had contributed to its creation. Of
course, contrary to the negationists claims, as
well as more recent allegations that the diaspora
was indeed vanishing, the Jewish diaspora seems
to be hale and healthy, to which the vibrancy of
Jewish cultural production in Britain and elsewhere testifies.
While the existence of Israel certainly proved to
be an important factor for Jewish lives in Britain, a
serious literary engagement with the Jewish state
surfaced surprisingly late in British Jewish fiction.
The earlier literary engagement in Brian
Glanvilles The Bankrupts (1958) and Gerda
Charless The Crossing Point (1960) or Frederic
Raphaels The Limits of Love (1960) and Chaim
Bermants Jericho Sleep Alone (1964) had little
impact. In 1963 Alexander Baron voiced not only
his own sentiments when he maintained that he
was deeply interested in Israel but that it had not
entered his imaginative world. It is only in more
recent British Jewish writing, especially in response to the First Lebanon War (1982) and the
subsequent deterioration of the situation in the
Middle East, that a proper and often highly critical
engagement with Israel, or Palestine, emerges
which in turn is frequently referred back to reflections on Jewish existence in England. Clive
Sinclair, for instance, addresses the issue of British
anti-Semitism in a head-on fashion in Blood Libels
(1985), while at the same time lashing out at
Israeli transgressions. Less audaciously, but no
less poignantly, Jonathan Wilson in The Hiding
Room (1995) and Bernice Rubens in I, Dreyfus
(1999) also engage with British anti-Semitism and
Israel. Linda Grant, finally, in When I Lived in
Modern Times (2000), while highly ambivalent
toward Zionist self-fashioning and Israeli political
expediency, construes a Jewish claim to postco-
199
loniality by overtly suggesting that British Jews

have been subject to an internal colonization.
Grants more recent The People on the Street: A
Writers View of Israel (2006), strongly reminiscent of Sinclairs earlier Diaspora Blues: A View of
Israel (1987), is a determined attempt to grapple
with the contradictions of Jewish existence in
Israel and the diaspora, and particularly those of
the British Jew, a category error, as the author
describes herself. Her insistence on the in-betweenness of the British Jew, suffering the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of Jewishness
and Britishness, encapsulates an ambiguity
shaped by the particular national context in Britain that has informed Jewish writing in this
country from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century.
In British Jewish writing the assertion of Jewishness had been impeded considerably by the
oppressive and overpowering idea of England in
an era of imperial expansion. The apparent superiority of English patterns of identification and
the pressure to assimilate left British Jews almost
no viable alternative but to commit mimicry, a
process that culminated in the conversion to
Christianity, for instance, of writers Cecily Sidgwick, G. B. Stern, Naomi Jacob, and Muriel Spark.
The failure of British Jewish literature to assimilate a monolithic and exclusive Englishness,
or to be assimilated to it, originates in the homogeneity and intransigence of the constructions of
the past that inform English national culture.
To understand the development of twentiethcentury Jewish fiction in Britain it is therefore
necessary to trace its antecedents. The very origins
of British Jewish writing in the nineteenth century
can be related to the struggle for emancipation.
Early British Jewish writers, many of whom were
women, explored Jewish themes but, frequently
reworking prevalent English cultural images of
Jewishness, construed in their apologetic fiction a
largely private religious identity that was often
presented alongside a public persona that seemed
fully assimilable into English mainstream culture.
With the influx of about 150,000 alien-seeming
Jewish immigrants between 1881 and 1914, following several waves of persecution in eastern
Europe, the pressure to present Jewish difference
in terms of its assimilability increased. But there
also arose critical and self-critical voices. Amy
Levy and Julia Frankau (writing as Frank Denby)
200
JEWISH FICTION
prefigured in their work the later emphasis on inbetweenness in that they questioned the assumptions of an English national culture as well as the
complacent self-image of British Jewry.
At the same time the evolving ghetto of the
impoverished Jewish East End in London found
literary attention, first sympathetically and apologetically, for instance in the fiction of Benjamin
Farjeon and Israel Zangwill, but then, in the
interwar years, increasingly critically. Writers like
Simon Blumenfeld (Jew Boy, 1935) and Willy
Goldman (East End My Cradle, 1940) reacted with
their autobiographical works against the bourgeois trends in the previous generation, but concentrated on class difference rather than ethnicity.
With Magnolia Street (1932) Louis Golding, writing about the fictitious community of Doomington, a rendering of Manchester, addressed British
anti-Semitism with an assimilationist bias.
World War II and the Holocaust were disruptive
events that, initially even more than the foundation of the state of Israel, gave British Jewish fiction
a new impulse. Indeed, the late 1950s have been
credited with bringing forth a new wave of Jewish
writing in Britain. This was a time of abrupt and
far-reaching cultural change that affected the
whole country and that saw the emergence and
gradual ascendance of a plurality of ethnic voices.
Specific to the success of British Jewish writers in
that period was the context of their literary production, which was determined by the new discovery not only of their ethnicity but also of their
working-class roots and their social commitment.
They did not, however, develop identifiable group
characteristics and were dependent on recognition
beyond the relatively small Jewish community
toward which they were highly ambivalent, frequently challenging its perceived complacency
and hypocrisy (e.g., Brian Glanville, Frederic
Raphael, and Bernard Kops) but also engaging with
Jewish concerns in a more committed way (e.g.,
Chaim Bermant, Gerda Charles, Lionel Davidson,
William Goldman, and Chaim Raphael).
The literary response to the wide-ranging destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust was
rather late, often indirect, and mostly by emigre
writers with a personal connection like George
Steiner, Thomas Wiseman, or Gabriel Josipovici
and Eva Figes, although Louis Golding in particular addressed the question of Jewish suffering in
the Holocaust early on in his non-fiction and
fiction (The Glory of Elsie Silver, 1946). The

immediate concerns the Holocaust provoked
were rather about a Yiddish culture that seemed
to have been irretrievably lost. While in America
Yiddishkayt exhibited a certain tenacity, in Britain
Yiddish never achieved literary prominence, even
though the Jewish Quarterly (established in 1953)
had promoted notions of an important role for
Yiddish in a postwar Jewish culture that was not
necessarily to be centered on Israel. And although
the East End poet Avram Stencl staunchly wrote
in Yiddish there is not, as it has been observed in
the Jewish American context, a multilingual dimension to British Jewish writing. English continued to be the language even of a number of
Jewish writers who emigrated to Israel, among
them Dennis Silk and Mordechai Beck.
While they remained linguistically committed to
England, for many British Jewish writers, turning to
non-English territories in their fiction, especially to
the diaspora and, less frequently, to Israel, became a
way of sidestepping the hegemony of English, or
even British, constructions of the past that excluded
Jewishness. This phenomenon, designated by Bryan
Cheyette as extraterritoriality (1996b), has been
described as the defining characteristic of much of
British Jewish writing in the latter half of the twentieth century, investing it with a critical potential that
challenges rigid conceptions of history and established constructions of the past as well as essentialist
conceptions of identity, of which the work of Ruth
FainlightandElaineFeinstein orSimonLouvishand
Clive Sinclair provides examples.
The oppressiveness of a fixed Englishness
which, in contrast to America, for a very long time
did not permit or admit the shaping influence of
ethnic minorities in Britain, has also been used to
explain the success of Jewish emigre writers like
Figes, Josipovici, and Steiner or Arthur Koestler,
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Dan Jacobson; precisely because they were not bound and bounded by
the historical fixity of the dominant culture and
its unremitting pressure of assimilation. But in
contemporary British Jewish writing the extraterritoriality that still informs the more recent
voices, for instance, of Elena Lappin, Jonathan
Treitel, and Jonathan Wilson has been superseded
by a succinct feeling of place connected to
specific locations in Britain whose particularities
are confidently explored in correlation with questions of belonging and alienation. Contemporary
JEWISH FICTION
British Jewish writers like Naomi Alderman, David

Baddiel, Lana Citron, Jeremy Gavron, Zoe Heller,
Howard Jacobson, Anna Maxted, Charlotte Mendleson, William Sutcliffe, Adam Thirlwell, Lisa
Appignanesi, Rachel Castell Farhi, Jenny Diski,
and Tamar Yellin, many of whom are of a younger
generation, explore critically the creative tension
that is offered by different forms of identification
in twenty-first-century Britain.
There is not a very large body of Irish Jewish
literature. This corresponds to the relatively small
number of Jews in Ireland, not because, as Garrett
Deasy maintains in Joyces Ulysses, Ireland had
never let them in, but rather because the
countrys economic situation was precarious and
did not attract immigration. It was only at the
beginning of the twentieth century that a larger
group of Jewish emigrants from Lithuania settled
in the country. In 1954 David Marcus emerged as
a writer with his first novel To Next Year in
Jerusalem in which he draws the explicit analogy
between the anti-colonial struggle in Ireland and
in Mandate Palestine. More recently, the Israeli
Irish writer Ronit Lentin has established herself as
a critical voice in the post-Zionist debate.
In 1960, Brian Glanville had claimed that there
were Anglo-Jewish writers but no such thing as
Anglo-Jewish writing. Indeed, to subsume a
vastly incongruent group of writers under the
heading of British Jewish entails the risk not
only of misrepresenting their work but also of
reducing them to a monolithic ethnicity. The
limitations of such an approach are evident. Anita
Brookner, for instance, has achieved mainstream
fame by refusing to submit to the constraints of
negotiations of ethnicity and, with only a very few
exceptions, has written out of her work almost any
reference to her own Jewishness. Still, there are
common concerns and common traditions that
suggest there is indeed something like British
Jewish fiction. This, however, appears to be very
much a work in progress.
SEE ALSO: Working-Class Fiction (BIF);

Baron, A. (1963). On Being English and Jewish. Jewish
Quarterly, 10, 610.
201
Bermant, C. (1964). Jericho Sleep Alone. London:

Chapman and Hall.
Blumenfeld, S. (1935). Jew Boy. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Brauner, D. (2001). Post-War Jewish Fiction:
Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic
Connections. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cesarani, D. (ed.) (1990). The Making of Modern
Anglo-Jewry. Oxford: Blackwell.
Charles, G. (1960). The Crossing Point. London: Eyre
and Spottiswoode.
Cheyette, B. (1993). Constructions of the Jew in English
Literature and Society: Racial Representations,
Cheyette, B. (ed.) (1996a). Between Race and Culture:
Representations of the Jew in English and American
Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Cheyette, B. (1996b). Englishness and
Extraterritoriality: British-Jewish Writing and
Diaspora Culture. Literary Strategies: Studies in
Contemporary Jewry, 12, 2139.
Cheyette, B. (ed.) (1998). Contemporary Jewish Writing
in Britain and Ireland: An Anthology. London:
Halban.
Cheyette, B. (in press). Diasporas of the Mind: BritishJewish Writing and the Nightmare of History. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Gilbert, R. (2008). Contemporary British-Jewish
Writing: From Apology to Attitude. Literature
Compass, 5(2), 394406.
Glanville, B. (1958). The Bankrupts. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Glanville, B. (1960). The Anglo-Jewish Writer.
Encounter, 24(2), 624.
Golding, L. (1932). Magnolia Street. London: Gollancz.
Golding, L. (1946). The Glory of Elsie Silver. London:
Hutchinson.
Goldman, W. (1940). East End My Cradle. London:
Faber and Faber.
Grant, L. (2000). When I Lived in Modern Times.
London: Granta.
Grant, L. (2006). The People on the Street: A Writers
View of Israel. London: Virago.
Marcus, D. (1954). To Next Year in Jerusalem. London:
Macmillan.
Raphael, F. (1960). The Limits of Love. London: Cassell.
Rubens, B. (1999). I, Dreyfus. London: Little Brown.
Sicher, E. (1985). Beyond Marginality: Anglo-Jewish
Literature After the Holocaust. Albany: SUNY Press.
Sinclair, C. (1985). Blood Libels. London: Allison and
Busby.
Sinclair, C. (1987). Diaspora Blues: A View of Israel.
London: Heinemann.
Stahler, A. (ed.) (2007). Anglophone Jewish Literature.
London: Routledge.
202
JHABVALA, RUTH PRAWER
Tylee, C. (2007). A Work in Progress: The

Contemporary Jewish-British Family Saga. Literature
and History, 16(1), 7795.
Valman, N. (2007). The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century
British Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Weber, D. (2007). Anglo-Jewish Literature Raises Its
Voice. At www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/
IP_Weber_English_htm, accessed Sept. 15, 2008.
Wilson, J. (1995). The Hiding Room. New York: Viking.
Zatlin, L. G. (1981). The Nineteenth-Century AngloJewish Novel. Boston: Twayne.
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer

RALPH CRANE
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne,

Germany on May 7, 1927, and grew up in England
after her Jewish family escaped Nazi Germany in
1939. Shortly after graduating from Queen Mary
College, London in 1951 with an MA in English,
she met and married Cyrus Jhabvala, and moved
to India.
She immediately immersed herself in her
adopted country and began to write about both
India and herself in India. Jhabvalas first four
novels To Whom She Will (1955), The Nature of
Passion (1956), Esmond in India (1958), and The
Householder (1960) are all domestic comedies
revolving around the lives of urbanized middleclass Delhi families. While the first two novels are
gentle comedies of manners in an Austenish
mode, her third novel, Esmond in India, takes a
darker direction with the first of the detailed
studies of displaced Europeans in India that
characterize her later Indian fictions. Following
the publication of The Householder, a deft comedy
of married life, she was approached by the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory to write
the screenplay for their adaptation of the novel,
thus beginning an enduring collaboration that has
produced over two dozen films and earned Jhabvala two Academy Awards.
Jhabvalas changed attitude toward India following her first trip back to Britain in 1960 is
reflected in her next novel, Get Ready for Battle
(1962), which moves away from domestic comedy to a much darker portrayal of Indias elephantine social problems. In her next three novels and
her first two collections of stories she also moves
away from the interest in India that had hitherto

marked her fiction to an interest in Europeans in
India. In A Backward Place (1965), for example,
she considers the effects India has on the three
main female European characters in the novel. In
A Stronger Climate (1968) all nine stories are
concerned with Europeans in India, which is also
the focus of many of her later stories, as well as her
next two novels, A New Dominion (1972) and the
Booker Prize-winning Heat and Dust (1975),
which also reveal her intertextual interest in E.
M. Forsters A Passage to India (1924).
During 25 years in India Jhabvala produced
eight novels and four collections of short stories as
well as a number of screenplays, all with Indian
settings, that have earned her a reputation as a
major writer of India. Her geographical shift to
America in 1975 was mirrored by a shift in the
geography of her fiction. Her next four novels all
set predominantly in America explore in detail
the sense of dislocation that Jhabvala, like so many
of her European characters, has experienced. In
Search of Love and Beauty (1983), which looks at a
group of German and Austrian refugees in
New York, is a cathartic book in which the
novelist explores her European Jewish heritage.
Three Continents (1987), her weakest and bleakest
novel, examines once more the effects of India on
the lives of Westerners, but without any fresh
insights, while Poet and Dancer (1993), which
continues the shift away from India as a location,
again fails to achieve the heights she reached in her
earlier fiction. In Shards of Memory (1995), however, Jhabvala returns to form. In this family saga
of the Kopf and Keller families and their involvement with the Master, the latest of Jhabvalas
many dubious guru figures, the focus is less on
whether or not the Master is a fraud, and more
on the importance of family ties explored in all her
American novels.
East into Upper East (1998), a collection of
stories written over two decades, focuses on the
dislocation and cross-cultural themes that have
characterized all her fiction to date. In the nine
chapters of the quasi-autobiographical My Nine
Lives (2004), Jhabvala deliberately blurs the
boundary between autobiography and fiction,
offering nine life stories, any of which she might
have lived, though none is actually the story of her
own life. Moving freely between Britain, America,
and India, and focusing on European refugees
JOHNSON, B. S.
who have escaped Nazi Germany as well as spiritual questers in India, this book is an engaging
retrospective of Jhabvalas career as a writer of
fiction.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); The Film
Industry and Fiction (BIF); Film/Television
Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Forster, E. M.
(BIF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Postcolonial
Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF)

Agarwal, R. G. (1990). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study of
Her Fiction. New Delhi: Sterling.
Crane, R. J. (ed.) (1991). Passages to Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala. New Delhi: Sterling.
Crane, R. J. (1992). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York:
Twayne
Gooneratne, Y. (1991). Silence, Exile and Cunning: The
Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 2nd edn. New Delhi:
Orient Longman.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1955). To Whom She Will. London:
Allen and Unwin. (Published in US as Amrita.)
Jhabvala, R. P. (1956). The Nature of Passion. London:
Allen and Unwin.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1958). Esmond in India. London: Allen
and Unwin.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1960). The Householder. London: John
Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1962). Get Ready for Battle. London:
John Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1963a). The Householder [screenplay]
(dir. J. Ivory). Merchant Ivory.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1963b). Like Birds, Like Fishes. London:
John Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1965). A Backward Place. London: John
Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1968). A Stronger Climate: Nine Stories.
London: John Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1971). An Experience of India. London:
John Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1972). A New Dominion. London: John
Murray. (Published in US as Travelers.)
Jhabvala, R. P. (1975). Heat and Dust. London: John
Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1976). How I Became a Holy Mother and
Other Stories. London: John Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1983). In Search of Love and Beauty.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1986). A Room with a View [screenplay]
(dir. J. Ivory). Merchant Ivory.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1987). Three Continents. London: John
Murray.
203
Jhabvala, R. P. (1992). Howards End [screenplay] (dir. J.

Ivory). Merchant Ivory.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1993). Poet and Dancer. London: John
Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1995). Shards of Memory. London: John
Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (1998). East into Upper East: Plain Tales
from New York and New Delhi. London: John
Murray.
Jhabvala, R. P. (2004). My Nine Lives: Chapters of a
Possible Past. London: John Murray.
Shahane, V. A. (1976). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann.
Sucher, Laurie (1989). The Fiction of Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Williams, H. M. (1973). The Fiction of Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala. Calcutta: Writers Workshop.
Johnson, B. S.
PHILIP TEW
Bryan Stanley Johnson was born in 1933 into a

working-class west London family just six years
before the outbreak of World War II. After graduating in English as a mature student at Kings
College London in 1959, he was to become a
controversial and versatile figure contributing
widely to the literary and cultural scene in Britain
in the 1960s and early 1970s variously as a novelist, poet, director of short films, television program maker, and journalist. Throughout his life
he remained acutely aware of the class privilege
that permeated British intellectual life and society
more generally, combatively insisting on the creative worth of his artistic projects and his proletarian sensibilities.
The war disrupted both his emotional development and his education; he was evacuated to
High Wycombe, a phase obsessively described in
Trawl, a Bildungsroman about Johnsons introspection and evisceration of his lifes betrayals
while on a trawler in the Barents Sea. Alienated
and estranged, he focuses intensely upon the
wartime separation from his mother and his
self-centered account of his various relationships
with women. Like almost all of his writing Johnson recounts actual experiences, combining technical innovation and close autobiographical
detail. In B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading
Philip Tew (2001) examines how this compulsion
204
JOHNSON, B. S.
is repeated broadly in Johnsons oeuvre. Even in

an early story from Statement against Corpses,
biographical experience dominates; Clean Living
is the Real Safeguard describes the Blitz, its effect
on ordinary Londoners, and, after the protagonist
returns home from evacuation, how he slashes his
wrists at school because of his rejection by a girl at
the behest of her middle-class parents, a poignant
act given Johnsons eventual suicide. Another
early story, Shela-Na-Gig, which is set in Lelyn,
Wales, where Johnson spent summers as a mature
student, describes driving to Dorset during which
time he encounters the sheela-na-gig, a distinctly
pagan representation of death and procreation.
After picking up a female hitchhiker he undergoes
an epiphany, sensing an elemental oneness. This
hints at the lifelong interest in the occult and
mysticism revealed in Jonathan Coes biography,
Like a Fiery Elephant (2004), which details
Johnsons rumbustious qualities, and his emotional vulnerability.
Johnson is now remembered as a significant
postwar British experimental novelist. Each of his
fictions attempts different strategies to approach
what he imagined to be a complex, yet literal,
verisimilitude. In his experimentation he drew
upon the innovations of Laurence Sterne and was
influenced by, variously, Rayner Heppenstall, the
stylistic intensity of the postwar French scene with
its existential philosophy, the nouveau roman,
and New Wave cinema. Travelling People (1963)
adopts multiple viewpoints and writing styles. A
set of graying to black pages offers homage to
Tristram Shandy. Albert Angelo (1964a), Johnsons
fictional account of supply teaching in north
London, is typographically and narratively innovative: proleptic holes cut whimsically through
two pages; columns for real-time dialogue, action
and thought; and an apotheosis, or breakdown of
the narrative when the author/narrator apparently
abandons his project. Trawl (1966) intensifies the
confessional and diary modes with sexual explicitness and description of the quotidian banalities
that nevertheless cumulatively convey a sense of
intensity.
The next three novels confirmed Johnsons
avant garde status, each highly technically innovative, based on various conceits that are articulated partly through the typographical and physical layout of the book. The Unfortunates (1999
[1969]), a book-in-a-box, has unbound chap-
ters that, apart from FIRST and LAST (surely

indicating the fixed coordinates of birth and
death), can be shuffled in any order. Johnson
here memorializes the life of Tony Tillinghast, a
friend who had died of cancer. As the reader
gradually realizes, Johnson recovers the past on
a trip to report on a professional football match in
Nottingham, where Tony had worked as an academic. The unusual formal aspects stress randomness and contingency. Variability of viewpoint provides the structural logic of House
Mother Normal (1971a), in which, with differing
levels of senility indicated by increasing blank
spaces on the page, inmates of a residential home
recount their experiences of abuse by the House
Mother over the same day. Every one of their
fragmentary narratives is allocated an equal number of pages, apart from the House Mother, whose
description ends controversially with an abnormal act, that of coupling with her dog in an act of
bestiality supposedly to entertain her elderly
charges, or at least evoke some response. She
alludes to being a puppet of the author, as does
the eponymous hero of Christie Malrys Own
Double Entry (1973c). The latters plot concerns
the resistance to authority by a disgruntled clerk,
his career evoking Johnsons own pre-university
days when he worked as an accounts clerk, bank
junior, and clerk at Standard Oil. Christie adapts
the double-entry system to revenge himself on
society for slights and diminishment of his rights,
moving toward a one-man terror campaign.
Johnson famously expounds his notion that the
contemporary novel should be short, brutal, and
full of archetypal confrontations symbolically
rendered. Although not as literalist as previous
novels, most of the action is rooted in events
with personal or historical provenance, and such
verisimilitude even includes the narratives reflections on various terror groups that characterized
the social and political struggle after 1968, and the
best way to manufacture Molotov cocktails.
Johnson collaborated with Margaret Drabble
to produce London Consequences (1972), a narrative combining unattributed chapters by 26
different novelists in a variety of styles, with a
prize offered for anyone identifying the authorship of each one accurately. Johnsons last novel,
the first of an intended trilogy, was published
posthumously. See the Old Lady Decently
(1975b) is a memento mori, written after his
JOYCE, JAMES
mothers death from cancer, seeming to celebrate, but more precisely to critique, her life and
times from the viewpoint of the oppressed.
Johnson reminds the reader of his or her mortality, rails against the historical repression of
capitalist Britain and its imperialist endeavors,
including the suppression of the unionists on
General Strike and the cruel complacencies
found in the colonies, in which the details of
exact location are excised to convey the implacable and recurrent nature of imperial criminality. Academic interest in Johnson has much
increased after the millennium. Johnson, who
died in 1973, is still regarded by many as the
quintessential British experimental or avant
garde writer of his time.
SEE ALSO: Coe, Jonathan (BIF); Critical Theory
and the Novel (BIF); Drabble, Margaret (BIF);
London in Fiction (BIF); Politics and the
Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)

Coe, J. (2004). Like a Fiery Elephant: The Life of B. S.
Johnson. London: Picador.
Hassam, A. (1986). True Novel or Autobiography?
The Case of B. S. Johnsons Trawl. Prose Studies, 9(1),
6272.
Higdon, D. L. (2001). Johnsons Christie Malrys Own
Double-Entry. Explicator, 60(1), 4952.
Johnson, B. S. (1963). Travelling People. London:
Constable.
Johnson, B. S. (1964a). Albert Angelo. London:
Constable.
Johnson, B. S. (1964b). Poems. London: Constable.
Johnson, B. S. (1966). Trawl. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Johnson, B. S. (1970). Youre Human Like the Rest of
Them. In New English Dramatists 14. London:
Penguin.
Johnson, B. S. (1971a). House Mother Normal. London:
Trigram.
Johnson, B. S. (1971b). Instructions for the Use of
Women; or, Here, Youve Been Done. For Bolocks
Please Read Blocks Throughout. Mean Point of
Impact. In Penguin Modern Stories 7. London:
Penguin, pp. 11534.
Johnson, B. S. (1972a). A Dublin Unicorn. Nottingham:
Byron.
Johnson, B. S. (1972b). Poems Two. London: Trigram.
Johnson, B. S. (ed.) (1973a). All Bull: The National
Servicemen. London: Allison and Busby.
205
Johnson, B. S. (1973b). Arent You Rather Young to be

Writing Your Memoirs? London: Hutchinson.
Johnson, B. S. (1973c). Christie Malrys Own Double
Entry. London: Collins.
Johnson, B. S. (1973d). Everybody Knows Somebody
Whos Dead. London: Covent Garden.
Johnson, B. S. (1974). Down Red Lane. Stand, 15(2),
818.
Johnson, B. S. (1975a). B. S. Johnson. In Penguin
Modern Poets 25: Gavin Ewart, Zulfikar Ghose, B. S.
Johnson. London: Penguin, pp. 11559.
Johnson, B. S. (1975b). See the Old Lady Decently.
London: Hutchinson.
Johnson, B. S. (1999). The Unfortunates [1969], rev.
edn. (ed. J. Coe). London: Picador.
Johnson, B. S., & Drabble, M. (eds.) (1972). London
Consequences. London: Greater London Arts
Association.
Johnson, B. S., & Ghose, Z. (1964). Statement against
Corpses. London: Constable.
Johnson, B. S. (1964). The Evacuees (photos by J. T.
Oman). London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Levitt, M. P.(19812). The Novels of B. S. Johnson:
Against the War against Joyce. Modern Fiction
Studies, 27(4), 57186.
Review of Contemporary Fiction (1985). B. S. Johnson/
Jean Rhys Number [special issue], 5(2).
Tew, P. (2001). B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading.
Tew, P. (2002). B. S. Johnson. Review of Contemporary
Fiction, 22(1), 758.
Tew, P. (2005). B. S. Johnson and the BBC: The Initial
Contacts. In C. Den Tandt (ed.), Reading without
Maps: Cultural Landmarks in a Post-Canonical Age.
Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, pp. 11933.
Tew, P., & White, G. (eds.) (2007). Re-Reading B. S.
Johnson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Joyce, James
MARGOT NORRIS
James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a suburb of

Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882, and died in
Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941. His
father came from a well-to-do Cork family that
invested him with the means and standing to
consider himself a gentleman. A boisterous,
entertaining character, he failed to develop a
sustained career or profession. Joyces mother
was a cultured, even-tempered woman whose
efforts to maintain her family in middle-class
comfort and respectability were eroded by
206
JOYCE, JAMES
sustained pregnancies and debts that consumed

her husbands legacy and drove the family into
deeper and deeper poverty. By the time Joyce was
12 years old, the family had 10 surviving children,
11 mortgages, and no remaining property.
As the eldest child, James Joyce felt the family
decline in his own fortunes. An early beginning at
a prestigious Jesuit boarding school led to a
poverty-stricken adolescence, marked by evictions to more and more squalid quarters and the
death of a beloved brother from typhoid. The
familys ambitions for his education nonetheless
managed to keep Joyce in Jesuit schools, and his
education at Belvedere College (18938) and
University College Dublin (18981902) trained
him in the Latin classics and in the rigors of
scholastic thinking. He supplemented his formal
education with wide reading in Continental literature available at the Capel Street library, which
exposed him to a tradition of progressive literary
realism that influenced his own writing.
An unsuccessful sojourn in Paris to study medicine was interrupted by his mothers terminal
illness and death, and Joyce spent the next year in
desultory activity which included a brief stay at
the Martello Tower with his friend Oliver St. John
Gogarty. He was saved from this spiritual vagrancy by meeting a young Galway woman named
Nora Barnacle with whom he first went walking
on June 16, 1904 a date later memorialized as the
day on which the action of his novel Ulysses is set.
The relationship resulted in an ill-planned elopement to the Continent that eventually saw the
couple settled first in Pola, and then in Trieste on
Italys Adriatic coast.
During the next decade, Joyce worked as an
instructor for the Berlitz language school, a position for which his university study in modern
languages had prepared him well. Although
Noras adjustment was more difficult, the city,
whose cosmopolitan population of eastern and
western Europeans gave it a lively intellectual and
political complexity, suited Joyce well. Although
he had begun writing and publishing stories while
still in Dublin, the Trieste period allowed him
time to undertake serious and sustained writing
even as his domestic life was eventful and sometimes rocky. Joyce drank heavily and, like his
father, incurred debt. His brother Stanislaus eventually joined him and Nora and 1905 saw the birth
of their son Giorgio. Later, two of Joyces sisters
also joined them. In the midst of this lively

domestic scene stabilized by Stanislauss responsible management Joyce finished the stories
for his collection called Dubliners and his autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, which became
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Joyces first publication, a small book of poetry
titled Chamber Music, appeared in 1907. Two
other collections of poetry were published in later
years, Pomes Pennyeach in 1927 and Collected
Poems in 1937. Joyce also wrote a study of love
titled Giacomo Joyce during his early Trieste period, and later produced a series of articles for the
Triestine newspaper Il Piccolo della Serra. In spite
of an early book contract for Dubliners, publication was delayed for years by wrangles over censorship issues with Joyces publisher. These frustrations, among others, inspired a brief, unsuccessful relocation to Rome, a sojourn that led to
the conception of a daughter, Lucia, and Joyces
conception of the story The Dead, and the germ
for what would later become his novel Ulysses. A
productive period ensued after the familys return
to Trieste, and, by the end of 1913, Joyces luck
turned with the tides of modern literary history.
Joyce was contacted by the poet Ezra Pound, the
informal talent scout and fundraiser for innovative writers, who had heard about Joyce from the
poet W. B. Yeats. Pound encouraged Joyce to send
his work to the little magazines that were then
publishing experimental writing, and soon chapters of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
appeared in The Egoist. In 1914 Dubliners was
published at last, but war was breaking out in
Europe, and by 1915 the Joyces, whose Irish
nationality made them British citizens, relocated
to neutral Switzerland for the duration of World
War I.
The family spent four years in Zurich, a city
with a lively avant garde theater scene important
to Joyce, a great lover of drama who had written a
play called Exiles during his Trieste years. A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published
in 1916, and Joyce turned in earnest to his sprawling new novel, Ulysses. When the war ended in
1918, the Joyces returned to Trieste but found the
postwar city uncongenial. At Pounds suggestion
they moved to Paris, a haven for expatriate writers. There they quickly assembled a circle of
friends and colleagues that included Sylvia
Beach, whose bookstore and lending library
JOYCE, JAMES
Shakespeare and Company came to Joyces

rescue when obscenity concerns made commercial publication of his new novel unlikely. Beach
offered to bring the book out and the first copies
of Ulysses came off the press on Joyces fortieth
birthday, February 2, 1922. The novels publication made Joyce a celebrity and encouraged him
to launch a new, even more outrageously experimental work whose title, kept secret for many
years, would be Finnegans Wake. Since Ulysses
remained banned for obscenity in much of the
English-speaking world during these years, Joyce
earned few royalties, and depended for support on
bequests and endowments from a generous patron named Harriet Shaw Weaver.
The 1920s in Paris proved to be a heady,
troubled time for Joyce. Bouts of eye inflammation, first experienced in Trieste, required a series
of painful eye surgeries. They were largely unsuccessful and Joyce began losing his sight. The avant
garde extravagance of Work in Progress, as
Finnegans Wake was called before its publication,
aroused deep skepticism and defection among
some of Joyces most ardent supporters, including
Ezra Pound. But new circles of friends and disciples replaced the doubters, including the Irish
writer Samuel Beckett, and Eugene and Maria
Jolas who eventually published segments of
Work in Progress in their journal transition.
To further strengthen support for the work they
joined Beckett in assembling a collection of essays
published in 1929 under the title of Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of
Work in Progress. The American poet William
Carlos Williams also contributed to the volume.
Joyces family life was troubled by the increasing
instability of his daughter Lucia, whose schizophrenic symptoms were unsuccessfully treated by
a series of psychiatrists. But there were happy
events as well. Joyces son Giorgio married, and a
grandson, Stephen, was born. And Joyce and Nora
were themselves finally married in London in
1931, an action that legally secured inheritances
for their progeny.
In 1933 a favorable court decision by Judge
John M. Woolsey of the United States District
Court of New York cleared Ulysses of charges of
obscenity and allowed for its publication by Random House Press. But the political storm clouds
gathering in Europe in the 1930s proved threatening to Joyce and the extended Jewish family, by
207
marriage, of his son. Finnegans Wake was completed and its publication celebrated at a lavish
party for Joyces forty-seventh birthday on
February 2, 1939. But before the end of the
following year, the Joyces had left Paris for Zurich,
desperately worried about the safety of their
institutionalized daughter. They arrived in Zurich
in December 1940 and less than a month later,
Joyce was dead, from peritonitis following surgery
for a perforated ulcer.
Joyces works reflected his life, his times, and
his varied cultures both in their themes and in
their aesthetic aims and development. Late Victorian and turn-of-the century Ireland placed him
in a country whose quasi-colonial status gave it
representation in the British parliament but little
control over its own affairs. As a result Ireland
suffered economic stagnation, rural and urban
poverty, and a sense of oppression that led to a
Home Rule movement ultimately frustrated by
the Catholic Churchs role in the downfall of
Charles Stewart Parnell, the countrys best hope
for independence through parliamentary negotiation. Joyces Dubliners stories reflect the national
despondency following this failure as a condition
of paralysis that called less for political agitation
against England than an unflinching self-examination. In this respect Joyce departed from the
aims of Irish cultural nationalism the movement
known as the Celtic Revival whose recovery of the
Gaelic language and of Irish myth and folklore he
regarded as parochial and backward-looking. Inspired by the realism of Ibsens drama, Dubliners
offers stories of schoolboy yearning, of entrapment by duty and responsibility, oppressive
working conditions, the degradation of patriotism, the ravage of families by alcoholism. The last
story in the collection, The Dead, thematizes
the ambiguous clash between Irish revival insularity and the protagonists look toward the Continent for cultural sustenance.
Joyce characterized his prose in these stories as
a style of scrupulous meanness. Influenced, like
Pound, by the style of Gustave Flaubert, Joyce
adopted a mode of writing in clean, dry, hard
prose that exemplified the modernists repudiation of the opulent emotional language they
attributed to romanticism. Joyces A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man also resorts to another
tenet of modernism classicism to frame
its Kunstlersroman, its semiautobiographical
208
JOYCE, JAMES
account of a sensitive boy growing up in Dublin

with aesthetic aspirations. By naming its protagonist Stephen Dedalus, the novel evokes the myth
of Icarus, the son of the artist Dedalus whose
winged escape from ancient Crete was aborted by
flying too close to the sun, melting the wax that
held his wings together. The classical superstructure endows the story of young Dedaluss struggles to free himself from the squalor of poverty,
and from the oppressive constraints of the
Catholic Church, with universal significance. A
Portrait also offers moments of enlightenment
and self-recognition, termed epiphany by
Joyce, as antidotes to the paralysis of Dublin life.
Stylistically, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man exhibits an imitative form of writing that
expresses the stages of Stephen Dedaluss artistic
development in a changing play of language
reflective of his evolving consciousness. Childhood is narrated in simple prose, the romantic
longings of early adolescence in lyrical language,
the rigorous scholasticism of the university phase
in erudite expression. A final series of diary entries
ending the novel make it clear that the shifting
narrative styles represented aesthetic simulations
rather than actual representations of Stephens
consciousness. A Portrait ends with Stephen Dedalus, like Icarus, attempting to escape his island
home for the Continent. Joyces next novel, Ulysses, begins with Stephen Dedalus returned to
Dublin, living in desolate aimlessness following
the death of his mother.
In Ulysses both the thematic enactment of
classical mythology and the experiments with
stylistic imitation undergo a dramatic enlargement and expansion. Set in 1904 Dublin, Ulysses is
structured in correspondence with Homers classic epic, the Odyssey, although the precise relation
of each chapter to an Odyssean adventure became
apparent only thanks to a schema Joyce sent to his
Italian translator, Carlo Linati. The story of
Homers voyager, who must overcome tremendous obstacles with wit and courage, is invested in
the unlikely figure of a 38-year-old Jewish advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom. Joyces
early love of drama recrudesces in the novels
classical unity of time, place, and action. Set on
a single specific day, June 16, 1904 in Dublin, the
action consists of the movements and interactions
not only of the protagonists Bloom, his wife
Marion (Molly), and Stephen Dedalus but also
of a considerable portion of the citys colorful

population. The variations from the Odyssey are
as intriguing as the correspondences. Blooms
obstacles and crises are as much psychological as
they are social. He must come to terms with grief
over the loss of his infant son, the suicide of his
father, and the infidelity of his wife who, unlike
the faithful Penelope of the classic, initiates an
adulterous affair with her impresario on this day.
Bloom also encounters prejudice and anti-Semitism, while Stephen Dedalus, still trying to realize
a vocation as an artist, finds himself excluded
from the Irish literary and intellectual milieu. The
city of Dublin is represented with what has been
called documentary realism not only for its
historically verifiable addresses, buildings, and
institutions, but also for the historical personages
mixed in with its fictional figures. This creates an
effect of tremendous vitality, as its citizens, on the
move, visit shops, school, post office, public bath,
church, cemetery, newspaper office, library, museum, pubs and eateries, beach, hospital, and
house of prostitution.
Ulysses owed its notoriety not only to features
of its content but also to the conspicuous experiments in style that produced a dizzying variety of
narrative voices. The style of narration, changing
virtually chapter by chapter, confronts the reader
with considerable difficulty. The early episodes
are told by an impersonal voice that nonetheless
moves in and out of the minds of protagonists
whose thoughts are reported in the process of
shaping and expressing. In addition to this
stream of consciousness, Joyce also produces
a variant of the imitative style introduced in A
Portrait by having the narration reflect themes,
settings, and Homeric correspondences. The episode reporting Blooms visit to the newspaper
office is divided into sections introduced by captions or headlines, for example, as well as windy
rhetoric befitting Aeolus, the keeper of the winds.
The episode corresponding to the lure of the siren
song tempting Odysseus and his men highlights
the musical qualities of the narrative prose, beginning with an overture that gives each character a musical leitmotif. The episode set in the
Holles Street Maternity Hospital recapitulates the
evolving styles of English literary history in mimicry of the embryonic development of a fetus. The
final episode is produced by the irrepressible and
lively thoughts of Molly Bloom in bed, as she
JOYCE, JAMES
revisits her day and her past. The novel ends with
her memory of the moment of love on Howth Hill
when she offered an affirmative yes I said yes I
will Yes to her husbands proposal and to life
itself.
The difficulty of reading Ulysses is eclipsed by
the challenges posed by Finnegans Wake, Joyces
last work. Its title, inspired by an Irish ballad of a
dead hod carrier who is revived by a splash of
whiskey during his wake, points to death and
resurrection as overall themes of the work. But
the phantasmagoric character of the writing
reminiscent of the hallucinatory brothel episode
in Ulysses departs dramatically from the realism
of Joyces earlier texts. The book is without stable
characters, setting, or actions. Everything is so
fluid and multiple that everything is indeterminate. Although there appears to be a family at the
heart of the work possibly named Earwicker and
consisting of mother, father, twin sons, and
daughter nothing is certain about them including
their names, numbers, or species. The mother
Anna Livia Plurabelle, as she is designated may be
old or young, or a hen, or the river Liffey. Her
husband may be a pub-keeper, or a mythic giant, or
the landscape of Dublin itself. The children, twin
sons who are enemies and a daughter who is also
sometimes doubled, variously take form as tree,
stone, cloud, or rainbow. There are transgressions
and sins at issue, including aggression and possible
incest, but trials and inquests fail to clarify them.
Like Ulysses, the work has mythic resonances
although these too are multiple. Genesis, the
Stations of the Cross, the Oedipus myth, Irish
mythology, all play structural roles. Joyce talked
of the Wake as a night work, and the analogue of
dream particularly Freudian dream offers
arguably the best analytical tool for making sense
of its seeming nonsense. This nonsense also permeates the language, whose words are multiple, interlaced with other words and meanings reminiscent
of the portmanteau words in Lewis Carrolls
Alice books. The Wakes language layers its English
with words from many other languages, creating a
universalizing effect.
Joyces influence on later twentieth-century
literature and culture has been enormous, as has
been his appeal to common readers. He has had
an impact not only on such Irish writers as Samuel
Beckett and Flann OBrien, but also on a much
wider international field. Vladimir Nabokov and
209
Umberto Eco reflect Joyces influence in their

word play, puns and puzzles, and historical and
arcane trivia. The Latin American writers strongly
influenced by Joyce include Jorge Luis Borges of
Argentina, Pablo Neruda of Chile, and Carlos
Fuentes and Octavio Paz of Mexico. Anthony
Burgess, Salman Rushdie, and J. M. Coetzee gloss
Joyce significantly in their work. The British
playwright Tom Stoppards 1974 play Travesties
features Joyces conflict with an English consular
official during a staging of Oscar Wildes The
Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich. Joyces
writing also provided instructive study for such
influential late twentieth-century critical theorists
as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. In 1979, the
American composer John Cage produced an
avant garde piece of music titled Roaratorio: An
Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake. Film adaptations of Joyces work include an early cinematic
version of Finnegans Wake by the film animator
Mary Ellen Bute, as well as ambitious adaptations
of Ulysses by Joseph Strick (1967) and Sean Walsh
(2003). The Strick film was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
in 1967. The famous American director John
Huston filmed the Dubliners story The Dead
in 1987. A film titled Nora, produced by Pat
Murphy in 2000, is based on the biography of
Joyces wife by Brenda Maddox. The International
James Joyce Foundation, established in 1967,
sponsors an international symposium on Joyces
work every two years, generally in a European city.
In alternating years a North American Joyce
conference is held in the US or Canada. In addition, Joyce study groups formed by common nonacademic readers meet regularly all over the
world.
SEE ALSO: Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Censorship
and the Novel (BIF); Critical Theory and the Novel
(BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Little Magazines (AF);
Modernist Fiction (BIF); OBrien, Flann (BIF)

Atherton, J. S. (1959). The Books at the Wake: A Study of
Literary Allusions in James Joyces Finnegans Wake.
Attridge, D. (2000). Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory,
and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
210
JOYCE, JAMES
Beck, W. (1969). Joyces Dubliners: Substance, Vision,

and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Beja, M. (1992). James Joyce: A Literary Life. Columbus:
Ohio University Press.
Bishop, J. (1986). Joyces Book of the Dark: Finnegans
Wake. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Brivic, S. (1985). Joyce the Creator. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
Brown, R. (1988). James Joyce and Sexuality.
Budgen, F. (1973). James Joyce and the Making of
Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Campbell, J., & Robinson, H. M. (1969). A Skeleton Key
to Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking.
Cheng, V. (1995). Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge:
Devlin, K. J. (1991). Wandering and Return in Finnegans
Wake. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ellmann, R. (1983). James Joyce, rev. edn. New York:
Gifford, D. (1982). Notes for Dubliners and A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 2nd edn.
Gifford, D. (with Seidman, R. J.) (1989). Ulysses
Annotated: Notes for James Joyces Ulysses, rev.
and expanded edn. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Gilbert, S. (1952). James Joyces Ulysses. New York:
Vintage.
Gillespie, M. P. (1989). Reading the Book of Himself.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Groden, M. (1977). Ulysses in Progress. Princeton:
Henke, S. A. (1990). James Joyce and the Politics of
Desire. New York: Routledge.
Joyce, J. (1963). Stephen Hero [1944]. New York: New
Directions.
Joyce, J. (1986). Ulysses [1922] (ed. H. W. Gabler with
W. Steppe & C. Melchior). New York: Vintage.
Joyce, J. (1999). Finnegans Wake [1939]. New York:
Penguin.
Joyce, J. (2006a). Dubliners [1914] (ed. M. Norris).
New York: Norton.
Joyce, J. (2006b). Exiles [1918]. London: Nick Hern.

Joyce, J. (2007). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man [1916] (ed. J. P. Riquelme). New York:
Norton.
Joyce, S. (1958). My Brothers Keeper. New York: Viking.
Kenner, H. (1979). Joyces Voices. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Kenner, H. (1987). Ulysses, rev. edn. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Kershner, R. B. (1989). Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular
Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Killeen, T. (2004). Ulysses Unbound. Bray: Wordwell.
Lawrence. (1981). The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses.
Leonard, G. (1993). Reading Dubliners Again: A
Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press.
Maddox, B. (1988). Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Mahaffey, V. (1995). Reauthorizing Joyce. Gainesville:
University of Florida Press.
McCarthy, P. A. (1980). The Riddles of Finnegans
Wake. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses.
McHugh, R. (1991). Annotations to Finnegans Wake,
rev. edn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Norris, M. (1992). Joyces Web. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Norris, M. (2003). Suspicious Readings of Joyces
Dubliners. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Riquelme, J. P. (1983). Teller and Tale in Joyces Fiction.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Scott, B. K. (1984). Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington:
Senn, Fritz. (1984). Joyces Dislocutions (ed. J. P.
Riquelme). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Shechner, M. (1974). Joyce in Nighttown. Berkeley:
Valente, J. (1995). James Joyce and the Problem of Justice.
K
Kelman, James
STEPHEN BERNSTEIN
A central figure in contemporary Scottish literature, James Kelman is the author of plays, polemics, and essays, but his most important work is
found in his short stories and novels. Since his
earliest work, Kelman has focused his fiction on
the characters, dialogue, and events of everyday
working-class life. In the process he has created a
version of literary realism that makes revolutionary use of point of view and free indirect speech to
limn the psyches of its narrators and protagonists,
a group whose central condition is alienation.
Kelmans approach to plot is spare, with the small,
yet personally meaningful, events of daily experience standing in for larger, potentially melodramatic, drama. Along with downplaying major
events, he shuns traditional strategies of closure
and resolution, so that his narratives typically
break off rather than end. Taken together, these
tactics govern a body of work that refuses to
engage in the practices by which the great majority
of stories and novels are written. Yet Kelmans
fiction is composed in a pioneering mode replete
with interest, conviction, and feeling. Samuel
Beckett, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway are
all important influences on his work, but his
achievement is uniquely his own, and has in turn
become an important touchstone for a generation
of younger Scottish writers such as Irvine Welsh,
Alan Warner, and Duncan McLean.
Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946 to a father
with a picture-framing business and a mother
who stayed home with the familys five boys. With
a distaste for the academic classic, he left school at

16 and concentrated on reading the literature that
appealed to him, taking whatever work he could
find. In 1969 he married Marie Connors, a social
worker, and at about this time he became involved
in a writing group at Glasgow University. The
groups organizer and mentor, Philip Hobsbaum,
helped Kelman make the connection that led to
his first book, the short story collection An Old
Pub Near the Angel (1973).
Kelmans first five books and pamphlets, from
the early 1970s to the early 1980s, are collections
of short stories, a literary form that has had
continuing appeal for him even as he has concentrated on novel-writing since the mid-1980s. His
stories are typically brief, focusing on only a few
moments or hours in the life of a protagonist
(frequently also the narrator). From his earliest
stories Kelman employs his characteristic point
of view, shifting suddenly (often within a single
paragraph or even sentence) from third to first
person or, occasionally, between first and second
person. The effect of these shifts is to intensify
the readers sense of a characters experience,
as the language and perspective particular to a
single consciousness underline broader observations. Glaswegian working-class dialect is also a
staple in Kelmans work, depending more on
phoneticized spellings than the inclusion of dialect words. After his first book Kelman dispensed
with quotation marks in dialogue, furthering the
seamlessness of integration among his narrative
elements.
With The Busconductor Hines (1984) Kelman
began to publish novels, and the 15 years from

212
KELMAN, JAMES
1984 through 2008 saw him publish seven novels

to only four short story collections. While the
novel obviously affords him a broader temporal
and geographic canvas on which to work, it also
allows him to deepen his exploration of the
individual within a complex cultural and
economic milieu. In his first three novels, The
Busconductor Hines, A Chancer (1985), and
A Disaffection (1989), Kelman examines the lives
of a trio of young male protagonists caught up in
the difficulty of living a satisfying life within the
limited opportunities available to them. Rab
Hines, the protagonist of the first novel, and
Patrick Doyle, the protagonist of A Disaffection,
are particularly philosphical about their plights,
establishing a strong existentialist undertow in
their narratives. Critical attention to Kelmans
work increased during this period, with A Disaffection shortlisted for Britains prestigious
Booker Prize, and winning Scotlands James Tait
Black Memorial Prize.
In 1994 Kelman published How Late It Was,
How Late, recounting a week in the life of Sammy
Samuels, a Glaswegian existing on the fringes of
the economy who goes blind after a police beating
and spends the novel negotiating the terms of his
new condition. Tremendous controversy erupted
when the novel was awarded the Booker Prize,
with one judge disparaging its use of dialect and
expletives. Kelmans acceptance speech was a
blistering riposte to those who would equate
polite language and literary quality.
Since How Late Kelmans novels have become
more varied in approach and voice, while continuing his long-term project of examining the
varieties of modern social, political, and economic alienation. Translated Accounts (2001) is a
radically experimental attempt to render texts
supposed to have originated from interrogations
in a territory under martial law. The resulting
documents, rife with omissions and lines of junk
characters, recount atrocities in a form even more
open-ended than usual in Kelmans work. You
Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004) is
the lengthy internal monologue of Jeremiah
Brown as he spends an evening in a pair of
American bars, thinking over his 12 years in the
US prior to a planned return to Scotland the
following morning. With mixed humor and
pathos, Brown reflects on the numerous misunderstandings, humiliations, and small victories
of being other on American soil. Kieron Smith,

Boy (2008) is a masterful first-person account of
the world of its eponymous protagonist as he
encounters increasingly complicated networks
of children, adults, and social institutions in
the changing Glasgow of the 1950s. The novels
monologue represents a new direction for Kelman
as he modulates its qualities in correspondence
with Kierons age during the lengthy narrative.
The result is arguably Kelmans most touching
and tender work.
Scottish Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction
(BIF)

Bernstein, S. (2000). James Kelman. Review of
Jackson, E., & Maley, W. (eds.) (2001). Kelman and
Commitment. Edinburgh Review, 108, 21122.
Kelman, J. (1973). An Old Pub Near the Angel and
Other Stories. Orono, ME: Puckerbush.
Kelman, J. (1983). Not Not While the Giro and Other
Stories. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Kelman, J. (1984). The Busconductor Hines. Edinburgh:
Polygon.
Kelman, J. (1985). A Chancer. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Kelman, J. (1987). Greyhound for Breakfast. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Kelman, J. (1989). A Disaffection. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Kelman, J. (1991). The Burn: Stories. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Kelman, J. (1992). Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural
and Political. Stirling: AK Press.
Secker and Warburg.
Kelman, J. (1999). The Good Times. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Kelman, J. (2001). Translated Accounts: A Novel.
Kelman, J. (2002). And The Judges Said . . .: Essays.
Kelman, J. (2004). You Have to Be Careful in the Land of
the Free. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Kelman, J. (2008). Kieron Smith, Boy. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Kelman, J., Owens, A., & Gray, A. (1985). Lean Tales.
K
ovesi, S. (2007). James Kelman. Manchester:
KENNEDY, A. L.
Kennedy, A. L.
KAYE MITCHELL
Alison Kennedy was born in Dundee on October

22, 1965. While doing a BA in theater studies at
Warwick University (19836), she began writing
dramatic monologues and scripts, and she has
since produced a diverse array of work to great
critical acclaim and increasing commercial success. In addition to her novels and short stories,
Kennedy has written two non-fiction books (on
bullfighting and the Powell and Pressburger film
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp); a play (The
Audition) for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and
scripts for live performances (both theater/devised pieces and dance) and for film (Stella Does
Tricks, 1998); and innumerable journalistic pieces
on the arts and on politics. As well as receiving
numerous prizes for her own work and being
listed twice (1993 and 2003) as one of Grantas
Best of Young British Novelists, she has served
as a judge of the Booker Prize, the Guardian First
Book Prize, and the Orange Prize. Recently,
she has collaborated with Scottish musicians for
the Ballads of the Book album (2007) and has
turned her hand to stand-up comedy, doing onewoman shows in comedy clubs in Edinburgh and
Glasgow.
Critical writings on Kennedy tend to position
her as one of a number of Scottish authors
including James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Alan
Warner, Janice Galloway, and others who have
formed part of the renaissance of Scottish literature since the publication of Alasdair Grays
Lanark in 1981. Yet Kennedy herself presents her
identity and nationality in a decidedly ambivalent
way, claiming that: My nationality is beaten
together from a mongrel mix of Scots, Welsh,
Scots-Irish and Midland English. Because I love
Scotland I will always seek to write about it as
enough of an outsider to see it clearly (Bell 102).
The explanation is a telling one, because
Kennedys work evinces a notable fascination
with outsiders: the marginalized, lonely, and dispossessed within society.
This is perhaps most in evidence in her first
collection of short stories, Night Geometry and the
Garscadden Trains (1990), which brought her
immediate critical attention and was awarded the
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Saltire Society
Book of the Year Award. These are stories of
213
ostensibly small lives and relationships, of the

minor epiphanies of everyday life; yet what Kennedy seeks to reveal is the vastness of the inner
lives of her characters, the richness of emotion
behind the facade of banality, the uncanny
strangeness of the apparently familiar. In the title
story, a woman discovers her husbands infidelity
by chance, returning home after her train to work
fails to appear; all the trains go to Garscadden. She
takes a knife from the kitchen, means to kill him,
but doesnt. These are seismic changes for her,
but invisible to the outside world. The perilous
potential of the domestic sphere and the fraught
nature of intimacy are recurrent themes here;
both Translations and The Moving House
treat of sexual abuse, sensitively representing the
confusion and trauma of the victims. Kennedys
documenting of such lives is always humane,
stressing their largeness, however they might appear. The narrator of The role of notable silences
in Scottish history notes the huge, invisible,
silent roar of all the people who are too small to
record, (1990, 64), while the wronged wife of
Night Geometry opines: We have small lives,
easily lost in foreign droughts, or famines . . . This
is not enough (34). Keenly alert to the ways in
which official histories neglect or pass over the
lives of ordinary people, Kennedys own stories
are compensatory, bringing such lives to light,
while also frequently reveling in their oddness.
Now That Youre Back (1994) reprises some of
the themes of Night Geometry, but is more obviously adventurous in its use of disparate styles,
genres, and narrative voices. Alongside the familiarly bleak yet empathetic stories of a sexual
abuse victim forced into prostitution (Friday
Payday), religious fundamentalist parents attempting to purify their son (A Perfect Possession), and two brothers nurturing a third after
some kind of breakdown (Now That Youre
Back), we find a humorous take on discipleship
in On Having More Sense, as a wise man
preaches on the greater wisdom of penguins, and
a macabre parody of Southern Gothic in Mixing
with the Folks Back Home as a mother writes to
her daughter explaining that her father is not her
real father, but in fact a serial killer.
In between these two collections, Kennedy
produced her first novel, Looking for the Possible
Dance (1993), a simple but lyrical portrait of a
Scottish girl, Margaret, who struggles to deal with
214
KIELY, BENEDICT
her grief for her beloved father, recently dead,

and her difficult relationship with her boyfriend
Colin and with Scotland. The novel is structured
around her train journey from Scotland to
London, as she reflects on her life, relationships,
and aspirations, and its ending evinces a quiet but
inconclusive optimism.
Kennedy writes vividly and unsettlingly about
love, sex (often of the dark and perverse variety),
and the bliss (romantic, sexual, or religious) that
threatens to undo identity. Thus Jennifer in So I
Am Glad (1995) becomes embroiled in a romantic
relationship with a man who may be a reincarnated Cyrano de Bergerac or merely a homeless
junkie; Helen Brindle in Original Bliss (a novella, in Original Bliss, 1997) flees an abusive
marriage to be with a famous self-help guru with
a pornography addiction all of this underscored
by a turbulent religious faith of the most orgasmic
kind. The stories of Indelible Acts (2002) document sundry intimacies and infidelities, with the
narrator of the title story expressing her desire for
something to stay with me . . ., for marks, for
brands in the memory, indelible acts, to remind
her of her encounters with her married lover
(115); the violence of this sexual imagery is not
unusual in Kennedys work.
Everything You Need (1999), arguably
Kennedys most ambitious novel, but the one
that has most divided reviewers, tackles the subject of the writing life itself. It centers on a group
of writers on a remote island, wrestling with
questions of faith, love, and suicide, and on the
relationship between Mary, an aspirant writer,
and Nathan, an established writer and (unbeknownst to her) her father. The eroticizing of the
fatherdaughter relationship and of Nathans two
suicide attempts showcases Kennedys attraction
to difficult subject matter, where sex and death are
intriguingly inextricable. This point is borne out
in Paradise (2004), the confessional first-person
narrative of Hannah Luckcraft, an alcoholic
whose life is spiraling out of control as she drinks
to ward off the awareness that reality theres
nothing but horror in that (309). The increasingly surreal, fragmentary nature of the narrative
mimics Hannahs blackouts and hallucinations,
her growing paranoia.
It is Kennedys most recent novel, Day (2007),
that has brought her to the attention of a wider
readership. This atypical historical novel (using
an unconventional combination of third- and

second-person narration) about a World War II
RAF serviceman and ex-prisoner of war, is a subtle
investigation of questions of history, class, and
memory and a tacit expression of Kennedys own
pacifism. It won her the Costa Book Award in
2008, and suggests that her reputation and appeal
continue to grow.
SEE ALSO: Postmodernist Fiction (BIF);
Scottish Fiction (BIF); World War II in
Fiction (BIF)
Bell, I. A. (ed.) (1995). Peripheral Visions: Images of
Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press.
Kennedy, A. L. (1990). Night Geometry and the
Garscadden Trains. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Kennedy, A. L. (1993). Looking for the Possible Dance.
Kennedy, A. L. (1994). Now That Youre Back. London:
Vintage.
Kennedy. A. L. (1995). So I Am Glad. London:
Vintage.
Kennedy, A. L. (1997). Original Bliss. London: Vintage.
Kennedy, A. L. (1999). Everything You Need. London:
Vintage.
Kennedy, A. L. (2002). Indelible Acts. London: Vintage.
Kennedy, A. L. (2004). Paradise. London: Vintage.
Kennedy, A. L. (2007). Day. London: Vintage.
March, C. L. (2002). Rewriting Scotland. Manchester:
Mitchell, K. (2007). A. L. Kennedy. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Norquay, G. (2005). Partial to Intensity: The Novels of
A. L. Kennedy. In J. Acheson & S. Ross (eds.), The
Contemporary British Novel Since 1980. Edinburgh:
Stoddart, H. (2005). Tongues of Bone: A. L. Kennedy
and the Problems of Articulation. In N. Bentley (ed.),
British Fiction in the 1990s. London: Routledge,
pp. 135149.
Kiely, Benedict
THOMAS OGRADY
Benedict Kiely wrote prolifically from the mid1940s almost until his death in 2007. His reputation may ultimately rest on his short stories and
KIELY, BENEDICT
his one novella, but he also wrote nine novels

between 1946 and 1985 that established him
during his lifetime as a substantial Irish man of
letters. His other books include an analysis of the
sectarian divide that defined life in his native
Northern Ireland during his formative years, a
critical study of nineteenth-century Irish novelist
and short story writer William Carleton, a critical
study of the Irish novel in the first half of the
twentieth century, two volumes of memoirs, and
a selection of miscellaneous essays written
throughout his six-decade career. He also wrote
an account of his rambling travels around Ireland,
and he compiled and edited several books centered on the importance of specific place in Irish
experience and in the Irish imagination.
Born on August 15, 1919 in a townland of the
County Tyrone village of Dromore, Kiely grew up
in the nearby town of Omagh. Graduating in 1936
from the Christian Brothers School in Omagh,
he left Northern Ireland in 1937 for the Irish
Free State (later the Republic of Ireland) with the
intention of studying for the priesthood at the
Jesuit novitiate in County Laois; forced by a back
ailment to abandon his clerical studies, he spent
18 months in a sanatorium in Dublin. His religious calling aborted, Kiely matriculated at
University College Dublin, where he received a
bachelors degree in history, Latin, and English
in 1943. Parlaying his degree and his earlier
freelance writing into a series of newspaper positions in Dublin, he settled in the city that would be
his permanent home and also the vantage point
from which he would take his literary measure
of Ireland.
The common denominator among Kielys novels is their depiction of darker aspects of Irish life
and the Irish psyche. Set in and around Omagh,
his first two novels, Land without Stars (1946) and
In a Harbour Green (1949), expose and explore the
bleakness of provincial life in a British barracks
town around the time of World War II. Kiely
would return to Omagh and environs in his
fiction throughout his career, especially in his
short stories, but his next six novels are mostly
set elsewhere in Ireland. Reflecting his solid establishment in Dublin, Kiely set his third novel,
Call for a Miracle (1950a), in the Irish capital, a
tangled world of broken bodies and damaged
souls (devout believers, jaded journalists, jejune
college students, displaced rural innocents). He
215
followed this with Honey Seems Bitter (1952),

a combined murder mystery, love story, and
psychological exploration (tellingly, it was republished in New York in 1954 under the title The Evil
Men Do). Banned by the Censorship of Publications Board, this novel gained Kiely desirable
notoriety in conservative mid-century Ireland,
elevating his stature among serious readers and
his fellow writers alike. In The Cards of the Gambler (1953), Kiely employs a Donegal folk tale with
Faustian overtones to frame a tour de force elaboration on the universal themes of literature (and
of life) good vs. evil, faith vs. doubt, mortality vs.
eternity featuring along the way cardsharping,
soul-selling, lashings of drink, adultery, and
death-defying acts of bravery. He followed this
entertaining novel with There was an Ancient
House (1955), which builds on the authors personal experience in the Jesuit novitiate to explore
the conflict between the needs of the spirit and
the temptations of the flesh. In The Captain with
the Whiskers (1960), set among recognizable landmarks but in a composite landscape of his native
County Tyrone and neighboring County Derry,
Kiely engages with the troubling issue of dysfunction in a family suffering both emotional and
physical abuse inflicted by a domineering patriarch. In Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968), Kiely
turns to the heart of the country, a lusterless
Midlands village called Cosmona, to explode the
myth of Irelands sexual prudery. Despite its name
deriving from the Irish cos mhona (bank of turf),
Cosmona is no mere land of canal-side bogtrotters, but a vital cosmos unto itself which retains
more than a trace of its earlier monastic name:
Insula Viventium, the Island of the Living.
In 1977, Kiely published Proxopera: A Tale of
Modern Ireland, arguably his most enduring
work. Dramatizing the dilemma of a retired
schoolteacher whose family is held hostage by
nationalist terrorists to his completing a proxy
operation the delivery to a nearby town of a
bomb hidden in a milk can this novella is infused
from start to finish with righteous anger. Clearly,
Kiely believes that the aggression of paramilitary
groups from either side of the sectarian divide in
Northern Ireland constitutes not just a broadly
moral transgression but also a personal transgression against the decent individuals and families
who make up the general populace of the politically troubled province. His final novel, Nothing
216
KIELY, BENEDICT
Happens in Carmincross (1985b), presents a variation on that theme. Reworking a real-life incident he recounted in his travelogue All the Way to
Bantry Bay (1978a), Kiely centers his narrative on
an Irishman returning to Northern Ireland from
America for his nieces wedding: the ceremony
never takes place as, posting the last of her invitations, the bride gets blown to pieces by a bomb
planted in a mailbox.
Kiely also published four collections of short
stories: A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963), A
Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly (1973), A Cow
in the House (1978b), and A Letter to Peachtree
(1987). Drawing heavily on the authors boyhood
years in Omagh and environs, the stories reflect
his debt to the oral tradition of Irish storytelling
in their presentation of the bold antics of aging
rakes, the comic misadventures of curious
adolescents, and the humorous dynamics of
swarming families. But almost invariably, a more
ominous tone or note resonates beneath or behind their intoxicating hilarity, and frequently the
line between gaiety and grief, laughter and lament
becomes blurred in Kielys literary vision. In 2001,
the stories were gathered, along with Proxopera,
into a single volume, The Collected Stories of
Benedict Kiely.
Throughout Kielys long career, his reputation
was shaped in part by the benign neglect that
trends and tendencies in the literary marketplace
and in academia can effect. It was also shaped in
part by his public profile by his being best
known in Ireland as a personality in both print
and broadcast media, by his being thought of
more as a diverting raconteur than as a serious
litterateur. His stature in the Irish literary pantheon remains uncertain. Benedict Kiely died on
February 9, 2007.
Irish Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);

Cahill, C. (ed.) (1994). A Tribute to Benedict Kiely
[special issue]. Recorder: The Journal of the American
Irish Historical Society, 7(1).
Casey, D. (1974). Benedict Kiely. Lewisburg, PA:
Eckley, G. (1972). Benedict Kiely. New York:

Twayne.
Fogarty, A., & Hand, D. (eds.) (2008).
Benedict Kiely [special issue]. Irish University
Review, 38(1).
Kiely, B. (1945). Counties of Contention. Cork:
Mercier.
Kiely, B. (1946). Land without Stars. London:
Christopher Johnson.
Kiely, B. (1947). Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and
Days of William Carleton, 17941869. London: Sheed
and Ward.
Kiely, B. (1949). In a Harbour Green. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Kiely, B. (1950a). Call for a Miracle. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Kiely, B. (1950b). Modern Irish Fiction: A Critique.
Dublin: Golden Eagle.
Kiely, B. (1952). Honey Seems Bitter. New York: E. P.
Dutton. (Published in US as The Evil Men Do.
New York: Dell, 1952.)
Kiely, B. (1953). The Cards of the Gambler. London:
Methuen.
Kiely, B. (1955). There Was an Ancient House. London:
Methuen.
Kiely, B. (1960). The Captain with the Whiskers.
London: Methuen.
Kiely, B. (1963). A Journey to the Seven Streams:
Seventeen Stories. London: Methuen.
Kiely, B. (1968). Dogs Enjoy the Morning. London:
Gollancz.
Kiely, B. (1973). A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly: A
Dozen Stories. London: Gollancz.
Kiely, B. (1977). Proxopera: A Tale of Modern Ireland.
London: Gollancz.
Kiely, B. (1978a). All the Way to Bantry Bay - and Other
Irish Journeys. London: Gollancz.
Kiely, B. (1978b). A Cow in the House and Nine Other
Kiely, B. (1980). The State of Ireland: A Novella and
Seventeen Stories. Boston: D. R. Godine.
Kiely, B. (1985a). The Aerofilms Book of Ireland from the
Air. London: Artus.
Kiely, B. (1985b). Nothing Happens in Carmincross.
London: Gollancz.
Kiely, B. (1987). A Letter to Peachtree and Nine Other
Kiely, B. (1989). Yeats Ireland: An Illustrated Anthology.
London: Aurum.
Kiely, B. (1991). Drink to the Bird: A Memoir. London:
Methuen.
Kiely, B. (1996). And as I Rode by Granard Moat.
Dublin: Lilliput.
Kiely, B. (1999a). A Raid Into Dark Corners and Other
Essays. Cork: Cork University Press.
KUREISHI, HANIF
Kiely, B. (1999b). The Waves Behind Us: A Memoir.

London: Methuen.
Kiely, B. (2001). The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely
(intro. C. McCann). London: Methuen.
Kureishi, Hanif
BRADLEY W. BUCHANAN
Hanif Kureishi occupies an ambiguous and controversial place in both twentieth-century British
fiction and in postcolonial literature. Much of his
most popular fiction deals primarily with the
position of Pakistani and Indian immigrants in
England and their children, but he refuses to
glamorize or indeed dwell upon non-Western
culture as something distinct from English life.
Instead, he concentrates on the effect of immigration and other social changes on London, his
fictions dominant setting. His often autobiographical work also deals with the moral aftermath of the permissive culture that dominated the
lives of young people in the 1960s and 1970s: it
examines infidelity, drug abuse, family break-up,
political pettiness, economic inequality, selfishness, and mens anger against feminism with
unflinching and sometimes disturbing directness.
Born in Bromley, England, on December 5,
1954, Kureishi first attained prominence in
1986 when his screenplay for the film My Beautiful
Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar. The story,
which features a gay love affair between a young
man of Pakistani origin and an English ex-skinhead, as well as an expose of the links between
illegal drugs and the more respectable business
ventures of Thatcher-era capitalism (which, the
films suggests, offered both opportunities and
grave dangers for immigrants), earned widespread
praise as well as condemnation from some Pakistani groups. Its themes of sexual transgression and
racial tension, as well as its satirical portrait of
social and economic ambition, laid the groundwork for many of Kureishis later fictional preoccupations. Kureishis first and most successful
novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), extended
his satire to a broader set of political concerns
including feminism, religious mysticism, political
correctness, left-wing theater, and the influence of
American racial politics. Though it too provoked
complaints from Muslims (as well as from con-
217
servative English critics) it also earned the Whitbread First Novel Award and remains the most
solid basis for Kureishis reputation as a novelist.
His subsequent fiction has been less successful,
in terms of both critical and popular responses,
and its detractors have remained vocal. The Black
Album (1995) attacked the leftist excesses of
academia as well as the crassness of consumer
culture, while also using the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdies novel The Satanic
Verses (1988) though the novel is never named
as an opportunity to portray a group of Muslim
students as a mixture of extremists and hypocritical fools. After this perhaps all too topical novel
was poorly received, Kureishis fiction moved
away from an engagement with racial themes
and religion to an autobiographical examination
of middle-aged men and their various discontents, as evinced in Intimacy (2000), a short novel
apparently dealing with his own real-life decision
to leave Tracey Scoffield, his wife and the mother
of two of his children. Two books of short stories,
Love in a Blue Time (1997) and Midnight All Day
(2001b), also elaborate the theme of male dissatisfaction, whose causes appear to be many: the
stultifying effect of family life, womens excessive
demands, the unrealistic myth of romantic fulfillment, a culture that encourages self-indulgence, mens own emotional and creative sterility,
and simple boredom. Despite the varied sources
of Kureishis apparent ennui, many critics have
found fault with the monotony of his preoccupations and with the drab humorlessness of his more
mature prose style.
The third phase of Kureishis career as a writer
of fiction was perhaps a reaction against such
criticisms: it features a turn away from the
hard-edged, satirical realism of his earlier work
toward a mild form of the fantastic, an engagement with alternate realities somewhat akin to
magical realism (as in Gabriels Gift) or science
fiction (The Body). Gabriels Gift (2001a) is a
lighthearted, lightweight tale about a boy who
discovers a gift for turning his art into real
objects; it presents a much less politically charged
world than is usual in Kureishis writing, and few
traces of his former preoccupations with race,
sexuality, or religion are visible. The Body (2002)
offers a darker, more challenging vision of a future
in which older people can temporarily live inside
218
KUREISHI, HANIF
(i.e., rent) the dead bodies of young beautiful

people, and thus enjoy a second or third crack at
fulfillment (especially of the sexual sort). This
prospect proves enjoyable for a while, but something is clearly missing in this promise of eternal
youth, and the tale ends with the protagonist
trapped and unable to return to his family.
Kureishis most recent (and longest) novel, Something to Tell You (2008), has earned both plaudits
and dispraise for revisiting some of the themes
and motifs of his early work. Its narrator, a
psychotherapist named Jamal, views pleasureloving London life with the same easy-going
indulgence of Karim Amir of The Buddha of
Suburbia, and he even encounters Omar Ali (the
homosexual hero of My Beautiful Laundrette).
Unlike these hedonists, however, Jamal has a
sinister secret to share with the reader, though
his growing torment is to some extent overshadowed by the unlikely love affair that blossoms
between Miriam, his rebellious sister, and Henry,
his neurotic and arty friend.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); London
in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile
in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF);
Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian
Diaspora (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities
in Fiction (BIF)

Buchanan, B. W. (2007). Hanif Kureishi. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kaleta, K. C. (1998). Hanif Kureishi:
Postcolonial Storyteller. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Kureishi, H. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. London:
Faber and Faber.
Kureishi, H. (1995). The Black Album. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Kureishi, H. (1997). Love in a Blue Time. New York:
Scribners.
Kureishi, H. (2000). Intimacy. London: Faber and
Faber.
Kureishi, H. (2001a). Gabriels Gift. New York:
Scribners.
Kureishi, H. (2001b). Midnight All Day. New York:
Scribners.
Kureishi, H. (2002). The Body and Seven Stories.
Kureishi, H. (2008). Something to Tell You. London:
Faber and Faber.
Moore-Gilbert, B. (2001). Hanif Kureishi. Manchester:
Ranasinha, R. (2002). Hanif Kureishi. Tavistock:
Northcote House.
Thomas, S. (ed.) (2005). Hanif Kureishi. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Yousef, N. (2002). Hanif Kureishis The Buddha
of Suburbia: A Readers Guide. New York:
Continuum.
L
Lawrence, D. H.
FIONA BECKET
D. H. Lawrence wrote some of the most popular,

challenging, and controversial fiction of the modernist period. He was also a celebrated poet, a
skillful dramatist and translator, an essayist of
rare insight on diverse subjects, and a phenomenal letter writer. His fiction maintains his position at the heart of twentieth-century British
literature with its combination of social and
domestic realism and poetic intensity in works
that bear witness to a deeply felt belief that the
conditions and repercussions of political modernity required a new kind of writing, a new relation
to language.
Lawrence was able to live by writing. Highly
conscious of his readership, particularly in Britain
and the United States, he was yet no slave to his
audience. Lawrences publishers were sensitive to
the fact of prosecution a state of affairs that often
resulted in the taking of editorial liberties and
Lawrences most significant works were either
suppressed by court order or threatened under
the censorship laws. The critical reception of the
earlier work tended toward the positive. The
major writing polarized opinion, often in response to the poetic style and to the presentation
of sexual relations. A gifted linguist and an
itinerant figure, Lawrence was extremely well
traveled. His early reputation rested on his poetry
Lawrence benefited from the support of Ford
Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford) and Ezra
Pound in particular his inclusion in the first
anthologies of Imagism (although Lawrence was
rather doubtful about his Imagist credentials,

characteristically fighting shy of cliques, groups,
or movements). However, it was the novel that
ensured his status as an internationally recognized writer, and it was the novel form that
Lawrence believed held the greatest potential for
radical thought in the modern age. His definition
of the novel, which included the Gospels and
Platos Dialogues, demonstrates the importance
of a dynamic congruence of language and form.
The products of a highly individual voice and
an idiosyncratic personal philosophy or
metaphysic, Lawrences novels, characterized
by intensely poetic and highly metaphorical
prose, are yet stylistically distinct from each
other. The plots often represent familiar or conventional modes the family saga, the twocouples structure, the picaresque, even modes
of popular romance yet the revision and
reworking of these produce a new kind of
metaphysical fiction the significance of which,
as cultural critique, many of Lawrences contemporaries found difficult to comprehend.
The early novels deconstruct romantic and
sexual love. Famously, one of Lawrences earliest
reviewers assumed D. H. to be a woman. The
reception of his third, autobiographical, novel,
Sons and Lovers (1913), was almost wholly positive. It was taken to epitomize a Freudian and
confessional mode a critical response that vexed
Lawrence and which he repudiated. While he
shared with Freud an interest in the instinctive
life (he wrote two books on the unconscious),
Lawrence nevertheless rejected what he knew
of Freudian psychology which he viewed as

220
LAWRENCE, D. H.
symptomatic of a modernity that pathologized

sex. Thematically, the mature novels constitute
a sustained critique of cultural and individual
violence and advocate, albeit indirectly, an end
of the degraded institutions and relations of
modernity, and a new, untested notion of selfhood. Lawrences principal characters frequently
undergo metaphysical journeys in which the
birth of the self is the unforeseen and unexamined
goal. However, in the later novels the impersonal
aesthetic of the mature writing tends to give
way to an overconscious messianic version of
individualism before resorting to the solutions
of a highly personal primitivist vision. An earlier
sensitivity to community similarly tends toward
a more brutal sense of race and nation in the later
novels, although Lawrence returns to the theme
of England and what he idiosyncratically calls
passional awareness in his final novel, Lady
Chatterleys Lover (1993 [1928], 101).
Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on
September 11, 1885, Lawrences origins in the
industrial English Midlands inevitably inform his
writing. He was educated at Nottingham High
School and University College, Nottingham, and
worked as a schoolteacher in Croydon before
illness prompted his resignation. His early life
and work were characterized by some strong ties,
particularly to women, although his letters bear
witness to some enduring male friendships. Lawrence was proud of a practical resourcefulness
and thrift which he learned at home but, as he
matured as a writer, he found provincial values,
and England more generally, stultifying and
oppressive.
During the years of the Great War (191418)
Lawrence was pronounced unfit for military service. He and his wife Frieda (Weekley, nee von
Richthofen) spent most of the war years in Cornwall, where, perhaps due to his wifes nationality
Frieda Lawrence was German by birth they were
vulnerable to (unfounded) accusations of spying.
This was a time of volatile relations both with
Frieda and their sometime close friends, the writer
Katherine Mansfield and critic John Middleton
Murry. Frieda was Lawrences lifelong companion but the marriage and marriage was a relationship Lawrence felt to be of fundamental
importance was notoriously explosive. Several
years his senior, Frieda had been married when
they first met and had then left her children and
agreed to a divorce in order to be with Lawrence.

During their time in Cornwall Lawrence made
plans, and quarreled, with the philosopher Bertrand Russell; stronger friendships included those
with Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Richard Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Lawrence
drew on his friends and acquaintances for many
of his characters a tendency that often attracted
their displeasure and caused resentment although he was not interested in literary portraiture. He left England after the war and began the
itinerant lifestyle that is often undertaken by the
principal characters in his novels. Lawrence traveled partly for his health, partly in response to
invitations, and often simply because he could.
He sojourned in Italy, producing insightful travel
writing which expanded the genre into more
critical directions than hitherto (Twilight in Italy,
1916; Sea and Sardinia, 1921; Mornings in Mexico,
1927; Sketches of Etruscan Places, 1932). In 1922,
often referred to in literary criticism as the year
of high modernism, he visited Ceylon (later
Sri Lanka), Australia, New Zealand, the South
Seas, and America. He settled for a while in the
American southwest (Taos), and made lengthy
visits to Mexico. Lawrences ability to travel to,
and to inhabit, a variety of places and cultures
produced extraordinary novels, novellas, poems,
short stories, discursive essays, even literary criticism material that examines and engages with
themes of difference and otherness often framed
by a preoccupation with sex and the unconscious,
race and nation. To say that he remained, at heart,
an English writer is not a jingoistic statement but
an indication of the source of what Lawrence
called his vision. The rejection of England
embodied by his travels and expressed in, for
instance, The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love
(1920), The Lost Girl (1920), and Aarons Rod
(1922), is a repudiation of the degraded conditions of overconscious modernity marked by
industrial progress, impersonal, directionless
warfare, and the alienated individual. Lawrence
never settled in the conventional sense of the
word, and died aged 45 in Vence, France, of
tuberculosis.
As one of the twentieth centurys most skillful
short story writers it is fitting that Lawrence won a
Nottinghamshire Guardian short story competition in 1907 with A Prelude. More significant,
however, was the publication of poetry and short
LAWRENCE, D. H.
stories in the influential English Review. The

following five years saw into print three novels
including Sons and Lovers (1913), a volume of
poetry, a play, and a collection of short stories that
included The Prussian Officer (1914). In its
treatment of complex family and sexual relationships, and the efforts of a son-lover to retain a
sense of singular self-integrity in his relations with
women, Sons and Lovers broke new ground and
was strikingly modern; and Lawrence recognized
the poetic power of his language in this new book
in contrast to the styles of the previous two novels.
Lawrence is recognizably a dualistic thinker and
the sexual discord between male and female that
underpinned these early novels remained central
to those that followed as he attempted to resolve
oppositionality into unity.
The year 1915 saw the publication and suppression of The Rainbow, the first of two novels to
explore modernity, and to give full expression to
Lawrences personal philosophy, with reference
to members of three generations of the Brangwen
family and their relationships. The publisher,
Methuen, was prosecuted under the Obscene
Publications Act of 1857. Women in Love is the
sister novel to The Rainbow and an altogether
more pessimistic book. Lawrence considered calling it Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) and, with
reference to its implications as a critique of modernity, called it a terrible and horrible and
wonderful novel (Letters 2: 669). In fact, not a
year passed in which Lawrence did not produce a
significant work, whether fiction, poetry, essay, or
travel writing. The Lost Girl, a novel published in
the same year as Women in Love, won the James
Tait Black Memorial Prize. Movements in European History, intended as a book for schools, was
published the following year. Studies in Classic
American Literature, a psychoanalytic critique of
writing by Franklin, Hawthorne, and Whitman
among others, published in 1923, still has acknowledged critical value. Through the 1920s
short stories and novellas drew on Lawrences
memories of England as well as his experience of
other continents, taking in radical, and sometimes
critically unpalatable, directions his thought on
human self-sufficiency, sex, and the vitalist philosophy which many associate with Lawrence.
The travel writing combines autobiography,
documentary, philosophy, and photographs; it
embodies an unparalleled attention to particulars
221
and provides vivid, personal dissertations on

place. Landmark volumes of poetry included
Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), with Pansies
seized by the police in 1929, along with 13 paintings by Lawrence exhibited at the Warren Gallery,
London. His last novel, Lady Chatterleys Lover
(1928), was published privately for subscription
in Florence. For years, an expurgated version was
available. The complete text, however, was published 30 years after Lawrences death by Penguin
Books in an action that triggered the much publicized and much discussed prosecution in 1960 of
Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications
Act of 1959. The publishing house was acquitted,
sold a great many books, and there ensued an
overdue public debate about censorship, one of
several cases that stimulated social change not
least in England.
Each of the 10 novels published in Lawrences
lifetime challenges orthodoxies, particularly conventional social and sexual mores. Specific dualities identify the contours of Lawrences thought
as he returns to the challenges they pose: male/
female; speech/silence; primitive/modern; self/
other. More than that the novels at their best
examine the future of the novel form, and provide
fascinating insights into the ambition and scale of
Lawrences artistic vision. They explore the relation of individual to community, race, nation,
and place, and do so in ways that maintain a
creative pressure on the capacity of the English
language to be modeled into new expressive and
poetic forms. At the core of Lawrences poetic
analysis into what it is to be human and modern
is a preoccupation with the instinctive and
non-verbal life. His personal philosophy, or
metaphysic, which is a word he uses in his
Study of Thomas Hardy (1985 [1914], 91), did
not remain fixed, although the essay explores the
creative potential of conflict, strife, and oppositionality that informs much of Lawrences mature
writing. The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser
(1912) and, in particular, Sons and Lovers had
approached this direction but the language, structure, and scale the vision of The Rainbow was
different.
The language of The Rainbow constitutes an
impersonal aesthetic written, according to Lawrences description, in a foreign language I dont
know very well (Letters 1: 544). The novels
narrative language is characterized by a forceful,
222
LAWRENCE, D. H.
concentrated mode of repetition in which familiar

and often simple words are required to take on
new meanings as the language tests the extent and
limits of Western individualism and Western
psychology. It was Lawrences first properly modernist novel and it builds its vision around the
lives and feelings of a yeoman farmer called Tom
Brangwen, his daughter, Anna, and her daughter,
Ursula. Both the beginning and the end of The
Rainbow offer visions of community that seem
either to embody or to promise that communitys
capacity for self-preservation and cultural renewal, even on the back of apparently catastrophic
social, cultural, and personal breakdown. The
novels symbolic logic is consistent, and supports
a highly idiosyncratic philosophy of change and
rebirth.
The sequel, Women in Love, differs from The
Rainbow in its modes of thought and language. In
the Foreword to Women in Love Lawrence wrote
that the bitterness of the war may be taken for
granted in the characters (1987b [1920], 485),
principally Ursula Brangwen, her sister Gudrun,
and their lovers Rupert Birkin, an educationalist
and radical, and Gerald Crich, an industrialist and
proprietor of a coal mine. The narrative trajectory
in The Rainbow is generational, and it exploits a
sense of mythic, impersonal time, in which biblical narrative models the Creation, the Flood
undergo modification as a means of engaging
with modernity and alienated modern selfhood.
Women in Love is apparently more personal, and
focuses on the two couples whose friendships and
love affairs identify the central preoccupations
of the book in its relentless critique of modern
culture and modern relationships. It is a novel
underpinned by violence; not gratuitous displays
of multiple violent acts but the subliminal violence, often sadistic, that in part defines modern
subjectivity in the context of a disintegrating and
dying culture. Some of the narratives key words
are corruption, dissolution, and reduction.
Rupert Birkin (the books Lawrence-figure) is
assaulted by his lover, Hermione Roddice, denigrated as a Kulturtrager capable of deriving
sensations (emotional and intellectual) only from
others. His next relationship, with Ursula Brangwen (who has undergone the experiences of The
Rainbow), provides the context for his critique
of romantic love in the face of her fidelity to a
conventional union of man and woman. She, in

turn, is mystified by Birkins love for the powerful,
blond Gerald Crich which Birkin insists can complement, if not balance, his love for Ursula. One
chapter in particular, called Gladiatorial, which
describes a friendly bout of ju-jitsu between Birkin and Gerald, employs homoerotic language
but not sex: the books underlying logic denies
this possibility (as in the Shame chapter of The
Rainbow which describes Ursulas short-lived
infatuation with her school-mistress, a freethinking feminist). Geralds lover, Gudrun, ultimately
finds his conventional values, with which she has
flirted, and his powerful physical presence stifling.
With the sadistic, stateless artist, Loerke (whose
name, like hers, has a mythic suggestiveness) at
her side, she defeats Gerald in a psychodrama
staged in the blank, white, crystalline landscape of
the Tyrolean Alps, away from the overdeveloped
townscapes of England. This novel which, in
contrast to the impersonal sweep of The Rainbow,
has been founded on talk, conversation, verbal
disputes, and, often, verbal confusion, ends in
mid-conversation with Birkin and Ursula disagreeing (as usual) about the details of Birkins
personal philosophy. Never before had the conventions of the English novel been so critically
overturned, revised, and re-presented in contexts
that so uncompromisingly explore the life of
feeling.
The subsequent novels failed to achieve the
intensity and critical acuity of The Rainbow and
Women in Love, but that is not to belittle their
achievement. In The Lost Girl and Aarons Rod the
main characters, Alvina Houghton and Aaron
Sisson respectively, tire of the confinements of
English provincial life and the predictable responsibilities of family. Both follow a trajectory to Italy,
Alvina through her marriage to Ciccio, a peasant
from the Abruzzi mountains. Aarons travels are
punctuated by his encounters principally with a
maverick intellectual called Rawdon Lilly who
articulates a messianic philosophy about political
and social authority. Aaron, a flautist, loses his
instrument to an anarchists bomb but is promised that creative energy will continue to flourish,
even or perhaps especially in oppositional
times. This novel explores a reversal of Lawrences
faith in marriage Aaron abandons his family in
England and shows strong male figures (not for
LAWRENCE, D. H.
the first time) shedding their ties to overbearing

(female) figures. The theme of male friendship
resonates in the novels to come.
Kangaroo (1923) and The Boy in the Bush (1924;
with M. L. Skinner) developed out of Lawrences
journey to Australia in 1922. The latter is underpinned by Lawrences preoccupation with the
creation of an alternative community in which
a new social project could be developed. This
remained an unrealized aspiration for Lawrence.
Kangaroo is a more significant novel and examines themes of charismatic leadership, power,
democracy, and revolution. Characteristic in
Lawrence is the tension between the attractions
of organized social and political change and the
necessity of singular detachment, principally in
the man (usually these figures are male) of feeling.
The socialist leader, Willie Struthers, preaches to
Richard Lovatt Somers (the Lawrence-figure who
has written essays on democracy) about brotherhood, but Somers has fears for the integrity of
individuality. Kangaroo is the nickname of the
charismatic leader of a right-wing group of disaffected war veterans (the Diggers) who is similarly
interested in engaging Somers as a lieutenant.
In the chapter called Bits Lawrence deliberates
on the theme of the fragmented self and ultimately
rejects the politics of the hive. Discursive, satirical, and digressive, Kangaroo is a good novel of
Australia with some poetically powerful descriptions of place.
The Plumed Serpent (1926) stays with the theme
of political and social revolution, and cultural
regeneration, this time in Mexico. The novel
describes an imagined revival of pre-Columbian
religious consciousness by means of a new cult of
the Men of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent god of MesoAmerican myth. A much stronger novel than its
critical reception suggests, it continues Lawrences examination of male friendship and charismatic leadership. The trinity at the heart of the
novel is constituted in the relationship of the two
revolutionaries, Don Ramon Carrasco and Don
Cipriano Viedma, and Kate Leslie, a middle-aged
Irish woman (who marries Cipriano) in whom
the death of the modern self and subsequent
transformation to an older mode of consciousness must be achieved. Most problematic in this
novel, arguably, is the distortion of Lawrences
previous concentration on blood-consciousness
223
(Fantasia of the Unconscious, 2004 [1922], 173) a

highly idiosyncratic metaphor in which the linking of the elements blood and consciousness is
an attempt to embody and describe subterranean
levels of human feeling in contrast to the Freudian
model. In The Plumed Serpent the emphasis shifts
problematically from a concentration on the universal life-blood to unpalatable theorizations of
race difference.
The Plumed Serpent proves to be a somewhat
utopian work for Lawrence inasmuch as it attempts to resolve many of the problems posed by
the previous novels and this is best and most
eloquently expressed by Marianna Torgovnick
who argues that The Plumed Serpent frees
Lawrence because it allows him to integrate the
dualities that plagued him (168). He did so by
resorting to a willed primitivism in which overconscious Western individualism undergoes a
series of small but significant deaths. The aspiration that underpins Lawrences writing, prior to
and including The Plumed Serpent, is for the
rebirth of the self in a context of cultural regeneration where the shackles of Western individualism are lost. However, as Torgovnick and others
have pointed out, Lawrence is bound by the
vocabulary and the values, the constraints and
assumptions, of Western thought.
Lawrences final novel, Lady Chatterleys Lover,
develops the acquiescence of Kate Leslie in the
figure of Connie Chatterley, the titled lady for
whom sexual fulfillment is possible only in contexts in which phallic power is seen as transformative. Her lover, the gamekeeper Mellors,
cannot, however, benefit from the fantasy context
of a new world or a religious revival of the kind
that sweeps away modern social and political
institutions and expectations in The Plumed
Serpent. The taboo of sex and marriage across
the class divide cannot be properly challenged in
postwar England where social difference and deference are seen to retain their power. While the
lovers, separated at the end of the novel, wait to
take up their lives again in a new place, Lawrence
situates Mellors in epistolary (and monologic)
mode to propose that only a revolution in sexual
attitudes can make cultural regeneration possible.
This is also a novel that digresses in order to
draw attention to the importance and potential
of the novel form, and which in places chooses to
224
LAWRENCE, D. H.
announce Lawrences distance from novelistic

tradition.
Had Lawrence never written novels or poetry,
the novellas and short fiction would, nevertheless,
constitute a significant body of work in its own
right. The themes and preoccupations of the novels persist, of course, in the short fiction. The
oppositionality of male and female underpins the
serious and innovative novellas, The Captains
Doll, The Ladybird, The Fox (all 1923), and
St. Mawr (1925). The Fox shows Lawrence making
reference to, but also revising, Freudian psychology and, like St. Mawr develops its own powerfully
symbolic mode. Personal rebirth prefigures cultural rebirth in St. Mawr and The Escaped Cock
(1929; later republished as The Man Who Died),
which takes, like The Plumed Serpent and The
Woman who Rode Away, a hinterland away from
the overused spaces of Europe and America as
the location for regeneration and rebirth. A malevolent primitivism recurs in The Princess and
The Woman who Rode Away in texts that have
provoked, not without justification, the condemnation of feminists. The three major collections
of short stories are identified respectively by their
inclusion of The Prussian Officer (1914),
England, My England (1915/1922) and The
Woman who Rode Away (1925/1928). The
Prussian Officer is a brilliant exploration of individuals deadened by their cultural moment and
also announces the centrality to Lawrence of the
barely conscious commerce of pleasure and pain.
Much of the language of The Prussian Officer,
the futurist imagery and the emphasis on mechanical obedience of inner drives anticipates aspects
of Women in Love. It is in complete contrast to, for
example Odour of Chrysanthemums, an exceptionally well-crafted story located in the English
Midlands in which a woman, washing clean the
body of her man after a fatal incident at the pit,
comes to understand the nature of their marital
and personal conflict. Many of the short stories
identify subliminal levels of strife between men
and women; many deal, by concentration on individuals, with war and the death of feeling. Several
of the later stories, like Jimmy and the Desperate
Woman, had a distinct satirical edginess in which
Lawrence attempted to settle a few scores.
Phenomenally productive and often controversial, Lawrence compulsively took issue with the
unexamined assumptions of his time and culture.
A major and central figure of British modernism,

he remains a writer whose work inspires a range of
often conflicting critical responses viewed by
some as a reactionary and by others as a flawed but
radical thinker. The reception of his work and the
attempts to suppress it in which the Chatterley
trial plays its part is part of recent British social
history. Lawrences work has contributed to the
shaping of attitudes in the twentieth century,
and to public debates about sex, censorship, and
freedom of expression. Crucially, Lawrence took
risks in his writing, and believed that the novel
form was a highly significant medium for cultural
critique: in Why the Novel Matters he famously
wrote The novel is the one bright book of life
(1985 [1936], 195). As a novelist he had a profound influence on the development in the twentieth century of metaphysical fiction with a
concentration on the life and language of the
feelings We have no language for the feelings
(1985 [1936], 203) and his work has had an
effect on writers as diverse as John Cowper Powys
and Doris Lessing. Lawrences writing, extensively
translated, continues to challenge and provoke
critical debate across cultures.
Ford, Ford Madox (BIF); Mansfield, Katherine
(WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/
Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); WorkingClass Fiction (BIF)

References to Lawrences works are to The Cambridge
Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence
(gen. eds. J. T. Boulton & W. Roberts). Cambridge:
Alldritt, K. (1971). The Visual Imagination of D. H.
Lawrence. London: Arnold.
Becket, F. (1997). D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet.
Bell, M. (1992). D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being.
Black, M. (1986). D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction.
London: Macmillan.
Cavitch, D. (1969). D. H. Lawrence and the New World.
Clarke, C. (1969). River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence
and English Romanticism. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
LEHMANN, ROSAMOND
Ellis, D. (1998). The Cambridge Biography of D. H.

Lawrence 18851930, vol. 3: D. H. Lawrence: Dying
Game 19221930. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Fernihough, A. (1993). D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and
Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kinkead-Weekes, M. (1996). The Cambridge Biography
of D. H. Lawrence 18851930, vol. 2: D. H. Lawrence:
Triumph to Exile: 19121922. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1979, 1982). The Letters of D. H.
Lawrence, vol. 1: September 1901May 1913
(ed. J. T. Boulton); vol. 2: June 1913October 1916
(eds. G. J. Zytaruk & J. T. Boulton). Cambridge:
Lawrence, D. H. (1985). Study of Thomas Hardy and
Other Essays [1936] (ed. B. Steele). Cambridge:
Lawrence, D. H. (1987a). The Plumed Serpent [1926]
(ed. L. D. Clark). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1987b). Women in Love [1920]
(eds. D. Farmer, L. Vasey, & J. Worthen). Cambridge:
Lawrence, D. H. (1989). The Rainbow [1915]
(ed. M. Kinkead-Weekes). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1992). Sons and Lovers [1913]
(eds. H. Baron & C. Baron). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1993). Lady Chatterleys Lover; and,
A Propos of Lady Chatterleys Lover [1928]
(ed. M. Squires). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1994). Kangaroo [1923] (ed. B. Steele).
Lawrence, D. H. (2004). Psychoanalysis and the
Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious
[1921, 1922] (ed. B. Steele). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Leavis, F. R. (1955). D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Millett, K. (1985). Sexual Politics [1977]. London:
Virago.
Sagar, K. (1985). D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art.
Torgovnick, M. (1990). Gone Primitive: Savage
Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Williams, R. (1970). The English Novel from Dickens to
Lawrence. London: Hogarth.
Worthen, J. (1991). The Cambridge Biography of D. H.
Lawrence 18851930, vol. 1: D. H. Lawrence: The
Early Years 18851912. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
225
Lehmann, Rosamond
JUDY SIMONS
Rosamond Lehmann writes fiction that chronicles

a shifting society fractured by war, loss, political
change, and class antagonism. Predominantly she
tells the story of early twentieth-century womanhood, reworking the traditional subjects of the
womans novel romance, marriage, family, and
the fabric of domestic existence to invest them
with new meaning. Lehmanns love stories expose
the bitterness of passion, her families are minefields of jealousy and resentment, her domestic
scenes contain unspoken danger zones, and her
well-brought-up young women are framed
against a background of social upheaval that mirrors their own internal traumas. No writer has
more painfully exposed the subterfuges or the selfabasement of the female psyche and none matches
Lehmanns delicacy and lyricism in expressing the
rapturous intensity of apparently inconsequential
experience. The New York Times called her prose
a continual harmony of glancing, glowing colors
(Chamberlain 3), and the author Anita Brookner,
in many respects her literary successor, commented that she succeeds in giving a unique account
of the world seen through feminine eyes, and this
she manages better than Virginia Woolf, whom
she knew, ever did (Brookner 20).
Born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, on
February 3, 1901, the day of Queen Victorias
funeral, Lehmann enjoyed a privileged upbringing, infused by the inheritance of the past. Many
of her books deal directly with the transition from
Victorian to modern and depict the reluctance of
one generation to let go its stranglehold on the
mores and behaviors of the next. Her first, highly
autobiographical, novel, Dusty Answer (1927),
takes its introspective heroine, Judith Earle, from
childhood to young adulthood, through university and first loves. Its singularity lies not so much
in taking a young girls consciousness as subject
but how that consciousness registers a distinctive
modernity. The Cambridge episodes, flirting with
lesbianism and premarital sex, prefigure campus
novels of mid-century, while the youthful cast
reflects the daring and spontaneity of life in the
aftermath of war.
The work was an immediate bestseller it had
freshness, originality, and shock value and
226
LEHMANN, ROSAMOND
Lehmann was acclaimed as a definitive, if controversial, contemporary voice. She produced six
more novels, each as stylistically innovative as
Dusty Answer, and on both sides of the Atlantic
she was rated one of the most important novelists
of the age. During World War II she wrote
masterly short stories for the literary journal, New
Writing, edited by her brother, John Lehmann,
and she was in constant demand as a broadcaster
and reviewer. Her work was translated into several
languages; in France especially her reputation
remained high, where, following their first publication, her books have never been out of print.
Dusty Answer was followed by the bleak A Note
in Music (1930), a thinly veiled account of the
misery of Lehmanns short-lived marriage to
Leslie Runciman, and her attraction to the painter, Wogan Phillips, who in 1928 became her
second husband. The themes of dislocation and
the isolated consciousness continued to haunt her
next two books, Invitation to the Waltz (1932) and
The Weather in the Streets (1936), which follow
the fortunes of Olivia Curtis, another self-portrait, over a decade. Taken together, with their
ironic subversion of nostalgia, they embody the
ambivalence of tone that became Lehmanns
trademark. The aristocratic Spencer family, romanticized in Invitation to the Waltz, is exposed
in the sequel as oppressive and hidebound, paralyzed by its own introversion. Yet Lehmanns
barbed satire is directed equally at the pretentiousness of artistic bohemianism she was on the
fringes of the Bloomsbury Group as at the selfprotective strategies of the upper class. An emancipated woman, Olivia is simultaneously liberated
and victimized by her independence; with tragic
irony, the realization of her adolescent fantasies
serves only to destroy her.
The tension between family and romantic desire, and the corrosive nature of thwarted love,
are most vividly captured in the two novels of
Lehmanns late maturity, The Ballad and the
Source (1944) and The Echoing Grove (1953). Both
are technically challenging in their use of multiple
narrators, and, in The Ballad and the Source, of
a Jamesian juvenile perspective on innocence and
adult intrigue. Lehmanns own passionate life
found expression in successive fictions, culminating in The Echoing Groves depiction of tortured
sisters and their love for the same man. Bound
by a shared past from whose memories they can
never escape, Madeleine and Dinah reflect something of the strain that dominated Lehmanns
relationships with her own siblings as well as the
fallout from her tempestuous affairs with the poet
Cecil Day Lewis and the writer Goronwy Rees.
The intensity of feeling is for many readers the
central theme of Lehmanns writing. Oh, the
torment of loving, cries Judith in Dusty Answer
(80): that sense of torment is at the heart of
Lehmanns fiction as her heroines continue to
pursue romance knowing that it will be their
downfall. Yet Lehmann is also an acute social
commentator. In particular her books, either
implicitly or explicitly, take war as a major subject, delineating its impact on civilian life and its
silent legacy in the form of a lost or maimed
generation whose attitude to existence is unalterably impaired.
Surprisingly, given her contemporary prestige
and the duration of her literary career, Lehmanns
published output is modest, and there were long
silences between her major novels. After the publication of The Echoing Grove she stopped writing
fiction seriously and although she produced a
memoir, The Swan in the Evening (1967) and
another novel, A Sea-Grape Tree (1976), neither
measures up to the achievement of her mature
writing. Her work fell into critical neglect, and she
remained virtually forgotten until republication
by the feminist press, Virago, in the 1980s, when
interest in the author underwent a remarkable
renaissance. Following Viragos lead, Penguin
reissued Dusty Answer and The Echoing Grove as
Modern Classics and, as sales figures rose, so
Lehmanns reputation was revitalized. Her work
was adapted for television and film, and she was
sought out for interviews. She died in 1990,
shortly before her ninetieth birthday.
SEE ALSO: Brookner, Anita (BIF); Edwardian
Fiction (BIF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
Bort, F., & Cachin, M.-F. (eds.) (2003). Rosamond
Lehmann et le metier decrivain. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de Marne-la-Vallee.
Brookner, A. (1990). Rosamond Lehmann. Spectator,
p. 20 (Mar. 17).
Chamberlain, J. (1927) [Review of Dusty Answer.]
New York Times Book Review, p. 3 (Dec. 4).
LEWIS, WYNDHAM
Dorosz, W. (1975) Subjective Vision and Human

Relationships in the Novels of Rosamond Lehmann.
Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.
Guppy, S. (1985). The Art of Fiction No. 88: Rosamond
Lehmann. Paris Review, 96, 16285. At www.
theparisreview.org/media/2894_LEHMANN2.pdf
accessed Mar. 4, 2010.
Hastings, S. (2002). Rosamond Lehmann: A Life.
Lehmann, R. (1927). Dusty Answer. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Lehmann, R. (1930). A Note in Music. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Lehmann, R. (1931). A Letter to a Sister. London:
Hogarth.
Lehmann, R. (1932). Invitation to the Waltz. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Lehmann, R. (1936). The Weather in the Streets.
London: Collins.
Lehmann, R. (1938). No More Music. Duke of Yorks
Theatre, London.
Lehmann, R. (1944). The Ballad and the Source.
London: Collins.
Lehmann, R. (1946). The Gypsys Baby and Other
Stories. London: Collins.
Lehmann, R. (1948). Genevieve (trans. J. Lemarchand).
London: John Lehmann.
Lehmann, R. (1953). The Echoing Grove. London:
Collins.
Lehmann, R. (1955). Children of the Game (trans.
J. Cocteau). London: Harvill. (Republished as The
Holy Terrors in 1957.)
Lehmann, R. (1956). A Hut, a Sea-Grape Tree.
In Winters Tales, vol. 2. London: Macmillan.
Lehmann, R. (1967). The Swan in the Evening:
Fragments of an Inner Life. London: Collins.
Lehmann, R. (1976). A Sea-Grape Tree. London:
Collins.
Lehmann, R. (1985). Rosamond Lehmanns Album.
Lehmann, R., & Beaton, C. (1941). Air of Glory: A
Wartime Scrapbook. London: Ministry of
Information.
Lehmann, R., & Pole, W. T. (1965). A Man Seen Afar.
London: Neville Spearman.
Lehmann, R., & Sandys, C. (1970). Letters from Our
Daughters. London: College of Psychic Studies.
Lehmann, R., & Sandys, C. (eds.) (1978). The
Awakening Letters. Jersey: Neville Spearman.
Lehmann, R., Day Lewis, C., & Roberts, D. K.
(1945). Orion, vol. 2. London: Nicholson and
Watson.
LeStourgeon, D. E. (1965). Rosamond Lehmann.
New York: Twayne.
Millar, G. (dir.) (1983). The Weather in the Streets.
Rediffusion Films.
227
OSullivan, T. (dir.) (2003). The Heart of Me. BBC

Films/Martin Pope.
Pollard, W. (2004). Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics:
The Vagaries of Literary Reception. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Siegel, R. (1990). Rosamond Lehmann: A Thirties Writer.
New York: Peter Lang.
Simons, J. (1992). Rosamond Lehmann. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Tindall, G. (1984). Rosamond Lehmann: An
Appreciation. London: Chatto and Windus.
Wallace, D. (2000). Sisters and Rivals in British Womens
Fiction, 191439. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Lewis, Wyndham
PAUL EDWARDS
Wyndham Lewis (18821957) wrote over 40

books including 14 fictional works. Others are
concerned with literature, art and aesthetics, and
cultural, political, and philosophical analysis. As
a painter he pioneered the form of geometrical
abstraction that characterized Vorticism and edited Blast (two issues, 1914 and 1915), publishing
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and
Rebecca West. Lewis was a major figure in British
art until blindness overtook him in 1951. His
portraits of James Joyce, Pound, and Eliot are
memorable and definitive. These fellow Men of
1914 regarded Lewis as their equal (sometimes
as a worthy antagonist), but the critical industry
around his work remains small.
Lewis is a rebarbative, muscular, and vivid
writer. His style is not transparent, but is itself
the material from which a grotesque fictional
world is created. This world recalls reality but is
an obvious simulacrum, which makes his work an
anticipation of postmodernism. Lewis dogmatically opposed modernist fictions concern with
the unconscious, with fleeting impressions and
deep psychology. It should concern itself rather
with the outside of things (and people), not
their interior (Lewis 1934). The redemptive
epiphanies of Joyce and Woolf were also too
cheaply bought, he thought. Add to this a
masculine scorn for sentimentality that sometimes seems to extend to emotion itself, and the
ingredients for a fatally confined fiction seem
complete. For some, that Lewis wrote in favor of
Hitler in 1931 (and is reputed to be a racist,
228
LEWIS, WYNDHAM
misogynist, and homophobe) confirms that the

humanistic nourishment that fiction supplies is
best sought elsewhere. For others, these factors
make Lewis worth studying as a representative of
fascist modernism. Neither reaction does justice to the values embedded in his fiction.
Lewis, whose tragic, absurdist philosophy anticipated Albert Camus, believed that the capacity
to understand and represent our condition is a
gift through which we may humanize ourselves (though equally we might use it to
dehumanize ourselves . . . still further: Lewis
1934, 289). Like other modernists he believed that
such humanization could and must be continued though artistic creation. Lewiss relentless,
sometimes withering, skepticism about the most
plausible and pretentious of affirmatives, either as
man or as thing (Lewis 1999 [1937], 247) masks
a passionate attempt to construct a reality that
reflects our potential as free human beings. The
problem was to strike a balance between the
destructive and creative aspects of his vision.
Trained at the Slade School of Art, Lewis began
his real education in Paris, where he moved in
1904. The decisive influences on his future fiction
were the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky. Since I was not
interested in problems of good or evil, I did not
read these books so much as sinister homilies as
monstrous character patterns, often of miraculous insight (Lewis 1950, 146). It was to the
exposition of such monstrous character
patterns in the activities of the peasants, fishermen, and innkeepers of Brittany (where he had
followed the Pont Aven painters in search of
authentic life) that Lewis devoted his first short
stories and literary sketches, published by Ford
in the English Review in 1909. Characters are
governed by fetishized mechanical routines
inferior religions (Lewis 1982, 147). The narrator elevated into a gloating connoisseur of
discomfiture in the revisions issued as The Wild
Body in 1927 registers and sometimes provokes
the upsetting of such routines. But he is himself
governed by an urge to fetishize normality into
grotesque, comic patterns. The sardonic extravagance of his prose seems motivated by the fear of
meaninglessness that it seeks to keep at bay.
Lewiss first novel, Tarr (1990 [1918] ), was
conceived as an extended exploration of similar
character patterns among an international cast of
art students in Paris. They believe they are living

authentically yet actually follow a script supplied
to them by nineteenth-century bohemianism.
But this was Lewiss life too, and real blood flows
through the characters veins, and is spilt, with
real pain, however much the semi-autobiographical Tarr would wish to deny it. The novel expanded and changed focus during six years of
composition (OKeeffe, in Lewis 1990), becoming
something of a testing ground for Lewiss Vorticist theories about art and life, internationalism
and the role of German romanticism in that
countrys military aggression in 1914. Otto Kreisler, a talentless German artist, is the character
most trapped in a routine his allowance suddenly terminated by his father but his struggles
to escape only confirm the romantic cliches that
confine him: a passionate affair (culminating in
rape), a duel, and eventual suicide. Tarr, Kreislers
more talented English counterpart, is equally
enmeshed in a tortuous love affair, but escapes,
partly by exalting Life into a Comedy, as Lewis
put it in a prologue. How this is to be interpreted
or evaluated remains one of the issues still open in
critical debate.
In the 1920s Lewis produced his large works of
cultural, political, and philosophical analysis, diagnosing the ideological weaknesses that had led
to war and thwarted revolutionary change (1926,
1927). Two major works of fiction transposed
and reflected on these critiques: The Childermass:
Section 1 (1928a) and The Apes of God (1930). The
Childermass is Lewiss most obscure and difficult
work, a fantastic novel set in an encampment in
the Afterworld, where the dead await judgment
and entry into the Magnetic City. Pullman and
Satters, respectively an intellectual and a naf
(embodying covert satirical commentaries on
Joyce and Gertrude Stein) undergo transformations in this unstable no mans land, then witness
the proceedings at the court of the Bailiff (an
amalgam of music hall entertainer and Mussolini)
as he selects those appellants with identities sufficiently stable for admission to the city. The Bailiff
is opposed by a rebellious faction led by Hyperides, who deploy philosophical and political arguments similar to Lewiss own. Innocents are killed,
but the narrative breaks off before any resolution
or real action and was not resumed until the 1950s,
when Lewis was commissioned by the BBC to
complete the work for radio dramatization.
LEWIS, WYNDHAM
The Apes of God is Lewiss most devastating and

unalloyed satire, set in London during the weeks
leading up to the 1926 General Strike, and
caricaturing many of Lewiss associates and patrons, most notably the Sitwell family. The apes
are wealthy amateur artists, imitators of the
godlike true artist (none appears in the novel).
Lewis takes his elaborate verbal masquerade to its
most extreme point of threatening emptiness in
this book, which accordingly has an ambiguous
reputation as his most important or most
unreadable.
From the 1930s on, Lewis wrote for the common reader. Snooty Baronet (1932) is a comically
heartless tale of a publicity stunt in Persia, intended to boost the sales of the narrators behaviorist books. Sir Michael Kell-Imrie, the maimed
war-veteran narrator, is, it becomes clear, a psychopath. He casually shoots his agent as Persian
bandits approach to perform the arranged kidnap. This apparently empty novel is one of Lewiss
best, a subtle reflection on the effects of war. The
Revenge for Love (1937) is an unsparing exposure
of the nothing in wait beneath the surface of life,
threatening to engulf his characters. Margot and
Victor are ordinary people caught up in communist and criminal machinations in the run-up to
the Spanish Civil War. The novel has, as Lewis
claimed, a metaphysical kernel, but it is the
actions of careless people that are responsible for
the tragic deaths of Margot and Victor. Margots
love is the realest thing in the world the novel
depicts an unprecedented revelation of the
humanism that lay concealed behind the harsh
surfaces of Lewiss fiction.
In 1939, his political reputation under a cloud
despite his retraction of sympathy for fascism,
Lewis went with his wife to North America, where
they spent the war years in some hardship. The
Vulgar Streak (1941) reads as an underpowered
predecessor of Self Condemned (1954), since both
depict masculine men who effectively destroy
themselves through undervaluing women who
love them. Self Condemned tells a story of tragic
hubris modeled on Lewiss own; the academic
historian Rene Harding resigns and emigrates
to Canada and hotel-bound poverty. The sheer
accumulation of detail of everyday life and
companionship with the wife he had taken for
granted gives this novel a new power. The hotel
burns down, becoming an empty cave of ice, and
229
Harding also becomes a hollow shell after his wife,

appalled at his increasing compromises, throws
herself under a truck. Lewis was by now blind, his
optic nerve and brain under attack from a pituitary tumor. Self Condemned transposes his fading
of consciousness to the whole project of Enlightenment in wartime, under threat of nuclear
annihilation.
His last major work continued The Childermass
in Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta as the retitled
The Human Age (1955). Pullman now has as
much of Lewis himself in him as of Joyce. Lewis
was now definitely interested in the problem of
good and evil, and the books follow Pullmans
progress, first under the protection of the Bailiff in
Third City (Purgatory) and then in Hell, where
he advises Sammael (Satan) himself. Pullman acts
throughout in accordance with what seem to him
to be expedient but enlightened attitudes in difficult times: Gods representative, an ineffectual
angel known as the Padishah, seems simply not
interested enough in imperfect man to bother
over what happens to Pullman as the great cosmic
power blocs clash. Sammael on the other hand
has an apparently idealistic plan to democratize
the divine, and Pullman is able to outdo him in
ingenious methods of persuading the rebel angels
to surrender divinity and enter a Human Age. The
main point is clear. The political and intellectual
compromises of intellectuals and artists in the
twentieth century whether with the left or
the right have led them to betray what should
be their deepest commitment, to truth and to the
divine. A final volume (The Trial of Man), in
which Pullman (no doubt still accompanied by
the childish Satters) would be judged, forgiven by
God, and assimilated to Heaven, remained unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, at Lewiss death.
Ford, Ford Madox (BIF); The Little Magazines
(AF); London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); West,
Rebecca (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
Beasley, R. (2007). Wyndham Lewis and Modernist
Satire. In M. Shiach (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge
230
LIVELY, PENELOPE
Edwards, P. (2000). Wyndham Lewis: Painter and

Writer. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gasiorek, A. (2004). Wyndham Lewis and Modernism.
Tavistock: Northcote House.
Humphreys, R. (2004). Wyndham Lewis. London:
Tate.
Jaime, C. C. (ed.) (2007). Wyndham Lewis the
Radical: Essays on Literature and Modernity.
Berne: Peter Lang.
Jameson, F. (1979). Fables of Aggression: Wyndham
Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Kenner, H. (1954). Wyndham Lewis. London:
Methuen.
Klein, S. (1994). The Fictions of James Joyce and
Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design.
Lewis, W. (1926). The Art of Being Ruled. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Lewis, W. (1927). Time and Western Man. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Lewis, W. (1928a). The Childermass: Section 1. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Lewis, W. (1928b). Tarr, rev. edn. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Lewis, W. (1930). The Apes of God. London: Arthur
Press.
Lewis, W. (1932). Snooty Baronet. London: Cassell.
Lewis, W. (1934). Men without Art. London: Cassell.
Lewis, W. (1991). The Revenge for Love [1937] (ed. R. W.
Dasenbrock). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow.
Lewis, W. (1941). The Vulgar Streak. London:
Robert Hale.
Lewis, W. (1950). Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My
Career Up to Date. London: Hutchinson.
Lewis, W. (1954). Self Condemned. London: Methuen.
Lewis, W. (1955). The Human Age, book 2: Monstre Gai;
book 3: Malign Fiesta. London: Methuen.
Lewis, W. (1982). The Complete Wild Body
(ed. B. Lafourcade). Santa Barbara, CA: Black
Sparrow. (Original contents published 190935.)
Lewis, W. (1990). Tarr: The 1918 version [1918]
(ed. P. OKeeffe). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow.
Perrino, M. (1995). The Poetics of Mockery: Wyndham
Lewiss The Apes of God and The Popularization of
Modernism. London: Modern Humanities Research
Association.
Lively, Penelope
ALISTAIR DAVIES
In a long and prolific literary career (she has

written over more than 40 works for adults and
children), Penelope Lively has excelled in a number of genres: the ghost story, the romance, the
historical novel, even science fiction. Her work for
adults has been marked by a consistent spirit of
experiment subtle enough to win the admiration
of critics while never alienating a wider readership. Absorbing modernist and postmodernist
modes, she is predominantly a realist writer
whose work, both for children and for adults,
questions our experience of time, memory, and
history and challenges the codes and expectations
of the real.
From the publication of her first novel for
children, Astercote (1970), Lively has enjoyed
considerable recognition and success. Her fifth
novel for children, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe
(1973), won the Carnegie Medal while her ninth,
A Stitch in Time (1976c), won the Whitbread
Prize. Her first collection of short stories, Nothing
Missing but the Samovar (1978a), won the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Her first novel for
adults, The Road to Lichfield (1977), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as was According to
Mark (1984a). She won the Booker Prize in 1987
for Moon Tiger, the deathbed reflections on her
own life and on the life of the twentieth century of
an English writer, for whom history is a shifting
kaleidoscope, without one defining perspective.
The novel focuses on a consistent theme of
Livelys work: the individuals drive for narrative
order and the need to accept the inherent dangers
and limitations of this drive.
Lively is a child of the British Empire and an
adult of its decline. Born in Egypt in 1933 (her
father worked for a bank), she enjoyed, as she
recounts in the first volume of her vivid, selfreflective memoirs, Oleander, Jacaranda (1994),
the privileged life of a colonial family. What she
retains from that period (the subtitle of her
memoir is A Childhood Perceived) is the childs
sense of the strangeness of things when they were
unfettered by the codes of English culture and of
English class. The most memorable characters in
her fiction for children and for adults are those
who exemplify or retain the primordial strangeness of childhood perception and who resist
containing experience and events within the neat
structures of narrative or explanation.
The world of colonial privilege ended with the
divorce of her parents in 1945 and with her
repatriation to England, even if the world of
LIVELY, PENELOPE
privilege did not. Educated at a private school and

at Oxford (where she studied modern history),
she found security in the upper-class world of her
maternal grandmother and her large house in
Somerset, powerfully evoked in the second volume of her memoirs, A House Unlocked (2001).
Prewar Egypt and postwar Somerset are recurrent
places in her writing, the one representing a
vanished world, the other a vanishing one. Given
the impact of World War II on her own life and on
the confident imperial world in which she grew
up, it is not surprising that World War II haunts
her work as the decisive event in the lives of many
of her characters and of their culture; but it is the
lives of middle- and upper-middle-class women,
as these changed in the wake of the political,
social, and sexual transformations of the postwar
period, that always take center stage.
From the beginning (in her fiction for children
and for adults), her work has focused on the
displacement felt by her characters not just in
time but in space, reflecting a modern world
where older structures have disappeared or are
disappearing, where change and transformation
are constant but where the present is always
haunted by a profound awareness of the past.
More recently, as in her novels The Photograph
(2003) and Consequences (2007) and her antimemoir Making It Up (2005), she has explored
the question of choices made and of imagined
alternative lives, but these works continue a
preoccupation at the heart of her work: the dual
roles of circumstances and of chance in shaping
lives.
Fiction (BIF); Colonial Fiction (BIF);
Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction
Jolly, M. (2000). After Feminism: Pat Barker, Penelope
Lively and the Contemporary Novel. In A. Davies &
A. Sinfield (eds.), British Culture of the Postwar.
London: Routledge, pp. 5882.
Lively, P. (1970). Astercote. London: Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1971a). The Whispering Knights. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1971b). The Wild Hunt of Hagworth. London:
Heinemann.
231
Lively, P. (1972). The Driftway. London:

Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1973). The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1974). The House in Norham Gardens.
London: Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1975a). Boy without a Name. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1975b). Going Back. London: Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1976a). Fannys Sister. London: Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1976b). The Presence of the Past: An
Introduction to Landscape History. London: Collins.
Lively, P. (1976c). A Stitch in Time. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1977). The Road to Lichfield. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1978a). Nothing Missing but the Samovar.
London: Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1978b). The Voyage of QV 66. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1979). Treasures of Time. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1981). The Revenge of Samuel Stokes. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1982). Next to Nature, Art. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1983). Perfect Happiness. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1984a). According to Mark. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1984b). Dragon Trouble. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1986). Pack of Cards: Collected Short Stories
19781986. London: Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1987a). Debbie and the Little Devil. London:
Heinemann.
Lively, P. (1987b). A House Inside Out. London:
Deutsch.
Lively, P. (1987c). Moon Tiger. London: Deutsch.
Lively, P. (1989). Passing On. London: Deutsch.
Lively, P. (1991). City of the Mind. London: Deutsch.
Lively, P. (1993). Cleopatras Sister. New York:
Viking.
Lively, P. (1994). Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood
Perceived. New York: Viking.
Lively, P. (1996). Heat Wave. New York: Viking.
Lively, P. (1998). Spiderweb. New York: Viking.
Lively, P. (2001). A House Unlocked. New York: Viking.
Lively, P. (2003). The Photograph. New York: Viking.
Lively, P. (2005). Making It Up. New York: Viking.
Lively, P. (2007). Consequences. New York: Viking.
Moran, M. H. (1997). The Novels of Penelope Lively: A
Case for the Continuity of the Experimental Impulse
in Postwar British Fiction. South Atlantic Review,
62(1), 101120.
232
LONDON IN FICTION
London in Fiction
WINNIE CHAN
Its fabled landmarks might be easily located in the

familiar AZ atlas, but London as portrayed in
twentieth-century fiction is a place of myth. Historic yet constantly changing, cosmopolitan yet
stolidly English, the city is incomprehensible, a
universal microcosm that has seized the imagination of just about every novelist in Britain, not
to mention its far-flung former colonies. These
writers have made London the setting, if not the
subject, of their diverse fictions, which depict
so many Londons that they defy description. Yet
in them the city is somehow always instantly
recognizable.
At the turn of the twentieth century, writers in
the worlds most populous city inherited a grim,
grimy London popularized in fiction by Charles
Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, home to not
only Dr. Jekyll, but also Mr. Hyde. This London
endures, for example, in the dirt, the discouragement, the discomfort of H. G. Wellss TonoBungay (1909, 81) and the hell of noise and dust
and dirt of Arnold Bennetts Riceyman Steps
(1923, 8). Well into the twentieth century, the
picaresque adventures of tramps in George
Orwells Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933) could have made themselves at home in
Henry Mayhews quintessentially Victorian expose of London Labour and the London Poor (1985
[1851] ). Even as its landmarks were being razed
to make way for new ones, such as Underground
Tube stations, an essentially Victorian London
persisted in fiction and, apparently, fact. This
stubbornly Victorian character associated with
industrial progress, imperial confidence, middleclass solidity, and English parochialism seems
to have resisted the advancement of modernism
into London.
Modernism was a largely urban sensibility,
since polyglot cities attract artists and intellectuals, and London had been a polyglot city since it
was known as Londinium in the Roman Empire,
if not earlier. During the nineteenth century,
Londons population sextupled to over six million, primarily through migration from the countryside and the northern cities, as well as the rest of
the world. Yet if Paris was modernisms capital,
then London was often regarded as its anti-capital, at least until human character changed,
according to Virginia Woolfs celebrated recollection, on or about December 1910 (1924, 4).
On or about that date, the London of modernist fiction began to resemble the fragmentary,
illogical Unreal City of T. S. Eliots The Waste
Land (1971 [1922] ), the poem that would become
the anthem of its generation. Joseph Conrads
The Secret Agent (1907) exemplifies this sensibility. A violent mashup of Victorian content in
modernist form, the novel fictionalizes a historically factual non-event a botched anarchist
bomb plot on the Greenwich Royal Observatory
in 1894 and peoples the familiar detective plot
with grotesquely Dickensian caricatures; however, the narrations caustically detached irony
erodes any coherence that might have survived
the chapters non-linear plotting. As the anarchists plot to explode a landmark that dictates
time, the novels plotting explodes conventions of
time, while its apprehension of London as a
maddening profusion of circles, triangles, and
squares transforms the urban space into the unreadable text it always was.
The subtler distortions of London in Virginia
Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway (1925) manipulate the
citys familiar geography to map not only space
and time, but also, above all, its characters subjectivities. Throughout a single day, characters
paths intersect as they travel about the city by foot
and tram, their journeys taking them from Deans
Yard to Oxford Street, from Whitehall to Regents
Park, from the present into the past and back.
As the novels eponym prepares for a dinner party,
she contemplates her marriage and a former
suitor, while the patient of one of her guests, a
shell-shocked veteran of the Great War whose
vividly tormenting perceptions are merely echoed
by hers, is so overwhelmed by the past that he kills
himself before dinner-time. Moreover, as numerous commentators have remarked, the journeys
traced by Mrs. Dalloway are impossible to complete in the time given.
For all its remarkable innovation, Woolfs
stream-of-consciousness technique was pioneered a decade earlier, in the 13 book-length
chapters of Dorothy Richardsons semiautobiographical Pilgrimage (191569). Richardson
disliked the term stream of consciousness, but
The Tunnel (1919), the novels fourth chapter,
depicts in conspicuously minute and unmediated
detail the protagonists first impressions of the
LONDON IN FICTION
city in the 1890s, thus suggesting modern London

as a site of unprecedented possibility for narrating
streams of consciousness. If modernist experimentation in fiction reoriented time and space,
then London was an irresistible subject of and
stimulus to such innovation.
The epicenter of Anglophone modernism
shifted to New York and Chicago as World War
II advanced onto British shores. The Blitz, intended to bomb Britain into submission, would
destroy towns large and small; it began on September 7, 1940 with 57 consecutive nights of air
raids on London, and resumed with unmanned
V1 bombs and V2 rockets in the Little Blitz of
19445. Windows were blacked out, streetlights
extinguished. Half of the over 60,000 civilians
killed were Londoners. Long since revised in
public memory as the finest hour of a heroic
people resisting evil, this time of darkness and
silence, punctuated by bombs and anti-aircraft
fire, produced morally ambivalent fictions set in
a city driven literally underground. Written as
they were on a diet of rations, against a backdrop
of bomb-pocked ruins, under nightly threat of
devastation, these anxious fictions depict a London and by extension, a nation in decline.
While wartime propaganda celebrated the Underground as a symbol of Londoners steadfast,
good-humored resistance against Hitler, wartime
fiction preserved a much more ambivalent portrait of this subterranean landscape, a site of
doubt and dread far removed from the moral
certainty of a righteous war. (Resurrecting Blitzera Tube stations, novels by writers born after the
war, including Graham Swifts Shuttlecock, 1981,
and Ian McEwans Atonement, 2001, have more
recently challenged the heroic legend.) As both a
propagandist for Britains Ministry of Information and an air-raid warden in London, Elizabeth
Bowen observed the ravages of the Blitz firsthand.
Yet in The Heat of the Day, written and set during
the war, the Blitz is obliquely depicted, though
intensely perceived, by the protagonist through
the non-existence of her window (1948, 93),
among other absences that renew the city daily.
Likewise, Bowens oft-anthologized story, The
Demon Lover (1945), suggests the trauma induced by the Blitz through its protagonists confusion of World War II with World War I.
By contrast, the Blitz propels the convoluted
plot of Graham Greenes thriller, The Ministry of
233
Fear (1943), whose protagonist eludes a would-be

assassin by navigating tube stations and bomb
shelters beneath the city and its maze of constantly
changing ruins above. Both this novel and
Bowens ironically contrast London with the
countryside, which, though physically untouched
by the Blitz, manifests corruption by it in illusory
pastoral. As the Blitz distorts space, so does it
distort time: despite their significant differences,
neither Greenes entertainment nor Bowens
impressionist narrative proceeds chronologically,
their fragmentary flashbacks emphasizing the
impossibility of return to a prewar past. Also,
both protagonists become entangled in love triangles that involve spies and thus transcend romantic infidelity. Since London figures among the
more heavily traveled regions of Greeneland,
Greene unsurprisingly revisits the theme of wartime infidelity in London with The End of the
Affair (1951).
Critics tend to dismiss wartime fiction as artistically uninteresting, but these snapshots of
Blitz London innovatively appropriate modernist
techniques to map a dynamically unfamiliar terrain that the modernists could perhaps not have
imagined, prompting moral reflection through
devastations of time and place, reflecting anxieties
that continued to reverberate decades after the
war. The Girls of Slender Means (1963), drawn
from Muriel Sparks own wartime experiences
in a womens shelter, typifies her compact black
humor. Set between VE Day and VJ Day from
May to August 1945, the plot climaxes as a V1
bomb explodes in the garden, trapping the girls
within. The plump, pious Joanna perishes after
the slender, mean Selina escapes through a window, returning to rescue not one of her housemates, but a designer frock that wartime rationing
had compelled her to share for candy coupons
and soap. Yet the fate of good and evil does not
affirm worldly injustice so much as it stimulates
moral reflection, effecting the religious conversion of the novels anarchic protagonist.
As the Cold War deepened, such reflections
turned to fantasy in the dystopic Londons of
George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and
Anthony Burgesss A Clockwork Orange (1962).
Where Orwells London is under constant surveillance by Big Brother, Burgesss London is
lawless and impersonal, breeding the extravagant
violence that befits a society in decline. Set in the
234
LONDON IN FICTION
near future, both novels depict societies whose

decline is vividly implied through violence to the
language. In Orwells novel, Newspeak, the only
language in the world whose vocabulary gets
smaller every year (55), officially extinguishes
Oldspeak, which readers would recognize as
English. By contrast, the sociopathic teenage
droogs of Burgesss novel communicate in
nadsat, which grafts onto English Cockney and
American slang, in addition to Russian, the language of the dominant culture. Likewise, the
Britain of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been reduced
to Airstrip One, a province of Oceania, which
consolidates Britains disintegrating Empire with
the ascendant Americas. Closer to this dystopic
future, Burgesss 1985 (1978) confirms Orwells
conclusions, but trade unions and militant
Muslims, rather than totalitarianism, threaten to
crush freedom and individuality.
After World War II, the Empire on which the
sun had once never set disintegrated, beginning
in 1947 with the independence and partition of
India and ending, thus far, in 1997 with the
cession of Hong Kong to China. In that 50-year
span, migrants from the Empires far-flung possessions principally the Caribbean, which was
nearest, and South Asia established a presence
for black British writing before long. Like migrants from the countryside and the North in
earlier fictions, these conspicuously foreign immigrants arrive in the imperial capital seeking
their fortunes, only to suffer disillusionment
when the colonial myths of civilized behavior
and fair play elude them. These fictions also tend
to depict crises of identity and processes of selfcreation as these new Londoners transform and
are transformed by the city.
The most ethnically diverse city in Europe,
London had long attracted migrants from around
the world, but the British Nationality Act of 1948
extended citizenship to those born in the colonies,
prompting mass migration that visibly changed
the citys complexion, to the great alarm of nativists who feared what the Jamaican performance
poet Louise Bennett has memorably satirized as
colonizin Englan in reverse (1983, 1067). Most
of these rights were revoked by the British Nationality Act of 1981, but colonization in reverse
could not be reversed. According to the 2001
census, 30 percent of the minority population in
England and Wales called London home: while
only about 2 percent of Britons claimed African

ancestry, for example, over 10 percent of Londoners did. As a familiar sign of protest declared,
We are here, because you were there.
Fiction abundantly documents this transformation of London. Among the earliest examples,
Colin MacInness London Novels explore the
citys emerging subcultures and racist reactions to
them: an African student narrates half of City of
Spades (1957), but Absolute Beginners (1959)
more notably dramatizes, almost in real time, the
racially charged Notting Hill riots that exploded
in September 1958. MacInnes was an Australian
writing about London, where Caribbean writers
had already begun to establish a voice, not least
through novels that depict migrant experience.
The most influential of these is Samuel Selvons
The Lonely Londoners (1956), a slim novel narrated in a pan-Caribbean, broken English spoken
nowhere in the Caribbean, but constructed specifically to seem Caribbean to English readers. Just
as Selvon reinvents the English language, so his
characters remap the unreal city: Bayswater, Notting Hill Gate, and Marble Arch become the
Water, the Gate, and the Arch. However,
the novels title makes a foregone conclusion of
the migrants failure to integrate.
Later migrant novels focus on self-creation,
a process often achieved through writing. V. S.
Naipaul, like Selvon a native of Trinidad, set in
London two novels about writers. The Enigma of
Arrival (1987) is more straightforwardly autobiographical than The Mimic Men (1967), a novel
notable for the claustrophobic descriptions of
its unreliable narrator, an exiled politician who
struggles to begin his memoir in a multi-mirrored, book-shaped room with a coffin-like
wardrobe (5) in Kensington High Street, a description that emphasizes the relationship of the
setting to the migrants subjectivity. In Buchi
Emechetas considerably less astringent SecondClass Citizen (1974), a perennially pregnant Ibuza
woman travels from Nigeria to join her husband,
an incompetent law student in London. Amid
gritty north London settings, she overcomes the
obstacles of gender (imposed by her philandering
husband), race (imposed by the majority English), and ethnicity (imposed by the West Indian
immigrants who had preceded her) in order to
create her brainchild, a novel that portrays
African experiences in English because She could
LONDON IN FICTION
not write in any African language, so it must be

English although English was not her mother
tongue (166). By the time her husband discovers
and burns her manuscript, she is ready to leave
him, having written her way to selfhood, at once
disillusioned and empowered by what the demystified imperial metropolis nonetheless makes
possible.
Despite these radical changes to Londons population, its numbers stagnated between six and
seven million from 1900 to 2000. In the same
time, Greater London doubled in area, absorbing
its suburbs. Orwells Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936) participated in a tradition satirizing the
anxieties of coarse but socially aspirant suburban
dwellers. In The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Hanif
Kureishi revises this tradition in the adventures of
a funny kind of Englishman (3), the adolescent
son of a Pakistani immigrant and a lower-middleclass Englishwoman, who confronts his identity
through sex, drugs, and theater in London. As the
Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall observes, race is the modality in which class is lived
in Britain (Hall et al. 1978).
Reflecting the changing face of Cool Britannia,
these post-imperial migrants and their descendants have also been revitalizing Anglophone
fiction. However, these exotic recent fixtures
of the Queens Honours List and shortlists for
Britains glitziest literary prizes warn that, even in
London, Britain is no Happy Multicultural
Land, in the mocking phrase of Zadie Smiths
White Teeth (2000, 384). As satirized in that novel
and Kureishis The Black Album (1995), The
Satanic Verses became notorious for blasphemy
against Islam and the bounty on its authors head,
but Salman Rushdies love-song to our mongrel
selves (1991, 394) exposed the rifts among
Britains marginalized communities. One of its
protagonists gives up the dream of Ellowen
Deeowen he had cherished as a child half a world
away when he discovers in L-O-N-D-O-N that
immigrants constitute a city visible but unseen.
He remembers, however, that William the Conqueror was an immigrant too.
Lacking the illusory cohesion of Victorian
London, much late twentieth-century fiction
about the city is haunted by its fictional past. For
good reason does the climactic scene of The
Satanic Verses occur on the set of a movie adapted
from a musical adapted from Dickenss Our
235
Mutual Friend. Alan Moores graphic novels resurrect the sordid fascination of late Victorian
London. The From Hell series (19916) revisits
the adventures of Jack the Ripper, while The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999 ) assembles legendary late Victorian Londoners from
Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible
Man, and The Picture of Dorian Gray to face off
against Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril that emanated from Limehouse in Sax Rohmers fabulously pulpy novels (191373). Less speculatively,
the city is a historical palimpsest in Edward
Rutherfurds sprawling London (1998), whose
two families impose linear, chronological order
on the city from pre-Roman times to the eve of
the twenty-first century. Enacting its own versions
of Masterpiece Theater, fiction about contemporary London narrates its present by reckoning
with Londons past. As the epigraph to White
Teeth, Zadie Smiths millennial blockbuster,
puts it, paraphrasing Shakespeare while cryptically crediting the National Archives as merely a
Washington, DC, museum: The past is
prologue.
As the millennium approached, notable novels
set in the city looked elegiacally to its past. The
pastoral title of London Fields (1989), regarded as
the masterpiece of Martin Amis, whose satirical
novels inevitably find their way back to London,
evokes elegy despite its multiple endings and
apocalyptic setting in 1999. Jeanette Wintersons
Sexing the Cherry (1989) is set in a magic realist
London that warps in and out of the seventeenthcentury English Revolution, while the novels
jacket avers that Winterson herself does not live
in London.
Amid this abundance of self-reflexive, formally
adventurous fiction, Londons most devoted
chroniclers have been Peter Ackroyd and Iain
Sinclair. Biographer of Shakespeare, Blake, Eliot,
and London itself his cultural history, London:
The Biography (2000), figures the city as a person
and traces its life from the earliest records to the
shiny millennial developments at Canary Wharf
and the Millennium Dome Ackroyd writes
about a blue plaque London of great men and
grand themes. Of Hawksmoor (1985), generally
regarded as his finest work, a novel involving a
real-life student of the legendary architect Christopher Wren, Ackroyd confessed to the New York
Times: Im not sure whether its a historical novel
236
LONDON IN FICTION
set in the present or a contemporary novel set in

the past (Kolbert 1996). As Ackroyds biographies of Londoners and novels about Londons
past blend fact and fiction, so the work of Iain
Sinclair resists generic classification. But Sinclair
focuses on minutiae about East London rather
than the city at large. His earliest experimental
fictions, such as White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
(1987) and Downriver (1991), resuscitate the
areas drowned voices (Atkins & Sinclair
1999, 128). While Ackroyd credits Sinclairs Lud
Heat (1975) with inspiring Hawksmoor, Sinclair
declares Ackroyd to be one of the monuments of
London in his volume of illustrated essays, Liquid
City (1999).
Perhaps appropriately, these complementary
writers fictions about London destabilize the idea
of fiction. Yet they do not destabilize the idea of
London. Since Chaucers pilgrims left for Canterbury from a Southwark inn, London has supplied
the impetus for storytelling. With the citys rich
history continually enriched by newcomers, the
storytelling shows no sign of abating.
SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); The City
in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (BIF);
Modernist Fiction (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of
the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction
of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF);
Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction

Ackroyd, P. (1985). Hawskmoor. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Ackroyd, P. (2000). London: The Biography. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Amis, M. (1989). London Fields. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Atkins, M., & Sinclair, I. (1999). Liquid City. London:
Reaktion.
Bennett, A. (1923). Riceyman Steps. London: Cassell.
Bennett, L. (1983). Colonization in Reverse. In Selected
Poems. Kingston, Jamaica: Sangsters.
Bowen, E. (1945). The Demon Lover. In The
Demon Lover and Other Stories. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Jonathan Cape.
Bradbury, M. (1991). London 18901920 [1976].

In Modernism: A Guide to European Literature
18901930. London: Penguin.
Burgess, A. (1962). A Clockwork Orange. London:
Heinemann.
Burgess, A. (1989). 1985. London: Arrow.
Eliot, T. S. (1971). The Waste Land [1922]. In T. S. Eliot:
The Waste Land: A Facsmile and Transcript of the
Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra
Pound (ed. V. Eliot). Orlando, FL: Harcourt.
Emecheta, B. (1974). Second-Class Citizen. London:
Allison and Busby.
Heinemann.
Greene, G. (1951). The End of the Affair. London:
Heinemann.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts,
B. (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and
Law and Order. London: Macmillan.
Kolbert, E. (1996). Wandering through History.
New York Times, p. 3 (Jan. 19).
Faber and Faber.
Kureishi, H. (1995). The Black Album. London:
Faber and Faber.
MacInnes, C. (1957). City of Spades. London:
MacGibbon and Kee.
MacInnes, C. (1959). Absolute Beginners. London:
MacGibbon and Kee.
Mayhew, H. (1985). London Labour and the London
Poor [1851]. London: Penguin.
McEwan, I. (2001). Atonement. London:
Jonathan Cape.
McLeod, J. (2004). Postcolonial London: Rewriting the
Metropolis. London: Routledge.
Moore, A., & Campbell, E. (19916). From Hell.
Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink.
Moore, A., & ONeill, K. (19992008). The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen. La Jolla, CA: Americas
Best Comics.
Murray, A. (2007). Recalling London: Literature and
History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair.
London: Continuum.
Naipaul, V. S. (1967). The Mimic Men. London:
Deutsch.
Naipaul, V. S. (1987). The Enigma of Arrival. London:
Viking.
Office of National Statistics. Census;1; 2001
Commentaries Ethnicity and Religion. At www.
statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/commentaries/
ethnicity.asp, accessed May 24, 2008.
Orwell, G. (1933). Down and Out in Paris and London.
London: Gollancz.
Orwell, G. (1936). Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London:
Gollancz.
LOWRY, MALCOLM
Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London:

Secker and Warburg.
Phillips, L. (2006). London Narratives: Post-War Fiction
and the City. London: Continuum.
Richardson, D. (1919). The Tunnel. London:
Duckworth.
Rohmer, S. (1913). The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
London: Methuen.
Rushdie, S. (1988). The Satanic Verses. London: Viking.
Rushdie, S. (1991). In Good Faith. In Imaginary
Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 19811991.
London: Granta.
Rutherfurd, E. [Wintle, F.] (1998). London: The Novel.
London: Crown.
Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London:
Allan Wingate.
Sinclair, I. (1987). White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.
London: Goldmark.
Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Spark, M. (1963). The Girls of Slender Means.
London: Macmillan.
Swift, G. (1981). Shuttlecock. London: Picador.
Wells, H. G. (1909). Tono-Bungay. London: Macmillan.
Bloomsbury.
Woolf, V. (1924). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.
London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Lowry, Malcolm
PATRICK A. McCARTHY
Malcolm Lowry (born July 28, 1909) was the

youngest son of Arthur O. Lowry, a cotton broker,
and his pious wife Evelyn. Raised in the Wirral
town of Caldy, he was then sent to the Caldicott
School and the Leys School, where he wrote
stories under the pseudonym CAMEL, for Clarence Malcolm Lowry (he despised the name
Clarence and soon abandoned it). In 1927, aged
17, he secured his fathers permission to sail to the
Far East and back as a deckhand on a freighter,
the SS Pyrrhus, before entering Cambridge. The
experience proved far less romantic than he expected, but he nonetheless mined it for the first of
his many autobiographical fictions, Ultramarine
(1933), whose protagonist Eugene Dana Hilliott is
resented by much of the ships crew but eventually
earns their respect by joining the firemen who
stoke the ships furnaces. Ultramarine draws not
237
only on Lowrys own experience but also on two

other sea voyage novels that he read while at
Cambridge: Conrad Aikens Blue Voyage, which
influenced his handling of dialogue and perspective, and Nordahl Griegs The Ship Sails On, with
whose protagonist and author Lowry identified
himself. He also met both writers, arranging for
Aiken to serve as his tutor (and father figure)
during summer 1929 and later traveling to Oslo
to meet Grieg.
In 1933, on vacation in Spain, Lowry met
Janine Vanderheim, a young American woman
who had adopted the name Jan Gabrial. They
married in Paris in January 1934, soon separated,
and reunited in New York that August. Meanwhile, Lowry worked on another autobiographical novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, about a
young man (Lowry) who tries to write a novel
(Ultramarine) but becomes obsessed with the
influence on his work of another novel (The Ship
Sails On) by a Norwegian novelist, Erikson
(Grieg). Lowrys subject was the dilemma of a
writer who has trouble establishing an identity of
his own, but In Ballast apparently ended happily,
its protagonist having worked out his relationship
to his literary precursor. But in 1935, when Lowrys American agent Harold Matson sent In Ballast to Burton Rascoe, an editor at Doubleday,
and enclosed a copy of Ultramarine to show that
Lowry was already a published writer, Rascoe
claimed (falsely) that Ultramarine was almost
entirely plagiarized from a story he had published
and that In Ballast was lifted from other sources.
Facing precisely the charge that he was attempting
to explore and overcome in his new novel, that he
was entirely a derivative writer, Lowry considered
suicide. A year later, depressed and unable to
control his drinking, he checked himself into the
psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, not only
because he needed help but also, he said, to do
research for a story. Rescued by Jan, he wrote a
rather powerful novella, based on his Bellevue
experience, entitled The Last Address, later revising it as Swinging the Maelstrom. Neither was
ever published, but after his death an amalgam
of the two appeared under the title Lunar
Caustic (1968b).
In October 1936 the Lowrys again changed
locale, traveling to Mexico for an extended stay.
There he began Under the Volcano (1947), a novel
set in Mexico that he spent the next decade writing
238
LOWRY, MALCOLM
and rewriting. The germ of the book, Lowry said,

was a bus ride like the one in chapter 8 that is
interrupted by the discovery, by the side of the
road, of a dying Indian whom no one can help
without risking liability for his death. At its center
is the figure of Geoffrey Firmin the Consul
an alcoholic whose life is simultaneously tragic
and comic and who writes a beautiful, heartrending letter, pleading with his ex-wife Yvonne to
return to him, yet is fully aware, even as he writes,
that he cannot post it. Strangely appealing, utterly
absurd, yet at times quite noble, the Consul is one
of the great protagonists of modern fiction.
As he began writing the story of the Consuls
doomed reunion with Yvonne, however, Lowrys
own marriage fell apart. Jan left him in December
1937 and moved to Los Angeles; he stayed in
Mexico until July 1938, then followed her, but
despite attempts at reconciliation the bond was
broken. After nearly a year in California he met
Margerie Bonner, a former film actress, and fell in
love with her; he soon moved to Vancouver,
where he was joined by Margerie. In December
1940, a month after his divorce from Jan became
final, he and Margerie were married. Well before
then, however, she had become the sustaining
force in his life: a woman who believed in his
genius and was willing to devote herself to him
and his writing.
When it was finally published in 1947, Under
the Volcano seemed to confirm Margeries faith.
It is a major literary achievement, a densely
textured, symbolic epic that, Lowry claimed in
a letter of January 1946 to Jonathan Cape, was so
designed, counterdesigned and interwelded that it
could be read an indefinite number of times and
still not have yielded all its meanings or its drama
or its poetry (1995, 527). The manuscript that
Harold Matson sent to one publisher after another in 1940, however, was only a poor cousin of the
published book. The plots of the 1940 and 1947
versions are not substantially different, although
Yvonne is the Consuls daughter rather than his
ex-wife in 1940 (the estranged wife, Priscilla,
never appears in person) and Hugh is Yvonnes
American boyfriend rather than the Consuls
younger brother. But the dialogue of the 1940
text is painfully clumsy, the characters poorly
drawn, and its details not fully interwoven. The
many rejection notices the book received in 1940
were a serious blow, but the result was a vastly
better book, after Lowry spent years rethinking

and reworking page after page. Anyone who
doubts that he knew exactly what he was doing
when he submitted the revised manuscript should
read the letter to Cape cited above, which covers
30 pages in Lowrys collected letters and, despite
exaggerated claims for esoteric levels of meaning,
is still the best introduction to the novels design
and themes.
On June 7, 1944 a fire broke out in the
squatters shack where the Lowrys lived on the
Burrard Inlet across from Vancouver. Among
the papers lost was virtually the entire manuscript
of In Ballast (although a carbon copy, unknown to
scholars for decades after Lowrys death, had been
left with Jans mother). The loss of this important
manuscript was devastating, and Lowry realized
that the same could have happened to Under the
Volcano, which Margerie had rescued from the
fire; even so, he spent yet another full year on
revisions before mailing the Volcano manuscript
to his agents in June 1945. In November, still
waiting for a decision, he and Margerie set out to
spend the winter in Mexico. The trip was important in crucial respects: for example, he learned
that he had miscopied and mistranslated the
apparently threatening sign that appears in the
garden in chapter 5, but he recognized that his
mistake could be passed along to the Consul and
the misinterpretation attributed to the characters
paranoid vision of the world. It was during this
trip, too, that he received news that Under the
Volcano had been accepted by Cape in England
and all but accepted by Reynal and Hitchcock
in the US, the letters being delivered on the same
day by the cartero on whom Lowry had modeled
the one who delivers Yvonnes long-lost picture
postcard in chapter 6. In other respects, however,
the trip was a catastrophe. For one thing, Lowry
discovered that his friend Juan Fernando
Marquez had been killed in a manner eerily
reminiscent of the Consuls death; for another,
Lowry himself was arrested, jailed briefly, and
harassed for weeks over an unpaid fine from his
19368 stay in Mexico. It seemed as if his past
were haunting him.
Even before Under the Volcano appeared,
Lowry planned two more novels, based on his
return trip to Mexico. In Dark as the Grave
wherein My Friend is Laid (1968a) the title comes
from On the Death of Mr. William Hervey,
LOWRY, MALCOLM
an elegy by Abraham Cowley Sigbjrn Wilderness (Lowry), accompanied by his wife Primrose
(Margerie), returns to Mexico, the setting of his
unpublished novel The Valley of the Shadow of
Death (Under the Volcano). He is haunted by a fire
that burned down his shack on June 6, 1944 (the
date is changed slightly to coincide with D-Day),
worried that the novel and film Drunkards Rigadoon (The Lost Weekend) will undercut his novel,
and stunned to learn that his friend Juan Fernando
Martinez (Marquez) was killed much as the character in his book was. In Dark as the Grave and its
sequel, La Mordida, where he is arrested for the
unpaid fine, Sigbjrn imagines that he is living
within his own book, or a version of that book now
being written by his daemon. Nowhere near completion and often unsatisfactory as fiction, these
novels are fascinating in other ways, particularly as
extended meditations on metafiction.
In later years Lowry plunged into several projects. There was a filmscript of Fitzgeralds Tender
Is the Night (1990) in collaboration with Margerie, brilliant, but impossibly long for a film; a
collection of short stories, Hear Us O Lord from
Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961), in which the
various protagonists move from a state of harmony, simplicity, and love (in The Bravest
Boat) into increasing self-involvement (beginning with Through the Panama), and finally
(in The Forest Path to the Spring) back to the
happiness that opened the collection; and a novel,
October Ferry to Gabriola (1970), about Ethan
Llewelyn, whose Lowryan obsessions include a
fear that his evil spirits have started a series of fires
that follow him around. Lowry also planned an
elaborate series of novels (including revisions
of Ultramarine and Under the Volcano) to be
called The Voyage that Never Ends, framed
by a narrative in which Sigbjrn Wilderness,
hospitalized and under anaesthesia, dreams the
other works. None of these late projects came to
fruition, although it is hard to understand why
Hear Us O Lord, at least, could not have been
published.
In 1954, evicted from their beloved shack, the
Lowrys moved to Europe, staying first in various
parts of Italy and then in England. Lowrys drinking was increasingly out of control, and on June
27, 1957, in the East Sussex village of Ripe, he died
of an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. The
promise of Under the Volcano had faded when
239
Lowry published almost nothing during the last

decade of his life, and he died a virtual unknown.
Yet Margerie devoted herself to getting other
works published, and during the next 13 years
editions of Hear Us O Lord, Lunar Caustic, Dark as
the Grave, and October Ferry appeared, along
with the badly edited Selected Poems (1962) and
Selected Letters (1965), both of which have been
supplanted by superior collected editions. These
and other posthumous publications, along with
Douglas Days (1973) compelling biography
and a more thorough and reliable biography by
Gordon Bowker (1993) two decades later, have
brought Lowry a degree of recognition that he
enjoyed only briefly during his lifetime. While his
other fiction, his film project, and his poems have
their interest, Lowry will always be known primarily as the author of Under the Volcano; but that
is no small achievement, for Under the Volcano is
one of the most endlessly fascinating novels of the
twentieth century.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF)

Ackerley, C., & Clipper, L. J. (1984). A Companion to
Under the Volcano. Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press.
Asals, F. (1997). The Making of Malcolm Lowrys
Under the Volcano. Athens: University of
Georgia Press.
Asals, F., & Tiessen, P. (eds.) (2000). A Darkness that
Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the
Twentieth Century. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Binns, R. (1984). Malcolm Lowry. London:
Methuen.
Bowker, G. (1993). Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm
Lowry. New York: St. Martins.
Bradbrook, M. C. (1974). Malcolm Lowry: His Art and
Early Life: A Study in Transformation. Cambridge:
Brittain, D., & Kramer, J. (dirs.) (1976). Volcano: An
Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry.
National Film Board of Canada.
Cross, R. K. (1980). Malcolm Lowry: A Preface to His
Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Day, D. (1973). Malcolm Lowry: A Biography.
Gabrial, J. (2000). Inside the Volcano: My Life with
Malcolm Lowry. New York: St. Martins.
240
LOWRY, MALCOLM
Grace, S. E. (1982). The Voyage that Never Ends:

Malcolm Lowrys Fiction. Vancouver: University of
Grace, S. E. (ed.) (1992). Swinging the Maelstrom:
New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry. Montreal:
McGill-Queens University Press.
Huston, J. (dir.) (1984). Under the Volcano. Universal.
Lowry, M. (1933). Ultramarine. London: Jonathan
Cape. (Rev. edn. published Philadelphia: Lippincott,
1962.)
Lowry, M. (1947). Under the Volcano. New York:
Reynal and Hitchcock.
Lowry, M. (1961). Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy
Dwelling Place. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Lowry, M. (1968a). Dark as the Grave wherein My Friend
is Laid (ed. D. Day & M. B. Lowry). New York:
New American Library.
Lowry, M. (1968b). Lunar Caustic (ed. E. Birney &
M. B. Lowry). London: Jonathan Cape.
Lowry, M. (1970). October Ferry to Gabriola
(ed. M. B. Lowry). New York: World.
Lowry, M. (1975). Psalms and Songs (ed. M. B. Lowry).
New York: New American Library.
Lowry, M. (1990). The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A
Scholarly Edition of Lowrys Tender is the Night
(ed. M. Mota & P. Tiessen). Vancouver: University of

Lowry, M. (1992). The Collected Poetry of Malcolm
Lowry (ed. K. Scherf). Vancouver: University of
Lowry, M. (1994). The 1940 Under the Volcano
(ed. P. Tiessen & M. Mota). Waterloo, ON:
MLR Editions.
Lowry, M. (1995, 1996). Sursum Corda! The Collected
Letters of Malcolm Lowry, vols. 1 and 2 (ed. S. Grace).
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Lowry, M. (1999). Satan in a Barrel and Other
Early Stories (ed. S. Grace). Edmonton:
Juvenilia.
McCarthy, P. A. (1994). Forests of Symbols: World, Text,
and Self in Malcolm Lowrys Fiction. Athens:
McCarthy, P. A. (ed.) (1996). Malcolm Lowrys
La Mordida: A Scholarly Edition. Athens:
McCarthy, P. A., & Tiessen, P. (eds.) (1997). Joyce/
Lowry: Critical Perspectives. Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky.
Salloum, S. (1987). Malcolm Lowry: Vancouver days.
Madeira Park, BC: Harbour.
M
Macaulay, Rose
ALICE CRAWFORD
Rose Macaulay (18811958) is best known for her

last novel The Towers of Trebizond (1956), with its
famous opening line, Take my camel, dear, said
myAuntDot,assheclimbeddownfromthisanimal
on her return from High Mass. The full extent of
her oeuvre is frequently not recognized. Author
of 23 novels between 1906 and 1956, she was also
a prolific journalist, BBC broadcaster, and writer of
travel and history books, as well as of literary criticism, poems, and plays. Themes of quest and the
pursuit of wholeness preoccupy her, and her writing interrogates constantly the idea of the souls
search for fulfillment. Struggles of the female quester concern her consistently, and images of androgyny characterize much of her work.
The second of the seven children of George
Campbell Macaulay (18521915) and Grace Mary
Conybeare (18551925), Macaulay came from
a strongly literary and academic background. Her
father lectured in English at Cambridge University; historian Thomas Babington Macaulay was
her grandfathers cousin. After spending much of
an idyllic childhood at the Italian fishing village
of Varazze, near Genoa, she returned to England
to attend first Oxford High School for Girls, then
Somerville College, Oxford, which she entered in
1900 to read modern history. Leaving Oxford in
1903 with an aegrotat, she published her first
novel Abbots Verney in 1906.
She was introduced gradually to London literary life, chaperoned initially by poet Rupert
Brooke (18871915), a family friend, and became
a recognized figure on the edges of the Bloomsbury Group. By 1914 she had written seven novels,
of which The Lee Shore (1912) won first prize in
a competition run by Hodder and Stoughton.
These early fictions, The Furnace (1907), The
Secret River (1909), The Valley Captives (1911),
Views and Vagabonds (1912), and The Making of
a Bigot (1914) are, like her first poems (The Two
Blind Countries, 1914), studded with the complex
iconography of mystic quests. All rather clumsily
trace a protagonists development from innocence to maturity, revealing ideas with which she
engages again in later, more sophisticated novels.
During World War I, Macaulay served in the
Ministry of Information where she met Gerald
ODonovan (18711942), the married ex-priest
who became her beloved companion for over
20 years. Her novels of this period, Non-Combatants and Others (1916), What Not (1918), and
Potterism (1920), seem to reflect her personal
happiness, confidently introducing humor and
satire into her writing. New maturity and the
war itself have allowed her freedom to fantasize
and to give rein to the fun, anger, and wit that
accompany the satirical mode.
Macaulays best novels date from the 1920s,
exploring with humor, verve, and satirical acuity
new possibilities available to women as they
attempt to construct the female self. The independent women protagonists of Dangerous Ages
(1921, winner of the Prix Femina (Vie heureuse))
and Told by an Idiot (1923) seek a combination
of personal and career fulfillment. Mystery at
Geneva (1922) and Orphan Island (1924) are
lighter novels interrogating the wider theme of

242
MANNING, OLIVIA
civilizations limits, a preoccupation that also

informs Crewe Train (1926), whose heroine contends with the conflict between the civilized and
the barbaric in her own personality. In Keeping
Up Appearances (1928), these separate drives are
portrayed as distinct individuals, while in Staying
with Relations (1930), the central female character
struggles to define a coherent self against a background of civilization on the verge of collapse.
There is a decline in the quality of Rose
Macaulays fiction in the 1930s. Between 1940 and
1950 she wrote no fiction at all, a situation surely
reflecting personal cataclysms she experienced
during World War II. A serious car accident, the
destruction of her home in the Blitz, and Gerald
ODonovans death darkened the years 193941.
They were Defeated (1932), Going Abroad (1934), I
Would Be Private (1937), and And No Mans Wit
(1940) are unhappy novels whose questing characters slide into hopelessness, the goals of their
quests increasingly tentative and unconvincing.
Macaulay seems to turn with relief at this stage to
the certainties of non-fiction, producing Life
among the English in 1942, They went to Portugal
in 1946, and Fabled Shore in 1949.
Her fiction re-emerges in 1950 with The World
My Wilderness, a distraught evocation of personal
and social disintegration left by the war, and culminates in 1956 with the mature synthesis of styles
and preoccupations of The Towers of Trebizond,
winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Macaulays return to the Anglican Church in 1951
is the most striking feature of the last eight years of
her life; her final novel is the fictional outpouring of
her personal church or adultery dilemma.
Rose Macaulays writing career spans 50 years.
Born a Victorian, she lived through the reigns of
six monarchs. Her novels offer a barometer of the
changing times, showing the emergence not only
of the modern woman but of the modern person.
Friendships with Virginia Woolf, Rosamond
Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster, and
Ivy Compton-Burnett were important to her
intellectual life; it is possible to see her distinctive
writing style informed and enriched by conversations with these other prominent authors. Her
writing is sharp, clear, funny, wise, perceptive,
zestful. She writes in all possible genres fiction,
poetry, drama, literary criticism, travel prose,
journalism and packs into her climactic last
novel her multifarious perceptions about how life
should be lived. Cool and detached on the

sidelines of modernism, a quiet but insistent
champion of female strengths, she deserves recognition as more than a footnote to the development of the twentieth-century canon. She is an
important player.
SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF); World
War I in Fiction (BIF)

Babington Smith, C. (1972). Rose Macaulay. London:
Collins.
Bensen, A. (1969). Rose Macaulay. New York: Twayne.
Crawford, A. (1995). Paradise Pursued: The Novels of
Rose Macaulay. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press.
Emery, J. (1991). Rose Macaulay: A Writers Life.
LeFanu, S. (2003). Rose Macaulay. London: Virago.
Macaulay, R. (1920). Potterism. London: Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1921). Dangerous Ages. London: Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1923). Told by an Idiot. London: Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1926). Crewe Train. London: Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1928). Keeping Up Appearances. London:
Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1930). Staying with Relations. London:
Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1932). They were Defeated. London:
Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1950). The World My Wilderness.
London: Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1956). The Towers of Trebizond. London:
Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1961). Letters to a Friend. London:
Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1962). Last Letters to a Friend. London:
Collins.
Macaulay, R. (1964). Letters to a Sister. London: Collins.
Passty, J. N. (1988). Eros and Androgyny: The Legacy of
Rose Macaulay. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press.
Manning, Olivia
THEODORE L. STEINBERG
Olivia Manning, born in 1908 (sometimes listed

as 1911), while not the most important novelist of
the twentieth century, produced fine work, which
has been largely overlooked by critics and general
MANNING, OLIVIA
readers, probably for two reasons: she was not

personally popular with her peers and therefore
was treated as an outsider, and she handles
narrative in traditional ways, with none of the
modernist innovations favored by her
contemporaries. Another factor that cannot be
discounted is her gender, although many of Mannings novels focus on mens lives rather than
womens. Her earlier novels contain few memorable scenes, but they leave strong overall impressions and provide valuable perspectives on
mid-twentieth-century British life. Mannings
novels reflect the places she lived in: she was born
in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England, but
lived as a child in Ireland and then with her
husband in Bucharest, Egypt, and Jerusalem. She
died in London in 1980.
Mannings protagonists, whether male or
female, share a similar malaise. They are loners
who feel cut off from their society and from their
families. They often feel abandoned by their parents, who ignored them or died (occasionally
through suicide). Their marriages are seldom
happy. Her characters, therefore, tend to be
isolated and keenly aware of their inability to
establish meaningful human contacts. Her earliest
work, The Wind Changes (1937), combines the
personal and the political in describing Dublin
during the 1920s, contrasting the views of
Elizabeth Dearborn with those of men who are
politically engaged. Artist among the Missing
(1949) foreshadows The Levant Trilogy by being
set in the Middle East during World War II.
Geoffrey Lynd undergoes a psychological crisis
as a result of his feelings of isolation, whereas his
wife Vi has no trouble dealing with her unpleasant
surroundings. For the first time in Mannings
work, we see a reversal of the usual gender roles
in a marriage, but even if the roles were more
stereotypical, the basic inequality would condemn the marriage. The inability of Geoffrey and
Vi to make meaningful human contact, with each
other or with anyone else, presents a frightening
picture.
So, too, does A Different Face (1953), in which
Hugo Fletcher returns to his childhood home,
whose name describes its character: Coldmouth.
Instead of comfort, he finds that he has neither
relatives nor friends there. The ruins that dot the
city, evidence of the Blitz, symbolize the society
of Coldmouth and his own bleak psychological
243
state. The Doves of Venus (1955) focuses on

a woman, Ellie Parsons, who is incapable of
escaping the sterile, lonely world of her mother.
The Play Room (1969; published the same year
in America as The Camperlea Girls) presents
a similar picture: Laura Fletcher uses her fathers
failures to wield power over her whole family.
The Rain Forest (1974) describes the sterility
of British life in the context of the decline of
the British Empire.
Mannings major work, her masterpiece, far
transcends these novels. That work is actually
a series of six connected novels, organized into
two trilogies: The Balkan Trilogy (1981), comprising The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City
(1962), and Friends and Heroes (1965); and The
Levant Trilogy (1982), comprising The Danger
Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and
The Sum of Things (1980). To add to the confusion, the two trilogies are often considered as
a single work known as The Fortunes of War. (The
Fortunes of War is also the title of the BBC
dramatization of 1987.)
On the surface, The Fortunes of War tells the
story of Guy and Harriet Pringle, a newly married
couple who live in Bucharest at the beginning of
World War II and who, in the second trilogy, are
evacuated to Egypt. As Tolstoy did in War and
Peace, Manning combines and contrasts private,
domestic affairs and public, political concerns,
allowing the domestic and the political spheres to
comment on and to clarify each other.
Because Guy teaches English in Bucharest, he
is perfectly positioned to observe the attitudes of
his Romanian students and his British colleagues
toward the coming war and toward each other.
Unhappily, Guy is not only naive, but also
simultaneously self-absorbed and entirely unselfreflective (as are most of his colleagues), which
means that his observations, while perhaps well
intentioned, tend to be irrelevant and often quite
mistaken. Much the same can be said about his
attitude toward domestic life. While he laments
German incursions into Romania, he has no
hesitation about trying to take over every aspect
of Harriets life. Harriet, on the other hand, is
a sharp observer of the political scene and gradually comes to understand the relationship
between the political and domestic spheres.
Ultimately, Harriet and Guy establish a fair
and meaningful union based not only on greater
244
MANTEL, HILARY
self-awareness but also on greater awareness of

each other.
Mannings great achievement in The Fortunes
of War lies in her ability to show how national
and domestic issues intersect. Her writing is not
innovative, but she shows considerable skill in her
adaptation of the Tolstoyan model to mid-twentieth-century life. Also, like Tolstoy, she employs
a huge cast of characters, each of whom she
imbues with a distinct personality. One of the
best is the half-Russian, half-Irish Yakimov, who
is both amusing and disturbing. Manning also
presents a fine sense of place. Her depictions
of Romania and Egypt during the war are striking.
Manning thought that her work should be better
known. She was right.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF);
Burgess, A. (1967). The Novel Now: A Guide to
Contemporary Fiction. New York: Norton.
Manning, O. (1937). The Wind Changes. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Manning, O. (1949). Artist among the Missing. London:
Heinemann.
Manning, O. (1953). A Different Face. London:
Heinemann.
Manning, O. (1955). The Doves of Venus. London:
Heinemann.
Manning, O. (1969). The Play Room. London:
Heinemann. (Published in US as The Camperlea
Girls.)
Manning, O. (1974). The Rain Forest. London:
Heinemann.
Manning, O. (1981). The Balkan Trilogy. New York:
Penguin.
Manning, O. (1982). The Levant Trilogy. New York:
Penguin.
Morris, R. K. (1972). Continuance and Change: The
Contemporary British Novel Sequence. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Morris, R. K. (1987). Olivia Mannings Fortunes
of War: Breakdown in the Balkans, Love and
Death in the Levant. In J. I. Biles (ed.),
British Novelists Since 1900. New York:
AMS.
Steinberg, T. L. (2005). Twentieth-Century Epic
Novels. Cranbury, NJ: University of
Delaware Press.
Mantel, Hilary
SUE ZLOSNIK
British journalist and fiction writer Hilary Mantel

is the author of nine novels, a range of short
stories, and an autobiography as well as numerous
essays and articles. Her fiction is characterized by
a combination of acute social observation, mordant wit, and intimations of another reality just
beyond the range of normal perception. Born in
1952 near Manchester, Mantel draws upon various phases of her life to provide settings for her
fiction: domestic disruption and relocation,
a Catholic education, the London School of Economics, a brief residency in Saudi Arabia, social
work, living in East Anglia, and suburban life in
Greater London, where she now lives and works.
Her fiction constantly returns to familiar gothic
motifs: monstrosity, female identity, family secrets, religion and repression, paranoia, liminality, metamorphosis, and the haunting of the past
by the present. In her autobiography, Giving up
the Ghost (2003), she describes an encounter with
a nameless terror at the age of 7, something
intangible . . . some formless, borderless evil
(107); this presence lurks in the pages of her
novels.
Mantels first novel, Every Day is Mothers
Day (1985), draws upon her experiences as a
hospital social worker and may be read on one
level as an indictment of an inadequate care
system in 1970s Britain. Such a literal reading,
however, does not do it justice. In its protagonist,
Muriel Axon, Mantel creates an ambiguous figure
of both pathos and monstrosity whose dislocation
from the normal world makes her capable of
matricide and infanticide. Vacant Possession
(published the following year but set 10 years
later than its predecessor) explores the implications of the Thatcher governments care in the
community policy as Muriel is released from a
mental hospital; however, the novel is more comic
in tone, and the identity-shifting Muriel looms
large as a female gothic monster.
In Eight Months on Gazzah Street (1988), Mantel
creates a different kind of female gothic. Its
heroine becomes a virtual prisoner in a characterless apartment in Jeddah, in the midst of an alien
and misogynistic environment (where nothing is
quite as it seems on the surface and people die in
MANTEL, HILARY
unexplained ways), and finds her methodical

mind of no help in deciphering the oppressive
mysteries around her. Fludd (1989) is more consistently comic in tone than any of its precursors.
Mantels self-confessed mind for detail provides
acute observations that root this fantastical tale
in time and place: the Catholic community in
a fictional 1950s Derbyshire village is visited by
the enigmatic Fludd whose effects are alchemical
and liberatory, especially for the young nun whom
he frees from the confines of convent life.
Mantels concern with the effects on individuals
of trauma on a grand scale was to find powerful
expression in her next two novels. A Place of
Greater Safety (1992) is a massive novel about the
French Revolution. The historical figures of
Desmoulins, Danton, and Robespierre are given
highly individuated lives in a novel that fuses the
personal and the political and in which Mantels
characteristic black humor is never abandoned,
even in the final tumbril. History makes its presence felt too in A Change of Climate (1994), set in
present-day Norfolk, where the tragic personal
history of Ralph and Anna Eldred, rooted in African politics, gradually unfolds. In 1998 Mantel
was to turn to a more remote history the Age of
Enlightenment in The Giant OBrien, which tells
the story of the exploitation of freakery but also
celebrates the power of the imagination.
In An Experiment in Love (1995) Mantel returns
to a reworking of her own youthful experiences.
In doing so, she creates a powerfully Gothic
female Bildungsroman. The novel focuses on female embodiment. In a gothic doubling, its central character Carmel is followed by the enigmatic
and malevolent Karina through their northern
Catholic childhood to residence in the same
London university hall. As Karina waxes (and is
shown at the end to be pregnant), Carmel wanes,
collapsing from near starvation brought on by
poverty and distress. As in Fludd, Mantel vividly
evokes the quotidian details of a world now gone,
yet the intimations of another reality beyond are
disturbingly represented. In Karina, she creates
a figure of amoral female monstrosity who, like
Muriel Axon, is apparently capable of anything;
even, it would seem, locking in her room-mate as
the hall burns down.
Beyond Black (2005), is located both around
the M25 motorway and in a liminal area between
the living and the dead. In the drab material
245
world of outer London in the 1990s, professional

psychic Alison Hart is constantly harassed by
entities that are described (using the language of
Heathrow) as airside. Although physically
large, she is not, however, a monstrous figure but
a persecuted heroine. In her daily life the boundary between ordinary experience and a timeless
but banal beyond is constantly destabilized.
There is nothing ethereal about Alisons fiends;
her spirit guide is one of several nasty individuals
from her past. Although there is a good deal of
comic effect in the novel, the narrative voice never
distances itself from Alisons perceptions of the
spirit world. Its denizens are given the same
substantial representation as the live characters.
Only when Alison is able to give shape to an
incident of major violent trauma in her childhood
is she able to exorcize her demons, her link with
the spirit world remaining in a more benevolent
form. The recipient of a number of prizes Mantel
maintains a dedicated readership; the recent
appearance of her work on university curricula
and in conference papers indicates growing
academic recognition of her significance as a
contemporary writer. Her latest novel, Wolf Hall
(2009), has been widely acclaimed and won the
Man Booker Prize: telling the story of the early life
and rise to power of the Tudor politician Thomas
Cromwell, it represents a return to the detailed
and vividly imagined historical fiction of A Place
of Greater Safety. Its portrayal of Cromwell reveals
an inner life, engaging the reader in sympathetic
identification with a figure perhaps best known to
posterity through the enigmatic representation of
his Holbein portrait.
Fiction (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF);

Horner, A., & Zlosnik, S. (2005). Gothic and the Comic
Turn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mantel, H. (1985). Every Day is Mothers Day. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Mantel, H. (1986). Vacant Possession. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Mantel, H. (1988). Eight Months on Gazzah Street.
London: Viking.
Mantel, H. (1989). Fludd. London: Viking.
246
MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET
Mantel, H. (1992). A Place of Greater Safety. London:

Viking.
Mantel, H. (1994). A Change of Climate. London: Viking.
Mantel, H. (1995). An Experiment in Love. London:
Viking.
Mantel, H. (1998). The Giant OBrien. London: Fourth
Estate.
Mantel, H. (2003). Giving up the Ghost. London: Fourth
Estate.
Mantel, H. (2005). Beyond Black. London: Fourth Estate.
Mantel, H. (2009). Wolf Hall. London: Fourth Estate.
Molino, M. R. (2003). Hilary Mantel. In M. Moseley
(ed.), British and Irish Novelists Since 1960. Detroit:
CengageGale,pp.23043.
Maugham, W. Somerset
PHILIP HOLDEN
W. Somerset Maugham is perhaps best known as

an accomplished writer of short stories in which
craft outweighs formal innovation, yet, in one of
the longest literary careers of any British writer, he
was most notable for his endless capacity for selfreinvention. Commencing as a late Victorian writer of realist fiction concerning class and gender,
Maugham also dabbled in the gothic and adventure romance. As an Edwardian he became one of
the most popular playwrights of his generation.
Growing weary of the limits imposed by conventional dramatic forms, he returned to fiction,
publishing his greatest novel, Of Human Bondage
(1915). His experiences during World War I and
after took his writing in two further directions.
Through his Ashenden short stories, relying on
personal experience as an intelligence agent, he
pioneered espionage fiction. Travels in the South
Pacific and later East and Southeast Asia resulted
in the exotic fiction for which he is best known. Yet
we should also not forget that much of Maughams
fictional production in his later career is concerned
with domestic issues, reflecting particularly on the
world of Anglophone literary production and
authorial celebrity in the first half of the twentieth
century. Indeed, Maughams greatest fictional
work is surely himself. Through thin fictionalization, autobiographical self-representation, destruction of documents, and outright disinformation, Maugham created himself as perhaps the
quintessential cosmopolitan English man of letters, an image that has slowly been picked apart by
scholars and biographers after his death in 1965.
Maughams early childhood was unhappy. He

was born in France of British parents in 1874, and
orphaned at the age of 10. Sent to England to be
cared for by an emotionally remote vicar uncle,
Maugham found himself initially ridiculed
by schoolmates because of his French accent. As
a young man, he left England, audited classes at
the University of Heidelberg, and then returned to
study medicine in London. His most successful
early fiction draws on autobiographical experience. Maughams first novel, Liza of Lambeth
(1897), is set in the slums of south London near
St. Thomas Hospital, the institution where he
trained. Following the generic conventions of
contemporary working-class fiction, the novel
describes a young womans affair with a married
man, her pregnancy, miscarriage, and ultimate
death through resultant septicemia. Mrs. Craddock, published in 1902, is set in rural Kent where
Maugham spent his teenage years: in contrast to
the misogyny of some of his later fiction, the novel
is a sympathetic portrayal of a young middle-class
woman, Bertha Leys, trapped in a marriage to
a man who is not her intellectual equal.
Maughams habit of drawing on autobiographical
sources is apparent even in non-realist works. The
Magician (1908) is a novel in which a young
woman is enslaved and killed by an occultist in
diabolic attempts to create new forms of life. The
novel draws on elements of gothic and science
fiction in contemporary works by Robert Louis
Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and Bram Stoker. Its early
scenes, however, are set in the bohemian milieu in
early twentieth-century Paris, where Maugham
resided from 1905 onward: the characters meet at
a restaurant called the Chien Noir (Black Dog),
which in reality was a meeting place on the Rue
dOdessa called the Chat Blanc (White Cat).
Maughams success as a playwright in the early
years of the twentieth century meant that his
interest in fiction diminished. It revived in 1915
with the publication of Of Human Bondage, an
autobiographical Bildungsroman based on a manuscript written some 15 years previously. The
novels protagonist, Philip Carey, resembles
Maugham in many ways: he is an orphan raised
by a clergyman uncle, who attends school at Tercanbury (a Hardyesque reversal of Canterbury,
where Maugham attended the Kings School), resides in Heidelberg and Paris, and studies medicine. Yet Maughams attempt to re-script his own
life to fit the narrative mode of the Bildungsroman

is unconvincing. Philip gives up dreams of adventure and an exploitative and ultimately humiliating
relationship with the working-class Mildred
Rogers for middle-class domesticity, a career as
a doctor, and marriage to the wholesome Sally
Altheny. The novels rushed comedic ending, however, cannot undo the fact that its disturbing power
centers on Philips relationship with Mildred.
Mildreds androgyny, like that of Prousts
Albertine Simonet, enables a coded representation
of a homosexual relationship. Maugham married
and had a daughter, but most of his emotional and
sexual life was invested in relationships with men.
In 1914, he met the American Gerald Haxton, and
their turbulent relationship was to persist for
three decades until Geralds death in 1944.
It was with Gerald, indeed, that Maugham first
traveled to the South Pacific in 1916, and Tahiti
became the setting of part of the authors next
novel, The Moon and Sixpence (1919). The novel
adapts the story of the French artist Paul Gauguin
into that of Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who rejects bourgeois respectability to
become a painter in Paris and then departs
to achieve artistic apotheosis and death in Tahiti,
Maugham substituting the French painters syphilis with Stricklands more socially acceptable
leprosy. Its conclusion reverses that in Of Human
Bondage, substituting Stricklands ultimate sacrifice in the name of artistic truth for Philips choice
of social conformity. Yet Maugham introduced
a key element in The Moon and Sixpence: a complex, ironizing narrational strategy. The novel is
not told by or focalized through Strickland; rather, it is recounted to its readers by a naive narrator
whom we are encouraged to identify with Maugham himself. The narrator pursues Strickland,
interrogating him, reconstructing his life retrospectively like a biologist who from a single bone
must reconstruct not only the appearance of an
extinct animal, but its habits (1919 : 40). Such
narrative strategies, involving a complex series
of identifications and disavowals between protagonist, narrator, and author, are central to much
of Maughams later writing.
From the beginning of the 1920s until the
middle of the 1930s, Maugham wrote a series of
short stories, novels, and travelogues set in the
South Pacific and Southeast and East Asia, which
constitute his most important work. The South
247
Pacific short story collection The Trembling of

a Leaf (1921) was followed by two volumes on
China: the travelogue On a Chinese Screen (1922),
and the Hong Kong-centered novel The Painted
Veil (1925). Maugham would also complete
a further travelogue about a trip across mainland
Southeast Asia, The Gentleman in the Parlour
(1930b). His reputation as a writer about Asia,
however, is ultimately founded on his writings on
the Malayan Archipelago (present-day Indonesia,
Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore) in the short story
collections The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ah King
(1933), and the novel The Narrow Corner (1932).
Popular reception in Britain now views Maugham
nostalgically as the chronicler of a vanished colonial order, yet this misunderstands the context of
what he called his exotic fiction. Unlike Rudyard
Kipling, Joseph Conrad, or E. M. Forster,
Maugham did not engage in public debate concerning the merits of imperialism: his narratives
do not exhibit Kiplings jingoism, Conrads tortured simultaneous attraction to colonial adventure and horror at the realities of colonial governance, or Forsters acerbic critique of colonial
inequalities. Maugham knew little of the countries
he visited, and his accounts of them often rely on
Orientalist literary traditions, attributing little
agency to non-European characters who are stereotypically presented. Yet in presenting a domestic colonialism with its attendant hypocrisies,
Maugham did not so much celebrate empire as
document its internal contradictions. In a manner
similar to contemporaries working in psychology
and ethnography, Maugham uses non-European
societies as a foil to show the artificiality of what
passed for colonial civilization: some of the force
of this critique no doubt comes from the fact that
his own sexuality was disavowed by discourses of
respectable sexuality that underpinned the European civilizing mission.
Like The Moon and Sixpence, Maughams
Malayan fiction often exhibits complex narrational strategies. On one level, the texts often strive to
contain transgression. Maugham makes much use
of the framed narrative common to much colonial
fiction. In a short story such as Footprints in the
Jungle, one man listens to another give an account
of a social scandal now sealed in the past: it is dug
up, analyzed dispassionately, and, at the conclusion of the narrative, safely reinterred. At times, the
fiction is also overmoralized. The ending of The
248
Painted Veil, for example, in which the vagrant

Kitty Fane learns the meaning of self-sacrifice in
devotion to charitable work in plague-stricken
China, is trite. Even in his more successful stories,
indeed, Maugham follows colonial stereotypes in
making European women the scapegoats for the
hypocrisies of colonialism: a prime example of this
is The Letter. Yet at times, as with The Moon and
Sixpence, a series of filiations and identifications
between framing and embedded narratives result
in a play of meaning that the text strives to but
cannot quite contain. At its most successful
Maughams short fiction and non-fiction moves
toward modernism, leaving a reader with a disturbing sense of incompleteness through uncertain denouements. The Malayan stories, indeed,
were to prove influential on contemporaries whose
politics or cultural contexts were very different
from Maughams: the socialist and anti-imperialist
George Orwell, or the exemplar of Shanghai
modernist cosmopolitanism, Eileen Chang.
Maughams other fiction written from the 1920s
to the late 1940s exhibits considerable variety in
subject matter. Cakes and Ale (1930a) is set in
London and the Kent of Maughams youth. While
critics and biographers have often seen the novel as
a partial roman-a-clef containing fictionalized representations of novelists Hugh Walpole and
Thomas Hardy, its central concerns are the manufacture of artistic celebrity and also the invention
of biographical narratives that conceal as much as
they reveal: both topics were dear to Maughams
heart. The Razors Edge (1944), Maughams most
popular novel, returns to the theme of the decadence of Western civilization through the experiences of the young American Larry Darrell, who
finds enlightenment in India. Both texts continue
Maughams habit of using complex narrative strategies, and elements of autobiography: the narrator
of The Razors Edge, for instance, is explicitly
identified as Maugham himself.
Maugham was to continue writing until the
1960s, and his death in 1965 prompted a flurry
of biographical studies and critical attention. His
status as a popular writer who, in his own words,
had a manufactured rather than natural talent,
incapable of those great, sustained flights that
carry the author on broad pinions into a celestial
sphere (Maugham, 1938 : 81), has led in the last
few decades to relative critical neglect. Nevertheless, biographies and film adaptations of
Maughams works have proliferated, and his sales

remain strong. Much scholarly work on Maugham
has, however, been formalist in nature, and few
major book-length critical studies have been published since 1990. Maughams elaborate performative identity, and the openness of his texts to queer
and postcolonial reading strategies, however,
suggest that re-evaluation may not be far away.
Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative
Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Working-Class
Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
Calder, R. (1989). Willie: The Life of W. Somerset
Maugham. New York: St. Martins.
Curtis, A., & Whitehead, J. (eds.) (1987). W. Somerset
Maugham: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge.
Hastings, S. (2009). The Secret Lives of Somerset
Maugham. London: John Murray.
Holden, P. (1996). Orienting Masculinity, Orienting
Nation: W. Somerset Maughams Exotic Fiction.
Meyers, J. (2004). Somerset Maugham: A Life. New
York: Knopf.
Maugham, W. S. (1897). Liza of Lambeth. London: T.
Fisher Unwin.
Maugham, W. S. (1902). Mrs. Craddock. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1908). The Magician. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1915). Of Human Bondage. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1919). The Moon and Sixpence.
London: Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1921). The Trembling of a Leaf.
London: Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1922). On a Chinese Screen. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1925). The Painted Veil. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1926). The Casuarina Tree. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1928). Ashenden; or, The British
Agent. New York: Doubleday.
Maugham, W. S. (1930a). Cakes and Ale; or, The
Skeleton in the Cupboard. London: Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1930b). The Gentleman in the Parlour:
A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong.
London: Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1931). Collected Plays. 3 vols.
London: Heinemann.
MCCABE, PATRICK
Maugham, W. S. (1932). The Narrow Corner. London:

Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1933). Ah King. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1938). The Summing Up. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1944). The Razors Edge. London:
Heinemann.
Maugham, W. S. (1949). A Writers Notebook. London:
Heinemann.
Morgan, T. (1980). Maugham. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
McCabe, Patrick
MICHAEL L. STOREY
Patrick McCabe, popular and award-winning

Irish writer, is best known for his dark and
gruesome, yet humorous novels about the dysfunctional state of Irish life. Like the plays of his
contemporary, Martin McDonagh, McCabes
works unrelentingly demythologize small-town
Irish life, portraying it in such a way as to disabuse
readers of any sentimental notions they might
have about Ireland and its people. His novels
depict domestic and sectarian violence, alcoholism, childhood trauma, psychopathic behavior,
various kinds of abuse including sex abuse by
clergy, madness, and suicide.
Born in Clones, County Monaghan in 1955 and
educated at St. Patricks College, Drumcondra,
McCabe pursued a career in teaching, first in
County Longford and then in London, while at
the same time writing fiction. The success of his
third novel, The Butcher Boy (1992), enabled him
to pursue a career in writing. He is the author of
nine novels; a book for children, The Adventures of
Shay Mouse (1985; illustrated by his wife, Margot); a play version of The Butcher Boy entitled
Frank Pig Says Hello; a collection of linked stories,
Mondo Desperado (1999); and several radio plays.
He has won impressive awards, including the Irish
Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction for The
Butcher Boy. That novel and Breakfast on Pluto
(1998) were shortlisted for the prestigious Booker
prize, and both have been made into films directed by Neil Jordan. McCabes distinctive style,
referred to as bog gothic, is characterized by
mentally disturbed narrators, horrific events,
gruesome description, and black humor. His
249
works reveal the influence of his childhood and

youthful obsessions: American culture, including
comic books, cowboy movies, and television
programs; drugs; music (he played in a band);
and hippie culture.
An early story, The Call (1979), won the Irish
Press Hennessy Award, but his first novel, Music
on Clinton Street (1985), attracted little attention.
His second novel, Carn (1989), set in a fictional
border town and treating the subjects of abuse,
madness, and IRA violence, garnered more praise.
The Butcher Boy, set in the 1960s, is arguably both
his most popular novel and his best. The narrator,
Francie Brady, relates the story of his childhood
trauma from the perspective of a psychiatric
hospital, where he has been confined for many
years since murdering Mrs. Nugent, the mother of
his friend Philip. Francies story includes abuse by
his alcoholic father; mental instability and the
eventual suicide of his mother; and sexual abuse
by a priest. More devasting, however, is Francies
psychological abuse by Mrs. Nugent, whose characterization of the Brady family as pigs (an
allusion to the English stereotype of the Irish)
destroys Francies fragile sense of pride in his
family and their Irish heritage. The Nugents
have pretensions to English culture and civility
that contrast sharply with the wild Irish traits
of Francies family his fathers volatility and
drunkenness, his mothers manic behavior,
and the permanent disorder of the family home.
Francie is thus caught between an unconscious
desire to become a member of the Nugent family
(he fantasizes about suckling Mrs. Nugents
breast) and a self-destructive intent to fulfill Mrs.
Nugents characterization of the family by behaving like a pig, including one scene in which he
fantasizes about teaching Philip and Mrs. Nugent
how to defecate like a pig. When Mrs. Nugent
entices his best friend, Joe Purcell, to give up
Francie for Philip, it sends Francie over the edge:
he kills her by firing a slaughterhouse bolt pistol
into her head. The brilliance of The Butcher Boy
lies not only in its major theme of the anxiety of
Irish identity, but also in its postmodernist style.
Perfectly conceived to reflect the mind of the
traumatized Francie Brady, it is characterized by
run-on and fragmented sentences; a disjointed,
shifting narrative; a blend of fantasy and reality
that are often difficult to distinguish from one
another; and allusions to American comics and
250
MCEWAN, IAN
John Wayne movies, as well as to Irish songs,

including The Butcher Boy, a ballad about
romantic betrayal and suicide, which Francies
mother ominously sings.
With The Dead School (1995) and Breakfast on
Pluto (1998), McCabe continued his success, and
his fascination with the darker aspects of Irish life.
Breakfast on Pluto, set against the backdrop of the
Irish Troubles in the 1970s, is related by Patrick
Pussy Braden, a transvestite prostitute who,
20 years earlier, had become entangled in IRA
terrorist activities and who yearns to discover his/
her real mother. Emerald Germs of Ireland (2001)
and Call Me the Breeze (2003), despite containing
many of McCabes trademarks lurid violence,
dark humor, mentally disturbed characters, and
the like received mixed reviews. But his most
recent novels, Winterwood (2006) and The Holy
City (2008), both novels of dark humor, violence,
and insanity, have been more favorably received.
The former won the Hughes & Hughes Irish
Novel of the Year. There are no book-length
studies of McCabes fiction, though there are
certain to be some in the near future as he continues to gather both popular and critical acclaim.
McCabe lives in County Sligo, Ireland.
SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF)
Jordon, N. (1997). Butcher Boy. (film).
McCabe, P. (1985). Music on Clinton Street. Dublin:
Raven Arts.
McCabe, P. (1989). Carn. Salcombe: Aidan Ellis.
McCabe, P. (1992). The Butcher Boy. London: Picador.
McCabe, P. (1995). The Dead School. London: Picador.
McCabe, P. (1998). Frank Pig Says Hello. In John
Fairleigh (ed.), Far From the Land: Contemporary
Irish Plays. London: Methuen.
McCabe, P. (1999). Mondo Desperado. London:
Picador.
McCabe, P. (2001). Emerald Germs of Ireland. London:
Picador.
McCabe, P. (2003). Call Me the Breeze. London: Faber
and Faber.
McCabe, P. (2006). Winterwood. London: Bloomsbury.
McCabe, P. (2008). The Holy City. London:
Bloomsbury.
Potts, D. (1999). From Tir na nOg to Tir na Muck:
Patrick McCabes The Butcher Boy. New Hibernia
Review, 3(3), 8395.
Scaggs, J. (2000). Who is Francie Pig? Self-Identity and

Narrative Reliability in The Butcher Boy. Irish
University Review, 30(1), 518.
Sweeney, E. (2004). Pigs!: Polluting Bodies and
Knowledge in Neil Jordans The Butcher Boy. In K.
Rockett & J. Hill (eds.), National Cinema and Beyond.
Dublin: Four Courts.
McEwan, Ian
LYNN WELLS
Rising above his early reputation as an author

fixated on the grotesque and perverse, Ian McEwan has established himself as one of the worlds
most celebrated prose fiction writers in English,
enjoying both critical approbation and commercial success. While he frequently employs the
self-conscious and experimental techniques associated with the postmodern period, he also prides
himself on his works compellingly readable quality and strong moral sensibility, characteristics
familiar to his readership from the tradition of the
great English novels of the nineteenth century.
His writing has won many awards, and several
of his texts have been adapted for the screen, the
most famous being the Oscar-winning film of
Atonement.
McEwan was born in 1948 in Aldershot, England, spending part of his youth living on army
bases in Singapore and Libya. He studied at the
University of Sussex before pursuing a masters
degree at the University of East Anglia, where he
was mentored by the English authors Angus
Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury, and was influenced by the work of contemporary writers
such as Iris Murdoch, Saul Bellow, and Norman
Mailer. At the age of 24, he began a career as a
professional writer, quickly becoming, along with
his friend Martin Amis, one of the enfants terribles
of the British literary scene. As a young writer, he
became active in various political causes, including the feminist and anti-nuclear movements, and
he has continued his activism in more recent years
by speaking publicly on issues of environmentalism and religious extremism. He lives in London
with his second wife, Annalena McAfee, and has
two grown sons from his first marriage.
In his first two books of short stories, First Love,
Last Rites (1975), and In Between the Sheets
(1978b), McEwan created characters on the
MCEWAN, IAN
margins of everyday society: orphaned and neglected children and adolescents, sexual deviants,
misfits, and murderers. This early work, which
earned him critical recognition along with the
nickname Ian Macabre, has elements of sexual
violence and is set in dreary, often claustrophobic,
urban environments with little or no hope of
social reform or individual compassion. His first
two novels, The Cement Garden (1978a) and The
Comfort of Strangers (1981), contained lurid
characters, themes, and settings similar to those
in the stories, with an increasing emphasis on the
importance of gender roles, particularly on male
domination over women.
During the early 1980s, McEwan took a hiatus
from writing novels to work in other forms,
including screenplays and an oratorio. Throughout this period, he became more engaged with
political realities, partly in response to what he
saw as the oppressive influence of Prime Minister
Margaret Thatchers right-wing policies. As
a result, he executed what Claudia Schemberg
calls an ethical turn in his work, returning to
the novel with a new commitment to openly
engaging in complex ethical, social and historical
issues (2004, 28).
Hailed as a turning point in McEwans career,
The Child in Time (1987) marked his first engagement with political satire. Set in a vaguely futuristic London under a heartless Thatcherite government, the novel combines gritty realism with
elements of fantasy, drawn from McEwans fascination with post-Einsteinian physics. The main
character, Stephen Lewis, who is searching for his
abducted daughter, has a number of unusual
temporal experiences that help him to see beyond
his obsessive desire to recover his child and to act
more compassionately toward others.
The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992) deal
with historical issues but also self-consciously
foreground the difficulties of representing the
past, which qualifies both texts as examples of
the subgenre of postmodern literature that
Linda Hutcheon (1988) calls historiographic
metafiction. The Innocent, a blackly comic spy
thriller, is set in Berlin after World War II, where
the main character, Leonard Marnham, an English radio technician, gets caught up in the
secretive world of espionage while becoming embroiled in a love triangle with a German woman
and her abusive ex-husband. Their relationship
251
serves as an allegory of the persistent effects of past

violence and the negative consequences of personal and cultural domination. Black Dogs, set
around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, also
has passages related to the aftermath of World
War II. Jeremy, the narrator, presents the text as
his memoir of the lives of his in-laws, Bernard and
June Tremaine, whose diametrically opposed
views create discrepancies in their memories of
shared events. This conflict becomes focused
around Junes experience of being attacked as a
young woman by black dogs, which have associations with the horrors of Nazi Germany.
With Enduring Love (1997), McEwan moved
away from political and historical themes to concentrate on the relationship between two men
brought together by a freak accident in which a
young boy is trapped in a hot air balloon. Each of the
five men who come to the boys rescue, including
the narrator Joe, faces the dilemma of saving himself
or risking death in order to save another. Joes guilt
over his choice of self-preservation is mirrored in
the egotistical behavior of Jed, a delusional erotomaniac who pursues Joe against his wishes. Joes
desperate efforts to get others, especially his wife, to
believe his tale of persecution at Jeds hands become
the basis of the texts openly self-conscious reflection on the difficulties of conveying the truth in
narrative form.
Amsterdam, for which McEwan won the Man
Booker Prize in 1998, returned to political satire
and the critique of Thatcherism. The world of the
text is characterized by greed, corruption, and
self-interest, embodied by two friends, the composer Clive Linley and the tabloid editor Vernon
Halliday. Both men represent a kind of masculine
egotism that is in direct contrast to the principles
of compassion and generosity associated with the
novels few female characters. In this tour de force,
McEwan draws on the tradition of English comic
writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis
to create a moral parable in which the villains are
properly punished through acts of poetic justice.
McEwans best-known novel, Atonement
(2001), has been lauded for its richly detailed
portrayal of events during World War II, including the retreat to Dunkirk and the service of
medical personnel in London hospitals. Despite
its verisimilitude, however, Atonement is a deeply literary text, with allusions to Shakespeare,
Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen, and many other
252
MCEWAN, IAN
authors. The central character, Briony Tallis, is

herself a writer, and her inflated belief in her own
imaginative gifts leads to the novels central
event, in which she falsely accuses a family friend
and her sisters lover, Robbie Turner, of raping
her young cousin. Brionys act of atonement for
this crime takes the form of writing various
narratives, which in turn provide the novels
multilayered structure. The texts intricate
movements between different levels of representation challenge the reader to sort out truth
from fiction, and to judge the ultimate sincerity
of Brionys act of repentance.
Saturday (2005) deals with issues of multiculturalism and global terrorism in the wake of the
September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Set on the day of the massive protest in London
against the imminent invasion of Iraq in 2003, the
text contains many references to 9/11, including a
burning plane streaking across the city sky behind
a glass-paned tower. The central conflict in
the novel takes place between a surgeon, Henry
Perowne, and the mentally ill street-thug Baxter,
suffering from Huntingtons disease. The altercations between the doctor and the thug, which
begin with a minor traffic accident, escalate into a
clear parody of the 9/11 attacks, with Baxters
assault on Perownes family and home paralleling
the invasion of the domestic United States.
McEwans careful focalization of the novels
events through Henrys eyes creates a subtly ironic
critique of the doctors ultimate triumph over his
assailant as a symbol of lasting security for contemporary Britain.
On Chesil Beach (2007) is set in the early 1960s
at the dawn of the sexual revolution. The tightly
constructed plot centers on newlyweds Florence
Ponting and Edward Mayhew, who are unable to
articulate their secret desires and anxieties on
their wedding night in a seaside hotel room. As
is common in McEwans work, there are selfreflexive elements in On Chesil Beach, with the
couples dilemma paralleling the difficulties of
reading the other, and of communicating adequately with language.
McEwans most recent novel, Solar (2010),
tackles the topical issues of climate change and
environmental stewardship using an allegorical
framework reminiscent of Saturday. The lifestyle
of the main character, Nobel prize-winning scientist Michael Beard, clearly symbolizes a world
given to unsustainable excess: he eats and drinks

too much, cheats on his lovers, and steals ideas
from his colleagues. Even his research on alternative energy sources such as solar is the product of
exploitation. The novels various settings the
Arctic, London, New Mexico map a state of
steady global degradation, which Beards ultimate
defeat at the hands of his vindicated victims can
do nothing to stop. The novels final image, of
Beards young child seeking her fathers loving
embrace, holds out the hope for moral redemption seen in many of McEwans works.
In all his fiction, McEwan combines a contemporary sensibility about the power and limitations
of narrative with a keen sense of his characters
inner lives and their struggles to deal morally with
one another. His work demonstrates an impressive variety of generic styles and a wide historical
range while consistently providing his readers
with points of identification and reflection about
their own lives.
SEE ALSO: Amis, Martin (BIF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF);

Childs, P. (ed.) (2006). The Fiction of Ian McEwan: A
Readers Guide to the Essential Criticism. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Childs, P. (2007). Ian McEwans Enduring Love.
London: Routledge.
Gauthier, T. S. (2006). Narrative Desire and Historical
Reparations: A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman
Rushdie. New York: Routledge.
Groes, S. (2009). Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical
Perspectives. London: Continuum.
Head, D. (2007). Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Malcolm, D. (2002). Understanding Ian McEwan.
McEwan, I. (1975). First Love, Last Rites. London:
Jonathan Cape.
McEwan, I. (1978a). The Cement Garden. London:
Jonathan Cape.
McEwan, I. (1978b). In Between the Sheets. London:
Jonathan Cape.
McEwan, I. (1981). The Comfort of Strangers. London:
Jonathan Cape.
MCGAHERN, JOHN
McEwan, I. (1987). The Child in Time. London:

Jonathan Cape.
McEwan, I. (1990). The Innocent. London: Jonathan
Cape.
McEwan, I. (1992). Black Dogs. London: Jonathan Cape.
McEwan, I. (1997). Enduring Love. London: Jonathan
Cape.
McEwan, I. (1998). Amsterdam. London: Jonathan
Cape.
McEwan, I. (2001). Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape
McEwan, I. (2005). Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape.
McEwan, I. (2007). On Chesil Beach. London: Jonathan
Cape.
McEwan, I. (2010). Solar. London: Jonathan Cape.
Noakes, J., & Reynolds, M. (eds.) (2002). Ian McEwan.
London: Vintage.
Roger, A. (1996). Ian McEwans Portrayal of Women.
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 32(1), 1126.
Ryan, K. (1994). Ian McEwan. Plymouth: Northcote
House.
Schemberg, C. (2004). Achieving At-one-ment:
Storytelling and the Concept of the Self in Ian
McEwans The Child in Time, Black Dogs,
Enduring Love, and Atonement. Frankfurt: Peter
Lang.
Slay, J., Jr. (1996). Ian McEwan. New York: Twayne.
Wells, L. (2010). Ian McEwan. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Wright, J. (dir.) (2007). Atonement. Studio Canal/
Relativity Media/Working Title Films.
McGahern, John
MICHAEL L. STOREY
The fiction of John McGahern, the often acclaimed (and once banned) Irish author, appears
to be written in an understated, realistic style. But
his realism like that of James Joyce, perhaps
McGaherns strongest literary influence is subtly
enhanced by poetic imagery and symbolism that
bring a romantic and metaphysical quality to his
writing. His fiction is almost always set in the rural
Irish midlands where McGahern grew up, and his
themes of oppressed, impoverished country life,
circumscribed by conservative Catholic doctrine
and ritual, are drawn from life in that part of
Ireland. While his fiction has been read as a social
critique of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, it is
renowned more for its timeless, existential themes
of family (including Oedipal) relationships,
growing up, the search for meaning, and the
confrontation with death. McGahern is best
253
known for his six novels and four collections of

stories (including The Collected Stories (1992)),
but he also wrote a memoir, a play, and several
radio and television adaptations of his fiction, as
well as numerous reviews and essays. Internationally recognized, he is especially admired in France.
McGahern was born in 1934 to Catholic parents. His father, a police sergeant, lived in the
police barracks a short distance from the family
home. His mother, a schoolteacher to whom he
was greatly attached, died of cancer when John
was 10 years old. He and his six siblings then
moved into the barracks with their father. After
completing his education at University College
Dublin, McGahern took a teaching position in
a national school near Dublin. He was dismissed
from his teaching position, however, when his
second novel, The Dark (1965), caused a scandal
(it was banned in Ireland) and it became known
that he had married a divorcee, a Finnish woman.
He then left Ireland for England, later traveling to
Spain and the US, where he held various jobs,
including some teaching positions. After divorcing his first wife, he remarried and eventually
returned to Ireland, where he lived until his death
in 2006.
McGaherns first novel, The Barracks (1963), is
an existential examination of the human condition. Elizabeth, the protagonist and second wife of
Reegan, an embittered and violent police sergeant, searches for meaning in her life as she dies
slowly of cancer. The novel treats the themes of
belief and unbelief, hope and despair, and lifes
meaning and its absurdity within the context of
rural, conservative Catholicism. His second novel, The Dark, banned because of its frank portrayal
of masturbation and sexual abuse, has been compared to Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. Like Joyces novel, The Dark is a semiautobiographical Bildungsroman. It follows the
motherless protagonist, young Mahoney, up
through his school years to his departure from
his fathers home. The novels central conflict, the
sons struggle with his violent, abusive father,
finds resolution in a final scene of reconciliation.
The Leavetaking (1974) and The Pornographer
(1979) also treat the theme of a young mans
growth into adulthood.
Amongst Women (1990) presents Michael Moran, a veteran of the Irish War of Independence,
an embittered, aging farmer and a tyrannical
254
MCLIAM WILSON, ROBERT
husband and father, surrounded by his three

daughters and second wife, Rose. Generally
acclaimed as McGaherns finest work, the novel is
a portrait of family dynamics and the decline
of patriarchal dominance in Ireland. In his final
novel,ThatTheyMayFacetheRisingSun(2002),the
protagonist Joe Ruttledge has returned from England to live with his wife, Kate, in the Irish midlands.
It is a beautiful, yet unsparing portrait of rural Irish
life its people, seasons, rituals, and rhythms.
Like the novels, MaGaherns short stories are
often semi-autobiographical. The protagonist is
usually a young, educated Irishman from a rural
background, most often a teacher, disaffected and
searching for meaning in his life. Most often he
seeks it through a love affair or through reconciliation with his father. The love stories My Love,
My Umbrella, Doorways, and Sierra Leone,
to name a few almost always end unsatisfactorily. The affairs often begin by happenstance,
quickly become intense, but end abruptly on
a bitter or ironic note. The fatherson stories,
such as Wheels, Korea, and Gold Watch,
are also bleak and depict the father, usually
a police sergeant or a small farmer, as meanspirited, brutal, and unreceptive to the sons
attempts at reconciliation.
McGaherns Memoir (2005; titled All Will Be
Well in the US), published the year before his
death, confirmed what many readers had long
suspected. Not only were the novels and stories
based on events and relationships in his life, but
the tyrannical, abusive father figure that dominates the fiction is modeled closely on the authors
own father. The memoir is a fitting final work
one that simultaneously sheds light on the novels
and stories and brings a sense of culmination to
them.
Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF)

Maher, E. (2003). John McGahern: From the Local to the
Universal. Dublin: Liffey.
McGahern, J. (1963). The Barracks. London: Faber and
Faber.
McGahern, J. (1965). The Dark. London: Faber and
Faber.
McGahern, J. (1970). Nightlines. London: Faber and

Faber.
McGahern, J. (1974). The Leavetaking. London: Faber
and Faber.
McGahern, J. (1978). Getting Through. London: Faber
and Faber.
McGahern, J. (1979). The Pornographer. London: Faber
and Faber. (Rev. edn. published 1984.)
McGahern, J. (1985). High Ground. London: Faber and
Faber.
McGahern, J. (1990). Amongst Women. London: Faber
and Faber.
McGahern, J. (1992). The Collected Stories. London:
Faber and Faber.
McGahern, J. (2002). That They May Face the Rising
Sun. London: Faber and Faber. (Published in US as
By the Lake.)
McGahern, J. (2005). Memoir. London: Faber and
Faber. (Published in US as All Will Be Well: A
Memoir.)
Sampson, D. (1993). Outstaring Natures Eye: The
Fiction of John McGahern. Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press.
McLiam Wilson, Robert

MATTHEW McGUIRE
Robert McLiam Wilson was born in 1964 in

Belfast. He attended Cambridge University for
a period before dropping out and temporarily
becoming homeless, an incident that had a significant impact on his subsequent artistic development. Alongside fellow novelist Glen Paterson,
McLiam Wilson is generally regarded as heralding
a new generation of Northern Irish writers, which
grew up amid the Troubles, and offers a different
perspective to that of older figures like Seamus
Heaney. McLiam Wilson has published three
novels, a non-fiction book about poverty in Britain and Ireland entitled The Dispossessed (1992),
and made a number of television documentaries
for the BBC. In 2003 he was declared one of
Grantas Best of Young British Novelists despite
not having published anything since 1996. While
his second novel Manfreds Pain (1992) details the
life of an elderly Jewish man living London,
McLiam Wilson is most highly regarded for
his Northern Irish fiction. Ripley Bogle (1989)
and Eureka Street (1996) address a number of
themes including the supersaturation of identity
politics in the North, the problematic nature of
MCLIAM WILSON, ROBERT
traditional Nationalist and Unionist ideologies,

and the dubious nature of aesthetic representations of the Troubles. The authors interest in
muddling the conventional thinking about Northern Irish loyalties is evinced through his own
pseudonym, playfully constructed from the Irish
(McLiam) and English (Wilson) versions of
the same name.
Ripley Bogle is an ironic Bildungsroman, set in
the 1980s. Its eponymous hero is a homeless
vagrant who wanders the streets of Thatchers
London recollecting his childhood spent growing
up amid the unfolding chaos of the Northern Irish
Troubles. As well as evoking the work of both
Charles Dickens and George Orwell, the book is
overtly Joycean in is playful mix of the highly ludic
and the highly literary. Seen through the eyes of
a child, Ripley Bogle presents an estranged and
defamiliarized version of this most well-documented period of Northern Irish history. The
novel renders the conflict as devoid of the ideologies upon which historical and political narratives rely. The authors own pseudonym finds its
mirror in the main character who comically
rechristens himself Ripley Irish-British Bogle in
an attempt to reconcile his ancestry, having both
an Irish mother and a Welsh father. Ripley Bogle
marked something of a watershed in Northern
Irish fiction which for the first time was presented
with a highly self-aware, postmodern representation of the post-1969 conflict. The novel satirized
the two most popular modes of Northern Irish
fiction, the Troubles trash thriller and the
across the barricades romance. McLiam Wilson
accuses these generic fictions of complicity in the
kind of ideological deadlock and theoretical slippage upon which the Troubles are predicated. The
novels dramatic denouement reveals that all narratives are suspect, that accessing an objective
truth is the goal of only the most naive reader.
Eureka Street is also concerned with a familiar
Northern Irish cliche. It depicts the lives of two
friends from opposite sides of the political divide
and their attempts to reconcile themselves to the
changing nature of Northern Ireland at the time
of the paramilitary ceasefires during the 1990s.
Again, it seeks to deliberately destabilize the
received categories of Northern Irish culture. Jake
Jackson is a disgruntled Catholic with a positive
loathing for anything Irish. His friend Chuckie
Lurgan is an entrepreneurial Protestant, more
255
interested in his wallet or his women than anything faintly political. Echoing the authors work
in The Dispossessed, the novel explores the underlying economics of the Troubles, reminding us
that the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland
was mainly restricted to the poorer parts of
society. Eureka Street contains one of the most
famous depictions of violence in recent Northern
Irish writing; the scene is a bomb blast in
the Fountain Lane area of Belfast city center. The
novel marks a significant departure in Northern
Irish fiction in that it focuses upon the city, and
not the country, as a source of artistic inspiration
and a symbol of potential redemption. The novel
offers a contrast to the iconography of Northern
Irish poetry and its tendency toward an organic
symbolism and a rural mythology as a source
of cultural consolation and relief. Whereas Ripley
Bogle took on the mass market fiction of the
North, Eureka Street satirizes the high art of
Northern Irish poetry and its attempts to elevate
itself above the ideological compromises of
Northern Irish life. The character Shague
Ghinthoss, a pun on shag and toss, parodies
the image of the Northern Irish poet, a criticism
McLiam Wilson makes explicit in some of his
non-fictional writing.
SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James
(BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)

Kennedy-Andrews, E. (2003). Fiction and the Northern
Ireland Troubles Since 1969: (De)constructing the
North. Dublin: Four Courts.
Kirkland, R. (2000). Bourgeois Redemptions: The
Fictions of Glen Patterson and Robert McLiam
Wilson. In L. Harte & M. Parker (eds.),
Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories.
McLiam Wilson, R. (1989). Ripley Bogle. London:
Vintage.
McLiam Wilson, R. (1992). Manfreds Pain. London:
Picador.
McLiam Wilson, R. (1993). 1989. In Twenty-One
Picador Authors Celebrate 21 Years of International
Writing. London: Picador.
McLiam Wilson, R. (1995). The Glittering Prize.
Fortnight, pp. 3445 (Nov.).
McLiam Wilson, R. (1996). Eureka Street. London:
Secker and Warburg.
256
MO, TIMOTHY
McLiam Wilson, R., & Wylie, D. (1992). The

Dispossessed. London: Pan.
Patten, E. (1995). Northern Irelands Prodigal
Novelists. In I. A. Bell (ed.), Peripheral Visions:
Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British
Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Pelaschiar, L. (2000). Transforming Belfast: The
Evolving Role of the City in Northern Irish Fiction.
Irish University Review, 30(1), 11726.
Mo, Timothy
ELAINE YEE LIN HO
Born in 1950, Timothy Mo read History at

St. Johns College, Oxford, and worked as
a reporter for Boxing News before becoming
a full-time writer. His Chinese father and English
mother divorced when he was 18 months old. The
first nine years of his life were spent in Hong Kong
where he was educated first in a Chinese convent
school and then in a school for the children of
English expatriates. This formative experience is
related in a little-known but important essay
(Mo 1996) published long after he had achieved
recognition as a novelist. The essay offers an
explanatory narrative for the way his career and
identity as a writer unfolded over two decades. In
hindsight, Mo sees himself as a child endowed
through genes and upbringing with a precocious
conceptual intelligence, adrift within an ideographic literary culture (305), stifled by teachers
who compelled him to read and write Chinese
characters. In the English school, which he found
liberating, he learnt boxing and developed a preference for Anglo-Western culture and stories of
action and adventure.
The essay also addresses the issues that framed
the critical reception of Mo from his first two
novels, The Monkey King (1978) and Sour
Sweet (1982): his cultural identity and unique
propensities as a fictionist. Set in mid-twentieth-century Hong Kong, The Monkey King narrates the fortunes of the Poon family and the
battle of wits between the patriarch Mr. Poon and
his son-in-law, Wallace Nolasco. Wallace, a Macanese of Portuguese descent, is the outsider who
eventually triumphs to replace Mr. Poon as head
of the family. In Sour Sweet, the setting is Chinatown, London where the immigrant Lily Chen
struggles for survival in an environment she bare-
ly comprehends, with little on her side but wit,

willfulness, and an inalienable sense of herself as
authentically Chinese. Both Wallace and Lily are
marginal to the social milieu in which they find
themselves, and Mo constitutes their marginality
as a variety of perspectives from which to satirize
the Chinese family and cultural traditions. The
subjects of these novels and Mos ancestry focus
attention on the issue of Chinese identity at a time
when ethnicity of any stripe was almost invisible
in British fiction. This focus runs counter to Mos
professed antipathy to Chinese culture, and tends
to distract from more perceptive appraisal of his
talents as a writer: his ability to draw complex and
sympathetic main characters, a stringent eye for
detail in scene-setting, and the capacity to make
descriptions of physical action and combat deliver
their impact.
These strengths are on full display in the ambitious epical narrative of his third novel, An Insular
Possession (1986), which explores the so-called
First Opium War fought between Britain and
China in the nineteenth century, which led to the
colonization of Hong Kong. In the two protagonists, Gideon Chase and Walter Eastman, American journalists caught between the two empires,
Mo refocuses his abiding interest in marginal
subjects and viewpoints but away from Chinese
ethnicity and culture. This is a move he continues
in The Redundancy of Courage (1991), considered
by some to be his finest work to date. The novel,
set in the fictional island of Danu, which closely
resembles East Timor, relates the islanders war of
independence, first against a European colonizer
and then against an imperial neighbor. The fighters are observed by Adolph Ng, the first-person
narrator, a Danuese whose Chinese ancestry is
important only insofar as it separates him from
his native and mestizo comrades-in-arms. Of
much greater significance is the novels critique
of hegemonic power and its sympathetic but also
dispassionate portrayal of characters who take up
roles of resistance. Mos own mimetic prowess is
such that the novel garnered praise from no less
than Jose Ramos-Hortas himself, the Timorese
leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who found
its realism remarkable especially considering
that Mo had not been to East Timor (www.
timothymo.co.uk/insulared.html, accessed Aug.
15, 2008). The novel was published before East
Timors struggle exploded onto the world stage
MODERNIST FICTION
and demonstrated Mos prescience as a global

observer and commentator.
In his fifth novel, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995), Mo migrates to another Asian
location, the Philippines. By this time, he was
spending more and more of his year in Asia, not
only in the Philippines but also in Thailand and
on family visits to Hong Kong. He had also turned
his back on mainstream commercial publishers to
set up his own Paddleless Press, a high-risk venture for an established author that bears more
than a passing resemblance to the intriguing mix
of courage and bravado found in his characters.
Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard is populated by
ordinary men and women who, like their counterparts elsewhere in Mos fictional worlds, inhabit
a society over which they have little control and
who have to negotiate daily with powerful structures that rule and ruin their lives. Their actions
are both admirable and nugatory, the outcomes
alternately tragic and comic. In describing the
foibles and antics on both sides, Mo is characteristically humorous. But he also bares his satires
lacerating edge. The novel attracted controversy
for its perceived attack on Philippine and other
nationalities as much as for its venue of
publication.
In his latest novel, Renegade or Halo2 (1999),
the protagonist Rey Castro is a migrant laborer
traveling out of the Philippines to Asia and the
Anglo-American West, a contemporary Ulysses,
antiheroic in the modernist vein but made visible
in a late modern globalizing world where the
cross-cultural encounters of an entire underclass
of working migrants rarely merit public and
fictional concern. The novel contains descriptions
of rape, torture, and cruelty but also sensitively
probes Reys psychology. His acerbic comments
present a host of cultures and cultural characteristics in unflattering light. Mos apparent readiness to rank cultural differences and levy value
judgments is highly unusual at a historical juncture in which cultural relativism appears to be the
order of the day.
Due to recent interest in diasporic literatures,
Sour Sweet remains Mos most popularly read and
widely taught novel to date. While it is a pioneering work that remains the best novel on Chinatown Britain, it does not show Mos full range as
an artist. Mining the groove of his undoubted
realist talent, Mo consistently sets his fiction
257
against forces that impose boundaries on human

action and expression wherever in the world he
perceives them. The perceptions can be partial
and provocative, but they are always uniquely
and astutely those of a cosmopolitan writer for
whom questions of value, justice, and social
action do not afford much room for gentility and
compromise.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); East Asian
Fiction (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The
Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)
Ho, E. Y. L. (2000). Timothy Mo. Manchester:
Kerr, D. (2001). Timothy Mos Man Sundae and Other
Overseas Workers. Journal of Commonwealth
McLeod, J. (1999). On the Chase for Gideon Nye:
History and Representation in Timothy Mos An
Insular Possession. Journal of Commonwealth
Mo, T. (1978). The Monkey King. London: Deutsch.
Mo, T. (1982). Sour Sweet. London: Deutsch.
Mo, T. (1986). An Insular Possession. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Mo, T. (1991). The Redundancy of Courage. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Mo, T. (1995). Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard.
London: Paddleless.
Mo, T. (1996). Fighting Their Writing: The Unholy
Lingo of RLS and Kung Fu Tse. In C. Hope & P.
Porter (eds.), New Writing 5. London: Vintage,
pp. 299318. (An earlier version published as One
of Billys Boys, Eastern Express Weekend
(Hong Kong), Feb. 5, 1994.)
Mo, T. (1999). Renegade or Halo2. London: Paddleless.
Timothy Mo website: www.timothymo.co.uk.
Modernist Fiction
BRYONY RANDALL
While the parameters of the terms modernist

and modernism are constantly under debate,
there is a broad critical consensus that modernist
fiction, in the Western Anglophone world,
usually denotes experimental narrative works
258
MODERNIST FICTION
produced between 1890 and 1940, and the major

figures in British and Irish modernist fiction
would include Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf,
and James Joyce. Prose fiction falling within this
category is identified by its breaking with literary
norms; being modern, in the sense of new,
different, unprecedented. And while experimentation in terms of form is most widely seen as
identifying modernist literature breaking up
linear narrative, using non-normative syntax,
inventing new forms of narrator, and so on
modernist texts are also characterized by their
willingness to address new and sometimes
controversial subject matter. Modernist fiction
has often been caricatured as holding real life
at a distance, interested only in its own formal and
stylistic innovations. But much modernist fiction
is characterized by a direct, often antagonistic,
engagement with the lived realities of its rapidly
changed, and changing, social and political world,
influencing and influenced by the contemporaneous developments in other art forms, as well as
presenting complex responses to intellectual
developments in every field, from politics and
philosophy to physics and biology.
The use of the word modernist as a literary
critical term is a relatively recent development.
Modernism was by no means a conscious
movement but evolved in various ways out of
the literature of earlier periods often reacting
against it, but also adopting and modifying its
forms. The writers we now refer to as modernist
would not have used the term to describe themselves, and indeed may have been surprised to
find themselves grouped with other writers
with whom they may not have found much in
common. The different kinds of innovation
now designated modernist range from Ford
Madox Fords profoundly unreliable narrator in
The Good Soldier (1915) to the multivocal
tunnelling narrative method of Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), where the narrative is smoothly passed
from one character to another; from D. H. Lawrences insistent, poetic prose, dealing with
previously taboo issues of sexuality and family
dynamics in novels such as Sons and Lovers
(1913), to May Sinclairs treatment of similar
themes in The Life and Death of Harriett Frean
(1922) through sparse prose, tightly focused
through an individual consciousness. Thus any
attempt to pin down the qualities that will be
displayed by every modernist text will inevitably

fail.
However, what these texts share is an unusual
form or mode of narration: one that might break
with the traditional linear chronology of the
novel, representing an alternative temporality or
temporalities; or allow access to the consciousness
(or indeed unconscious) of its characters and, in
doing so, propose different ways of conceiving the
relationships between people; or include language
and diction not previously considered novelistic,
whether by working with lowbrow forms of
speech, or including poetic language, dense
with imagery and allusion. Another classic modernist characteristic is the breaking down of
boundaries between genres (in, for example,
Virginia Woolfs Orlando (1928), subtitled A
Biography, or Mary Buttss Armed with Madness
of the same year, modeled along the lines of
a medieval Grail epic). While, broadly speaking,
the Victorian novel seeks to convince the reader of
the contiguity of the world it creates with the real
world in which the reader lives, modernist fiction
draws attention to its own fictionality to the fact
that it is formed in language and, in doing so,
provokes the reader to probe the relationships
between him- or herself, language, and the real
world.
The innovations of British and Irish modernist
writers are rooted in responses to a world whose
beliefs had been radically disrupted during the last
decades of the nineteenth century. This period
saw a reorientation in scientific, philosophical,
and political thought toward the fundamental
questions of both Gods and mans place in the
universe. Mid-century, Charles Darwins theories
of evolution had implied a challenge to belief in
a creator-god, but also as a consequence undermined the picture of an anthropocentric universe.
Karl Marx (with his collaborator Friedrich
Engels) emphasized the extent to which individuals were in thrall to the economic mechanisms
of an industrialized society. Sigmund Freud proposed that, rather than being rational beings in
control of our thoughts and actions, we are
constantly influenced by the unconscious, full of
desires, drives, and fears originating in childhood.
And Friedrich Nietzsche, famously pronouncing
that God is dead, suggested that humanity can
look only to itself to generate its values, hence
individuals should make their choices based on
MODERNIST FICTION
what will enable them to succeed. In the early

twentieth century, the work of Albert Einstein in
physics and Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics
emphasized the relative instability of the physical
world and of language, respectively. It is in the
context of these developments in other disciplines
that we must see the experimentations of the
writers of modernist fiction.
Alongside these developments, dramatic
changes in the political, social, and cultural landscape of Britain and Ireland in this period form
both the backdrop to, and the material of, modernist fiction. The feminist movement gained
momentum throughout the 1880s, 1890s, and
into the twentieth century; campaigns on the
specific issue of votes for women ran alongside
broader debates about womens role and rights in
society. The fight for Irish independence from
British rule was one of many global movements
asserting the right to self-determination of
nations colonized by European powers; the end
of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of
the decline of empire globally. Alongside the loss
of this means of anchoring Britains sense of itself,
the so-called death of liberalism in British
politics posed a further challenge to assumptions
about progress and stability. The development of
extremist political movements across Europe in
the early decades of the twentieth century shook
the belief in the dominance of liberal politics.
And, of course, politics and economics eventually
played themselves out in the most apocalyptic of
events, World War I. Unprecedented in scale,
the Great War not only affected the lives of
every individual British and Irish citizen, but
demanded a profound reassessment of assumptions about what, collectively and individually,
humans could apparently do to each other
indeed, to themselves.
This period also saw a dramatic acceleration in
technological innovation: electric light; the telegraph and later telephone; the bicycle, car, and
airplane. Photography became an aspect of everyday life that began to be taken for granted; the
cinema developed as a new mode of entertainment. Public transport proliferated and became
part of the daily routine for many. These developments not only radically changed, within the
course of a generation, the day-to-day experiences
of individuals and communities, but challenged
traditional concepts of time and space. A person
259
on the other side of an ocean could be heard as if

they were in the same room; people could, individually in a car or in a carriage full of strangers,
traverse distances in an afternoon that previously
might have taken days. The night-time streets of
the city could become as bright as day; sitting still
in a darkened room, one could witness vast
panoramas, dramatic movement, projected onto
a screen.
Finally, it is crucial to place modernist fiction in
the context of contemporary developments in
other art forms. Not only did the invention of
the new art form of cinema influence experimental forms of representing time in narrative (in,
for example, Dorothy Richardson or Virginia
Woolf), but this was also a period of radical
innovation in the other visual arts, particularly
painting and sculpture. When post-impressionist
and cubist painters such as Paul Cezanne, Vincent
Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso were first exhibited
in London in the 1910s their works caused outrage in their challenge to received notions of
visual art and their desire to transform assumptions about how and indeed what we see, and how
it might be represented. Presenting multiple
perspectives simultaneously, disrupting the
hierarchical relationship between subject and
context, drawing attention to the materiality of
the artistic medium the impact of these gestures
in the art world can easily be read across to
innovations in narrative, which in turn would
feed back into other artistic forms.
No historical period is without its changes, but
modernist fiction was produced in a period
marked by a particularly intense concentration
of disruptions to long-held beliefs, assumptions,
and modes of experience. Individual writers
might be particularly engaged with certain aspects
of their environment above others. But seen
collectively, the capacity of British and Irish
modernist fiction writers to engage with, even
welcome, the fragmentary and inconclusive in
the form of their work as well as its content
reflects the newly fragmentary and inconclusive
nature of the world around them.
As befits so slippery a category, many of the key
early contributors to British and Irish modernist
fiction were neither British nor Irish; conversely,
much writing by British and Irish writers took
place outside of Britain or Ireland. Among the key
figures who exemplify this crossing of national
260
MODERNIST FICTION
boundaries are Henry James (who was born

in America, but lived most of his adult life in
England, becoming a British citizen just before his
death) and Joseph Conrad (a Pole who settled in
England and learned English only in his twenties).
Jamess novels resist categorical conclusions
and neat endings; this is perhaps the most
modernist of their characteristics. He is credited with refining and popularizing so-called free
indirect discourse, where the thoughts and feelings of a particular character are rendered in
third-person narrative, placing the narrative voice
in an ambiguous position between narrator and
character. He also plays with the potential of
the first-person narrative to disrupt, rather than
confirm, narrative authenticity; in The Turn of the
Screw (1898) a mysterious story is told through an
unnamed narrator, himself reporting what he has
been told by a friend who has read the firsthand
account of events, placing layers of uncertainty
and possible slippage between the story and the
reader. Conrad, a great admirer of James, also
used this so-called frame narrative in his most
famous novel Heart of Darkness (1902) to render
the journey on which it takes the reader into the
African interior, and into the damaged mind of
the elusive Kurtz even more unsettling; his Secret
Agent (1907) is a disturbing story of terrorism
and manipulation that resonates with twentyfirst-century preoccupations. Disrupting the
expected firm relationship between fiction and
reality, between language and the things we use
language to describe, these works exemplify
modernist fictions attempt to respond adequately to a world where assumptions about the foundations of human experience had been radically
undermined.
Another key figure in this early modernist scene
is Ford Madox Ford. A novelist and short story
writer, and sometime collaborator with Conrad,
Ford made an equally important contribution to
the development of modernist fiction in his role as
editor and publisher, publishing Conrad, James,
Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and James
Joyce, among others, in his English Review and
Transatlantic Review. (Indeed, periodicals such as
these, and The Egoist and The Athenaeum, were
crucial outlets for modernist fiction.) Fords most
celebrated work is The Good Soldier, a finely
drawn exploration of deceit and loyalty through
one of the most famously unreliable narrators in
British fiction. But he is also recognized for the

World War I tetralogy Parades End (1982
[19248]), a panoramic evocation of the realities
of life in the trenches as well as the emotional and
psychological struggles of those left behind. Other
writers known for their war fiction are Rebecca
West, whose Return of the Soldier (1918) was the
first war novel by a woman, and Richard Aldington, also a poet, who drew on his own experiences
on the front line in Death of a Hero (1929).
The impact of the war resonates throughout the
modernist fiction of the 1920s and into the 1930s,
directly and obliquely. Virginia Woolfs Jacobs
Room (1922) and To the Lighthouse (1928) have
war as their, almost absent, center, reflecting its
unspeakability. Similarly, her Between the Acts,
posthumously published in 1941, is a novel whose
festive subject matter (a village pageant) works in
productive tension with the dark shadow of
World War II. Although Woolf is often associated
with particular innovations in narrative fiction
(free indirect discourse, poetic prose) each of her
10 novels unfolds a different mode of narrative,
from the more traditionally realist The Voyage
Out (1915) to the lyrical evocation of a single
London day in Mrs. Dalloway to the prose poem
of The Waves (1931).
The once familiar depiction of Woolf as the
token woman among a male high modernist cabal
has in the last couple of decades been displaced by
a much more gender-balanced picture of modernist innovation, Bonnie Kime Scotts anthology
The Gender of Modernism (1990) being a landmark text in this critical trajectory. From the
fervently feminist, proto-modernist short stories
of George Egerton (the pen name of the Irish
writer Mary Chavelita Dunne) in the 1890s, to
Dorothy Richardsons monumental 13-volume
Pilgrimage (1979 [191567]; the first work of
fiction to be described as stream of consciousness) to the mysterious novels of Mary
Butts in the 1920s and 1930s, whose infusion with
myth and preoccupation with sexuality compare
interestingly with the better-known work of D. H.
Lawrence, the centrality of British and Irish women writers to the modernist literary landscape is
now firmly established. Ongoing work toward the
(re)discovery and republication of female writers,
such as the Welsh short story writer Dorothy
Edwards, keeps this project alive in modernist
studies.
MODERNIST FICTION
While modernism is frequently described as

a hybrid, expatriate phenomenon, the republication of writers such as Edwards is indicative of
current critical interest in the idea of national
modernisms. In Ireland, other major figures
include Flann OBrien, Elizabeth Bowen, and
Samuel Beckett (via proto-modernists like Oscar
Wilde and John Millington Synge); indeed,
Becketts mid-century work in prose and drama
represents some of the most extreme forms that
modernist writing might take, presenting a radical
challenge to notions of human subjectivity, time,
and experience with a dark humor. But James
Joyce remains the most celebrated Irish modernist; his immense novel Ulysses (1922), using
the Greek epic as its model, is often cited as the
crowning achievement in modernist fiction, not
least because of its deployment of many radically
different styles within a single volume. Famously,
the final chapter has no punctuation, evoking the
fluid interior world of the character Molly Bloom.
Earlier in the century, Joyces short story collection Dubliners (1914) had caused controversy in
its attention to taboo subjects and refusal to
provide comfortable conclusions. Even more
controversial is his Finnegans Wake (1939), written in an entirely synthetic language, based on
English but where almost every word is a portmanteau made up of words from any number of
different languages.
The fiction of Scottish writers such as Lewis
Grassic Gibbon (best known for his immense A
Scots Quair, 1946 [19324]) and Neil M. Gunn is
firmly located in a Scottish context, as well as
participating in a transnational modernist literature. In Wales, Caradoc Evans, Saunders Lewis,
and the prose work of Dylan Thomas all display
qualities we might now consider modernist.
And this interest in the range of modernisms
draws attention to the idea of a specifically English
modernism, in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence,
Butts, and E. M. Forster.
Later in the century, numerous prose fiction
writers turned to less overtly experimental styles;
nevertheless, there is increasing critical interest in
exploring modernist traces in the work of Christopher Isherwood, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry
Green, Rosamond Lehmann, and Rose Macaulay.
(E. M. Forster is a similar liminal figure from early
in the century, claimed as modernist by some, as
Georgian by others.) But other writers such as
261
B. S. Johnson and Malcolm Lowry display their

modernist heritage much more overtly. So while,
by the 1960s, the cultural phenomenon of
postmodernism had apparently marked the end
of modernist fiction, its impact resonates through
the end of the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first.
SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF);
Feminist Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Scottish Fiction (BIF);
World War I in Fiction (BIF)

and Windus.
Beckett, S. (1986). The Complete Dramatic Works.
Bradbury, M., & McFarlane, J. (eds.) (1976).
Modernism 18901930. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bradshaw, D. (ed.) (2003). A Concise Companion to
Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Butts, M. F. (1928). Armed with Madness. London:
Wishart.
Conrad, J. (2007). Heart of Darkness [1902]. London:
Penguin.
Dettmar, K., & Bradshaw, D. (eds.) (2006). A
Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Edwards, D. (1927). Rhapsody. London: Wishart.
Ford, F. M. (1915). The Good Soldier. London: John
Lane.
Ford, F. M. (1982). Parades End [19248]. London:
Penguin.
Gibbon, L. G. (1946). A Scots Quair [19324]. London:
Jarrolds.
Goldman, J. (2004). Modernism 19101945: Image to
Apocalypse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
James, H. (1881). The Portrait of a Lady. London:
Macmillan.
James, H. (1898). The Turn of the Screw. London:
Heinemann.
Joyce, J. (1914). Dubliners. London: Grant Richards.
Joyce, J. (1922). Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Co.
Joyce, J. (1939). Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and
Faber.
Kolocotroni, V., Goldman, J., & Taxidou, O. (1998).
Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1913). Sons and Lovers. London:
Duckworth.
262
MOORE, BRIAN
Levenson, M. (ed.) (1999). The Cambridge Companion

to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Nicholls, P. (1995). Modernisms: A Literary Guide.
Rainey, L. (2005). Modernism: An Anthology. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Richardson, D. (1979). Pilgrimage [191567]. London:
Virago.
Scott, B. K. (1990). The Gender of Modernism: A Critical
Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sinclair, M. (1922). The Life and Death of Harriett
Frean. London: Collins.
Nisbet.
Whitworth, M. (ed.) (2007). Modernism: A Guide to
Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Woolf, V. (1915). The Voyage Out. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1922). Jacobs Room. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1927). To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1928). Orlando. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1931). The Waves. London: Hogarth.
Moore, Brian
EAMON MAHER
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1921, Brian

Moore spent the majority of his life in Canada and
the US. The author of some 20 novels, he is
characterized as a talented storyteller as well as
someone with a keen understanding of the female
psyche (ODonoghue, 1991). By the time of his
death in January 1999, Moores standing was
extremely high: a lucrative book contract signed
with Bloomsbury in 1988 made him financially
secure and many of his novels were successfully
adapted for the screen (most notably Catholics,
Black Robe, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,
and Lies of Silence). While many of the earlier
novels have a distinctively Irish flavor, others are
situated in France, the US, Canada, and South
America.
The family of Moores upbringing was staunchly Catholic and nationalistic, yet Moore found the
religious atmosphere of Belfast stifling. Lacking
what he described as a religious sense, and being
uninspired by the thought of following his father
and brothers into a career in medicine, he fled
Belfast to work in the British Ministry of War
Transport in 1942. Much of what he experienced
traveling around Europe and North Africa at the

end of World War II was filed away and used in
subsequent novels such as The Colour of Blood
(1987), The Statement (1995), and The Magicians
Wife (1997).
Although a confirmed agnostic from an early
age, Moore was fascinated by those who had
faith. His education at St. Malachys, the Catholic
diocesan school in Belfast, filled him with disdain
for religious bigotry. His first novel, The Lonely
Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), traces the tragic
plight of an alcoholic spinster who desperately
seeks comfort in a relationship with a returned
emigrant, James Madden, who mistakenly
believes that she is a woman of means. On
discovering that she is even more impoverished
than he, Madden puts an end to the relationship.
This leads to a bout of drinking and a fatal
questioning of her faith by Judith. She ends up
railing against religion during a visit to her
friend, Mrs. ONeill: God! What does He care?
Is there a God at all, Ive been asking myself,
because if there is, why does he never answer our
prayers? (229).
Moores first novel presents a gloomy picture of
Belfast, where people live in a religious ghetto
with little hope of escape or diversion. The Feast
of Lupercal (1958) and the autobiographical
The Emperor of Ice Cream (1966) consolidate the
image of a sectarian, repressive city. The former
has at its main protagonist Diarmuid Devine,
a teacher in Ardath College, a thinly disguised
representation of St. Malachys, who is momentarily dazzled by the arrival of a young woman
from Dublin. In the same way as for Judith
Hearne, Catholicism and the colonial bigotry
of Belfast frustrate his ability to reach a sense of
independent maturity (Hicks 25). He is unable
to consummate his passion for Una and the
liaison endangers his career in Ardath. The Emperor of Ice Cream does offer the promise of
liberation, which is supplied, strangely enough,
by the bombing of Belfast during World War II.
Gavin Burke joins the ARP (civil defense) unit
(as Moore did) and finds himself enmeshed in
the unfolding of history. He is unexpectedly cast
in a heroic role as he courageously pulls bodies
from collapsed buildings and discovers qualities
he never knew he possessed. At the end of the
novel, in a symbolic gesture, Burke and his fellow
ARP member, Freddy Hargreaves, choose not to
MOORE, BRIAN
kneel as the Our Father is recited in the hospital.

This is the first example of a triumphant break
from the shackles of religion by one of Moores
characters.
The range of topics covered in the novels is
vast. Political issues are broached in The Colour
of Blood, describing the travails of a cardinal in
communist Poland, No Other Life (1993), which
treats of the effects of liberation theology on
a Caribbean island, and Lies of Silence (1990),
set in Belfast during the Troubles. The Statement
deals with a Vichy collaborator in Nazi-occupied
France during World War II, whereas The
Magicians Wife broaches colonial activities in
Algeria under the Emperor Napoleon III. Sexuality and issues of identity are central elements
in I am Mary Dunne (1968), The Doctors Wife
(1976), and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes
(1981).
Two notable, and very different, approaches to
Catholicism are evident in Catholics (1972a) and
Cold Heaven (1983). The former is set on a
remote island monastery off the southwestern
coast of Ireland in the period after Vatican IV.
The monks of the monastic community are anxious to say the Mass in Latin, which contravenes
the ecumenical thrust of Vatican IV. A progressive priest, James Kinsella, is sent by Rome to
bring the monks to order. The abbot, Tomas
Kinsella, a man who lost his faith during a visit
to Lourdes, attempts to steer a path between the
two factions and ends up rediscovering the ability
to pray. Prayer is the only miracle (91), he tells
the monks, thus revealing the key that unlocks his
unbelief. Cold Heaven is a fascinating exposition
of how a Marian apparition transforms the life of
an entrenched agnostic, Marie, who successfully
faces down the patriarchal Catholic Church
which she associates with its priests and indulgences and denials of the imperfection of this
world for an illusionary hereafter (1983, 889).
Marie steers a path away from religion and ends
up leaving her husband to live with a man with
whom she is deeply in love. In an interview,
Moore stated: Belief is an obsession of mine. I
think everybody wants to believe in something
politics, religion, something that makes life
worthwhile for them. And with most people
theres a certain point in their lives when these
beliefs are shattered. And its that point I seize on
as a writer (Craig 253).
263
Graham Greene referred to Brian Moore as his

favorite living author and his work is certainly
worthy of close scrutiny and will continue to
attract scholarly attention in the future.
SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Politics and the
Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
Craig, P. (2002). Brian Moore: A Biography. London:
Bloomsbury.
Hicks, P. (2007). Brian Moore and the Meaning of the
Past. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen.
Moore, B. (1955). The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
London: Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1958). The Feast of Lupercal. London:
Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1960). The Luck of Ginger Coffey. London:
Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1963). An Answer from Limbo. London:
Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1966). The Emperor of Ice Cream. London:
Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1968). I am Mary Dunne. London:
Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1971). Fergus. London: Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1972a). Catholics. London: Triad/Panther.
Moore, B. (1972b). The Revolution Script.
Moore, B. (1975). The Great Victorian Collection.
London: Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1976). The Doctors Wife. London:
Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1979). The Mangan Inheritance. London:
Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1981). The Temptation of Eileen Hughes.
London: Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1983). Cold Heaven. London: Triad/
Panther.
Moore, B. (1985). Black Robe. London: Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1987). The Colour of Blood. London:
Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1990). Lies of Silence. London: Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1993). No Other Life. London: Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1995). The Statement. London: Flamingo.
Moore, B. (1997). The Magicians Wife. London:
Flamingo.
Murray, C. (ed.) (1988). Brian Moore Special Issue.
Irish University Review, 18(1).
ODonoghue, J. (1991). Brian Moore: A Critical Study.
Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Sampson, D. (1998). Brian Moore: The Chameleon
Novelist. Dublin: Merino.
264
MURDOCH, IRIS
Murdoch, Iris
BRAN NICOL
Iris Jean Murdoch was a singular figure in twentieth-century literature. In addition to being one
of the most distinctive postwar British novelists,
producing 26 novels (as well as five plays, a book
of poems, a libretto, and a recently rediscovered
short story), she was also an esteemed moral
philosopher, publishing numerous philosophical
books and essays. Murdochs fiction is an interesting combination of the classic realist emphasis on character and detailed description and
the conventions of prose romance. Her plots
are gripping and full of bizarre twists and
coincidences that disrupt the apparent stability
of the lives of her characters. Nevertheless
her characters experiences, and the way they
respond, mean that her novels are serious explorations of profound philosophical questions
such as the nature of goodness, love, spirituality,
power, and death.
Murdoch was born on July 15, 1919 in Dublin,
though her family moved to England when she
was only a year old. She always regarded herself as
an Irish writer, despite spending most of her life in
England, and being educated at some of the most
quintessentially English institutions (the Froebel
Institute, Badminton School, and Cambridge
and Oxford universities). Rather than pointing
to peculiarly Irish qualities in Murdochs writing, the significance of her insistence is that it
indicates her willingness to style herself as something of an outsider to the English literary tradition. Indeed, in her formative years as a writer and
philosopher she looked to Continental literary
and philosophical traditions for inspiration,
admiring in particular the work of Jean-Paul
Sartre, Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein. She met Sartre, Queneau,
and other European intellectuals during a period,
in 19446, when she worked with displaced
people on the Continent for the Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. When she studied
philosophy at Cambridge after the war she did
so under the shadow of Wittgenstein. Her book
on Sartre, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), was
one of the first serious analyses by a British
philosopher of the prominent Continental tradition of existentialism.
Murdoch was a Fellow at St. Annes College and

university lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University between 1948 and 1963, following which,
between 1963 and 1967, she lectured at the Royal
College of Art, London. Having married fellow
don John Bayley in 1956, she lived all her life in
Oxford. She has been called the very personification of the Oxonian intellectual (New York
Times, Dec. 26, 2001), and was known to be
fiercely intelligent, kind, and eccentric (known
for the untidiness of her home, her love of pubs,
and oddities of behavior such as delivering completed manuscripts to publishers in plastic bags).
Her fiction, peopled with middle- and upper-class
academics and civil servants, reflects her own
rarefied social environment. The outward
impression of stability and sedentariness in her
life was contradicted, however, by a string of
biographical studies that followed her death in
1999, including three memoirs published by
Bayley. It emerged that Murdoch had led a complicated emotional life and had had a multitude of
affairs. Her reticence to speak about her private
life and perhaps the emphasis on goodness in
her philosophy had given her a saintly public
persona, and the systematic couplings and
power games that typify social relations in her
novels were assumed by readers to be purely
the product of her imagination. The increased
knowledge of her life, however, makes them seem
more autobiographical.
Murdochs first novel, Under the Net, a picaresque tale of bohemian London in the 1950s, was
published in 1954. It saw her briefly classified as
part of a new socialrealist movement in fiction,
whose members also included contemporaries
such as Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, which
rejected the introspective, experimental strains
of modernism. Her next few novels, however,
including The Flight from the Enchanter (1956),
The Bell (1958), and A Severed Head (1961), made
it clear that Murdochs brand of realism was far
from a reflection of everyday life of the period.
This is underlined by the arguments in
notable polemical essays such as The Sublime
and the Beautiful Revisited (1958), Against
Dryness (1961), and Existentialists and
Mystics (1970), which demonstrate how different Murdochs understanding of realism was to
the kind of documentary clarity favored by social
realism. There she argued that contemporary
MURDOCH, IRIS
fiction and philosophy proved that contemporary

culture was suffering from an inability to think or
speak about morality and politics with sufficient
depth, and was beset by an impoverished understanding of the human personality. She felt contemporary fiction had a duty to engage with this
problem, and her solution was that writers look to
the achievements of nineteenth-century realist
novelists such as Tolstoy and George Eliot, who
were able to create complex characters that seemed
unlike those of the majority of Murdochs
contemporaries to exist independently of their
author and the demands of the plot.
This independence of character was the
counterpart of the activity at the very heart of
Murdochs own ethics, which she developed
through works of philosophy such as The Sovereignty of Good (1970b) and The Fire and the Sun
(1977): the necessity of attending to the world
outside the self and the other people who inhabit
it without misperceiving it through the prism of
personal fantasy. Murdochs moral philosophy
was essentially a form of Platonism, one which
turns on the value of moving from low Eros to
high Eros, that is, avoiding selfish worldly
gratification by looking objectively at the external
world. The motivation behind this can be
summed up by the title of her last work of
philosophy, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
(1992). Everyday morality was once shaped by
the metaphysical conceptual framework provided by religion. But in a post-Christian world,
where the ready protective symbolism of religion was in decline, she felt an alternative was
required. Art could perform this function, as it
shows us the world, our world and not another
one, with a clarity which startles and delights us
simply because we are not used to looking at the
real world at all (Murdoch 1997b, 352).
Murdochs philosophical background made
her an agile and formidably intelligent theorist
of contemporary fiction, and an important
counter-voice to prominent anti-realist novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Alain RobbeGrillet, B. S. Johnson, or John Barth. But it also
meant that reviewers tended to measure her own
work against the exacting standards of the great
realist novelists she championed and find it wanting. In fact, the comparison between Murdochs
own writing and nineteenth-century realism is
rather misleading. Murdoch always had more in
265
common with contemporaries who were preoccupied by myth and psychodrama, and whose
work was more self-consciously aesthetic, such as
William Golding or Muriel Spark. Nevertheless,
her fiction does live up to the high expectations set
up by her philosophy and literary theory in an
important sense: it is a serious attempt to explore
the nature of existence in a world without God.
This dilemma explains why so many of her
plots involve accidental events. Novels such as The
Bell (1958), A Word Child (1975), and The Good
Apprentice (1985) revolve around accidental
deaths for which the central character is responsible. Thus they implicitly ask how a guilty man
can achieve redemption in the face of the absence
of God, or how we derive any meaning at all from
our lives. If meaning is not determined by God,
can we legitimately as existentialists such as
Sartre argued we must determine meanings in
our own lives? Murdochs characters try to aestheticize their experience by drawing its disparate
elements into a consoling narrative. The reader
realizes that what they are unable to accept is the
fact that existence is really made up of accidental,
contingent elements that must be understood as
such. Goodness is not a matter of shaping ones
life artistically, but of trying to respect the otherness of the world outside us and the people in it.
Critics tend to agree that Iris Murdochs best
fiction was produced in the 1970s and early 1980s.
This period is marked by an increasing confidence
in combining an expansive canvas of characters,
reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel, with
a tightly woven plot and symbolic structure typical of twentieth-century fiction. Most notable are
her novels A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970a),
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), The
Black Prince (1973), A Word Child (1975), and The
Sea, the Sea (1978) (for which she won the Booker
Prize). These novels, in different ways, each place at
the heart of the narrative a powerful, self-obsessed
man who is able to dominate those around him. In
three remarkable novels, The Black Prince, A Word
Child, and The Sea, the Sea, this man is presented
convincingly from the inside as a result of
Murdochs remarkable literary tranvestism, her
ability to narrate convincingly from a first-person
male perspective. Such tyrannous characters point,
at one level, to the importance in Murdochs life of
charismatic men such as Canetti or Wittgenstein,
but, at another, demonstrate her lifelong interest in
266
MURDOCH, IRIS
the nature of power and myth. In particular, they

suggest that what enables some people to maintain
power over others is the willingness of people to be
subjected. The powerful figure somehow embodies
what they desire. While each of these fictions,
typical of Murdochs writing, confines itself, romance-like, to its own mysterious self-contained
world rather than attempting to reflect wider and
clearly identifiable social and political realities, a
concern with power and delusion undoubtedly has
clear relevance to an age shaped by the media,
ideology, and the specter of totalitarian regimes.
In the last two decades of Murdochs writing
career, her fiction became closer still to the realist
works of the nineteenth century that she so admired. Novels such as The Philosophers Pupil
(1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and
the Brotherhood (1987), and The Green Knight
(1993) resemble, more than the work of any other
late twentieth-century writer, the Jamesian loose,
baggy monster of a novel, packed with different
characters wrapped up in a complex plot.
By contrast, Murdochs last novel was Jacksons
Dilemma (1995), one of the shortest she had produced since the 1960s. Its brevity has much to do
with her suffering from the effects of Alzheimers
disease while writing it, the illness that would soon
cause her death. Murdoch published nothing after
Jacksons Dilemma and slowly withdrew from public life, to be cared for by Bayley and close friends.
She died on February 8, 1999. Shortly afterwards
Bayley, a prominent literary critic in his own right,
published a bestselling memoir, Iris: A Memoir
(published as Elegy for Iris in the United States),
which was turned into a successful Oscar-nominated movie, Iris, in 2001. While part of the fascination
was undoubtedly Hollywoods interest in tragic
genius, the film nevertheless underlines the poignancy of a writer known for her vitality and
intelligence beingdeprived by illness ofher memory
and identity.
SEE ALSO: Amis, Kingsley (BIF); Golding,
William (BIF); Spark, Muriel (BIF); Wilson,
Angus (BIF)
Antonaccio, M. (2000). Picturing the Human: The
Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bayley, J. (1999). Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch.

London: Abacus.
Byatt, A. S. (1994). Degrees of Freedom: Early Novels of
Iris Murdoch, rev. edn. London: Vintage.
Conradi, P. J. (2001a). Iris Murdoch: A Life. London:
HarperCollins.
Conradi, P. J. (2001b). Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the
Artist, 3rd edn. London: HarperCollins.
Dooley, G. (ed.) (2003). From a Tiny Corner in the
House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch.
Murdoch, I. (1953). Sartre: Romantic Rationalist.
Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes.
Murdoch, I. (1954). Under the Net. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1956). The Flight from the Enchanter.
Murdoch, I. (1957). The Sandcastle. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1958). The Bell. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1961). A Severed Head. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1962). An Unofficial Rose. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1963). The Unicorn. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1964). The Italian Girl. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1965). The Red and the Green. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1966). The Time of the Angels. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1968). The Nice and the Good. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1969). Brunos Dream. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1970a). A Fairly Honourable Defeat.
Murdoch, I. (1970b). The Sovereignty of Good. London:
Routledge.
Murdoch, I. (1972). An Accidental Man. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1973). The Black Prince. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1974). The Sacred and Profane Love
Machine. London: Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1975). A Word Child. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1976). Henry and Cato. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1977). The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato
Banished the Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murdoch, I. (1978). The Sea, the Sea. London: Chatto
and Windus.
MYSTERY/DETECTIVE/CRIME FICTION
Murdoch, I. (1980). Nuns and Soldiers. London: Chatto

and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1983). The Philosophers Pupil. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1985). The Good Apprentice. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1986). Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues.
Murdoch, I. (1987). The Book and the Brotherhood.
Murdoch, I. (1989a). The Black Prince: A Play. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1989b). The Message to the Planet.
Murdoch, I. (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
Murdoch, I. (1993). The Green Knight. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1995). Jacksons Dilemma. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1997a). Existentialists and Mystics:
Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1997b). On God and Good. In P.
Conradi (ed.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on
Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto and
Windus, pp. 33762.
Murdoch, I., & Priestley, J. B. (1964). A. Severed Head:
A Play. London: Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, I., & Saunders, J. (1968). The Italian Girl:
A Play. London: Samuel French.
Nicol, B. (2002). Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction,
2nd edn. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Rowe, A. (ed.) (2007). Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment.
Mystery/Detective/Crime
Fiction
ROSEMARY ERICKSON JOHNSEN
Crime fiction in the twentieth century underwent

dramatic shifts in generic structure, thematic foci,
and critical reception. In many ways a young
genre as the century began, it matured into
a form capable of exploring significant social
issues; what has sometimes been critiqued as
crime fictions unreflective replication of dominant social groups and cultural norms altered
almost beyond recognition by the centurys end
to a genre that privileges minority groups of all
kinds and critical, even subversive, ideologies.
267
The genre has been remarkably fluid, yet it has

also retained some of the key elements that appeal
to readers. Early twentieth-century crime writers
such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and
Dorothy L. Sayers remain popular with twentyfirst-century readers and have achieved a new life
through television and film adaptations. Critical
approaches to the genre have kept pace with
developments within crime fiction but, unsurprisingly, also reflect scholarly trends; theoretical
approaches of particular prominence in the last
quarter century have been structuralist (especially
narrative theory), psychoanalytic, and feminist.
During the twentieth century, there was considerable interplay between English writers and
those from other national traditions, especially
writers of American crime fiction, but it is possible to delineate the main developments in
British crime fiction over the course of the
century.
Early twentieth-century examples of the genre
carry over themes and structures from the late
Victorian period. The Sherlock Holmes stories
typify several of the main traits of this period:
atmospheric settings, dramatic action sequences,
and an emphasis on the brilliance of the detective.
Holmes assumes disguises, pursues villains, and
is presented as the triumph of ratiocination: he
solves the mystery because he observes more
clearly and thinks more logically than do others.
Another major writer of this early period is G. K.
Chesterton. Although Chestertons Father Brown
stories focus on the detectives intuition rather
than on his logic, and their emphasis on spirituality (specifically Roman Catholic) is at odds with
the secular framework of the Holmes stories, both
series share key elements. They appear primarily
in the short story genre, both make the detective
character central to both plot and theme, and the
stories in both often conclude with the detective
enlightening the confused people around them.
Chestertons stories are surprisingly athletic;
Holmes is known for his physical exploits, but
Chestertons little priest is equally intrepid in his
approach to dangerous villains. These two significant series reflect the popularity of short stories
during the early twentieth century, with stories
appearing in periodicals initially, followed by
book publication as collections.
The interwar period saw the rise of a style of
detective fiction that is often referred to as the
268
golden age mystery. The term has been contested by recent scholars, and there exists no
universally accepted term, partly because most
of the descriptions imply a judgment even as they
identify/describe the style: terms currently in use
include golden age, classic, traditional,
cozy, and clue-puzzle. Major authors of the
period include Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.
Sayers, and Margery Allingham. Key markers
of popular crime fiction of this period include
a restricted setting (often upper class, such as
a country house or an island retreat), a strongly
patterned plot leading to a denouement that
restores order, and characters who are individualized but not developed in much depth. The
reader of these books expects the author to play
fair in constructing the plot and distributing
clues; Stephen Knights term clue-puzzle draws
attention to the role of the reader in trying to
figure out whodunit (2004, 88). Writers of this
period worked within a clear framework, but also
stretched the genre by constructing startling
departures from the expected; one of the most
well-known examples is Christies Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the seemingly guileless
narrator turns out to be the killer. Taken to an
extreme, as in the crime novels of Freeman Wills
Croft, this subgenre can seem superficial, more
focused on factual trivia like rail timetables than
on characters and social context. Although they
are sometimes belittled by later practitioners of
the genre, these writers contributed enormously
to the genre, not only through their published
crime novels, but also through the theories they
promulgated through clubs and reviews and, in
some cases, through the academic cachet they
offered. For example, W. H. Auden and Cecil
Day-Lewis, important poets of the era, lent their
highbrow credentials to the genre. Day-Lewis
published 20 crime novels under the pseudonym
Nicholas Blake, and Audens still significant essay
on the genre, The Guilty Vicarage (1928), offered prestige to a genre moving into the mainstream. The golden age writers, in the tension
between consoling uniformity and energizing
revision (Horsley 38), established the genre in
important ways while opening up possibilities for
later writers to develop further.
After World War II, crime fiction writers
turned toward more realistic plots and characters. One significant development was a turn
toward the police detective as sleuth; in earlier

versions, the gifted individual, whether Holmes or
Poirot, tended to sweep past the bumbling police
in solving the mystery. Two major writers who
began publishing series featuring police detectives
were P. D. James, whose Dalgliesh series began in
1962 with Cover Her Face, and Ruth Rendell,
whose first Inspector Wexford book, From Doon
with Death, was published in 1964. Dalgliesh is
a bridge figure, combining some of the sensitivity
of earlier aristocratic amateurs such as Sayerss
Peter Wimsey and Allinghams Albert Campion
with the officially sanctioned duties of a Scotland
Yard detective. Dalgliesh writes poetry, has tortured romantic relationships with women, relies
on psychology to assist in solving crimes, yet he is
a police officer; the series pushes the boundaries
when, for example, Dalgliesh decides not to bring
the perpetrator to official justice. Wexford is
a more traditional policeman, but Rendell enlarges the conventions to include development of
a family life that changes realistically over time,
and from its inception the series offered plots that
asked readers to think about social issues and
current events; the first novels resolution confronts assumptions of heterosexuality, and later
books take up issues such as motorway expansion
and the place of African immigrants in a rural
English district.
Another significant postwar development was
the re-emergence of the spy/thriller/adventure
novel. The Cold War and accompanying fear of
nuclear warfare lent impetus to two very different
series: the James Bond thrillers written by Ian
Fleming (14 titles from 1953 to 1966) and the spy
fiction of John Le Carre (21 titles since 1961).
Elements of earlier instances of the subgenre are
given a new emphasis by Fleming and Le Carre.
The Bond series reveals traces of the empire/
adventure fiction of writers such as Rider Haggard
and Rudyard Kipling alongside the flamboyance
of Baroness Orczys Scarlet Pimpernel. Flemings
books feature the glamorous Agent 007 and his
intelligence-agency staff; replete with exotic
femmes fatale, evil villains with plans for world
domination, travelog-worthy settings, and hightech gadgets, the series transferred successfully to
film beginning with Dr. No in 1962. Le Carres spy
novels are often seen as the antithesis of the Bond
books; many of them feature George Smiley,
a mild middle-aged agent. Like W. Somerset
Maugham in his Ashenden stories, Le Carre draws

on his own experience in government-sponsored
espionage. Le Carres first novel, Call for the Dead
(1961), introduced Smiley, whose task is to identify an East German spy. Over the years, Le Carre
has adapted his espionage novels to changing
circumstances: his most recent publication, A
Most Wanted Man (2008) explores the war on
terror through the actions of a young male
Muslim facing deportation from Germany and
the female civil rights lawyer who represents him.
Le Carres books downplay the potential glamour
of espionage work to suggest instead the complicated moral codes of people and nations in a time
of increasing globalization.
Since the 1980s, the genre has developed in
many directions. While some crime writers continued to publish work written in the clue-puzzle
mode, sustaining and enlarging the boundaries
of that subgenre, other writers turned to deliberately subversive modes and/or perspectives.
Two postwar trends attained genre-altering status in the late decades of the twentieth century.
First, the postwar move toward greater psychological exploration of characters murderer,
victim, and those affected by the crime led to
late twentieth-century crime fiction that emphasized psychological development and psycho-social interrelations over traditional mystery plotting. Many of these books also draw on the
postwar trend toward more social critique, and
the genre exploded into an unprecedented diversity of sleuths, plot structures, and subgenres.
Rendells career suggests some of the changes
characteristic of the final 20 years of the century;
she has written one-offs alongside the Wexford
series since 1965, but in 1986 she began publishing crime novels under the pen name Barbara
Vine. The Vine books are darker than the Wexford series titles: they are more focused on the
psychological causes of, and reactions to, crime,
and they openly critique society; often they are
sympathetic to the characters who commit the
crimes. Reginald Hill, whose Dalziel and Pascoe
series began in 1970, has also reflected the changing emphases of the genre; not only have the
Dalziel and Pascoe books become more issueoriented, but in 1993 Hill introduced a new series
character, Joe Sixsmith, who is a Luton-based,
black, out-of-work machinist turned private
investigator.
269
The work of Val McDermid offers an informative example of many key developments in the
genre; she has reflected trends, but has also shaped
them through the example of her work, her
reviews and patronage, and a non-fiction study
of the female private investigator, A Suitable Job
for a Woman (1994). McDermid has three series,
and has written a number of one-offs. Her first
published crime novel, Report for Murder (1987),
introduced Lindsay Gordon. The first five Gordon titles, perhaps unsurprisingly for a series
featuring a lesbian sleuth in the 1980s, were
published by the feminist Womens Press; by the
sixth title, in 2003, the lesbian sleuth had become
sufficiently mainstream for HarperCollins to
publish Hostage to Murder. The Kate Brannigan
series began in 1992 with Gollancz; with its
regionalism and (heterosexual) feminist sleuth,
it represents an intensification of other trends in
the genre. Her one-off novels, along with the Tony
Hill/Carol Jordan series (first title published in
1995), take readers deep into dysfunctional psychology (including the graphically portrayed
serial killer) and social issues such as child abuse,
pornography, and incest. One of the characteristic
contemporary markers of the Hill/Jordan books is
that the characters themselves are presented as
psychologically scarred, and their issues become
part of the plot; Tony Hills sexual dysfunction is
presented as giving him special insight as a profiler, and both Hill and Jordan suffer imprisonment and assault at different times during the
series development.
More traditional mysteries continued to develop alongside the more obviously status-quo-challenging work, however, and some new subgenres
enjoyed increasing popularity. Sherlock Holmes
pastiches have appeared practically since the original stories were published, and they continue to
emerge. In the latter decades of the century, series
proliferated featuring real-life and fictional characters as sleuths; Jane Austen and several of her
characters have put been to use in this way, as have
Beatrix Potter, Sigmund Freud, and Robert Peel.
The starting point for the historical subgenre is
widely considered to be Ellis Peterss Brother
Cadfael series (pseudonym of Edith Pargeter; first
title published in 1977), and the subgenre
achieved remarkable popularity in the following
decades. Anne Perry is one of the bestselling
writers in this subgenre, and she has published
270
prolifically in multiple series: her first two series

have Victorian settings (Thomas Pitt series, 25
books, beginning in 1979; William Monk series,
16 books, beginning in 1990), and in the twentyfirst century, she added a series set during World
War I while continuing to produce Pitt and Monk
titles. Perrys books are heavy on period atmosphere and melodramatic plots. She adds her own
twist to the traditional detective sidekick role by
providing both of her sleuths with female companions whom they ultimately marry; these
characters allow the books to explore social
restrictions on women in a non-threatening way.
Monks partner, Hester Latterly, served as a nurse
under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War,
which provides opportunities for significant secondary plots, particularly in the early books of the
Monk series. In the 1990s, the historical mystery
subgenre took on particular resonance for women
writers, who saw the genre as an opportunity to
revisit womens history through a popular genre
form. Writers such as Gillian Linscott (with her
suffragette sleuth, Nell Bray) produced awardwinning fiction that was openly feminist in orientation. One indication of the significance
achieved by the subgenre was the creation of
a Crime Writers Association dagger award
specifically for the historical subgenre in 1999
(named after Ellis Peters); its winners include
such writers as C. J. Sansom, Andrew Taylor,
Lindsey David, and Linscott.
The crime fiction genre has proven its staying
power over the course of the twentieth century.
Dominant forms become subgenres (e.g., the
clue-puzzle mystery), new subgenres emerge
(the historical, the serial killer), and older subgenres blend into dominant modes. As a literary
mode, crime fiction has always rested unevenly
between popular forms and literary fiction. Some
of its most popular writers, such as P. D. James,
have extended their reach well beyond the audience for crime fiction and receive accolades
normally reserved for literary writers. At the same
time, CWA awards have been given to writers
whose works have never been marketed as crime
fiction, such as Sarah Waters. When a book is
shortlisted for the Booker Prize and also wins
a CWA dagger, it is clear that the genre has
joined the mainstream literary culture. The
power of a series, the crime plots potential for
interrogating social conditions and exploring the
psychology of the individual, an expanding place

in the bookstores (even as other genres, such as
the once venerable Western, shrink), a lively
scholarly conversation all of these factors
suggest that crime fiction will only gain in prominence in the twenty-first century, as new writers
continue to respect, yet also to challenge, the
genres traditional boundaries.
SEE ALSO: Campus Novel (BIF); Detective/
Crime Fiction (WF); Feminist Fiction (BIF);
Historical Fiction (BIF); Noir Fiction (AF)

Auden, W. H. (1948). The Guilty Vicarage. In The
Dyers Hand and Other Essays. London: Faber and
Faber.
Christie, A. (1920). The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
London: John Lane.
Christie, A. (1926). The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
London: Collins.
Coward, R., & Semple, L. (1989). Tracking Down
the Past: Women and Detective Fiction. In. H. Carr
(ed.), From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and
Womens Writing in the Postmodern World.
London: Pandora.
Haycraft, H. (ed.) (1974). The Art of the Mystery Story: A
Collection of Critical Essays [1946], rev. edn. New
York: Carroll and Graf.
Haycraft, H. (1984). Murder for Pleasure: The Life and
Times of the Detective Story [1942], rev. edn. New
Herbert, R. (ed.) (1999). The Oxford Companion to
Crime and Mystery. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Horsley, L. (2005). Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction.
Irons, G. (ed.) (1995). Feminism in Womens Detective
Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
James, P. D. (1962). Cover Her Face. London: Faber and
Faber.
Johnsen, R. (2006). Contemporary Feminist Historical
Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Klein, K. (1988). The Woman Detective: Gender and
Genre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Knight, S. (1980). Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction.
London: Macmillan.
Knight, S. (2004). Crime Fiction 18002000: Detection,
Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Le Carre, J. (1961). Call for the Dead. London: Gollancz.
Le Carre, J. (2008). A Most Wanted Man. London:
Light, A. (1991). Forever England: Femininity, Literature

and Conservatism Between the Wars. London:
Routledge.
Linscott, G. (1999). Absent Friends. London:
Virago.
Makinen, M. (2001). Feminist Popular Fiction.
Malmgren, C. (2001). Anatomy of Murder: Mystery,
Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, OH
Popular Press.
McDermid, V. (1987). Report for Murder. London:
Womens Press.
McDermid, V. (1994). A Suitable Job for a Woman:
Inside the World of Women Private Eyes. London:
HarperCollins.
Munt, S. (1994). Murder by the Book? Feminism and the
Crime Novel. London: Routledge.
Peters, E. (1977). A Morbid Taste for Bones. London:
Macmillan.
Plain, G. (2001). Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction:
Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh:
271
Porter, D. (1981). The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology

in Crime Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Priestman, M. (1990). Detective Fiction and Literature:
The Figure on the Carpet. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Priestman, M. (ed.) (2003). The Cambridge Companion
to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rendell, R. (1964). From Doon with Death. London:
John Long.
Rowland, S. (2001). From Agatha Christie to Ruth
Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective Crime
Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shaw, M., & Vanacker, S. (1991). Reflecting on Miss
Marple. London: Routledge.
Todorov, T. (1977). The Typology of Detective Fiction.
In The Poetics of Prose, trans. R. Howard. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Vine, B. (1986). A Dark-Adapted Eye. London: Viking.
Walton, P., & Jones, M. (1999). Detective Agency:
Women Rewriting the Hardboiled Tradition. Berkeley:
O
OBrien, Edna
ELKE DHOKER
As the author of 16 novels, six collections of short

stories, a dozen plays, and several works of nonfiction, Edna OBrien is one of the most prolific
Irish writers. Yet, in spite of this steady flow of
writing and her wide readership on both sides of
the Atlantic, critical recognition has been slow in
coming. Until the mid-1990s critics relegated her
work to the realm of womens fiction and
analyzed it for what it revealed of the authors
own life and love affairs. More recently, however,
critical reinterpretation of her work has led to its
recognition as an important testimony to sociopolitical realities in twentieth-century Ireland and
as a powerful representation of universal human
desires and obsessions.
Edna OBrien was born on December 15, 1930
in a small rural village in the west of Ireland. Being
raised on a farm in this closed Catholic community left an indelible mark on the author, as did
her experience of the unhappy marriage of her
parents. OBrien was educated at a convent school
and later attended the Pharmaceutical College in
Dublin. In 1952 she eloped with Czech Irish
author Ernest Gebler. The couple settled in Wicklow before moving to London, where OBrien still
lives. The marriage ended in 1964 and OBrien
raised their two sons alone.
In 1960 Edna OBrien came to fame with The
Country Girls, a remarkable first novel that chronicles the development of two Irish girls, Kate and
Baba, from childhood in a rural village, through
religious indoctrination in a convent school, to the
brink of adulthood and independence in Dublin.

Critics in England and America praised the novel
for its originality and appeal. Yet in Ireland the
novel was banned by the Censorship Board for its
profanity and its outspoken treatment of womens
bodies and sexuality. The novel was followed by
The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married
Bliss (1964) and reissued with a new epilogue in
1987 as The Country Girls Trilogy. In the trilogy, a
gradual darkening from novel to novel can be
noticed as the girls hopes and expectations turn
to disillusionment and despair.
The most remarkable feature of the trilogy is the
opposition and interplay of the romantic, submissive, and naive Kate and the irreverent, opportunistic, and funny Baba. While Kate is struggling
with the impossible ideals of Irish femininity, Baba
radically rejects these ideals but is equally unable to
realize a fulfilling sense of self. The trilogy thus
offers a powerful critique of the limiting roles
prescribed for women in literature and in life
(Byron). Kates romantic quest for wholeness and
identity through love would become a familiar
theme in OBriens fiction. In August is a Wicked
Month (1965) and Casualties of Peace (1966)
OBrien also depicts young women with failed
marriages who are having affairs in a doomed
quest for emotional fulfillment and a stable sense
of self. This quest can be traced to the original,
prelapsarian unity with the mother, which the
protagonists seek to regain through sexual union
(Pelan). Yet, as Anita Brookner observed in The
Spectator (Oct. 15, 1988), no compensation for
the loss of the mother is possible . . . all men in the
world could not replace the original closeness.

O B R I E N , E D N A
The sexual explicitness of these two novels

further reinforced OBriens reputation as the
Irish Colette, a reputation that OBrien to a
certain extent consciously marketed in readings
and interviews. Yet, with the formal and narrative
experimentation of her next three novels, OBrien
also sought to prove that this image did not
preclude a serious engagement with literature.
Thus, the second-person narration of A Pagan
Place (1970) has the unsettling effect of making
the reader a second player, standing simultaneously inside and outside the fictional world
(Herman 1994). Night (1972) is constructed as
the interior monologue of Mary Hoolihan and
abounds with intertextual references to the tradition of Irish femininity from Cathleen Ni Houlihan to Molly Bloom. Mary is also a descendant
of Baba in The Country Girls in her rebellious
rejection of what is properly feminine. Johnny I
Hardly Knew You (1977), finally, is narrated by an
unreliable narrator: a middle-aged woman who
has murdered her younger lover. Love and loss,
obsession and disappointment are again the main
themes here, but they intersect with reflections on
female power and control (Dhoker). In general,
however, critics were not enthusiastic about
OBriens narrative experiments which did not
seem to square with the received opinion of her as
a spontaneous confessional writer.
By contrast, OBriens short story collections of
the 1960s and 1970s received far greater praise. The
Love Object (1968) is a significant first collection in
which OBrien demonstrates her skill in penetrating the female psyche. Although set in different
European countries, the collection is remarkably
unified: all female characters are obsessed with a
love object a rug, a new sofa, an (older) lover
which promises a transformation of their lonely
existence. While their inevitable disappointment
can in part be blamed on the insensitiveness of the
males these women pin their hopes on, it is also, as
Schrank & Farquharson (212) have pointed out,
the working out of the emotional dialectic of the
romantic in the absence of any social awareness or
political consciousness.
OBriens next collection sports the nicely ironic title A Scandalous Woman: Stories (1974). For
while the women in this collection may be called
scandalous by their judgmental neighbors or by
the reader the men are truly to blame. Backed up
by a rigorously patriarchal system, they either
273
turn women into sacrificial victims or cause their

descent into madness, as in the title story of the
collection. The tales in Mrs. Reinhardt and Other
Stories (1978), Returning (1982), and Lantern
Slides (1990) provide variations on these themes.
All of these stories tend to be one or another of
two types: urban stories in which an exiled,
middle-aged Irishwoman is trying to cope with
love and loss in a hostile environment, or rural
stories of Irish childhood and adolescence. Recurrent themes in both types of stories are alienation
and loneliness, the restrictions of patriarchal
society and the lovehate relationship with the
mother and the mother country a theme that
OBrien also explored in her famous non-fiction
work Mother Ireland (1976). Several of the stories
also reveal the influence of Joyce in their depiction
of individual and national paralysis and in their
intertextual references to his work.
After the publication of Johnny I Hardly Knew
You, OBrien told the Paris Review that she felt she
had written all [she] wanted to say about love
and loss and loneliness and being a victim and all
that and that she was now hoping to develop, to
enlarge (Guppy 24, 26). The attempt to chart
new territory proved difficult; the usually prolific
author did not publish a new novel for 11 years.
Nor did The High Road (1988) or Time and
Tide (1992) really fulfill expectations, since these
novels stage rather typical OBrien heroines trying
to come to terms with failed relationships. A
relatively new element in The High Road is the
lesbian relationship between the protagonist and
her Spanish lover. While this affair initially promises a more fulfilling kind of love, it is brutally
terminated by the conservative, patriarchal
powers of the Spanish village where the novel is
set. Time and Tide is a moving exploration of
motherhood, both in terms of the strong but
debilitating motherdaughter bond and in terms
of the daughter-as-mother who tries to cope with
the loss of her grown-up sons.
A truly new departure in OBriens oeuvre was
announced with House of Splendid Isolation
(1994), the first novel of her so-called trilogy of
contemporary Ireland. This novel takes up the
difficult topic of Irish nationalism as an IRA
gunman from the North seeks shelter in the big
house of a dying woman in the South. OBrien
treats both characters with remarkable compassion and insight and offers a nuanced view of the
274
O B R I E N , E D N A
conflict. Down by the River (1996) deals with

another issue dividing contemporary Ireland:
abortion laws and the rights of women. It is based
on the famous X case in which a young girl,
pregnant as a result of rape, is barred from traveling to Britain for an abortion. Wild Decembers
(1999) tackles the Irish obsession with the land as it
traces the increasingly violent battle between Brennan and Bugler, two neighboring farmers. Although this novel, like so many in OBriens
oeuvre, ends in death, the ending is not entirely
negative. In fact, all three novels of the trilogy end
on a tentative note of hope, as if OBrien foresees a
positive future for the island if only it can transcend its violent past (King 2000).
In the Forest (2002) continues in the line of the
trilogy with OBriens reworking of a recent,
traumatic event: the murder of a young woman,
her son, and a priest by a madman. To the dismay
of some critics and readers, OBrien offers insight
into the psychology of victim and murderer alike,
suggesting that the latter is as much a victim of
hypocrisy and neglect as the former in rural
Ireland.
In The Light of Evening (2006), finally, OBrien
returns to one of the familiar themes of her
fiction, the ambivalent relationship between
mother and daughter. And she treats the theme
with greater objectivity and understanding than
ever before. If in earlier stories and novels, the
narrative perspective and the readers sympathy
lay squarely with the daughter (Weekes 2006),
The Light of Evening offers for the first time a fulldrawn and convincing portrait of the mother. The
lives of both mother and daughter in The Light of
Evening are clearly autobiographical and OBrien
has even drawn on the loving and admonishing
letters her own mother wrote to her every week.
This sensitive and moving account of two unhappy marriages makes one realize, in retrospect, how
mistaken critics have been in calling OBriens
earlier fiction, from The Country Girls to Time and
Tide, confessional. Still, even if this initial reception may have hampered the serious critical
study of OBriens fiction, it also stands as an
ironic testimony to the emotional honesty and
lasting power of her work.
Feminist Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce,
James (BIF)

Byron, K. (2002). In the Name of the Mother . . .: The
Epilogue of OBriens Country Girls Trilogy. Womens
Studies, 31(4), 44765.
Dhoker, E. (2006). Powerful Voices: Female Narrators
and Unreliability in Three Irish Novels. Etudes
Irlandaises, 32(1), 2131.
Guppy, S. (1984). The Art of Fiction No. 82: Edna
OBrien. Paris Review, 26, 2250.
Herman, D. (1994). Textual You and Double Deixis in
Edna OBriens A Pagan Place. Style, 28(3), 378410.
Ingman, H. (2002). Edna OBrien: Stretching the
Nations Boundaries. Irish Studies Review, 10(3),
25365.
King, S. H. (2000). On the Side of Life: Edna OBriens
Trilogy of Contemporary Ireland. New Hibernia
Review, 4(2), 4966.
Laing, K., Mooney, S., & OConnor, M. (eds.) (2006).
Edna OBrien: New Critical Perspectives. Dublin:
Carysfort.
OBrien, E. (1960). The Country Girls. London:
Hutchinson.
OBrien, E. (1962). The Lonely Girl. London: Jonathan
Cape.
OBrien, E. (1964). Girls in Their Married Bliss. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OBrien, E. (1965). August is a Wicked Month. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OBrien, E. (1966). Casualties of Peace. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OBrien, E. (1968). The Love Object. London: Jonathan
Cape.
OBrien, E. (1970). A Pagan Place: A Novel. London:
OBrien, E. (1972). Night. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
OBrien, E. (1974). A Scandalous Woman: Stories.
OBrien, E. (1976). Mother Ireland. London:
OBrien, E. (1977). Johnny I Hardly Knew You: A Novel.
OBrien, E. (1978). Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories.
OBrien, E. (1982). Returning: Tales. London:
OBrien, E. (1985). A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of
Edna OBrien. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
OBrien, E. (1987). The Country Girls Trilogy and
Epilogue. London: Jonathan Cape.
OBrien, E. (1988). The High Road. London:
OBrien, E. (1990). Lantern Slides: Short Stories.
OBrien, E. (1992). Time and Tide. London: Viking.
O B R I E N , F L A N N
OBrien, E. (1994). House of Splendid Isolation. London:

OBrien, E. (1996). Down by the River. London:
OBrien, E. (1999). Wild Decembers. London:
OBrien, E. (2002). In the Forest. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson.
OBrien, E. (2006). The Light of Evening. London:
OHara, K. (1993). Love Objects: Love and Obsession in
the Stories of Edna OBrien. Studies in Short Fiction,
30(3), 31725.
Pelan, R. (2006). Edna OBriens Love Objects. In L.
Colletta & M. OConnor (eds.), Wild Colonial Girl:
Essays on Edna OBrien. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, pp. 5877.
Schrank, B., & Farquharson, D. (1996). Object of Love,
Subject to Despair: Edna OBriens The Love Object
and the Emotional Logic of Late Romanticism.
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies [Edna OBrien
special issue], 22(2), 2136.
Weekes, A. O. (2006). Martyrs to Mistresses? The
Mother Figure in Edna OBriens Fiction. In P. A.
Lynch, J. Fischer, & B. Coates (eds.), Back to the
Present Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History
Since 1798, vol. 1. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 30924.
OBrien, Flann
JOSEPH NUGENT
Flann OBrien, born Brian ONolan (Irish Brian O

Nuallain), aka Myles na gCopaleen (or na
Gopaleen), is as dazzling a writer as Ireland has
produced. Whether we take him as an accomplished modernist or prescient postmodernist, his
critical significance is now confirmed, his reputation and popularity assured. OBriens best novels
are intricately plotted, brilliantly executed, often
morbidly funny experiments that entice the reader into an alternative universe of dark absurdity.
During his lifetime he was celebrated mainly as a
newspaper columnist, his journalistic pyrotechnics transcending the squalid Ireland of the 1940s
and 1950s to strike, Swift-like, at our pretensions
and pomposities even today.
Born in Strabane in the north of Ireland on
October 5, 1911, OBrien was the third boy in a
Roman Catholic family of 12 children. His father
Michael, although a civil servant of the Crown,
was a Gaelic enthusiast who brooked no English in
275
the home. Not until the family settled in Dublin in

1923 did OBrien enter school and become fully
exposed to his peers and their vernacular English.
The rhythms of the Dublinese he encountered
there resound through his subsequent writings.
In 1929, OBrien entered University College
Dublin, then in thrall to the spirit of James Joyce,
who only a generation earlier had studied there.
At UCD, OBrien pursued with little enthusiasm
though final success his BA and MA while
becoming, like many of his creations, a habitue
of the Dublin public house. Over the intervening
five years, his boisterous oratory and seditious
humor drew throngs to the Literary and Historical Debating Society. Comhthrom Feinne, the
colleges student magazine, provided a vehicle for
his nascent absurdism. There he adopted the guise
of Brother Barnabas, the first in a parade of
literary personae engaged in a lifelong struggle
to transcend the confines of conventional English.
To extend the platform for his satire he
co-founded the journal Blather, a publication of
the Gutter; commercial ineptness, however, saw
the enterprise collapse and his persona du jour,
Count OBlather, silenced (Cronin 72). Despite
OBriens studied projection of disinterest in the
lecture hall and the library, UCD awarded him an
MA for his thesis on Nature in Irish Poetry in
1935. He sat the entrance exams for the Irish Civil
Service that same year.
With the death of his father, OBrien at 26 years
of age became responsible for the welfare of his
many siblings. Almost immediately he turned
with vigor to a project that had its origins in the
writings of Brother Barnabas. Within a year, a
manuscript entitled At Swim-Two-Birds was sent
to Longmans, Green and Company in London.
There an exuberant reader, one Graham
Greene, reported that We have had books within
books before now, but ONolan takes Pirandello
and Gide a long way further (Cronin 89). The
screw is turned, he explained, until you have (a)
a book about a man called Trellis who is (b)
writing a book about certain characters who (c)
are turning the tables on Trellis by writing about
him (Cronin 89). While critical reviews from the
English literary journals were generally poor,
consolation came from Paris. Samuel Beckett was
excited by it and an intrigued James Joyce seemingly adopted its publication as another of his
late-life causes.
276
Published in 1939, At Swim-Two-Birds

authored by Flann OBrien, revealed an array
of techniques that would later be termed
postmodern. At the time, its complexities, evasions, contortions, and seeming determination to
confound the audience attracted the label antinovel. In this metafictional twisted Celtic knot
an array of preposterous characters from legend
and popular fiction casually intermingle with the
working-class inhabitants of modern Dublin
(OBrien 2007, p. xii). Plucked from their arcane
origins, Finn MacCool and Mad Sweeny (later
resurrected by Seamus Heaney in Sweeney Astray,
1983) conform to the literary theories of the
novels primary narrator, a louche young man
studying at University College Dublin. A modern
novels characters, he insists, should be interchangeable as between one book and another;
indeed, Each should be allowed a private life,
self-determination and a decent standard of
living (OBrien 1960, 33). An author too lazy to
invent his own characters, however, risks the ire of
those he has corralled between book covers. His
own imported figures may turn against the
plagiarist-creator of the novel-within-the novel
to haul him before the courts on trumped-up
charges as in At Swim. The perplexed reader
who negotiates the works three beginnings must
always expect the kind of bamboozling aphorisms
that OBrien reveled in: Evil is even, he tells us,
truth is an odd number and death is a full stop
(314).
Abysmal sales at home and his failure in 1939 to
secure an American publisher were compounded
by the Luftwaffes bombs which destroyed the
remaining copies of At Swim-Two-Birds soon
after World War II began. The novel all but
vanished until its republication to acclaim in
1960. In 1940, however, OBrien had another
daring work in progress. Less experimental in
form but more intricately detailed, The Third
Policeman is altogether darker in tone than At
Swim.
The novels recognizably Irish if startlingly
surreal landscape is patrolled by assorted policemen overly concerned with the Atomic Theory.
A transfer of molecules between the locals and
their bicycles (caused by the bad roads of the
district) has caused many of the inhabitants to
become suffused with bicycle-ness and many
bikes to become half-human. Into this world is
cast the understandably bewildered narrator, in

flight from the murder he committed in the
novels opening line. In time it becomes clear that
the unnamed protagonist is dead and that he and
the novel are traversing the circular landscape of
hell itself, enduring the beginning of the unfinished, the rediscovery of the familiar, the
re-experience of the already suffered, the freshforgetting of the unremembered (OBrien 2007,
406). Nothing in the main text, however, caps the
absurdity of the copious footnotes, in which
OBriens lingering distaste for the pretensions of
academic discourse takes flight. The footnotes
methodically document an earnest learned disputation over the lunatic ramblings of deSelby, a
scientist engaged in investigating the nature of
hammering, the possibility of diluting water, and
the cleansing of those air-balls that are the
actual cause of darkness. To OBriens lasting
embarrassment, the work was rejected by Longman in the summer of 1940, thus lost to the public
until its posthumous appearance in 1967.
Back in 1941, OBrien was compiling an angry
work of public protest. The short novel An Beal
Bocht, later translated into English by Patrick C.
Power as The Poor Mouth (1973), seethes with
indignation. Taking a furious swipe at the insincerity of a tawdry Ireland with which OBrien was
becoming increasingly disenchanted, it targeted
those who paid mere lip-service to the Irish language he so loved. A scathing riposte to the smug
earnestness of the Celtic Twilight and the Gaelic
Revival, the work was originally written in
OBriens rich and colorful Irish. While a little of
the novels chief delight its upending of the
pieties in which the Gaelic biographies of the
period had been encased may be lost in translation, OBriens lament over the loss of a Gaelic past
is at once hilarious and deeply affecting. The 1996
Dalkey Archive edition is made even more glorious
by Ralph Steadmans inspired illustrations.
OBrien sought fame, and expected success. In
1939 he had engaged under a series of noms de
guerre in a lightly scurrilous attack on the writer
Frank OConnor through the letters page of the
Irish Times. The ensuing shenanigans won him
the offer of a daily column, Cruiskeen Lawn
(The Little Full Jug), by the newspapers editor,
R. M. Smiley. Despite OBriens sporadic forays
into writing for the Dublin theater, Cruiskeen
Lawn was to remain the chief platform for his
manic and often alcohol-fuelled creativity and the

source of his celebrity from 1940 almost until his
death. Times readers were treated to Myless
radical expansion via puns, neologisms, portmanteau words, and malapropisms of the tiny fund
of noises the English language had provided him
with; in his native Gaelic, of course, there
were those who know so many million words
that it is a matter of pride to them never to use the
same word twice in a lifetime (OBrien 1968,
207). The dyspeptic Myless many pet hates
politicians, bureaucrats, experts of all sorts were
subjected to daily abuse in columns headed
Bores, or The Myles na Gopaleen Catechism
of Cliche. In response, the drinking classes of
Dublin embraced Myless characters, The Brother and The Plain People of Ireland, and gathered his linguistic inventions into their own patois. As a result Myles became, Keith Hopper
insists, OBriens most holistically conceived
dramatic persona (1995, 35).
The surprising acclaim that accompanied the
republication of At Swim-Two-Birds in 1960 enticed OBrien back to the path he had left. In many
ways, it was too late. Too many creative energies
had been dissipated by drink, ill health, and
general disillusionment. The Hard Life (1961),
with its blustering attack on the Catholic Church
symbolized by the Jesuit Father Fahrt and a Mr.
Collopy who disgraces himself in front of the
pope, has a whiff of opportunism about it. Although enlivened by OBriens still pitch-perfect
ear for the vagaries of Dublin dialogue, the rendition is more conventional, the storyline more
predictable than before.
OBriens last completed novel, The Dalkey
Archive (1964) was, conceptually, altogether more
ambitious. But this meandering treatise on life,
death, the existence of God and the human condition seldom excites. To people it OBrien plundered much, including the Mollycule Theory
from the typescript of The Third Policeman: sadly,
the sparkle of these 25-year-old inserts only accentuates the dullness that surrounds them. True
to the literary theories of At Swim-Two-Birds, the
paratextual deSelby, St. Augustine, and James
Joyce are lassoed, now with the aid of a time
machine, and put to work. But the Joyce depicted
here is a degraded edition of the one whose alma
mater OBrien had entered 30 years before. Now
ashamed of the novels he produced, the great
277
author has become a harmless idiot, required by

the Jesuits only as a part-time mender of their
tattered underwear.
That the shade of Joyce loomed over OBrien
from the start is a commonplace. But the consensus that Flann OBrien was a failure, and Myles
na Gopaleen was to blame is increasingly questioned by critics such as Joseph Brooker (2005)
who celebrate the fantastic fictions of both Flann
the novelist and Myles the journalist. Under
whatever guise, OBrien still thrills with his startlingly innovative experiments in language and
his devastating social satire written at a time, as he
might have said, when it was neither popular nor
profitable.
Flann OBrien died on April Fools day, 1966.
SEE ALSO: Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Irish Fiction
(BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); Modernist Fiction
(BIF); OConnor, Frank (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF)

Asbee, S. (1991). Flann OBrien. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Brooker, J. (2005). Flann OBrien. Tavistock: Northcote
House.
Clissmann, A. (1975). Flann OBrien: A Critical
Introduction to His Writing. Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan.
Cronin, A. (1998). No Laughing Matter: The Life and
Times of Flann OBrien. New York: Fromm.
Hopper, K. (1995). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Post-Modernist. Cork: Cork University Press.
Imhof, R. (ed.) (1985). Alive, Alive O! Flann OBriens
At Swim-Two-Birds. Dublin: Wolfhound.
Kiberd, D. (2001). Gaelic Absurdism: At Swim-TwoBirds. In Irish Classics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
OBrien, F. (1941). An Beal Bocht. Dublin: An Preas
Naisiunta. (Trans. by P. C. Power as The Poor Mouth.
London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1973.)
OBrien, F. (1943). Faustus Kelly: A Play in Three Acts.
Dublin: Cahill.
OBrien, F. (1960). At Swim-Two-Birds. London:
Longman.
OBrien, F. (1961). The Hard Life: An Exegesis of
Squalor. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
OBrien, F. (1964). The Dalkey Archive. London:
MacGibbon and Kee.
OBrien, F. (1967). The Third Policeman. London:
MacGibbon and Kee.
278
O C O N N O R , F R A N K
OBrien, F. (1968). The Best of Myles: A Selection from

Cruiskeen Lawn (ed. K. ONolan). London:
MacGibbon and Kee.
OBrien, F. (2007). The Complete Novels (intro. K.
Donohue). New York: Knopf.
Conaire, B. (1986). Myles na Gaeilge. Dublin: An
O
Clochomhar.
Taaffe, C. (2008). Ireland through the Looking Glass.
Cork: Cork University Press.
OConnor, Frank
MICHAEL L. STOREY
Frank OConnor is acclaimed as one of Irelands

greatest short story writers and an international
master of the genre. Influenced by nineteenthcentury Russian and French realists, especially
Turgenev and Maupassant, OConnor worked
exclusively within the realistic mode, restricting
his fictional world to that of working- and middle-class Irish Catholics. Out of that world he
created masterpieces of the short story.
Born Michael Francis ODonovan in 1903 in
the city of Cork to impoverished working-class
parents an alcoholic father and a doting mother
the author adopted the pseudonym Frank
OConnor in the mid-1920s at the beginning of
his writing career. As a student at St. Patricks
National School, OConnor met Daniel Corkery
teacher, writer, and ardent nationalist who
encouraged him to embrace Irish culture and to
learn the Gaelic language. In 1918 OConnor
joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) but did
not participate in the War of Independence
against England (191921). In the Irish Civil War
(19223) between the Free State army and the diehard Republicans, OConnor joined the latter and
worked on their publicity staff, until he was
captured and imprisoned by Free State soldiers.
After the conflict ended in a Free State victory, he
was released and found work as a librarian. He
also taught Gaelic and co-founded the Cork
Drama League. In 1935 he joined the board of
directors of the famous Abbey Theatre and was
appointed managing director in 1937. He later
worked for the BBC in London, then in 1951
moved to the United States, where he taught at
various universities and published stories in the
New Yorker magazine. In 1961, after suffering a
stroke, he returned to Ireland, where he died in
1966.
OConnor is renowned for his stories, of which

he wrote over 200, but he also wrote poetry, two
novels, two volumes of autobiography, six books
of literary criticism, a biography (The Big Fellow:
A Life of Michael Collins, 1937), several travel
books, and numerous essays. He also collaborated
on four plays and wrote a fifth himself, and he
translated numerous Gaelic poems into English,
publishing several collections.
Despite confining himself to realistic portrayals
of provincial Catholic Ireland and relying mostly
on a small set of character types idealists,
romantics, dreamers, and the like OConnor
produced an impressive range of stories. They
encompass nearly every conceivable topic affecting
working- and middle-class Ireland in the twentieth
century: childhood and parentchild relationships, courtship, sexual morality and marriage,
emigration, the Troubles, the role of the church,
and the law. The breadth of his literary tone is also
impressive, ranging from the comic, farcical, and
satiric to the poignant, ironic, and tragic.
In The Lonely Voice (1962), his study of the short
story, OConnor argues that the short story captures an intense awareness of human loneliness
(19). While this quality does not characterize
every OConnor story, it is certainly the dominant
quality in such stories as Guests of the
Nation, In the Train, The Majesty of the Law,
Michaels Wife, The Long Road to Ummera,
Uprooted, The Frying Pan, and Bridal
Night eight of his finest stories. In Guests of
the Nation, the title story of his first collection,
which contains stories about the Troubles (the
War of Independence and the Civil War) an Irish
rebel named Bonaparte is left feeling very lost
and lonely (1931, 19) after carrying out in
great anguish an order to execute two English
prisoners with whom he has grown close.
Stories of humor and satire balance those with
darker themes. His stories of childhood First
Confession, My Oedipus Complex, and The
Drunkard, to name just three are both comic
and poignant in their portrayal of the travails of
childhood, such as making ones first confession
or dealing with the arrival of a new sibling.
OConnor also brought this serio-comic perspective to stories of motherson relationships (e.g.,
Judas), romance (The Mad Lomasneys), and
the Catholic clergy (The Holy Door). He could
also be hilariously scathing of the Irish nationalist,
O F L A H E R T Y , L I A M
as in Eternal Triangle, which satirizes revolutionary sentimentalism and patriotic blather.

One of OConnors trademarks is his distinctive narrative voice. He greatly admired the oral
tradition of the seancha, the Gaelic storyteller
who recited stories from memory to gatherings of
people. In The Lonely Voice OConnor lamented
that the short story no longer rang with the tone
of a mans voice speaking (1962, 29). Given the
great differences between oral and written narratives, it would have been impossible for OConnor
to fully restore the voice of the seancha to the
modern Irish story. But in the warmth, immediacy, rhythm, and tone of his narrative voice, he
was able to connect the modern Irish story to its
ancient source, thereby contributing significantly
to the great legacy of Irish storytelling.
SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Working Class
Fiction (BIF)
Lennon, H. (ed.) (2007). Frank OConnor: Critical
Essays. Dublin: Four Courts.
Matthews, J. (1983). Voices: A Life of Frank OConnor.
New York: Atheneum.
OConnor, F. (1931). Guests of the Nation. London:
Macmillan.
OConnor, F. (1932a). The Saint and Mary Kate.
London: Macmillan.
OConnor, F. (1932b). The Wild Birds Nest: Poems from
the Irish. Dublin: Cuala.
OConnor, F. (1936). Bones of Contention. London:
Macmillan.
OConnor, F. (1944). Crab Apple Jelly. London:
Macmillan.
OConnor, F. (1947). The Common Chord. London:
Macmillan.
OConnor, F. (1951). Travellers Samples. London:
Macmillan.
OConnor, F. (1952). The Stories of Frank OConnor.
New York: Knopf.
OConnor, F. (1954). More Stories by Frank OConnor.
New York: Knopf.
OConnor, F. (1957). Domestic Relations. New York:
Knopf.
OConnor, F. (1961). An Only Child. London:
Macmillan.
OConnor, F. (1962). The Lonely Voice: A Study of the
Short Story. Cleveland: World.
OConnor, F. (1981). Collected Stories. New York: Knopf.
Sheehy, M. (ed.) (1969). Michael/Frank: Studies on
Frank OConnor. New York: Knopf.
279
Steinman, M. (1990). Frank OConnor at Work.

Tomory, W. (1980). Frank OConnor. Boston: Twayne.
Wohlgelernter, M. (1977). Frank OConnor. New York:
OFlaherty, Liam
HEDDA FRIBERG-HARNESK
Among Irish writers, Liam OFlaherty is one of the

major analysts of post-revolutionary disillusion in
the mid-1920s and one of the leaders, with Sean
OCasey and James Joyce, of a counter-Revival
realism in art (Kiberd 491, 498). Sean OFaolain,
for one, placed OFlaherty at the head of the
realistic school of his day (173). Not only the
realist, OFlaherty is also master of the lyrical mode,
a poet in prose, who chose the short story as a
medium (Kennelly 1994, 198). As a short story
writer, OFlaherty belongs with such other giants of
his generation as Mary Lavin, Frank OConnor, and
OFaolain.Somecriticshaveseenhimaccordingto
the Irish measure as a naturalist, a realist, a social
critic or historian, or a voice of things Irish, an
acquaintance of Yeats, George Russell, and Sean
OCasey others as a European writer, belonging
to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, or
the film-maker Ingmar Bergman (Zneimer, p. vii),
as well as to an Irish one.
Born on August 28, 1896, in Gort na gCappal, a
windswept village on rocky Inis Mor, the largest of
the Aran Islands, OFlahertys life journey took
him from medieval Aran rurality to twentiethcentury urban modernity. In 1908, OFlaherty left
Aran to train as a postulant for the Holy Ghost
Order at Rockwell College. He attended other
schools, among them University College Dublin,
where he read Marx, Engels, Connolly, and Bentham. To his nationalism following in the footsteps of his father, the first Sinn Feiner on their
island (OBrien 16), Liam had joined the Republican Volunteers he now added a socialist strand.
While at University College Dublin, he also decided to leave the road to priesthood. This, and his
enlistment in the British Army in 1915, caused
him as he recalls in Shame the Devil (1934) to
be held as a pariah and a fool and a renegade,
and was a far greater blow to my relatives
than my refusal to become a priest (21). His
nightmarish experiences on the Western Front
280
O F L A H E R T Y , L I A M
ended in September 1917, when he was wounded

and shell-shocked at Langemarck. Treated in a
Dublin hospital for melancholia acuta, he was
later invalided out of the war.
OFlaherty recalls his postwar seafaring years
traveling to London, South America, Turkey,
and North America in the autobiographies
Two Years (1930), I Went to Russia (1931), and
Shame the Devil. Returning to Dublin, he turned
to revolutionary groups and, on January 18,
1922, he and some unemployed dock workers
occupied the Rotunda. Raising a red flag from its
roof, he declared an Irish soviet republic. The
incident forced him to leave Ireland for London.
From there, he launched his literary career,
publishing his first short story, The Sniper,
and his first novel, Thy Neighbours Wife, in
1923. The short story collection, Spring Sowing,
appeared in 1924 as did his second novel, The
Black Soul (1924a), with its brooding protagonist
Fergus OConnor. Like the first novel, this one is
set in Inverara, a mythologized Aran. Intensely
productive years followed, and by 1930
OFlaherty had produced eight of his prose
books, innumerable short stories, newspaper
articles, and a biography. He had also met and
married Margaret Barrington, and their daughter, Pegeen, was born in 1926.
OFlahertys reputation rests on his short stories, which are deceptively simple slices of rural life.
The appeal of the stories lies not solely in their
literary qualities, but also in the issues of biculturality they raise. Scholars have noted that the
effects of OFlahertys bilingualism, and his habit
of writing Irish and English versions of the same
stories apparently reinventing them rather than
self-translating them have not been fully explored (Cahalan 18).
Among OFlahertys Dublin thrillers to
which Mr. Gilhooley (1926), The Puritan
(1931), and The Assassin (1928) belong The
Informer (1925), magnificently propelled by the
lumbering, slow-witted Gypo Nolan, is by far the
greatest success. Between 1929 and 1992 it has
been turned into four films and at least three
stage versions in English (Sheeran 2000).
In Skerrett (1932), OFlaherty is, as Kennelly (1998) has put it, at his gripping best, and
the novel stands out as uniquely powerful. Skerrett
illustrates the writers tendency to, as Kiberd puts
it, see land as the only enduring hero (495).
Thus, teacher David Skerrett (based on David

OCallaghan, OFlahertys Inis Mor schoolmaster) devotes his life to the people of the island of
Nara, but finds in the end that there is nothing
beyond this unconquerable earth but the phantasies born of mans fear and mans vanity . . . this
grinning, unsympathetic earth, to which all beings
were the same, the bones of the wicked as the
bones of the just (262).
In his historic trilogy, OFlaherty explores
three momentous events of Irish history: the great
famine of the 1840s in Famine (1937), the land
war of 187982 in Land (1946), and the 1916
Easter Rising in Insurrection (1950). In the masterly Famine, OFlaherty moves away from his
early preoccupation with an individual, tortured
psyche to focus on the collective fate of the
poverty-stricken tenantry of the Galway region.
Here he faces squarely the larger, socio-political
framework and the historical context within
which his imagination has been formed. If his
greatest passion explodes in Skerrett, his compassion surges to the fore in Famine (Friberg 204).
Having arrived, in Shame the Devil, at a stance of
artistic detachment, he here fuses detachment
with compassion, achieving his greatest scope and
artistic cohesion yet.
il (1953) and The Pedlars Revenge
After Du
(1976), OFlaherty ceased publishing. Agonized
by an inability to write, he struggled, until his
death on September 7, 1984, to complete a new
novel, The Gamblers.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction
(BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); OConnor, Frank
(BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF)

Cahalan, J. M. (1991). Liam OFlaherty: A Study of the
Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne.
Costello, P. (1997). Liam OFlahertys Ireland. Dublin:
Wolfhound.
Friberg, H. (1996). An Old Order and a New: The Split
World of Liam OFlahertys Novels. Uppsala: Uppsala
University.
Kennelly, B. (1988). OFlaherty His Mark. Irish Times,
Weekend, p. 7 (Sept. 3).
Kennelly, B. (1994). Liam OFlaherty: The Unchained
Storm. In Journey into Joy: Selected Prose
(ed. A. Persson). Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe.
ORWELL, GEORGE
Kiberd, D. (2001). After the Revolution: OCasey and

OFlaherty. In Irish Classics. Cambridge, MA:
OBrien, J. (1973). Liam OFlaherty. Cranbury, NJ:
Associated University Press.
OFaolain, S. (1937). Don Quixote OFlaherty. London
Mercury, 37 (Dec.), 1705.
OFlaherty, L. (1923). Thy Neighbours Wife. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OFlaherty, L. (1924a). The Black Soul. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OFlaherty, L. (1924b). Spring Sowing. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OFlaherty, L. (1925). The Informer. London: Jonathan
Cape.
OFlaherty, L. (1928). The Assassin. London: Jonathan
Cape.
OFlaherty, L. (1930). Two Years. London: Jonathan
Cape.
OFlaherty, L. (1931). I Went to Russia. London:
Jonathan Cape.
OFlaherty, L. (1932). Skerrett. London: Gollancz.
OFlaherty, L. (1933). The Martyr. London: Gollancz.
OFlaherty, L. (1934). Shame the Devil. London:
Grayson and Grayson.
OFlaherty, L. (1937). Famine. London: Gollancz.
OFlaherty, L. (1946). Land. London: Gollancz.
OFlaherty, L. (1950). Insurrection. London: Gollancz.
il. Dublin: Sairseal and Dill.
OFlaherty, L. (1953). Du
OFlaherty, L. (1976). The Pedlars Revenge and Other
Stories (ed. A. A. Kelly). Dublin: Wolfhound.
OFlaherty, L. (1996). The Letters of Liam OFlaherty
(ed. A. A. Kelly). Dublin: Wolfhound.
Sheeran, P. F. (1976). The Novels of Liam OFlaherty.
Dublin: Wolfhound.
Sheeran, P. F. (2000). The Informer. Cork: Cork
University Press.
Zneimer, J. (1970). The Literary Vision of Liam
OFlaherty. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Orwell, George
DAPHNE PATAI
George Orwell, considered by many to be one of

the great political writers in the English language,
was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in
Motihari, Bengal, India, at the time a British
colony. His father, Richard Blair, was a subdeputy opium agent in the Indian Civil Service
who, in 1897, married Ida Mabel Limouzin,
daughter of a Frenchman living in Burma. In
1904, when Eric was a year old, Ida Blair moved
281
back to England with him and his elder sister.

Another sister was born a few years later. For the
next eight years, Eric rarely saw his father.
In his 1946 essay Why I Write, Orwell stated
that he knew from the age of 5 or 6 that he would
become a writer (18: 316). In 1911, at the age of 8,
Eric Blair was enrolled as a scholarship student at
St. Cyprians, a well-regarded preparatory school
in Sussex. Always something of a misfit, and aware
of his own shabby-genteel background (5: 115),
the boy hated his five years there, and especially
the headmasters snobbish wife. Orwell the writer
took his revenge decades later in a scathing essay,
Such, Such Were the Joys, written in the 1940s
(19: 35687). Orwell himself considered the essay
libelous and it was therefore published only posthumously (in 1952 in the Partisan Review). Many
critics have noted the relationship between this
essay and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both of
which denounce institutionalized authoritarianism and the sadistic drive for power.
After St. Cyprians and brief enrollment at
Wellington, Eric Blair attended prestigious Eton
College as a Kings Scholar, graduating in 1921.
There, at the age of 16, he suddenly discovered
the joy of mere words (18: 317). Not academically inclined and lacking the money to attend
university, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police,
choosing to be posted in Burma (where his
grandmother still lived). He served from 1922 to
1927, ever more critical of imperialism and the
roles in which it trapped both its subjects and its
administrators. The experience provided the setting for two of his best-known essays, A Hanging (1931) and Shooting an Elephant (1936),
as well as for his first novel, Burmese Days (1934),
which, though presenting a caustic portrait of
British imperialism in Burma, is hardly more
sympathetic to the Burmese themselves. The
novels protagonist, Flory, detests imperialism
but hates himself even more and ultimately commits suicide.
Constrained by his work in the Indian Imperial
Police, Eric Blair despised his role as part of the
actual machinery of despotism, as he later wrote
(5: 136). He returned to England in August 1927
and resigned his position within a few months.
Wanting to break with the class of oppressors, and
attracted to ways of life unlike his own, he engaged in social exploration (in Peter Keatings
phrase). He went to Paris to become a writer but,
282
ORWELL, GEORGE
when his money ran out, lived a working-class life

and then returned to England where he tried out
the life of a tramp and vagabond, following the
example of Jack London, a writer he much admired. This conscious social descent lasted intermittently between 1928 and 1932 and provided
material to which Orwell returned again and
again in the 1930s. These adventures are recounted in his first book, the memoir/reportage
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), published under the pen name George Orwell. They
also provided him with material for his second
novel, A Clergymans Daughter (1935), his only
novel with a female protagonist.
Orwells third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936), like the preceding two, focused on the
frustrated aspirations of the protagonist. Later in
life Orwell declined to have A Clergymans
Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying reprinted, writing to his agent that they were both
thoroughly bad books (16: 232). After the fame
he gained with Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, these early novels
acquired significance and have been reprinted
constantly since his death less for their intrinsic
value than for their status in the corpus of
Orwells work, though A Clergymans Daughter
does contain one episode written in an experimental Joycean style.
At the suggestion of Victor Gollancz, his
publisher, Orwell embarked on another social
descent. In early 1936, he went to the economically depressed northern part of England to
experience and write about the lives of the
working class and unemployed. His seven-week
investigation resulted in his second book of
reportage, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), published by Gollanczs Left Book Club and offered
as the clubs selection for March 1937. As Orwell
wrote in Wigan Pier, he wanted to submerge
himself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side
against their tyrants (5: 138). Wigan Pier is a
powerful social commentary, and a revealing
one, for Orwell expresses considerable ambivalence toward the working class among whom he
lived. But there was no ambivalence in his contemptuous caricatures, in the books second half,
of leftists: One sometimes gets the impression
that the mere words Socialism and Communism draw towards them with magnetic force
every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer,

sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist, and feminist in England (5: 161). Such
comments moved Gollancz to add an introduction of his own, perhaps to make the book more
palatable to his leftist readership.
Orwell considered himself part of the generation that had missed World War I and thus felt
untested in battle (12: 270). With the outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War, he went to Spain to report
and stayed on to fight against fascism, joining the
Independent Labour Partys sister party in
Spain, the Trotskyist POUM (Partido Obrero de
Unificacion Marxista). In Catalonia, where he
arrived in late December 1936, Orwell observed
the beginnings of what he considered to be a true
socialist revolution, only to see it put down by the
Soviet-backed Spanish Communist Party, to
whom the POUM and the anarchists were as
much an enemy as Francos Falangists. Orwell
had served for only four months with the POUM
militia on the Aragon front when, on May 20, he
was shot in the throat. He recovered from his
wound but had to flee Spain or face arrest for his
involvement with the outlawed POUM. Thereafter, wounded in Spain became a constant epithet whenever he was mentioned.
Homage to Catalonia, which Victor Gollancz
declined to publish, was brought out by Fredric
Warburg in April 1938. Unsparing in its criticisms
of the Communist Partys attacks on anarchists
and Trotskyists in Spain, the book consolidated
Orwells reputation as a non-communist socialist
who spoke his mind. Lies, manipulation, assaults
on the notions of truth and objective reality,
destruction of the past by rewriting history, journalists who become propagandists, betrayals by
friends, pointless cruelty and death all these
themes, later so important to Orwell, appeared
first in Homage to Catalonia.
Spain had a profound impact on Orwells work,
as he stated plainly in his famous essay Why I
Write: Every line of serious work that I have
written since 1936 has been written, directly or
indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it (18: 319;
emphasis original). But Orwells political judgments were not always as keen as his political
passions. In his essay Why I Join the I.L.P.
[Independent Labour Party] (1938), he wrote:
The only regime which, in the long run, will dare
ORWELL, GEORGE
to permit freedom of speech is a Socialist regime

(11: 168).
Diagnosed with tuberculosis in April 1938,
Orwell spent nearly six months in a sanatorium.
In early September, he went with his wife Eileen
OShaughnessy, whom he had married in 1935, to
Morocco to convalesce. There he wrote Coming
Up for Air (1939) and a number of important
essays, among them Marrakech (1939). He left
Morocco at the end of March 1939, taking the
manuscript of his new novel to Victor Gollancz
that Stalinist publisher, Orwell would later call
him (Bowker 250) with whom he was still under
contract.
After his own baptism by fire in Spain, Orwell
for a time rejected war as a solution to political
conflict, even in the face of the growing menace of
Nazi Germany. For two years, between 1937 and
1939, he supported the Independent Labour
Partys anti-militarist stance. Opposing the Popular Front endorsed by the communists, Orwell
expressed his relief when Chamberlain returned
from Munich on September 30, 1938, having
signed an agreement with Hitler allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland. But, on the night
before the NaziSoviet Non-Aggression Pact
(signed on August 23, 1939), Orwell rediscovered
via a dream both his patriotism and his true
feelings about military action. He welcomed war
against Germany and lamented that his health
made it impossible for him to fight. In his essay
My Country Right or Left (1940), he stated that
there could be no substitute for patriotism and
the military virtues . . . however little the boiled
rabbits of the Left may like them (12: 2712).
Ours, he wrote, was the one-eyed pacifism that
is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong
navies (12: 270). And in the essay Inside the
Whale (1940), he took Henry Miller to task for
his passivity and detachment from the problems
of his time (12: 1078). Given his change of heart,
Orwell broke with the ILP for its continued
pacifism, which, he argued repeatedly, was
objectively pro-Fascist. As he explained in his
1942 essay Pacifism and the War: If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically
help that of the other (13: 396). Many of his
essays of this period defend patriotism. In Notes
on Nationalism (1945), for example, Orwell
distinguishes between patriotism, the legitimate
love of and preference for ones native land, and
283
nationalism, which he saw as inevitably driven by

a desire for power over other nations. Patriotism
is defensive, he argued, while nationalism is offensive (17: 142).
Unable to fight, Orwell became a BBC broadcaster to India and in that capacity was subjected
to the censorship imposed by Britains Ministry of
Information. It has long been known that Orwells
hatred of hypocrisy and bureaucratic jargon was
intensified by his experience at the BBC during
World War II. A cache of his unknown writings,
however, discovered in the BBC archives in 1984,
has allowed this connection to be more fully
documented.
Upon leaving the BBC in 1943, Orwell (now
officially introduced everywhere as George
Orwell) became literary editor of the leftist paper
Tribune. In addition to a weekly column, aptly
titled As I Please, he contributed book reviews
to Tribune, as well as to The Observer and the
Manchester Evening News. Meanwhile, his
London Letter continued to appear in Partisan
Review.
Although Orwell had first conceived the idea of
using an animal allegory to expose the Soviet
myth upon returning from Spain, he began to
work on Animal Farm only in 1943. As he would
later state in Why I Write, Animal Farm was
the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose
and artistic purpose into one whole (18: 320).
The manuscript was turned down by Gollancz
and several other British publishers who wished to
avoid offending the Soviet Union, at the time
Englands ally. Orwells agent tried to sell the book
to the Dial Press in New York; it was rejected on
the grounds that it was impossible to sell animal
stories in the USA. Finally, Fredric Warburg
expressed interest in the book and published it
in August 1945; it was published in the US in 1946
and was also translated into numerous languages.
Warburg remained Orwells publisher for the rest
of his life and beyond.
Animal Farm made Orwell instantly famous. A
little-recognized inspiration for Animal Farm was
Philip Guedallas A Russian Fairy Tale (1930),
with a similar political message. It was Guedalla
who described, in that story, a Good Fairy who
believed that all fairies were equal, but held
strongly that some fairies were more equal than
others (206). Orwells adaptation of the line
284
ORWELL, GEORGE
would become the single most famous sentence to

be associated with his name, taking its place
alongside key terms and phrases that he would
later introduce in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Animal Farm, an easily decipherable romana-clef, also tackled many of the themes Orwell
would explore more deeply in Nineteen EightyFour: the rewriting of history, the manipulation of
language to make genuine thought impossible,
the dominance of leaders over their followers, the
assault on objective truth. In short, the unrelenting pursuit of power and the terror unleashed in
order to consolidate and retain it. The Russian
Revolution was bound to fail, Orwell wrote in a
1945 essay on Arthur Koestlers book The Yogi and
the Commissar, because it had carried within it
the seeds of evil that would eventually destroy it
and this would have been the case even had
Lenin lived (17: 343).
Accounts of Orwells 10-year marriage to
Eileen OShaughnessy vary, not least because
Orwell was something of a philanderer. Still, he
was eager to have a child and, in June 1944, the
couple adopted a boy, Richard. Eileen died in
March 1945 in the course of a hysterectomy (an
operation of which Orwell disapproved). In early
1946 Orwells volume of Critical Essays appeared,
earning him the respect of critics on both sides of
the Atlantic.
Seeking a quiet life close to nature, in 1946 an
exhausted Orwell moved, with his son Richard
and a housekeeper, to Barnhill, a remote croft
house on the Scottish island of Jura. The climate
only exacerbated his tuberculosis. Richard Blair,
who still considers Jura his spiritual home, has
said (Brown 2008) that although his father is
commonly seen as dour and sour, he also harbored a strong romantic streak and a restless
penchant for adventure. Jura thus joined colonial
Burma, the doss-houses of England and the kitchens of Paris, civil war Spain, and the coal mines of
Wigan as locales in which Orwell could test his
mettle and sharpen his powers of observation.
It was on Jura that Orwell began Nineteen
Eighty-Four in earnest, but he was interrupted by
illness and hospitalization. Returning to Jura in
July 1948, he finished the manuscript. Then, in
January 1949, he once again entered a sanatorium.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June
1949 to immediate acclaim. Orwell had considered calling the book The Last Man in Europe
for he conceived it as a tale of resistance and

ultimate capitulation to a totalitarian regime in
which nothing is left of the private self. The novel
was much influenced by James Burnhams book
The Managerial Revolution (1941), which predicted a postwar future characterized by an oligarchy of managers imposing absolute bureaucratic rule on a world divided into three superstates. These states, centered on Europe, Asia, and
America, would be in perpetual conflict but without the possibility of actually defeating one
another.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, this vision turns into
the three totalitarian powers engaged in constant
ersatz conflict and suddenly shifting alliances, the
point of which is to stimulate production without
ever raising the standard of living. Big Brother is a
symbolic creation who governs the population of
Oceania according to the principles of IngSoc
(Orwells satirical version of English socialism),
which places all power in the hands of the Party.
Telescreens keep the population under constant
surveillance; thought control is institutionalized,
sexual pleasure prohibited (in order to better
focus repressed desire on the Partys official enemies), and no private self allowed to exist. Children inform on their parents; low-grade literature
is mechanically produced for consumption by the
Proles the dirty masses who alone are somewhat
free of surveillance merely because they are considered too dim-witted to be a danger.
Orwells most memorable perhaps only
memorable female character is Julia in Nineteen
Eighty-Four. Described as a rebel from the waist
down by the novels protagonist, Winston
Smith, she becomes Winstons lover as a conscious blow against the Party. Winstons ultimate
betrayal of Julia, under torture, is the emblem of
his capitulation to OBrien, his tormentor and
hero.
Although Nineteen Eighty-Four belongs comfortably within the tradition of twentieth-century
dystopian novels, what sets Orwells novel apart
from comparable works is the absence of the usual
rationale for pursuing power. In the dystopian
tradition, there is typically a Grand Inquisitor
scene (deriving from a famous episode in
Dostoevskys Brothers Karamazov), in which the
leader justifies his exercise of power by referring to
the weakness of the masses, eager to be delivered
from the burden of freedom. This rationale is
ORWELL, GEORGE
rejected in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the

Party pursues power for its own sake. Nineteen
Eighty-Four is also memorable for its book-within-the-book Goldsteins Theory and Practice of
Oligarchical Collectivism, and for its Appendix on
Newspeak, in which Orwell sets out an explanation of how manipulation of language can ultimately make free thought impossible.
In September 1949, Orwell was admitted to
University College Hospital in London. Ever since
Eileens death in 1945, he had sought another
wife, unsuccessfully inviting a number of his
female acquaintances to become the widow of a
well-known writer. In October, still in the hospital, he married Sonia Brownell (an assistant editor
at Cyril Connollys magazine Horizon).
Orwell died of tuberculosis on January 21,
1950, at the age of 46. He was buried at the
Church of All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. Sonias control of his literary estate for
decades thwarted scholars and would-be biographers. Though Orwell had wanted no biography
written of him, Sonia did eventually commission
one (by Bernard Crick) and then, shortly before
her death in 1980, tried to prevent its publication.
In 1998, after 17 years of research, Peter Davison
published the nearly exhaustive Complete Works
of George Orwell, in 20 volumes and more than
8,500 pages.
Orwells status as a moral exemplar, famous for
his honesty and decency, has been such that
people on all sides politically have tried to claim
him as their own. His writing is ambivalent
enough that appropriate quotations can be
found to support many contradictory positions.
As Orwells politics changed, however, his rhetoric did not. Thus, for example, he first charged the
pansy left with trying to stir up war fever, and,
once he himself had abandoned his anti-war
position, charged the same pansy left with
cowardice for opposing war with Germany.
Orwells fertile mind and varied interests make
him hard to classify: a romantic, an old-fashioned
liberal but also an anti-capitalist, a lifelong selfproclaimed socialist who was fiercely anti-communist, a poseur who criticized in particular the
hypocrisy of middle-class leftists, an exposer of
power and its corrupting effects who was nonetheless attracted to it. Orwells subjects were far
ranging: from his continuing criticism of Stalinism and totalitarianism and other contemporary
285
political issues, to his pioneering work on popular

culture: boys weeklies, detective fiction, cartoon
art, good bad books, as well as countless essays
on literature. He also contributed numerous
words and phrases to the English language: Newspeak, double think, memory hole, Hate Week,
Ministry of Truth, etc. He had an excellent ear for
catchwords and slogans, such as Big Brother is
Watching You (borrowed from an advertisement
he had seen in London). His 1945 essay You and
the Atom Bomb is credited with introducing the
term cold war (17: 321), and in perhaps his most
famous essay, Politics and the English Language
(1946), he advised, let the meaning choose the
word, and not the other way about (17: 429).
Good prose is like a windowpane, he stated in
Why I Write (18: 320). Orwells belief in the
referential power of language and its importance
for a democratic politics is an antidote avant la
lettre to todays postmodernism, which has famous intellectuals expressing skepticism about
the existence of an external reality and languages
potential to tell the truth about the world.
Because Orwell attempted to think clearly and
write without veils of mystification, it is all the
more striking that he nonetheless shared the
conventional antipathy of his culture toward
homosexuals, women, and Jews; he also believed
that abortion and birth control were examples of
moral degeneration. These aspects of his thinking,
however, have often been ignored, in favor of an
idealized view of him. V. S. Pritchett, for example,
famously called Orwell the wintry conscience of
a generation and a kind of saint (1950, 96).
Successive biographies (in particular those by
Crick, Shelden, Meyers, Taylor, and Bowker) have
provided different perspectives on Orwells life
and work, and have tempered some of the earlier
adulation. Orwells reputation for integrity, however, was seriously compromised by documents
released in July 1996, revealing that, in April 1949,
he had offered to provide the British Foreign
Offices covert propaganda unit, the Information
Research Department, with an annotated list he
had compiled of 86 names of crypto-communists, fellow-travellers, and others he considered unreliable (19978, 20: 24059).
Orwell observed that all art is propaganda; but,
importantly, he also recognized that all propaganda is not art. In the end, he was perhaps
his own best interpreter. In Why I Write he
286
ORWELL, GEORGE
explained his objectives: What I have most

wanted to do throughout the past ten years is
to make political writing into an art. . . . But I
could not do the work of writing a book, or even
a long magazine article, if it were not also an
aesthetic experience. . . . So long as I remain alive
and well I shall continue to feel strongly about
prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to
take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of
useless information (18: 31920). Perhaps it is
Orwells passionate commitment to both goals,
and not only the state of our contemporary
world, that have made his work as relevant today
as when it was written.
SEE ALSO: London, Jack (AF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian
Fiction (BIF)
All references to Orwells writings are to The Complete
Works of George Orwell, ed. P. Davison (19978), by
volume and page number.
Bowker, G. (2003). Inside George Orwell. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Brown, A. (2008). Big Brothers living legacy. Sunday
Times (Nov. 23). At http://entertainment.
timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/
books/article5212649.ece accessed Feb. 15, 2010.
Burnham, J. (1941). The Managerial Revolution: What is
Happening in the World. New York: John Day.
Collini, S. (2003). The Grocers Children: The Lives and
Afterlives of George Orwell. Times Literary
Supplement, pp. 3, 6 (June 20).
Crick, B. (1981). George Orwell: A Life, rev. edn.
Davison, P. (1996). George Orwell: A Literary Life. New
York: St. Martins.
Fowler, H. W., & Fowler, F. G. (1906). The Kings
English. Oxford: Clarendon.
Gottlieb, E. (1992). The Orwell Conundrum: A Cry of
Despair or Faith in the Spirit of Man? Don Mills, ON:
Carleton University Press.
Guedalla, P. (1930). A Russian Fairy Tale. In The
Missing Muse. New York: Harper.
Hitchens, C. (2002). Why Orwell Matters. New York:

Basic Books.
Keating, P. (ed.) (1976). Into Unknown England,
18661913: Selections from the Social Explorers.
Koestler, A. (1945). The Yogi and the Commissar and
Other Essays. London: Jonathan Cape.
Meyers, J. (2000). Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a
Generation. New York: Norton.
Orwell, G. (1970). Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters of George Orwell (ed. S. Orwell & I. Angus).
4 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Orwell, G. (19978). The Complete Works of George
Orwell (ed. P. Davison). 20 vols. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Patai, D. (1984). The Orwell Mystique: A Study in
Male Ideology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press.
Pritchett, V. S. (1950). George Orwell. New Statesman
and Nation, p. 96 (Jan. 28).
Rodden, J. (1989). The Politics of Literary Reputation:
The Making and Claiming of St. George Orwell.
Rodden, J. (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to
George Orwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rodden, J., & Cushman, T. (eds.) (2004). George
Orwell into the Twenty-First Century. Boulder, CO:
Paradigm.
Runciman, D. (2008). Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of
Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond. Princeton:
Stansky, P., & Abrahams, W. (1972). The Unknown
Orwell. London: Constable.
Stansky, P., & Abrahams, W. (1979). Orwell: The
Transformation. London: Constable.
Steinhoff, W. (1975). George Orwell and the Origins
of 1984. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Taylor, D. J. (2003). Orwell: The Life. New York: Henry
Holt.
Watson, G. (1998). The Lost Literature of Socialism.
Cambridge: Lutterworth.
Williams, R. (1971). Orwell. Glasgow: Collins.
Woodcock, G. (1967). The Crystal Spirit. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Zwerdling, A. (1974). Orwell and the Left. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
P
Phillips, Caryl
DAVE GUNNING
Caryl Phillips has established himself as one of the

foremost chroniclers of what he calls the new
world order: the late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century global relationships that colonial and
postcolonial frameworks seem increasingly unable
fully to explain. His drama, fiction and travel
writing engage consistently with people searching
for ways to belong to societies that are often hostile
to their presence, and his work is throughout
marked by his refusal to accept simple answers to
the complicated question of where, and how, home
might be found. He has been the recipient of such
prestigious literary awards as the James Tait Black
and Commonwealth Writers prizes, and has been
shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the PEN/
Faulkner Award. In 1993 he featured as one of
Grantas 20 Best of Young British Novelists.
Born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts on
March 13, 1958, Phillips was still an infant when
his parents migrated to the United Kingdom.
Raised in white working-class areas of Leeds and
Birmingham, he attended the Queens College,
University of Oxford (where he is now an honorary fellow). He lives in New York City, and is
professor of English at Yale University.
While studying for his English degree, Phillips
traveled to the United States in 1978, where he came
across the writings of Richard Wright, Ralph
Ellison, and James Baldwin and realized that he
wanted to write himself. Baldwin (who became a
friend of Phillips until his death in 1987) can be
seen as a particular influence on the younger
writers attempts to capture the subtleties of human
experience in difficult times. Phillipss first writing

success was in the field of drama; his play Strange
Fruit opened at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield on
October 30, 1980. This play, and his first novels The
Final Passage (1985) and A State of Independence
(1986), introduce many of the themes concerning
migration and belonging that would continue to be
crucial throughout his career.
In 1987 Phillips published an account of his
journey around Europe, The European Tribe. This
book, which was scathing in its attack on the
deep-rooted and persistent racism he found
across the continent, develops his earlier explorations of homelessness and offers his first full
examination of many of the concerns that would
shape his later writing. In Amsterdam he visited
Anne Franks house and revealed how, as a child,
he had looked to the Jewish experience to understand his own exclusion. This, and the reflections
he offered on Shakespeares Othello and Shylock
while in Venice, foreshadowed the interrelations
between histories of suffering that would come to
dominate his writing.
Higher Ground (1989) was the first of Phillipss
novels to offer three separate narratives. No explicit links are drawn between the stories of a late
eighteenth-century African working as an interpreter for slavers, a 1960s African American radical serving time for robbery, and a Jewish refugee
in postwar London, but the connections between
the sense of displacement felt by each resonate
throughout. His next two novels, Cambridge
(1991) and the Booker Prize-shortlisted Crossing
the River (1993), concentrated more squarely on
the histories of the African diaspora. In the former, Phillips closely echoes eighteenth- and nine-

288
POLITICS AND THE NOVEL
teenth-century texts that record aspects of slavery

by such authors as M. G. (Monk) Lewis, Lady
Mary Nugent, and Olaudah Equiano, to present
the contrasting first-person accounts of the circumstances that bring the white Emily Cartwright
and black slave Cambridge into contact on a
Caribbean plantation. Phillipss belief in the key
importance of form in understanding character
and situation comes through in these carefully
rendered voices, each blinkered to the full realities
of his or her situation.
The Nature of Blood (1997) is Phillipss most
complex and ambitious novel to date. It continually shifts between the story of a Holocaust survivor, Eva Stern, an account of the 1480 persecution
of the Jews of Portobuffole, near Venice, and a
first-person narrative of a African general who,
although not named, seems to be Othello. It ends
by detailing an encounter in modern-day Israel
between Evas Uncle Stephan, now a disillusioned
Zionist, and a black Falasha Jew from Ethiopia.
While it was criticized in some quarters for its
appropriation of Jewish suffering, the novel
stands as Phillipss clearest portrayal of the need
to understand the connections between experiences of alienation and brutality.
In 2000 Phillips published his second travelogue, The Atlantic Sound, which continued his
explorations of the global legacies of the slave
trade; but his Commonwealth Writers Prize-winning A Distant Shore (2003) was set in present-day
Britain, and maps the relationship between a middle-aged white woman and an African asylum
seeker. It can seem in some ways a major departure
from the focus on history that had shaped his work
for the previous 15 years, yet its attention to the
complexities that make people different, and the
possibility for communication between them, reveals it as in many ways typical of his work.
Dancing in the Dark (2005), the story of the
real-life entertainer Bert Williams, was Phillipss
first novel set wholly in the United States, but
Foreigners (2007a) marked a return to Britain and
further developments in Phillipss blending of
history, fiction, and reportage. The year 2007 also
saw Phillipss return to writing for the stage with
his adaptation of Simon Schamas Rough Crossings which revealed his continuing interest in the
history of slavery. Phillips remains a major figure
in articulating the complicated ways in which
brutal past events play out in the complex present.
SEE ALSO: Baldwin, James (AF); Black British

Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical
English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction
(WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in
Fiction (WF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)

Ledent, B. (2002). Caryl Phillips. Manchester:
Ledent, B. (ed.) (2007). Familial and Other
Conversations: Special Issue on Caryl Phillips.
Moving Worlds, 7(1).
Phillips, C. (1981). Strange Fruit. Ambergate: Amber
Lane.
Phillips, C. (1985). The Final Passage. London: Faber
and Faber.
Phillips, C. (1986). A State of Independence. London:
Faber and Faber.
Phillips, C. (1987). The European Tribe. London: Faber
and Faber.
Phillips, C. (1989). Higher Ground. London: Viking.
Phillips, C. (1991). Cambridge. London: Bloomsbury.
Phillips, C. (1993). Crossing the River. London:
Bloomsbury.
Phillips, C. (1997). The Nature of Blood. London: Faber
and Faber.
Phillips, C. (2000). The Atlantic Sound. London: Faber
and Faber.
Phillips, C. (2001). A New World Order: Selected Essays.
Phillips, C. (2003). A Distant Shore. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Phillips, C. (2005). Dancing in the Dark. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Phillips, C. (2007a). Foreigners: Three English Lives.
London: Harvill Secker.
Phillips, C. (2007b). Rough Crossings. London: Oberon.
Thomas, H. (2006). Caryl Phillips. London: Northcote
House.
Politics and the Novel

ALEX HOUEN
British and Irish political novels in the twentieth

century are incredibly varied in form, voice, and
content. This is hardly surprising given the numerous political upheavals in this period, along
with the changes in approach to the novel as a

genre. The best political novels are notable for
exploring (1) the limits of what the novel,
Britain and/or Ireland, and politics are,
and (2) how those entities relate to each other.
For several critics, the realist forms that
predominated in the nineteenth century were
inextricably linked to bourgeois liberalism in
emphasizing the views and voice of an individual.
Such novels could also present wider purviews:
nineteenth-century naturalism, in particular,
examined ways in which character might be
socially and biologically determined. Usually,
though, the nineteenth-century investment in
individualism was evidenced by the use of an
omniscient narrator and by a linear narrative as
development of a main character. In the twentieth
century, novelists fashioned alternative forms of
characterization and narrative voice so as to
engage with changes in the political landscape.
Plotting affairs of state thus frequently meant
plotting new states of mind and body.
In the first decade of the twentieth century,
many writers rejected nineteenth-century novelistic conventions to address the effects of modernization. Samuel Butlers The Way of All Flesh
(1903) and H. G. Wellss Tono-Bungay (1909)
both examine mechanization and modernization,
in the face of which Wellss narrator, George
Ponderevo, announces: I fail to see how I can
be other than a lax, undisciplined storyteller
(Wells 1946 [1909], 107). Joseph Conrad experiments with non-linear omniscient narration in
The Secret Agent (1907), which focuses on the
impact of international anarchism in London. In
showing how characters domestic lives becomes
entangled in affairs of state, the novels plot
adduces the political complexity of the anarchists
plots. Conrad also collaborated with Ford Madox
Hueffer (who changed his name to Ford in 1919)
in developing non-linear forms of narration as a
novelistic impressionism that would give a
better sense of the simultaneity of places, persons, and emotions (Ford 1998, 325) taking
place in the writer.
Such experiments usher in a modernist approach to the novel that was well established by
1910. Indeed, Virginia Woolf went so far as to
claim that human character changed around
December 1910 (Woolf 1998 [1924], 396); the
novelists job was thus to change the character of
289
the novel. For Woolf, this partly entailed producing novels more adequate to womens experience.
Just as women were not represented adequately in
politics (female suffrage was not granted in Britain until 1918), so Woolf felt that female subjectivity had not been adequately represented in
fiction. Along with writers such as Dorothy
Richardson (in her Pilgrimage novels, 191538),
Woolf experimented in mixing free indirect
discourse, interior monologue, and collaged narrative structure to present new explorations of
subjectivity and personal relationships.
By 1913 Britain was gripped by a range of
political activism from strikes to suffragette
militancy all of which was derailed by mobilization for the Great War (191418). With British
citizens being conscripted to suffer the horrors of
trench warfare, relations between the state, subjectivity, and the wars traumas were much explored in novels. Ford Madox Fords The Good
Soldier (1915) is set before the war and employs
the impressionist narration he developed with
Conrad to present the unreliable view of his
narrator, John Dowell, on the sexual and social
intrigues by which he is confounded. After fighting at the front, Ford drew on his experiences for
his Parades End tetralogy (2002 [19248]), which
follows the life of Christopher Tietjens and uses an
impressionist approach in part to merge
Tietjenss experience of warfare with his fraught
domestic life. Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) includes an examination of shell-shock
and the inability of society to aid those suffering
from it. She followed this up with To the Lighthouse (1927), which features the war as an event
that ruthlessly strips her narrative of its plot and
characters. If, as Woolf upheld, human
character had changed in 1910, then the Great
War clearly presented a more severe and sustained
period of upheaval. Other notable novels that link
the wars political and psychological effects include Edmund Blundens Undertones of War
(1928), Wyndham Lewiss Childermass (1928),
and Richard Aldingtons Death of a Hero (1929).
Ireland faced another war during this period
its War of Independence. The Republican struggle
to end Britains rule over Ireland came to a head in
the Easter Rising of 1916 when the British army in
Dublin crushed the Republican forces and then
executed Padraic Pearse and other rebel leaders.
In the wake of this event, Republicans waged a
290
relentless guerrilla war against the British forces,

which was the main factor in bringing about the
Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) as a compromise. The
treaty established Ireland as an independent free
state with the exception of six Ulster counties in
Northern Ireland, which were retained as part of
the United Kingdom. The Anglo-Irish writer
Elizabeth Bowen examines the years before the
treaty in The Last September (1929), which portrays an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family torn between its allegiances to Britain and Ireland. In
contrast, James Joyces Ulysses (2008 [1922])
might seem apolitical given the time at which it
was published. Set in Dublin on a single day, June
16, 1904, the novel charts a convergence of meanderings between Leopold Bloom and Stephen
Dedalus. British rule is questioned (e.g., in the
Telemachus episode) no less than Irish nationalism (e.g., in Cyclops), but the political stance
of the novel is more a matter of using different
narrative styles and voices while excavating a
variety of tongues from within the English language. Insularities of subjectivity and nationality
thus give way to a wider linguistic community.
In the second half of the 1920s labor unrest
peaked with the General Strike of 1926. By the
early 1930s, Britain, like America, was suffering
from serious economic depression and high unemployment. Critics such as George Orwell and
Philip Henderson criticized 1920s modernism for
having lost sight of political reality by focusing on
subjectivity. Numerous novelists concurred and
resuscitated a realist approach, which is particularly in evidence in 1930s working-class fiction.
Walter Greenwoods Love on the Dole (1933) is a
notable example, depicting unemployment in
northern England and presenting dialogue in a
northern working-class vernacular. Lewis Grassic
Gibbons trilogy A Scots Quair (1946 [19324]) is
a landmark Scottish novel that follows heroine
Chris Guthrie and builds an anti-capitalist
vision that encompasses the effects of World War
I and disappointment over the failed General
Strike of 1926. Other important novels addressing
issues of class and labor include James Hanleys
Boy (1931) and Lewis Joness Cymardy (1978
[1937]).
The 1930s was a period in which various political ideologies clashed to gain ascendancy. Stalin
instigated purges to consolidate the power of his
Communist Party in the USSR. Germany was
turning toward National Socialism. Fascism took

root in Italy under Mussolini and then in Spain
when General Francos forces deposed the popularly elected Republican government in 1936,
thereby precipitating the Spanish Civil War
(19368). In Britain and Ireland the left-wing
ideologies of communism, socialism, and anarchism won more adherents than national socialism and fascism, particularly among writers. Fears
over the spread of right-wing politics led over
2,700 British volunteers to help the struggle
against Francos Fascists during Spains Civil
War. Among the volunteers were a number of
writers, including George Orwell whose Homage
to Catalonia (1938) is an autobiographical account of the experience. Wyndham Lewiss
Revenge for Love (1937) presents a cynical novelistic view of British motives for fighting against
Francos forces (Lewis had decidedly right-wing
sympathies). Published in the wake of Francos
victory, Graham Greenes The Confidential Agent
(1939) is pessimistic in suggesting that Spains
political conflict would spread. A number of other
novels envisaged conflict in Europe, including
Rex Warners The Professor (1938) and Orwells
Coming Up for Air (1939).
World War II (193945) proved the forecasts of
war to be right and had devastating effects on
Britain and her allies (Ireland remained neutral).
As with World War I, novelists struggled to
produce novels adequate for engaging with horrors like the London Blitz (19401). James
Hanleys No Directions (1943) portrays a single
night of the Blitz and tries to capture myriad
experiences of it by detailing the effects on a single
tenement. Henry Green, who served in the Auxiliary Fire Service, gives an excellent impression of
the devastation in Caught (1943). Like Hanley,
Green focuses on the impressions of his characters, eschewing intervention from an omniscient
narrator. Elizabeth Bowens Heat of the Day
(1949) is also set in wartime London and mixes
metaphysical romance with a spy plot to show
how politics and private life could become entangled. In contrast, Evelyn Waugh builds a more
epic survey of the war years in his Sword of
Honour trilogy which, like Fords earlier Parades
End tetralogy, examines how traumas of war
become compounded with treacheries of domestic life in the mind of his main character, Guy
Crouchback.
Britain emerged a victor from the war, but took

many years to recover from it. With the economy
in a parlous condition, Clement Attlees new
Labour government maintained food rationing
and upheld a range of Welfare State policies,
establishing the National Health Service (NHS)
in 1948 and nationalizing major industries and
public utilities. Continuing fears over totalitarian
politics found a voice in Orwells Animal Farm
(1945), an anti-Stalinist allegory set in a farmyard,
which he followed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949), perhaps the best-known British political
novel of the century. Set in a dystopian 1984, the
latter depicts a world divided into three political
blocs and shows Winston Smith, the main character, in his struggle to reject the totalitarian
rule of Big Brother in Oceania, the bloc that
absorbed Britain and Ireland. In showing Big
Brothers power to be largely dependent on the
control of language, the novel is a landmark work
in examining links between politics and linguistic
expression.
Orwells forecast of a world divided into political blocs was arguably confirmed by the ensuing
Cold War stand-off between the countries
including Britain (Ireland remained neutral)
allied under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the countries allied under the
Warsaw Pact. Resultant fears over the possibility
of nuclear war were addressed in a number of
novels, notably Aldous Huxleys Ape and Essence
(1948), Nevil Shutes On the Beach (1957), and
John Bowens After the Rain (1958). The Cold
War spy novel was another form of fiction
that developed realist insights into links between
international espionage and British political institutions salient examples include Len
Deightons The Ipcress File (1962) and John Le
Carres Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (1974).
The 1950s in Britain were known as the Angry
Decade largely because the Welfare State ideals of
Attlees Labour government were felt by many not
to have lived up to expectations. With the country
still suffering from the economic burdens of the
war, realist working-class fiction enjoyed a resurgence from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.
More than that of the 1930s, much of this fiction
portrayed vicissitudes of social mobility. Kingsley
Amiss Lucky Jim (1954) portrays its workingclass character Jim Dixon struggling to fit in as
a lecturer with his predominantly middle-class
291
colleagues in a provincial university. In a cynical

conclusion, Jim rejects academic life to take up a
better-paid position as an assistant to his lovers
rich uncle. John Braines Room at the Top (1957),
Raymond Williamss Border Country (1960), and
David Storeys This Sporting Life (1960) also
address difficulties of social mobility through
working-class characters. For many reviewers, the
best proletariat novel since the 1930s was Alan
Sillitoes Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1958), which uses northern English vernacular
to give voice to its main character, Arthur Seaton,
in his uncompromising stance toward amatory
relationships and factory life.
Many commentators have claimed that since
the 1950s working-class solidarity has weakened
apace with the diminishing faith in consensus
politics. Margaret Thatchers Conservative government (197990) overturned many welfare
state aims, privatizing industries, undermining
trade union power, and championing individual
entrepreneurs. Socialist idealism was thus forced
to give way to burgeoning middle-class liberalism.
Since the 1960s, the growth of identity politics
(advancing the rights of a group marginalized on
grounds such as ethnicity, gender, or religion)
has also increasingly meant that political constituencies and solidarities cannot be thought of
simply along lines of class, political party, or
locality. The womens liberation movement that
grew in the 1960s and 1970s was particularly
successful in advancing a range of political rights
for women, and there have been numerous novels
by authors such as Angela Carter, Fay Weldon,
and Jeanette Winterson that have experimented
in figuring womens voices aesthetically in order
to examine strictures of womens socio-political
status. Since the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967, queer fiction has also grown apace
with political organizations advancing queer
sexuality (ranging from gay and lesbian to bisexual and transgendered). Queer novels by writers
such as Alan Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson,
and Colm Toibn have been important in
relating a fluidity of sexual identity to other social
hybridities.
Since the 1950s a major factor contributing to
social hybridity has been immigration. The British Nationality Act, 1948 granted rights of UK
residence to virtually all citizens of British Commonwealth countries. Intended to draw an influx
292
of cheap labor, the Act was certainly successful on

that score. A range of novels from Caribbean
immigrants portrayed difficulties in resettling,
including George Lammings The Emigrants
(1954) and Sam Selvons The Lonely Londoners
(1956), whose narrator speaks a mix of Trinidadian vernacular and standard English. More recent novels showing generational differences
within families who migrated include Caryl
Philipss The Final Passage (1985), Hanif
Kureishis Buddha of Suburbia (1990), and Zadie
Smiths White Teeth (2000).
Migration to Britain continued even though
many nations that Britain had colonized
achieved independence (including India and
several Caribbean and African countries). A range
of postcolonial novels have examined transitions
to independence by developing new forms of
historical fiction. Important examples include
Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (1981),
Anita Desais Clear Light of Day (1980), Ben
Okris The Famished Road (1991), and Giles
Fodens The Last King of Scotland (1999). Rushdie
also ignited furious debates on the politics of
postcolonialism, postmodernism, and fiction
with the publication of his Satanic Verses
(1988). Iran, which deemed it as portraying the
prophet Mohammed in a blasphemous light,
pronounced a death sentence on Rushdie and the
book was banned in several countries.
The demise of the British Empire has been
followed by several shifts in the political unity
between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern
Ireland. For both Ireland and Northern Ireland
the partition since 1921 has been a particularly
fraught issue. Militant disagreements about it in
Northern Ireland were particularly fierce from
1968 to 1998, between Unionists (who were almost exclusively Protestant and favored union
with Britain) and Nationalists (who were almost
exclusively Catholic and sought a unified, independent Ireland). This period of conflict, known
as the Troubles, saw more than 3,200 people
shot and 40,000 wounded. The Belfast Agreement
of 1998 was designed to be a compromise arrangement for all sides and granted political
devolution to Northern Ireland. Because of continuing political strife, however, devolution was
suspended until 2007. Novels on the Troubles are
plentiful, with many of them refracting their
realism through a lens of tragic romance (doomed
love between a Catholic and a Protestant). Notable alternatives include Robert McLiam Wilsons
Ripley Bogle (1989), Deirdre Maddens One by
One in the Darkness (1996), and Patrick McCabes
Breakfast on Pluto (1998).
Proposals for devolution in Scotland and Wales
were defeated in referendums in 1979 but were
successful in referendums in 1997. The Scottish
Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly
were subsequently established in 1999. After the
1979 referendum numerous Scottish novelists
explored the condition of Scotland. Alasdair
Grays Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) is a
major example; set partly in contemporary Glasgow and partly in the dystopian realm of
Unthank, the examination of Scotland also
involves pitting realism and fantasy against each
other. James Kelman has been influential in
using narrators who speak in Scottish vernacular,
and in novels such as How Late it Was, How
Late (1994) he explores how individuals are
affected by various government institutions.
Other important novels examining the state of
Scotland include Irvine Welshs Trainspotting
(1993) and Alan Warners Morvern Callar (1995).
There have been fewer novels in English examining Welsh life and politics partly because many
Welsh novelists have preferred to write in Welsh.
Richard Llewellyns How Green Was My Valley
(1939) has remained popular and documents life
in Welsh coalmining communities. More recently, Mary Joness Resistance (1985) has examined
militant Welsh nationalism, and Trezza
Azzopardis The Hiding Place (2000) has considered multiculturalism in Wales in relation to the
Maltese community in Cardiff in the 1960s.
Since the 1980s factors such as Thatcherism
and the weakening of class solidarity have
prompted a number of novelists to cast a critical
eye on the political state of Britain more generally.
Martin Amiss Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
portrays the consumer greed of its time through
its disagreeable main character, John Self. Ian
McEwans The Child in Time (1987) imagines a
future Conservative government seeking to
mold ideal citizens from birth. And Jonathan
Coes What a Carve Up! (1994) looks in part
at the replacement of Thatcher by fellow
Conservative John Major, along with Britains
preparations for participation in the First Gulf
War in Iraq.

Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Colonial Fiction
(BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical
Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics/
Activism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative
Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Utopian and
Dystopian Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction
(BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF); World War II
in Fiction (BIF)
and Windus.
Amis, M. (1984). Money: A Suicide Note. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Azzopardi, T. (2000). The Hiding Place. London:
Picador.
Bergonzi, B. (1970). The Situation of the Novel. London:
Macmillan.
Blunden, E. (1928). Undertones of War. London:
Cobden-Sanderson.
Bowen, E. (1929). The Last September. London:
Constable.
Jonathan Cape.
Bowen, J. (1958). After the Rain. London: Faber and
Faber.
Braine, J. (1957). Room at the Top. London:
Methuen.
Butler, S. (1903). The Way of All Flesh. London: Grant
Richards.
Coe, J. (1994). What a Carve Up! New York:
Viking.
Conrad, J. (1907). The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale.
London: Methuen.
Deighton, L. (1962). The Ipcress File. London: Hodder
and Stoughton.
Desai, A. (1980). Clear Light of Day. London:
Heinemann.
English, J. F. (ed.) (2006). A Concise Companion to
Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Foden, G. (1999). The Last King of Scotland. London:
Faber and Faber.
Ford, F. M. (1915). The Good Soldier. London: John
Lane.
Ford, F. M. (1998). On Impressionism [1914]. In V.
Kolocotroni, J. Goldman, & O. Taxidou (eds.),
Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 32530.
Ford, F. M. (2002). Parades End [19248]. London:
Penguin.
293
Foster, J. W. (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge Companion

to the Irish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Jarrolds.
Gray, A. (2007). Lanark: A Life in Four Books.
Edinburgh: Canongate.
Green, H. (1943). Caught. London: Hogarth.
Greene, G. (1939). The Confidential Agent: An
Entertainment. London: Heinemann.
Greenwood, W. (1933). Love on the Dole. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Hanley, J. (1943). No Directions. London: Faber and
Faber.
Head, D. (2002). The Cambridge Introduction to Modern
British Fiction, 19502000. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Huxley, A. (1948). Ape and Essence. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Jones, L. (1978). Cymardy [1937]. London: Lawrence
and Wishart.
Jones, M. (1985). Resistance. Belfast: Blackstaff.
Joyce, J. (2008). Ulysses [1922]. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Secker and Warburg.
Faber and Faber.
Lamming, G. (1954). The Emigrants. London: Michael
Joseph.
Le Carre, J. (1974). Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy. London:
Random House.
Lewis, W. (1928). The Childermass. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Llewellyn, R. (1939). How Green Was My Valley.
London: Michael Joseph.
Madden, D. (1996). One by One in the Darkness.
McCabe, P. (1998). Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador.
McEwan, I. (1987). The Child in Time. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Okri, B. (1991). The Famished Road. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Secker and Warburg.
Philips, C. (1985). The Final Passage. London: Faber
and Faber.
Richardson, D. (1938). Pilgrimage [191538]. 4 vols.
London: J. M. Dent/Cresset.
Picador.
Rushdie, S. (1988). The Satanic Verses. London:
Penguin.
294
POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Schwarz, D. R. (1989). The Transformation of the English

Novel 18901930. London: Macmillan.
Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London: Allan
Wingate.
Shute, N. (1957). On the Beach. London: Heinemann.
Hamilton.
Stevenson, R. W. (1986). The British Novel Since the
Thirties: An Introduction. London: Batsford.
Longman.
Warner, A. (1995). Morvern Callar. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Warner, R. (1938). The Professor. New York: Knopf.
Waugh, E. (2001). The Sword of Honour Trilogy
[195261]. London: Penguin.
Wells, H. G. (1946). Tono-Bungay [1909]. London:
Penguin.
Welsh, I. (1993). Trainspotting. London: Vintage.
Williams, R. (1960). Border Country. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Wilson, R. M. (1989). Ripley Bogle. London: Deutsch.
Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. London: L. and
W. Woolf.
In V. Kolocotroni, J. Goldman, & O. Taxidou (eds.),
Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 3957.
Postcolonial Fiction
of the African Diaspora
JOHN J. SU
The phrase postcolonial fiction of the African

diaspora typically refers to those works written
since the 1950s by African immigrants and their
descendants. The era of decolonization on the
African continent began in 1957 with the independence of Ghana, and the political turmoil
across Africa during the next two decades, combined with the need in Great Britain for cheap
labor in the aftermath of World War II, led to
significant waves of migration through the 1960s.
Writing by so-called black Britons has gained
increasing prominence and prestige since the
1960s, and has played a crucial role in a rethinking
of what constitutes Britishness in a post-imperial
context.
A variety of factors make generalizations about

African diaspora writing very difficult. The immense cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity of
Africa means that the life experiences of a West
African immigrant such as Buchi Emecheta differ
considerably from those of an East African such as
Abdulrazak Gurnah. The identity categories used
in Great Britain can cause further confusion. Well
into the 1990s, it was common to use the term
black Briton indiscriminately to refer to immigrants from Africa, the British West Indies/
Caribbean, and South Asia. Salman Rushdie, the
most famous contemporary author of South
Asian descent, identified himself with this term
in his non-fictional essays during the 1980s. The
complex biographies of many expatriate authors
also make classification difficult and often idiosyncratic. G. V. Desani and Doris Lessing, for
example, have not been characterized as belonging to the African diaspora, although the former
was born in Africa and the latter spent a significant portion of her childhood there. Many of
the authors from the British West Indies were
descended from African slaves, including Sam
Selvon, George Lamming, David Dabydeen, and
Caryl Phillips. Yet West Indian or Caribbean
literature has been seen as a separate phenomenon. In part, this is because Caribbean migration
was more concentrated in the aftermath of World
War II, and the arrival in 1948 of the SS Empire
Windrush with 492 passengers from the West
Indies provides a very convenient marker for the
beginning of contemporary West Indian literature in Great Britain. The cohesiveness of West
Indian or Caribbean authors was further cemented in the 1950s by the BBC production of Caribbean Voices, a radio show that highlighted the
works of authors including Selvon, Lamming, and
V. S. Naipaul.
No equivalent landmark date exists for immigrant writers from Africa, though 1555 is often
listed as the year in which Africans first were
brought to Britain. Evidence suggests that Africans were in Britain centuries earlier, as soldiers in
Caesars army, but in 1555 five Africans were
brought to Britain to learn English in order to
serve as translators for the rapidly expanding slave
trade. The emphasis on this date is important
because it links the presence of Africans in Britain
to the emergence of capitalism and imperialism.
Prior to the twentieth century, literature written
in Britain by Africans was dominated by the issue

of slavery. While slavery was abolished in Great
Britain in 1807, the presence of abolitionist speakers from the United States kept the issue in the
forefront of Britain through the 1860s and beyond. The two fathers of African literature in
Britain, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano,
both produced autobiographical works, Letters of
the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1998 [1782])
and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, Written by Himself (2001 [1789]) respectively. The two have often
been characterized as polar opposites, Sancho as
an assimilationist and Equiano as a militant on
behalf of African cultures. C. L. Innes (2002)
suggests that the opposition is overstated, but it
has provided the basic paradigm for understanding African diaspora literature prior to the twentieth century.
The publication of Chinua Achebes Things
Fall Apart in 1958 is often seen as a crucial
moment in the development of postcolonial
literature generally and African literature specifically. While Achebe himself spent only limited
time in Great Britain, the thematic concerns of
his first novel shaped the writings of subsequent
expatriate Africans. Perhaps the most significant
development in his work was the focus on questions of nationhood for the former colonies of
the British Empire: would such nations attempt
to restore precolonial societies, model themselves
on Western democracies, or create some kind of
hybrid system of governance? The conspicuous
critique of Christianity is apparent throughout
Achebes writings, and many of the authors who
followed him. Whereas Equiano and other African writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth
century consistently invoked the rhetoric and
authority of Christianity on behalf of the cause
of abolition, the tendency among twentieth-century postcolonial authors is to highlight the ways
in which Christianity promoted British imperialism and denigrated not simply the religious
beliefs among the colonized populations but also
their cultural traditions and practices. Achebe
understood the novel as crucial not only to the
conceptualization of Englishness but also to imperial portraits of Africa. The novels of Rudyard
Kipling, Joyce Cary, and Joseph Conrad helped
to promote among the English middle classes
the perception that Africa was a land without
295
history, peopled only by violent and promiscuous savages. Achebes project of rewriting
colonial history from the perspective of the
colonized is signaled from the very first word
of Things Fall Apart, which is the name Okonkwo. In Conrads Heart of Darkness (1902), not a
single African is named, denying the inhabitants
of the continent not only cultural histories but
personal histories.
Writers who would follow Achebe including
his countrymen Buchi Emecheta and Ben Okri,
and Abdulrazak Gurnah of Zanzibar/Tanzania
tended to differ from the Windrush generation of
Caribbean authors including Selvon, Lamming,
and Vic Reid in their interest in portraying postcolonial violence and civil war (V. S. Naipaul is an
exception, portraying civil wars in works such as A
Bend in the River, 1979, and Half a Life, 2001),
though these conflicts are depicted as occurring in
Africa. Achebe, Emecheta, and Okri all portrayed
the horrors of the Biafran War (196770), the
Nigerian civil war that shook the entire continent.
As the most populous nation in Africa and possessing significant oil reserves, Nigeria was long
seen as the Great Exemplar for the continent.
Works such as Achebes Anthills of the Savannah
(1988 [1987]), Emechetas Destination Biafra
(1982), and Okris Booker Prize-winning The
Famished Road (1991) all focused on the civil
war as a moment of profound disillusionment as
anti-colonial liberation struggles were replaced by
ethnic conflicts. Achebes and Okris novels both
demonstrate profound anxiety that the civil war
demonstrated the failure of Africans to move
beyond the colonial era and to develop national
identities that would transcend narrower ethnic
and tribal affiliations. Rather than making a radical break with the colonial past, postcolonial
nations seemed doomed to relive ethnic and tribal
conflicts that were cultivated by the British in
order to prevent a united resistance. What must a
people do to appease an embittered history, asks
one of the protagonists of Anthills of the Savannah
at the end of the novel, mourning the unending
cycle of violence in her country (204).
Gurnahs work also portrays postcolonial violence in his native Tanzania, where the black
majority overthrew an Arab elite that had been
in the country for centuries. Gurnah differs from
Achebe in focusing less on the conflicts themselves than on the exiles such conflicts produce,
296
and this difference might be taken to be emblematic of African diaspora writers. From his first
novel, Memory of Departure (1987), onward,
Gurnah explores the experiences of Africans who
feel at home neither in Africa nor in Great Britain.
In a world seemingly consumed by violence,
Gurnahs protagonists find themselves on an
endless pilgrimage, whether it is Hassan Omar
working on a cargo ship at the end of Memory of
Departure or Yusef running away to join German
troops in Paradise (1994). Gurnah seems unwilling
to portray a moment of final reconciliation between his protagonists and their families; between
warring ethnic and religious groups; between a
colonial past and a postcolonial present. Readers
never discover the ultimate fate of either Omar or
Yusef. In a later novel, such as Admiring Silence
(1996), the unnamed narrator finds himself with
an uncertain future after being left by his English
partner Emma and their teenage daughter Amelia.
The letter he receives from his family in Zanzibar
ends with the words Come home, which the
narrator cannot read as anything other than cruel
irony: for 20 years, he never told them about
Emma and he grossly fabricated his descriptions
of them to her.
Buchi Emecheta added a new dimension to the
portrayals of life in Britain by male writers in the
1950s and 1960s: the experiences of African women and their struggles with sexism in both Britain
and Africa. In a trilogy comprised of In the Ditch
(1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), and The
Bride Price (1976), Emecheta depicts the struggles
of Adah to acquire an education and to support
her children. The sexism of Ibo culture is described from the very first paragraphs of SecondClass Citizen: her parents were so disappointed
that their first child was not a boy that they did not
even bother to record her birth date. Her mother
tries to prevent her child from getting an education; her family forces her to marry as a teenager;
her husband Francis exploits her for her income.
Emigrating to Britain in hopes of finding a better
life, Adah confronts the increasing cruelty of her
husband as well as discrimination in her new
homeland for being black and female. Emecheta
emphasizes the connections between racism and
sexism: after discovering that in the eyes of the
English she is a second-class citizen, Adah
slowly discovers that in the eyes of Francis, a
woman was a second-class human. Franciss own
frustration with the demeaning treatment he

receives in Great Britain is taken out on Adah,
and he becomes progressively more abusive. Jealous of her job, her growing independence, and her
literary aspirations, he burns the novel she has
been writing (entitled The Bride Price) as well as
her passport, their marriage certificate, and their
childrens birth certificates. The end of the novel
leaves Adah forced to care for five children, unable
to get the English legal system to protect her from
Francis or to compel him to support his family,
yet looking forward to the possibility of building a
better future for herself and her children.
Emecheta, like most of the other African and
Afro-Caribbean expatriate authors of her generation, employs conventions of Western literary
realism in her writing. This is significant because,
by the 1970s, many white English authors including John Fowles and Angela Carter were engaging
in experiments with style, language, and narrative
voice that would eventually be referred to as
postmodern. The preference for realism among
expatriate writers in Great Britain from former
colonies is due to several factors. First, the conventions of realism correspond well with the
expectations of a reading public that saw the
fiction of postcolonial authors as a kind of sociological testimony. Much as Equiano was expected
to testify to the dehumanizing effects of slavery,
Gurnah, Emecheta, and other postwar authors
were expected to testify to the dehumanizing
effects of colonialism. The often playful experiments with language and convention that were
characteristic of so-called postmodern literature
were typically seen as incompatible with a responsibility to portray the horrors of colonial and
postcolonial violence. Second, the conventions
of realism enabled postcolonial authors to infuse
the British novel with language and idioms taken
from their home countries. Sam Selvon has been
celebrated for creolizing the British novel,
drawing on the everyday language of West Indian
immigrants; similar efforts can be found among
authors of the African diaspora. Since the nineteenth century, self-proclaimed realists such
Stendhal insisted that the novel should present
the language and experiences of everyday life. In
Stendhals words, a novel is a mirror, taking a
walk down a big road (342), not some romantic
portrait of aristocracy filled with complex imagery and artifice. Authors such as Emecheta
and Gurnah capture this spirit a century later,

portraying the squalor in which many immigrants
lived.
Ben Okris most celebrated novel, The Famished Road, indicates that expatriate authors have
become increasingly innovative formally. The
Famished Road has been celebrated as a work of
magic realism or postmodernism, though Okri
himself has downplayed such characterizations.
Okri has suggested that his writing represents a
form of realism, one informed by cultural and
spiritual beliefs that would be foreign to many
British readers: So what seems like surrealism or
fantastic writing actually is not fantastic writing,
its simply writing about the place in the spirit of
the place. Im not trying in the slightest to produce
strange effects (quoted in Arana & Ramey 147).
The stated intent is not incompatible with
postmodernism, which like modernism before it
drew heavily from the cultures of colonial territories. The novel follows the adventures of
Azaro, an abiku child. Abiku in Yoruba, or ogbanje
in Ibo, refers to a spirit-child that dies shortly after
birth, and continually returns to its mothers
womb in a cycle of birth and death. The abiku/
ogbanje has been portrayed in the work of Nigerian authors including Achebe, Okri, and
Wole Soyinka. For Okri, the abiku functions as
a kind of metaphor for Nigeria itself, a postcolonial nation that dies with the Biafran War
shortly after its birth as a nation in 1960. Okri
explores the same question that haunted Achebe
in Anthills of the Savannah: what might be necessary to end an apparently seemingly endless cycle
of violence?
There is significant evidence that the term
postcolonial may be beginning to outlive its
usefulness as a term to describe the writings of
expatriate Africans and their descendants.
Postcolonial emphasizes the ways in which
authors continue to be defined by the dynamics
of a colonial center and periphery. Without denying that forms of imperialism continue to exist,
many younger authors (particularly those who
were born in Britain) are more interested in
moving beyond the binaries of white/black, colonizer/colonized, civilized/savage that have been
integral to the defense of British colonialism and
its critique by postcolonial literature. Victoria
Arana and Lauri Ramey (2004), for example, use
the term neo-millennial avant-garde artists to
297
describe authors such as Andrea Levy, Bernardine

Evaristo, and Diran Adebayo. Adebayos Some
Kind of Black (1996) and My Once upon a Time
(2000) portray a multicultural London that looks
radically different from the city portrayed half a
century earlier in Sam Selvons The Lonely Londoners (1956). Since the 1990s, the British reading
public as a whole has demonstrated an increasing
appetite for such multicultural fictions. Such an
appetite is, no doubt, not completely different
from the Orientalist fantasies that led Britons to
consume the writings of Kipling and Conrad.
However, it increasingly appears to be the case
that Britons have accepted if not embraced the
idea that Britishness is being reinvented in ways
that incorporate the cultural attitudes and norms
of its African, Afro-Caribbean, and South Asian
populations.
SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF);
Colonial Fiction (BIF); East African Fiction (WF);
Globalization and the Novel (BIF); London in
Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile
in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the
British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial
Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora
(BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);
Southern African Fiction (WF); West African
Fiction (WF)

Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1988). Anthills of the Savannah [1987].
New York: Anchor.
Acheson, J., & Ross, S. C. E. (eds.) (2005). The
Contemporary British Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Adebayo, D. (1996). Some Kind of Black. London:
Virago.
Adebayo, D. (2000). My Once upon a Time. London:
Abacus.
Arana, R. V., & Ramey, L. (eds.) (2004). Black British
Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (eds.) (1989). The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Baucom, I. (1999). Out of Place: Englishness, Empire,
and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
298
POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE BRITISH SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London:

Routledge.
Emecheta, B. (1972). In the Ditch. London: Barrie and
Jenkins. (Rev. edn. published 1979.)
Allison and Busby.
Emecheta, B. (1976). The Bride Price. New York:
Braziller.
Emecheta, B. (1982). Destination Biafra. London:
Allison and Busby.
Equiano, O. (2001). The Interesting Narrative of the
Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,
Written by Himself [1789] (ed. W. Sollors).
New York: Norton.
Fishburn, K. (1995). Reading Buchi Emecheta: CrossCultural Conversations. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Gikandi, S. (1996). Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity
in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Gilroy, P. (1987). There Aint No Black in the Union
Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.
London: Hutchinson.
Gurnah, A. (1987). Memory of Departure. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Gurnah, A. (1994). Paradise. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Gurnah, A. (1996). Admiring Silence. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Head, D. (2002). The Cambridge Introduction to Modern
British Fiction, 19502000. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Innes, C. L. (2002). A History of Black and Asian Writing
in Britain, 17002000. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Innes, C. L. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to
Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge:
Lee, A. R. (ed.) (1995). Other Britain, Other British:
Contemporary Multicultural Fiction. London: Pluto.
Naipaul, V. S. (1979). A Bend in the River. London:
Deutsch.
Naipaul, V. S. (2001). Half a Life. London: Picador.
Okri, B. (1991). The Famished Road. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Sancho, I. (1998). Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an
African [1782] (ed. V. Carretta). New York: Penguin.
Wingate.
Stendhal. (2003). The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of
1830 [1830] (trans. B. Raffel). New York: Modern
Library.
Tew, P. (2004). The Contemporary British Novel.
London: Continuum.
Postcolonial Fiction
of the British South Asian
Diaspora
J. EDWARD MALLOT
Multicultural fiction writers have been highly

visible in the United Kingdom for several years,
but no group has received more popular success
and critical attention than the South Asian diaspora. Following the 1981 publication of Salman
Rushdies Midnights Children, author after author has garnered mass acclaim, record-breaking
advances, and prestigious awards so much so
that an alleged Booker backlash emerged by the
late 1990s, even as some claimed that the future
of English Literature is Indian (Ranasinha 63).
Ruvani Ranasinha notes that these Anglophone
writers become highly visible as mediators, cultural translators, and spokespersons (10) despite their sometimes dubious, tenuous claims on
authenticity, or their often professed reluctance
to represent entire ethnic communities.
The term British Asian, like so many markers
of collective identity, has a complicated and
manufactured history. Rushdie and others had
long self-identified as black British, an umbrella
term denoting minority communities and ethnic
literatures. Over the course of the 1980s and
1990s, however, theorists, authors, and audiences
questioned both its political efficacy and its aesthetic implications, following Stuart Halls assertion that the black British label created a problematic hegemony incapable of representing the
ethnic diversity of contemporary culture (1996b
[1987], 166). Likewise, Susheila Nasta cautions
against the subsequent, more specific label South
Asian, which inevitably flattens a diverse range
of backgrounds, effectively allowing the white
majority to once again divide and rule (6).
Further, the term British Asian, or British
South Asian, literature fails to specify which
individuals are referenced, or by which criteria.
Does the term include Sam Selvon and V. S.
Naipaul, immigrants of South Asian descent but
usually associated with the West Indian diaspora?
Does it represent Mulk Raj Anand and G. V.
Desani, both important early examples of British
Asian writing, who came to prominence in the
UK but then returned to India? Does the term
necessarily imply fiction about South Asia or

about Britain? Does it suggest political agenda
or aesthetic sensibility, the authors citizenship or
residence, the texts readership or subject matter?
If the term British Asian fiction seems relatively recent, so does its practice. The West Indian
and African diasporas, led by figures such as
Selvon, Naipaul, and Buchi Emecheta, found
audiences in the UK well before any substantial,
sustained emergence of Indian English literature.
South Asians had, of course, been living in Britain
at least as far back as 1700 and, after the postwar/
decolonization era, eventually formed the
nations largest minority ethnic group. But with
few exceptions the English reading public did not
embrace subcontinental novelists. Ranasinha
notes that South Asians found British audiences
as social historians, not as creative writers; even by
the 1950s, Indian fiction was understood as a
commercial liability in metropolitan publishing
houses, with the result that would-be novelists
either failed to win contracts or tempered politicized representations of difference (12). Some
individuals did attain genuine UK readerships.
Anand maintained associations with the Bloomsbury group; his Untouchable (1935) and Coolie
(1936) illuminate the conditions of the poor in
colonial India. Desani produced an unexpected
hit with All about H. Hatterr (1948), a curious
picaresque novel charting the title characters
comic quest for Enlightenment. The initial H,
Hatterr claims, stands for Hindustaniwalla, one
of many surprising linguistic subversions he
terms rigamarole English (2007 [1948], 37). As
Nasta observes, Desanis fiction immediately announces itself as subversive, challenging contemporary conventions of language, genre, and style;
All about H. Hatterr prefigures the postmodern
sensibilities of Rushdie, who has acknowledged
some stylistic indebtedness to the work.
A handful of novelists, such as Attia Hosain and
Kamala Markandaya, produced multiple works
during the mid-century period, and are today
recognized as key figures of early British Asian
writing. But despite individual successes such as
Hosains Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and
Markandayas Nectar in a Sieve (1954) British
Asian fiction still lacked the consistent readership
of Selvon and Naipaul. Perhaps surprisingly, in
the 1970s three India-themed novels won the
prestigious Booker Prize all written by Eur-
299
opeans (J. G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Paul

Scott). This lack of direct Indian representation
changed swiftly and dramatically in 1981, with
Midnights Children. The magical odyssey of Saleem Sinai born at the stroke of Indias independence wowed audiences and critics alike, quickly
assuming canonical status. In 1993, the novel won
the Booker of Bookers award; in 2008, British
readers named Midnights Children the best winner of the competitions 40-year history. According to Ranasinha, the work propelled South
Asian Anglophone writing into the mainstream
(59), and British minority writers have often
claimed that Rushdies success not only inspired
their own efforts, but helped make a broader
audience possible for multicultural artists. For
white audiences, the author became the de facto
representative of South Asia, with increasingly
complicated implications by the end of the 1980s.
Rushdie has always proven a controversial
novelist, seemingly inviting criticism with his
depictions of Indira Gandhi in Midnights Children and various Pakistani historical figures in
Shame (1983). But few could have anticipated the
international furor surrounding his 1988 work
The Satanic Verses. The author argued that this
was a story about immigration and exile, hybridized identities and metamorphoses a lovesong, he would explain later, to our mongrel
selves (1991, 394). The novels twinned protagonists, arriving in England and quickly transforming into an angel and a devilish goat, find that
their new physical attributes reflect English
stereotyping. The white majority controls the
immigrants because they describe us . . . They
have the power of description, and we succumb to
the pictures they construct (1997 [1988], 174).
Saladin Chamcha learns that he must reject all
such attempts to define him, and instead embrace
each part of his mongrel self. Rushdies work
also includes dream sequences about the prophet
Muhammads life and the early development of
Islam, including the infamous and long-contested
satanic verses. The authors radical reimagining
of Muslim history angered communities throughout the world, ultimately resulting in assassinations, riots, disruptions in diplomatic relations
and international trade, and the death decree
from Ayatollah Khomeini. The world was reminded of the sheer power of literature to
provoke and to endanger; Rushdie himself went
300
into hiding for several years. If Midnights Children increased the visibility of British Asian writing at the beginning of the 1980s, The Satanic
Verses exposed its political potential at the decades end. The crisis transformed multicultural
British writing altogether, raising the visibility of
black British authors to unprecedented heights
while shattering the imagined coherence of the
black British community.
Rushdies themes of immigration and exile,
assimilation, and intolerance have frequently featured in other British Asian fiction. The protagonist of Markandayas The Nowhere Man (1972)
mistakenly believes that hes assimilated so successfully that hes more English than the English
(1973 [1972], 72). Only after injustices and attacks from increasingly hostile neighbors does he
realize that I have been transformed into a
stranger (241) not the magical transmutation
of Rushdies immigrants, but similar in spirit
and effect. In contrast, Hari Kunzrus debut
The Impressionist (2002) features Pran Nath, so
gifted at assimilation that he becomes a sort of
everywhere man, adopting a series of identities
ranging from upper-class Indian brat to crossdressed sex worker, Victorian schoolboy,
missionary orphan, English university student,
imperial anthropologists assistant, and African
desert nomad. In Britain, his light skin and carefully modulated accent allow him to pass as
Jonathan Bridgeman; at every turn the young
man searches for signs of Englishness to adopt, so
that it sinks a little deeper into his skin (247).
His performance as Jonathan Bridgeman is so
convincing that the beautiful and mysterious
Astarte Chapel rejects him for being too typical,
breaking his heart by telling him that Youre the
most English person I know (332). In starkly
different fashion, Rushdie, Markandaya, and
Kunzru each explore the value of assimilation,
the construct of an alleged essential Englishness,
the limits and pitfalls of colonial mimicry.
Monica Alis hugely successful Brick Lane
(2003) perhaps surprisingly touches on similar
themes, its protagonist Nazneen exposed to conflicting strategies of adapting to life in east London.
An arranged marriage brings the young woman
from Bangladesh to Brick Lane. Her husband,
Chanu, is often well meaning, but significantly
older, generally hapless, and a poor match for her
romantic aspirations; Nazneen later finds herself
drawn to the young, handsome, politically active

Karim. But Alis protagonist observes and adapts,
negotiating a London life increasingly on her own
terms. Surrounded by characters either determined to preserve Bangladeshi collective identity
or determined to assimilate completely, she learns
to establish her own rules and expectations.
Ultimately she rejects both husband and lover,
deciding to stay in Britain with her children. In the
novels oft-cited closing scene, Nazneen takes the
girls ice skating. While one daughter protests that
you cant skate in a sari, Nazneen sees potential
for her own appropriations of Englishness and
Asianness. This is England, she replies. You can
do whatever you like (369).
Multicultural British fiction boasts several
high-profile female authors Zadie Smith and
Andrea Levy among the most famous and Brick
Lane places Ali at the forefront of women novelists. But while Ali may be the most recognizable
name, several others received significant critical
attention during the post-Midnights Children
period. Ravinder Randhawas A Wicked Old
Woman (1987) has been considered an important
early example of feminist British Asian fiction. Its
central character, Kulwant, disguises herself as the
wicked old woman of the title, a masquerade
that invites her to explore the unstable nature of
identities more broadly. But Kulwants wanderings in old woman disguise allow Randhawa to
introduce a variety of other women, each struggling to come to terms with hybridity, prejudice,
and intergenerational conflict. The complicated,
interweaving narrative strands include Maya,
conducting research on madness in the Asian
community for a television documentary, and
Rani, who barely survives a brutal attack. Shellshocked and hospitalized, Rani recovers only
when the other women heal her through collective storytelling. Farhana Sheikhs unorthodox
narrative The Red Box (1991) features Raisa,
whose interviews with young female students
illuminate prejudice and violence plaguing ethnic
minorities in secondary schools. In Atima
Srivastavas Transmission (1992), the female protagonist struggles with the complexities of
second-generation life, as she prepares a television program about the HIV/AIDS crisis. In a
principal plotline of Meera Syals Life Isnt All Ha
Ha Hee Hee (1999), Tania prepares a documentary about contemporary British Asians, starring
close friends Chila and Sunita. But Tanias project

exposes them in such stark, unflattering light that
the film threatens to tear the friendships apart.
Writers and audiences have long been acutely
aware of the politics of representation, even more
so following the scandal of the Satanic Verses
affair. Cultural critics have written extensively
and forcefully about the lack of representation
for minorities in mainstream British media, and
the complicated political ramifications of what
representations do exist; repeatedly, novelists
have explored these issues in their fiction.
This concern with self-definition and mainstream access connects Syal to the works of Hanif
Kureishi, already famous for 1980s screenplays
such as My Beautiful Laundrette. Kureishis stature in British ethnic literary criticism nearly rivals
Rushdies own; Sukhdev Sandhu considers him
the most important figure responsible for dragging Asians in England into the spotlight (230).
Without question, he provides critical insight and
exposure to the status and concerns of the Britishborn children of Asian immigrants; in particular,
his work illuminates often unexpected distinctions between first- and second-generation experience. My name is Karim Amir, the protagonist
of The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) begins, and I
am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am
often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from
two old histories (1991 [1990], 3). Not proud
of his Englishness, Karim is hardly Pakistani
either, mirroring Kureishis own insistence that
he identifies, first and foremost, as a Londoner.
Ranasinha argues that Kureishis work parodies
the idea of homogeneous, distinct, racially defined communities (222). The determined mess
of identity in The Buddha of Suburbia neither
expressing nor exploiting nor rejecting ethnicity
entirely places Karim in what Mark Stein has
called not simply post-ethnicity, but posedethnicity (115), employing expected markers of
difference on occasion, but undercutting any
notion that identity can be confined to race alone.
Hence Karims acting career, beginning with a
disastrously comic turn as Mowgli and ending as
token minority soap opera character, parallels his
tendency to view ethnicity itself as performance.
Like Kureishi, a host of second-generation
writers have come to literary prominence; many
investigate the oft-called in-between or caught
301
between cultural positions of British-born

Asians. Syals comic Bildungsroman, Anita and
Me (1996), introduces a girl growing up in an
intolerant rural England in the 1960s. Nadeem
Aslams bleak, violent novel Maps for Lost
Lovers (2004) explores tensions within British
Asian families. As the community in the Desert
of Loneliness struggles to understand the disappearance of unmarried lovers Jugnu and Chanda,
family matriarch Kaukab attempts to come to
terms with a country still foreign and hostile, and
children even stranger and more hateful. Her
efforts to maintain Muslim piety may reflect the
stereotype of Asian immigrants, but in this work
the younger generation sometimes embraces a
still stronger fundamentalism. In this sense,
Aslams novel echoes a group of texts exploring
the rise of radical Islam in British Asian youth.
Kureishis 1997 story My Son the Fanatic, in
which a wholly secular Pakistani immigrant
becomes horrified at his sons turn to fundamentalism, now seems hauntingly prescient of the
September 11 and July 7 terrorist acts. His second
novel, The Black Album (1995), explores similar
terrain, its plot largely concerned with youth
anger against white Britain generally, and
Rushdies Satanic Verses specifically. Alis Brick
Lane community fails to cohere in the wake of
September 11 and its own political infighting; in a
seemingly life-reflecting-art moment, production
of the novels film adaptation was suspended in
2006 when some residents protested alleged antiMuslim, anti-Bangladeshi plotlines. In Moshin
Hamids The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007),
the title character responds to post-9/11 intolerance by joining an activist Islamic organization in
Pakistan. Assimilation has proven a consistent key
issue for British Asian texts, but its principal terms
have changed in the wake of recent global violence; these authors explore the reasons behind
the rise of youth-based political activism, and its
potential consequences for the body politic.
Memory of home and homeland, of precolonial and pre-independence conditions, of life
before England, of the basic tenets of non-Western tradition, religion, and culture provides
fertile territory for British multicultural fiction.
In British Asian writing, texts of and about memory tend to take two forms. In one vein, authors
look back to particular political periods in
subcontinental history. A. Sivanandans When
302
Memory Dies (1997) charts waves of communal

violence inflicted against Tamil minorities in both
pre- and post-independence Sri Lanka. Rushdies
Shame and Mohammed Hanifs A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) reflect on the political power
players of post-independence Pakistan, in distinctly postmodern and often damningly satiric
fashion. In another vein, exiled characters cast a
nostalgic eye back to subcontinental homelands,
such as in Sunetra Guptas Memories of Rain
(1992). In Romesh Gunesekeras Reef 1994 and
The Sandglass (1998), characters longing for Sri
Lanka remains compromised both by ongoing
communal violence and by the gaps, errors, and
inventions of memory itself. For Nasta,
Gunesekeras prose suggests a poetics of diaspora
in which return is no longer possible, and the filters
of fragmented memory no longer provide an untroubled or celebratory route to an imaginary
homeland (213). As various literary characters
and cultural theorists attest, returning home in
memory or in reality is no longer a simple, viable
option. Stuart Hall argues that Migration is a oneway trip. There is no home to go back to. There
never was (1996a [1987], 115).
Nor is return necessarily desirable for descendants of immigrants, or those who have fought to
immigrate to and to stay in the UK. Markandayas
protagonist may have found himself a nowhere
man, but the second and third generations,
headed by Kureishi, more frequently position
themselves as British, challenging and expanding
the very notion of Britishness in their lives and
works. Indeed, Kureishi and Kunzru now typically place their fictions outside ethnic communities
or questions of difference; far from being
nowhere novelists, they now seek to explore
contemporary Britain more broadly. Thus it may
soon be the case that British Asian fiction no
longer denotes literature about ethnic/cultural
identity, or even necessarily about the United
Kingdom; as writer after writer achieves prominence, the relatively new field promises even
wider audiences and areas of inquiry in the decades ahead. This does not mean, however, that
narratives of arrival are a thing of the past; many
authors explore the still significant numbers of
newcomers, and their determination to remain
and prosper. Manzu Islams Burrow (2004)
concerns an illegal immigrant in contemporary
London. Even as authorities close in around him,
he maintains that England is not as difficult as it

used to be. At least we have learnt how to defend
ourselves and shout for what is due to us . . . We
had to do it because England is all we have by way
of a home . . . We will do anything to survive;
were going to survive (291).
Colonial Fiction (BIF); Indian Fiction (WF);
Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF);
Pakistani Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction
of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial
Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean
Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF)
Ali, M. (2003). Brick Lane. New York: Scribners.
Anand, M. R. (1935). Untouchable. London: Lawrence
and Wishart.
Anand, M. R. (1936). Coolie. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Aslam, N. (2004). Maps for Lost Lovers. New York:
Knopf.
Desani, G. V. (2007). All about H. Hatterr [1948].
New York: New York Review of Books.
Gunesekera, R. (1994). Reef. New York: New Press.
Gunesekera, R. (1998). The Sandglass. London: Granta.
Gupta, S. (1992). Memories of Rain. New York: Grove.
Hall, S. (1996a). Minimal Selves [1987]. In H. A. Baker,
Jr., M. Diawara, & R. H. Lindeborg (eds.), Black
British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 11419.
Hall, S. (1996b). New Ethnicities [1987]. In H. A. Baker,
Jr., M. Diawara, & R. H. Lindeborg (eds.), Black
British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 16372.
Hamid, M. (2007). The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Orlando, FL: Harcourt.
Hanif, M. (2008). A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
New York: Knopf.
Hosain, A. (1961). Sunlight on a Broken Column.
New Delhi: Penguin.
Islam, M. (2004). Burrow. Leeds: Peepal Tree.
Kunzru, H. (2002). The Impressionist. New York:
Dutton.
Kureishi, H. (1991). The Buddha of Suburbia [1990].
New York: Penguin.
Kureishi, H. (1995). The Black Album. London: Faber
and Faber.
Kureishi, H. (1996). My Beautiful Laundrette and Other
Writings. London: Faber and Faber. (Play originally
published 1986.)
POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE WEST INDIAN/CARIBBEAN DIASPORA
Kureishi, H. (2005). My Son the Fanatic [1997].

In The Word and the Bomb. London: Faber and Faber,
pp. 6174.
Markandaya, K. (1954). Nectar in a Sieve. London:
Putnams.
Markandaya, K. (1973). The Nowhere Man [1972].
London: Allen Lane.
Nasta, S. (2002). Home Truths: Fictions of the South
Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Ranasinha, R. (2007). South Asian Writers in TwentiethCentury Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Randhawa, R. (1987). A Wicked Old Woman. London:
Womens Press.
Jonathan Cape.
Rushdie, S. (1997). The Satanic Verses [1988].
New York: Picador.
Sandhu, S. (2003). London Calling: How Black and Asian
Writers Imagined a City. London: HarperCollins.
Sheikh, F. (1991). The Red Box. London: Womens
Press.
Sivanandan, A. (1997). When Memory Dies. London:
Arcadia.
Srivastava, A. (1992). Transmission. London: Serpents
Tail.
Stein, M. (2004). Black British Literature: Novels of
Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University
Press.
Syal, M. (1996). Anita and Me. New York: New Press.
Syal, M. (1999). Life Isnt All Ha Ha Hee Hee. London:
Doubleday.
Postcolonial Fiction of the

West Indian/Caribbean
Diaspora
TIMOTHY WEISS
In the Caribbean, one emigre writer recollects,

you grow up knowing that youre going to leave
(Philip 230). That seems to be a given for writersto-be of the West Indies/Caribbean basin, whose
diaspora includes the United States, Canada, and
Great Britain. For the Anglophone Caribbean,
London has long served as a de facto cultural
capital, and with the post-World War II surge of
migration, its West Indian population grew significantly. By 1961 an estimated 172,000 West
303
Indians had immigrated to the UK, and by 1981

500,000 people of West Indian background lived
there. Diasporic literature begins as a literature of
immigration, later becoming a migrating literature constantly reformulating its sense of place
and identity. Migration creates the desire for
home, which in turn produces the rewriting of
home (Conde & Lonsdale 1999). In its beginnings, diasporic literature exists on the margins
of national literatures, whether British, American,
or Canadian; as it evolves from one generation
of writers to the next it redefines national spaces
and imagines transnational ones.
West Indian diasporic literature began with
C. L. R. James, who went to England in 1931 to
write and publish books. His Minty Alley (1936) is
the first West Indian novel published in England
focusing on West Indian subject matter and incorporating West Indian dialects. Minty Alley
portrays a Port of Spain barrack-yard through
the eyes of a middle-class young man, Haynes,
who temporarily lodges there. Knowing the world
through books and content at first to observe his
neighbors from the privacy of his room, he gradually becomes more involved in their lives,
sheds his innocence, and enters the fray of color-conscious, sexually charged lower-class Trinidadian society. James was a pioneer as was
E. R. Braithwaite who also emigrated to England
in the 1930s and whose To Sir, With Love (1959),
both the book and the film (1967), later became
an important popular landmark for it was not
until the late 1940s and the arrival of Empire
Windrush emigrants that West Indian disaporic
literature in Great Britain entered its first, definitive phase.
The rubric Windrush generation derived
from the troopship/passenger vessel the SS Empire
Windrush which began carrying West Indians and
other emigrants to England in June 1948, an event
that came to symbolize the beginnings of contemporary, multiracial Britain and the reshaping
of national identity designates this postwar
migration from the Caribbean (and other former
colonies). George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, V. S.
Naipaul, and Wilson Harris, as well as lesserknown writers such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Andrew Salkey, Roger Mais, Roy Heath, and Michael
Anthony, all immigrated to England in the
late 1940s and 1950s. The challenges they faced
were daunting given that there existed neither
304
publishers nor readers, nor even an established

subject matter, for this new literature, but they
arrived at a time of literary transition, when their
work could be encouraged and supported by
institutions such as the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) and publishing houses such
as Andre Deutsch, Heinemann, Longman, and
Faber and Faber. The radio program Caribbean
Voices transmitted sparks from this new literary
flame to metropolitan and overseas audiences and
became the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English
(Wambu 2000).
George Lamming, whose novels include In the
Castle of My Skin (1953) and The Emigrants
(1954), was one important writer whose career
the program helped launch. Returning to the rural
landscape of his childhood in Barbados in the
1930s and 1940s, In the Castle of My Skin recounts
a boys growing up in a village where people have
little or no knowledge of their history; the novel
relates the coming to awareness of the individual
and the community in a colony where feudal
relations between white landlords and black
workers are coming to an end. The Emigrants
picks up where In the Castle of My Skin leaves off,
tracing the voyage of the young man who has left
his native island, traveling with other West
Indians to England. The better break that each
seeks is circumscribed by the barriers they
encounter such as difficulty in finding lodging
and employment, harassment by police, and their
own ignorance of life in Britain.
Sam Selvon traveled on the same passenger ship
as Lamming from the West Indies to London and
composed parts of his first novel, A Brighter Sun
(1952), during the transatlantic crossing. His bestknown work, The Lonely Londoners (1956), takes
the form of a series of vignettes recounted from the
third-person point of view of Moses Aloetta, a
Trinidadian immigrant who has lived in London
for 10 years and has gotten into the habit of helping
new arrivals from the West Indies and Africa get
settled there. Its comic elements counterpoint a
harsh reality of segregation and racism. During the
1970s and 1980s Selvon continued to reflect on the
immigrant experience, tracing his protagonists
(mis)fortunes and peregrinations in Moses
Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983).
V. S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris stand out as
the most prolific novelists of the first generation
of West Indian/Caribbean emigres. Naipauls novels combine, in a transformative manner, autobiographical and historical elements, and respond
to contemporary predicaments and issues not
only in the Caribbean and Great Britain, but in the
developing world. Miguel Street (1959), his first
written but third published work, portrays an
inner-city neighborhood of Port of Spain through
the eyes of a boy growing up there, rendering it
indirectly through the ironic process of the
adolescents discoveries, questionings, disillusionment, and eventual departure from the
island. The Mystic Masseur (1957) writes a sympathetic yet satiric (fictional) biography of a
healer, Ganesh, who rises from his east Indian
village origins to become author and intellectual,
politician and decorated statesman. The Suffrage
of Elvira (1958) looks at politics in rural Trinidad,
where narrow ethnic loyalties, jealousies, and
philistinism trump processes of democratization.
A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) treats the colonial
Trinidad of the authors grandparents and parents, recording a colonys transition from a rural
to an urban, modern society. Although its protagonist is modeled on the authors father,
Biswass sense of not belonging is also Naipauls.
Expatriates, immigrants, and exiles figure in several later novels: in The Mimic Men (1967) Ralph
Singh, a middle-aged businessman and self-exiled
West Indian politician, writes his memoirs and
simmers in his alienation from both Caribbean
and London societies. The Booker Prize-winning
In a Free State (1971) recounts a journey into
disorder in an African country, as does another
important novel, A Bend in the River (1979),
whose narrator, an immigrant shop owner of
Indian Muslim origin, depicts a postcolonial
Africa caught in cycles of half-development,
deterioration, and destruction. The Enigma of
Arrival (1987) has been read as a novel that
reconciles an immigrants colonial heritage with
the socio-cultural changes of post-imperial England, reinterpreting what it means to be British
today; it can also be read as an expression of a new
transnational identity, explored further in A Way
in the World (1994).
Wilson Harris is a visionary novelist and theorist whose works draw from Caribbean and South
American sources (e.g., Amerindian mythology)
as well as the whole Western literary tradition; not
only his fiction but also non-fictional works such
as The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (1983) have influenced second-generation
Anglo-Caribbean writers. Mythopoeic and marvelously real in style and genre, Harriss fiction
engages in a play of opposites conqueror and
conquered, Old and New World, the living and
the dead where all oppositions are shown to be
interrelated. A mixture of dream and parable,
Palace of the Peacock (1960), part of The Guyana
Quartet (19603), reimagines a version of the El
Dorado myth/legend, with the principal character
of Donne and his crew embodying the conquistadores of an earlier epoch. The crews journey to
the interior of a rain forest recalls Conrads Heart
of Darkness (1902), yet unlike the latter, the
narrative ends not in disillusionment but in celebration and illumination, more like The Divine
Comedy, a major influence on Harris who repeatedly makes a point of drawing on literary traditions from around the world as well as on native
Caribbean materials. Novels such as The Eye of the
Scarecrow (1965), Ascent to Omai (1970), Companions of the Day and Night (1975), The Tree of
the Sun (1978), The Carnival Trilogy (1993), and
Jonestown (1996) continue Harriss reimagining
of late twentieth-century human identity.
Conjuring up the ghosts of tormented Old
WorldNew World history, employing folklore
and myth as translational vehicles, Harriss fiction
is above all an art of cross-cultural passages,
transformation of consciousness, historical quest,
and redemption.
During the first half of the twentieth century,
Dominican-born Jean Rhys was the only Caribbean woman writer to achieve an international
reputation, beginning with The Left Bank and
Other Stories (1927) and especially with Wide
Sargasso Sea (1966), which tells the story of
Antoinette Cosway, first wife of Edward Rochester of Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre (1847), and
establishes a model of literary rewriting that later
authors would adopt and develop further.
The way having been paved by Lamming,
Selvon, Naipaul, Harris, and Rhys, from the
1970s through the 1990s a second generation of
writers of West Indian/Caribbean background
emerged in the UK, and these writers can be
discussed from at least three perspectives: women
writers, who give us their own accounts of the
experience of displacement and their particular
shaping of themes introduced by first-generation
305
male writers; the predominance of Guyanese

writers; and further development of the project
of revisioning Caribbean history and exploring
contemporary identity, especially with a multicultural, transnational emphasis. Diasporic
fiction by women of Caribbean background
developed sooner in North America than in the
UK, with Brooklyn-born Paula Marshall publishing Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), which recounts the lives of Barbadian immigrants in New
York. In the UK, on the other hand, fiction by
women writers was absent from the literary boom
of the 1950s; it was not until the 1970s and 1980s
that novels by women about womens experiences
began to be published. Merle Hodges Crick
Crack, Monkey (1970) tells the story of a girls
growing up in Trinidad, her movement from
village to city and the resulting conflicts of moral
sensibility that this brings, and her eventual departure for England. Hodges novel expands the
range of accounts of West Indian childhood, told
from male perspectives in Lammings In the Castle
of My Skin, Naipauls Miguel Street, and Anthonys The Year in San Fernando (1965), for
example. Guyanese-born Beryl Gilroy emigrated
to England in 1952 and belongs to an earlier
generation than does Hodge; she published the
autobiographical Black Teacher (1976), which
chronicles her experience as a black headmistress
in a London borough, and after that, novels
such as Frangipani House (1986), which portrays
an aging woman in a Caribbean retirement
home and thus treats indirectly an aspect of
emigration that remains in the background: the
fate of family and friends the emigrant leaves
behind.
Jamaican-born Joan Rileys novel, Unbelonging
(1985), examines the plight of black immigrant
girls in England, recounting the story of 11-yearold Hyacinth who is bullied at school and beaten
and sexually abused at home. The coedited collection Leave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Belonging
(Riley & Wood 1996) takes a larger, more varied
view of the immigrant experience, demonstrating
its multiplicity and richness. Grace Nichols, Janice Shinebourne, and Pauline Melville are three
other Guyanese writers who immigrated to or
sojourned in the UK. Nicholss Whole of a Morning Sky (1986) and Shinebournes Timepiece
(1986) take a female slant in their narratives,
each treating a girls or familys movement from
306
village to city in Guyana during the struggle for

independence in the 1960s. Author and actor
Pauline Melville has published short story collections, Shape-Shifter (1990) and The Migration of
Ghosts (1999), and a novel, The Ventriloquists
Tale (1997), combining Amerindian legends
with postcolonial, magically real explorations of
identity and place. Stylishness and the theme of
metamorphosis link the three works: from the
space-shifter, who conjures up different manifestations, to the ventriloquist and migrating ghosts,
such as a president who returns to a village whose
Amerindian inhabitants laugh at a video of his
funeral. Melville enjoys turning the tables, poking
fun and satirizing; she is at once irreverent and
lighthearted.
Trinidadian Shiva Naipaul and Guyanan Roy
A. K. Heath chart individuals desperation and
failures in West Indian/Caribbean communities.
The deceased, younger brother of V. S. Naipaul,
Shiva also attended Oxford where he studied
Chinese; equally known as a travel writer, his
fiction can be even more caustic and grimmer
than his brothers. Fireflies (1970) and The ChipChip Gatherers (1973) take place in Trinidad; A
Hot Country (1983; published in the US as Love
and Death in a Hot Country) is set in a fictionalized Georgetown, Guyana, where a million people
find themselves trapped in the sun-stunned vacuum separating ocean from jungle (5). The
realist-naturalist mode likewise distinguishes novels of Heath, who immigrated to England in 1951
and then embarked on a career as a teacher and an
attorney, not publishing his first book until 1974.
His best-known novels remain The Armstrong
Trilogy, comprising From the Heat of the Day
(1979), One Generation (1981), and Genetha
(1981). Their protagonist, a rough-tempered man
with neither backbone nor background, finds
himself always somewhat out of control in situations beyond his mastery. Recounting the lives
of two generations of a Georgetown family,
Heaths novels chronicle the interplay of caste,
class, manners, morals, and passions in twentiethcentury Guyana.
In the 1950s and 1960s first-generation West
Indian emigre writers in Britain initiated the
narratives and themes and carved out creative
identities that the second-generation would
expand; by the 1980s and 1990s to be writers of
mixed or multicultural background from former
colonies had become an advantage. We see the

influence of Naipaul, who traveled often and
wrote about an array of contemporary issues, and
Harris, who was always a bridge builder between
continents and traditions and who constantly
interrogates the past, on West Indian writers who
came into prominence during that period. Like
Naipaul, Caryl Phillips has written travel books,
essays, and novels as well as plays and scripts for
radio, television, and film. The works of Fred
DAguiar, poet, playwright and fiction writer,
show the imprint of Harris, with their aspects of
the marvelously real and their thematic interest in
time, memory, and the relationship between the
living and the dead. DAguiar explores the traumas of history that continue to haunt us and the
complexity of the human spirit. The Longest
Memory (1994), set in early nineteenth-century
America, recounts the story of a slave who is
captured after being denounced by his foster
father and then whipped to death. The future
is just more of the past waiting to happen, The
Longest Memory begins, and DAguiars second
fictional work, Dear Future (1996), continues an
investigation of time, drawing on such disparate
sources as Harris and H. G. Wells. Feeding the
Ghosts (1997) combines history with the marvelous, turning to the infamous Middle Passage and
one recorded incident in 18323 of a ships captain who jettisoned 130 slaves en route to the West
Indies. In DAguiars imaginative account, one
slave thrown overboard, Mintah, manages to
cling to the ship, climb back on board, and
conceal herself. She gets paper and quills from
the captains chest she has been educated in a
Dutch mission and keeps a journal, which is
brought as evidence to the trial against the captain
later in Britain. Mintah (and DAguiar) write to
feed the ghosts, a moral responsibility to acknowledge that the dead are part of the living and
that history is often untold and always unfinished.
Another Guyanese-born author David Dabydeen,
a scholar, poet, and novelist, writes crafted fiction
about diasporic identity. In Disappearance (1993)
an immigrant and Afro-Guyanese engineer goes
to England to work on a large-scale project to
shore up a sea wall in the town of Dunsmere; there
he lodges with a middle-aged woman, Mrs.
Rutherford, who lived a number of years with
her husband in colonial Africa and who introduces her lodger to a bygone England. The novel
evokes Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival as well as

Harriss The Secret Ladder (1963), although in
both cases with a shift of attitude and tone, as if
postcolonial themes can no longer be treated in
the manner of first-generation writers. The skillfully narrated A Harlots Progress (1999) plays
against William Hogarths series of eighteenthcentury paintings and engravings, imagining the
life story of a West Indian slave who appears in
Plate 2; the narrative moves in flashbacks from
Mungos birthplace in Africa to the Americas and
England, where he serves, in turn, Lord Montague, a Jew, and a prostitute (i.e., Moll Hackabout,
the central figure of Hogarths engravings). As an
elderly man Mungo dictates his story to a Mr.
Pringle of the Committee for the Abolition of
Slavery.
It may be that postcolonial fiction of the West
Indian/Caribbean diaspora, which came about as
a result not only of political change but also of
post-World War II immigration to the UK and
America, has run its course. The extravagances
and touches of parody in Melville, DAguiar, and
Dabydeen suggest an evolving dynamic and a
search for new directions. The themes of the first
generation, such as coming to awareness in the
colony, emigration, and new identity in the metropolis, have transformed into other themes
that focus on untold histories and revisionings
of history, on multicultural identities, and
on human inequalities and injustice, though certainly not limited to the diaspora. Second- and
third-generation West Indian/Caribbean diasporic writers will continue to blend into the
whole range of fiction written in English as well
as present new perspectives on a multicultural
United Kingdom and world where the drama of
displacement, cultural differences, and transcultural allegiances and identities carries on.

Colonial Fiction (BIF); Fictional Responses
to Canonical English Narratives (WF);
Globalization and the Novel (BIF); London in
Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile
in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the
African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West Indian
Fiction (WF)
307

Arnold, A. J. (ed.) (2001). A History of Literature in the
Caribbean, vol. 2: English-and-Dutch Speaking
Regions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Braithwaite, E. R. (1959). To Sir, with Love. Bath:
Chivers.
Conde, M., & Lonsdale, T. (eds.) (1999). Caribbean
Women Writers: Fiction in English. New York: St.
Martins.
Cudjoe, S. R. (ed.) (1990). Caribbean Women Writers:
Essays from the First International Conference.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Dabydeen, D. (1993). Disappearance. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Dabydeen, D. (1999). A Harlots Progress. London:
Vintage.
DAguiar, F. (1994). The Longest Memory. London:
Vintage.
DAguiar, F. (1996). Dear Future. New York: Pantheon.
Gilroy, B. (1976). Black Teacher. London: Cassell.
Gilroy, B. (1986). Frangipani House. London:
Heinemann.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation (trans. B. Wing).
Harris, W. (1960). Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber
and Faber.
Harris, W. (1963). The Secret Ladder. London: Faber
and Faber.
Harris, W. (1983). The Womb of Space: The CrossCultural Imagination. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Harris, W., & Bundy, A. J. M. (eds.) (1999). Selected
Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the
Imagination. London: Routledge.
Heath, R. A. K. (197981). The Armstrong Trilogy,
comprising From the Heat of the Day, One Generation,
Genetha. New York: Persea.
Hodge, M. (1970). Crick Crack, Monkey. Oxford:
Heinemann.
James, C. L. R. (1936). Minty Alley. London: Secker and
Warburg.
King, B. (2004). The Oxford English Literary History, vol.
13: 19482000: The Internationalization of English
Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lamming, G. (1953). In the Castle of My Skin. London:
Michael Joseph.
Lamming, G. (1954). The Emigrants. London: Michael
Joseph.
Maes-Jelinek, H. (2006). The Labyrinth of Universality:
Wilson Harriss Visionary Art of Fiction. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Melville, P. (1990). Shape-Shifter. London: Womens
Press.
308
POSTMODERNIST FICTION
Melville, P. (1997). The Ventriloquists Tale. London:

Bloomsbury.
Melville, P. (1999). The Migration of Ghosts. London:
Bloomsbury.
Naipaul, S. (1970). Fireflies. Harlow: Longman.
Naipaul, S. (1973). The Chip-Chip Gatherers. Harlow:
Longman.
Naipaul, S. (1983). A Hot Country. London: Hamish
Hamilton. (Published in US as Love and Death in a
Hot Country. New York: Penguin, 1985.)
Naipaul, V. S. (1961). A House for Mr. Biswas.
New York: Penguin.
Naipaul, V. S. (1967). The Mimic Men. New York:
Vintage.
Naipaul, V. S. (1971). In a Free State. New York:
Vintage.
Naipaul, V. S. (1979). A Bend in the River. New York:
Vintage.
Naipaul, V. S. (1987). The Enigma of Arrival. New York:
Knopf.
Naipaul, V. S. (1994). A Way in the World. New York:
Knopf.
Nair, S. (1996). Calibans Curse: George Lamming and
the Revisioning of History. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Nasta, S. (2002). Home Truths: Fiction of South Asian
Diaspora in England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nichols, G. (1986). Whole of a Morning Sky. London:
Virago.
Philip, M. N. (1993). Writing a Memory of That Place
[interview]. In J. Williamson, Sounding Differences:
Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Riley, J. (1985). The Unbelonging. London: Womens
Press.
Riley, J., & Wood, B. (eds.) (1996). Leave to Stay: Stories
of Exile and Belonging. London: Virago.
Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. New York:
Longman.
Selvon, S. (1975). Moses Ascending. New York:
Heinemann.
Selvon, S. (1983). Moses Migrating. New York: Three
Continents.
Shinebourne, J. (1986). Timepiece. Leeds: Peepal Tree.
Wambu, O. (ed.) (2000). Hurricane Hits England: An
Anthology of Writing about Black Britain. New York:
Continuum. (Originally published as Empire
Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing about Black Britain.
London: Gollancz, 1998.)
Webb, B. J. (1992). Myth and History in Caribbean
Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard
Glissant. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Weiss, T. F. (1992). On the Margins: The Art of Exile in
V. S. Naipaul. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press.
Postmodernist Fiction
PAUL CROSTHWAITE
Postmodernism is a term commonly associated

with fiction published since the 1960s that revives,
contests, or reformulates the legacy of formal
and stylistic innovation inherited from the
modernist writers of the early twentieth century. Postmodernism has been perhaps the most
significant concept in critical discussions of the
novel over the last three decades.
As the term makes clear, postmodernism stands
in relation to modernism, but the one movement
did not simply follow upon the other in consecutive succession. It would be impossible to say
when, or even if, modernism ended, but it was
clear by the end of World War II that the wave of
radical experimentation that we now think of as
the modernist movement was waning in energy
and influence. Lawrence, Ford, Joyce, and Woolf
were all dead, while Forster had long since abandoned the novel. Important modernists such as
Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green,
Wyndham Lewis, Flann OBrien, and Dorothy
Richardson continued to work in the postwar
period, but all remained, in different ways, marginal to literary culture in the British Isles. Crucially, the network of wealthy patrons, small
presses, and avant gardist little magazines that
had forged the notion of a distinctively modern
movement in literature, and had positioned this
movement as the defining sensibility of the age,
had been fragmented and dispersed by the economic and political turmoil of the 1930s and
1940s. The decline of modernism left a vacuum
at the forefront of English fiction that would be
filled, at least initially, by writers who sought to
guide the novel in an aesthetically conservative
direction. The foremost novelists of the 1950s and
early 1960s figures such as C. P. Snow, Anthony
Powell, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, and William Cooper actively repudiated the introversion
and experimentation of modernism, advocating,
instead, realist conventions that harked back to the
Victorian and Edwardian periods: an orientation
toward the broad panorama of social life; recognizable, authentically rendered settings; neatly
drawn characters; chronologically linear narratives; and measured, transparent prose, untroubled by syntactical or typographical deviations.
Given the challenges to austerity, authority,

and convention that marked Britain and Ireland
in the 1960s the explosion of mass consumerism, the rise of youth culture, the counterculture
and anti-Vietnam War movements, the Irish
Catholic civil rights struggle, the emergence of
second-wave feminism, and the sexual revolution it was inevitable that as the decade
unfolded the restored preeminence of realist fiction would come to appear increasingly reactionary and anachronistic. A model for a form of
fiction that might adequately channel the disruptive energies of the period came from France in
the form of the nouveau roman or new novel.
Associated with the likes of Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and, most notably,
Alain Robbe-Grillet, the nouveau roman displaced
the novels traditional concern with character,
plot, and theme in favor of a systematic working
through of the various permutations of a set of
textual units, a strategy that tended to emphasize
what Robbe-Grillet called the the movement of
the writing itself. Such texts would be highly
influential for a new generation of British
novelists.
The novels of this new generation are often
categorized as metafictions, a term coined in
1970 by one of the forms chief American exponents, William Gass (1970). Metafiction is not an
exclusively postmodernist mode, nor is postmodernist fiction necessarily metafictional, but the
self-conscious, self-scrutinizing impulse that
characterizes metafiction is a particularly prevalent feature of the postmodernist novel. Metafiction, as the term suggests, denotes fiction that is
concerned with its own fictional status or fictionality. Metafictions aim to expose, interrogate, and
subvert the established conventions according to
which fictional narratives are constructed and
construed. The most famous British metafiction,
John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman
(1969), is a pastiche of the Victorian realist novel
that openly declares its allegiance with RobbeGrillet and the nouveau roman. In typical metafictional style, Fowles forces his readers to confront the artificial, contrived, and conventionalized status of the traditional novel, reminding
them that his characters are pure figments of
imagination, who have no existence outside
my own mind, and requiring them to choose
between two alternative endings. All the devices
309
and mechanisms that realist novelists meticulously conceal in order to construct a believable,
consistent fictional world, metafictional writers
like Fowles willfully make visible. Fowless novel
was only the most high-profile manifestation of a
renewed experimentalism in British fiction in the
mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s; a similarly
subversive approach to traditional fiction was
evident in the work of Christine Brooke-Rose,
John Berger, Brigid Brophy, David Caute, Gabriel
Josipovici, and Muriel Spark. The radical, iconoclastic sensibility that animated the work of
these writers was taken to a logical extreme by
B. S. Johnson, whose texts of the 1960s not only
self-consciously signaled the constructedness of
their own narratives, but also further resisted the
readers immersion in the fictional world by
directing attention to the book itself as a material
artifact: Alberto Angelo (1964) included several
pages with holes cut through them, while The
Unfortunates (1969) consisted of unbound sections, presented in a box, which could be shuffled
and reassembled at random.
The work of this group of novelists illustrates
particularly clearly the most important difference
between modernist and postmodernist fiction.
Characteristic features of modernist novels, such
as unpunctuated streams of consciousness or
narratives that present events out of chronological
order, draw attention to the style and form of the
text, thereby threatening the transparency so
prized by realism. But they do so, typically, in the
pursuit of a more realistic mode of representation
than realism itself; realistic, that is, not so much in
their delineation of the external realm of objects
and social relations, but in their fidelity to the
internal, psychological flux of thought, perception, memory, and desire. Postmodernist novels,
in contrast, tend to determinedly reject any
aspiration toward realism, authenticity, or believability. Instead of attempting to render human
experience in a manner that is as lifelike and
convincing as possible, they overtly remind readers that their characters consist of nothing more
than words on a page.
These strategies left the postmodernists open to
accusations of having intensified modernist
fictions air of historical disengagement, austere
formalism, and solipsistic self-absorption (now
focused not so much on the inner worlds of the
characters as on the internal functioning of the
310
text itself). Younger writers, in particular, began

to suggest that the emphasis of the metafictionalists on a formal registration of the upheavals of
the period was an inadequate response to contemporary events and the long histories from
which they emerged. At the same time as endorsing a more explicit engagement with questions of
history and politics, this emerging generation also
advocated fiction that, while exploring the parameters of the form, offered readers the pleasures
permitted by established techniques of plotting
and characterization.
Beginning in the late 1970s, this reordering of
priorities gave rise to a vibrant seam of hybrid
fiction part innovative, part traditional which
led critics to speak of British postmodern
realism and postmodern historiographic
metafiction. The latter term, coined by the
Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon (1988; 2002)
and developed in the British context by Alison
Lee (1990), has proved particularly influential.
It describes fiction that concertedly probes the
expanses of the historical past its epic movements, iconic figures, and obscure incidents
while, in a manner consistent with the
postmodern historiography of scholars such as
Hayden White, self-reflexively indicating the impossibility of objectively establishing the facts of
the past. Novels such as Peter Ackroyds Chatterton (1987), John Banvilles Doctor Copernicus
(1976), Julian Barness Flauberts Parrot (1984),
A. S. Byatts Possession (1990), and Fowless own A
Maggot (1985) foreground the challenge of reconstructing historical events from contesting
narratives, testimonies, and documents that leave
the reality of the past as it was perpetually
obscure. This fascination with the shadowy
contours of the historical event has orbited remarkably often around the catastrophes of World
War II. In such texts as Ian McEwans Black Dogs
(1992) and Atonement (2001), Lawrence
Norfolks In the Shape of a Boar (2000), Graham
Swifts Shuttlecock (1981) and Waterland (1983),
and D. M. Thomass The White Hotel (1981) the
devastating upheavals of the 1940s present unique
challenges to historical knowledge, prompting
characters to pursue the truth of events whose
traumatic force ultimately exceeds the claims of
representation and understanding.
If the actuality of the past was understood to be
impenetrable and unknowable in the fiction of the
period, it followed that the author was licensed to

envision history as he or she wished. Inspired by
the Latin American magical realist writers
Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos
Fuentes, and Gabriel Garca Marquez who rose
to global prominence in the 1960s and 1970s,
British and Irish novelists began to blend historically consistent, broadly verisimilar narratives
with extravagant, fantastical incidents that transgressed any notion of realism. The uses to which
these strategies could be put were various: to
reimagine the history of the nation along alternative liberatory or even utopian lines; to disturb
the instrumental rationality of the imperialist
project through the irruption of indigenous
traditions of magic and folklore; to signal the
spectral, ghostly continuance of the past into the
present; or to conceive of wildly subversive constellations of gender, sexuality, and desire. These
implications of magical realism operated in different ways and to varying extents in such texts as
Banvilles Birchwood (1973), Angela Carters
Nights at the Circus (1984), Alasdair Grays
Lanark (1981), Desmond Hogans A Curious
Street (1984), Ben Okris The Famished Road
(1991), Salman Rushdies Midnights Children
(1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), and
Jeanette Wintersons The Passion (1987).
The broad interest in the past evident in the
innovative fiction of this period encompassed a
more specific interest in the milestones of literary
history itself. A range of important texts, which
Peter Widdowson (2006) has dubbed re-visionary fictions, appropriated and rewrote canonical works of earlier eras: Charles Dickenss Great
Expectations (1861) in Sue Roes Estella: Her
Expectations (1982); Oscar Wildes The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891) in Will Selfs Dorian (2002);
Robert Louis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Thomas Hardys
Tess of the dUrbervilles (1891) in Emma
Tennants Two Women of London (1989) and Tess
(1993); and Shakespeares The Tempest (1611) in
Marina Warners Indigo (1992). The implications
of these texts were ambiguous. On the one hand,
they suggested a depersonalization of the act of
writing that resonated with the work of French
theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida,
and Julia Kristeva. In an assault on the great
author-genius figure of high modernist myth
the author whose destiny it was to bring forth the
radically new work in a heroic act of poiesis

these thinkers argued for the never original
always citational and intertextual status of
the literary artifact, which was viewed, in Barthess
(1977) words, as no more than a tissue of
quotations. On the other hand, however, these
novels could be seen as staging active, engaged
interventions in the grand tradition of English
Literature, excavating the politically and sexually
troubling material submerged by their progenitor
texts. For women writers, in particular, this genre
of postmodernist fiction offered a means of decentering the masculine and patriarchal perspective inscribed in so many canonical texts. The
obtrusive presence in the text of the traces of
earlier works a self-conscious emphasis on its
intertextual condition extended far beyond
such re-visionary fictions, however, emerging
as a pervasive feature of the postmodernist novel.
The willingness of postmodernist writers
from the 1970s onward to utilize many of the
tried and tested techniques of fictional realism
while continuing to unsettle the aesthetic,
philosophical, and political assumptions embedded in realist novels was paralleled by a new
receptiveness to the forms of popular, genre,
or mass fiction (themselves typically realist in
style if not content). This tendency is, indeed,
often identified as one of the key distinguishing
features of postmodernism. Though critics have
recently demonstrated the myriad ways in which
the activities of modernist writers, critics, and
publishers were entangled with the market, it is
nonetheless evident that modernists perceived the
formally difficult, philosophically sophisticated
work over which they labored to exist at a decisive
remove from the realm of newspapers, glossy
magazines, Hollywood movies, and potboiler
novels consumed by the vast majority of society.
Recent decades, however, have seen an increasing
interfusion of the literary and the popular.
This shift toward more accessible forms could be
viewed as a mere capitulation to the demands of
the mass market, a cynical attempt to shift more
copies by adopting commercially proven forms.
More generally, it could be interpreted as an
expression of what the American Marxist theorist
Fredric Jameson (1991) terms the cultural logic
of late capitalism. As Jameson theorizes it, postmodernism arises from the tendency of contemporary global capitalism to commodify all cul-
311
tural forms, to reduce them to mere units of

commercial exchange. For the likes of Andreas
Huyssen (1986), however, the collapse of the
distinction between high and low culture in
postmodernism could equally be read as a strategic and progressive move, a challenge to the elitist,
often politically reactionary if not outright
fascist orientation of modernism in the name
of a more democratic, inclusive, and pluralistic
vision of culture.
It is certainly true that the new coupling of
literary and popular conventions in this period
by no means resulted in a straightforward process
of artistic decline or dumbing down. On the
contrary, the vitality of many mass culture forms
opened up productive new possibilities that had
not previously been available to the high art
novel. Texts that staged an intersection with
science fiction such as J. G. Ballards The Atrocity
Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973), Carters The
Passion of New Eve (1977), McEwans The Child in
Time (1987), and Ian Watsons Chekhovs Journey
(1983) offered radically new configurations of
subjectivity, gender, sexuality, technology, and
temporality. Similarly, postmodernist reinventions of the detective, crime, and whodunit
genres as undertaken by the likes of Ackroyd
in Hawksmoor (1985) and Martin Amis in Other
People: A Mystery Story (1981) and London Fields
(1989) succeeded in foregrounding the inherently philosophical character of such texts: their
fixation on questions of knowledge, meaning,
truth, and interpretation.
Postmodernist novels of the 1980s and 1990s
did not merely incorporate the narrative forms
and conventions of popular, genre texts. The
innovative fiction of the period was also suffused,
at the level of content, with the products of
mass culture. Not only genre novels, but popular
music, film, and television titles, mainstream
magazines and newspapers, shopping, consumerism, and advertising, and the styles of club and
dance culture circulate through the work of Amis,
Jonathan Coe, Toby Litt, Will Self, Alan Warner,
and Irvine Welsh. The tendency of such texts to
hover indeterminably between complicity and
critique in their treatment of the allegedly
degraded, vacuous landscape of mass culture
troubled some readers, but the lurid vibrancy
of this world undoubtedly helped to invigorate
the novel.
312
As the first decade of the twenty-first century

draws to a close, the condition of postmodernist
fiction in Britain and Ireland is a paradoxical
one. On the one hand, the debates about postmodernism have lost much of the urgency they
displayed in preceding decades, new writers are
less likely to be discussed in terms of their affiliation, or otherwise, with postmodernist aesthetics,
and other problematics, such as postcolonialism
and globalization, suggest different ways of thinking about the contemporary novel. On the other
hand, however, the influence of postmodernism
has been so pervasive that few major novelists to
have emerged in recent years do not utilize
the repertoire of techniques developed by earlier
generations of postmodernists. This influence
is particularly clearly visible in the work of
A. L. Kennedy, David Mitchell, Toby Litt, Zadie
Smith, and Sarah Waters. If, as Jameson, suggests,
postmodernism is the cultural dominant of late
capitalist consumer society, then its fictional
manifestations have a long, and perhaps interminable, future.
SEE ALSO: The Avant-Garde Novel (AF);
Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF);
Feminist Fiction (BIF); Fictional Responses to
Canonical English Narratives (WF);
Globalization and the Novel (BIF);
Historical Fiction (BIF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (BIF);
Ackroyd, P. (1985) Hawksmoor. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Amis, M. (1989) London Fields. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Baker, S. (2000) The Fiction of Postmodernity.
Ballard, J. G. (1970) The Atrocity Exhibition. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Barthes, R. (1977) The Death of the Author. In Image,
Music, Text (trans. S. Heath). London: Fontana,
pp. 1428.
Bukatman, S. (1993) Terminal Identity: The Virtual
Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Byatt, A. S. (1990) Possession. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Carter, A. (1984) Nights at the Circus. London: Chatto

and Windus.
Connor, S. (1997) Postmodernist Culture: An
Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, 2nd
edn. Oxford: Blackwell.
Crosthwaite, P. (2009) Trauma, Postmodernism, and the
Aftermath of World War II. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Currie, M. (ed.) (1995) Metafiction. London: Longman.
Dhaen, T., & Bertens, H. (eds.) (1993) British
Postmodern Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Eaglestone, R. (2004) The Holocaust and the
Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elias, A. J. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s
Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fowles, J. (1969) The French Lieutenants Woman.
Gass, W. H. (1970) Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.
In Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf,
pp. 326.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An
Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Heise, U. K. (1997) Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative,
and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hutcheon, L. (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism:
Hutcheon, L. (2002) The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd
edn. London: Routledge.
Huyssen, A. (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism,
Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism; or, The Cultural
Johnson, B. S. (1969) The Unfortunates. London:
Panther.
Lee, A. (1990) Realism and Power: Postmodern British
Fiction. London: Routledge.
Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge (trans. G. Bennington & B.
Massumi). Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
McHale, B. (1987) Postmodernist Fiction. New York:
Methuen.
McHale, B. (1992) Constructing Postmodernism.
London: Routledge.
Nicol, B. (ed.) (2002) Postmodernism and the
Contemporary Novel: A Reader. Edinburgh:
Robbe-Grillet, A. (1965) Snapshots and Towards a
New Novel (trans. B. Wright). London: Calder and
Boyars.
Rushdie, S. (1988) The Satanic Verses. London:
Penguin.
POWELL, ANTHONY
Smyth, E. J. (ed.). (1991) Postmodernism and

Contemporary Fiction. London: Batsford.
Stevenson, R. (2004) The Oxford English Literary
History, vol. 12: The Last of England? Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Swift, G. (1983) Waterland. London: Heinemann.
Warner, M. (1992) Indigo; or, Mapping the Waters.
Waugh, P. (1984) Metafiction: The Theory and Practice
of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Routledge.
Waugh, P. (1992) Practising Postmodernism/Reading
Modernism. London: Arnold.
Widdowson, P. (2006) Writing Back: Contemporary
Re-Visionary Fiction. Textual Practice, 20(3),
491507.
Powell, Anthony
NICHOLAS BIRNS
Anthony Dymoke Powell was born December 21,

1905 in London. His father was a military officer
of Welsh and English ancestry, his mother a
descendant of Lincolnshire landowners. Powell
attended the New Beacon School, a preparatory
school in Sussex, and then Eton and Oxford.
Though his family had enough money to send
him to institutions associated with the upper
class, he was not himself of the aristocracy. Powell
went to London to work at the Duckworth
publishing firm, which produced his first novel,
Afternoon Men (1931), a chronicle of jaded, disaffected young Londoners which served as a drily
inconclusive generational manifesto for a cohort
born in the twentieth century and inured to its
disillusionments. Venusberg (1932), his second
novel, is set in an unnamed Baltic country, while
From a View to a Death (1933), his third, is set
among the English landowning class and concerns
hunting, transvestism, and social aspiration.
Powells next novel, Agents and Patients (1936),
set in Berlin and England, involves a pair of
swindlers and the innocent young man who becomes involved with them. It achieved a new level
of perceptive, philosophical comedy. Whats Become of Waring? (1939) is the first novel in which
Powell used a first-person narrator. This mystery
story about literary forgery set the tone for his
mature idiom.
But this idiom was not to flower until after
World War II, during which Powell served in a
313
variety of administrative and military intelligence

positions. Powell resumed producing fiction in
1951 with A Question of Upbringing. Whereas his
five prewar novels had been short, standalone
works heavily reliant on dialogue and without
long, meditative passages, this novel announced
itself as part of an extended Music of Time sequence (195175), later amended to A Dance to
the Music of Time. This sequence followed
the fortunes of the narrator character Nicholas
Jenkins, a man much like Powell himself, through
school, university, work, love, and the army. Yet,
unlike C. P. Snows contemporaneous sequence
Strangers and Brothers and Marcel Prousts
Remembrance of Things Past, after which Powells
novel sequence is in some ways patterned, Jenkins
does not take a major role in the action and is far
more intent on observing the behavior of others.
Jenkinss story nonetheless coalesces into one
continuous narrative, with a huge array of characters major and minor who pass through the
chronicle, often reappearing in situations and
places where we least expect them. Three of the
figures who reappear most often are Jenkinss
principal acquaintances at school: the sensitive,
vulnerable Charles Stringham, the hearty, selfconfident Peter Templer, and the ambitious,
opportunistic Widmerpool. Widmerpool is the
antihero of the series, who pops up incongruously
in various circumstances (in France, at debutante
balls, as the fiance of a much older woman), and
who represents the values despised in the novels.
Widmerpool, who begins as a social outsider, has
a need to be on the winning side socially and
politically. This leads him to make opportunistic,
short-term calculations that often hurt him in the
long run. However, Widmerpool is more than an
unattractive go-getter; he emerges as a moral
monster who will not relinquish his sense for
vengeance on Stringham for condescending to
him at school. He carries his vengeance even to the
point of marrying Stringhams tempestuous and
promiscuous niece, Pamela Flitton, partly to get
back at Stringham.
Stringham succumbs to alcoholism (although
he revives to die heroically in the Japanese camp at
Singapore) and Templer goes to his death, perhaps arranged by Widmerpool, on an anti-Nazi
military mission in the Balkans. Though Jenkins is
personally happy after an exciting affair with
Templers sister Jean, he marries Lady Isobel
314
PRIESTLEY, J. B.
Tolland Widmerpool, who advances rapidly in

the army and, later, politics, seems to be presiding
over a society where his values increasingly hold
sway. Jenkins, though, finds new sustenance in the
charming composer Hugh Moreland and the
painter Ralph Barnby, whose aphorisms about
women pepper the text. Although Moreland
and Barnby also die prematurely, the values
they represent a passive, non-assertive trust in
art and good character finally prevail over
Widmerpools.
A Dance to the Music of Time, which ended with
Hearing Secret Harmonies in 1975, is notable for
the vast reach of its literary and cultural allusions,
including not only literature but history, politics,
and the visual and performing arts. It has been
attacked for covering only one, upper-class, and/
or bohemian stratum of society, although the
seventh book, The Valley of Bones (1964), is set
largely among middle-class bank clerks who join a
Welsh regiment during the war. The accusation of
class bias was often a cover for attacks on Powells
anti-communist viewpoint, which is evident in
his work. Even now, some decades after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, Powells reputation
remains too embroiled in leftright clashes to be
impartially judged.
Powells Journals, written in his seventies and
eighties, further consolidate his reputation as
having perhaps the most complete career of any
British novelist in the twentieth century, having
written novels, criticism (he was a respected
regular reviewer for the Daily Telegraph), and
memoir. Powell died on March 28, 2000 at his
home, The Chantry, in Somerset.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)

Barber, M. (2004). Anthony Powell: A Life. Woodstock,
NY: Duckworth Overlook.
Berberich, C. (2007). The Image of the English
Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature:
Englishness and Nostalgia. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Birns, N. (2004). Understanding Anthony Powell.
Joyau, I. (1994). Investigating Anthony Powells
A Dance to the Music of Time. New York: St.
Martins.
Powell, A. (1931). Afternoon Men. London: Duckworth.

Powell, A. (1932). Venusberg. London: Duckworth.
Powell, A. (1933). From a View to a Death. London:
Duckworth.
Powell, A. (1936). Agents and Patients. London:
Duckworth.
Powell, A. (1939). Whats Become of Waring. London:
Cassell.
Powell, A. (195175). A Dance to the Music of Time. 12
vols. London: Heinemann.
Powell, A. (1984). To Keep the Ball Rolling. London:
Heinemann.
Powell, A. (1990). Miscellaneous Verdicts. London:
Heinemann.
Powell, A. (1992). Under Review. London: Heinemann.
Powell, A. (1995). Journals 19821986. London:
Heinemann.
Powell, A. (2005). Some Poets, Artists, and a Reference for
Mellors. London: Timewell.
Spurling, H. (1977). Invitation to the Dance. London:
Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B.
ALISON CULLINGFORD
Essayist, playwright, and broadcaster, J. B. (John

Boynton) Priestley was one of the most popular
English authors of the mid twentieth century,
publishing 29 novels and novellas between 1927
and 1976.
Priestley did not consider himself to be a born
novelist, finding essays and plays far easier to
write: he compared the mental effort of writing
a long novel to lifting an elephant off his desk
every morning. Nevertheless fiction was the ideal
expression for many of his ideas. Enjoying a
technical challenge, Priestley experimented with
many kinds of fiction: thrillers, medieval whimsy,
science fiction, and horror. However, his style
remained recognizable. He saw his writing in the
comic tradition, admiring authors such as Fielding, Dickens, and Bennett, and embraced what he
called extroversion and breadth and vitality, as
opposed to what he considered to be the critical
fashion for introversion and strangeness and
intensity (1962, 157). Priestleys settings are
mostly contemporary, his casts of characters
large, his time scales short. Priestleys best novels,
as he was aware, offered more than just a wellcrafted enjoyable story, deriving emotional
resonance by skillfully evoking the prewar
PRIESTLEY, J. B.
Bradford so important to him while acknowledging the end of that era. However, Priestley could
enrich even the slightest of his fictions with his
enthusiasm for magic and the arts, especially
the transforming power of music, dreams, and
the mystery of time.
Born in 1894 in Bradford, a cosmopolitan wool
town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Jack
Priestley was the son of a socialist schoolmaster.
On leaving school, Priestley became a clerk in a
wool office, but was keen to be a writer, publishing
articles in newspapers, especially the Bradford
Pioneer. Priestley served in the British Army in
World War I from 1914 to 1919, then studied at
Cambridge. Rejecting academia, he moved to
London to write for his living, initially as an
accomplished essayist and reviewer. His first
novel, Adam in Moonshine (1927a), was a light
romance of mistaken identity, set in the Yorkshire
Dales, his second, Benighted (1927b), a psychological horror tale of stranded travelers taking
shelter in a crazy household.
Collaborating on an epistolary novel Farthing
Hall (1929) with novelist Hugh Walpole freed
Priestley financially to write a large-scale picaresque novel, The Good Companions (1929), in
which three diverse travelers revive a concert
troupe. This heart-warming, lively book delighted
readers and made Priestley a household name. It
was followed by Angel Pavement (1930), bleaker
in tone, which shows the effect on the staff of
a furniture firm of a takeover by the dubious
Golspies, in a vividly described London.
In the 1930s, Priestleys fiction took second
place to his new interest in drama, yet he continued to write novels, bringing his growing social
concern, into, for example, Wonder Hero (1933),
which depicts the poverty of declining northern
town Slakeby. World War II provided new fictional themes, such as the intriguing slice of
working life, Daylight on Saturday (1943), about
an aircraft factory. Priestley hoped that the war
would bring an opportunity to build a better,
more equitable society, and his wartime writing,
like his inspiring Postscripts radio broadcasts,
shines with optimism. Postwar, Priestley wrote
one of his finest novels, Bright Day (1946), in
which a screenwriter looks back from a meretricious gray present to the golden age of pre-World
War I Bradford. Like almost all Priestleys finest
works, it recreates the musical, classless, friendly,
315
and comfortable world of his boyhood, in this

case going beyond nostalgia to explore disillusionment, through the way in which the enchantment of the Alington family is destroyed.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Priestleys disillusionment with politics and concern about the growth
of mass media, which he dubbed Admass, were
reflected in satirical fiction, for example, Festival
at Farbridge (1951), on the Festival of Britain, and
Sir Michael and Sir George (1964), about warring
arts administrators. His own favorite novel was
The Image Men (1968), in which two disreputable
academics set up a public relations institute. He
also wrote unsettling short stories and thrillers
and revisited 1913 Bradford for another remarkable novel, Lost Empires (1965), in which a young
painter joins his magician uncles theater troupe.
Priestley continued to write fiction until the late
1970s. He died in 1984. After a dip in critical and
popular attention to Priestleys works, with the
exception of the best-known plays, the 2000s have
seen a great revival of interest, particularly in his
discussion of Englishness, his views of social and
political conflict, and his complicated attachment
to the lost city of prewar Bradford.
(BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World
War II in Fiction (BIF)

Atkins, J. (1981). J. B. Priestley: Last of the Sages.
London: John Calder.
Braine, J. (1978). J. B. Priestley. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson.
Brome, V. (1988). J. B. Priestley. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Cooper, S. (1970). J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author.
London: Heinemann.
Day, A. E. (2001). J. B. Priestley: An Annotated
Bibliography with a Supplement. Slad: Ian Hodgkins.
Hughes, D. (1958). J. B. Priestley: An Informal Study of
His Work. London: Hart-Davis.
Klein, H. (2002). J. B. Priestleys Fiction. Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang.
Nelson, M. (1999). The Novels of J. B. Priestley: A Short
Guide. Bradford: J. B. Priestley Society.
Priestley, J. B. (1927a). Adam in Moonshine. London:
Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1927b). Benighted. London: Heinemann.
316
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY: THE RISE OF THE PAPERBACK
Priestley, J. B. (1929). The Good Companions. London:

Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1930). Angel Pavement. London:
Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1933). Wonder Hero. London:
Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1937). Midnight on the Desert. London:
Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1943). Daylight on Saturday: A Novel
about an Aircraft Factory. London: Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1946). Bright Day. London: Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1951). Festival at Farbridge. London:
Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1960). Literature and Western Man.
London: Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1962). Margin Released: A Writers
Reminiscences and Reflections. London: Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1964). Sir Michael and Sir George.
London: Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1965). Lost Empires. London:
Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. (1968). The Image Men. London:
Heinemann.
Walpole, H., & Priestley, J. B. (1929). Farthing Hall.
London: Macmillan.
The Publishing Industry:

The Rise of the Paperback
CLAIRE SQUIRES
The paperback book is an intrinsically twentiethcentury literary and publishing phenomenon, and
the story of its rise is central to the modern
publishing industry. Portable, disposable, and
contemporary, the paperback is more than simply
a book published within paper or card covers. It is
a mass-market commodity: cheap, accessible, and
rendered iconic by the British company Penguin.
The paperback is also associated with pulp publishing of sometimes dubious quality, but has
been at the vanguard of bringing education and
entertainment to a mass readership, overturning
censorship and promoting bestseller culture. By
the mid-1960s, the Beatles would aspire to be a
Paperback Writer, in the words of their number
one song.
The history of paperback publishing begins
before the twentieth century, and Penguins innovations followed in the path of several earlier
publishing companies, both British and Continental. One forerunner of paperback lists was the
cheap reprint series of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the railways
and the British educational system brought about
new markets composed of commuters and the
educated working classes, who were catered for by
series such as Routledges Railway Library and
Hodder and Stoughtons yellow jackets. Such
series were hardback in format, but were similar
to the later paperback imprint in terms of their
content and their approach to new markets.
The physical format of the paperback also
predated Penguin by centuries. Books with paper
covers existed from the early years of printing in
the late fifteenth century, and in subsequent
centuries books were sometimes produced in the
format, allowing individual buyers to have their
books bound in matching covers for their libraries. During the mid nineteenth century, the Leipzig-based publisher Tauchnitz started the Collection of British Authors series, which was a close
precursor of the modern paperback. Although
based in Germany, the paperback series was an
English-language list, which continued into the
first half of the twentieth century. In 1932, Tauchnitz was joined by another German paperback
publisher, Albatross. The physical format, design,
and avian colophon (the publishers logo), bear
close similarity to that of Penguin, which would
start up only a few years later.
Other British companies also established new
cheap reprint publishing in the same period as
Penguin, with both Collins and Hutchinson starting lists in 1934 (cloth-bound but priced very
modestly at seven pence). Hutchinson in particular encountered strong resistance from booksellers, who were concerned at the much smaller
margins and the potential undercutting of the
more profitable hardback market. In the 1930s,
sixpenny paperback lists were set up by Pearson
(genre novels), Newnes (phrasebooks), and Martyn (childrens books).
The founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane,
began his publishing career at the Bodley Head
in 1919. He was 16 years old, and joined his
uncles family firm to learn the trade. While there,
he most notably published the first British edition
of James Joyces Ulysses in 1936. Lanes fame,
however, derived from his foundation of Penguin
Books in the previous year.
The motivations and inspiration for the
establishment of this new paperback imprint were
numerous, and historians of publishing dispute

the relative importance of the myths of creation
of Penguin Books (Hare 3). One story is often told
of Lanes journey home to London after a weekend staying with the crime writer Agatha Christie
and her husband. The selection of books for sale
from the train station was poor and, finding no
cheap but good-quality reading material, Lane set
about to remedy the situation. Lane discussed his
intentions for Penguin in an article in the trade
journal The Bookseller a few months before the
launch of the first 10 titles in August 1935. The
aim of Penguin, he wrote, was to convert . . .
book-borrowers into book-buyers (Hare 3).
Penguin was thus catering to the new reading
population of the early twentieth century brought
about by successive Education Acts. This population was educated, literate, but not wealthy. In the
1930s, a Penguin paperback was priced at six
pence, making it as consumable as a packet of
cigarettes, as Lane would often note.
The Penguin paperback was therefore conceived as a commodity. This mercantile motivation partly stemmed from the financial difficulties
in which the Bodley Head found itself. As well as
the more altruistic motivation to provide good
reading matter for the new reading public, Penguin was also created to make money for the
failing publisher, and the first few books were
published as an imprint of the Bodley Head. Lane
was concerned, though, that this paperback commodity should have cultural, educational, and
informational value. The first 10 titles published
in 1935 gave an indication of the mixed approach
Lane took. The initial batch included Mary
Webbs Gone to Earth, Ernest Hemingways A
Farewell to Arms, Andre Mauroiss Ariel (a life
of Shelley), and detective novels by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Lane had acquired the
rights for the initial list from several hardback
publishing houses (including the Bodley Head,
Jonathan Cape, and Chatto), sometimes in the
face of skepticism about his aims.
Despite this skepticism and the high targets
that Penguin needed in order to make its low-cost
model work the initial list took off. Another
founding myth of Penguin is that the buyers
wife from the general retailer Woolworths influenced the chains decision to place a high order
of the books, when the buyer himself was unconvinced, thinking the books too upmarket for
317
his customers. Whatever the truth behind this

story, Woolworths stocked the books in great
quantity, the titles achieved heavy sales through
conventional bookshops, and Penguin also
initiated a series of innovative sales channels
including the Penguincubator, a purpose-built
slot machine.
Penguin was not an innovator of the paperback
format, but what was innovatory was its combination of the format, its sales, distribution, and
marketing strategies, its design principles, and its
choice of content. From the beginning, Penguin
presented to its readers a consistent, color-coded
design that encouraged recognition and brand
awareness orange for general fiction, green for
crime, dark blue for biographies. The developing
lists included a wide selection of texts: new writers, middlebrow crime, travel, biography, and
then later the Penguin Classics, the Specials (pamphlet-type books on current political issues, particularly attuned to the circumstances of the 1930s
and 1940s), and Puffin childrens books.
Penguins paperbacks were books of quality, but
with a distinctly mass-market approach and
appeal.
During World War II, Penguin benefited from
its comparatively generous paper ration; and it is
during this time that it became a cherished
institution (MacKenzie 251), publishing not
only the Penguin Specials, but also working with
the government to produce the Forces Book Club
and books for prisoners of war, as well as more
generally providing information and light relief
for a nation at war.
Some years after the war came Penguins most
iconic moment, and one that was intrinsically
bound up in the history of the paperback book.
Lane decided to publish an unexpurgated
edition of D. H. Lawrences sexually explicit Lady
Chatterleys Lover (1928) as a Penguin paperback.
Lane delivered copies of the books to the police,
and it became in 1960 the first test case of the new
Obscene Publications Act. Penguin amassed a
range of witnesses in defense of the book, including writers, academics, and religious figures. In
the opening address by the prosecution, it was
clear that the provocation was in its format and
availability. The question posed by the prosecution to the jury of whether they would wish their
children, wife, or servants to be able to read the
book demonstrated that this was not an issue of
318
content per se, but of access to content. This access

was facilitated by the cheap and readily available
format of the paperback book.
Penguin won the trial unanimously, and went
on to sell millions of copies of the book. When
Penguin floated on the stock market in 1961,
shares in the company were popularly called
Chatterleys, and Philip Larkin later immortalized the trial in poetry, as a moment which
heralded the new world of the 1960s. The paperback book, particularly in the shape of the Penguin, thus entered the public consciousness as
thoroughly modern and accessible.
Following the early success of Penguin, other
companies in both the UK and the US followed its
model. In America, Pocket Books was established
in 1939, closely followed by Avon Books in 1941.
Pocket Books brought a law suit against Avon for
plagiarism of format, but lost (Flower 17). The
paperback format was already well established by
both Penguin and its forebears, and the ensuing
years would see further companies take it up.
In Britain, Pan Books was founded in 1944, and
Corgi in 1951. By the late 1950s, in a speech on the
topic of the past, present, and future of paperback
books, Desmond Flower identified that over 30
companies were operating paperback lists in Britain, and that in 1958 three paperback publishers
alone had produced between them 22 million
books (Flower 201).
Common elements in paperback publishing
emerged. Apart from Penguin, which following
a substantially enlarged edition of George Bernard
Shaws An Intelligent Womans Guide to Socialism,
Capitalism and Sovietism published original
titles as well as books previously offered as hardbacks elsewhere, most paperback lists operated by
buying reprint rights from other companies, or by
republishing its existing hardback books in paperback format. This pattern is still to a large
extent retained, though paperback originals of
the 1970s moved away from this convention.
Publishers in the late twentieth century continued
to publish initially in hardback to fulfill market
expectations and the practices of literary journalists, who traditionally prioritized reviews of new
hardback publications. By the beginning of 2007,
however, the literary imprint Picador which had
initially been set up as a paperback list before
turning to hardback publication as well announced that it would publish most of its titles
simultaneously in both hardback and paperback,

with a minimal hardback print run. This announcement occasioned much debate in the trade
media, demonstrating the controversy that the
paperback format, and challenges to conventional
publishing practices, still causes.
In the early years, Penguins covers consisted
only of the color bands, typography, and the
Penguin colophon. In America, Pocket Books and
Avon used illustrations, and in order to compete
in the 1940s, Penguin USA followed suit long
before its British parent company turned to illustrated covers in the 1960s. In Britain, Pan and
Corgi also used pictorial and then photographic
covers. The reluctance of the British Penguin to
turn to the pictorial derived from different motivations: a strong sense of the overall Penguin
brand, on the one hand, but also Allen Lanes
distaste for what he referred to as bosoms and
bottoms paperback books whose covers
made their appeal, he felt, through titillation
(MacKenzie 253).
Penguins insistence on somberly designed
covers, and content of a certain quality, set it
apart from and above the mass of other developing companies, and a more downmarket idea of
what the paperback could be. The paperback was
the medium for postwar pulp or mushroom
publishing. Beginning in the postwar decade, this
publishing trend boomed in the 1950s when
paper rationing eventually ended after wartime
restrictions. The US market heavily influenced
content, which was dominated by gangster novels,
science fiction, westerns, crime and racy novels
whose covers often promised more than they
actually delivered. In Britain, publishers included
Federation Press, Gramol Publications, Phoenix
Press, R. and L. Locker, Modern Fiction Ltd., and
Scion Ltd. In terms of their swift production
processes and lack of reprints these companies
were more closely allied to the magazine and
comic publishing industries than traditional book
publishing, although what they produced were
short paperback novels. The length of the books
was tightly controlled, typically at 36,00040,000
words. Authors were paid on a 1,000-word fee
basis, and frequently wrote under pseudonyms
with several writers producing material for one
author.
The gangster novels of Hank Janson who
also is a character in some of his own books sold
over 20 million copies between 1946 and 1971.

The enormous success of such publications, and
their occasionally risque nature, did not evade the
notice of the law. In 1954, Jansons publishers
were taken to court for obscene libel over the
seven titles Accused, Auctioned, Persian Pride,
Pursuit, Amok, Killer, and Vengeance. The prosecution resulted in a fine and six months imprisonment for the publishers, and book destruction
orders, and bookshops were also prosecuted for
stocking some of the output of the mushroom
publishers. Paradoxically, however, the British
government bought copies of Hank Janson books
for distribution to the Forces. In the 1950s, further
pulp publishers were repeatedly taken to court
because of their publications, leading to subsequent bankruptcies and the slowing of the pulp
market.
The broader paperback market went from
strength to strength. Mainstream paperback publishers incorporated genre fiction into their lists in
the postwar decades a third of Penguins titles in
the 1960s were crime and established genre
specialists such as the romance publisher Mills
& Boon moved from hardback into paperback
publication in the same period. The paperback
could be said to have evolved in the 1930s, but its
modern, truly mass-market identity arrived in
the 1960s. In the postwar period, developments
in graphic design and photography, and the
paperbacks ability to reflect a broad range of
reading tastes and multimedia synergies, including television and film tie-in editions, firmly
established its modern credentials.
Title output statistics alone demonstrate the
growing dominance of the paperback market: at
the beginning of the 1960s, under 6,000 titles were
published in the format, whereas a decade later
production had risen to 37,000 titles per year. By
the end of the century, approximately 60 percent
of title output was in the paperback format, rising
from 30 percent in 1975. In the 1960s, Penguin
and Pan were both selling around 20 million
copies a year (Stevenson 1378). Such high figures
emphasize the economic, social, and cultural
force of the paperback book.
The paperback is, arguably, a democratic publishing medium. It has a low price point, is
typically produced in large print runs, is distributed via diverse sales channels (from traditional
bookshops to newsagents and supermarkets), and
319
thus enables readers to access easily a wide range

of subject matter both fiction and factual including, as the Lady Chatterleys Lover trial
demonstrated, controversial content. The idea of
paperback democracy thus extends beyond
the mechanisms of pricing and distribution strategies to encompass a broader sense in which
growing access to book consumption lowers
conventional barriers around reading (Stevenson 141). More than ever before, book readers
were also book owners, echoing Lanes formulation on the foundation of Penguin. People had the
intellectual and economic means to own and
consume books, radically democratizing the
marketplace.
The price, production values, and relative
availability of books also meant that books became more portable, more readily damaged, and
more liable to be disposed of. The airport novel
and the beach read are products bought for
temporary entertainment, stuffed in suitcases,
covered in sand and suntan cream, and liable to
be left behind in hotels, or given away at the end of
a journey to a charity shop. The aura of the book
might thus have been diminished, but its cultural
reach was extended.
Alongside the rise of the paperback book,
particularly from the 1960s onward, there has
also been a development of a culture of marketing
which reached an apogee at the end of the century.
The large print runs of the paperback novel are
directly linked to a publishing industry structured
around a promotional culture and bestseller lists.
Release times of paperbacks are carefully calculated to tie in with literary prizes, seasonal sales
spikes, and film or TV adaptations, and to optimize media opportunities. After the abandonment of the price-regulating Net Book Agreement
in 1995, discounting became common practice in
chain and online retailers, with the highest-selling
paperbacks primarily marketed through front-ofstore promotions in three-for-two and other price
offers. For some cultural critics, this was a step too
far, with the paperback leading literary culture
from a democratic into a highly commercialized
marketplace. For many others, it is the logical
conclusion of Allen Lanes idea. For in the twentyfirst century, despite numerous competing media,
the paperback novel still sells in the millions,
confirming Lanes hope and hunch that paperback publishing on the Penguin model is
320
PYM, BARBARA
capable of great expansion, and will increasingly

make knowledge more accessible (Flower 6).
The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)

Eliot, S., & Rose, J. (eds.) (2007). A Companion to the
History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell.
Feather, J. (2006). A History of British Publishing, 2nd
edn. Abingdon: Routledge.
Flower, D. (1959). The Paper-Back: Its Past, Present and
Future. London: Arborfield.
Hare, S. (ed.) (1995). Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane
and the Penguin Editors 19351970. London:
Penguin.
Holland, S. (1993). The Mushroom Jungle: A History of
Postwar Paperback Publishing. Westbury: Zeon.
Lewis, J. (2005). Penguin Special: The Life and Times of
Allen Lane. London: Viking.
MacKenzie, R. (1991). Penguin Books. In J. Rose & P.
Anderson (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses,
18811965. Detroit: Gale, pp. 25161.
McAleer, J. (1999). Passions Fortune: The Story of Mills
& Boon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCleery, A. (2007). The Paperback Evolution:
Tauchnitz, Albatross and Penguin. In N. Matthews &
N. Moody (eds.), Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans,
Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction.
Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 317.
Morpurgo, J. (1979). Allen Lane: King Penguin. London:
Hutchinson.
Princep, B. (1991). Pan Books Limited. In J. Rose & P.
Anderson (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses,
18811965. Detroit: Gale, pp. 2445.
Rolph, C. (ed.) (1961). The Trial of Lady Chatterley.
Schmoller, H. (1974). The Paperback Revolution. In A.
Briggs (ed.), Essays in the History of Publishing.
London: Longman, pp. 283318.
Squires, C. (2005). Novelistic Production and
the Publishing Industry in Britain and Ireland.
In B. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and
Irish Novel 19452000. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
17793.
Squires, C. (2007). Marketing Literature: The Making of
Contemporary Writing in Britain. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Stevenson, R. (2004). The Oxford English Literary
History, vol. 12: 19602000: The Last of England?
Sutherland, J. (1978). Fiction and the Fiction Industry.
London: Athlone.
Sutherland, J. (2002). Reading the Decades: Fifty Years of

the Nations Bestselling Books. London: BBC.
Williams, W. (1973). Allen Lane: A Personal Portrait.
Pym, Barbara
MICHAEL COTSELL
The English novelist Barbara Pym was born in

1913 and was brought up in Oswestry, a small
town in Shropshire. Her childhood was happy.
The family was church-going and the Church of
England, both in its inhibitions and absurdities, is
a presence in all her work.
She attended a girls boarding school and then
went on to study English at Oxford. Her love of
English poetry is evident in her work, which is rich
in literary allusion. Her fiction is often concerned
with women who are educated, upper middle
class, mildly scholarly (Rossen 21), people on the
fringes of academia. At Oxford she fell in love but
was rejected. Though she continued to enjoy a
busy romantic life, Pym at this time appears to
have chosen the life of a single woman and author
over marriage.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s she wrote a
number of early unpublished works, some of
which were published after her success was assured (Crampton Hodnet, 1985; Civil to Strangers
and Other Writings, 1987). During World War II
she was a Wren (member of the Womens Royal
Naval Service). In 1946 she took employment at
the International African Institute where she
worked until her retirement in 1974. Jane and
Prudence (1953) is set in a village but suburban
London is more typically the setting of her novels.
Anthropology increasingly interested her and
from Less than Angels (1955) on the world of
anthropology became almost as important to her
fiction as the church.
Some Tame Gazelle (1950), a novel centered on
a pair of comic spinsters based on herself and her
sister, Hilary, was her first success and led to a
succession of remarkable works in the 1950s.
Excellent Women (1952), now a Penguin Classic
in which Mildred, the self-effacing spinster who
is the narrator, declares, I suppose an unmarried
woman just over thirty, who lives alone, and has
no apparent ties, must expect to find herself
PYM, BARBARA
involved or interested in other peoples business,

and if she is also a clergymans daughter then one
might really say there is no hope for her (5) is
widely regarded as her most successful work. It
was followed by Jane and Prudence, a tale of two
women, one married, the other not; Less than
Angels; and A Glass of Blessings (1958), her Emma,
in which the heroine is gently humbled after she
falls for an obvious homosexual. Her heroines are
enormously likable even when they become, as
she intends, frustrating to others or themselves.
Love in her work is an elusive necessity, yet
women are often hesitant or subtly selfish, and
men are overbearing and egotistical, but also
weak. Her women are often in love but satisfactory resolutions for romance are hard to come by.
What emerges in her work is a presentation
of frequent deprivations, lack of appreciation,
unsatisfied longings, triviality, unexpected rewards, hopefulness, poetry, and rich humor.
Her dialogue is deft and her characters voices
subtly differentiated. Her ability to evoke the
unspoken between characters is particularly adept. There is an uncomfortable conversation
about shared bathrooms between a male and
female tenant in Excellent Women, which may
stand for her subtle evocation of the body as
much as does her sexual humor (male characters
in her works have such names as Rockingham or
Rocky, Fabian Driver, Piers Longridge, and
Everard Bone).
Though she continued writing, Pym failed to
find a publisher between 1963 and 1977. She was
then identified by Lord David Cecil and the poet
Philip Larkin as the most underrated writer of the
century. She went on to enjoy a revival and a
correspondence and friendship with Larkin,
whose influence on her later work is clear. She
could now publish Quartet in Autumn (1977), a
touching and compassionate study of four retirees
adrift in London, and The Sweet Dove Died
(1978), a harsher depiction of contemporary
sexual life. Her last novel, A Few Green Leaves
(1980), set in the village where she lived in her
retirement, is a gentle, saddened work which has
been said to be about the passing of the gentry as
an influence on local lives (Shulz 116). She died
from cancer in 1980.
321
Pyms legacy lies in her achievement in proving

that the novel of the comedy of manners the
novel in the tradition of Jane Austen and
Trollopes Barchester novels was relevant to
modern English life. Her sensitivity to domestic
life and particularly to the lives of women has been
echoed in the fiction of a number of her
contemporaries. What Larkin called her plangent
qualities and her fine comedy are likely to ensure
a future for her work.
Cotsell, M. (1989). Barbara Pym. London: Macmillan.
Holt, H. (1990). A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym.
London: Macmillan.
Lenckos, F. E., & Miller, E. J. (eds.) (2003). All This
Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym.
Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Liddell, R. (1989). A Mind at Ease: Barbara Pym and Her
Novels. London: Peter Owen.
Pym, B. (1950). Some Tame Gazelle. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Pym, B. (1952). Excellent Women. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Pym, B. (1953). Jane and Prudence. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Pym, B. (1955). Less than Angels. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Pym, B. (1958). A Glass of Blessings. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Pym, B. (1961). No Fond Return of Love. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Pym, B. (1977). Quartet in Autumn. London:
Macmillan.
Pym, B. (1978). The Sweet Dove Died. London:
Macmillan.
Pym, B. (1980). A Few Green Leaves. London:
Macmillan.
Pym, B. (1982). An Unsuitable Attachment. London:
Macmillan.
Pym, B. (1984). A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in
Diaries and Letters (ed. H. Holt & H. Pym). London:
Macmillan.
Pym, B. (1985). Crampton Hodnet. London: Macmillan.
Rossen, J. (1987). The World of Barbara Pym. London:
Macmillan.
Salwak, D. (ed.) (1987). The Life and Work of Barbara
Pym. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Schulz, M. (1987). The Novelist as Anthropologist.
In Salwak (1987), pp. 10119.
Q
Queer/Alternative
Sexualities in Fiction
HOWARD J. BOOTH
The twentieth century in Britain and Ireland saw

dramatic changes for homosexuals and those who
did not identify with traditional gender roles.
Initially the law, medicine, and culture defined
such people in predominantly negative ways. In
time more positive views of sexual and gender
difference began to circulate, and reform campaigns gathered force. The closing decades of the
century saw male homosexual behavior largely
decriminalized and non-normative gender and
sexual identities gaining new legal rights. Further,
the framework that had come into being in the
second half of the Victorian period began to be
dismantled. Fiction reflected the changes through
this whole period, with many authors seeking to
use their writing to influence debates on sexuality
and gender identity.
The trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, and his
imprisonment, had linked homosexuality and the
figure of the artist in the public mind. In the
following years the environment for male
homosexuals the medical term and the identity associated with it were of late Victorian
provenance was harshly repressive. Lesbianism
was not illegal, but was held in place by many of
the same forces as male homosexuality. Writing
fiction about homosexual experience was always
going to be a challenge. Literary forms and a
language would need to be developed to represent
it. Authors who wanted to change attitudes had
to find ways of expressing themselves without
arousing a negative response from the newspapers

and the authorities. Publishers, bookshops, and
libraries had to be located that were willing to
produce and distribute such fiction. The texts that
appeared were sometimes expurgated or available
only to the few able to pay a high price. Even then
some were withdrawn from sale or banned.
As Gregory Woods noted, what fiction there was
after the Wilde trials addressing non-normative
sexuality usually ended tragically, either in death
or in capitulation to social norms that offered
nothing (Woods 217). In many of these texts
the language of degeneration was used. Conditions of modern living, it was held, meant that
those who would not have lived to have children in the past were now breeding. A range of
abnormalities was said to result, where sexual
deviance was one form they could take. While
Howard Overing Sturgis had, in his novel Tim
(1891), addressed youthful romantic friendships, his 1904 novel Belchamber centers on
Sainty, Lord Belchamber, who is weak and permanently lamed after a riding accident. Though
well intentioned, others bend him to their will.
As Noel Annan remarked, in Belchamber
Sturgis described a world in which love cannot
exist (Annan, p. viii).
When E. M. Forster came to draft his novel
about homosexual maturation, Maurice (1971),
between 1913 and 1914, he resolved to reject a
tragic trajectory. Urged on by his then mentor, the
socialist and homosexual rights campaigner
Edward Carpenter, Forster resolved on a happy
ending. The novel sees a failed relationship with
Clive Durham that involves malemale intimacy
and is conducted under the influence of Clives

QUEER/ALTERNATIVE SEXUALITIES IN FICTION
reading of Plato. This is followed by a sexual

relationship across class boundaries with the
gamekeeper on Clives estate, Alec Scudder. Forster differs from the Ulster writer Forrest Reid
who sought to align idealized, age-asymmetrical
relationships and nature. The successful relationship not only offers fulfillment for Maurice, but it
also shows how a divided England can be made
whole. A traditional marriage plot novel is recast
for a homosexual relationship, though this poses
challenges for the writer given the initial loneliness and isolation of the main character; the
novels symbolism has to carry much of the
meaning. Forster returned to Maurice a number
of times in later years to make revisions. The text
could not have been published before the Obscene
Publications Act of 1959 allowed a defense of
artistic merit. It could perhaps have appeared in
the 1960s, but the elderly Forster gave permission
for the novel to be published only after his death.
His achievement can be fully understood only
when the context in which Maurice was first
written is kept in mind.
Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo,
also wrote a text with a happy ending, albeit by
recourse to an improbable plot twist. An outsider,
he has fascinated many down the years, including
A. J. A. Symons, whose Quest for Corvo (1934) is a
classic of experimental biography. Rolfes novel
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1993; finished
in 1910, but first published in a heavily expurgated form in 1934) takes its title from Platos
Symposium to suggest an intense, complementary
union between the main character Nicholas
Crabbe and a young boy, Zildo. In the closing
pages it is acknowledged that the boy is in fact a
girl. Crabbe and Gilda can marry and the relationship can become sexual. Though the plot
creaks and groans, it allows Rolfe to address sexual
and gender ambiguity.
Maurice refuses to engage with the two main
models of the time for explaining homosexuality.
One, as already mentioned, was degeneration.
The other was that one had, in order to desire
someone of the same sex, really to be a member of
the other sex at some underlying psychological or
physical level. This model was dominant in the
representation of women who desired women in
the modernist period. The major lesbian novel
was Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness, which
appeared and was promptly banned after an
323
obscenity trial in 1928. That the view taken of

homosexuality was crucial to how texts were
regarded by the legal authorities can be shown
by what happened to Compton Mackenzies
Extraordinary Women, which was published in
a limited edition that same year. It addressed
expatriate lesbians on the island of Capri and
suggested that a lesbian relationship would never
last; its subtitle is Theme and Variations.
Mackenzies novel of the year before about the
male homosexual colony on Capri, Vestal Fire
(1927), linked homosexuality to degeneration.
His texts, though, were not banned; it seems that
the view taken of homosexuality was important
to whether proceedings were initiated. In Ireland, Molly Keane also depicted homosexuality
while denying it a positive outcome in Devoted
Ladies. The Well of Loneliness follows the early
life of Stephen, addressing her sense of being
different. Instead of accepting the norms of
feminine behavior she wants to do things that
are normally seen as male. She is an invert
attracted to feminine women. As a piece of
writing it has often been criticized, and its bleak
ending suggests that Stephen can never experience lasting, reciprocated love. However, the
novel has been important to generations of
lesbians, and in the last decade has received
renewed attention from queer historians and
theorists of gender. They have pointed to its
complex investigation of individual response to
models of twentieth-century gender and sexual
identity. Such attributes can also be found in
Halls other fiction, for example in her short
story Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself.
The discourses that connected gender and sexuality were taken into the new, modernist forms
of writing. In Joyces Ulysses (1922), the main
character at the center of the days events in
Dublin is the deeply human Leopold Bloom. He
is described at one point as a new womanly
man. While he is heterosexual he is depicted as
being between the sexes, and being the better for
it. Woolfs novel Orlando (1928), in the popular
1920s form of the fantasy novel, has a span of three
and a half centuries. It was written for Vita
Sackville-West, and was described by her son
Nigel Nicolson as the longest and most charming
love-letter in history (Nicolson 201). Orlando is
a young man at the court of Elizabeth I, and ends
the text as a woman aged 36 in the year of the
324
novels publication. Orlando seeks to detach

gendered identity and selfhood from physical
characteristics. Woolf explored issues of lesbian
desire and bisexuality as a sub-theme in other
novels. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway (1925),
Clarissa remembers her youthful, intense relationship with Sally Seton, before both of them
got married. She sees the same pattern being
repeated for her daughter, Elizabeth, who is involved with Miss Kilman.
A concern with gender roles, desire, and the
pressure to conform is found in an intense form in
the writing of D. H. Lawrence. He both represented malemale intimacy for example in the
A Poem of Friendship chapter of his first novel
The White Peacock (1911) and subscribed to the
prevailing view that what sexuality and relationships had to offer was reserved for sex with
members of the opposite sex. Over time, Lawrence became increasingly vigilant in his treatment
of non-normative forms of sexuality. The
Shame chapter of The Rainbow (1915) moves
from depicting the attraction of a relationship
between two women to sharply condemning their
relationship, as the chapter title suggests. There
was also, as Lawrences short novel The Fox shows,
a tendency to see as threatening women who took
on masculine roles.
Other writers of the period, outside the traditional modernist canon, made significant interventions on other sexualities. Ronald Firbank
has long had his champions for his heady combination of modernist play and extreme aestheticism, in texts such as Valmouth (1919) and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).
In Dawns Left Hand (1931), the tenth part of
Dorothy Richardsons multipart modernist text
Pilgrimage, a triangular relationship emerges as
Miriam starts a relationship with a married man
but is also aware of her intense feelings for another
woman, Amabel. Sylvia Townsend Warners first
and most popular novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), is,
like Orlando, in the genre of the fantasy novel. Its
main character is at once a young woman of the
1920s and a witch able to move beyond conventional social constraints. Warners 1927 novel Mr.
Fortunes Maggot, set on a Pacific island, brilliantly explores the relationship between colonialism
and masculinity. The novel depicts the relationship between the missionary Timothy and a
young boy, Lueli. At the end, Timothy realizes
that true love would best be expressed by his

leaving and that what he brings to the remote
island as a Western man only does harm in the
long run. Warner had written incisively as a critic
on Jane Austen, and her final novel, The Flint
Anchor (1954), tells the story of John Barnard,
who lives from 1790 to 1863. It explores the
tensions and pressures around aging, gender
roles, and sexuality that Austens texts often elide.
In the 1930s and 1940s a return in the English
novel to realism coincided with a shift toward
recording the emerging urban subcultures. There
was a stress on social interaction involving homosexual characters rather than on maturation and
early relationships. The Berlin novels of Christopher Isherwood set out to observe 1930s bohemian
life in the capital of the Weimar Republic. The
effort to create a detached, camera-like observer
insulated the writer from his novels references to
homosexuality, which are anyway few and cautious. The Thirties Generation of writers retreated
from direct involvement in homosexual politics;
political writing was held to be bad art.
Isherwoods writing in his later, American phase
was more direct, and he returned to his Berlin
years in his moving Christopher and His Kind
(1976). Though a memoir, it draws on the techniques of fiction; for example, the author depicts
his earlier self as a character called Christopher.
World War II brought together people from
different backgrounds. Many lived for the present, no longer held by old moral codes because
they feared that there might not be much in the
way of a future. The Irish writer Elizabeth Bowens
short stories Mysterious Kor and The Happy
Autumn Fields explored the possibilities the war
opened up for female intimacy. The characters in
the fiction of the short-lived Denton Welch
(191548) make a period of uncertainty into one
of malemale erotic possibility. Mary Renaults
Charioteers, published in 1959, is a sensitive and
acute study of a small group of men during World
War II. Renaults historical novels set in classical
times, beginning with The Last of the Wine (1956),
both constructed worlds where attitudes to human relationships and sexuality were radically
different and invited powerful feelings of identification from their readers.
Ireland entered the twentieth century with the
same legal and medical context as Britain with
respect to homosexuality; what was different was
the stronger, more proscriptive role of religion in

the form of the Roman Catholic Church and
mainly in the North Presbyterian Protestantism.
A nationalist line of writing, initiated by Oscar
Wilde, sought to unsettle the interconnections in
British discourse between masculinity, morality,
and the power of the nation. This was developed
by writers of the Celtic Revival. After partition
and independence, attitudes to gender and sexuality in Ireland became more proscriptive. This is
common in postcolonial contexts, and writers
adopted a range of responses. For example, Edith
Somerville and Martin Ross (whose real name was
Violet Martin), the authors of the Irish RM
novels, excluded the erotic from their texts, displacing it onto the depictions of the Irish countryside and the chase of the hunt. Kate OBrien
was the most outspoken and brave of Irish lesbian
writers, though she was marginalized. OBrien set
novels such as Mary Lavelle (1936) and That Lady
(1946) in Spain; her readers were encouraged to
draw parallels with modern Ireland.
In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, homosexuality was represented more and more in fiction. It
was explored in relation to other issues of the day,
such as the limits of liberalism (in the novels of
Angus Wilson) or decolonization (in, for example, Simon Ravens The Feathers of Death, 1959).
The agenda was set by the gathering campaign for
decriminalization. Compton Mackenzies Thin
Ice (1956) argued for law reform on the basis that
the existing law encouraged blackmail; discourses
of degeneration were, however, still to the fore in
his fiction. The Wolfenden Committees report of
1957 into homosexuality and prostitution advocated partial decriminalization, which came for
England and Wales only in 1967, though prosecutions went up in the years that followed as the
police felt they had a law they could enforce more
effectively. The Stonewall uprising in New York in
1969, when gays subjected to a police raid turned
round and fought back, became the symbolic
event when an open, unapologetic homosexual
identity started to be asserted worldwide. Male
homosexuality was not decriminalized in Scotland until 1980, and in Northern Ireland until
1982. The Republic of Ireland legislated in 1983.
In 1980s Britain, the initial gains of the 1970s
came under severe threat. The negative attitudes
of the Conservative government and the popular
press were seen in particular in the response to the
325
AIDS crisis. The short stories of Adam Mars-Jones,

in Monopolies of Loss (1992) and The Darker Proof:
Stories from a Crisis (with Edmund White, 1987),
probed its impact on lives, social networks, and the
gay community. New literary and theoretical approaches were also emerging in these years. Lesbian
and gay studies began to focus on how sexual
identities were made and constructed not born:
homosexuality was not something that had been
discovered in the late nineteenth century but had
always existed; rather it was a medical and legal
category produced in a specific Western historical
moment. The realization that terms like
homosexual, lesbian, and gay were perhaps
limited by that specific context led to the advent of
the queer movement, which can be said to have
begun around 1990. For long a term of abuse, the
word queer was reappropriated as a term for
what lay outside or troubled the definitions of
sexology and discourses of power. It came at a time
when the conventions of the short, limited postwar
realist British novel were giving way. The new
possibilities found in narrative in postmodernist
fiction made for a new wave of British and Irish
lesbian and gay writing.
Queer fiction has perhaps taken two main
forms. One has been to queer the past, including
the recent past, to re-examine earlier experience
and writing through new eyes. Sarah Waterss
novels have been very popular, reaching a further
audience through television adaptations. They
have sought to reinsert lesbian desire into history
and ways of telling stories, drawing on the
gothic and the Victorian sensation novel. Alan
Hollinghursts The Swimming Pool Library (1988)
explores what happens when the world of wealth,
casual sex, and consumption associated with the
main character, Will, is interrupted when he discovers his grandfathers role in persecuting an
older generation of homosexuals. The relationship between homosexuality and art is important
to Hollinghurst, as it also is to the contemporary
Irish writer Colm Toibn. The other main line of
writing drew on queer theory. Jeanette Winterson
has sought to align changing ways of thinking
with innovation in form. Her first novel, Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), intersperses an
account of a queer childhood in an extremely
religious working-class Lancashire upbringing
with fairytale-like narratives. Later texts, including The Passion (1987) and Written on the Body
326
(1992), have probed traditional constructions of

sexuality and gender, and the way in which the
body is represented, using the writing strategies of
postmodernist fiction. Writing that addresses the
concerns of everyday lesbian and gay lives continued to appear, however; examples include the early
novels of the Irish writer Emma Donoghue, Stir
Fry (1994) and Hood (1995).
Carrying forward a major conclusion of the
queer movement, that we should not simply
accept the definitions we inherit from nineteenth-century sexology such as heterosexual
or homosexual, or indeed the notion of having a
single sexuality or an essential gender identity at
all, Jackie Kays 1998 novel Trumpet sympathetically examines the responses of a family and
friends who discover, on his death, that a jazz
musician had been passing as a man when he
was in fact biologically a woman. Queer had, at
the end of the century, begun to open a space for
fiction on transgender issues. Much of the full
range of experience of gender and sexuality,
though, especially outside large Western cities,
still remained to be explored by queer writers.
Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Fantasy
Fiction (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Gender and
the Novel (AF); Historical Fiction (BIF);
Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF);
Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF)
Annan, N. (1986). Introduction. In H. O. Sturgis,
Belchamber. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bowen, E. (1945). Mysterious Kor and The Happy
Autumn Fields. In The Demon Lover and Other
Stories. London: Jonathan Cape.
Doan, L. (2006). Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women
and English Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Donoghue, E. (1994). Stir Fry. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Donoghue, E. (1995). Hood. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Firbank, R. (1919). Valmouth. London: Grant Richards.
Firbank, R. (1926). Concerning the Eccentricities of
Cardinal Pirelli. London: Grant Richards.
Forster, E. M. (1971). Maurice. London: Arnold.

Jonathan Cape.
Hall, R. (1934). Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. London:
Heinemann.
Hollinghurst, A. (1988). The Swimming Pool Library.
Isherwood, C. (1976). Christopher and His Kind. New
Isherwood, C. (1992). The Berlin Novels, comprising
Mr. Norris Changes Trains [1935], Goodbye to Berlin
[1939]. London: Minerva.
Jagose, A. (1996). Queer Theory. Carlton South, Vic.:
Melbourne University Press.
Kay, J. (1998). Trumpet. London: Picador.
Keane, M. (as Farrell, M. J.) (1934). Devoted Ladies.
London: Collins.
Keane, M. (1981). Good Behaviour. London: Deutsch.
Lawrence, D. H. (1911). The White Peacock. London:
Heinemann.
Lawrence, D. H. (1915). The Rainbow. London: Methuen.
Mackenzie, C. (1956). Thin Ice. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Mars-Jones, A. (1992). Monopolies of Loss. London:
Faber and Faber.
Mars-Jones, A., & White, E. (1987). The Darker Proof:
Stories from a Crisis. London: Faber and Faber.
Nicolson, N. (1973). Portrait of a Marriage. London:
OBrien, K. (1936). Mary Lavelle. London: Heinemann.
OBrien, K. (1946). That Lady. London: Heinemann.
Raven, S. (1959). The Feathers of Death. London:
Anthony Blond.
Reid, F. (1905). The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys.
London: David Nutt.
Reid, F. (1955). Tom Barber, comprising Young Tom
[1944], The Retreat [1936], Uncle Stephen [1931].
New York: Pantheon.
Renault, M. (1956). The Last of the Wine. London:
Longmans, Green.
Renault, M. (1959). The Charioteer. New York: Random
House.
Richardson, D. (1931). Dawns Left Hand. London:
Duckworth.
Rolfe, F. (1993). The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (ed.
A. Eburne). London: Quartet.
Sturgis, H. O. (1891). Tim. London: Macmillan.
Sturgis, H. O. (1904). Belchamber. London: Constable.
Symons, A. J. A. (1934). The Quest for Corvo. London:
Cassell.
Toibn, C. (1999). The Blackwater Lightship. London:
Picador.
Walshe, E. (ed.) (1997). Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish
Writing. Cork: Cork University Press.
Warner, S. T. (1926). Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving
Huntsman. London: Chatto and Windus.
Warner, S. T. (1927). Mr. Fortunes Maggot. London:

Chatto and Windus.
Waters, S. (1998). Tipping the Velvet. London: Virago.
Waters, S. (2002). Fingersmith. London: Virago.
Weeks, J. (1990). Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in
Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present.
London: Quartet.
Welch, D. (1943). Maiden Voyage. London: Routledge.
Welch, D. (1944). In Youth is Pleasure. London:
Routledge.
327
Winterson, J. (1985). Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

London: Pandora.
Winterson, J. (1987). The Passion. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Winterson, J. (1992). Written on the Body. London:
Bloomsbury.
Woods, G. (1998). A History of Gay Literature: The
Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1928). Orlando. London: Hogarth.
R
Richardson, Dorothy
SCOTT McCRACKEN
Dorothy Richardson was born into a middle-class

family in the small town of Abingdon, just south
of Oxford. Her father lost most of his money
when she was a teenager and the family moved to
London, where she attended a progressive school
influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin. At 17,
when the familys financial situation deteriorated
further, she went to work as a teacher in Germany, then as a governess and teacher in England,
and eventually as a receptionist in a dental surgery in Harley Street. While working in London
in the 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson lived in
lodgings in Bloomsbury and associated with writers, political radicals, and European exiles. Several of the men and women she had relationships
with at this time figure in her long prose work,
Pilgrimage, for example, Benjamin Grad (Michael
Shatov in Pilgrimage), Veronica Leslie Jones
(Amabel), and H. G. Wells (Hypo Wilson). Her
affair with Wells resulted in a miscarriage and this
seems to have precipitated her decision to become a writer.
Her writing career began with reviews, essays,
and journalism in small periodicals. She published a series of short pieces in the Saturday
Review between 1908 and 1914 before beginning
Pilgrimage, the first part of which, Pointed Roofs,
was published in 1915. She married the artist Alan
Odle in 1917, who was largely unrecognized in his
own lifetime, but whose pen and ink drawings are
now collectors items. Odle was an important
influence on her work and, although few letters
between Richardson and Odle survive, it is clear

from his surviving correspondence that he and
Richardson shared many ideas about literature
and art. From 1917 until 1939, they spent their
winters in Cornwall and their summers in London. In the 1930s, Richardson was active in
support of refugee writers from Germany. They
stayed permanently in Cornwall from 1939 until
Odles death in 1948. She did not leave Cornwall
until she was moved unwillingly to a nursing
home in Kent in 1954. She died in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers
who changed the rules of prose fiction at the
beginning of the twentieth century. With James
Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William
Faulkner in the United States and, in England,
Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form
of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce,
to have been at the forefront of a revolution in
literature. The first chapter of her long work
Pilgrimage was begun in 1913 and published in
1915, two years after the publication of the first
volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, a year
after the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolfs
first experimental novel Jacobs Room. The first 10
chapters of Pilgrimage were published by Duckworth at lengthening intervals between 1915 and
1931: Pointed Roofs (1915), Backwater (1916),
Honeycomb (1917), The Tunnel (1919), Interim
(1919), Deadlock (1921), Revolving Lights (1923),
The Trap (1925), Oberland (1927), and Dawns
Left Hand (1931). Extracts from Interim were
published in Little Review 191920. The eleventh
chapter, Clear Horizon, was published by Dent in

RICHARDSON, DOROTHY
1935. In 1938, Dent published a four-volume

edition that included a new chapter, Dimple
Hill. In 1967, Dent and Knopf published a new
edition simultaneously in Britain and the United
States that included the unfinished chapter
Richardson had been working on until 1953,
March Moonlight. In 1979 Pilgrimage was recognized as a feminist classic with the publication of
a Virago paperback edition. Although a number
of critical terms have been used to describe
Pilgrimage, Richardson was unhappy with May
Sinclairs description (borrowed from William
James) of her work as stream of consciousness.
In fact, she denied that she was writing a novel at
all. Novels, in Richardsons opinion, always suffered from being conducted tours. Pilgrimage
in contrast gradually develops its own aesthetic,
always deferring either an ending or narrative
resolution.
Richardson also published short stories in a
variety of periodicals (a collection was published
by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She
was the author of numerous articles in periodicals
such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her
literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal
Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a
regular column, Comments by a Layman, for
the Dental Record. She translated eight books into
English from French and German. Between 1927
and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the
avant garde little magazine Close Up. A selection
was republished in 1999 by Princeton University
Press as part of an anthology of articles from the
periodical. Richardson showed as much interest
in cinema audiences as in the films themselves. As
in all her work, she was acutely aware of the
dynamics of gender, seeing the cinema, just as
she saw the boarding houses, cafes, and shops
represented in Pilgrimage, as a counter-public
sphere for women.
Richardsons aesthetic was influenced by
diverse currents of thought. She was part of
the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn
of the century that embraced vegetarianism,
feminism, and socialism. Olive Schreiner and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact
on her work and one of her first reviews was
of a book by the advocate for homosexual
rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet,
Edward Carpenter. Her first book was about the
Quakers: The Quakers: Past and Present (1914b).
329
The philosophical influences on Pilgrimage

included the American transcendentalist Ralph
Waldo Emerson, the Cambridge philosopher
John Ellis McTaggert, Henri Bergson, and, in
the 1930s, the Russian existentialist philosopher
Nikolai Berdaeyev.
Yet Pilgrimage was not just a novel of ideas.
Richardson was deeply marked by her experience
of working for 1 a week in London at the turn of
the century. Her literary aesthetic was always
concerned with the relationship between
womens work and art. A semi-autobiographical
work, Pilgrimage covers the life of its protagonist,
Miriam Henderson, from early childhood to the
moment she becomes a writer. In its succeeding
episodes, London is an elastic material space
that facilitates Miriams public life. Londons
streets, cafes, restaurants, and clubs figure largely
in her explorations, which extend her knowledge
of both the city and herself. Uncomfortable with,
even hostile to, the nineteenth-century conventions of femininity, Miriam seeks a third space
between masculinity and femininity, developing a
new and evolving form of gendered identity that is
enabled by the possibilities the city offers.
Richardsons work was the subject of intense
critical discussion in the 1920s, given its centrality
to the emergence of modernist prose fiction. After
a brief dip in the 1930s, there was renewed critical
interest after World War II and her work started
to receive due recognition with the critical revisions that followed second-wave feminism in the
1960s and 1970s. In the last 10 years, Richardson
has been fully restored to the modernist canon
and is now included as a matter of course in
introductory texts.
Yet Richardson was always, and has remained,
a controversial figure. She was well known in
avant garde circles in London in the 1920s, paying
a visit to Paris in 1924 where she met Ernest
Hemingway and Mary Butts. Her work was discussed by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Edith
Sitwell, John Rodker, William Carlos Williams,
and Katherine Mansfield among others. She knew
Lawrence and was the object, with Joyce and
Proust, of his famous attack, Surgery for the
Novel or a Bomb? (1925). Alfred Knopf, her
American publisher, described her novels as
more or less notorious (Fromm 119). Toward
the end of her life, she had started to become the
subject of doctoral theses. In the postwar period,
330
RICHARDSON, DOROTHY
she was written about by those critics, such as

Leon Edel and Thomas Staley, who pioneered the
institutionalization of modernist literature as part
of university literature courses.
However, it was with the emergence of secondwave feminism that her importance to twentiethcentury literature came to be recognized. Richardson was rediscovered in pioneering critical
works such as Elaine Showalters A Literature of
Their Own (1982 [1977] ) and in Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubars No Mans Land (198894). Two
critics in particular, Gloria Fromm and Gillian
Hanscombe, were instrumental in establishing her
importance. Fromms biography came out in 1977,
with a second edition in 1994. Hanscombe published a paperback edition of Pilgrimage with
Virago in 1979 and her monograph, The Art of
Life, came out in 1982. A number of Richardsons
key critical writings were published in Bonnie
Kime Scotts anthology of women modernists, The
Gender of Modernism (1990).
The 1990s saw the publication of the critical
apparatus for a scholarly approach to Pilgrimage
in George H. Thomsons A Readers Guide (1996)
and his Notes on Pilgrimage: Dorothy Richardson
Annotated (1999). The 1990s also saw monographs by Jean Radford, Carol Watts, Kristin
Bluemel, and Elisabeth Bronfen. Critical work on
Richardson has continued to develop, with
monographs by Joanne Winning and Jane Garrity
making important contributions. Both critics
highlight Richardsons significance for lesbian
literary history. Critical work has also appeared
in Japanese, French, Italian, and German.
SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James
(BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
Bluemel, K. (1997). Experimenting on the Borders of
Modernism: Dorothy Richardsons Pilgrimage.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Donald, J., Friedberg, A., & Marcus, L. (eds.) (1999).
Close-Up, 19271933: Cinema and Modernism.
Dorothy Richardson Website. At www.keele.ac.uk/
depts/en/richardson/richardsonmain.html, accessed
Mar. 9, 2010.
Edel, L. (1964). Dorothy Richardsons Pilgrimage. In

The Modern Psychological Novel 19001950 [1955],
rev. edn. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, pp. 15461.
Fromm, G. G. (1994). Dorothy Richardson: A Biography
[1977] 2nd edn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Garrity, J. (2003). Neither English nor Civilized:
Dorothy Richardsons Spectatrix and the Feminine
Crusade for Global Intervention. In Step-Daughters
of England: British Women Modernists and the
National Imaginary. Manchester: Manchester
Hanscombe, G. E. (1982). The Art of Life: Dorothy
Richardson and the Development of Feminist
Consciousness. London: Owen.
McCracken, S. (1997). Masculinities, Modernist Fiction,
and the Urban Public Sphere. Manchester:
McCracken, S.(ed.) (2008 ). Pilgrimages: The Journal
of Dorothy Richardson Studies. At www.keele.ac.uk/
depts/en/richardson/pilgrimages/index.html,
Parsons, D. (2007). Theorists of the Modernist Novel:
James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Radford, J. (1991). Dorothy Richardson. New York:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Richardson, D. (1914a). Gleanings from the Works of
George Fox. London: Headley.
Richardson, D. (1914b). The Quakers: Past and Present.
London: Constable.
Richardson, D. (1915). Pointed Roofs. London:
Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1916). Backwater. London:
Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1917). Honeycomb. London:
Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1919a). Interim. London: Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1919b). The Tunnel. London:
Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1921). Deadlock. London: Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1923). Revolving Lights. London:
Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1925). The Trap. London: Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1927). Oberland. London: Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1930). John Austen and the
Inseparables. London: William Jackson.
Richardson, D. (1931). Dawns Left Hand. London:
Duckworth.
Richardson, D. (1935). Clear Horizon. London: J. M.
Dent/Cresset.
Richardson, D. (1938). Pilgrimage. 4 vols. London: J. M.
Dent/Cresset. (Includes authors foreword and
Dimple Hill for the first time.)
Richardson, D. (1967). Pilgrimage. 4 vols. London: J. M.
Dent. (Includes March Moonlight for the first time.)
RICHARDSON, DOROTHY
Richardson, D. (1989). Journey to Paradise: Short Stories

and Autobiographical Sketches (ed. T. Tate). London:
Virago.
Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing [1977], rev.
edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sinclair, M. (1918). The Novels of Dorothy Richardson.
Little Review, 4, 311.
Staley, T. F. (1976). Dorothy Richardson. Boston:
Twayne.
331
Thomson, G. (1996). A Readers Guide to Dorothy

Richardsons Pilgrimage. Greensboro, NC: ELT.
Thomson, G. H. (1999). Notes on Pilgrimage:
Dorothy Richardson Annotated. Greensboro, NC:
ELT.
Watts, C. (1995). Dorothy Richardson. Plymouth:
Northcote House/British Council.
Winning, J. (2000). The Pilgrimage of Dorothy
Richardson. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
S
Science Fiction
NICHOLAS RUDDICK
Science fiction of the literary kind was invented in

Britain and there has been a lot of British science
fiction. More than 3,000 significant science fiction
novels and story collections by authors born or
long resident in the UK were published in Britain
in the twentieth century. Yet science fiction in
general and British science fiction in particular are
problematic concepts. Science fiction was not
used as a genre label until the 1930s in the USA,
long after works now considered to be science
fiction first appeared in Britain. There is still no
generally accepted academic definition of science
fiction, and there remains an academic reluctance
to take seriously what is thought to be a popular
literature for the immature. Those who do take
British literary science fiction seriously are often
anxious to disassociate it from sci-fi Hollywood
blockbusters and their spin-offs.
British science fiction originates in late nineteenth-century fiction by H. G. Wells. The young
Wells was of the first generation of British students to receive a thorough scientific education.
His intellectual hero was Thomas Henry Huxley,
the leading figure in the campaign to persuade
educated Britons to accept the new evolutionary
theory. The agnostic Huxley argued that Darwinism called for a thorough re-envisioning of mans
place in nature, and named the shift from the
scriptural to the scientific explanation of lifes
origins a new reformation. Science fiction could
not have come into being without this reformation; more than any other kind of fiction, science
fiction explores what it is to be a member of the

human species in a scientifically conceived
universe.
Wellss late Victorian contemporaries were
progressionists: they believed that human beings
advanced inevitably toward perfection. Wells, by
contrast, knew that humanity was a biological
species engaged in a struggle for existence against
competing organisms and changing environmental conditions. Progress was never assured, while
the certain consequence of failure to adapt was
extinction. Seeking to persuade his contemporaries that progressionism was delusional, Wells
wrote scientific romances that explored the
consequences of the new worldview for the future
of humanity.
Wellss main science fiction invention was a
machine to accelerate evolutionary change artificially so that, instead of occurring slowly over
millions of years, it could be observed by an
individual in historical time. In Wellss first great
scientific romance The Time Machine (1895), the
seeming utopia of the far future hides a dystopian
nightmare of post-human regression. Wells demonstrates that by Darwinian logic any static
utopia goes to the bad: if a species doesnt need
to struggle to survive, it degenerates mentally and
physically. The Time Machine transformed utopian and dystopian fiction and was the seminal
work of modern literary science fiction.
In his other major early scientific romances
Wells applied evolutionary thought to existing
fictional themes. The Island of Doctor Moreau
(1896) is about a mad scientist who, unlike Mary
Shelleys Victor Frankenstein, is aware of human

SCIENCE FICTION
evolutionary history. The Invisible Man (1897) is a

psychological portrait of the scientific genius as
dangerous lunatic. In The War of the Worlds
(1898), Wells updated the alarmist invasion narrative and elaborated on post-Darwinian anxieties about being supplanted by a superior species.
Wellss interest in character and his anti-progressionism continue to mark British science fiction,
while American science fiction tends to be more
idea-driven and optimistic.
Wellss scientific romances include exciting
adventure, Swiftian satire, and horrific elements
worthy of Poe. They are also cognitively rich: they
force readers to confront metaphysical questions
that the traditional realistic novel has no means of
dealing with. Hugo Gernsback, the US father of
science fiction as pop-cultural entertainment,
reprinted all Wellss major scientific romances in
his pioneering pulp magazine Amazing Stories
(19269). Though Wells himself showed no interest in this transatlantic development, his work
more than any other helped Gernsback formulate
science fiction as a popular genre.
After 1900, Wells promoted a technocratic,
socialist world state as a means of avoiding human
self-extinction. Mainstream writers wrote scientific romances to disagree with his politics: Joseph
Conrad and Ford Madox Ford in The Inheritors
(1901); Rudyard Kipling in With the Night
Mail (1909 [1905] ) and As Easy as ABC
(1917 [1912] ); and E. M. Forster in The Machine
Stops (1909). In The War in the Air (1908) and
The World Set Free (1914) Wells suggested that
civilization needed to be torn down before it
could be reconstructed on sounder principles.
His contemporaries George Griffith, William Le
Queux, and Louis Tracy simply relished staging
near-future wars with advanced weaponry.
Disasters, both man-made and natural, became
a frequent subject of twentieth-century British
science fiction, reflecting the pessimism that
comes naturally to disillusioned idealists in a
bellicose, spiritually uncertain age. In M. P. Shiels
The Purple Cloud (1901) everyone is quickly killed
off with volcanic gas so as to track the mental
degeneration of the lone survivor. A striking
interwar counterpart is S. Fowler Wrights Deluge
(1927), in which a devastating flood allows society
to be reorganized on libertarian principles.
Many notable early scientific romances were
variations on Wellsian visions of superhumanity
333
or subhumanity: J. D. Beresfords The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), G. B. Shaws Back to Methuselah (1921), E. V. Odles The Clockwork Man
(1923), Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932),
John Gloags Tomorrows Yesterday (1932), and
W. Olaf Stapledons Odd John (1935). Stapledon,
a visionary on whom the science fiction label
sits awkwardly, traced in Star Maker (1937)
humanitys ultimate evolution into a disembodied godlike entity.
A few early science fiction writers turned to
prehistory, as Wellss focus on the future left ripe
for exploitation the terrain that had been opened
up by the post-Darwinian discovery of human
antiquity. Arthur Conan Doyles The Lost World
(1912) remains the most popular work of prehistoric science fiction: an exciting adventure yarn
combining those staples of pop prehistory, apemen and dinosaurs. Fowler Wrights Dream
(1931) and James Leslie Mitchells Three Go Back
(1932) are more earnest: their nostalgia for
the primitive is a protest against the horrors of
modern civilization.
Between the late 1930s and early 1960s, scientific romance was slowly superseded by American-style science fiction as Yank magazines
filtered into Britain. Stirrings of British science
fiction fandom were evident by 1937, by which
time John Wyndham, who later traded on
the quintessential Englishness of his fiction, had
already begun publishing in the US pulps. C. S.
Lewis in his Cosmic Trilogy (1990 [193845] )
used science fiction motifs to allegorize Christian
themes, but the genres agnostic roots made the
result awkward. Lewiss friend J. R. R. Tolkien
instead developed fantasy fiction, first with
The Hobbit (1937) and after World War II with
The Lord of the Rings (19545). A counter-genre
to Wellsian science fiction, Tolkienian heroic
fantasy offers a consoling escape from the ugly,
godless scientific world.
Katherine Burdekins Swastika Night (1937),
Rex Warners The Aerodrome (1941), and The
Sound of His Horn (1952) by Sarban constitute
a neglected trilogy of British science fiction
responses to the rise of totalitarianism in the
1930s. So do three famous postwar works: George
Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the bestknown dystopian novel in world literature;
and William Goldings Lord of the Flies (1954)
and The Inheritors (1955), poetic novels that
334
SCIENCE FICTION
recapitulate the fall of humanity in an attempt

to understand the persistence of evil in a secular,
naturalistic universe.
The 1950s saw the rise of the cosy catastrophe
exemplified by Wyndhams The Day of the Triffids
(1951), in which the English people, faced with
alien menaces, pulled together as they had done
during the Blitz. More disconcerting ecological
disaster scenarios by John Christopher such as
The Death of Grass (1956) were not quite so
popular, perhaps because they dealt with more
plausible dangers. While Wyndhams fiction was
marketed without science fiction trappings,
Arthur C. Clarkes seemed indistinguishable from
American science fiction of the Golden Age. Yet
Clarke owed more to Stapledons evolutionary
transcendentalism than to US models. His early
masterpiece Childhoods End (1953) suggests the
cost, as well as the benefit, of becoming superhuman. This decade also saw the debut of Brian
Aldiss, who throughout his long, distinguished
career has built bridges between science fiction
and the mainstream and between British scientific
romance and American science fiction. His first
important novel was Non-Stop (1958), a striking
variation on the science fiction theme of conceptual breakthrough.
During the New Wave (196279), British writers under the influence of J. G. Ballard rejected
the technophilia of American science fiction and
imported more sophisticated narrative techniques from the literary avant garde. In Ballards
The Drowned World (1962), the disaster is neither
a dreadful warning nor an excuse to remodel
society, but a manifestation of a Freudian death
drive; the characters embody humanitys unconscious desire to return to the inorganic realm.
Further insights into the roots of violence were
offered by the British-based US film director
Stanley Kubrick in his black comedy Dr. Strangelove (1964), and by Anthony Burgesss novel
A Clockwork Orange (1962), filmed powerfully
by Kubrick in 1971.
Ballard was the twentieth-century British writer who, after Wells, did most to make science
fiction a literature worth reading. While Wellss
estranged perspective came from his lowly background and scientific training, Ballards came
from his upbringing in Shanghai and his wartime
internment in a Japanese camp. His science fiction masterpieces are his Urban Disaster Trilogy,
Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and HighRise (1975). No other British writer has so ambitiously attempted to decode the demented dreams
of Western civilization from the bland, concrete
reality of the contemporary urban environment.
British New Wave science fiction is typified by
the contents and design of New Worlds magazine
under Michael Moorcocks editorship (196471),
and by story anthologies such as Judith Merrils
England Swings SF (1968) and Langdon Joness
The New SF (1969). Longer experimental fictions
such as Aldisss Report on Probability A (1968) and
Ballards The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) retain
sociological interest. More durable achievements
will likely include Moorcocks Behold the Man
(1969), John Brunners Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
and The Sheep Look Up (1972), Keith Robertss
Pavane (1968), Ian Watsons The Embedding
(1973), and Christopher Priests Inverted World
(1974).
Perhaps the greatest science fiction achievement in the 1960s was the collaboration between
New Wave Kubrick and Golden Age Clarke that
resulted in the film and novel both called 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968). Kubricks enigmatic
movie, in which a computer is the most interesting character, the background music has more
emotional impact than the dialogue, and each
frame is a compositional masterpiece, remains the
most highly regarded science fiction film ever
made. But Kubrick owed much to Clarkes conception of humanitys continuing need for selftranscendence if our extinction is to be averted.
British science fiction seemed to fall into a
decade-long trough after the New Wave, when
sci-fi values dominated the publishing industry
in the wake of George Lucass film Star Wars
(1977). Ballard in Hello America (1981) turned
his satiric gaze on US popular culture, while
Christopher Priest abandoned science fiction entirely. The 1980s was a golden decade of science
fiction parody and pastiche: Douglas Adamss The
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and its
sequels; Terry Pratchetts Discworld series, beginning with The Colour of Magic (1983); Terry
Gilliams movie Brazil (1985); and the TV series
Red Dwarf (198899). Playing little part in the US
cyberpunk renaissance, British science fiction
writers seemed drained: stasis or decadence were
the keynotes of M. John Harrisons In Viriconium
(1982) and Aldisss monumental Helliconia
SCIENCE FICTION
Trilogy (19825). But respected mainstream

novelists now incorporated science fiction elements without condescension: Russell Hoban in
Riddley Walker (1980), Alasdair Gray in Lanark
(1981), D. M. Thomas in The White Hotel (1981),
and John Fowles in A Maggot (1985).
A boom revitalized British science fiction
after 1990, though the most prominent contemporary writers are too different to form a school,
and slip easily between science fiction and adjacent genres, even within the same work. Gwyneth
Jones in Bold as Love (2001) writes near-future
science fiction/fantasy/horror fiction from a feminist perspective. China Mieville in Perdido Street
Station (2000) writes weird fiction colored by
Marxism and contemporary literary theory. Stephen Baxters Evolution (2002) is a Darwinian
epic in the tradition of Wells, Stapledon, and
Clarke. Kim Newman writes recursive dark
fantasy; Jeff Noon composes playful, hallucinatory experimental fiction; and Neil Gaiman operates
in every conceivable fantastic medium and genre.
Though few literary historians would disagree
that Wells is a major figure in the history of science
fiction, Americans tend to emphasize the foundational role played by the pulp magazine editors
Gernsback and John W. Campbell. In other words,
they believe that Americans should earn most of
the credit for the existence of a genre whose protocols were formulated in the USA. Meanwhile,
Aldiss, who has long argued for Shelleys Frankenstein (1818) as science fictions originating work,
has shown little interest in identifying the specificity of British science fiction.
There are three main critical approaches to the
problematic existence of British science fiction.
The editors of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
(Clute & Nicholls, 1993), the best-regarded reference work in the field, feel that it would have been
redundant to give separate entries for the USA
and UK, since science fiction from these areas
dominates the Encyclopedia. This approach
emphasizes the idea of science fiction as an
Anglo-American collaboration and makes the
huge science fiction field a little more manageable.
Yet because this approach ignores differences
between British and American science fiction, it
feeds suspicions that British science fiction is an
impersonation of the genuine American article.
The science fiction novelist and critic Brian
Stableford argues in Scientific Romance in Britain
335
(1985) that Wellsian scientific romance was an

integral part of British literary culture until 1950,
barely interacting with American science fiction.
Deriving from the post-Darwinian scientific essay, scientific romance is speculative, futuristic,
elegant, delicately ironic, and evolutionary in
theme. After World War II changes in British
publishing practices made it more profitable to
ape American models and scientific romance died
out. Stableford threw a brilliant new light on a
forgotten chapter in British literary history but
implied that, after 1950, British science fiction was
a pale shadow of American science fiction.
In Ultimate Island (1993), critic Nicholas
Ruddick delineates a continuing British science
fiction tradition that links Wells to the present.
It expresses itself via the recurrent motif of
the Island as a metaphor both for Great Britain
and for the insular self. This Island functions as
an arena on which a catastrophic evolutionary
struggle is staged. Ruddick promotes a science
fiction canon of important works marked by this
specifically British feature, but excludes many
notable oeuvres. Clarkes work does not display
the required Britishness, while the unquestionably British works of Aldiss lack the characteristic
motif.
The academic study of science fiction in Britain
is now firmly established, with the Science Fiction
Foundation at the University of Liverpool serving
as its natural focus. What British science fiction
now needs is a comprehensive literary history that
synthesizes the critical approaches summarized
above. The goal of such a project would be to show
how British science fiction, far from being an
impersonation of American models, is an indigenous cultural product with deep roots and with a
long series of literary achievements to its credit.
SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Fantasy,
Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF);
Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian
Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian
Fiction (AF)
Adams, D. (1979). The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
London: Pan.
Aldiss, B. W. (1958). Non-Stop. London: Faber and
Faber.
336
SCIENCE FICTION
Aldiss, B. W., & Wingrove, D. (1986). Trillion Year

Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London:
Gollancz.
Ballard, J. G. (1962). The Drowned World. London:
Gollancz.
Ballard, J. G. (1970). The Atrocity Exhibition. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Ballard, J. G. (1973). Crash. London: Jonathan Cape.
Baxter, S. (2002). Evolution. London: Orion.
Beresford, J. D. (1911). The Hampdenshire Wonder.
London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Bergonzi, B. (1961). The Early Scientific Romances of
H. G. Wells. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Brunner, J. (1968). Stand on Zanzibar. New York:
Doubleday.
Brunner, J. (1972). The Sheep Look Up. New York:
Harper and Row.
Burdekin, K.(as Constantine, M.) (1937). Swastika
Night. London: Gollancz.
Heinemann.
Christopher, J. (1956). The Death of Grass. London:
Michael Joseph.
Clarke, A. C. (1953). Childhoods End. New York:
Ballantine.
Clarke, A. C. (1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York:
Clute, J., & Nicholls, P. (eds.) (1993). The Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction 2nd edn. London: Orbit.
Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1901). The Inheritors:
An Extravagant Story. London: Heinemann.
Doyle, A. C. (1912). The Lost World. London: Hodder
and Stoughton.
Forster, E. M. (1928). The Machine Stops [1909]. In The
Eternal Moment and Other Stories. London: Sidgwick
and Jackson, pp. 161.
Foundation (1984). British Science Fiction as Seen
from Abroad [special issue], 30 (Mar.).
Fowles, J. (1985). A Maggot. London: Jonathan Cape.
Gerber, R. (1959). The English Island Myth: Remarks
on the Englishness of Utopian Fiction. Critical
Quarterly, 1(1), 3643.
Gilliam, T. (dir.) (1985). Brazil. 20th Century Fox.
Gloag, J. (1932). Tomorrows Yesterday. London: Allen
and Unwin.
Golding, W. (1954). Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and
Faber.
Golding, W. (1955). The Inheritors. London: Faber and
Faber.
Greenland, C. (1983). The Entropy Exhibition: Michael
Moorcock and the British New Wave in Science
Fiction. London: Routledge.
Harrison, M. J. (1982). In Viriconium. London:

Gollancz.
Hoban, R. (1980). Riddley Walker. London: Jonathan
Cape.
and Windus.
Jones, G. (2001). Bold as Love. London: Gollancz.
Jones, L. (ed.) (1969). The New SF. London:
Hutchinson.
Kincaid, P. (1995). A Very British Genre: A Short History
of British Fantasy and Science Fiction. Folkestone:
British Science Fiction Association.
Kipling, R. (1909). With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000
A.D. [1905]. In Actions and Reactions. London:
Macmillan, pp. 10967.
Kipling, R. (1917). As Easy as ABC [1912]. In A Diversity
of Creatures. London: Macmillan, pp. 144.
Kubrick, S. (dir.) (1964). Dr. Strangelove; or, How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Columbia.
Kubrick, S.(dir.) (1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey. MGM.
Lewis, C. S. (1990). The Cosmic Trilogy, comprising Out
of the Silent Planet [1938], Perelandra [1943], That
Hideous Strength [1945]. New York: Tor.
Merril, J. (ed.) (1968). England Swings SF. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday.
Mieville, C. (2000). Perdido Street Station. London:
Macmillan.
Mitchell, J. L. (1932). Three Go Back. London: Jarrolds.
Moorcock, M. (1969). Behold the Man. London: Allison
and Busby.
Nicholls, P. (1973). An ABC of British Science Fiction:
Apocalypse, Bleakness, Catastrophe. In C. Carrell
(ed.), Beyond This Horizon. Sunderland: Ceolfrith,
pp. 1825.
Odle, E. V. (1923). The Clockwork Man. London:
Heinemann.
Secker and Warburg.
Pratchett, T. (1983). The Colour of Magic. Gerrards
Cross: Smythe.
Priest, C. (1974). Inverted World. London: Faber and
Faber.
Priest, C. (1979). British Science Fiction. In P. Parrinder
(ed.), Science Fiction: A Critical Guide. London:
Longman, pp. 187202.
Roberts, K. (1968). Pavane. London: Hart-Davis.
Ruddick, N. (1992). British Science Fiction: A
Chronology, 14781990. New York: Greenwood.
Ruddick, N. (1993). Ultimate Island: On the Nature of
British Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Sarban (Wall, J. W.) (1952). The Sound of His Horn.
London: Peter Davies.
Science Fiction Studies (2003). The British SF Boom
[special issue], 30(3).
SCOTT, PAUL
Shaw, G. B. (1921). Back to Methuselah: A

Metabiological Pentateuch. London: Constable.
Shiel, M. P. (1901). The Purple Cloud. London: Chatto
and Windus.
Stableford, B. (1985). Scientific Romance in Britain
18901950. New York: St. Martins.
Stapledon, W. O. (1937). Star Maker. London:
Methuen.
Thomas, D. M. (1981). The White Hotel. London:
Gollancz.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937). The Hobbit; or, There and Back
Again. London: Allen and Unwin.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1965). The Lord of the Rings [19545].
Warner, R. (1941). The Aerodrome: A Love Story.
London: John Lane.
Watson, I. (1973). The Embedding. London: Gollancz.
Wells, H. G. (1895). The Time Machine: An Invention.
London: Heinemann.
Wells, H. G. (1896). The Island of Doctor Moreau.
London: Heinemann.
Wells, H. G. (1897). The Invisible Man. London:
C. A. Pearson.
Wells, H. G. (1898). The War of the Worlds. London:
Heinemann.
Wright, S. F. (1927). Deluge: A Romance. London:
Fowler Wright.
Wyndham, J. (1951). The Day of the Triffids. London:
Michael Joseph.
Scott, Paul
JANIS HASWELL
Two decades before the publication of Edward

Saids Orientalism (1978), Paul Mark Scott examined in 13 successive novels the colonial relationship between England and India. Scott is best
known for the Raj Quartet, produced as a drama
series by Granada Television in 1984 and aired
on PBS under the title The Jewel in the Crown.
His contribution to the postcolonial assessment
of the imperial experience is nothing less than
groundbreaking.
Scott was born on March 25, 1920, in London,
to a family of painters and commercial artists.
When his fathers business failed, Scott left public
school to work as an accountant. At the beginning
of the war, he enlisted in British Intelligence and
was deployed to India in March 1943, where he
commanded an air supply unit. After repatriation
in 1946, Scott worked as an accountant in a
literary agency, then joined David Higham As-
337
sociates as an agent, and was later a director until

1960, when he left to write full-time. He was
married to novelist Nancy Edith Avery on October 23, 1941 and had two daughters, Carol (b.
1947) and Sally (b. 1948).
Originally a poet and then a playwright, Scott
reached his full potential as a novelist only gradually, publishing his first novel, Johnny Sahib, in
1952, and seven subsequent novels in the next 12
years. They are varied in quality, and later he
would counsel readers to avoid them except
for The Mark of the Warrior (1958). But this
advice is misleading since Scotts most important
themes the importance and dignity of work, and
the historical ties between England and India
emerge consistently.
By the early 1960s Scott had built a reputation
as a novelist on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1964
his publisher sent him to India to rejuvenate his
creative juices. While visiting the village of his
former havildar, Scott found himself reacting to
the primitive conditions by assuming a sahib
face the facade ruling whites turn toward the
foreign and frightening other. He would revisit
India again in 1969 and 1971.
The resulting four novels are collectively titled
the Raj Quartet. The dominant image of The
Jewel in the Crown is a girl running in the dark:
Daphne Manners, who paid the price for loving
Hari Kumar (an England-educated black man
returned to India). This is Scotts trademark
technique, weaving his themes around a primary
image deepened by a counterpoint image the
missionary Edwina Crane, who has qualities,
according to Scott, different from but perhaps
complementary to those of the girl . . . It is a
technique of reverse exploration (1986, 64). The
Day of the Scorpion (1968) widens the story line,
infusing the lives of the Layton family in Pankot
with the KumarManners tragedy. Sarah Layton
emerges as the iconoclast who resists the Rajs
collective pressure to use her white skin as the
basis of her value and identity. The Towers of
Silence (1971) is a quiet book that pushes Scotts
themes even deeper through the perspective of
retired missionary Barbie Batchelor, a devotee of
Ralph Waldo Emerson. A Division of the Spoils
(1975) is a book of action, centered on historian
Guy Perron, who witnesses the moment of Indian
independence and what Scott believed was the
moral failure of England: the partition of India
338
SCOTT, PAUL
and Pakistan. Scott regarded Sarah as the center

of Division and Perron as a positive, sympathetic
critic. But the character who unites the Quartet
is Ronald Merrick the complex, lower-class
Englishman who defended at all costs (to the
point of tragic self-delusion) the racial superiority
of whites. He was, more than any other character,
caught in the colonial mentality of what Scott
called perpetual Edwardian sunlight (1986,
126).
Although he admitted only to T. S. Eliot
as an influence, Scott is often compared to
E. M. Forster, an unfortunate reference that has
prompted some critics to pronounce the Quartet
as seriously limited in its critique of imperial
power. Scott himself, however, characterized his
novels as a literature of dissent, though he
adamantly refused to privilege realities of
power as his focus; heavy-handed politicized
fiction would generate a network of images incapable of capturing the fundamentals of human
experience (1986, 83). He avoided didacticism for
another reason: he sought a particular relationship with his readers, a moral dialogue between
the writer and the reader, and thereby invited a
creative and critical response to his novels (114).
Readers who enter into that dialogue find that
the Quartet offers an anti-essentialist account of
national identity, prompting Schwarz to call Scott
white Englands first novelist of decolonization
(1992, 99).
During his lifetime, Scotts novels never
achieved the status of commercial blockbusters,
primarily because he attempted to put India back
on Englands map of awareness, and India was not
a saleable topic in the 1950s and 1960s. Scott
believed that silence about the demise of empire
would only engender historical ignorance, a dangerous thing. His return to India marks his refusal
to keep quiet, to do nothing in the face of insular
indifference and belligerence. His message, in its
broadest formulation, is that Englishness has
been inexorably altered because England has cohabited with India. This insight has the potential
to break down cultural insularity. In Scotts view,
England would never know itself apart from its
colonial relationship with India because India is
the place where the British came to the end of
themselves as they were (1998, 3).
In 1977 Staying On was awarded the Booker
Prize. Scotts final published work, a retelling of
the Cinderella story titled After the Funeral

(1978), featured pen and ink illustrations by his
daughter Sally. While teaching as a writer-inresidence at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma
in the fall of 1977, Scott was diagnosed with cancer
and underwent surgery. He returned to London
in December, and died there on March 1, 1978.
Forster, E. M. (BIF)

Childs, P. (1998). Paul Scotts Raj Quartet: History and
Division. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria.
Haswell, J. (2002). Paul Scotts Philosophy of
Place(s): The Fiction of Relationality. New York:
Peter Lang.
Schwarz, B. (1992). An Englishman Abroad . . . and at
Home: The Case of Paul Scott. New Formations, 17,
95105.
Scott, P. (1952). Johnny Sahib. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Scott, P. (1953). The Alien Sky. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Scott, P. (1956). A Male Child. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Scott, P. (1958). The Mark of the Warrior. London: Eyre
and Spottiswoode.
Scott, P. (1960). The Chinese Love Pavilion. London:
Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Scott, P. (1962). The Birds of Paradise. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Scott, P. (1963). The Bender. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Scott, P. (1964). The Corrida at San Feliu. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Scott, P. (1966). The Jewel in the Crown. London:
Heinemann.
Scott, P. (1968). The Day of the Scorpion. London:
Heinemann.
Scott, P. (1971). The Towers of Silence. London:
Heinemann.
Scott, P. (1975). A Division of the Spoils. London:
Heinemann.
Scott, P. (1977). Staying On. London: Heinemann.
Scott, P. (1978). After the Funeral. London:
Whittington.
Scott, P. (1998). The Day of the Scorpion. Chicago:
Scott, P. (1986). My Appointment with the Muse.
London: Heinemann.
Spurling, H. (1990). Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the
Raj Quartet. New York: Norton.
SCOTTISH FICTION
Tedesco (Haswell), J., & Popham, J. (1985).

Introduction to the Raj Quartet. Washington, DC:
University Press of America.
Weinbaum, F. S. (1992). Paul Scott: A Critical Study.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Scottish Fiction
DAVID GOLDIE
In an essay of 1896 the quixotic Scottish writer

R. B. Cunninghame Graham railed against contemporary trends in Scottish fiction, arguing that,
because of their pernicious influence, to-day a
Scotchman stands confessed a sentimental fool
. . . oppressed with the tremendous difficulties of
the jargon he is bound to speak, and above all
weighted down with the responsibility of being
Scotch (Nash 45). Many of the Scottish writers
who followed him in the next century were very
conscious of this responsibility of being Scotch
and the need to answer to its particular demands.
For some it was a source of pride, and a duty of
care they took on willingly; for others it was an
unwelcome historical burden that impeded the
free travel of their minds. But whether they liked
it or not, they shared in Scotland an often problematic common ground. At the beginning of the
twentieth century Scotland was a small nation on
the periphery of Europe; a nation without statehood, locked as it was into a political union
dominated by a partner, England, that was almost
10 times its size. It was weak as a political entity
but strong economically, having gained enormously from the British imperial project for
which it had provided much of the heavy engineering as well as merchants, administrators, and
soldiers. Added to this, it was a country that had
difficulty in coming to a settled view of itself: a
country of three languages (English, Scots, and
Gaelic) and two distinct cultures (Lowland and
Highland); a nation renowned for its beautiful
landscapes that had some of the most heavily
industrialized and squalid cities on the planet; a
place that set a high value on education, with
more ancient universities than England, but
which lost many of its best minds to London.
Given these contexts, it is perhaps no surprise
that the most influential book on Scottish literature to emerge in the early century, G. Gregory
339
Smiths Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919), characterized the nations literature
as fundamentally divided against itself. In Gregory Smiths view, Scottish literature was rarely
capable of achieving a unified vision but was
rather perennially involved in a delicate balancing
act between extremes of fantasy and realism,
escape and engagement. The term he coined for
this, the Caledonian antisyzgy (from syzygy,
meaning unity or alignment), was picked up and
used (perhaps overused) by practitioners and
critics, and became the paradoxical sign, the token
of a deep self-contradiction and insecure sense of
identity, under which Scottish literature marched
for much of the twentieth century.
At the turn of the century, Scottish fiction
seemed to be stuck firmly on the escapist side of
Gregory Smiths dichotomy, tending to evade the
difficult issues of contemporary Scotland by
dwelling in the nations past. The novels and
stories of Fiona MacLeod (William Sharp),
among them Pharais: A Romance of the Isles
(1894) and The Sin-Eater (1895), for example,
depict a myth-laden rural Scotland, heavy with
the world-weariness and cultural pessimism of
the French Symbolists and the Celtic Twilight.
Less enervated, but perhaps similarly evasive and
pessimistic, was the still popular tradition of
Scottish historical fiction. Largely established by
Sir Walter Scott and lately reinvigorated by Robert Louis Stevenson, this tradition was not without its moral ambiguities and psychological
depths, but its emphasis on romantic adventure
and stirring landscape distanced it from the everyday concerns of its readers. It was a tradition
that would continue: John Buchans John Burnet
of Barns (1898) and Witch Wood (1927), Violet
Jacobs Flemington (1911), and Neil Munros The
New Road (1914) were worthy successors, the last
in particular blending Stevensons psychological
acuteness with Scotts ambiguity about the relative merits of Highland and Lowland cultures in a
very readable story of the moral decline and
economic destruction of Jacobitism in eighteenth-century Scotland. The popular novels of
Nigel Tranter and Dorothy Dunnett would continue this tradition in the second half of the
twentieth century, ensuring a wide international
readership for Scottish historical fiction.
A different past was evoked in the so-called
Kailyard fiction, which dominated Scottish
340
SCOTTISH FICTION
literature at the turn of the century, and which was

the main cause of Cunninghame Grahams ire.
This fiction, as typified by J. M. Barries Auld Licht
Idylls (1888), S. R. Crocketts The Stickit Minister
(1893), and Ian McLarens Beside the Bonny Brier
Bush (1894), constructs a timeless small-town
Scotland of pawky, perceptive farmers and their
gossipy sharp-witted wives, of ministers who
learn to love the earnest eccentricities of their
flocks, and of the soft-centered tragedies of
bright young men dying on the verge of success
in the wider world. It is a fiction that is often
derided for its sentimentalism, but there is perhaps more to it than its detractors allow. It offered
a reassuring notion of rootedness and community
to its many readers, and was, as several contemporary critics have argued, often more ironic and
self-reflexive than it might appear at first glance.
But what is unanswerable is that it signally failed
to address the issues of the contemporary nation:
like the fictions of the Celtic Twilight and of
historical romance, it provided worthwhile and
often thoughtful entertainment but ultimately
ducked the issues facing a modern, largely
urban society.
The need to redress the balance, to stop taking
refuge in the past and to make a literature that
squarely faced the facts of industrialization (and
later deindustrialization) was one that would be
felt strongly throughout Scottish fiction for the
rest of the century. The first steps toward this were
taken in two early century novels that challenged
the Kailyard directly and exposed its cozy assumptions to the cold blasts of European realism
and classical fatalism. The first is George Douglas
Browns The House with the Green Shutters (1901),
a novel that brings a whiff of Balzac and Zola to
small-town Scotland, showing a bourgeois family
cracking under commercial pressures and the
strain of keeping up appearances. As is often the
case in Scottish fiction, the plot focuses on the
contention between a father and son: the domineering John Gourlay senior, an imaginatively
limited and brutal merchant of high ambitions,
and the morbidly oversensitive, fushionless John
Gourlay junior. As the story builds toward the
younger Gourlays murder of his father, the reader hears strong echoes of classical tragedy, but
above all feels the rural pieties of the Kailyard
being violently, almost melodramatically, desecrated. Gillespie (1914) by John MacDougall Hay
a kind of Dostoevsky to Douglas Browns Balzac

similarly takes strands of Kailyard fiction, naturalism, and classical drama and knits them with a
malevolent Presbyterianism into a grim familial
tragedy, precipitated by the hubris of a tyrannical
merchant father, Gillespie Strang.
Both novels challenge the assumptions of the
Kailyard, showing the corrosive moral effects of
commercialization, but continue to inhabit its
small-town environment. The city, the locus of
much English and European realism and the
environment in which most Scots lived, rarely
featured in Scottish fiction until the 1930s. With
the exception of Frederick Nivens The Justice of
the Peace (1914), another father and son novel
with a largely benign view of Glasgow, and Patrick
MacGills Children of the Dead End (1914) and
The Rat-Pit (1915), which offer much harsher
takes on the Irish immigrant experience in Glasgow and western Scotland, Scottish cities went
largely unexplored in fiction. This absence would
be remedied by sensitive treatments of urban
poverty in novels such as Dot Allans Makeshift
(1928), Edwin Muirs Poor Tom (1932), and
George Blakes The Shipbuilders (1935), and
would be exploited for sensational effect in Alexander McArthur and Kingsley Longs No Mean
City (1935). The most interesting comparative
examinations of the urban experience in this
period, however, come in two works that trace
the movement of families from rural to urban
Scotland. The first is Lewis Grassic Gibbons A
Scots Quair trilogy of 19324, which follows Chris
Guthrie, from her youth in the rich farming
country of the Mearns before World War I,
through successive failing marriages and life in
a declining small town, to her (and her sons)
engagements with radical politics in the fictional
city of Duncairn in the 1930s. The novels, beginning with Sunset Song (1932), move from an
elegiac portrayal of a rural community destroyed
by World War I to a strident account of contemporary urban poverty and political struggle.
Chriss journey is a personal one, an attempt at
self-realization in the face of a hostile and patriarchal political economy, but it is also a national
one. Her husband half-joking refers to her in the
second novel in the sequence, Cloud Howe (1933),
as Chris Caledonia: a reminder that these
are Scotlands struggles as much as those of an
isolated individual adrift in modernity. Equally
SCOTTISH FICTION
radical in its politics, and almost as wide in its epic

sweep, is James Barkes The Land of the Leal
(1939). A more overtly populist book than A
Scots Quair, and less dominated by a lyrical attention to landscape, The Land of the Leal follows a
family on their long journey from a declining
countryside in the nineteenth century to 1930s
Glasgow. The novels strong central character,
Jean Ramsay, shares some of the traits of Chris
Guthrie but also owes something to the resolute,
independent women, Joanna Bannerman and
Martha Ironside, who manage to escape the narrowing confines of conventional femininity in
Catherine Carswells Open the Door! (1920) and
Nan Shepherds The Quarry Wood (1928).
This mid-century urban fiction was complemented by a reinvigorated rural fiction which
bore some traces of its Kailyard and Celtic antecedents but was less sentimental and idealized,
which acknowledged the economic poverty of the
Scottish countryside but still attempted to see it in
mythic or archetypal terms as a source of spiritual
regeneration. Elements of this are present in
Gibbons Scots Quair, particularly in Chris
Guthries sense of connection to an ancient landscape symbolized in the standing stones to which
she habitually retreats; but it is in the novels of
Neil M. Gunn that this sense of a regenerative
natural landscape finds its fullest expression. His
Highland River (1937) offers an interesting contrast with Gibbon for the way its protagonist Kenn
is, unlike Chris Guthrie, able to rediscover a sense
of natural vitality and hope in his native countryside following the devastation of World War I:
tracing the stream of his life back to its spiritual
wellsprings in childhood. Gunns other major
novels, Sun Circle (1933), Butchers Broom
(1934), and The Silver Darlings (1941), take him
further back into Scotlands past in the case of
Sun Circle to its far distant past but this is not the
melancholy escapism of the Celtic Twilight. Gunn
is aware of the land as a changing economic
environment, a real geography of habitation and
commerce, but he is also alive to its profound
meliorative effects. Working by the accumulation
of closely observed natural detail rather than
generalizing rhetoric, he attempts in these
novels to persuade the reader to look again and
look deeper at the redemptive patterns of
communal life that have shaped the historic Scottish landscape.
341
Gibbon and Gunn are often associated with the

Scottish Renaissance, a movement centered on
the poet Hugh MacDiarmid that attempted to
instill a new confidence in the Scottish voice and a
new sense of independence in its literature.
The success of this movement between the wars,
however, was not matched by success after. Scottish fiction, by most accounts, lost its way in the 30
years after World War II. Robin Jenkinss The
Cone-Gatherers (1955), James Kennaways Tunes
of Glory (1956), and Muriel Sparks The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie (1961) are examples of fine
individual novels by writers who maintained a
steady and high-quality output, but who seemed
to be working in isolation from the main streams
of Scottish thought. Novels that dealt more directly with contemporary conditions, such as
Edward Gaitenss Dance of the Apprentices
(1949) and Gordon M. Williamss From Scenes
Like These (1968), conjured a people and a culture
that seemed exhausted by two World Wwars and
the passing of Scotlands industrial greatness.
What humor they contained was largely the humor of the gallows. This sense of terminal decline
was added to by novels like William McIlvanneys
Docherty (1975), which elegized the masculine
certainties of Scotlands industrial past while
implicitly acknowledging their redundancy in the
present. A surprising number of novels in this
period, notable among them J. F. Hendrys Fernie
Brae (1947), Archie Hinds The Dear Green Place
(1966), and George Friels Mr. Alfred MA (1972),
portrayed sensitive, educated individuals being
beaten down by the urban culture that surrounded them. Modeling themselves on James
Joyces Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man they conveyed a depressing message:
that there was no place in a hostile contemporary
Scotland for the artist and the intellectual.
It is widely agreed that this mood altered in the
early 1980s, and that the last 20 years of the
century saw a significant upswing in the confidence and the range of Scottish fiction. This, it is
sometimes argued, is a consequence of the revived
Scottish political and cultural nationalism that
led, eventually, to the creation in 1999 of a
devolved Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. But
its literary impetus can be said to come principally
from two writers whose work appeared in that
decade, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. Grays
Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) brought a new
342
SCOTTISH FICTION
intellectual assurance and inventiveness into play,

in a narrative that juxtaposed the depressingly
familiar story of a failed Scottish artist against an
imaginatively rich phantasmagoria set in a parallel Scotland. Gray takes a recognizable Scottish
tale of the youthful formation and defeat of its
central character and turns it playfully, with the
aid of techniques culled from a range of conventional, postmodern, and science fictions, into an
intriguing, sometimes mind-bending, aesthetic
adventure. His postmodern playfulness and his
confronting of traditional Scottish masculine attitudes, seen also to advantage in the textual,
moral, and typographic experiments of 1982
Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992), helped
create a writing environment free from many of
the constraints of conventional realism. The novels of Iain Banks, for example, in a prolific output
following his debut, The Wasp Factory (1984),
blend the real and fantastic in sometimes startling
ways. Often, as in The Bridge (1986), they employ
bold time shifts, narrative trickery, and an allusive
wit to uncover historical trauma and explore
difficult issues of personal (and, by implication,
national) identity. A range of other works,
among them Janice Galloways The Trick is to
Keep Breathing (1989), the stories of A. L.
Kennedys Now That Youre Back (1994), and
Irvine Welshs Marabou Stork Nightmares
(1995), similarly use the kinds of bold experimental technique found in Gray to delve into the
darker, less tractable and attractive places of the
Scottish psyche.
If Gray qualified the Scottish urban realist
tradition and helped it develop a new kit of
sophisticated narrative tools, James Kelman
might be said to have worked the other way,
stripping it back down to its raw essentials. From
his first substantial collection of short stories, Not
Not While the Giro (1983), and his debut novel
The Busconductor Hines (1984) Kelman developed a distinctive expletive-laden dialect voice
marked by its desire to write not from somewhere
above the urban working class but from deep
within it. The issue of dialect was fundamental
here, with Kelman being the first writer to challenge directly the problems of representing
Scotlands diverse languages and accents in English that earlier writers had skated uneasily
around. Novelists like Munro and Gunn had, in
the absence of a Gaelic prose fiction tradition
(in contrast to its strong poetic tradition), often

used Gaelic syntax to defamiliarize their English
and offer a sense of linguistic difference without
compromising readability. Similarly with Scots:
many writers choosing to follow Stevenson in
employing a strong Scotch accent of the mind
(Stevenson 23) rather than attempting to mimic
spoken Scots in phonetic forms. The dominant
mode remained English. Where Scots accents
appeared at all it was as direct speech, their
orthographical awkwardnesses being safely corralled in the enclosures of a Standard English
narration. For Kelman this was not so much a
technical nicety as a fundamental political problem, a thoughtless but systematic subjection of the
Scots (and particularly the working-class Scots)
voice to a dominating English one. As a consequence, he introduced a voice that had not been
heard before in Scottish fiction, a narrating consciousness with an often crude, confused force
that refuses to privilege itself in register and
vocabulary over its characters. The result is seen
in novels such as A Chancer (1985) and the Booker
Prize-winning How Late It Was, How Late (1994),
which fuse third-person narration, characters
thoughts, and direct speech in a raw, free indirect
vernacular voice that brings the experiences of
those marginalized by modern society characters like the feckless gambler Tammas and the
blinded small-time criminal Sammy Samuels
powerfully and often sympathetically back to the
center of our attention.
This apparently simple step, of valorizing the
demotic and privileging it as narrative speech, had
a surprisingly powerful effect in freeing Kelmans
successors from the restrictions of polite form.
Enthused by his combativeness and his linguistic
radicalism, younger writers such as Irvine Welsh,
Duncan McLean, Alan Warner, and Des Dillon
produced a number of bold, confrontational novels that use the vernacular with a new confidence
McLean and Warner taking that voice out of its
industrial heartlands and, in novels such as
McLeans Bunker Man (1995) and Warners Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands
(1997), bringing a hard, hip urban sensibility to
the small towns of the Kailyard and the romantic
countryside of the Celtic Twilight. Probably the
most widely known Scottish book of the late
twentieth century, Welshs Trainspotting (1993;
filmed by Danny Boyle in 1995) perhaps best sums
SCOTTISH FICTION
up this new confidence. In parts a degrading,

vicious account of deprivation and addiction, in
others a boisterous, inventive testimony to the
qualities of humor and intelligence that can
weather such devastation, it is never less than
assured in its emotional tone and its range of
dialect voices: compelling the readers attention
despite the potential difficulties of its dense
Leith dialect and unrelenting obscenity. The
complaints of Cunninghame Grahame about
perceived Scottish sentimentalism and the difficulties of the Scots language seemed, 100 years
later, to be no longer such an issue for Scottish
fiction. The burden of being Scotch may not
have been lifted entirely, but it was now being
explored with directness and a confident vigor.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Politics
and the Novel (BIF)
Allan, D. (1928). Makeshift. London: Melrose.
Banks, I. (1984). The Wasp Factory. London:
Macmillan.
Banks, I. (1986). The Bridge. London: Macmillan.
Barke, J. (1939). The Land of the Leal. London: Collins.
Blake, G. (1935). The Shipbuilders. London: Faber and
Faber.
Brown, G. D. (1901). The House with the Green Shutters.
London: John Macqueen.
Brown, I., Clancy, T. O., Manning, S., & Pittock, M.
(eds.) (2007). The Edinburgh History of Scottish
Literature, vol. 3: Modern Transformations:
New Identities (from 1918). Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Buchan, J. (1898). John Burnet of Barns. London:
John Lane.
Buchan, J. (1927). Witch Wood. London: Hodder and
Stoughton.
Carswell, C. (1920). Open the Door! London:
Andrew Melrose.
Christianson, A., & Lumsden, A. (eds.) (2000).
Contemporary Scottish Women Writers. Edinburgh:
Craig, C. (ed.) (1987). The History of Scottish Literature,
vol. 4: Twentieth Century. Aberdeen: Aberdeen
University Press.
Craig, C. (1999). The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative
and the National Imagination. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Crawford, R. (2007). Scotlands Books: The Penguin
History of Scottish Literature. London: Penguin.
343
Dunn, D. (ed.) (1995). The Oxford Book of Scottish Short

Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Friel, G. (1972). Mr. Alfred MA. London: Calder and
Boyars.
Gaitens, E. (1949). Dance of the Apprentices. Glasgow:
William McLellan.
Galloway, J. (1989). The Trick is to Keep Breathing.
Edinburgh: Polygon.
Gibbon, L. G. (1932). Sunset Song. London: Jarrolds.
Gibbon, L. G. (1933). Cloud Howe. London: Jarrolds.
Gibbon, L. G. (1934). Grey Granite. London: Jarrolds.
Gifford, D., & McMillan, D. (1997). A History of
Scottish Womens Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Gifford, D., Dunnigan, S., & MacGillivray, A. (eds.)
(2002). Scottish Literature: In English and Scots.
Gray, A. (1984). 1982 Janine. London: Jonathan Cape.
Gunn, N. M. (1933). Sun Circle. Edinburgh: Porpoise.
Gunn, N. M. (1934). Butchers Broom. Edinburgh:
Porpoise.
Gunn, N. M. (1937). Highland River. Edinburgh:
Porpoise.
Gunn, N. M. (1941). The Silver Darlings. London: Faber
and Faber.
Hart, F. R. (1978). The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey.
Hay, J. M. (1914). Gillespie. London: Constable.
Hendry, J. F. (1947). Fernie Brae. Glasgow: William
McLellan.
Hind, A. (1966). The Dear Green Place. London: New
Authors.
Jacob, V. (1911). Flemington. London: John Murray.
Jenkins, R. (1955). The Cone-Gatherers. London:
Macdonald.
Kelman, J. (1983). Not Not While the Giro and Other
Stories. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Kelman, J. (1984). The Busconductor Hines. Edinburgh:
Polygon.
Kelman, J. (1985). A Chancer. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Secker and Warburg.
Kennaway, J. (1956). Tunes of Glory. London:
Putnams.
Kennedy, A. L. (1994). Now That Youre Back. London:
Jonathan Cape.
MacGill, P. (1914). Children of the Dead End. London:
Herbert Jenkins.
MacGill, P. (1915). The Rat-Pit. London: Herbert
Jenkins.
MacLeod, F. (1894). Pharais: A Romance of the Isles.
Derby: Harpur and Murray.
344
SELF, WILL
MacLeod, F. (1895) The Sin-Eater and Other Tales.

Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes.
March, C. L. (2002). Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean,
Warner, Banks, Galloway, and Kennedy. Manchester:
University of Manchester Press.
McArthur, A., & Long, K. (1935). No Mean City:
A Story of the Glasgow Slums. London: Longmans,
Green.
McCordick, D. (ed.) (2002). Scottish Literature in the
Twentieth Century: An Anthology. Dalkeith: Scottish
Cultural Press.
McIlvanney, W. (1975). Docherty. London: Allen and
Unwin.
McLean, D. (1995). Bunker Man. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Muir, E. (1932). Poor Tom. London: J. M. Dent.
Muir, E. (1936). Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of
the Scottish Writer. London: Routledge.
Munro, N. (1914). The New Road. Edinburgh:
Blackwood.
Murray, I., & Tait, B. (1984). Ten Modern Scottish
Novels. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Nash, A. (2007). Kailyard and Scottish Literature.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Niven, F. (1914). The Justice of the Peace. London:
Eveleigh Nash.
Petrie, D. (2004). Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film,
Television and the Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Shepherd, N. (1928). The Quarry Wood. London:
Constable.
Smith, G. G. (1919). Scottish Literature: Character and
Influence. London: Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1961). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
London: Macmillan.
Stevenson, R. L. (1888). Memories and Portraits.
Wallace, G., & Stevenson, R. (eds.) (1993). The Scottish
Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams.
Cape.
Warner, A. (1997). These Demented Lands. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Watson, R. (2007). The Literature of Scotland: The
Twentieth Century, 2nd edn. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Welsh, I. (1993). Trainspotting. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Welsh, I. (1995). Marabou Stork Nightmares. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Williams, G. M. (1968). From Scenes Like These.
Wittig, K. (1958). The Scottish Tradition in Literature.
Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.
Self, Will
M. HUNTER HAYES
The author of 18 books and recipient of praise

from novelists such as J. G. Ballard and Martin
Amis, Will Self has earned a reputation as one of
Englands more provocative writers. A caustic
satirist and deconstructionist of political and
popular cultures, Self has developed a distinctive
prose style that combines lyrical precision with
verbal agility while offering unique perceptions
on contemporary life, a style he terms dirty
magical realism.
Born William Woodard Self in London on
September 26, 1961, the son of Peter and Elaine
Rosenbloom Self, a political science professor and
publishers assistant respectively, Self spent his
childhood and teenage years in the north London
suburbs that feature prominently in his early
short stories and novels. Selfs mother, an expatriate American from a working-class Jewish
background that contrasts sharply with the
more privileged Anglican background of Selfs
paternal lineage, encouraged his love of reading.
Despite possessing a deep familiarity with
British, Continental, and American literature,
when Self entered Exeter College, Oxford University in 1979 he read politics, philosophy,
and economics instead of English. This early
training in philosophy, coupled with Selfs linguistic dexterity, provides a key component of
Selfs fiction.
His second book, The Quantity Theory of
Insanity (1991), a collection of short stories
published six years after Slump (1985), a collection of Selfs trenchant cartoons that appeared in
the New Statesman introduces readers to notable characters and motifs that continue to populate Selfs fictive world. One prominent recurring
character, Dr. Zachary Busner, a self-styled renegade pop psychiatrist reminiscent of R. D. Laing,
appears in Ward 9, which presents a psychiatric
hospital as a nightmarish environment. Additional details concerning Busners background and
career emerge piecemeal through Selfs successive
works of fiction, including his 1997 novel, Great
Apes. The collections best-known story, The
North London Book of the Dead, features details
taken closely from Selfs reactions to his mothers
death from cancer in 1988. Additionally, this story
SELF, WILL
posits a situation London inhabited by the

deceased as well as the living that Self explores
more fully and even more personally in his third
novel, How the Dead Live (2000a). The Quantity
Theory of Insanity generated wide press coverage
in England as well as critical acclaim; it was
shortlisted for the 1992 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize the
following year.
Self followed The Quantity Theory of Insanity
with a pair of novellas in Cock and Bull (1992)
that satirized social conventions of sex and gender identity. In Cock a woman acquires a penis
and begins to assume masculine behavior traits
that include rape and murder. Its counterpart,
Bull, describes the fate of a rugby player and
journalist, John Bull, who grows a vagina behind
one knee and is subsequently seduced and impregnated by his doctor. These novellas combine
Kafkaesque transformations and a postmodern
self-awareness typical of much of Selfs later
work. In 1993, the year that the influential literary magazine Granta included Self in its second
Best of Young British Novelists installment, he
published his first novel, My Idea of Fun. A
Faustian novel subtitled a cautionary tale, My
Idea of Fun is a highly allusive work that displays
the influence of James Hoggs The Private Memoirs and Personal Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824) and Mikhail Bulgakovs classic political
and cultural satire, The Master and Margarita
(1966), while also referring at times to childrens
stories and jokes. Although many critics responded harshly to the novels grotesque violence, other critics responded enthusiastically
to the novel. Such sharp critical division has
become commonplace with the reception of
Selfs work. A multilayered novel that ridicules
consumerist culture while also providing a
critical look at the authors well-publicized
history of drug addiction, My Idea of Fun
explores the links between personal will and
moral action.
Throughout the 1990s Self contributed to
many general interest and literary magazines
while also working at one time or other for each
of Londons leading newspapers, and he continues to write weekly columns and various
articles. Many of these articles appear in his
collections of journalism and essays, Junk Mail
(1995), Sore Sites (2000c), Feeding Frenzy (2001),
345
and Psychogeography (2007). His 1996 novella,

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, takes a fiercely
satirical look at Londons media and celebrity
milieu. He has also been a frequent commentator
on the radio and television, appearing frequently
on BBC Radio 4 and on television programs
including Have I Got News for You, Shooting Stars,
and Grumpy Old Men. Through these appearances and his newspaper columns, Self has
become well known to many people unfamiliar
with his fiction.
His second full-length novel, Great Apes
(1997), adopts a satiric method akin to eighteenth-century satirists through its depiction of
chimpanzees as the dominant evolutionary species. In this novel, chimpanzees and humans
exchange places in the evolutionary order, compelling Self not only to reimagine quotidian behaviors but also to present the modern city drawn
to a smaller physical scale. Such considerations of
scale, whether spatial, physical, temporal, or psychological, have long been a figurative device that
Self employs effectively to relate the reader to the
fictive environment. In Great Apes he does so in
order to challenge conventional notions of
humans supposed superiority to other species.
Whereas Great Apes undercuts many humanist
arguments, his next novel, How the Dead Live,
raises metaphysical questions in its depiction of a
necropolitan London by closely reinterpreting
The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This novel also
includes Selfs harshest depiction of his years as a
heroin addict.
Selfs following novels have become increasingly political. Dorian: An Imitation (2003), his
retelling of Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian
Gray, which Self moved forward a century, deals
with the socio-politics of sexual identity and
AIDS. In 2006 he published The Book of Dave
(2006), a novel with a bifurcated narrative structure set several centuries in the future and the
recent past in order to portray the misogynistic
anger that Dave Rudman, a London cab driver,
suffers due to his loss of parental rights and a
futuristic dystopian society in which a repressive
religion is founded on a sacred text that is in fact
Rudmans mad rant to his son. With The Butt
(2008a), Self allegorically depicts a society combining Australia, where he lived briefly and continues to visit, with Iraq that provides the setting
for his satiric look at the military and social
346
SINCLAIR, IAIN
politics of Tony Blair and George W. Bush. After

his start as a promising enfant terrible, Self has
proven to be a prolific and influential writer
whose work acquires significance beyond the
United Kingdom.
SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF);
London in Fiction (BIF); Politics and the
Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
Alderson, D. (2005). Not Everyone Knows Fuck All
about Foucault: Will Selfs Dorian and Post-Gay
Culture. Textual Practice, 19(3), 30929.
Golomb, L. A. (2003). In R. J. Lane, R. Mengham, & P.
Tew (eds.), Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge:
Polity, pp. 7486.
Hayes, M. H. (2007). Understanding Will Self.
Self, J. (2001). Self Abuse: Love, Loss and Fatherhood.
Self, W. (1985). Slump. London: Virgin.
Self, W. (1991). The Quantity Theory of Insanity.
London: Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (1992). Cock and Bull. London: Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (1993). My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale.
London: Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (1994). Grey Area and Other Stories. London:
Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (1995). Junk Mail. London: Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (1996). The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. London:
Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (1997). Great Apes. London: Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (1998). Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough
Boys. London: Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (2000a). How the Dead Live. London:
Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (2000b). Perfidious Man. London: Viking.
Self, W. (2000c). Sore Sites. London: Ellipsis.
Self, W. (2001). Feeding Frenzy. London: Viking.
Self, W. (2003). Dorian: An Imitation. London: Viking/
Penguin.
Self, W. (2004). Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe.
London: Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (2006). The Book of Dave. London: Viking/
Penguin.
Self, W. (2007). Psychogeography. London:
Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (2008a). The Butt: An Exit Strategy. London:
Bloomsbury.
Self, W. (2008b). Liver. London: Viking.
Self, W. (2009). Psycho Too. London: Bloomsbury.
Sinclair, Iain
ALEX MURRAY
Iain Sinclair is one of the most challenging and

innovative contemporary British novelists, with
his Beat-inspired explorations of London, both
past and present, having changed the face of city
writing in the twentieth century.
Born in Wales in 1943, Sinclair moved to
London in 1961 to undertake a brief course at
the London School of Film Technique in Brixton,
before moving to Trinity College Dublin, where
he undertook an English and fine arts degree. He
then returned to London a few years later and
taught film studies briefly in the North East
London Polytechnic. Following this Sinclair made
a documentary about Allen Ginsbergs appearance at the Dialectics of Liberation conference
in 1967. In the 1970s Sinclair set up his own
publishing house, Albion Village Press, while also
working as a council gardener, cigar packer,
brewery worker, and book dealer.
This eclectic background helps explain
Sinclairs unusual approach to literature. While
many of his contemporaries, such as Peter Ackroyd and Will Self, studied at Oxford or Cambridge and moved into journalism, Sinclair was to
immerse himself in a visual medium (he has made
a number of films), while taking influence from
American postwar literature, rather than systematically following a traditional literary education.
Sinclair was also involved in various London
avant garde literary circles as well, attempting
to publish and champion writing that would
otherwise struggle to find an audience. These
differences mark themselves very clearly in his
writing. Beginning in the 1970s he was to publish
a series of small-circulation poetry collections
which drew heavily on the Beat and Black Mountain poets, including Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide
Bridge (1978).
Lud Heat attempted to plot an occult map of
London by suggesting that the churches of the
seventeenth-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor were infused with a power that was to
influence these spaces in the present. Following
these early poems, Sinclair published his first
novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, through
the tiny Goldmark press in 1987. The novel is a
dense and sophisticated simultaneous explora-
SINCLAIR, IAIN
tion of contemporary London and the Jack the

Ripper murders of 1888. It contains, roughly
speaking, three narratives. The first follows a
group of book dealers in the present as they make
their way around the UK, and then around the
East End of London, as they attempt to find the
rare first publication of Conan Doyles Studies in
Scarlet and ruminate on the identity of Jack the
Ripper. The second narrative is set in 1888 and
largely follows the activities of James Hinton and
his friend Sir William Withey Gull, who, in
Sinclairs novel, is Jack the Ripper. The third
narrative is a vignette of Gulls childhood that
explores the religious influences on Gulls later
acts. Yet this summary does little to provide an
image of the density of Sinclairs prose, and the
confusion that his anti-narrative style creates.
The boundaries between the three narratives are
continually blurred as Sinclair allows the past and
the future to cast a light upon each other.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings achieved a
degree of critical success, yet it was soon overshadowed by Sinclairs second novel, Downriver
(1991), which was awarded the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize. The novel is a long and sprawling
exploration of the lower reaches of the Thames, or
more particularly of the transformation of the
Docklands under Thatcherism. It is part of a
project that Sinclair has referred to as exorcising
Thatcherism, in which the struggle against
abstract government policy is framed as an apocalyptic, absurdist battle for the citys soul. Again
the narrative style is dense, the prose rife with
allusions, both cultural and historic, that require
an active and engaged reader with a knowledge of
Londons past. The critical acclaim that followed
brought Sinclair a rise in readership and increased
his public profile, and he became a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and other
such publications. He followed up Downriver with
the almost impenetrable Radon Daughters (1994),
a novel loosely tied around a set of key energy
fields that radiate out from the London General
Hospital in Whitechapel that again explored
psychic scars on the London landscape. The novel
is also notable for its savage Sinclairian satire of
Oxbridge academia.
The late 1990s brought Sinclair further recognition with his series of documentary London
walks, Lights Out for the Territory (1997a), an
alternative guidebook to London for literati. The
347
book is actually composed of nine excursions

around London, examining separate elements of
the citys past and present through the act of
walking. Only one of these pieces had not been
previously published; the book is more a collection of essays than a unified volume. In it Sinclair
constructs something like an alternative myth of
the city, one that stands in opposition to the citys
broader governmentality, crass capitalism, and
heritage industry. This work was celebrated by
a number of famous Londoners including Peter
Ackroyd and Ken Livingstone, the once and future mayor of London. Two years later, with
Rachel Lichenstein, Sinclair published Rodinskys
Room (1999), an account of the disappearance of
the Spitalfields synagogue caretaker David Rodinsky in the 1960s. Sinclair posited his book in
opposition to the blue plaque history of the city;
his was an attempt to account for those silenced
by the relentless development of the city.
Following the success of Lights Out for the
Territory, Sinclair, in an almost self-conscious
fashion, attempted to move his writing out of
London. In Landors Tower (2001) he moved his
mythographic project to the Welsh valleys; in
London Orbital (2002) he explored the boundaries
of the city on the M25; in Dining on Stones (2004)
he examined the area around the A13, leading
from London to the coast; and in Edge of The
Orison (2005), he followed the walk of John Clare
from Epping Forest to a village near Peterborough. In all of these prose works London is a place
to be escaped, with its zones of decay and detritus
increasingly disappearing within its inner city,
swallowed up by the relentless process of gentrification that has transformed London since the
1970s. In 2006 Sinclair edited a collection of essays
entitled London: City of Disappearances, in which
appear contributions from such contemporary
figures as Michael Moorcock, Will Self, and
J. G. Ballard and such historical figures as Thomas De Quincey. The collection suggests that
Londons condition is one of continual disappearance with its history in a constant process of
erasure, and that the task of its writers is to
record the city as it disappears from view. Sinclair, the London mythographer par excellence,
is fittingly publishing a documentary fiction
entitled Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, which
concerns the London suburb that has been the
authors home for the past 30 years and which is
348
SINCLAIR, MAY
currently being transformed forever by its redevelopment for the 2012 Olympic Games.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); London in
Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF)

Atkins, M., & Sinclair, I. (1999a). Liquid City. London:
Reaktion.
Baker, B. (2007). Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Bond, R. (2005). Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt.
Lichtenstein, R., & Sinclair, I. (1999). Rodinskys Room.
London: Granta.
Murray, A. (2007). Recalling London: Literature and
History in the Work of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd.
London: Continuum.
Sheppard, R. (2007). Iain Sinclair. London: Northcote
House.
Sinclair, I. (1988). White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
[1987]. London: Palladin.
Sinclair, I. (1991). Downriver. London: Vintage.
Sinclair, I. (1994). Radon Daughters. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Sinclair, I. (1995). Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge
[1975, 1978]. London: Vintage.
Sinclair, I. (1997a). Lights Out for the Territory. London:
Granta.
Sinclair, I. (1997b). Slow Chocolate Autopsy
(illus. D. McKean). London: Phoenix.
Sinclair, I. (2001). Introduction. In A. C. Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet. London: Penguin.
Sinclair, I. (2002). London Orbital: A Walk around the
M25. London: Granta.
Sinclair, I. (2003). The Verbals: Iain Sinclair in
Conversation with Kevin Jackson. London: Worple.
Sinclair, I. (2005). Edge of the Orison. London:
Hamish Hamilton.
Sinclair, I. (ed.) (2006). London: City of Disappearances.
Wolfreys, J. (2004). Writing London: Materiality,
Memory, Spectrality. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Sinclair, May
ALLISON PEASE
May Sinclair was one of the most respected,

intellectually connected, and widely read English
novelists and critics of the early twentieth century.

Comprising 21 novels, a novel in verse, numerous
short stories, two books on idealist philosophy, a
book on the Br
onte sisters, a journal about assisting an ambulance during World War I, and
dozens of literary reviews, Sinclairs vast oeuvre
encompasses realist and experimental styles as
well as thematic concerns with philosophical
idealism, the loss of faith, the literary marketplace,
new women, psychology, patriarchy, and the
restraints of social convention that reflect her
unique longevity as late Victorian, Edwardian,
and modernist female writer. Sinclairs fiction
engages the literary innovations of her time,
beginning with novels that were socially rebellious
in a realist mode and moving toward novels that
experimented with narrative point of view and
stream of consciousness, a phrase she famously
used to describe Dorothy Richardsons style in
Pilgrimage (191538), thus creating a new critical
vocabulary for understanding modernism. Most
consistently, her fiction explores the social conditions and psychological conflicts that impede
individual self-realization.
Born Mary Amelia St. Clair Sinclair in 1863 in
Rock Ferry, near Liverpool, to a middle-class
Scottish family, May, the name she adopted in
the 1890s, was the youngest and only girl of six
children. Her father was an alcoholic ship owner
whose business failed when May was 7, causing
her parents to separate and the boys to be sent to
numerous relatives. Thereafter May lived with her
religious, strong-willed mother in reduced circumstances, moving from place to place. Despite
this, May taught herself German, Greek, and
French and read widely. She received one year
of formal schooling at the Cheltenham Ladies
College where she gained the admiration of
Dorothea Beale, one of the most respected educators in England. She published a lyrical and
philosophical book of poems under the name
Julian Sinclair in 1886, and her first novel, Audrey
Craven, in 1897, and continued to live with and
care for her mother until her death in 1901.
Sinclair never had any public romantic attachments and lived alone through the publication of
her final novel in 1927. She developed Parkinsons
disease and remained out of public view until she
died in 1946.
May Sinclairs first commercial and critical
success arrived after the death of her mother with
SINCLAIR, MAY
the publication of her third novel, The Divine Fire,

in 1904. Often compared to George Gissings New
Grub Street (1891), The Divine Fire centers around
the vulnerability of impoverished authors and the
commercialization of book publishing. Like
much of Sinclairs work, it is heavily imbued with
the idealist philosophy of T. H. Green (183682).
Sinclairs novels focus on the spiritual and psychological self-realization of their characters,
chronicling their struggles with frustrating human institutions and conventions. In an early
article on idealism Sinclair argued: We regard
the individual as under a positive obligation to
develop to his utmost all the powers and latent
capabilities of his nature (1893, 703). Her
Edwardian novels, such as The Helpmate
(1907), Kitty Tailleur (1908), and The Creators
(1910) reflect Edwardian feminisms concern
with womens sexual and social roles, and
question the mind/body dualities imposed on
women. In these earlier novels impediments to
self-realization come from external, social
sources, conventions that in the later novels have
been internalized into internal psychological conflict. By the early 1920s critics had claimed Sinclair
as the foremost English woman novelist of her
time as well as the best known in England and
America.
Although Sinclairs psychological theories are
imbricated with her idealist philosophy, and are
considered by todays standards simplistic, her
contemporaries respected her psychological acumen, one publisher introducing her to a PEN
conference in 1924 as the great novelist, the
greatest psychological analyst in fiction (Boll
142). Sinclair was an avid reader of psychology
and in 1913 was a benefactor and member of the
board of the first clinic in Britain to offer psychoanalytic treatment, the Medico-Psychological
Clinic. The three novels generally regarded as her
best, The Three Sisters (1914c), Mary Olivier: A
Life (1919), and The Life and Death of Harriet
Frean (1922), are psychological studies of women
who are victimized by their familys demands that
they conform to the Victorian ideal of the selfsacrificing woman. These novels, each set in rural
England, detail the workings of repression,
whether of sexual feelings or the drive for
independence.
Largely through the work of feminist scholars,
modernist criticism has come to reassess and
349
value Sinclair, whose reputation waned for many

decades in the twentieth century. Critical attention has focused on her admittedly autobiographical novel, Mary Olivier: A Life, which brings
together Sinclairs most pronounced formal innovations with her ongoing concerns with
womens struggles for independence and selfrealization, the harms of repression, and sublimation as an almost mystical force by which to escape
and simultaneously realize oneself. Influenced by
the early volumes of Richardsons Pilgrimage, the
novel is written in stream-of-consciousness, impressionist, or poetic imagist style and fluctuates
between second- and third-person narration. The
narrative brings the reader into intimate contact
with the psychological processes of the narrator,
Mary, foregrounding her internal conflicts as she
struggles early in life to earn her mothers recognition on a par with her brothers and later in life to
escape the psychological confines of her mothers
repressive expectations so she can, at age 40,
develop into a writer. The novel is lyrical and
dense, and is similar in style and content to the
better-known modernist novels, James Joyces A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and
Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse (1927).
Sinclair was at the center of literary modernism, but not of it. She befriended and supported
the work of struggling and well-known authors,
among them Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia
Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, H.D., Richard Aldington, Rebecca West, and Katherine Mansfield.
Almost a generation older than these figures,
however, she is as much influenced by the nineteenth century as the twentieth.
SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Feminist
Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF);
Richardson, Dorothy (BIF); World War I
in Fiction (BIF)

Boll, T. E. M. (1973). Miss May Sinclair: Novelist.
Press.
Kunka, A. J., & Troy, M. K. (eds.) (2006). May Sinclair:
Moving towards the Modern. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Raitt, S. (2000). May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian.
Oxford: Clarendon.
350
SMITH, ZADIE
Sinclair, M. (1893). The Ethical and Religious Import of

Idealism. New World, 2, 694708 (Dec.).
Sinclair, M. (1897). Audrey Craven. London:
Blackwood.
Sinclair, M. (1898). Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson. London:
Blackwood.
Sinclair, M. (1901). Two Sides of a Question. London:
Constable.
Sinclair, M. (1904). The Divine Fire. London:
Constable.
Sinclair, M. (1906). Superseded. New York: Henry Holt.
Sinclair, M. (1907). The Helpmate. London: Constable.
Sinclair, M. (1908). Kitty Tailleur. London: Constable.
Sinclair, M. (1910). The Creators: A Comedy. London:
Constable.
Sinclair, M. (1912a). Feminism. London: Womens
Suffrage League.
Sinclair, M. (1912b). The Three Brontes. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1913). The Combined Maze. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1914a). The Judgement of Eve and Other
Stories. London: Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1914b). The Return of the Prodigal. New
York: Macmillan.
Sinclair, M. (1914c). The Three Sisters. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1916). Tasker Jevons: The Real Story.
London: Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1917a). A Defence of Idealism: Some
Questions and Conclusions. London: Macmillan.
Sinclair, M. (1917b). The Tree of Heaven. London:
Cassell.
Sinclair, M. (1919). Mary Olivier: A Life. London:
Cassell.
Sinclair, M. (1920). The Romantic. London: Collins.
Sinclair, M. (1921). Mr. Waddington of Wyck. London:
Collins.
Sinclair, M. (1922a). Anne Severn and the Fieldings.
London: Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1922b). Life and Death of Harriett Frean.
London: Collins.
Sinclair, M. (1922c). The New Idealism. London:
Macmillan.
Sinclair, M. (1923). Uncanny Stories. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1924a). Arnold Waterlow: A Life. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1924b). A Cure of Souls. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1925). The Rector of Wyck. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1926). Far End. London: Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1927a). The Allinghams. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1927b). History of Anthony Waring.

London: Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1930). Tales Told by Simpson. London:
Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1931). The Intercessor and Other Stories.
London: Hutchinson.
Zegger, H. (1976). May Sinclair. Boston: Twayne.
Smith, Zadie
DENNIS A. FOSTER
Zadie Smith emerged as one of the most important young novelists in Britain in 2000 with the
publication of White Teeth. Her three novels to
date explore the crossings and conflicts of race,
religion, class, and culture in contemporary family, politics, and business. She is at the forefront of
multicultural writers and was listed by Granta in
its Best of Young British Novelists 3 (2003).
Smith was born in north London on October
27, 1975, to a Jamaican mother and an English
father. Her blended family includes a brother, Ben
Smith, known as the rap musician Doc Brown.
The working-class London she grew up in embodies the postcolonial mixing of peoples and
cultures that now characterizes many larger Western cities. Educated in public schools, she graduated from Kings College, Cambridge (1998) in
English. While at Cambridge, she wrote much of
White Teeth. An early chapter of that book, published by Granta as The Waiters Wife, brought
the book pre-publication attention and a substantial advance. The book was enthusiastically received and won a number of prizes, including the
Guardian First Book Award (2000) and the Whitbread First Novel Award (2000). The intellectual
and linguistic verve of the book drew comparisons to the work of Salman Rushdie and Martin
Amis. Her next book, The Autograph Man (2002),
although not as well received, continued to develop the voice that had sustained the explosive
playfulness of her first novel, but with a more
restrained delivery. On Beauty, her third novel,
brought her the Orange Prize for Fiction (2006)
and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for
Fiction (2005).
Smiths writing approaches the intermixing of
world cultures not through the language of identity politics or the privileged perspective of the
SMITH, ZADIE
marginal, subaltern figure. Rather, she allows

identity to emerge from the intimate encounters
of people compelled, often hilariously, to live
together. In White Teeth, working-class Londoner
Archie Jones is best friends with Samad Iqbal,
whom he fought beside in World War II. He has
married Clara, a beautiful 19-year-old Jamaican.
The interactions of these characters and their
families displays less a set of precise cultural
differentiations than an emerging set of new
features. Samads twins, for example, develop in
opposing directions, drawing from a grab bag of
English, Indian, Muslim, scholarly, and terrorist
qualities. The appearance (and escape) of a genetically engineered mouse designed for research
exemplifies the inevitable gap between origin and
outcome.
Although with not quite the comic touch,
Autograph Man picks up the exploration of identity in the fatherless Jewish Chinese character of
Alex-Li Tandem. Alex is writing a book dividing
the world up into Jewish and Goyish things
that cuts across all lines Jewish office items
(the stapler, the pen holder), Goyish office items
(the paper clip, the mouse pad) (77) and neither race nor religion matter. At the same time, his
Holy Grail-like pursuit of an authentic Kitty
Alexander autograph suggests the deep interplay
of celebrity, market value, and symbol in fabricating a meaningful world. The play of Smiths
language works against any equation of identity
with being and permanence. Rather, it shows that
character is constantly evolving and in flux.
From an epigraph in White Teeth to the explicit
homage in On Beauty (2005), Smith has drawn
from E. M. Forster, emulating his investigation of
the multitude of personal interactions that constitute literary as well as social being. Placing On
Beauty in an American academic setting, she
expands the postcolonial dimensions of her writing to America while reducing her focus to the
small town. Still, the fractures that constitute race,
gender, family, and beauty remain implicit in all
relations. Throughout the novel, she examines the
problems that fantasy the notion that some
simple wholeness is possible brings to social
relations. This idea occurs as well in a short essay
Smith wrote prior to the US invasion of Iraq
in 2003 (6), which focuses its critique on the
American failure to think complexly about the
consequences of war. Smith seems always to look
351
at the next development in each relationship, to

connect in Forsters sense.
The pressures of being a famous author rather
than a writer writing have appeared in numerous
of her interviews over the years. One response for
Smith has been to turn to something like the
literary criticism she once anticipated writing. In
Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel (2007),
written for an unfinished book of essays on writing and fiction, Smith takes apart the fantasy of
producing the perfect book. In the titles allusion
to Samuel Beckett, she reveals something of
the ethic of writing and, by extension, of reading.
The ongoing failure that constitutes valuable
writing requires that readers also give themselves to the difficult work of reading. And
asked to speak on craft, Smith sounds like
Virginia Woolf in A Room of Ones Own or Three
Guineas: Ive been asked to speak about some
aspect of craft. I dithered over this lecture. I
always dither over lectures, never more than
when theyre about craft (2008, 5). In her
dithering, her approach and refusal, her ultimately not identifying with the book (The
book was genuinely strange to me, 12), she,
like Woolf, distances herself from the forces of
identity politics, economics, and criticism that
have marked so much of the literary movement
to which she has contributed.
SEE ALSO: Forster, E. M. (BIF); London in
Fiction (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West
Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF);
Bentley, N. (2007). Re-Writing Englishness: Imagining
the Nation in Julian Barness England, England and
Zadie Smiths White Teeth. Textual Practice, 21(3),
483504.
McEwan, I. (2005). Zadie Smith. Believer 3(6), 4764.
Smith, Z. (1999). The Waiters Wife. Granta, 67
(Autumn), 12743.
Hamilton.
Smith, Z. (2002). The Autograph Man. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Smith, Z. (2003). We Proceed in Iraq as Hypocrites and
Cowards and the World Knows It. Guardian, G2,
p. 7 (Feb. 27). At www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/
feb/27/iraq.world1, accessed Mar. 1, 2010.
352
SPARK, MURIEL
Smith, Z. (2005). On Beauty. Harmondsworth:

Penguin.
Smith, Z. (2007). Fail Better. Guardian (Jan. 13).
At http://zadiesmithnews.wordpress.com/2007/01/
13/fail-better/#more-20, accessed Mar. 1, 2010.
Smith, Z. (2008). That Crafty Feeling. Believer, 6(5),
512.
Spark, Muriel
GERARD CARRUTHERS
Muriel Spark is one of the most important Catholic novelists of the second half of the twentieth
century. An elegant stylist and a sophisticated
manipulator of the novel form, she is a writer of
clinical, often cruel, comedy while diagnosing a
deeply deficient materialism in the contemporary
human condition. Spark has enjoyed both a wide
readership as well as great critical acclaim.
Muriel Sarah Camberg was born in Edinburgh
on February 1, 1918 to a Scottish Jewish father and
an English mother. She was educated at James
Gillespies School in the Scottish capital, where
she encountered the teacher Christina Kay, who
became the model for Sparks most famous character, Jean Brodie. Marrying Sydney O. Spark in
1937, she immigrated with him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and had a son, Robin
(b. 1938). In 1944 she divorced the mentally
unstable Spark, left her son in a convent school,
and returned to Britain where she worked for the
Political Intelligence Office. From 1947 to 1949
Muriel Spark was editor of the Poetry Review, had
her first literary success when The Seraph and the
Zambesi won The Observer newspapers Christmas short story competition in 1951, but was
most intent on becoming a poet. The Fanfarlo
and Other Verse appeared in 1952. During the
early 1950s Spark also gained recognition as a
critic and editor by publishing a coedited collection of essays on William Wordsworth (1950), a
book on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951), a
coedited selection of letters by the Brontes (1953),
and a study of John Masefield (1953). Having
been brought up in a nominally Presbyterian
background (principally through the medium of
James Gillespies), Spark became an Anglican in
1953, heavily influenced as she was by the life and
work of T. S. Eliot. In 1954, however, increasingly
immersed in the work of John Henry Newman,
whose letters she coedited in 1957, she changed

denomination yet again, becoming a Roman
Catholic. Her first novel, The Comforters
(1957), was much admired by critics, including
Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and was the
result not only of Sparks interest in the numinous
but of her recent experience of breakdown and
hallucination (in part due to overindulgence in a
slimming drug). As her reputation for being one
of the most innovative novelists in the Englishspeaking world burgeoned, she moved to
New York in 1962, where she wrote for the New
Yorker, which serialized much of her emerging
fiction. In 1966 Spark moved to Italy, where she
was to live for the rest of her life. She was awarded
the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The
Mandelbaum Gate in 1965 and the Order of the
British Empire in 1967. She became an honorary
member of the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters in 1978, a Dame of the British
Empire in 1993, and a Commandeur in the
French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996.
She was awarded a lifetimes achievement honor,
the David Cohen Prize for Literature, in 1997. Her
twenty-second novel, The Finishing School, was
published in 2004, and she died on April 13, 2006.
The Comforters is the first of many semiautobiographical novels by Spark. In it Caroline Rose,
a half-Jewish convert to Catholicism, struggles to
square the idea of free will with the omniscient
Godhead. Influenced by the French nouveau roman, then little known in the English-speaking
world, this self-reflexive novel involves a central
character who becomes aware of the story being
typed out and of the shocking possibility that
reality in the novel is all a fabrication. Sparks
version of the playful, even postmodern, novel is
fascinating since it is part of her attempts, ongoing
throughout her career, to marry such experimental, metafictional technique to anagogic, or religious, purposes. The Comforters considers the
idea, using the metaphor of the novel, that the
world is a difficult place for the individual morally
to discern, and that the only person entitled to
judge, or to promulgate any absolute narrative, is
God (a curious tension for a creative writer to set
up within her work).
Sparks novels all deal with characters struggling to make sense of who is in control of
a complicated, theocentric destiny. Her third,
Memento Mori (1959), established Spark as a
SPARK, MURIEL
consummate black humorist as Death assumes

the modern technology of the telephone to
threaten, seemingly, a group of elderly Londoners, many of whom have led self-obsessed
lives. In fact Deaths reminder to these people
that they must die is, in effect, God giving them
the chance for moral self-reckoning as the end of
their lives approach. Blithely ignorant of the
afterlife and puffed up with their own importance, most of the characters carry on toward
oblivion in a kind of modern danse macabre,
where the reader is invited to laugh at the veniality
of most of what passes for human activity in the
secular world and to consider the possibility for
themselves that there might be a bigger story
beyond what we apprehend as normality. The
Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) continued what
was fast becoming Sparks hallmark mode of
traumatizing the modern world with unlikely
supernatural visitation. In this novel Dougal
Douglas, in the first instance a stereotypical, disliked Scotsman on the make come to live high
on the hog in London, enters the lives of a group
of suburban characters obsessed with material
progress, respectability, pursuing blackmail, and
adulterous relations. Claiming to be a demon,
Dougal accomplishes such feats as shape-changing by holding down two jobs at once through the
simple expedient of reversing his name for his
second employer and becoming Douglas
Dougal. He also meddles in the lives of others,
for instance turning an extramarital affair into a
menage a trois by becoming a second boyfriend
to a secretary having relations with her boss.
Here we see Dougal acting as an orthodox diabolic
force, where he exacerbates already freely chosen
moral evil and does not introduce it where it
does not already preexist (since in the divine
economy God is the ultimate power who will not
allow the Devil to enforce sin on human existence). In these and other ways, Dougal ruins
some characters and potentially allows all to
consider that the rationalist, materialist, sensualist, consumerist view of life that predominates
in the late twentieth century is in fact morally
threadbare.
In Sparks most famous novel, The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), the eponymous
schoolmarm, like Dougal Douglas, is one of
Sparks many storytellers who create a fog of
multiplying fictions that beguile and blinker.
353
Sparks most Scottish novel, one of only a few

set even partly in her native country, it depicts
Brodie as a combination of Mary, Queen of
Scots and John Knox, Catholic and Protestant,
testimony to a heterogeneous national identity, a
theme that persistently interests Spark at the level
of the individual (one of her finest short stories,
The Gentile Jewesses, has particular fun with
oxymoronic identity as Spark makes the point
that cultural labels that are generally descriptive
are always inadequate, indeed unimaginative).
Jean Brodie highlights Sparks lack of recognition
among her fellow contemporaries in Scottish
writing (in spite of being the Scottish writer, in
heady combination of both popular and critical
acclaim, with the greatest worldwide status since
Robert Louis Stevenson). As a woman of mixed
identity and as a successful cosmopolitan writer,
little concerned in her work with the condition of
Scotland, Spark has been regarded somewhat
coldly by others in the Scottish literary pantheon
(Robin Jenkins, her closest Scottish contemporary in stature, has claimed categorically that she
is not a Scottish writer). Jean Brodie is an essay in
uncertain identity and the fact that human beings
are always less in control of events than they think.
Brodie, a woman of marginalized location, allowed even the limited role of a spinsterhood
teaching career at a girls school only because of
the decimation of the male population following
World War II, fabricates fantasies of her life story
for the consumption of her pupils and herself.
Liberating and pathetic, Brodies stories are licentious and an index of her strictly limited freedom
in society. She also attempts to dictate the life
stories of her chosen students, her creme de la
creme, in a way that is routinely defeated in
each case. We know this through Sparks flash
forward technique that gives endings away, so
that the reader, enlightened, is less interested in
the outcome of the plot and has attention drawn
instead to the works moral parameters. Exuberant, silly, and the inadvertent occasion for grace in
the lives of her chosen set, Brodie is one of the
most extravagant fictional creations of the later
twentieth century (a fine film version was made in
1969 starring Maggie Smith, for which she won an
Oscar, and numerous versions for the stage also
have been produced).
The Girls of Slender Means (1963) consolidated
Sparks technique of casting and satirizing the
354
SPARK, MURIEL
moral dynamics among an intimate set of people

against a large-scale historical backdrop (this time
the residents of a female hostel during World War
II). Moving briefly away from her previous miniaturism, where many characters interlock in the
course of what had been, in the case of Brodie and
Slender Means, essentially novellas, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) is another historical fiction (set
against Palestinian tensions in the 1960s) which,
in its extended foray into the mind of one largely
admirable central character, essays a depth of
psychological realism that Spark had not previously attempted, nor to which she was to return.
She returned to a series of short novels of devastating surface satire, where the characters are
largely inscrutable in their inner lives but where
the morality of their situation becomes shockingly clear. The Drivers Seat (1970) features a kind of
hyper-version of Jean Brodie, where a woman,
having given up on a world in which she is
desperately unhappy, sets out to engineer the
drama of her own demise though God, in sinister
form, does not allow her absolute control of
events. Arguably Sparks finest technical performance (something, in any case, that she believed),
this book is certainly the most chilling of all of
Sparks works in its cold-hearted presentation of
the characters. An excellent film version starring
Elizabeth Taylor was made in 1975. Similarly
notable Sparkian performances from the same
period are Not to Disturb (1971), in which brilliantly managed formal cliche, where all happens
according to a most predictable gothic horror
plot, mimics the way in which the immorality of
the characters has brought a hellish certainty to
their lives (and deaths); and The Abbess of Crewe
(1974), a stunning satire of the Watergate scandal,
set in a convent, where neurotic surveillance and
control become the obsessive focus of the
protagonists motivation.
In the 1970s Spark satirized, not always convincingly, the larger than life pretensions of life in
both New York and Italy, before returning to her
best form in the late novels, Loitering with Intent
(1981) and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988),
both of which satirize the literary London she had
known in the 1950s. These novels show Spark
with her hugely amused and scathing eye,
lampooning nefarious schemers and culture
vultures. A mocker of the arrogance of overblown
human designs in its earthbound forms, Spark is
one of the most important religious novelists of

the twentieth century.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Jenkins,
Robin (BIF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Scottish
Fiction (BIF)
Bold, A. (ed.) (1984). Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for
Vision. London: Vision/Barnes and Noble.
Bold, A. (1986). Muriel Spark. London: Methuen.
Carruthers, G. (1997). The Remarkable Fictions of
Muriel Spark. In D. Gifford & D. McMillan (eds.),
A History of Scottish Womens Writing. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press pp. 51425.
Carruthers, G. (2008). Fully to Savour Her Position:
Muriel Spark and Scottish Identity. Modern Fiction
Studies, 54(3), 48704.
Cheyette, B. (2000). Muriel Spark. Tavistock: Northcote
House.
Hynes, J. (1988). The Art of the Real: Muriel Sparks
Novels. London: Associated University Press.
Hynes, J. (ed.) (1992). Critical Essays on Muriel Spark.
London: Macmillan.
Kemp, P. (1974). Muriel Spark. London: Paul Elek.
Lodge, D. (1971). The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience:
Method and Meaning in Muriel Sparks The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie. In The Novelist at the Crossroads.
London: Routledge.
Malkoff, K. (1968). Muriel Spark. New York: Columbia
University Press.
McQuillan, M. (ed.) (2001). Theorising Muriel Spark:
Gender, Race, Deconstruction. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Randisi, J. (1991). On Her Way Rejoicing: The Fiction of
Muriel Spark. Washington, DC: Catholic University
of America Press.
Rankin, I. (1985). Surface and Structure: Reading
Muriel Sparks The Drivers Seat. Journal of Narrative
Technique, 29, 14655.
Richmond, V. B. (1984). Muriel Spark. New York:
Ungar.
Spark, M. (1957). The Comforters. London: Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1959). Memento Mori. London: Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1960). The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London:
Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1961). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
London: Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1963). The Girls of Slender Means. London:
Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1965). The Mandelbaum Gate. London:
Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1970). The Drivers Seat. London:
Macmillan.
STOREY, DAVID
Spark, M. (1971). Not to Disturb. London: Macmillan.

Spark, M. (1974). The Abbess of Crewe. London:
Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1981). Loitering with Intent. London: Bodley
Head.
Spark, M. (1988). A Far Cry from Kensington. London:
Constable.
Spark, M. (1994). The Collected Short Stories. London:
Penguin.
Stanford, D. (1963). Muriel Spark: A Biographical and
Critical Study. Edinburgh: Centaur.
Whittaker, R. (1982). The Faith and Fiction of Muriel
Spark. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Storey, David
WILLIAM HUTCHINGS
Uniquely among working-class writers of his

generation, David Storey has been acclaimed in
England and America as both a novelist and a
playwright. Born in 1933 in Yorkshire, the son of a
coalminer, Storey draws quite specifically on his
varied life experience as a professional athlete, an
artist (educated at Londons prestigious Slade
School of Fine Art), a teacher, a construction
worker, a writer, and a son whose education,
talents, and parental ambitions elevated him
however uneasily from the working class to the
middle class.
Like other novelists of the so-called angry
young men generation (Sillitoe, Wain, Braine,
Kingsley Amis), Storey remains best known for
his first book. This Sporting Life (1960b) is narrated by Arthur Machin, a professional rugby
player whose on-field life and in-game values he
finds difficult to reconcile with his increasingly
intimate domestic relationship with his widowed
landlady. The novel insightfully depicts the psychological values inherent in this roughest of male
contact sports competitiveness, toughness, camaraderie, pain, rituals, teamwork, dedication,
rowdiness, and (not least) violence. Outside the
fields of grown-up play, these characteristics
prove insufficient, even dangerous. There, quite
different, often difficult, bafflingly complex emotions prevail. The novels much acclaimed film
adaptation was directed by Lindsay Anderson (1963)
from Storeys screenplay.
Storeys subsequent two novels, in quick
succession, broke numerous social and literary
355
taboos of their day. Flight into Camden (1960a) is

a breakaway novel whose female first-person
narrator defies social conventions and familial
expectations, establishing a new autonomy
through an adulterous relationship. Radcliffe
(1963b), Storeys earliest third-person narrative,
depicts unabashedly homoerotic desire with a
virtually unprecedented frankness and forthrightness for English fiction. At the time, such relationships were unlawful, discussed only obliquely if at
all. Radcliffe, however, culminates in a protracted,
passionate malemale kiss inside a chapel a
quasi-sacramental scene that scandalized many
readers. Though the characters physiotypes
and class backgrounds now seem stereotypical
(wealthy, effete Leonard Radcliffe lusts after muscular, working-class Vic Tolson), and though the
violent denouement seems lurid and/or melodramatic, Radcliffe remains a milestone in the depiction of homosexuality in English fiction. Storeys
portrayal is far more explicit and forthright than
that of D. H. Lawrence, to whom he has often
been compared a linkage that Storey disdains
(Sage 64).
Storeys next two novels were hewn from a
long, unfinished work. Pasmores (1972) subject
is psychological breakdown a theme Storey
introduced in The Restoration of Arnold Middleton
(1967), his first play. In the novel, Colin Pasmore
undergoes an existential crisis involving both
emotional collapse and marital separation. Yet,
unlike countless novels and plays about domestic
dissolution and strife-laden homes, Pasmore
probes psychological self-exile and the anxieties
of forced exclusions the pain accompanying the
loss of the familiar and mundane, of home,
security, and countless rituals formerly taken for
granted that no longer reassure. Storeys focus
is the central characters reactions rather than
actions, depicted with extraordinary nuance and
psychological insight; his later play The March on
Russia (1989) takes place in Pasmores parents
home. With A Temporary Life (1973), Storey
explored for the first time the life and psychology
of an artist, a former athlete now a teacher, whose
wife is hospitalized with mental illness.
Saville, winner of the Booker Prize in 1976, is a
Bildungsroman whose protagonist comes of age
in Yorkshire during and after World War II.
Acclaimed for its detailed evocation of time,
place, and the working-class community against
356
STOREY, DAVID
which Colin Saville defines himself, it is also an

insightful psychological portrait of ambition,
alienation, and the costs and rewards of achievement. Similarly, in A Prodigal Child (1982), Bryan
Morley grows up distanced from his farm-working parents; he is attracted to and welcomed by the
family of the farms owner, the Spencers. Again,
issues of class, mores, love, and social mobility are
thoughtfully explored.
Present Times marked Storeys turn from his
childhoods era to strife-torn, early Thatcherite
England. Postcolonial immigration, feminist
agitation, financial duress, and unemployment
bewilder and beleaguer middle-aged Frank Attercliffe, a sportswriter and former professional
footballer, the father of five children, abandoned
by his wife for a richer man. Fourteen years later,
A Serious Man (1998) offered an even more
devastating critique of New Labours Britain,
narrated by Richard Fenchurch (a character also
in Storeys play Stages 1992), whose near-complete emotional breakdown resulted in a five-year
confinement in a mental institution. Disconcertingly, many details of Fenchurchs life as a
formerly acclaimed novelist, playwright, and
painter are markedly similar to Storeys own,
radically problematizing where the books fictionality begins and ends, even as the narrators
mental instability makes his self-presentation
unreliable. Yet, clearly, Fenchurch would be
incapable of writing a novel as complex and
sophisticated as A Serious Man.
Matthew Maddox, the protagonist of As It
Happened, is an emeritus professor at a school
of fine art. Having failed an attempted suicide,
now absent his remarried wife and departed
children, he seeks rehabilitation and a sense of
purpose amid the cultural and social malaise
that Fenchurch also deplored. Divided within
himself, as Storeys characters often are, he too
seeks restoration beyond mere resignation and
dismay.
Thin-Ice Skater (2004) marks another abrupt
transition in Storeys fiction. Its narrator is a
withdrawn, self-absorbed 17-year-old whose
strange, obsessive memos comprise the books
first 45 pages and its final chapter; his erotic
involvement with his middle-aged aunt yields
disastrous familial consequences.
Renowned for seemingly straightforward
realism and sharply observed period details of
postwar England, Storeys novels are equally remarkable for their psychological nuances and deft
insights into social class particularly the plight of
those educated out of the working class they were
born into but finding at best uneasy acceptance
into professional or artistic circles. Despite the
later novels increasingly dour or disaffected socio-political themes, their psychological incisiveness and their eloquence are undiminished.
Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
Anderson, L. (dir.) (1963). This Sporting Life. Rank/
Independent Artists.
Eyre, R. (dir.) (1980). Pasmore. Play for Today. BBC
Television.
Jackson, D., & Perkins, W. (1993). David Storey. In M.
Moseley (ed.), British Novelists Since 1960. 3rd series.
Detroit: Gale, pp. 25377.
Pittock, M. (1990). Revaluing the Sixties: This Sporting
Life Revisited. Forum for Modern Language Studies,
26(2), 96108.
Pittock, M. (1991). Storeys Radcliffe. Durham
University Journal, 52(2), 23548.
Pittock, M. (2000). A Serious Novel. Forum for Modern
Language Studies, 35(3), 26177.
Randall, P. R. (1986). The Tie that Binds: Family in the
Novels of David Storey. In A. Wertheim (ed.), Essays
on the Contemporary British Novel. Munich: Max
Hueber, pp. 22744.
Reinelt, J. (1972). Storeys Novels and Plays: Fragile
Fictions. In W. Hutchings (ed.), David Storey: A
Casebook. New York: Garland, pp. 5372.
Sage, V. (1976). Conversation with David Storey. New
Review, pp. 635 (Oct.).
Storey, D. (1960a). Flight into Camden. London:
Longman.
Storey, D. (1960b). This Sporting Life. London:
Longman.
Storey, D. (1963a). Journey through a Tunnel. Listener,
pp. 15961 (Aug. 1).
Storey, D. (1963b). Radcliffe. London: Longman.
Storey, D. (1967). The Restoration of Arnold Middleton.
Storey, D. (1972). Pasmore. London: Longman.
Storey, D. (1973). A Temporary Life. London: Allen
Lane.
Storey, D. (1976). Saville. London: Jonathan Cape.
Storey, D. (1982). A Prodigal Child. London: Jonathan
Cape.
SWIFT, GRAHAM
Storey, D. (1984). Present Times. London: Jonathan

Cape.
Storey, D. (1989). The March on Russia. New York:
Samuel French.
Storey, D. (1992). Stages. In Storey: Plays, vol. 1:
The Contractor, Home, Stages, and Caring. London:
Methuen.
Storey, D. (1998). A Serious Man. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Storey, D. (2002). As It Happened. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Storey, D. (2004). Thin-Ice Skater. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Tredell, N. (2006). Saville, by David Storey. In
M. Moseley (ed.), Booker Prize Novels, 19692005.
Detroit:CengageGale,pp.808.
Swift, Graham
DAVID MALCOLM
Graham Swift is one of the most highly regarded

contemporary British novelists. Since the publication of his first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner,
in 1980, he has won numerous literary prizes
(Last Orders took the Booker Prize in 1996) and
widespread critical acclaim. His fictions have
been translated into many languages, and films
have been made of three of his novels. His work
receives long and usually positive reviews in
major journals. Above all, critics and scholars
pay attention to his 1983 novel Waterland, which
can be seen as one of the central British novels of
the last two decades of the twentieth century.
Although its success has overshadowed Swifts
seven other novels, they, too, have won serious
critical consideration. In a review of Tomorrow
(2007), Alvarez writes: Waterland is an extraordinary work, and there was even better to come
(36). Despite some negative commentary, especially with regard to The Light of Day (2003) and
Tomorrow, Swifts fictions, especially Last Orders
(1996), are seen as important and powerful
novels. In 1996, the eminent Irish novelist
John Banville wrote that Book for book,
Swift is surely one of Englands finest living
novelists (8).
Swift was born in south London in 1949. He
was educated at a private secondary school and at
Queens College, Cambridge, and York University. He has been a full-time writer for most of his
357
career, concentrating almost entirely on fiction.

He is a very private figure in the British literary
world, and one whose biography shows little
direct connection with his work.
Swifts novels are part of a substantial change
that takes place in British fiction in the 1980s.
Along with his contemporaries, Ian McEwan,
Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie,
Rose Tremain, and others, Swift is seen as bringing new thematic depth and technical innovation
to a parochial and unambitious British novel.
While this argument is not wholly true, it does
bear examination, and was certainly perceived as
accurate in the 1980s.
Swifts fiction is homogeneous, although it is
neither repetitious nor boring. He works with a
small number of kinds of narrator, a limited
variety of characters and settings, and a restricted
set of themes. His narrators are usually middleaged (predominately male) and reflective,
scrutinizing their pasts, trying to make sense of
them, in monologues delivered to no one or to
characters who cannot hear them. The past
itself, in various forms individual history, the
history of a locality, national and international
history is the narrators and the novelists
concern. Most narrators are aware of how difficult it is to reconstruct the past. Memory is
selective; causes are hard to know; versions of
the past are frequently best guesses or inventions.
The narrators organization of their memories
embodies these difficulties: they are non-linear
and associative; often words fail the speakers.
The status of these accounts as constructs is
emphasized constantly.
Swifts settings and characters are also variations on some basic motifs. He favors London
suburbs, middle class and working class, although
Waterland is mostly set in a fictionalized,
but verisimilar, East Anglia. There are, however,
excursions beyond south London; for example,
sections of Out of This World (1988) take place in
Greece and postwar Germany. All novels have
roughly contemporary settings, although there
are extensive passages set in the past, either recent
or distant. The family that embodiment of the
individuals link with the past is at the center of
Swifts writing. His narrators usually brood over
relations always complex, frequently soured
between fathers and their children and between
spouses. The characters themselves are drawn
358
SWIFT, GRAHAM
from a variety of social backgrounds: the Beeches

in Out of This World are wealthy arms manufacturers; the protagonists in Last Orders are from
the south London working class and lower middle
class. Critics usually point to the unglamorous
and quotidian nature of these figures, an observation that is only partly true. Certainly their
emotional lives are very rich, and their experiences (incest, abortion, adultery, murder) intense. Indeed, the action of Swifts novels is often
quite violent. Warfare, which for Swift embodies
the destructive power of history, plays an important part in many of his novels.
In terms of genre, Swifts fiction is rooted in the
nineteenth-century British traditions of the social-psychological and the historical novel. It
remains within the conventions of realist fiction,
apart from his use of dead narrators in Out of This
World and Last Orders. However, the technical
complexity of Swifts work multiple points of
view and narrators, an intricate and non-chronological organization of events, the admixture of
many texts generically different from the dominant genre in a novel (for example, fairy tale,
encyclopedia entry, and scientific account in
Waterland), a language that frequently draws
attention to itself gives the novels a self-referential and metafictional focus that goes beyond
the norms of realist prose. Two of his novels,
Shuttlecock (1981) and The Light of Day, have
elements of spy fiction and detective fiction, but
these are both subordinate to the novels psychological interests.
Swift published a collection of short stories,
Learning to Swim and Other Stories, in 1982.
Although these stories have received negative
commentary from many English-language reviewers, scholars in Continental Europe have
been kinder to them. Certainly, two of them,
Seraglio and Hoffmeiers Antelope, are powerfully ambiguous pieces of work.
In almost 30 years, Swift has published eight

novels. His most recent fiction, Tomorrow, is,
unusually for Swift, narrated entirely by a
female character. It is, like his other novels, an
exploration of a familys past and the relation of
that past to the present and future. It has received
hostile reviews. However, no matter how Swifts
career develops, his position in late twentiethcentury British fiction, centered on the achievements of Waterland and Last Orders, is surely
secure.
SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF);
London in Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF)
Alvarez, A. (2007). The Trouble with Happiness [review
of Tomorrow]. New York Review of Books, pp. 367
(Nov. 22).
Banville, J. (1996). Thats Life [review of Last Orders].
New York Review of Books, pp. 89 (Apr. 4).
Craps, S. (2005). Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of
Graham Swift. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.
Lea, D. (2005). Graham Swift. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Malcolm, D. (2003). Understanding Graham Swift.
Swift, G. (1980). The Sweet-Shop Owner. London: Allen
Lane.
Swift, G. (1981). Shuttlecock. London: Allen Lane.
Swift, G. (1982). Learning to Swim and Other Stories.
London: London Magazine Editions.
Swift, G. (1983). Waterland. London: Heinemann.
Swift, G. (1988). Out of This World. London: Viking.
Swift, G. (1992). Ever After. London: Picador.
Swift, G. (1996). Last Orders. London: Picador.
Swift, G. (2003). The Light of Day. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Swift, G. (2007). Tomorrow. London: Picador.
Widdowson, P. (2006). Graham Swift. Tavistock:
Northcote House.
T
Thomas, D. M.
BRAN NICOL
The novelist, poet, and translator Donald Michael

Thomas is the author of nearly 20 collections of
poetry, translations of the Russian poets Pushkin,
Akhmatova, and Yevtushenko, a biography of
Solzhenitsyn, and 13 novels, of which the most
famous is The White Hotel (1981). His fiction has
been considered a significant example of postmodernist writing in that it is anti-realist or
experimental in form and frequently uses the
techniques of pastiche and what Linda Hutcheon
has termed historiographic metafiction (5).
Thomas was born in 1935 in Redruth in
Cornwall. After what he has described as a rather
sheltered early life in west Cornwall, his emigration to Melbourne in Australia at the age of 14
had considerable impact, especially the long
journey by boat itself, during which he went
through puberty. Many of his poems and stories
revolve around the idea of a literal and symbolic
journey, usually by boat or by train, while perhaps his most important collection of poetry,
The Puberty Tree (1992), continually returns to
depict the young Thomass formative experiences in Australia. Australian culture and education (he attended University High School in
Melbourne) also made a lasting impression on
him, not least in cementing his views about the
narrow-mindedness of English society and
culture.
On his return from Australia in 1951, Thomas
began his National Service, most of which involved learning Russian. While he was graded
suitable for low level interrogation of prisoners
(Thomas, 1987), more important than this skill

was the feeling for Russian culture he picked up as
a result. In particular, Thomas discovered the
poetry of Alexander Pushkin (17891837) and
Anna Akhmatova (18891966), probably Russias
two most important poets. After completing National Service, Thomas studied English at New
College Oxford, graduating with first class honors
in 1959 and taking his MA.
At Oxford Thomas entered into the first of three
marriages and published a short story called The
Opportunist in the university magazine Isis the
only publication using his full name. Another
Donald Thomas at Oxford had already published
a volume of poems, and so Thomas subsequently
opted for his trademark initials. Thomas began
writing poetry while taking his diploma in education at Oxford in 1958 and continued to do so while
teaching English at Hereford College of Education
from 1963 to 1977. He became established as a poet
when he was included in Penguin Modern Poets 11
(Black et al. 1968) along with D. M. Black and his
friend Peter Redgrove.
When Hereford College closed down in 1977,
Thomas, at a loose end, returned to Oxford to
embark on a BLitt on Problems in Translating
Pushkin under the supervision of renowned
critic and writer, John Bayley. Although he never
completed his thesis, his immersion in Russian
writing, and his admiration for Russian writers
such as Pushkin, Pasternak, and especially Mikhail Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita
(19667) led him to try writing a novel that would
follow the creative laws of poetry, based very
largely on symbol and image without sacrificing
the drive of realist narrative. He wrote two novels,

360
THOMAS, D. M.
Birthstone (1980), originally begun in collaboration with the poet Elizabeth Ashworth, and The
Flute-Player (1979), a phantasmagoric history of
twentieth-century totalitarian society.
Thomas had intended these novels to be only a
temporary break from writing poetry. Yet at the
end of the 1970s he felt compelled to write another, having been driven to compose a number of
intuitive poems (such as Woman to Sigmund
Freud), as well as experiencing predictive dreams
and astounding coincidences. His third novel,
The White Hotel (1981), is the story of a woman
who is analyzed by Sigmund Freud and is later
murdered by the Nazis at the massacre of Babi Yar
in the Ukraine in 1941. The novel is notable for its
intertextual juxtaposition of different genres,
such as erotic fantasy, poetry, letters, psychoanalytic case study, and a documentary account of the
Holocaust, and its incorporation of passages of
writing from other authors (mainly Freud and
Anatoly Kuznetsovs realist novel about the Babi
Yar massacre). It was shortlisted for the Booker
Prize in 1981.
As is the case with other examples of postmodern bricolage, by the likes of William Burroughs or
Kathy Acker, Thomas was accused of plagiarizing
elements of the novel, even though his debt to
Freud and Kuznetsov is clear from the copyright
page and allusions in the text. The accusations are
perhaps better understood within the context of
the postmodern fondness for incorporating other
texts in a supposedly self-contained work of fiction, a practice that challenges the conventional
understanding of originality and authorship.
Similar effects are created by Thomass Russian
Nights quintet, which followed The White Hotel:
Ararat (1983), Swallow (1984), Sphinx (1986),
Summit (1987), and Lying Together (1990). These
novels are linked not just by their concern with
Russia and the tension between artistic freedom
and a suppressive totalitarian society, but also by
their stylistic promiscuity and Thomass impersonation of the voices of other writers, such as
Pushkin, H. Rider Haggard, and the psychiatrist
Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
In the 1990s Thomas published three novels
which probe the impact of the momentous, traumatic elements of twentieth-century history on
the conscious and unconscious minds of those
who live through them. Flying in to Love (1992a) is
a fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination
and its aftermath, while Pictures at an Exhibition

(1993) is another controversial yoking together of
the Holocaust and psychoanalysis. Eating Pavlova
(1994) masquerades as the personal diary of
Freud, resulting in the creation of an even more
libertarian and subversive though still plausible
Viennese doctor than we know, and allowing
Thomass distinctive Freudian style of richly
symbolic writing to flourish.
In the last decade, Thomas has published only
low-key works: two novels and a second memoir,
Bleak Hotel (2008), which revolves around the
frustrations of The White Hotel being optioned by
film companies for 27 years without ever being
made into a film. But his poetic yet highly readable fiction, especially The White Hotel, continues
to be admired by readers, and his work regarded
by academics as symptomatic of the techniques
and values of postmodern writing generally, and
the genre of Holocaust fiction particularly. He
lives in Truro, Cornwall.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF);
Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (BIF)
Akhmatova, A. (1988). Selected Poems (trans. D. M.
Thomas). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Berman, J. (1987). The Talking Cure: Literary
Representations of Psychoanalysis. New York: New
York University Press, pp. 27094.
Black, D. M., Thomas, D. M., & Redgrove, P. (1968).
Penguin Modern Poets 11: D. M. Black, Peter Redgrove,
D. M. Thomas. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foster, J. B. (1995). Magical Realism, Compensatory
Vision, and Felt History: Classical Realism
Transformed in The White Hotel. In L. P. Zamora &
Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, pp. 26783.
History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, pp.
15877.
Nicol, B. (2002). D. M. Thomas. Plymouth: Northcote
House/British Council.
Punter, D. (1985). The Politics of Fear. In The Hidden
Script: Writing and the Unconscious. London:
Routledge, pp. 11328.
Pushkin, A. (1982). The Bronze Horseman and Other
Poems (trans. D. M. Thomas). London: Secker and
Warburg.
I B I N , C O L M
TO
Thomas, D. M. (1979). The Flute-Player. London:

Gollancz.
Thomas, D. M. (1980). Birthstone. London: Gollancz.
Thomas, D. M. (1981). The White Hotel. London:
Gollancz.
Thomas, D. M. (1983). Ararat. London: Gollancz.
Thomas, D. M. (1984). Swallow. London: Gollancz.
Thomas, D. M. (1986). Sphinx. London: Gollancz.
Thomas, D. M. (1987). Summit. London: Gollancz.
Thomas, D. M. (1988a). Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A
Century in His Life. London: Little, Brown.
Thomas, D. M. (1988b). Memories and Hallucinations.
London: Gollancz.
Thomas, D.M. (1990). Lying Together. London: Gollancz.
Thomas, D. M. (1992a). Flying in to Love. London:
Bloomsbury.
Thomas, D. M. (1992b). The Puberty Tree: New and
Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe.
Thomas, D. M. (1993). Pictures at an Exhibition.
London: Bloomsbury.
Thomas, D. M. (1994). Eating Pavlova. London:
Bloomsbury.
Thomas, D. M. (1998). Lady with a Laptop. New York:
Carroll and Graf.
Thomas, D. M. (2000). Charlotte. London: Duckworth.
Thomas, D. M. (2008). Bleak Hotel. London: Quartet.
Vice, S. (2000). Documentary Fiction: D. M. Thomas,
The White Hotel. In Holocaust Fiction. London:
Routledge, pp. 3866.
Toibn, Colm
WILLIAM A. JOHNSEN
Colm Toibn is one of the most recognized and

influential writers in Ireland in that he serves a
public role as a commentator on current events, as
a reviewer and editor, and as a presence at conferences and festivals, yet he preserves against this
publicity a prose true to his characters rather than
his own biography. Toibn has admitted to an
early admiration for Hemingway, although his
prose is unclouded by Hemingways plainerthan-thou bravado. There are of course Irish
influences on the author as well (he has edited
a magisterial anthology of Irish fiction from Jonathan Swift to Emma Donoghue (1999c) for
Penguin), yet his tone is markedly different from
the ironic deadpan of Joyces Dubliners or the
deadbeat of Becketts prose.
Born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford,
Toibn was educated at the Christian Brothers
361
School (where his father taught) and then at St.

Peters College, Wexford. He took a BA in history
and English at University College Dublin in 1975.
He lived in Barcelona for three years, teaching
English and learning Catalan, in the midst of
Spains political turbulence. When he returned
to Ireland he began writing for In Dublin, Hibernia, and the Sunday Tribune; he served three years
(19825) as editor of Magill, at the time Irelands
most influential current affairs magazine. During
this time he worked on an MA in modern English
and American literature but never submitted his
thesis (on Anthony Hecht). In 1985 he left Ireland
again, writing journalism while traveling in South
America (especially Argentina during the time of
the trial of the generals) and Africa. He published
his first book in 1987 (Walking Along the Border,
with photographs by Tony OShea) and, in 1990,
he published The Trial of the Generals (1990c),
Homage to Barcelona (1990a), and his first novel
(completed in 1986), The South (1990b). Toibn
lives and works mainly in Dublin, but spends a
summer month each year in Spain.
In 1959 Iris Murdoch advised contemporary
novelists to avoid the self-regarding neurosis of
high modernism by creating characters unlike
themselves (1959, 271). Toibn is such a novelist,
even when he borrows from his own past: his first
novel is a portrait of a Protestant womans artistic
emergence. Katherine Proctor, the main character
of The South, leaves husband, son, and ancestral
big house behind to begin painting and a new life
in Barcelona with another painter who was jailed
and tortured for his revolutionary activities during the Spanish Civil War. They live in an isolated
mountain village with their daughter, but flashbacks force her lover Miguel (who does not drive)
to flee with their daughter in the jeep, killing them
both in an accident. Katherines past pursues her
as well through an Irish painter, Michael Graves
(also from Enniscorthy), whose continued friendship preserves her Irish identity in Spain. They
return to Ireland together, and Katherine makes
an elaborate peace with her son, now married. She
resumes her painting and keeps quiet company
with Graves, not pretending that these arrangements are equal to what she has lost.
The Heather Blazing (1992), Toibns next novel, follows Eamon Redmond, a high court judge
who is driving to his holiday cottage with his wife,
Carmen. He has just decided a suit in favor of a
362
I B I N , C O L M
TO
hospital discharging financial responsibility for a

handicapped child to her impoverished parents.
The novel reviews the childhood that brought him
to such emotional distance from the pain of
others, and from his wife and children. Chapters
alternate between Eamons present and his past,
during his childhood in Enniscorthy where his
father (a schoolteacher) raised him alone after his
mother died. He profits from his fathers political
affiliation to Fianna Fail, and meets his future wife
while canvassing. His rise in the courts is not
hampered by his politics. Carmen tries to make
him keep less to himself. Unexpectedly, she has a
stroke and dies. Through his grief he gradually
comes closer to his children and their families. In
a beautifully understated final episode, he becomes a companion to his grandson by making
him a basin of seawater to play in. At the end, the
two go to the shore to play in the sea, repeating a
custom that Eamon shared with his father. Already it is clear that Toibns journalistic career of
calling Irelands politics to account has transformed into the project of imaginatively re-envisioning Ireland.
The Story of the Night (1996), the authors third
novel, is set in Argentina during the military
dictatorship of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Richard Garays adamantly British mother taught
him English and associated herself with the British
enclave in Buenos Aires. Richard feels distant
from his family, his schoolfellows, and his fellow
English teachers at the school, but he is in love
with Jorge Canetto, a fellow university student
who asked him to teach him English. Richard and
Jorge go for a holiday in Spain together, but Jorge
is emphatically heterosexual in his company.
Richards bilingualism proves invaluable to the
CIA, and he is woven into the profiteering of
denationalizing the Argentinian oil industry as a
consultant. As Richards world widens beyond his
parents flat and their furniture, which he has
kept, he meets Pablo, Jorges brother returned
from San Francisco. Eventually Pablo agrees to
move into a modern house Richard sublets.
Although Toibns fictional characters speak as
sparely as he writes, it is only The Story of the Night
that is told in the first person. Perhaps only the full
power of Toibns understated prose can carry
what one expects or fears for Richard and Pablo.
Although dates are never given, Richards description of San Francisco recounts the initial appear-
ance of HIV/AIDS. When Pablo inexplicably

leaves him, Richard in despair goes to New York
with an acquaintance from the oil industry who
gives him sex and cocaine without complications.
But Richards apparently allergic reaction to the
drugs shows how well this narrator keeps from
himself the fact that he has AIDS. The full weight
of Toibns investment in a stylistic spareness
across several novels pays for the dignity of
Richards suffering at the end of the novel. The
modesty of his narrating prose educates the reader
to respect Richards physical and emotional pain,
especially his own modesty in facing it. Hemingways spareness and the French tradition of
lecriture blanche pale in comparison with what
Toibn is able to achieve. Toibn has described in
several interviews the history of his increasing
identification with gay writing, which began at
this time. Such identification for Toibn is less
about tagging himself as a homosexual and more
about leading the way in modeling respect for it.
The Blackwater Lightship (1999a), shortlisted
for the Booker Prize, quietly returns to Enniscorthy, but consciously reinvokes properties and
families described in The Heather Blazing. The
pattern of alternating between Irish and international settings in his novels has now become
apparent. Toibns fourth novel offers a new,
more energetic narrating and listening to several
characters who are good at telling their own
stories to each other. It is as if Toibn lets his
laconic prose style temporarily rest in peace in
Richard Garays terminal narrative. Dora Devereux, Lily, and Doras granddaughter Helen are the
three main characters. Helens father died when
she was a child. Living separate from her mother
while she attended to her father in the hospital
educated her in separation, and she keeps her
mother separate from her own life as a principal of
a comprehensive school, mother of two boys, and
wife. The separation is broken by her brother
Declan (who is near death from AIDS), who wants
to leave the hospital to go to his grandmothers
house in Cush (another locale detailed in The
Heather Blazing). The grandmother Dora, her
daughter Lily, and her granddaughter Helen must
deal with Declans friends and his life in the close
area of a cliffside cottage and the unrelenting last
stages of Declans illness.
The Master (2004b), also shortlisted for the
Booker Prize, is perhaps Toibns major work to
I B I N , C O L M
TO
date, profiting from his 10-year commitment to

gay writing begun with The Story of the Night and
the series of essays on gay writers for the London
Review of Books (19942000), published as Love in
a Dark Time (2002b); but also from conducting
archival biographical research for Lady Gregorys
Toothbrush (2002a). It is rare for biographers to
successfully create novelistic attachments to the
characters their books treat. Toibns study of
Henry James is as moving as Richard Ellmann
on James Joyce and Hermione Lee on Virginia
Woolf. He enables the reader to sense that Jamess
reluctance to give himself away to passion with
either men or women is at one with his unparalleled artistic achievements in prose. Toibn creatively restores an antecedent master for contemporary writing who can amend the crude divisions of gay and straight fiction.
Mothers and Sons (2006) collects some of
Toibns recent short stories, a form he has sponsored previously by editing an audiocassette of
Irish short stories in 1997 as well as the fiction
anthology for Penguin in 1999. The first story,
The Use of Reason, appeared nine years earlier
in the composite novel by seven Irish writers
(Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright,
Hugo Hamilton, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph
OConnor, and Toibn) edited and conceived by
Dermot Bolger as Finbars Hotel (1997). Perhaps
the finest story in Mothers and Sons is The Name
of the Game, which concerns a woman who
overcomes the debts left by her husband by
opening a chip shop, and then sells it successfully
to finance a new life despite the pressure from her
son to leave him in charge of it. Toibn has
announced a second planned collection of stories
on exile and return, and has begun to describe
himself in interviews and public appearances as a
story-catcher. Yet Toibn has also said that he has
returned to writing fiction by pen and ink, as if to
keep the pace of this new commitment to more
stories in hand.
Brooklyn (2009), his latest novel (starting again
in Enniscorthy), tells Eilis Laceys all too common
Irish story of emigrating to Brooklyn, establishing
a self-sufficient life impossible at home, yet
pulled back by Irish duties and affections impossible to escape. Her story modifies the defeated
return told in George Moores famous story
Homesickness (which Toibn anthologized in
The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction) and uncannily
363
evokes Joyces Eveline. Before returning to Ireland to comfort her mother grieving for the
sudden death of Eiliss older sister Rose, she
marries her Brooklyn Italian boyfriend at his
urging in a civil ceremony. He feels that she might
not return otherwise. He is right. Eilis is now more
attractive to the young men of Enniscorthy, who
had ignored her earlier, and they are more attractive to her. She schedules her return to Brooklyn
only when the network of transatlantic Irish
family gossip blows the cover on her double life.
This novel continues Toibns ongoing project
across essay, drama, and fiction: to repossess and
renew Irish literature by crafting more complex
representations of gay lives and Irish identity.
SEE ALSO: Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Irish
Fiction (BIF); James, Henry (AF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities
in Fiction (BIF)

Bolger, D., Doyle, R., Enright, A., Hamilton, H.,
Johnston, J., OConnor, J., & Toibn, C. (1997).
Finbars Hotel. London: Picador.
Bss, M. (2005). Belonging without Belonging: Colm
Toibns Dialogue with the Past. Estudios Irlandeses,
0, 229.
ibn. Dublin:
Delaney, P. (ed.) (2008). Reading Colm To
Liffey.
Eagleton, T. (1999). Mothering: Review of The
Blackwater Lightship. London Review of Books, p. 8
(Oct.14).
Foster, R. F. (2007). Luck and the Irish.
McCourt, J. (2005). Colm Toibn. In A. Roche (ed.),
The UCD Aesthetic: Celebrating 150 Years of UCD
Writers. Dublin: New Island pp. 22938.
Murdoch, I. (1954). Under the Net. London Chatto and
Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1959). The Sublime and the Beautiful
Revisited. Yale Review, 49, 24771.
Toibn, C. (1985). Inside the Supreme Court. Magill,
8(7), 835.
Toibn, C. (1987). Walking Along the Border. London:
Macdonald.
Toibn, C. (1990a). Homage to Barcelona. London:
Simon and Schuster.
Toibn, C. (1990b). The South. London: Serpents
Tail.
Toibn, C. (1990c). The Trial of the Generals: Selected
Journalism 19801990. Dublin: Raven Arts.
364
TREVOR, WILLIAM
Toibn, C. (1991). Fecking off to England. In M. Rowe

(ed.),SoVeryEnglish.London:SerpentsTail,pp.1315.
Toibn, C. (1992). The Heather Blazing. London:
Picador.
Toibn, C. (1994). The Sign of the Cross: Travels in
Catholic Europe. London: Jonathan Cape.
Toibn, C. (1996a). The Kilfenora Teaboy. A Study of
Paul Durcan. Dublin: New Island.
Toibn, C. (1996b). Playboys of the GPO. London
Review of Books, 18(8), 1416 (Apr. 18).
Toibn, C. (1996c). The Story of the Night. London:
Macmillan.
Toibn, C. (1999a). The Blackwater Lightship. London:
Picador.
Toibn, C. (1999b). The Irish Famine. London: Profile.
Toibn, C. (ed.) (1999c). The Penguin Book of Irish
Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Toibn, C. (2002a). Lady Gregorys Toothbrush. Dublin:
Lilliput.
Toibn, C. (2002b). Love in a Dark Time. London:
Picador.
Toibn, C. (2004a). Beauty in a Broken Place. Dublin:
Lilliput.
Toibn, C. (2004b). The Master. London: Picador.
Toibn, C. (2005). Barcelona, 1975. Dublin Review, 18,
7989.
Toibn, C. (2006). Mothers and Sons. London: Picador.
Toibn, C. (2007). A Brush with the Law. Dublin Review,
28, 1133.
Toibn, C. (2009). Brooklyn. London: Viking.
Trevor, William
MICHAEL L. STOREY
William Trevors numerous, highly acclaimed

novels and stories are distinguished by their moral
vision, psychological complexity, comic and tragic insights, and detached, ironic perspectives.
Having lived in Ireland and England, Trevor is
adept at setting his fiction in both countries,
writing insightfully about English and Irish life
and in his Irish fiction about both Anglo-Irish
Protestants and Irish Catholics. Best known for
his novels and stories, Trevor has also written
plays, childrens fiction, essays, and reviews, and
he has both adapted his fiction and created original dramas for radio and television. Two of his
novels, Fools of Fortune and Felicias Journey, have
been made into major films. He has been the
recipient of numerous literary prizes, including
the prestigious Whitbread Award, which he has
won three times.
Trevor was born William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland, in 1928 to Protestant parents. His father was a bank official whose
routine transfers resulted in the family living in
numerous small towns, in both the Irish Free State
(which in 1949 became the Republic of Ireland)
and British-controlled Northern Ireland. As a
result of these frequent family relocations, Trevor
was educated in about a dozen schools, some of
which were Catholic. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he taught for a few years in
Ireland. In 1952 he married, and the following year
he and his wife moved to England, where Trevor
again taught but also worked as a sculptor and then
for an advertising agency. He took the pseudonym
William Trevor for his first novel, A Standard of
Behaviour (1958), and upon winning the
Hawthornden Prize for his second novel, The Old
Boys (1964), he left the advertising agency and took
up writing full-time. He and his wife settled in
Devon, England, where they still live.
Trevors novels fit within the English tradition
of the serious moral novelists, particularly Dickens, Hardy, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, and
Graham Greene. His short fiction resembles in
both style and subject that of the best modern
Irish short story writers, especially Joyce, Frank
OConnor, and Sean OFaolain, with Joyces Dubliners (1914) perhaps being his single greatest
literary influence. Trevors most recurrent themes
are dark ones of loneliness, alienation, marital
unhappiness, betrayal, calamity, madness, evil,
guilt, and the like, though he often tempers his
treatment of these bleak themes with irony and
humor. One of his signature techniques is the use
of multiple perspectives in relating a narrative a
technique that often results in the readers uncertainty about the truth of events.
Characters in his novels, such as the title characters of Mrs. Eckdorf in ONeills Hotel (1969) and
Elizabeth Alone (1973) and Julia in Other Peoples
Worlds (1980), often come to painful realizations
about their lives, while his short stories are often
structured, like Joyces Dubliners, on what Joyce
called epiphany, that is, an illumination or
recognition. In the story Mr. McNamara, for
example, a boy attempts to learn more about his
father after his fathers death in hope of understanding himself better. His search takes him to
Dublins Fleming Hotel where his father often
visited the title character and brought back his
TREVOR, WILLIAM
friends gifts and stories to the family. What the

boy discovers is that Mr. McNamara is really Nora
McNamara. Angry over his fathers betrayal and
hypocrisy, the boy wants to reveal the truth to his
mother, but cannot. Instead, he is burdened by
the awful secret, a burden that will embitter him
for life. Frequently a novel or story will trace a
characters unhappiness or perverseness back to a
childhood incident. In The Death of Peggy
Meehan, the 46-year-old narrator recalls how in
a childhood fantasy he killed Peggy Meehan.
When she died of an illness a short time later, he
was struck with guilt and began to see her. As
the story ends, she continues to appear to him
ironically as an object of desire in his terribly
lonely life.
Many of Trevors works treat the disappointments, betrayals, and failures of love and marriage. An early novel, The Love Department
(1966), explores with both comic effect and moral
insight the middle-class marriages of London
suburbanites. Teresas Wedding, an early story,
and Honeymoon in Tramore, a late one, have
the same theme: the wedding couples recognition
that their marriage falls considerably short of their
romantic ideals. In some stories, such as the
renowned Ballroom of Romance, characters
resign themselves to loveless marriages, while in
others, such as Office Romances and A Bit on
the Side, they act out the emptiness, betrayals,
and loneliness of failed relationships.
Trevors fascination with evil in human nature
has resulted in his depiction of psychopaths, con
men, sexual deviants, murderers, and the like.
Quite often the malevolent or perverse behavior
of these characters is a result of their being
neglected or abused as children. In The Children
of Dynmouth (1976), set on the Dorset coast of
England, the 15-year-old protagonist, Timothy
Gedge, neglected by his family, goes about maliciously exploiting for his own gain the secret sins
and failings of people of Dynmouth village their
sexual proclivities, infidelities, and pathologies.
The most sinister of Trevors characters is Mr.
Hildritch of Felicias Journey (1994), an Englishman who ensnares the title character. Sexually
abused as a child by his mother and rejected by a
series of women, Hildritch is a psychopath who
despite living a seemingly ordinary life kills
women but then blocks out his horrendous acts
from his conscious mind.
365
Typically, Trevors plots place innocent characters in situations in which they are threatened
psychologically, sexually, physically by the malicious characters. Julia of Other Peoples Worlds
(1980), for instance, is brought under the malevolent influence of a younger man, Francis Tyte,
who bigamously marries her while indirectly
participating in the murder of his first wife. In
Felicias Journey, Felicia is a pregnant Irish girl
who has been thrown out of her home by her
puritanical father; she goes to England in search of
the young man who seduced her. There she meets
by chance Hildritch, who draws her into his
psychopathic world.
A recurrent theme in Trevors Irish fiction is the
tragic legacy of Irelands politically violent past,
specifically the Anglo-Irish War of 191921 (part
of the so-called Troubles) in which Irish rebels
fought for independence against the British army.
Trevors treatment of this theme is distinguished
by his compassionate and non-political perspective which allows him to shed light on the great
human cost of the Troubles. In Fools of Fortune
(1983), The Silence in the Garden (1988), and The
Story of Lucy Gault (2002), as well as in several
short stories, Trevor shows how personal tragedy
results from the larger political tragedy. In Fools of
Fortune, which spans the years 1918 to 1982, the
protagonist Willie Quinton experienced as a child
the burning of the family home, Kilneagh; the
murder of his father, two sisters, and family
servants by the Black and Tans, a brutal British
paramilitary force; and the suicide of his mother
distraught over the family misfortunes. This chain
of tragic events was set in motion because Willies
Anglo-Irish parents, despite being allied by religion and heritage to the British, were supportive
of Irish nationalists in their bid for independence
in the Anglo-Irish War. It continues when, out of
revenge, Willie kills the man who murdered his
father and sisters and is forced to flee, leaving
behind his lover and English cousin, Marianne.
Pregnant with his child, Marianne waits at Kilneagh for decades with the child, Imelda, who
eventually becomes mentally disturbed. In the
end, the family achieves a measure of happiness
as Willie, now an old man, returns to Kilneagh.
Trevor takes up this theme of the tragic past in
several short stories and links it to the sectarian
violence and terrorism of the Northern
Troubles the decades-long conflict between
366
TREVOR, WILLIAM
Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists in

Northern Ireland. In The Distant Past, a story
set in the late 1960s at the onset of the Northern
Troubles, Trevor shows how, despite decades of
relative peace in Ireland, the bitter legacy of the
distant past (specifically the Anglo-Irish War)
really lies just below the surface and easily rises
to embitter relationships between Catholics and
Protestants once more. Attracta, arguably the
most powerful story by any contemporary writer
about the devastating effects of terrorism in
Northern Ireland, records the attempts of the title
character, an elderly Catholic schoolteacher in the
North, to convey to her young Protestant pupils
the horror and senselessness of sectarian violence.
She attempts to do so by reading to them a
shocking newspaper account about the wife of
a British army officer stationed in Northern Ireland. The report graphically reports the murder
and decapitation of the husband and the rape and
suicide of the wife. Attracta links these horrific
events to her own victimization in the Anglo-Irish
War when her parents were accidentally killed in
an IRA ambush of British forces. But the children
have become immune to violence, and when they
tell their parents about their teachers efforts,
Attracta is forced into retirement.
In over 50 years of writing Trevors fiction has
remained, in style and technique, firmly within
the mode of realism with occasional use of the
gothic to enhance psychological themes of guilt
and madness. He has not been lured by the
postmodernist techniques embraced by many of
his contemporaries. But among writers of realist
fiction, Trevor is undoubtedly one of the worlds
best.
SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF)
MacKenna, D. (1999). William Trevor: The Writer and
His Work. Dublin: New Island.
Morrison, K. (1993). William Trevor. New York:
Twayne.
Paulson, S. (1993). William Trevor: A Study of the Short
Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Schirmer, G. (1990). William Trevor: A Study of His
Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Trevor, W. (1958). A Standard of Behaviour. London:

Hutchinson.
Trevor, W. (1964). The Old Boys. London: Bodley Head.
Trevor, W. (1965). The Boarding House. London:
Bodley Head.
Trevor, W. (1966). The Love Department. London:
Bodley Head.
Trevor, W. (1967). The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and
Other Stories. London: Bodley Head.
Trevor, W. (1969). Mrs. Eckdorf in ONeills Hotel.
London: Bodley Head
Trevor, W. (1971). Miss Gomez and the Brethren.
Trevor, W. (1972). The Ballroom of Romance and Other
Stories. London: Bodley Head.
Trevor, W. (1973). Elizabeth Alone. London: Bodley
Head.
Trevor, W. (1975). Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories.
Trevor, W. (1976). The Children of Dynmouth. London:
Bodley Head.
Trevor, W. (1978). Lovers of their Time and Other
Trevor, W. (1979). The Distant Past and Other Stories.
Trevor, W. (1980). Other Peoples Worlds. London:
Bodley Head.
Trevor, W. (1981). Beyond the Pale and Other Stories.
Trevor, W. (1983). Fools of Fortune. London: Bodley
Head.
Trevor, W. (1986). The News from Ireland and Other
Trevor, W. (1988). The Silence in the Garden. London:
Bodley Head.
Trevor, W. (1990) Family Sins and Other Stories.
Trevor, W. (1991). Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My
House in Umbria. New York: Viking.
Trevor, W. (1992). The Collected Stories of William
Trevor. New York: Viking.
Trevor, W. (1994). Felicias Journey. London: Viking.
Trevor, W. (1996). After Rain. London: Viking.
Trevor, W. (1998). Death in Summer. London: Viking.
Trevor, W. (2000). The Hill Bachelors. London: Viking.
Trevor, W. (2002). The Story of Lucy Gault. London:
Viking.
Trevor, W. (2004). A Bit on the Side. London: Viking.
Trevor, W. (2005). The Dressmakers Child. London:
Viking.
Trevor, W. (2007). Cheating at Canasta. London:
Viking.
Trevor, W. (2009). Love and Summer. London: Viking.
U
Upward, Edward
CHRIS HOPKINS
Edward Upward was closely associated with W. H.

Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood in the 1930s. However, his literary reputation has sometimes been seen as minor in comparison to those of such contemporaries. Certainly he lived much less in the public eye, and his
writing career features a large hiatus between 1939
and 1962. However, his fiction is often distinctive
and innovative, driven by its exploration of politics and aesthetics.
Upward was born on September 9, 1903 in
Romford, Essex. His father, a doctor, supported
his sons literary ambitions. He went to Repton
School and then Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as did Isherwood. Upward gained more
from the official curriculum than did Isherwood
(who left without a degree). Nevertheless, for both
the imaginative focus of university life was their
parallel fictional universe of Mortmere.
Through these stories they developed a broadly
oppositional stance toward what they termed the
poshocracy, the existing social order.
After graduation, Upward taught as a private
tutor and in preparatory schools, before being
appointed English master at Alleyns Boys
School, Dulwich, in 1932. In the same year, he
visited the USSR and on his return attended
meetings of the Communist Party of Great Britain, becoming a member by 1934. In the party he
met Hilda Percival, also a teacher, and they married in 1936. His position as a Communist Party
activist and a public schoolmaster was an odd one.
Upward said that They must have known . . . I

carried on my political work in the evenings selling
the Daily Worker, and politics was my salvation. I
was miserable and couldnt have borne the life of a
teacher without it (Wroe 2003).
Nevertheless, Upward remained a respected
teacher at the school until his retirement from
teaching in 1961. Unlike others in Britain who
were disillusioned by the HitlerStalin pact of
1940, Upward remained a party member. He
finally left the Communist Party in 1948 because
he felt that, in supporting the postwar Labour
government (affiliation was sought in 1946), it
had abandoned its revolutionary identity and
become utterly uncommunist (Wroe 2003).
His commitment to the party had marked consequences for his writing after 1938: some accounts say he suffered a breakdown after completing Journey to the Border (1938), while
others say he felt that party work was more
urgent than writing. In either case, there began a
period of writers block lasting for some 16
years. After 1954, he was able to write again
and he produced substantial works between
1962 and 1977.
Upwards writing began with the coimagined
Mortmere stories. Mortmere was a subversive,
gothic world, based in parodies of favorite authors
and genres, including Conan Doyle, Poe, and the
detective story in general. The stories were not
published at the time, but a number have been
published subsequently. The Railway Accident,
chiefly written by Upward and published in 1949,
is the best known. The fantastic world of Mortmere and the narration and style appropriate to it

368
UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN FICTION
are a vital prehistory to his main publication of

1930s, the novella Journey to the Border. Overall,
the stories produced a kind of surrealist effect,
which Isherwood said was homegrown: I use the
term surrealism . . . we had, of course, no idea
that such a movement already existed on the
continent (Lodge 203).
By 1938, Upward knew a good deal about
surrealism, and a surrealist mode is used in Journey to the Border in sophisticated and politically
resonant ways. The story concerns a nameless
private tutor who coaches the son of the Parkin
family and lives in their home. He, like Upward,
finds his position miserable, living in a situation
in which mind and body are subservient to wealth
and crassly ideological bourgeois beliefs. At the
opening of the story the tutor is suffering from
acute anguish caused by his lack of control over
any aspect of his life. He falls into a neurotic state
of hallucination (though in many ways this in fact
reveals his oppressors as they really are) in which
his lack of grip on any sure reality leads him into a
perpetual circle of self-questioning and self-accusation. The surreal visions of this ungrounded
mental life are linked by the story to what is seen as
the inevitable alienation of bourgeois life as capitalism enters a period of terminal crisis. At the
close of the novella the tutor sees that there is a
way out of this mental prison, that Marxist social
thought provides a ground that can distinguish
illusion and reality. Though this sounds schematic in summary, the accomplished narrative technique makes the journey to the border (first of
madness and then toward sanity) one in which the
reader is fully engaged.
The logic of the novella was carried over into
Upwards own writing life: the emphasis in his
postwar work was on the representation of reality
from a Marxist perspective. His major postwar
work was the trilogy The Spiral Ascent, made up of
In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969),
and No Home but the Struggle (1977). In some
ways the trilogy tackles similar material to his
novella of 1938, although the surreal mode is no
longer used: it explores the life of a communist
teacher, Alan Sebrill, from the 1930s to the 1970s,
and his quest to integrate all aspects of his life
artistic, political, and everyday into something
whole and unalienated. The trilogy had a mixed
reception, and critical views remain polarized:
some see the work as the product of an arid and
unengaging socialist-realist doctrine, while others

see it as a serious, impressive, and individual
narration of the experience of political commitment. Since his hundredth year, Upward has
brought out previously unpublished work, a
number of new stories, and new editions of other
works with Enitharmon Press. He died in
February 2009.
SEE ALSO: Isherwood, Christopher (BIF);
Politics and the Novel (BIF)
Cunningham, V. (1989). British Writers of the Thirties.
Finney, B. (1976). Laily, Mortmere and All That.
Twentieth Century Literature, 22(3), 286302.
Hopkins, C. (1994). Neglected Texts, Forgotten Contexts:
Four Political Novels of the Nineteen Thirties.
Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University.
Hynes, S. (1979). The Auden Generation. London: Faber
and Faber.
Lodge, D. (1977). The Modes of Modern Writing:
Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern
Literature. London: Arnold.
Upward, E. (1938). Journey to the Border. London:
Hogarth.
Upward, E. (1962). In the Thirties. London: Heinemann.
Upward, E. (1969). The Rotten Elements. London:
Heinemann.
Upward, E. (1972). The Railway Accident and Other
Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Upward, E. (1977). No Home but the Struggle. London:
Heinemann.
Upward, E., & Isherwood, C. (1994). The Mortmere
Stories. London: Enitharmon.
Walker, A. (2000). Edward Upward: A Bibliography
19202000. London: Enitharmon.
Wroe, N. (2003). A Lifetime Renegade. Guardian, p. 16
(Aug. 23).
Utopian and Dystopian

Fiction
CHRIS FERNS
The title of Thomas Mores Utopia (2002 [1516] )

involves a play on words, deriving from both the
Greek eu-topos good place and ou-topos no
place. Utopia may be defined as both a good
place, an ideal (or at least significantly improved)
society, and at the same time one that does not
exist, an ambiguity that is reflected in the terms

usage. To describe something as utopian may
be to applaud it as a desirable goal or to denounce
it as hopelessly impractical.
More was not the first writer to imagine a model
state: Utopia draws on a tradition of political
thought going back to Platos Republic and beyond. What renders Utopia distinctive, however, is
that Mores vision is presented in the guise of a
contemporary discovery narrative, recounted by a
traveler who supposedly accompanied Amerigo
Vespucci on one of his voyages, and then proceeded to engage in further exploration. As a result
the narrative takes on a tantalizing air of plausibility, raising the possibility that such a society just
might exist in the real world particularly given
that the account provided by Mores traveler is
hardly less credible than some contemporary discovery narratives purporting to be authentic.
Utopia describes an island whose society is
rationally organized to provide stability, security,
and freedom from hunger, endless toil, and war.
Money and private property have been abolished,
and while everyone must work, the limitation of
the working day to six hours would have represented an enormous liberation to most people in
Mores day. Yet while there is little to indicate that
More intended Utopia as a practical recipe for
political reform, in the work of his successors a
didactic intent is clearly apparent to the extent
that in some cases works of utopian literature
have influenced developments in the world to
which they propose an alternative. The House of
Salomon, the scientific research institute described in Francis Bacons New Atlantis (1974
[1627] ), is often cited as one of the inspirations
for the foundation of the Royal Society; James
Harringtons Oceana (1992 [1656] ) was taken as
a model for constitutional reform during both the
American and French revolutions; while Edward
Bellamys Looking Backward (1967 [1888] ) inspired the foundation of Bellamy societies worldwide, leading the philosopher John Dewey to cite
it as second in importance only to Das Kapital
among works written in the previous 50 years. A
distinguishing feature of utopian literature, then,
is that it sets out not only to describe alternatives
to the world that exists, but to do so in the hope of
transforming it.
In the twentieth century, the most important
writer of utopian fiction was H. G. Wells. In a
369
series of novels including A Modern Utopia

(1905), In the Days of the Comet (1906), The
World Set Free (1914), Men Like Gods (1923), and
The Shape of Things to Come (1933) as well as a
range of non-fictional works Wells sets out his
vision of a utopian World State organized on
rational principles. He described his ideal as a
scientifically organized classless society where
the middle class would have expanded to absorb
both upper and lower classes, but he clearly did
not see democracy as necessary to achieving this
goal. A Modern Utopia proposes that power
would rest in the hands of a ruling elite called
the samurai explicitly compared to Platos
guardians a voluntary nobility under whose
guidance a combination of sound education and
eugenics (only those with the ability to reach a
specified income level are permitted to have
children) might ultimately produce a cleaned
and perfected humanity such as that portrayed in
Men Like Gods. By then, the necessity for most
laws and regulations would have been eliminated,
since universal education would lead to a rational
consensus on all matters of importance: as one
character in Men Like Gods declares, our education is our government.
Many aspects of Wellss ideal now seem either
repugnant or hopelessly optimistic, yet his importance as a writer of utopias rests not merely on
their content, but on the attention he paid to the
problems inherent in utopian narrative. While the
narrative model provided by More, and followed
by his many successors a traveler discovers a
utopian society in some remote part of the world,
receives a guided tour, and returns to describe its
wonders had proved serviceable enough in the
Renaissance, by the nineteenth century, with the
ending of the age of discovery, it was clearly
becoming outdated. Furthermore, Wells recognized that the static character of most earlier
utopias their tendency to represent utopia as
having achieved a state of perfection that rendered
any further alteration superfluous was out of
keeping with the realities of social change which
were now impossible to ignore. Strongly influenced by the evolutionary theories of Darwin and
T. H. Huxley, and keenly aware of the likely
impact of continuing technological innovation
on society, Wells emphasized the need for utopia
to be not static but kinetic. In an effort to
present utopia as a work in progress, rather than
370
a finalized ideal, Wells increasingly utilized the

narrative conventions of science fiction, a genre in
which he was also a pioneer. Instead of an undiscovered island, A Modern Utopia and Men Like
Gods are set in parallel universes, while The World
Set Free and The Shape of Things to Come describe
future utopian societies that emerge from cataclysmic war. How far his narrative experiments
succeed is open to debate: some commentators
have complained that his utopian novels lack the
imaginative vigor of his earlier scientific romances. Nevertheless, Wells was among the first
writers of utopian fiction to recognize that not
merely its content, but its form, needed to change
with the times.
Wells also had a major influence on the composition of some of the most significant dystopias
of the twentieth century. These include Yevgeny
Zamyatins We (1924), Aldous Huxleys Brave
New World (1932), and George Orwells Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949), while E. M. Forsters short
story The Machine Stops (1976 [1909] ), depicting a humanity rendered helpless by its reliance on the technology of which Wells was so
enthusiastic an advocate, was also written as a
direct response to Wellss utopian dreams.
Satiric attacks on utopian writing were nothing new. Aristophanes parodied Plato; Swift
ridiculed the Baconian scientific dream in Book
III of Gullivers Travels (1726), while his depiction of the land of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV
provides a grimmer reflection on the ideal of
utopian perfection; and Bellamys Looking Backward prompted a rash of parodic responses,
designed to show where its proposals would
really lead. Yet in the twentieth century attacks
on the utopian ideal take on a new urgency,
reflecting a growing concern about the possibility of its realization, and the fear that it would
prove anything but the unmixed blessing writers
such as Wells had imagined. Would the strong,
centralized authority envisaged in so many utopias, supported by scientific and technological
resources of which early writers had only
dreamed, really be used in the best interests of
the citizen? All the experience of the totalitarian
regimes of the first half of the twentieth century
tended to suggest otherwise. And even if the
authoritys intentions were benign, would not
the solution of humanitys problems deprive it of
the challenges necessary to sustain progress, and
lead to the degeneration of the race? Wells

himself had explored that possibility in The Time
Machine (1895), and in Brave New World, set in
the year AD 2540, Huxley offers a vision of the
utopian future where humans have become anything but the superior beings imagined in Men
Like Gods.
Wells is only one of Huxleys satiric targets.
From the names of the characters (Benito Hoover,
Lenina Crowne, Helmholz Watson among
others) it is apparent that Huxley sees the various
conflicting ideologies of the period fascism,
capitalism, communism as all being utopian in
tendency, and operating hand in hand with the
discoveries of modern science to further the creation of a world of mindless conformity. As
presiding deity of his future World State, Huxley
chooses Henry Ford, pioneer of the production
line which now produces human beings instead of
motor cars, as well as being instrumental in the
creation of the consumer society whose excesses
the novel satirizes.
Nevertheless, the parallels with Wellss utopian
vision are impossible to ignore. In particular,
Huxley takes aim at two of its central features:
education and eugenics. In Brave New World new
educational methods do indeed lead to consensus
on virtually all issues but do so by means of
brainwashing, sleep-teaching, and behavioral
conditioning which inculcates an ideal of infantile
dependence on authority. And, rather than eliminating the lower orders by selective breeding,
Huxleys World State reinforces the class system
by rendering the classes still more distinct
through a process of prenatal conditioning. As
is the case with the lunar inhabitants in Wellss
The First Men in the Moon (1901), workers are
bred to be physically adapted to the tasks they will
grow up to perform, while the problem of alienated labor is addressed by breeding an underclass
of Epsilons who are too stupid to object to it.
Huxley recognizes that some dissidence is to be
expected, especially among the Alpha elite, from
whom the World Controllers are drawn, but even
this can be easily handled by exiling troublemakers to convenient islands (a solution also
proposed in A Modern Utopia). In this regard,
Brave New World differs markedly from We and
Nineteen Eighty-Four, where repression is heavily
relied on to ensure conformity. Indeed, a distinguishing feature of Huxleys dystopia is how
much it resembles a utopia. It too offers peace,

security, prosperity. Work is not unduly burdensome, crime is unknown, and happiness almost
universal and if much of the happiness is
provided by mindless distractions, sexual promiscuity, and stupefying drugs, this is as much a satire
of Western consumer society as of utopia. Nor do
the rebels Huxley portrays offer much by way of
an alternative. The excessively brainy Helmholz
Watson is discontented only because he lacks the
opportunity to be truly creative, and he embraces
the prospect of exile with enthusiasm. His fellow
rebel, the unpopular Bernard Marx, resents society mainly because he feels he does not fit in; when
he achieves social success temporarily his discontent evaporates. Only John the Savage, who comes
from a Mexican reservation where old customs
persist, genuinely loathes the society of the World
State but his views are represented as no less the
result of conditioning (albeit a different one) than
those of the Brave New Worlders. In particular,
his romantic idealization of the vacuous Lenina
Crowne, followed by his puritanical revulsion
when she proves only too eager to sleep with him,
suggest that his more traditional sexual mores are
little better than Brave New Worlds state-endorsed promiscuity. The novel concludes with
Johns suicide, leaving the order of the World
State undisturbed.
Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four provides a very
different vision of a possible future and one
much closer at hand. Where Huxleys dystopia is
primarily an extrapolation of tendencies in Western consumer society, Orwells, like Zamyatins
We (a work by which it is heavily influenced)
depicts a totalitarian state clearly inspired by
Soviet-style communism. Big Brother, whose
mustachioed face stares down from innumerable
posters in Oceania, one of the three power blocs
that dominate the world of the future, is as clearly
modeled on Stalin as Zamyatins Benefactor is on
Lenin. State control is maintained by a combination of omnipresent surveillance and brutal repression. The actions of its citizens are continually
monitored by telescreens a kind of two-way
television, while the Thought Police endeavor to
ensure that not only subversive actions, but even
subversive thoughts, receive the punishment they
deserve. Ultimately, the goal is to reform the
language to the point where, in Newspeak, it
will no longer be possible even to think subver-
371
sively. In the meantime, Oceanias propaganda

machine ensures that the states version of reality
is almost universally accepted even where it is
completely at variance with what actually
happens.
As in Brave New World (and also We) resistance
to the state is associated with defiance of its sexual
morality. Where Helmholz, Bernard, and John
the Savage prefer monogamy or abstinence to
state-endorsed promiscuity, Nineteen-Eighty
Fours hero, Winston Smith rebels against the
sexual puritanism of Oceania by having an affair
with a co-worker, Julia. Yet while Huxley represents traditional sexual morality as no less socially
constructed than that of the utopian future, Orwell (like Zamyatin) portrays sexual dissidence as
a positive force but only at the cost of effectively
reinscribing the sexual stereotypes of his own
period.
A key scene in both Nineteen Eighty-Four and
We involves a female character abandoning the
androgynous uniform approved by the state in
favor of a more traditionally feminine appearance. Julia yearns for a real womans frock and
silk stockings, and enhances her allure for Winston by wearing make-up which he finds renders
her far more feminine. Old-fashioned artifice is
represented, paradoxically, as more natural
than, and hence preferable to, the norms of the
dystopian state.
In common with both Zamyatin and Huxley,
Orwell also provides a reworking of the Legend
of the Grand Inquisitor scene in Dostoevskys
The Brothers Karamazov. But while Zamyatin and
Huxley follow Dostoevsky in having the representative of authority justify its actions, however
regrettable, as being in the best interests of a
humanity incapable of taking charge of its own
destiny, in Orwells version OBrien, who interrogates and tortures Winston, declares that the
only motivation of those in charge is the pursuit of
power for its own sake. Whether this adds to or
detracts from the force of his critique of utopia
remains debatable. If Stalinism is one of his main
satiric targets, it was surely the presence of precisely the utopian agenda that OBrien disclaims
that rendered Stalins monstrous crimes possible
the belief that what was done was ultimately in
the service of a greater good.
Since Nineteen Eighty-Four no British utopias
or dystopias have had an impact comparable to
372
those of Wells, Huxley, or Orwell although

Huxley continued to explore utopian possibilities
in his work. In his Foreword to the 1946 edition of
Brave New World he discussed possible alternatives to the nightmare it depicts, a theme to which
he later returned in his non-fictional Brave New
World Revisited (1958), and toward the end of his
life he produced a full-blown utopia, Island
(1962). Island portrays a society that combines
the best elements of Western scientific knowledge
and Eastern spiritual awareness, which, together
with its portrayal of the use of psychedelic drugs as
an educational tool, gained it a certain vogue in
the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, while Huxleys
utopian vision is in many respects more appealing
than Wellss, the work as a whole suffers from its
narrative limitations. Disregarding Wellss experiments with narrative form, Island returns to
the traditional model of the Renaissance, the only
real distinction being that his utopian island is
reached, not in the course of a voyage of discovery, but when a recreational boating trip goes
disastrously awry. The result is a decidedly predictable narrative, lacking any of the innovative
quality that rendered Brave New World so
distinctive.
Also worthy of note is Anthony Burgesss dystopian Clockwork Orange (1962) where the mindless violence of the protagonist Alex and his
comrades is represented as the lesser of two evils
in comparison to the utopian project of eliminating violence by means of psychological conditioning. Doris Lessing also explores a range of scenarios, both utopian and dystopian, in her Canopus
in Argos: Archives novel sequence (197983), although in recent interviews she has declared she
does not believe in utopia any more. Yet while in
recent years there has been a considerable expansion in the academic study of utopias and utopian
literature, there has been no real parallel in Britain
to the resurgence of utopian writing that has
occurred elsewhere. The major utopias and dystopias of the later twentieth century produced by
writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ,
Samuel Delany, Marge Piercy, and Margaret Atwood have been an almost exclusively North
American phenomenon.
SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Fantasy,
Science Fiction (BIF); Speculative Fiction (AF);

Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
Bacon, F. (1974). The Advancement of Learning and New
Atlantis. Oxford: Clarendon.
Bellamy, E. (1967). Looking Backward [1888].
Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Heinemann.
Ferns, C. (1999). Narrating Utopia. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press.
Forster, E. M. (1976). The Machine Stops [1909].
In Collected Short Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Harrington, J. (1992). The Commonwealth of Oceana
and A System of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
and Windus.
Huxley, A. (1958). Brave New World Revisited. New
York: Harper and Row.
Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the Future. London:
Verso.
Kubrick, S. (dir.) (1971). A Clockwork Orange. Warner
Brothers.
Kumar, K. (1987). Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern
Times. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lessing, D. (1992). Canopus in Argos: Archives,
comprising Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta [1979];
The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five
[1980]; The Sirian Experiments [1980]; The Making of
the Representative for Planet 8 [1982]; Documents
Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen
Empire [1983]. London: Vintage.
Levitas, R. (1990). The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse, NY:
Linfield, S. (2001). Against Utopia: An Interview with
Doris Lessing. Salmagundi, 1301, 5974.
Menzies, W. C. (dir.) (1936). Things to Come. United
Artists.
More, T. (2002). Utopia [1516]. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Secker and Warburg.
Orwell, G. (1951). Wells, Hitler and the World State.
Critical Essays. London: Secker and Warburg,
pp. 928.
Radford, M. (dir.) (1984). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Virgin
Films.
Wells, H. G. (1895). The Time Machine. London:
Heinemann.
Heinemann.
Wells, H. G. (1905). A Modern Utopia. London:

Chapman and Hall.
Wells, H. G. (1906). In the Days of the Comet. London:
Macmillan.
Wells, H. G. (1914). The World Set Free. London:
Macmillan.
373
Wells, H. G. (1923). Men Like Gods. London:

Cassell.
Wells, H. G. (1933). The Shape of Things to Come.
London: Hutchinson.
Zamyatin, Y. (1924). We (trans. G. Zilboorg). New
York: E. P. Dutton.
W
Warner, Alan
SCOTT HAMES
Alan Warner won overnight fame with his debut

novel in 1995, and was immediately linked to a
fashionable grouping of young male Scottish
writers including Irvine Welsh and Duncan
McLean. Though he was involved in the small
literary counterculture from which Welshs
Trainspotting (1993) sensationally emerged, situating Warner within this urban Scottish school
can be misleading. While these writers took confidence from 1980s Scottish fiction by James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, and shared an enthusiasm
for hedonistic youth culture, Warners fiction has
little in common with the urban realism of Trainspotting and its imitators. Distinct from that
novels stark naturalism, masculine bravado, and
punk ethic, Warners highly lyrical fiction typically centers on the lives and voices of laconic
young people, particularly women, in remote
Highland settings. Landscape and the atmosphere
of small-town legend are central to his work, in
which every place name and nickname evokes an
outlandish anecdote, whose retelling becomes a
vital ceremony of belonging.
While each of his novels achieve a highly specific sense of place and community, Warners style
is a heightened realism, often edging into the
surreal and dreamlike. It is never the direct,
straight verisimilitude usually associated with
dialect fiction. Nor is it dialect fiction per se:
Warners vernacular writing is experimental and
highly stylized, and capturing authentic local
speech is not his aim. The idiosyncratic, vividly
concrete language of his protagonists helps to
characterize them as individuals rather than

bearers of a communal voice. Locality is nonetheless crucial to Warners art, in which claustrophobic patterns of provincial life gradually reveal
their own potential for visionary transcendence.
Warners sensuous, visually arresting prose transforms the quotidian the as per usual, as his
characters always call it into a bewitching otherworld suffused with erotic possibility and religious mystery. Two subjects have dominated
Warners critical reception: the topical prominence of place, popular culture, and Scottishness in his work, and his rendering of bafflingly
credible girlhood femininities highly original,
wholly convincing portraits of young womens
inner lives (Schoene 255).
Warner was born in 1964 in the remote coastal
town of Oban, the model for The Port which
appears in each of his first four novels. He was
raised in a small hotel owned by his parents in a
neighboring village, and worked on the local
railway before attending university in London.
Railways, hotels, and the milieu of seasonal tourist
towns recur throughout his fiction, often in tension with the exciting but ephemeral culture of the
metropolis. Warner took a second degree at the
University of Glasgow and then worked in a
supermarket before publishing Morvern Callar in
1995. Described by Warner as an old existential
novel recast in todays colours, the story begins
with the titular central character discovering the
corpse of her boyfriend, who has committed
suicide (Weissman 1997). Morvern undertakes
a journey of self-exploration after publishing his
novel under her own name, but her absent (or
withheld) emotional reaction to her partners

WARNER, ALAN
death provides the novels sustaining tension.

Morverns predicament, isolation, and seemingly
numb reticence evoke a Scottish teenage Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camuss The
Outsider. Warners debut received a Somerset
Maugham Award and was adapted for the screen
in 2002. The hypnotic film version was well
received by critics (especially the largely silent
performance of Samantha Morton), though director Lynne Ramsay was only partly successful in
translating Morverns distinctive linguistic grip
on the world into a consistent visual style.
These Demented Lands (1997), the hallucinatory
sequel to Morvern Callar, contains Warners most
daring and inventive writing to date. The novels
opening scenario in which Morverns ferry out of
The Port sinks, casting its passengers into a subaquatic landscape of colours . . . glissanding on
the lunar seabeds way below mixes biblical
allusion, Greek myth, and apocryphal local history
to intoxicating effect (5). The novels psychedelic
landscapes, improbable characters, and unstable
narrative world show the influence of writers
includingAndre Gide, Michael Ondaatje, and Juan
Carlos Onetti. Warner insists, internationalism is
so important you cant arrive at your own style
just through the local (Dale 124).
The Sopranos (1998) is the story of five Catholic
schoolgirls from The Port and their riotous adventures during a visit to the Capital (a thinly
disguised Edinburgh). The individual voices, outlooks, and vulnerabilities of the five senior pupils
are vividly realized in Warners most conventional
novel (the sequel to which, The Stars in the
Bright Sky, will appear in 2010). When the writer
Janice Galloway observed that Warners women
are never done fiddling with their stockings, she
likely had The Sopranos in mind (March 1999, 94).
The novel contains an unmistakable note of male
voyeurism, though this erotic distancing is tempered by the third-person narrative voice joining
the ensemble as a sixth soprano, sharing the
idioms and exuberance of the teenage characters:
Fionnula stepped quick to the toilets, swayed a
good bit an biffed the door, she checked the
mirror an saw the nose shine but shed left
make-up in her bag sos lifted a sleeve to it an
her lips were jibberin, jibberin, Jesussussusus
(Warner 1998, 191).
Warner was chosen as one of Granta
magazines 20 Best of Young British Novelists
375
the year after publishing The Man Who Walks

(2002), a picaresque journey across a Highland
landscape encrusted with Celtic myth, kitsch
Scottish history, and profane local legend. The
novels conclusion takes aim at the
overwhelming, colonizing superiority of Hollywood versions of Highland history,
determined to force a vision on the mundane
and curse the consequences but this charge fits
Warners own, audacious attempt to remythologize Scottish landscape and culture (277).
The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (2006)
seems to mark a shift in Warners career, moving
beyond The Port to a Spanish provincial resort,
and the erotic confession of the prosperous
middle-aged designer Manolo Follana, who
believes he is HIV-positive. Warners brilliant
feeling for locality marks the unnamed provincial
city of this novel, with its familiar tourist economy and gossipy lore. Inverting several of Warners
previous trademarks, the novel shifts from a
youthful relish of sexual adventure to plaintive,
fastidious, death-haunted reflections on the past.
Portraying language as a barrier to, rather than as
the basis of, human connectedness, this novel
abandons the vernacular voice but contains
Warners most ambitious and elaborate symbolic
patterning. The slightly artificial English
translatorese of The Worms contains its own
lyric and comic strengths, and showcases
Warners gift for sustained stylization.
All his work, according to Warner, endeavors
to give the impermanent the quality of myth
(Dale 127). His vital and inventive fiction feels
very much of its time and place, and yet destined
to last.
SEE ALSO: Ondaatje, Michael (WF); Scottish
Fiction (BIF); Welsh, Irvine (BIF)

Dale, S. (2000). An Interview with Alan Warner.
Edinburgh Review, 103, 12133.
March, C. L. (1999). Interview with Janice Galloway.
Edinburgh Review, 101, 8598.
March, C. L. (2002). Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean,
Warner, Banks, Galloway and Kennedy. Manchester:
Ramsay, L. (dir.) (2002). Morvern Callar. Company
Pictures.
376
WAUGH, EVELYN
Redhead, S. (2000). Repetitive Beat Generation.

Edinburgh: Rebel.
Schoene, B. (2007). Alan Warner, Post-Feminism and
the Emasculated Nation. In B. Schoene (ed.),
Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish
Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 25563.
Cape.
Warner, A. (1997). These Demented Lands. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Warner, A. (1998). The Sopranos. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Warner, A. (2002). The Man Who Walks. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Warner, A. (2006). The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven.
Weissman, L. (1997). A Drink or Two with Alan
Warner. At www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0497/
warner/interview.html, accessed Sept. 1, 2008.
Waugh, Evelyn
BERNARD SCHWEIZER
Born in 1903, in London, Evelyn Waugh grew up

in an upper-middle-class home, in which literature formed a integral part of daily life. His father,
Arthur Waugh, was head of the publishing house
Chapman and Hall and also an amateur literary
critic. His only sibling, Alec Waugh, was a successful novelist at the age of 18, and Waugh
doubtlessly learned some tricks of the trade from
him, although he went on to eclipse his elder
brothers reputation. After attending an Anglican
boys school, Evelyn Waugh studied history at
Hertford College, Oxford. But being more interested in socializing and drinking than in academic
pursuits, he left the university prematurely in
1924, with only a third-class degree, after which
he had two unsuccessful teaching stints. He was
dismissed from his second post as a teacher for
alleged sexual misconduct, but he had accumulated enough experience by then to write his
fictional account of a failed student turned novice
teacher, Decline and Fall (1928). This comic novel
is widely admired for its hilarious rendering of the
naive protagonists education at the hands of an
unscrupulous society. Expelled from Oxford for a
prank others had played on him, the luckless Paul
Pennyfeather embarks on a teaching career
that only enmeshes him further in conflict and
scandal, as his naivety acts as a foil to point up the

ruthlessly selfish nature of a pleasure-driven, decadent society composed equally of ill-behaved
pupils and their shameless parents. At the time
of its publication, the books indecorous treatment of social anarchy and sex caused a stir.
Waugh married his namesake, Evelyn Gardner,
in 1928, but their marriage broke down shortly
afterward when his wife began an affair with
another man. The latent misogyny in Waughs
portrayal of female characters may well stem from
that betrayal. Even while undergoing the mortification of his wifes infidelity, he wrote his second,
enormously successful, novel, Vile Bodies
(1930b). It is a mordant reflection on the vapidity
of Londons fashionable youth, mired in campy
frivolity and addicted to sex, alcohol, speed, and
gossip. The antics of these Bright Young Things
are tellingly pointless and repetitive, as captured
in their verbal ticks (how blind-making, isnt
that rather sad-making? (184, 185) and their
inclination to find everything more or less
bogus. The novels running joke, the on-andoff-again engagement of Adam and Nina, symbolizes the unprincipled nature of this set. Ironically, Waugh himself belonged to the circle of
Bright Young Things; hence, relying for his comic
effects on the very anarchy and frivolity that he
outwardly decried shows that on a basic level he
was attracted to it. Indeed, he made a fine career
out of cultural pessimism.
But turning absurdity into comedy was not
Waughs only way of dealing with his discontent.
Waugh sought relief from a malaise composed of
depression, spousal betrayal, and ennui by converting to Catholicism in 1930. It would take
more than a decade for specific Catholic motifs
to appear in his fiction, notably in Brideshead
Revisited (1945), where he sought to dramatize
the operation of divine grace on a reluctant
believer. In the meantime, he drew literary inspiration from an eclectic range of non-Catholic
writers, including the satirists Hector Hugh Munro
(Saki), the comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, the
parodist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, as well as
the more ponderous aristocrat Sir Osbert Sitwell,
whom he styled The Grand Old Man of English
Letters (Waugh 1977, 95) By contrast, he rejected
the modernism of Bloomsbury and stayed
clear of the leftist Auden coterie. Still, he shared
the restlessness of most British writers of the
WAUGH, EVELYN
1930s and traveled extensively. Part of it had to

do with the need to distance himself from his
failed marriage; the same impulse is enacted in
several of his novels, in which a cuckolded
protagonist seeks solace by traveling to distant,
exotic lands.
Waughs first travel book, Labels (1930a), already hints at marital problems, chronicling an
aborted honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean.
The books tone is one of deflated expectation and
weariness. After this debut travelogue, Waughs
travel writing became increasingly politicized. In
his second travel book, Remote People (1931),
Waugh acknowledged the importance which
politics assume the moment one begins to travel
(137). He lampoons the coronation of Ethiopias
native emperor Haile Selassie, then the only black
ruler of an African nation besides Liberia. While
Waugh found everything surrounding the
emperors coronation to be laughable, he praised
the efficiency and taste of the British colonizers in
Kenya, thereby revealing his colonial mindset.
Although Waugh also skewered the British, notably members of the aristocracy and the urban
youth culture, he stopped short of belittling British monarchs.
Like D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene,
Waugh based several novels on his voyages
abroad. In the novel that came out of his Ethiopian journey, Black Mischief (1932), the fictional
screen is thin enough to let the reader recognize a
crass version of Ethiopia behind the country of
Azania and its naively progressive ruler, Seth.
Black Mischief, arguably Waughs most farcical
novel, pokes merciless fun at modernization and
progress, as the emperors schemes to bring Azania into the twentieth century fail one after the
other. The end of the novel enacts two secret wishfulfillment scenarios: Waughs protagonist Basil
Seal ends up ingesting his own lover who, unbeknownst to him, had been captured and stewed by
cannibals (this gruesome twist may well signify a
cathartic swipe at his first wife); and Azanias
political chaos leads to the declaration of a joint
FrenchBritish protectorate, which suggests a
benevolent view of imperialism.
Waughs next travel book, Ninety-Two Days
(1934b), is a version of the modern quest for El
Dorado gone wrong. Waughs disillusioning experience in South America provided him with
inspiration for one of his best novels, A Handful of
377
Dust (1934a), which is also partly set in Guyana.

Like the three novels that came before, this one is
again startlingly original in its plot, although the
underlying themes of polite amorality, the juxtaposition of innocence and experience, and the
sense of a gradual descent into chaos, are staples of
Waughs imagination. Tony Last, a well-meaning
but ultimately bumbling member of a declining
aristocratic house, abandons his ancestral home
after learning of his wifes infidelity (her affair was
merely an attempt to dispel boredom). He looks
for a better world by going on a vague quest for El
Dorado in South America. Instead of stumbling
on the golden city, he is entrapped by a lunatic
settler in the Amazon hinterland and forced by
him to read Dickens aloud for the rest of his life.
Waughs next travel book, Waugh in Abyssinia
(1936), is based on his second and third trips to
Ethiopia, one before and one after the Italian
invasion of 1935. At the time of its publication,
Waughs statement that Ethiopians are by any
possible standard an inferior race drew less
criticism than his open support of Mussolinis
politics. Even today, the books glossing over of
Italian war crimes and its naive presentation of
benevolent fascists is embarrassing. The novel to
come out of these trips, Scoop (1938), is another
wish-fulfillment fantasy, with Waugh posturing
as a wannabe reporter, William Boot. In contrast
to Waugh, who had been a rather unsuccessful
foreign correspondent, Boot literally makes history during his stay in Ishmaelia (alias Ethiopia).
Waughs last travel book of the 1930s, Robbery
under Law (1939), was commissioned by a British
oil magnate. Not surprisingly, the book attacks
Mexicos socialist regime and its expropriation of
foreign petroleum concerns in 1938. By the time
Waugh went to Mexico, he had obtained a divorce
and married the devoutly Catholic Laura Herbert,
with whom he had six children. He now lived in a
respectable country house in the west of England,
trying to lose his bourgeois moorings and model
himself on a country squire. Thus, his social
trajectory was just the opposite of the decline that
haunts his aristocratic protagonists, especially the
Marchmains of Brideshead Revisited.
Although many readers consider Brideshead
Revisited to be his best work of fiction, some
critics are disappointed because the novel lacks
his trademark hilarity. Indeed, the sincerity with
which Waugh chronicles the disintegration of the
378
WAUGH, EVELYN
Marchmain family and their estate, Brideshead,

reveals a different side of him. Nevertheless, his
perennial concerns are all at work here: the waste
of youth, epitomized in the degeneration of the
flamboyant alcoholic Sebastian Flyte; the flight of
the male protagonist, Charles Ryder, to Latin
America to escape a failed marriage; the disappearance of country houses as a symptom of the
nobilitys decline; and the way in which faith
holds out hope for redemption in a drab, materialistic world. The ending of the novel, in which the
lapsed Catholic, Lord Marchmain, makes peace
with God on his deathbed comes close to propagating Catholic dogma. Despite the novels contrived focus on religious conversion, Waughs
invocation of an angst-ridden, dissipated, disillusioned set of characters desperately trying to wrest
meaning from any source whatever be it the
past, drink, art, or faith is a lasting document to
Waughs power of social observation, psychological realism, and spiritual yearning.
The most important work of Waughs later
phase is doubtlessly the Sword of Honour trilogy, a
series of novels dramatizing the military misadventures of yet another Waugh alter ego, Guy
Crouchback, a bumbling antihero who is spurned
by women, unsuccessful in the army, and beset by
ethical and spiritual doubts. The trilogy, which
was adapted as a television drama in 2001
(Anderson 2001), illustrates Waughs deep
disillusionment with the West during World War
II. He was appalled by the Allied decision to
collaborate with the Soviet Union and let it claim
eastern Europe as its sphere of influence. At that
point, Waugh felt that the West had lost its moral
moorings. Thus, the eponymous sword on display in Westminster Abbey, designed as a gift
from King George IV to Stalin, should really be
called sword of dis-honour, a symbol of the
Allies betrayal of eastern Europe and its Catholic
population. This is a serious enough theme, but it
jars with Waughs desire to deliver slapstick comedy and farce. The contrary impulses set up a
tension that threatens to undermine the works
formal coherence and to dislodge its moral center.
Still, the trilogy compellingly exposes the dullness
of army life and highlights the disillusioning
savagery of war. The great British historian
A. J. P. Taylor is reported to have recommended
the novel to anybody who wanted to know what
World War II was really like.
For those who balk at the prospect of plodding

through Waughs slow-paced trilogy, there is the
delightful collection The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (1998). Readers new to Waugh will
appreciate his perfect ear for dialogue, his skill at
farce, his deflation of hypocrisy, and his keen eye
for snobbery and social class distinction. Since
there is less room in these stories to paint a broad
canvas of cultural pessimism or build elaborate
ethnocentric fantasies, many of these stories
succeed as true satires of social mores and
personal foibles. Moreover, aficionados of
Waugh will appreciate in the collection an outtake from Black Mischief, an alternative ending
to A Handful of Dust, a prequel to Brideshead
Revisited, as well as chapters of an unfinished
novel.
Waugh died suddenly, in April 1966, of a heart
attack, after having completed only one volume of
his autobiography, covering his early years (A Little
Learning, 1964). What he could not accomplish
himself, biographers have more than compensated
for since his death. There are now a half-dozen
full-length biographies of Waugh. Waughs
ongoing popularity is not a result of his politics,
which were reactionary to the point of embarrassment. His conservative opinions published
in the right-wing press could be so wrongheaded
as to call his entire judgment into question. His
support for Mussolinis war of aggression against
Ethiopia in 1935 is notorious. And his warnings
that Britain was headed for a classless society did
not inspire confidence in his prophetic abilities.
Part of this was genuine conviction, as Waugh
identified himself as an arch-conservative who
had no problem being called a snob. However,
part of it was also posturing, as he could conveniently raise his authorial profile through the
notoriety gained by writing controversial
journalism.
Today, Waugh is often invoked as a masterful
satirist, but he himself rejected the label, and with
good reason. Satire is essentially a didactic and
ameliorative project. It pokes fun at the vices and
follies of specific people or systems through exaggeration in order to bring about progress and
improvement. Waugh held no belief in positive
change and ridiculed the idea of progress, which
sets him apart from other Tory satirists such as
Jonathan Swift or Alexander Pope. His overarching worldview was dominated by an obsession
WAUGH, EVELYN
with decline. He saw change and decay wherever

he looked and ached for the restoration of a
bygone world of feudal loyalties, aristocratic traditions, and monarchic rule. Although capable of
valor in battle and courage under pressure, he
might quake at the mere mention of the common man. The idea of the welfare state, of
multiculturalism, and even of democratic government were quite unnerving to him. This reactionary sensibility accounts for a good deal of the
situation comedy of his novels, as he lampoons
anything from humanitarianism, to sexual liberation, to respect for non-whites, to modernization, to republicanism. But his satire is so indiscriminate and unconstructive as to defy the usual
didactic impulse of satire.
Having said this, it would be churlish to deny
Waughs ongoing relevance. Besides his inflammatory journalism, Waugh also penned articles
on such subjects as education, youth, and literature that have enduring value. Moreover, his
fiction has aged well. Not only was he a master
prose stylist and an expert at crafting intricate
plots, his fiction also resonates with larger
cultural concerns that still speak to us. This man,
who refused to install a telephone in his home,
who relied on an ear trumpet to hear better, and
who railed against modern gadgets of all sorts
might find admirers among todays critics of
globalization, universal commodification, and
unchecked modernization. Indeed, his lament
against standardization (all buildings will look
the same, all shops sell the same produce, all
people say the same things: 1977, 47]) appears
particularly prescient. Moreover, his attack on
gossip writing and sensationalist journalism in
Vile Bodies and Scoop anticipates todays paparazzi-fueled infatuation with the lives of media
stars and the antics of TV personalities. Finally,
his disdain for the telephone may sound consolatory to those who are appalled by todays addiction to cell phones and the cheapening of meaningful communication in the digital age. That
major films of his novels keep being made can
be seen as further evidence that Waugh has a
strong contemporary following.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Politics

and the Novel (BIF); World War II in
Fiction (BIF)
379

Anderson, B. (dir.) (2001). Sword of Honour. TalkBack.
Beaty, F. L. (1992). The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh: A
Study of Eight Novels. DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press.
Blayac, A. (ed.) (1992). Evelyn Waugh: New Directions.
Carens, J. F. (1966). The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh.
Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Carens, J. F. (1987). Critical Essays on Evelyn Waugh.
Boston: G. K. Hall.
Davis, R. M. (1989). Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His
Time. Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press.
Fry, S. (dir.) (2003). Bright Young Things [film of Vile
Bodies]. Revolution Films/Doubting Hall.
Hastings, S. (1994). Evelyn Waugh: A Biography.
Jarrold, J. (dir.) (2008). Brideshead Revisited. Ecosse
Films.
Lodge, D. (1971). Evelyn Waugh. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Patey, D. L. (1998). The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical
Biography. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stannard, M. (1987). Evelyn Waugh. New York:
Norton.
Waugh, E. (1928). Decline and Fall. London: Chapman
and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1930a). Labels. London: Duckworth.
Waugh, E. (1930b). Vile Bodies. London: Chapman and
Hall.
Waugh, E. (1931). Remote People. London: Duckworth.
Waugh, E. (1932). Black Mischief. London: Chapman
and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1934a). A Handful of Dust. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1934b). Ninety-Two Days. London:
Duckworth.
Waugh, E. (1936). Waugh in Abyssinia. London:
Longman.
Waugh, E. (1938). Scoop. London: Chapman and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1939). Robbery under Law. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1945). Brideshead Revisited. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1952). Men at Arms. London: Chapman and
Hall.
Waugh, E. (1955). Officers and Gentlemen. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1961). Unconditional Surrender. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1964). A Little Learning. London: Chapman
and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1977). A Little Order: A Selection from His
Journalism (ed. D. Gallagher). Boston: Little, Brown.
380
WELDON, FAY
Waugh, E. (1998). The Complete Stories of Evelyn

Waugh. Boston: Little, Brown.
Waugh, A. (2004). Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography
of a Family. London: Headline.
Weldon, Fay
LORENA RUSSELL
Fay Weldon, CBE, is a prolific British writer of

novels, screenplays, and short stories. Since her
premier as a novelist with The Fat Womans Joke
in 1967, she has penned some 28 novels, seven
short story collections, seven works of nonfiction, and 16 screenplays (including Upstairs,
Downstairs and a 1985 BBC adaptation of Pride
and Prejudice). Her memoir, Auto da Fay, was
written in 2002. Her writings exhibit a persistent
interest in sexual politics, which she explores with
a sardonic sensibility, punchy prose, and dry wit.
Her satire is marked by a dark, ironic tone that
questions social inequalities and their often irrational and unexpected consequences.
Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw on September 22, 1931 in Worcestershire, England. She
lived in New Zealand until she was 14, when she
returned to England with her mother and sister.
In interviews and her memoir, she recalls her early
days in a household of women, and her newfound
freedom upon entering St. Andrews University in
1949, where she studied economics and psychology. She married at 22, but the marriage did not
last. Weldon found herself struggling as a single
mother with her son Nicolas before landing a
position in advertising, a job that she held with
some success for about eight years. Two of her
more memorable lines from this period include
Go to work on an egg (Hancock & Blodgett 300)
and Vodka gets you drunker quicker (Jeffries 2006). The former slogan garnered her fame
while the latter was never published. In 1962 she
married Ron Weldon and had three more sons.
She has since divorced, and is currently married to
poet Nick Fox.
It was in the 1960s that Weldon took up
writing. Along with her many published works
of fiction and non-fiction, she remains a major
part of the literary scene. In 1983 she served as
chair of the judges for the Man Booker Prize.
Her 1978 Praxis was shortlisted for the award,
The Heart of the Country (1987a) won the 1989

Los Angeles Times Book Prize, while her 1997
collection of short stories Wicked Women won the
1996 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. In 1990
Weldon received an honorary doctorate from the
University of St. Andrews, and she was awarded
the CBE in 2001. Fay Weldon is a frequent contributor to the Guardian, and has taught creative
writing at Brunel University in London since
2006.
Many of her best-known novels, including
Remember Me (1976), The Life and Loves of a
She-Devil (1983), Splitting (1995b), and Worst
Fears (1996), follow the trials of a betrayed wife.
Weldons stories frequently concern the hardships
of women, tracing the material and psychological
effects of failed relationships and economic challenge. Despite the comic tone, her novels consider
how these hardships play out through various
degrees of suffering, alienation, and revenge. Gender difference remains a persistent concern in her
writings, as the difficulties facing Weldons earlier
characters arise largely from womens social status
as second-class citizens.
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil succeeds in its
radical imaginings of what might happen if a
wronged woman were to take control (an element
sadly absent from the 1991 American film adaptation). The plot is classic Weldon, as it follows
the elaborate revenge of the wronged wife Ruth
Pradgett against her philandering husband Bobbo
and his lover, the romance novelist Mary Fisher.
Accepting the role of a female Lucifer, Ruth
systematically embarks on a path of revenge bent
on ruining Bobbos claims on happiness. In the
chapters that follow, Ruth lays waste to Bobbo
and Marys fairy-tale affair. In episodic style, she
cleverly infiltrates an entire range of social systems
medical, judiciary, religious to bring ruin and
misery on the couple. In the end Ruth endures a
radical series of operations that ultimately transform her into the very image of Mary Fisher. The
conclusion of the novel finds Ruth living out her
days having taken over Mary Fishers body, seaside tower, and servants, in firm control of the
much reduced Bobbo. While Ruth Pradgett is an
uneasy hero by any standard, the text effectively
challenges the predominant image of woman as
victim, and remains a classic example of one
significant strand of feminist thought from the
1980s.
WELDON, FAY
Down among the Women (1971), Praxis, and

The Cloning of Joanna May (1989a) deal with
cycles of economic hardship, abuse, and oppression. Many of Weldons characters, like the aged
titular character Praxis, recognize their implication in the cycle, but are helpless to change it.
Weldons writing typically challenges readers to
face their darker sides, demanding a certain reckoning with elements of sadism, anger, eroticism,
and other unwomanly traits that stand outside
traditional concepts of femininity. Like Ruth
Pradgett, and Praxis, Mabs in Puffball (1980) is
certainly not a character with whom most readers
would readily identify. She viciously persecutes
her neighbor and ruthlessly beats her children.
Yet, there is an element in her character that also
serves to place her outside the seemingly natural
order of patriarchal norms. Mabss behavior
inverts this order, and her acts again invite
readers to consider her against the circumstances
of oppression, and thereby to reconsider the
seeming stability of the natural order between
the sexes.
Weldons 2001 novel, The Bulgari Connection,
received a flurry of criticism for its participation
in what was considered crude product placement.
Weldon had received payment from the jewelrymaker for the story, which was elaborated from a
commissioned shorter piece. The novel itself
ironically condemns materialism, and is centered
on the dysfunctional relationships arising out of
our perverse investments in class, money, sex, and
jewelry.
Weldons feminism has modified through the
years in response to changing social norms, and
her more recent writings such as What Makes
Women Happy (2006) and The Spa Decameron
(2007) are often less concerned with womens
oppression and more with their abuses of power.
The Spa, a frame-narrative told by a group of
women isolated at a remote Scottish spa during a
storm, offers a series of meditations on class, age,
and love. In the conclusion of her non-fictional
What Makes Women Happy, Weldon offers moral
advice: Be good and youll be happy. Be happy
and youll be good (Jeffries 2006). These are
the words that set the prisoner free. While the
emphasis on ethics may seem odd from a writer
best known for crafting a series of delightfully
wicked characters, it is nevertheless fitting that
the answer comes in such a simple yet profound
381
notion. As Regina Barreca observes, it is

obvious that Fay Weldon is not wicked, not really.
True, her fiction and her nonfiction alike are filled
with images of transgression, subversion, heresy,
and hysteria, but her writings are, in the end,
humane, compassionate, sympathetic, and
merciful (4). In a career spanning some 40-odd
years and still going strong, Fay Weldons
fast-moving style and comedic stories never
fail to surprise with their wisdom and ethical
insights.
SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF);
Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative
Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
Barreca, R. (ed.) (1994). Fay Weldons Wicked Fictions.
Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Dowling, F. (1998). Fay Weldons Fiction. Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Faulks, L. (1998). Fay Weldon. New York: Twayne.
Hancock, A., & Blodgett, H. (1998). Fay Weldon. In M.
Moseley (ed.), British Novelists Since 1960. 2nd series.
Jeffries, S. (2006). Lie Back and Think of Jesus (Sept. 5).
At www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/05/gender.
religion, accessed July 22, 2009.
Knutsen, K. P. (2001). War Crimes and the Crime
Novel: Fay Weldons The Shrapnel Academy.
English Studies, 82(5), 43749.
Krouse, A. N. (1978). Feminism and Art in Fay
Weldons Novels. Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction,
20(2), 520.
Smith, P. J. (2000). Women Like Us Must Learn to
Stick Together: Lesbians in the Novels of Fay
Weldon. In A. H. P. Werlock (ed.), British Women
Writing Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, pp. 12547.
Weldon, F. (1967). The Fat Womans Joke. London:
MacGibbon and Kee. (Published in US as
And the Wife Ran Away. New York:
David MacKay, 1968.).
Weldon, F. (1971). Down among the Women. London:
Heinemann.
Weldon, F. (1971 3). Upstairs Downstairs. London
Weekend Television.
Weldon, F. (1975). Female Friends. London:
Heinemann.
Weldon, F. (1976). Remember Me. London: Hodder and
Stoughton.
Weldon, F. (1978). Praxis. London: Hodder and
Stoughton.
382
WELLS, H. G
Weldon, F. (1980). Puffball. London: Hodder and

Stoughton.
Weldon, F. (1983). The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.
Weldon, F. (1984). Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane
Austen. London: Michael Joseph.
Weldon, F. (1985a). Polaris and Other Stories. London:
Weldon, F. (1985b). Pride and Prejudice (dir. C. Coke).
BBC.
Weldon, F. (1986). The Shrapnel Academy. London:
Weldon, F. (1987a). The Heart of the Country. London:
Hutchinson.
Weldon, F. (1987b). The Hearts and Lives of Men.
London: Heinemann.
Weldon,F.(1987c).TheRulesofLife.London:Hutchinson.
Weldon, F. (1988). Leader of the Band. London: Hodder
and Stoughton.
Weldon, F. (1989a). The Cloning of Joanna May.
London: Collins.
Weldon, F. (1989b). Sacred Cows. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Weldon, F. (1990). Darcys Utopia. London: Collins.
Weldon, F. (1992). Life Force. London: HarperCollins.
Weldon, F. (1993). Affliction. London: HarperCollins.
(Published in US as Trouble. New York: Viking.)
Weldon, F. (1995a). The Hole in the Top of the World
(dir. S. McLoughlin). LA Theatre Works/BBC.
Weldon, F. (1995b). Splitting. London: Flamingo.
Weldon, F. (1996). Worst Fears. London: Flamingo.
Weldon, F. (1997a). Big Women. London: Flamingo.
(Published in US as Big Girls Dont Cry.)
Weldon, F. (1997b). Wicked Women. London: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
Weldon, F. (1999). Godless in Eden. London: Flamingo.
Weldon, F. (2000). Rhode Island Blues. London:
Flamingo.
Weldon, F. (2001). The Bulgari Connection. London:
Flamingo.
Weldon, F. (2002). Auto da Fay: A Memoir. London:
Flamingo.
Weldon, F. (2003). Breakfast with Emma (dir. P. Teal).
Shared Experience, London
Weldon, F. (2004). Mantrapped. London:
HarperCollins.
Weldon, F. (2005). She May Not Leave. London: Fourth
Estate.
Weldon, F. (2006). What Makes Women Happy.
London: Fourth Estate.
Weldon, F. (2007). The Spa Decameron. London:
Quercus.
Weldon, F. (2008). The Stepmothers Diary. London:
Quercus.
Weldon, F. (2009). Chalcot Crescent. London: Corvus.
Wells, H. G
SIMON J. JAMES
H. G. Wells was born in Bromley, Kent in 1866,

the son of a servant and a shopkeeper and cricketer. He escaped from apprenticeship as a draper
to become a pupil-teacher in Midhurst, and then a
student at the Normal School of Science (now
Imperial College) in London; his first books were
biology textbooks. The importance of education
and of scientific method were to become significant themes in Wellss subsequent career as a
writer of fiction.
Wells made an immediate impact with the
scientific romance The Time Machine (1895),
which imaginatively extended new developments
in research into mathematics, geology, and biology, especially the theory of evolution. The Time
Traveller journeys into the year 802701 expecting
to find a highly developed future civilization.
Instead, he discovers that humanity has degenerated into two separate species: the beautiful but
mentally feeble Eloi, and the technically proficient
but apelike Morlocks, who literally prey on the
Eloi. He escapes back to the present, but his
narrative is left unresolved, as he fails to return
from his second journey. The Time Machine was
followed by a series of fantastic romances which
warn against a misguided and complacent faith in
mankinds evolutionary and cultural security.
Prendick in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
is horrified to discover that the island where he
has been shipwrecked is home to an exiled vivisectionist, who is creating hybrid human beings
from other animals. The animals revert to their
original nature and Moreau is killed; Prendick is
eventually rescued from the island but cannot
bear to live among society again, seeing humans as
animals. Griffin, the eponymous protagonist of
The Invisible Man (1896), also attempts to employ
a scientific invention, the secret of invisibility, for
his own advancement; but, eventually hungry,
cold, and bleeding, he is beaten to death by a
mob. In The War of the Worlds (1898), the
Martians technologically advanced space-traveling
cylinders, tripods and Heat Ray, and super-adapted
physiology seem to make them superior when they
attempt to colonize the Earth, but in the end the
invaders are defeated by Earths humblest species, its
bacteria.
WELLS, H. G
Later romances such as When the Sleeper Wakes

(1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901b), The
Food of the Gods (1904), In the Days of the Comet
(1906), The War in the Air (1908), and Men Like
Gods (1923) are fantasies of power. Here, Wells
imagines models of social organization different
from the modern democratic nation state. This
would become an increasingly important theme
in Wellss work once he began to add to his
fictional output political and utopian books such
as Anticipations (1901a), Mankind in the Making
(1903), A Modern Utopia (1905b), and New
Worlds for Old (1908), which imagine futures for
the human race more perfected than the present
day portrayed in the fiction. Wellss early realism
satirizes the status quo in depicting lower-middleclass protagonists whose aspirations for a better
kind of life are restricted by social class and poor
education. The student hero of Love and Mr.
Lewisham (1900, the first of his books that Wells
described as a novel) dreams of distinction in
science and politics, but has to surrender his sense
of his own importance when he falls in love,
marries, and becomes a father. Kipps (1905a)
developed from what was planned as a much
larger novel, The Wealth of Mr. Waddy (whose
remnants were eventually published in 1969).
Kipps escapes from the drapers shop thanks to
an unexpected inheritance discovered by his actor
friend Chitterlow, but is unable to escape from the
effects of his inadequate schooling and from the
many interdictions of the Edwardian class system.
His dreams of becoming a gentleman finally
ruined by a disastrous stay in a London hotel,
Kipps breaks off his engagement to the pretentious Helen Walshingham and marries instead his
childhood sweetheart, the servant Ethel Pornick.
Helens brother proves to have swindled most of
Kippss fortune away, but an investment in a
bookshop and in Chitterlows play eventually
provides the Kippses with security and a happy
ending. The draper Polly, in The History of Mr.
Polly (1910) is prone to romantic dreaming and,
lacking the vocabulary to express himself, to
inventing new words. Trapped in an unhappy
marriage and a failing business, Polly burns
down his shop and runs away, finding happiness
first as a tramp and then as the odd-job man in a
country inn.
Wells always argued for the freedom of
novelists to choose whatever form expressed
383
their subject matter freely, especially since he

saw his own work as constituting not merely a
reflection of the real world, but an intervention
in it. Here, he differed from his friend Henry
James:
The important point which I tried to argue . . .
was that the novel of completely consistent characterization arranged beautifully in a story and
painted deep and round and solid, no more
exhausts the possibilities of the novel, than the
art of Velazquez exhausts the possibilities of the
painted picture. . . .
Throughout the broad smooth flow of
nineteenth-century life in Great Britain, the art
of fiction floated on this same assumption of
social fixity. The Novel in English was produced
in an atmosphere of security for the entertainment of secure people who liked to feel established
and safe for good. Its standards were established
within that apparently permanent frame and the
criticism of it began to be irritated and perplexed
when, through a new instability, the splintering
frame began to get into the picture.
I suppose for a time I was the outstanding
instance among writers of fiction in English of
the frame getting into the picture. (Wells, 1934,
4935)
Wellss magnificent condition of England novel

Tono-Bungay (1909b) is disordered, fragmented,
self-conscious, and amoral in its narrative mode.
George Ponderevo grows up as the child of a
servant at the country house Bladesover, which
comes to symbolize for him everything subservient, backward-looking, and decaying about contemporary society. Georges Uncle Edward makes
a swift, spectacular fortune from the patent medicine Tono-Bungay, which confers no actual benefit but is brilliantly advertised Tono-Bungays
success is proof that the body politic is sick
beyond cure. Edwards empire eventually collapses and, following a disastrous expedition to
steal a valuable mineral from an African country,
and his rejection by his aristocratic lover, George
uses his scientific talents to manufacture a deadly
battleship for a foreign power.
Tono-Bungay marks the turning point in
Wellss career as a novelist. His twentieth-century
fiction throws off Victorian models to take
increasing formal liberties in sprawling, discur-
384
WELLS, H. G
sive novels that mirror the increasing disorder of

modern life. Since the passing of Victoria the
Great, he wrote in The Soul of a Bishop (1917),
there had been an accumulating uneasiness in
the national life. It was as if some compact and
dignified paper-weight had been lifted from peoples ideas, and as if at once they had begun to
blow about anyhow (24). The novels that follow
Tono-Bungay interleave plot with dialogue or
interior monologue on such subjects as sexual
morality, education, and the establishment of a
utopian world government. Ann Veronica
(1909a) scandalized the Edwardian establishment
with its depiction of a young woman who chooses
her scientific instructor Capes as her lover even
though he is married. (Subsequently, Capess wife
dies, Capes earns success as a playwright, and Ann
Veronica is reconciled with her father.) Remington, in the roman-a-clef The New Machiavelli
(1911), abandons his wife and a promising
political career for another woman and exile in
Italy. Trafford and Marjorie in Marriage (1912)
shake off the insubstantial trappings of civilization and in Labrador establish a more real basis
for living.
Wellss fiction, which predicted tanks, aerial
bombardment, and the atomic bomb, had always
been excited by the subject of warfare. While armed
conflict provides evidence that humanity is not
governed efficiently, the destruction of the status
quo by military technology might offer the possibility of rebuilding a better civilization in the
future. Wellss later work includes future histories
such as The World Set Free (1914b) and The Shape
of Things to Come (1933), which predict societys
destruction by modern technology, then its subsequent utopian rebuilding. This strain took on
greater urgency in Wellss work once he foresaw,
and then reported on, the Great War. Wellss home
front novel, Mr. Britling Sees it Through (1916), the
best selling of Wellss works of fiction in his own
lifetime, shows a writer musing on the war and its
likely aftermath. Joan and Peter (1918) dramatizes
its protagonists upbringing, and concludes that
school history teaching should stress humanitys
common origin over the artificial categories of
national identity. He followed this novel with a
textbook that sought to do just that, The Outline of
History (1919), which sold millions of copies
across the world. Wells continued to write dream
visions (such as Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole
Island, 1928) and sprawling semiautobiographical

novels about world and sexual politics (notably
The World of William Clissold, 1926) through to
1941s You Cant Be Too Careful. Wells lived in a
house that he had designed with the architect C. A.
Voysey, Spade House, in Sandgate, Kent; at Easton
Glebe, Essex; at Lou Pidou in France; and in
London. When asked to provide his own epitaph,
he suggested, God damn you, you fools, I told you
so. He lived long enough to see, and write about,
World War II, dying in August 1946.
Wells was a highly versatile and prolific writer,
who also produced short stories, newspaper articles, popular science, and screenplays. In a writing career that spanned over 50 years, Wells
established friendships with Henry James, George
Bernard Shaw, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad,
and Arnold Bennett, and romantic relationships
with novelists such as Elizabeth von Arnim,
Dorothy Richardson, and Rebecca West. He
became president of International PEN and campaigned against censorship. Wells was a significant public figure, running twice for Parliament,
and meeting world leaders including Winston
Churchill, Lenin, Stalin, and both Theodore and
Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was instrumental in the
formation of both the League of Nations in 1922
and the Sankey Declaration of Human Rights
which was published after his death.
Wellss greatest imaginative preoccupation was
escape. In the little discussed The Sea Lady (1902)
Chatteris chooses the better dreams (160), of
the heroine over a life of bourgeois respectability
escaped by returning with her to the sea. Wellss
work not only consistently imagines different
ways of escaping the petty limitations and
unhappiness of everyday life, but actively seeks
to make everyday life better for its readers. In his
essay The Contemporary Novel (1914), he
claimed:
I consider the novel an important and necessary
thing indeed in . . . modern civilisation. . . . In
many directions I do not think we can get along
without it. . . . The novel has inseparable moral
consequences. . . . And I do not mean merely that
the novel is unavoidably charged with the representation of this wide and wonderful conflict. It is
a necessary part of the conflict. . . . You see now
the scope of the claim I am making for the novel;
it is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of
WELSH FICTION IN ENGLISH
understanding, the instrument of self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of
manners, the factory of customs, the criticism of
laws and institutions and of social dogmas and
ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the
initiator of knowledge, the seed of fruitful selfquestioning. (1914a, 14868)
Wells was a major influence as preacher and

pedagogue in his own time, and continues to be
so, especially in science fiction and cinema.
Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Politics and the
Novel (BIF); Science Fiction (BIF);
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF)

Batchelor, J. (1985). H. G. Wells. Cambridge:
Bloom, R. (1977). Anatomies of Egotism: A Reading of
the Last Novels of H. G. Wells. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Scheick, W. (1984). The Splintering Frame: The Later
Novels of H. G. Wells. Victoria, BC: University of
Victoria.
Smith, D. C. (1986). H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A
Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wells, H. G. (1895). The Time Machine: An Invention.
London: Heinemann.
Wells, H. G. (1896). The Island of Doctor Moreau.
London: Heinemann.
Wells, H. G. (1897). The Invisible Man: A Grotesque
Romance. London: Pearson.
Heinemann.
Wells, H. G. (1899). When the Sleeper Wakes: A Story of
the Years to Come. London: Harper.
Wells, H. G. (1900). Love and Mr. Lewisham. London:
Harper.
Wells, H. G. (1901a). Anticipations of the Reaction of
Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life
and Thought. London: Chapman and Hall.
Wells, H. G. (1901b). The First Men in the Moon.
London: Newnes.
Wells, H. G. (1902). The Sea Lady: A Tissue of
Moonshine. London: Methuen.
Wells, H. G. (1903). Mankind in the Making. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Wells, H. G. (1904). The Food of the Gods and How It
Came to Earth. London: Macmillan.
Wells, H. G. (1905a). Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul.
London: Macmillan.
385
Wells, H. G. (1905b). A Modern Utopia. London:

Chapman and Hall.
Wells, H. G. (1906). In the Days of the Comet. London:
Macmillan.
Wells, H. G. (1908). The War in the Air, and Particularly
How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted.
London: Bell.
Wells, H. G. (1909a). Ann Veronica: A Modern Love
Story. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Wells, H. G. (1909b). Tono-Bungay. London:
Macmillan.
Wells, H. G. (1910). The History of Mr. Polly. London:
Nelson.
Wells, H. G. (1911). The New Machiavelli. London:
Lane.
Wells, H. G. (1912). Marriage. London: Macmillan.
Wells, H. G. (1914a). An Englishman Looks at the World,
Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon
Contemporary Matters. London: Cassell.
Wells, H. G. (1914b). The World Set Free. London:
Macmillan.
Wells, H. G. (1915). Boon, The Mind of the Race, The
Wild Asses of the Devil and The Last Trump: Being a
First Selection from the Literary Remains of George
Boon, Appropriate to the Times. London: T. Fisher
Unwin.
Wells, H. G. (1916). Mr. Britling Sees It Through.
London: Cassell.
Wells, H. G. (1917). The Soul of a Bishop: A Novel (with
Just a Little Love in It) about Conscience and Religion
and the Real Troubles of Life. London: Cassell.
Wells, H. G. (1918). Joan and Peter: The Story of an
Education. London: Cassell.
Wells, H. G. (1920). The Outline of History, Being a Plain
History of Life and Mankind. London: Newnes.
Wells, H. G. (1923). Men Like Gods. London: Cassell.
Wells, H. G. (1926). The World of William Clissold: A
Novel at a New Angle. London: Benn.
Wells, H. G. (1933). The Shape of Things to Come: The
Ultimate Revolution. London: Hutchinson.
Wells, H. G. (1934). Experiment in Autobiography:
Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain.
London: Gollancz.
Wells, H. G. (1941). You Cant be Too Careful: A Sample
of Life 19011951. London: Secker and Warburg.
Wells, H. G. (1969). The Wealth of Mr. Waddy: A Novel.
Welsh Fiction in English

STEPHEN KNIGHT
Medieval Wales, like Ireland, had a rich prose

fiction in Celtic, but there is no direct link to
386
modern English-language fiction. Welsh fiction

in English began in the nineteenth century and
flourished in the twentieth. The first phase explored Wales from an English viewpoint but after
that south Wales writers more honestly realized
their turbulent industrial world. The third phase,
after World War II, involved an increasing emphasis on the independence of this small but
complex country and integration between
Welsh-language and English-language cultures.
Recently, in the major centers, urban literature
has come into its own, focusing on the personal
and social tensions evident at the start of the
twenty-first century.
At first, English publishers, starting around
1800, produced what postcolonialists call firstcontact material in travel tales, romances, and
historical novels. Often by Welsh men and women, these works focused on touristic topics emphasizing the nature, beauty, and implicit exploitability of the country. Some writers were more
assertively Welsh: in The Rebecca Rioter (1880)
Amy Dillwyn described sympathetically the southwestern 1840s resistance to rapacious landowners.
A Maid of Cymru (1901) by the sisters Mallt and
Gwenffreda Williams (writing as The Dau
Wynne, the two Wynnes) was firmly nationalist.
Allen Raine (Anne Adaliza Evans) wrote internationally successful romances, but her viewpoint
was always Welsh and she focused on contemporary conflicts like the seductions of London in A
Welsh Singer (1897) and in The Queen of the Rushes
(1906) the dramatic nonconformist revival of
1904. Intensifying romance with ethnography,
Raine first realizes a distinctly Welsh voice in
English-language fiction.
Caradoc Evans, like Raine from southwest
Wales, published My People (1915) and Capel Sion
(1916) while working as a London journalist. His
brief, pungent stories pillory greed, hypocrisy,
and ignorance in his former rural community.
Deeply resented in Wales to this day, the stories
were popular in London: as in dark tales of Red
Indian or Aboriginal savagery, the native
Welsh were patronized if brilliantly from an
implicitly imperial and imperious viewpoint.
More positive materials came from the AngloWelsh borders. Hilda Vaughans The Battle to the
Weak (1925) presents social and gender debate
from England-facing east Wales, first in a small
town and then among the landowning gentry.
Iron and Gold (1948; first published in 1942 as The

Fair Woman in the USA) moves toward Welsh
myth. Geraint Goodwin, another London journalist, realized Anglo-Welsh encounters along the
border in Call Back Yesterday (1935), while
Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler) wrote and
illustrated the fine allegorical novella Country
Dance (1932), in which a woman is courted by
two men, one Welsh, the other English, with
tragic outcome.
The newly industrial landscape was also realized. Joseph Keating, a former collier, was the first
to produce mining fiction in Son of Judith (1900).
He deals with the dire pit context but romance is
never far away: the viewpoint is never a workers,
and gentry women remain central. Parallel distancing occurs in Rhys Daviess first novel The
Withered Root (1927), in which the hero eludes
industry in his native Rhondda by becoming a
revivalist preacher.
The first thoroughgoing Welsh industrial novelist was Jack Jones. Raised in the iron and steel
crucible of Merthyr, he wrote, while unemployed, Black Parade (1935), a richly colloquial
tapestry of the lives and deaths of working
men and women. Published first was the laterwritten Rhondda Roundabout (1934), less sprawling and challenging through being a malefocused romance, and then came Bidden to the
Feast (1938), where Jones went back to the 1860s
to present a full and vigorous origin-legend of
Welsh industrialism.
Leftism across 1930s Britain made Wales of
wide interest, and Rhys Davies, now an established London literary figure, produced a trilogy
taking the coalfield from its inception in Honey
and Bread (1935), through the turn-of-the-century
crisis in A Time to Laugh (1937), to the bitter crisis
of the mid-1920s in Jubilee Blues (1938). Davies
realizes memorably the socio-economic disaster
of south Wales between the wars, though he was
never fully a realist: his finest novel, The Black
Venus (1944), uses myth to allegorize Welsh
experiences, rural, industrial, and colonial.
Political rigor entered Welsh fiction in Lewis
Joness Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939). Len
Roberts, son of a miner, is a left activist who resists
wartime patriotism and Labour reformism alike,
and, like Jones himself, joins the Communist
Party. The novels can be gesturing, both in politics
and personalities, but Jones narrates vividly the
human experience of and resistance to the thirties

crises on the coalfield and in Spain.
Gwyn Thomass politics were as left as Lewis
Joness but he is remembered as a comedian. His
first-written, but later-published, Sorrow for Thy
Sons (1988) was darkly comic about 1930s south
Wales, but a London publisher rejected it as being
too somber. When he began publishing 10 years
later, he mocked his targets rather than assaulting
them. The World Cannot Hear You (1951) is the
best of these dissenting comedies; but more political, perhaps because historical, and set in the
1830s is All Things Betray Thee (1949). Its US title
was Leaves in the Wind, and although Thomas
includes a gentry romance (with a nod to Gone
with the Wind), the heroes are revolutionary
trade unionists and the novel failed in America.
Thomas is remembered as a writer who added to
industrial fiction the verbal verve central to the
Welsh self-concept.
The best-known treatment of industrial Wales,
unfortunately, is How Green Was My Valley
(1939) by Richard Llewellyn, an army officer and
film worker. Reversing the established south
Wales novel, it recounts the origins of industrialism from a conservative position. As in firstcontact narratives, the Welsh are portrayed as
being quaint and passionate, not collective and
democratic, and at the novels end the men of the
central family break a strike to save the mine for
the owners. Widely rejected by those from south
Wales, the novel was nevertheless a massive force,
especially after the Oscar-winning film of 1941.
Up till about 1960, London publishers sought
another novel in the same vein, which explains
the brief fame of Richard Vaughans rural sentimentalities like Moulded in Earth (1951). Negotiating that reductive pressure would be one of the
tasks of the postwar writers of Welsh fiction.
Dylan Thomass early prose was surrealism set
in Wales, but his publisher preferred the amusing
whimsy of Thomass later prose, as in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Dog (1940). His friend Glyn
Jones was also a poet and, as in his early collection
The Blue Bed and Other Stories (1937), a fine
symbolist. His major novel The Island of Apples
(1965) is a European-style fable about transcendence in Joness own world of Merthyr. Alun
Lewis, who died in action, made a wartime reputation with poetry and stories in The Last Inspection (1942), dealing with Wales as well as India,
387
and in subtle and wide-ranging stories in the

posthumous In the Green Tree (1948).
Two postwar writers and intellectuals had a
major impact both internationally and in Wales:
Emyr Humphreys and Raymond Williams.
Humphreys, like Glyn Jones and many Welshlanguage writers, was a conscientious objector and
remained sympathetic to both the Welsh nationalist cause and pacifism. His first major book was A
Mans Estate (1955), exploring Welsh conservative
masculinity and employing a mythic substructure
drawing on Aeschylus. He then used Joyces Ulysses
as the model for Outside the House of Baal (1965),
which intercalates the limited life events of a retired
minister and his sister-in-law with a sweeping
historical and social account of most of the Welsh
twentieth century, considering, very unusually,
both the north and south. Many commentators
regard this as the most important single Welsh
novel in English, but Humphreys, who deliberately
writes in English to address a larger audience, went
on to work in a more widely accessible mode.
His The Land of the Living series started with
National Winner (1971), focusing on lawyer-poet
John Cilydd More, whose oversensitivity leads to
his early death. His youngest sons inquiries take us
back to Mores youth, his marriage with Amy
Parry, and his engagements with politics, history,
nationalism, and various forms of meretricious
modernity. As the series continues, a south Welsh
unionist, modeled on the novelist Lewis Jones, dies
in Spain, while Amy, less sensitive than her husband, moves into Labour politics and high influence. As ever in Humphreys, and in Welsh writing
generally, myth is close: the inquiring son is
Peredur, the original Welsh name of the grailachiever Perceval, while his brothers Bedwyr and
Gwydion also invoke a still potent Celtic past.
National Winner, though the first published, was
meant to constitute the dark end of the series, but
the resurgence of the Welsh language and the
nationalist spirit in the 1970s and 1980s led Humphreys to write a seventh book, Bonds of Attachment (1991). Now, while many forces remain
hostile, and nationalist violence is seen as destructive by the pacifist Humphreys, he understands
Wales as, pointing to his overall title, still a land of
the living.
While Raymond Williams was based in Cambridge and wrote on English literature and international theory, his fiction focused mostly on
388
Wales. Border Country (1960) takes an Englandbased Welsh academic back home to his dying
fathers memories of the 1926 strike. Continuing
the trilogy, Second Generation (1964) follows
Welsh workers to the car industry in postwar
Oxford, and explores the class and generational
strain created by education. The Fight for Manod
(1977) deploys the central figures of the first two
books to uncover plans by government and international capital for exploitative new technology developments in Powys, Williamss own midWales region. Williams turned from the future to
the past when, late in life and a member of the
Welsh nationalist party, he planned a historical
trilogy about his own region. Nevertheless, The
People of the Black Mountains series was finished
only as far as the middle ages (The Beginning,
1989; The Eggs of the Eagle, 1990).
More recent industrial history has preoccupied
several writers. Ron Berry, himself a miner, wrote
vigorously about the male culture of the pits,
varying from dynamic ethnography in Flame and
Slag (1968) to retrospective sentiment in This
Bygone (1996). Alun Richards realized with humor and sympathy the impact of industrial decline in short stories in Dai Country (1976). The
major post-industrial novel is the darkly powerful
Shifts (1988) by Christopher Meredith. In this
work a south Wales steelworks is closing and three
characters take varied paths: one of the men
returns to England, one moves uncertainly toward local history and learning Welsh, while his
wife, now ignored by both, lacks even those
options. Meredith, a Welsh speaker, went on to
write a medieval historical novel, Griffri (1991).
Such links with Welsh-language material are
common, notably in Lloyd Joness pan-Wales
cultural travelogues Mr. Vogel (2004) and Mr.
Cassini (2006). There are also many translations
of novels from Welsh to English, the most important being Kate Robertss powerful account of
an early twentieth-century family, Feet in Chains
(1977), Islwyn Ffowc Eliss post World War II
political fantasy The Shadow of the Sickle (1998),
and Caradog Prichards magic-realist One Moonlit Night (1995). While these look to the past in
theme and mode, powerfully postmodern are Wil
Owen Robertss The Pestilence (1991) and Mihangel Morgans Melog (2007).
This last work was translated by Meredith, and
he has also produced Sidereal Time (1998), which
explores the consciousness of a woman schoolteacher and so connects with another major element of modern Welsh writing: the development
of a voice both Welsh and female. As well as the
early romancers like Allen Raine and Hilda
Vaughan, Welsh women had been writing all the
time, often for magazines, as is shown in Jane
Aarons important anthology A View across the
Valley (1999). After the war Menna Gallie reshaped male industrial fiction through the mystery genre in Strike for a Kingdom (1959), in which
the inquiring miner is also a Welsh-language poet,
and in her second novel The Small Mine (1962) in
which she emphasizes a female viewpoint.
Cardiff-born Bernice Rubens has dealt with
local women and their social world in I Sent a
Letter to My Love (1975) and Yesterday in the Back
Lane (1995), while Siân James, after succeeding in
England with often ironic romances, reconnects
with Wales in A Small Country (1979). Yet Jamess
sharpest work is in her short stories, collected in
Not Singing Exactly (1996). In State of Desire
(1996) Catherine Merriman mixes womens lives
and post-industrial action. Stevie Davies interprets in telling detail the politics of gender and
class in Wales in Kith and Kin (2004).
Rachel Trezises In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl
(2000) charts the pain experienced by a selfharming girl in modern Merthyr and her use of
disability to image the human cost of social failure
is common in other modern Welsh writing. In
Richard John Evanss ironically titled Entertainment (2000) a central character is wheelchairbound but also very aggressive; Lewis Daviess
My Piece of Happiness (2000) represents memorably the mentally disabled and their slim chance
of a normal life; the central characters of Niall
Griffiths successful and powerful novels of modern social resistance (often likened to the Scottish
fiction of Irvine Welsh) are incapacitated by drugs
(Grits, 2000) or by a missing limb in the prizewinning Stump (2003).
Dolores, the central figure of Trezza
Azzopardis The Hiding Place (2000), has a stump
for a hand but her disability is used to focus ethnic
tensions in the authors own Maltese community,
part of Cardiffs maritime past, and shows the
multicultural awareness that recurs in recent
Welsh fiction. John Williams realizes more genially the multicultural Tiger Bay community in
Cardiff Dead (2000), while more widespread
ethnic anxiety is explored in Charlotte Williamss

Sugar and Slate (2002), about a woman who, like
the author, is both from north Wales and AfroCaribbean, and in Mr. Schnitzel (2001) by Stephen
Knight (not the author of this essay), which deals,
quasi-autobiographically, with a family that
bridges Austria and Swansea. Tristan Hughess
Send My Cold Bones Home (2006) links the island
of Anglesey with the transatlantic world, past and
present, while Peter Ho Davies, himself Chinese
Welsh, deals in The Welsh Girl (2007) with a
complex wartime interface in Wales between the
Welsh (in both languages), the English, and the
Germans. Further responses to the complexity of
modern identity are John Sam Joness gay male
fiction, as in Welsh Boys Too (2000) and Crawling
through Thorns (2008), and the Newport-based
lesbian novel by Erica Woof Mud Puppy (2002).
Not all Welsh fiction fits readily into categories:
Lily Tobias is an interwar Jewish writer using
Welsh contexts in Eunice Fleet (1933); Nigel
Heseltines Tales of the Squirearchy (1946) is
surreal gentry farce; and Malcolm Pryce started
a series of postmodern comedies with Last Tango
in Aberystwyth (2004). There are also Welsh-born
writers who have mostly dealt with English or
international themes, such as Dorothy Edwards,
Richard Hughes, Howard Spring, Bertha Thomas,
Stuart Evans, and, today, Sarah Waters and
Russell Celyn Davies. But many Welsh authors
have worked with a nationally committed imagination to interpret their own time and their own
place. Though English fiction in Wales is, in any
substantial form, little more than 100 years old,
the authors have generated both remarkable
variety and striking quality in this small, ancient,
and vociferous part of the world, and the long
Welsh tradition of potent narrative has been
powerfully continued in the English language.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Politics
and the Novel (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
Aaron, J. (ed.) (1999). A View across the Valley: Short
Stories by Women from Wales. Dinas Powys: Honno.
Aaron, J. (2007). Nineteenth-Century Womens Writing
in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity. Cardiff:
389
Aaron, J., & Williams, C. (eds.) (2005). Postcolonial

Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Azzopardi, T. (2000). The Hiding Place. London:
Picador.
Berry, R. (1968). Flame and Slag. London: W. H. Allen.
Bohata, K. (2004). Postcolonialism Revisited. Cardiff:
Davies, L. (2000). My Piece of Happiness. Cardiff:
Parthian.
Davies, R. (1927). The Withered Root. London: Holden.
Davies, R. (1944). The Black Venus. London:
Heinemann.
Evans, C. (1915). My People. London: Melrose.
Evans, M. (1932). Country Dance. London: Barker.
Gallie, M. (1959). Strike for a Kingdom. London:
Gollancz.
Goodwin, G. (1935). Call Back Yesterday. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Gramich, K. (2007). Twentieth-Century Womens
Writing in Wales: Land, Gender, Belonging. Cardiff:
Green D. (2009). Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial
Novelist. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Griffiths, N. (2000). Grits. London: Jonathan Cape.
Hughes, T. (2006). Send My Cold Bones Home. Cardiff:
Parthian.
Humphreys, E. (1965). Outside the House of Baal.
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Humphreys, E. (1971). National Winner. London:
Macdonald.
James, S. (1996). Not Singing Exactly. Dinas Powys:
Honno.
Jones, G. (1965). The Island of Apples. London: J. M.
Dent.
Jones, G. (2001). The Dragon Has Two Tongues [1968],
rev. edn. (ed. T. Brown). Cardiff: University of Wales
Press.
Jones, J. (1938). Bidden to the Feast. London: Hamilton.
Jones, J. S. (2000). Welsh Boys Too. Cardiff: Parthian.
Jones, Lewis (1937). Cwmardy. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Jones, Lloyd (2004). Mr. Vogel. Bridgend: Seren.
Keating, J. (1900). Son of Judith. London: G. Allen.
Knight, S. (2001). Mr. Schnitzel. London: Viking.
Knight, S. (2004). A Hundred Years of Fiction. Cardiff:
Lewis, A. (1942). The Last Inspection. London: Allen and
Unwin.
Llewellyn, R. (1939). How Green Was My Valley.
London: Michael Joseph.
Meredith, C. (1988). Shifts. Bridgend: Seren.
Merriman, C. (1996). State of Desire. London:
Macmillan.
Prys-Williams, B. (2004). Twentieth-Century
Autobiography. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
390
WELSH, IRVINE
Raine, A. (1906). The Queen of the Rushes. London:

Hutchinson.
Thomas, D. (1940). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Dog. London: J. M. Dent.
Thomas, G. (1949). All Things Betray Thee. London:
Gollancz. (Published in US as Leaves in the Wind.
Boston: Little, Brown.)
Thomas, G. (1988). Sorrow for Thy Sons. London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Thomas, M. W. (ed.) (2003). Welsh Writing in English.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Trezise, R. (2000). In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl.
Cardiff: Parthian.
Vaughan, H. (1925). The Battle to the Weak. London:
Heinemann.
Williams, C. (2002). Sugar and Slate. Aberystwyth:
Planet.
Williams, J. (2000). Cardiff Dead. London:
Bloomsbury.
and Windus
Williams, R. (1977). The Fight for Manod. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Woof, E. (2002). Mud Puppy. London: Womens Press.
Welsh, Irvine
ROBERT MORACE
Even in an age of hyper-consumerism accustomed to an endless supply of instant classics by

new writers, Irvine Welshs Trainspotting (1993)
stands out as much for creating a cultural phenomenon as for launching an individual career,
for appealing to postliterate youth as well as
broadsheet reviewers, for helping put contemporary Scottish fiction on the world literary map,
and for creating a sense of national self-confidence
that played a part in the passage of the 1997
referendum on devolution.
Welsh was born in 1958 in Leith, Edinburghs
port area, and was raised in the citys Muirhouse
section, one of the numerous postwar council
estates that were intended to improve living conditions for working-class families from places like
Leith but instead created the social pathologies
depicted in Welshs work. Welsh left school at 16,
lived in London for a time, squatting in abandoned buildings, trying his hand at punk music,
experimenting with drugs, and eventually buying
and selling real estate during the London housing
boom. On visits back to Edinburgh, he discovered

that many of his friends were either dead, addicted
to heroin, or HIV-positive and was as angry over
their failure to better themselves as he was over the
Thatcher governments policies and its devastating socio-economic effects.
The result was Trainspotting, a novel that he
never thought would be published and, given its
small initial print run, that his publisher did not
expect would be widely read. But Welshs novel
about a group of Edinburgh no-hopers in their
mid-twenties, most of them male, many of them
addicted to heroin, some to alcohol and violence,
all of them surrounded by death and urban
decay, struck a nerve, reaching a worldwide
audience following the release of Danny Boyles
film version in 1996. Although influenced more
by pop culture (film, music, television) than high
art, Trainspotting should be understood as the
most visible link in a chain of Scottish writers
whose fiction appeared after the failed 1979
referendum: Alasdair Gray, James Kelman,
William McIlvanney, Janice Galloway, and A. L.
Kennedy. But Trainspotting eschews the philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological trappings
of their fiction and more vehemently of the
Oxbridge (and East Anglia) literary novel and
creates interest in a new, more youth-oriented
fiction in Scotland (Alan Warner and Laura
Hird) and outside (John King in England, Niall
Griffiths in Wales). Unlike a mythified William
Wallace shouting freedom in Mel Gibsons
1995 film Braveheart, Trainspotting offers a
bunch of voices shouting to be heard in their
own language (dialect), time, and place. Dependence here is not just an individual psychological
condition but a powerful socio-political trope in
a novel that ends with the central character (to
the extent that it has one central character)
escaping Scotland.
The Acid House (1994), a collection of short
stories and novella, quickly consolidated Welshs
reputation as the poet laureate of the chemical
generation and demonstrated the marketability
of the Welsh brand within the culture industries
transformed by Thatchers economic policies. His
second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995),
provides an arresting portrait of the pathological
Scot as a young urban male, graphic not only in its
language and depiction of violence (especially
WELSH, IRVINE
sexual violence) but in the way Welsh uses typography and page design to trace the comatose
protagonists various states of (sub)consciousness
as he tries both to confront his past and to
escape it.
The success of the film Trainspotting was not
quite enough to offset negative reviews of Ecstasy
(1996), a collection of three hastily written
chemical romances. Originally hailed as a
literary Kasper Hauser, Welsh was now being
judged according to rather conventional literary
standards and found wanting by reviewers who
failed to understand that his fiction is rooted more
deeply in visual culture than in literature and
who seemed intent on putting the consistently
bestselling Frankensteins monster they had
helped create back in his place. Filth (1998), a
400-page monologue by a misogynistic, abusive,
cocaine-fueled police detective (as well as his
transvestite self and his tapeworm), and Welshs
in-your-face play, Youll Have Had Your Hole, the
same year, offered additional proof, reviewers
claimed, that Welshs stock-in-trade was shock
for shocks sake.
Welsh did not publish his next book for three
years. For all its continuities with the previous
work, Glue (2001) signals a significant change in
his writing, away from the energy and spontaneity of the early work and toward a more
organized and self-consciously literary and much
less engaging kind of fiction, less dependent on
the vernacular and increasingly set outside Edinburgh: Glue, in four parts spanning four decades
and narrated by four friends; Porno (2002), the
Trainspotting sequel, set a decade later; The
Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006),
which combines Robert Louis Stevensons Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wildes Portrait of
Dorian Gray with a long section set in California
(also the setting of Babylon Heights, 2006, a play
co-written with Dean Cavanagh); If You Like
School, Youll Love Work (2007), a remarkably
lifeless collection of stories set in the US, Spain,
and Fife; and a new novel, Crime (2008), set in
Florida, where the Dublin-based author now
resides part of the year.
The Irvine Welsh once hailed as the enfant
terrible of contemporary fiction, who claimed he
would write only as long as he had something
to say, has become Irvine Welsh, author. The
391
urgency, authenticity, edginess, and demotic energy of his early fiction has given way to literary
self-consciousness, offset by Welshs willingness
to support numerous worthy projects and causes.
Whether Welsh can return to form with his
planned Trainspotting prequel remains to be seen.
Scottish Fiction (BIF); Warner, Alan (BIF);
Working-Class Fiction (BIF)

Boyle, D. (dir.) (1996). Trainspotting. Miramax/
PolyGram.
Craig, C. (1999). The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative
and Narration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Kelly, A. (2005). Irvine Welsh. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
March, C. (2002). Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean,
Warner, Banks, Galloway, and Kennedy. Manchester:
Morace, R. (2001). Irvine Welshs Trainspotting: A
Readers Guide. New York: Continuum.
Morace, R. (2007). Irvine Welsh. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Petrie, D. (2000). Screening Scotland. London: BFI.
Schoene, B. (2004). Nervous Men, Mobile Nation:
Masculinity and Psychopathology in Irvine Welshs
Filth and Glue. In E. Bell & G. Miller (eds.), Scotland
in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 12145.
Schoene-Harwood, B. (2000). Writing Men: Literary
Masculinities from Frankenstein;1; to the New Man.
Warburg.
Welsh, I. (1994). The Acid House. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Welsh, I. (1995). Marabou Stork Nightmares. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Welsh, I. (1996). Ecstasy. London: Jonathan Cape.
Welsh, I. (1998). Filth. London: Jonathan Cape.
Welsh, I. (1999). The Acid House: A Screenplay. London:
Methuen.
Welsh, I. (2001). Glue. London: Jonathan Cape.
Welsh, I. (2002). Porno. London: Jonathan Cape.
Welsh, I. (2006). Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs.
Welsh, I. (2007). If You Liked School, Youll Love Work.
Welsh, I. (2008). Crime. London: Jonathan Cape.
392
WEST, REBECCA
West, Rebecca
BERNARD SCHWEIZER
Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield in London, in 1892,

Rebecca West changed her name (inspired by
Ibsens heroine in Rosmersholm) in 1911, at the
cusp of what was to become a stellar writing
career. She was awarded Britains highest honor
in 1959, Dame Commander of the British Empire
(DBE), in recognition of her importance as an
accomplished woman of letters. Coming from an
impoverished family (her father was financially
irresponsible and squandered money on stockmarket gambles), West approached the task of
writing with a professionalism seldom seen in one
so young. By the time she was 20, she had already
made a name for herself by writing bold, unsparing critical articles and book reviews on womens
issues, suffrage, socialism, colonialism, and literature in newspapers and magazines in England
and America. And she would go on to write in the
genres of literary criticism, biography, journalism, cultural anatomy, short story, and novel.
But while Wests across-the-board writing talents brought financial prosperity, her protean
output resisted easy canonization. Her diverse
achievements all compete for attention; while her
brief, accessible journalistic work remains mostly
uncollected, arguably her greatest book, Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), weighs in at
1,200 closely printed pages, daunting all but the
most intrepid readers; her crowning achievement
as a novelist, the Aubrey saga (The Fountain
Overflows, 1956; This Real Night, 1984; and Cousin
Rosamund, 1985), presents its own difficulties: the
story was interrupted for 30 years instead of
stimulating reader interest by sequential publication, as the two sequels to the first installment
appeared only after Wests death. Other novels by
West such as Harriet Hume (1929) and The Birds
Fall Down (1966) remain out of print.
Nevertheless, a steady revival of Wests work is
under way, with scholarly and general interest in
her work galvanized by the foundation of the
International Rebecca West Society in 2003. Her
diverse output has been increasingly seen as a
strength that warrants multidisciplinary and holistic approaches transcending period, movement, or genre. Indeed, Rebecca West grew up
among the exciting ferment of modernism and
worked well into the era of postmodernism. She

was a between-the-wars writer as well as a postwar
writer. Some of her work does show typical signs
of modernism, notably stylistic experimentation,
shifting points of view, fragmentation, attention
to subconscious processes, and an emphasis on
gender and sexuality. Still, she can at best be
identified as a kind of border modernist, or
intermodernist, for she wrote in a manner that
not only reflects literary innovation but also
rehearses some conventions of the realist novel,
even while anticipating developments that have
come to be associated with postmodernism. Although no postmodernist in any definite sense,
she was adept at deconstructing received dualisms
and stereotypes, and her work celebrates peripheral social and historical perspectives even as it
presents alternatives to the master-narratives of
nation, empire, and modernity.
To understand the work of Rebecca West, one
must be attuned to its political and philosophical
implications. West was a public intellectual of the
first order who rubbed shoulders (and occasionally butted heads) with some of the centurys
most prominent figures, including Emmeline
Pankhurst, Emma Goldman, Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., J. Edgar Hoover, Lionel Trilling, and many
others. Ideologically, she was a paragon of liberalism. She based her feminism, her nationalism,
her anti-totalitarianism, and her pro-civil rights
stance on the principles of emancipation, freedom, rationalism, and fairness. Like other British
public intellectuals, including George Orwell and
Arthur Koestler, she became an ardent anti-communist from the mid-1940s onward, arguing that
with the demise of fascism, communism had
become the worlds most dangerous totalitarian
ideology. Conservatives like William Buckley, Jr.
admired West for that reason, even though she
had been a socialist in her twenties and had been
deeply marked by the anarchist radicals her father
had brought into the house when she was a child.
Rebecca Wests literary acquaintances include
Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound,
Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, and D. H.
Lawrence. She also had a 10-year liaison with
H. G. Wells, who fathered her only child, Anthony
Panther West, with whom she had a tense and
often unhappy relationship marred by mutual
recriminations. Such personal relationships have
left a strong imprint on Wests fiction. A lover
WEST, REBECCA
closely resembling H. G. Wells, an illegitimate

child (reminiscent of Anthony), a father figure
who abandons his family (just as Wests father,
Charles, did when she was 9), a sister who is
spiteful and meddling (based, perhaps unfairly,
on her sister Letitia), as well as a musically gifted
maternal figure (inspired by Wests own mother)
are frequent staples in her novels.
West drew literary inspiration from Charlotte
Bronte, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and D. H.
Lawrence, and her work accordingly reflects these
writers preoccupation with gender relations and
sexuality, with memory and origins, with social
class conflict, and with mans loneliness in an
absurd universe. Her first novel, The Return of the
Soldier (1918), resonates with all of these themes:
a shell-shocked soldier in World War I returns
home amnesiac, forgetting that he was married to
a conventional society woman, desiring to be
reunited with his first love, a soulful workingclass woman. Her next novel, The Judge (1922), is
a long, passionate story about a doomed love
relationship between a young suffragette and an
older, Byronic expert in explosives, whose mother
unwittingly sabotages the union (a nod to Freud)
and whose illegitimate half-brother triggers a
violent denouement. Again, the novel repays the
obvious feminist and gender approach, while
developing a Sophoclean pessimism that continues the existentialist vision hinted at in The
Return of the Soldier. Harriet Hume (1929), Wests
London Fantasy, is her strongest claim to mainstream modernism a prismatic, introspective
text that chronicles the fatal obsession of a successful career politician with a wraithlike, piano
prodigy. This novels philosophical framework
centers on Manichean dualisms, transposed into
the relationship between the sexes. The Thinking
Reed (1936) is a novel of manners about the
corrupting effect of wealth on inherently decent
people. By implying that wealth exercises an
influence as pernicious as poverty, West displayed
her inherent sympathy for the middle classes
(although she herself eventually reached upperclass status). The series of novels often referred to
as the Aubrey trilogy were planned as a Saga of
the Century, according to Wests own notes.
Even though the three existing volumes cover
only about a quarter of the century, they constitute a masterpiece, filled with period detail,
replete with historical and cultural significance,
393
and crackling with imagination, wit, and drama.

The rich palette of characters is suffused with deep
psychological interest and spellbinding emotional
power. It is a modern epic that, through the
vicissitudes of the Aubrey family, dramatizes the
larger forces that shaped the early twentieth century. West orchestrates the events to show the
destructive (male) elements of the twentieth century are locked in struggle with the enlightening
(female) potential of art, intellect, and compassion. The Birds Fall Down (1966), the last novel
published during Wests lifetime, is a spy thriller.
Although an explicitly political novel, this story
about terrorists, agitators, spies, and traitors in
the run-up to the Russian Revolution of 1905 also
resonates with philosophical significance, as evidenced in discussions about the Trinity, the relevance of absolute political loyalty, and the meaning of the Hegelian dialectic in the context of
treason.
Wests preoccupation with treason was not
limited to fiction, as evidenced by the two books
The Meaning of Treason (1949) and The New
Meaning of Treason (1964). These immensely
successful works aim to solve the mystery why
rational people can betray their own kind, a theme
that goes back, once again, to the memory of her
own fathers desertion of his family. And not just
that at times, she felt equally betrayed on this
earth by the ultimate patriarch, God the Father.
The spies and traitors, whose trials she observed in
the courtroom, seemed to her symptoms of a
larger, universal malaise. She analyzes the motives, backgrounds, and personalities of men like
William Joyce, John Amery, and Alger Hiss as if
she were trying to read their minds and plumb the
depths of what to her constitutes the real original
sin: betrayal of ones country and home.
Wests reportage of various treason trials and of
the Nuremburg tribunal made her into a celebrity,
and Time magazine put her on its front cover in
1948, proclaiming her to be the worlds foremost
woman writer. But enduring literary reputations
are seldom made on the strength of journalism,
and it is therefore significant that the focus of
scholarly interest is now gradually shifting back to
Rebecca West as a gifted all-rounder, a thinker
who was an accomplished reporter, a fine literary
reviewer, a philosopher, and a premier novelist.
When she died in March 1983, William Shawn,
editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, wrote:
394
WILSON, ANGUS
Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have

a lasting place in English literature. No one in this
century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more
wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of the world more intelligently
(quoted in Charlton 1983).
SEE ALSO: London in Fiction (BIF);
Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF);
Wells, H. G. (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)

Bridges, A. (dir.) (1982). The Return of the Soldier. Barry
R. Cooper Productions.
Charlton, L. (1983). Dame Rebecca West Dies in
London. New York Times, p. B7 (Mar. 16).
Glendinning, V. (1987). Rebecca West. London:
Norton, A. (2000). Paradoxical Feminism: The Novels
of Rebecca West. Lanham, MD: International
Scholars.
Rollyson, C. (1996). Rebecca West: A Life. New York:
Scribners.
Rollyson, C. (2005). Rebecca West and the God that
Failed. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.
Schweizer, B. (2002). Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion,
and the Female Epic. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Schweizer, B. (ed.) (2006). Rebecca West Today:
Contemporary Critical Approaches. Newark:
University of Delaware Press
Nisbet.
West, R. (1922). The Judge. London: Hutchinson.
West, R. (1928). The Strange Necessity. London:
Jonathan Cape.
West, R. (1929). Harriet Hume. London: Hutchinson.
West, R. (1933). St Augustine. London: Peter Davies.
West, R. (1936). The Thinking Reed. London:
Hutchinson.
West, R. (1941). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. London:
Macmillan.
West, R. (1949). The Meaning of Treason. London:
Macmillan.
West, R. (1955). A Train of Powder. London: Macmillan.
West, R. (1956). The Fountain Overflows. New York:
Viking.
West, R. (1966). The Birds Fall Down. London:
Macmillan.
West, R. (1982). The Young Rebecca (ed. J. Marcus).
West, R. (1984). This Real Night. London: Macmillan.
West, R. (1985). Cousin Rosamund. London: Macmillan.
West, R. (2003). Survivors in Mexico (ed. B. Schweizer).

New Haven: Yale University Press.
West, R. (2005). Woman as Artist and Thinker. Lincoln,
NE: iUniverse.
Wolfe, P. (1971). Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker.
Wilson, Angus
MARINA MACKAY
Although in his own lifetime (191391) he was

considered one of the most important British
novelists of the postwar period, Angus Wilson is
nowhere near as widely read as he was. So to say
that he is very much a writer of his time may seem
faint praise, but perhaps his most obvious claim
on our attention is the extraordinary archive of
mid-century morals and manners represented by
the eight novels and three collections of short
stories that he produced in a career that ran from
the immediate aftermath of World War II to the
early 1980s. But what makes this oeuvre more
than just a social record, albeit a more nuanced
record than most of his contemporaries left behind, is Wilsons sense, partly fascinated and
partly appalled, of the ways in which those slick
surfaces of everyday social interaction that he
reproduces so meticulously are continuously
jeopardized by the private and public sadisms
they attempt to conceal. Concerns with the inauthenticity of social relations and the intractable
reality of moral evil give Wilsons fiction its
primary themes and its characteristically edgy,
theatrical forms.
Although Wilson was almost 40 when he began
his career as a published writer with a short story
in Cyril Connollys magazine Horizon in 1947, the
earlier years of his life shed useful light on what
would become his characteristic obsession with
both the entrapping realities and the ultimate
depthlessness of class codes. Born on August 11,
1913 in the Sussex town of Bexhill-on-Sea,
Wilson belonged to what might best be described
as the genteel poor, or, in short, high class but
no cash. His father was an upper-class AngloScottish gambler and his mother the daughter of
bourgeois South Africans of English origin, and
both were deeply committed to keeping up
appearances without the income that would lend
such appearances substance. With its frequent
WILSON, ANGUS
moves from superficially realistic narration into

pure playscript, Wilsons most autobiographical
novel, the parodic family saga No Laughing Matter
(1967) brings into the foreground the necessary
theatricality of a family whose financial insecurity
and emotional instability perpetually endanger all
their efforts to maintain a good social front.
Notwithstanding his rackety and chaotic home
life, Wilson was educated at the prestigious Westminster School, thanks to an unusual instance of
fiscal foresight on the part of his mother, who died
when he was 15. After completing a degree in
history at Merton College, Oxford, he worked as
a cataloguer of books for the British Museum until
World War II took him to the famous code-breaking center at Bletchley Park. His career as a writer
began after a serious nervous breakdown during the
war, and the story he claimed was the first he ever
wrote certainly gives a disturbing sense of his mid1940s state of mind. Raspberry Jam is the story of
an imaginative but isolated upper-class boy witnessing the protracted torture and killing of a little bird
at the hands of two deranged old women whom he
has befriended the raspberry jam of the title
describes what the bird looks like when its killers
have finished with it. This story appears in his first
collection, The Wrong Set, published in 1949, which
was followed by another enthusiastically received
collection, Such Darling Dodos, in 1950 and a first
novel Hemlock and After in 1952.
These early successes allowed Wilson to give up
his day job, and he continued to write fiction fulltime until 1980, the year in which he was knighted
for services to literature. That year also saw the
publication of his final novel, Setting the World on
Fire, a highly stylized and self-referential meditation on the relationships between political violence and creative fantasy in which preparations
for an operatic production of Lullys Phaeton in
an invented stately home in Westminster provide
the cover for a terrorist plot to blow up a government building. From Raspberry Jam, his first
work, to Setting the World on Fire, his last,
Wilsons writings return time and again to private
acts of brutality and public acts of terror that
threaten to explode the serene complacencies of
Englands socially privileged classes.
In the best-known of Wilsons novels, AngloSaxon Attitudes (1956a), the aging medieval
historian Gerald Middleton attempts to strip
away the layers of deception that have accrued
395
around his personal and professional lives. He has

long suspected that an old friend, Gilbert Stokesay, a modernist artist killed in World War I,
successfully deceived his eminent historian father
by planting a pagan idol in the tomb of a seventhcentury bishop. It is now his final chance and his
duty, Gerald feels, to expose the hoax even at the
risk of confronting his involuntary complicity in
the cover-up. Meanwhile, he has decided that the
longstanding evasions of his relationship with his
monstrously infantile Danish wife, Inge, must
also come to an end; already in love with another
woman, the wife of the dead Gilbert Stokesay,
when he married her, Gerald has suspected for
years that Inge was responsible for an accident
that left his beloved daughter Kay with a disfiguring injury. Notwithstanding their mixed effects
and outcomes it turns out, for example, that the
family is keen not to have its ancient prevarications and evasions laid bare Geralds investigations, professional and personal, will liberate him
from 40 years of debilitating self-reproach.
Like his other early novels Hemlock and After
and The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot (1958), AngloSaxon Attitudes is a novel of the liberal conscience
that looks back to E. M. Forster in its concern with
the moral necessity (and occasionally paralyzing
outcomes) of the properly examined, fully selfaware life. Wilson may well have had mixed feelings about Forster, however, in view of the latters
relative lack of candor about their shared homosexual identity: Forster had, for a start, the kind of
moral authority in postwar England that might
have made him a compelling voice in the ongoing
struggle for equal rights for gay men. With that in
mind, Wilson is historically an important figure
because, openly gay but writing in an era before the
decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain, all
his novels treat gay male sexuality without any
apology, whitewash, or special pleading.
In Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, gay subculture performs a structural function. The novel is often
described as Dickensian in its social range
because it gives such a panoramic account of the
English society of its time, but the double life of
Geralds gay son is what introduces into the world
of the rich and respectable Middletons the lowerclass survivors who know the truth about the
archaeological hoax that Gerald is trying to unravel. The notorious persecution of gay men in
the 1950s also helps to make sense of Wilsons
396
WILSON, ANGUS
fictional interests in what lies beneath respectable

social and psychological surfaces. The hero of his
first novel, Hemlock and After, is the successful
novelist Bernard Sands who, married with adult
children while having affairs with younger men
on the side, feels he is managing his complicated
emotional life with maturity and integrity. His
crisis comes when, waiting for a friend and former
lover in Leicester Square, he sees the police arrest a
gay man for importuning who, moments earlier,
had accosted him. In a compellingly dramatic
scene, Bernard collapses when he realizes that
what he has found so devastating about the arrest
is not the persecution of another gay man but his
own thrill sexual and, he thinks, fascistic at the
states exercise of its power.
Gay dilemmas and liberal-humanist dilemmas
also coincide in As If By Magic (1973). By far the
worst received of Wilsons novels, it is ironically
the one that speaks most resonantly to the concerns of our own time, even leaving aside its
compellingly bold treatment of gay sex bold
because it deliberately outrages high-minded
liberal piety as it does conservative sanctimony.
Playfully allusive and funny though it is, the
subject of As If By Magic is, to borrow the title
of Wilsons other experimental novel, no laughing matter. This is a novel about planetary
responsibility, about globalization, environmental racism, and the exploitation of the developing
world. Its hero is the plant geneticist Hamo
Langmuir, who heads east ostensibly to see at
first hand the practical outcomes of his genetically modified super-rice Magic but also as a
pretext to sleep with the beautiful young Asian
men of his sexual fantasies. His travels across
Asia intersect with those of his goddaughter
Alexandra, who has dropped out, in true sixties
style, and is now on the hippy trail to Goa.
Through the Alexandra plot, the novel demonstrates how a renunciation of Western capitalism
is more easily declared than accomplished:
Alexandras magic the New Age mysticism
of the late twentieth century is as suspect a
quick fix as Hamos magic rice, which has turned
out to be highly profitable but socially catastrophic; and Alexandras spiritual appropriation
of the East is no less marked and problematic
than the economic and sexual exploitations of
Asia in which her godfather comes to recognize
himself as complicit.
A writer of his own time, then, Wilson may

ultimately be a writer of ours as well. For all the
comic energy generated by his mimetic and satirical talents, Wilson was a novelist not only of real
moral seriousness but also of enduring political
relevance. And even on the basis of his technical
accomplishments alone, he should occupy a central place in the story of the British novel in the
second half of the twentieth century. In his restless
pursuit of a fictional form that would convey both
the substance and the staginess of social relationships and private self-knowledge, Wilson helps to
explain how postwar realism, with its confidently
documentary imperatives, could turn into something far more complex and unsettling.
SEE ALSO: Forster, E. M. (BIF); Globalization
and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction
(BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in
Fiction (BIF)

Conradi, P. J. (1997). Angus Wilson. Plymouth:
Northcote House.
Drabble, M. (1995). Angus Wilson: A Biography.
Gardner, A. (1985). Angus Wilson. Boston: Twayne.
Faulkner, P. (1980). Angus Wilson: Mimic and Moralist.
Halio, J. L. (1985). Critical Essays on Angus Wilson.
Boston: G. K. Hall.
Wilson, A. (1949). The Wrong Set and Other Stories.
Wilson, A. (1950). Such Darling Dodos and Other
Stories. London: Secker and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1952a). Emile Zola: An Introductory Study of
His Novels. London: Secker and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1952b). Hemlock and After. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1956a). Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1956b). The Mulberry Bush. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1957). A Bit Off the Map and Other Stories.
Wilson, A. (1958). The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot.
Wilson, A. (1961). The Old Men at the Zoo. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1963). The Wild Garden; or, Speaking of
Writing. London: Secker and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1964). Late Call. London: Secker and Warburg.
WINTERSON, JEANETTE
Wilson, A. (1967). No Laughing Matter. London: Secker

and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1970). The World of Charles Dickens.
Wilson, A. (1973). As If By Magic. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1977). The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling:
His Life and Works. London: Secker and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1980). Setting the World on Fire. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1983). Diversity and Depth in Fiction:
Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson (ed. K.
McSweeney). London: Secker and Warburg.
Wilson, A. (1986). Reflections in a Writers Eye: Travel
Pieces. London: Secker and Warburg.
Winterson, Jeanette
JEFFREY ROESSNER
Jeanette Winterson has written some of the most

provocative and original fiction to emerge in contemporary British literature. Her relentlessly inventive and magical imagination, along with a limpid
prose style and her keen sense of romance, has won
her a host of devoted fans. As she has taken her
place in the contemporary literary landscape, it has
become easy to overlook the striking quality of her
early work, particularly the trio of novels through
which most readers first encountered her Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit (1985b), The Passion (1987),
and Sexing the Cherry (1989). These works sounded
a new note in fiction, transmuting the influence of
Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, and the magic
realists into an original voice through which Winterson relentlessly assaulted restrictive social roles
and heterosexist notions of identity.
Most biographical accounts of Winterson have
trouble distinguishing between the facts of her
upbringing and her semiautobiographical transformation of them in her first novel, Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit. Given Wintersons self-identified role as fabulist, we should be skeptical of all but
the broadest outline of her coming of age. She was
born on August 27, 1959 in Manchester, England,
and raised by adoptive evangelical parents who
nursed her on biblical fervor and seemed intent on
preparing her for the life of a missionary. As the
adolescent Winterson came to terms with her
identity as a lesbian, she broke with her church
and family and pursued a literary education, read-
397
ing English at St. Catherines College, Oxford. She

then moved to London to work on the Whitbread
Award-winning Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
Although Winterson rejected her religious upbringing, her writing reflects the spiritual zeal that
suffused her childhood; such avidity appears in the
seriousness with which she takes her vocation as a
writer (see Art and Lies, 1994a), and in her neoromantic celebration of desire. In this respect, The
Passion establishes the pattern for much of her later
work. Set largely in Venice, the novel relates the tale
of Henri, a cook in Napoleons army, and his love
for an ethereal, web-footed woman named
Villanelle, who embarks on her own quest to
retrieve her heart from a female lover. Here as
elsewhere, Wintersons characters submit to the
overwhelming, mystical force of passion and
follow it wherever it leads in this way, she
naturalizes lesbian desire and subverts rigid
gender roles. While Winterson revises history and
traditional fairy tales in The Passion, she also
consistently rewrites biblical narratives, mythology, childrens fables, and films all of which she
sees as upholding debilitating gender stereotypes.
Sexing the Cherry, like The Passion, maps the
debate about repression and desire onto history.
Set mainly during the English Civil War, the novel
endorses the profligate supporters of King Charles I
while savaging his uptight puritan tormentors.
Narrators include an oversized, grotesque figure
named Dogwoman and her foundling son, Jordan,
as well as contemporary incarnations of these characters. Detailing Jordans quest for adventure and
his love for a mystical dancer, the novel includes
meditations on romantic desire and the creation of a
hybrid gender that would escape the male/female
dichotomy. Throughout, Winterson critiques Enlightenment rationalism, explicitly denying uniform ideas of space and time, and radically experiments with form: she places Dogwoman and Jordan
in episodic adventures and breaks the narrative
frame by including revised fairy tales and rhetorical
digressions. Often overtly moralistic in these vignettes, Winterson presents herself as the parabolist of
the postmodern lesbian sublime.
Supporting her challenge to restrictive notions
of gender, Winterson often focuses on sexually
ambiguous characters: her fourth novel, Written
on the Body (1992), offers her first explicitly
ungendered character. Having engaged in past
relationships with both men and women, the
398
WODEHOUSE, P. G
first-person narrator of the novel offers an encomium to a female lover named Louise, who
develops a terminal illness. The narrator ultimately
makes the anguished choice to end the relationship and leaves Louise in the care of her physician
husband. A meditation on passion and grief,
the novel offers a haunting celebration of desire
and the play of imagination that fuels it, and
invites readers to ask how knowing the gender of
the narrator would have changed the emotional
terrain of this story.
Winterson has relished the role of provocateur,
in both her life and art, as her narrative experiments make clear. After her initial success, she
became notorious for her hubris (proclaiming
herself heir to Virginia Woolf, making grand
claims about salvation through art, and undergoing public break-ups with her married lesbian
lovers). Imaginatively, too, Winterson embraced
the role of enfant terrible as part of her artistic
mission; the contemporary incarnation of her
character Dogwoman from Sexing the Cherry
seems to voice her approach: The trouble is that
when most people are apathetic ordinary people
like me have to go too far, have to ruin their lives
and be made an object of scorn just to get the
point across (1989, 140).
More recently, Winterson has developed a
passion for technology and exploring the modes
of communication it affords. She launched her
own well-received website, where she posts regular columns, and traced the contours of gender
identity through cyberspace in The PowerBook
(2000) and into the realm of science fiction in
The Stone Gods (2007). Offering a singular, uncompromising voice that provokes and delights
her avid readers, Winterson continues to energize
important cultural debates concerning gender,
desire, and personal identity.
Postmodern. New York: Columbia University Press,

pp. 13855.
Grice, H., & Woods, T. (eds.) (1998). Im Telling You
Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of
Reading. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Makinen, M. (2005). The Novels of Jeanette Winterson.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Onega, S. (2006). Jeanette Winterson. Manchester:
Winterson, J. (1985a). Boating for Beginners. London:
Methuen.
Winterson, J. (1985b). Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
London: Pandora.
Winterson, J. (1986). Fit for the Future: The Guide for
Women who Want to Live Well. London: Pandora.
Winterson, J. (1987). The Passion. London:
Bloomsbury.
Bloomsbury.
Winterson, J. (1992). Written on the Body. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Winterson, J. (1994a). Art and Lies: A Piece for Three
Voices and a Bawd. London: Jonathan Cape.
Winterson, J. (1994b). Great Moments in Aviation
and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Two
Filmscripts. London: Random House.
Winterson, J. (1995). Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and
Effrontery. New York: Knopf.
Winterson, J. (1997). Gut Symmetries. London: Granta.
Winterson, J. (1998). The World and Other Places. New
York: Knopf.
Winterson, J. (2000). The PowerBook. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Winterson, J. (2003). The King of Capri. New York:
Bloomsbury.
Winterson, J. (2004). Lighthousekeeping. London:
Fourth Estate.
Winterson, J. (2005). Weight: The Myth of Atlas and
Heracles. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Winterson, J. (2006). Tanglewreck. New York:
Bloomsbury.
Winterson, J. (2007). The Stone Gods. London: Hamish
Hamilton.

Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/
Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF);
Wodehouse, P. G
KIRBY OLSON

Andermahr, S. (ed.) (2007). Jeanette Winterson: A
Contemporary Critical Guide. London: Continuum.
Doan, L. (1994). Jeanette Wintersons Sexing the
Postmodern. In L. Doan (ed.), The Lesbian
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born on

October 15, 1881 to Henry Ernest Wodehouse
and Eleanor Deane. He was the third of the
couples four children. Wodehouses parents lived
in Hong Kong, but his father insisted that the
WODEHOUSE, P. G
children be raised in England and receive an

English education. Young Wodehouse and his
siblings were raised in Bath and Croydon by
surrogate parents. After enduring a series of
boarding schools in his teens, Wodehouse attended and graduated from Dulwich College. He
then survived a short stint as a banker, while
writing in the evenings. In less than a year
Wodehouses articles, stories, and eventually
books caught on with the British public and he
was able to spend the rest of his life as a full-time
writer. He met Ethel Rowley on Long Island, New
York in 1914 and, after a brief courtship, the two
were married. She was a widow with a daughter
from a previous marriage. The couple lived on
Long Island in luxurious circumstances, although
Wodehouse preferred to spend his days writing
and only regretfully attended the lavish dinner
parties that his wife loved to throw. When possible,
his work days exceeded 10 hours.
Wodehouse is best known for his super-valet
character Jeeves, who appears in a dozen novels
and short story collections. Jeeves is every aristocrats dream. He is a butler who knows how to
make a perfect Martini, and also how to resolve
the accompanying hangover. He can introduce
one to a gorgeous young woman, yet help one
escape the clutches of matrimony. Well versed in
philosophy, he can quote Spinoza and Nietzsche,
yet he is not above cheating at croquet. Jeevess
master is Bertie Wooster, a facile young man
who narrates the stories. Wooster has only two
competencies: a knowledge of flowers and of
biblical theology. Other than that he is a flop in
almost every area of life, and so turns to Jeeves for
help when he gets in trouble.
The success of the WoosterJeeves sequence
shouldnt be allowed to overshadow Wodehouses
other 90-odd books, his plays, or his acute memoirs. Such characters as the dapper and eccentric
Lord Emsworth and his favorite pig, or the phenomenal Psmith (a forerunner of Jeeves), or Uncle
Fred, to name but a few, are also considerable
accomplishments, and would have made the name
of many a lesser writer. But Jeeves has succeeded in
dwarfing all his other creations, and is therefore
the focus of critical interest.
P. G. Wodehouse led an uneventful life, save for
one controversial incident. At the onset of World
War II, he was living in Brittany, France when the
Nazis invaded and took him captive. Taken to
399
Germany, Wodehouse was asked if he would like

to give a series of radio broadcasts to England.
Ever the ham, he agreed and penned five short
radio addresses to England which he then proceeded to broadcast. He was apparently unaware
that England was being blitzed by unmanned
missiles; his radio addresses, which downplayed
the Nazi threat, proved offensive to the British ear.
As a result, he was banned from broadcasting on
the BBC until as late as 1961.
This single incident in Wodehouses life colored the critical reception of all his work and
continues to do so to this day. In Wodehouse at
War, Iain Sproat (1981) assembles all the radio
broadcasts and provides a larger historical context
for them. According to Sproat, among various
left-wing political groups and individuals, there
was a sustained attempt, from the time of
Wodehouses Berlin broadcasts onwards, to
portray Wodehouses alleged action not merely
as the aberration of a contemptible individual,
but as being somehow typical of his class (31).
Some on the far left in Britain were interested
in making a connection between the upper classes and treachery, and saw in Wodehouse a
perfect symbol. At the same time, many writers
came to Wodehouses defense. One of them was
George Orwell, who wrote in his essay In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse that he made an
ideal whipping boy for the left (194). Orwell did
much to save Wodehouses reputation, but he
resorted to presenting his client as perhaps much
less shrewd than he actually was. This distortion
has greatly colored the critical reception of Wodehouse, to the extent that it ought to be reconsidered at some length. Nowhere, Orwell
writes, so far as I know, does [Wodehouse] so
much as use the word Fascism or Nazism
(192). And yet, Sir Roderick Spode, a character
who appears in Wodehouses The Code of the
Woosters (1938), was clearly based on the British
fascist Oswald Mosley. The Code of the Woosters
was written shortly before the outbreak of World
War II, and reveals that Wodehouse indeed had
read the newspapers and that he understood
what was at stake. Yet Orwell, in order to exonerate Wodehouse from responsibility for his
wartime radio addresses, writes, His picture of
English society had been formed before 1914, and
it was a nave, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture. Orwell sums up, If my analysis of
400
WODEHOUSE, P. G
Wodehouses mentality is accepted, the idea that

in 1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda
machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous
(1901).
While the radio addresses are not ordinarily
considered among Wodehouses masterpieces, his
severest critics have given them extraordinary
attention. However, close analysis reveals little in
them that is even remotely objectionable. A typical
passage on his stay at a lunatic asylum converted
into a prison focuses on the discomfort of the
place. To his critics on the far left this was nevertheless an example of a disengaged political stance.
Always popular outside of academia, with many
of his 100 books still in print more than a quarter
century after his death, Wodehouse has never been
accepted within the world of academic criticism.
This should not surprise us, for he relentlessly
mocks high culture and laughs at those who
maintain that the acquisition of higher knowledge
marks them as elite. Jeeves, a butler, even quotes
the classics of philosophy in such a way as to
undermine the erudition of the upper classes.
The plots of Wodehouse novels almost invariably turn upon the eccentricities of the upper
classes as they seek out silver cow-creamers and
other collectible items, while the lower classes are
more interested in love affairs. In the novel Thank
You, Jeeves (1934), Jeeves has been replaced by
another butler, Brinkley, after a spat.
Outwardly, we read of the replacement butler,
he was all respectfulness, but inwardly you could
see that he was a man who was musing on the
coming Social Revolution and looked on [Bertie]
as a tyrant and an oppressor (62). An extremely
thin veneer of social conventions keeps them from
massacring each other. Bertie goes into the city of
Bristol for a musical comedy and dinner and upon
his return Jeeves encourages him to black-up his
face to get aboard an American millionaires yacht
with a minstrel group in order to visit a nubile
woman in whom Berties best friend is interested.
The meeting is cut off, however, and suddenly
Bertie is lost on his own aristocratic grounds in
blackface, and is chased from one end of the
grounds to the other by policemen who would
ordinarily have defended him but now see him as
constituting a danger by reason of what they
suppose to be his race. Jeeves has deliberately
arranged the scene in order to reveal to Bertie
how essential Jeeves is to his well-being.
In the scene in which Bertie is in blackface, he

returns home and is attacked by his supposedly
communist butler Brinkley. Running upstairs to
lock himself in his room, he is sure that the
socialist revolution is on. But Brinkley believes
he is actually defending Bertie against a black
intruder of whom he has got wind, who, of course,
is Bertie himself. Police are called, and they too
join the hunt for the black intruder. Bertie runs
from the house that in the melee has suffered a
smashed lamp and has burned to the ground. The
farce trades on social expectations, and quietly
satirizes race, gender, and class relations of the
period. While Wodehouse is not engaging in an
open critical denunciation of bias, his best stories
inadvertently turn upon and satirize these stereotypes and illustrate how such frameworks determine the perceptions of many of his compatriots.
That Wodehouse is capable of spinning such a
political thread through his many otherwise ostensibly light books reveals his political savvy,
which is often overlooked because he is careful
to wear his sharpness lightly. Because he has
written in a lower genre of comedy, and his work
has been thought to be escapist farce, he has only
rarely been taken seriously by the academy.
Alexander Cockburn (1938) has gone as far as to
call the WoosterJeeves cycle the central achievement of English fiction in the twentieth century,
while others view its creator as a traitor to his
country. Wodehouse lived outside of England
after World War II, on Long Island, New York.
He continued to write and publish well-received
work but, without question, a dark cloud remained over his head. In 1974, just before his
death, he returned to England to be knighted by
the Queen. Wodehouse died on February 14, 1975.
SEE ALSO: Orwell, George (BIF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF)
The main repository of Wodehouse papers is the
Wodehouse Library at Dulwich College, London, to
which Wodehouse bequeathed his letters and manuscripts, and a complete collection of his published
books.
Cockburn, A. (1938). Introduction. In P. G.
Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters. New York:
Doubleday, Doran, pp. vxii.
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
MacDermott, K. (1987). Light Humor and the

Dark Underside of Wish Fulfillment: Conservative
Anti-Realism. Studies in Popular Culture, 10,
3753.
Mooneyham, L. (1994). Comedy among the
Modernists: P. G. Wodehouse and the Anachronism
of Comic Form. Twentieth Century Literature, 40(1),
11438.
Olson, K. (2001). Bertie and Jeeves at the End of
History: P. G. Wodehouse as Political Scientist. In
Comedy After Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy
from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford. Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press, pp. 93112.
Orwell, G. (1946). In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse. In
Critical Essays. London: Secker and Warburg, pp.
17995.
Sproat, I. (1981). Wodehouse at War. New Haven:
Ticknor and Fields.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1923). Jeeves. New York: Doran.
(Published in UK as The Inimitable Jeeves. London:
Herbert Jenkins.)
Wodehouse, P. G. (1930). Very Good, Jeeves. London:
Herbert Jenkins.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1934). Thank You, Jeeves. London:
Herbert Jenkins.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1938). The Code of the Woosters.
London: Herbert Jenkins.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1940). Quick Service. London:
Herbert Jenkins.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1947). Joy in the Morning. London:
Herbert Jenkins.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1949). The Mating Season. London:
Herbert Jenkins.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1953). Ring for Jeeves. London:
Herbert Jenkins. (Published in US as The Return of
Jeeves. New York: Simon and Schuster 1954.)
Wodehouse, P. G. (1954). Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit.
London: Herbert Jenkins. (Published in US as Bertie
Wooster Sees It Through. New York: Simon and
Schuster 1955.)
Wodehouse, P. G. (1960). How Right You Are, Jeeves.
New York: Simon and Schuster. (Published in UK as
Jeeves in the Offing. London: Herbert Jenkins.)
Wodehouse, P. G. (1963). Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.
London: Herbert Jenkins.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1967). The World of Jeeves. London:
Herbert Jenkins.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1971). Jeeves and the Tie that
Binds. New York: Simon and Schuster. (Published
in UK as Much Obliged, Jeeves. London: Barrie and
Jenkins.)
Wodehouse, P. G. (1974). The Cat-Nappers: A Jeeves
and Bertie Story. New York: Simon and Schuster.
(Published as Aunts Arent Gentlemen: A Jeeves and
Bertie Story. London: Barrie and Jenkins.)
401
Wodehouse, P. G. (1976). Jeeves, Jeeves, Jeeves. New

York: Avon.
Wodehouse, P. G. (1980). Wodehouse on Wodehouse.
London: Hutchinson.
Woolf, Virginia
KATHLEEN WALL
Virginia Woolf (18821941) wrote experimental

novels notable for their expressive form and
poetic language. While her primary reputation is
that of an experimental novelist, her collected
essays and her two book-length essays, A Room
of Ones Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938),
establish her importance as a feminist and cultural
critic. Her experimental aesthetic, her founding of
the Hogarth Press (along with her husband, Leonard Woolf), and her membership in the Bloomsbury Group, place her at the center of British
modernism in the first 40 years of the twentieth
century.
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the second daughter of
Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen. It was the second
marriage for both parents, so Woolf was born into
a complex blended family that consisted of
Leslies mentally challenged daughter Laura from
his first marriage, and Julias children from her
marriage to Herbert Duckworth: Stella, George,
and Gerald Duckworth (all teenagers when
Virginia was born), as well as her older siblings
Vanessa and Thoby. Her younger brother Adrian
would be born a year later.
Leslie Stephen was an enthusiastic mountaineer who was variously the editor of Cornhill
Magazine (187182) and the Dictionary of
National Biography (188591), and wrote the
well-respected History of English Thought in the
Eighteenth Century (1876) and The Science of
Ethics (1882). While Woolf resented her parents
lack of investment in formal educations for herself
and her elder sister, painter Vanessa Bell, she also
recognized that Leslies place in the literary world,
his encouragement of her reading, and his belief
that she might one day make a fine historian,
contributed to confidence in her ability to earn
her living by writing.
Julia Stephen (whose beauty was admired
and recorded by photographer Julia Margaret
402
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
Cameron and the Pre-Raphaelite painters) embodied the ideal of the Victorian Angel in the
House, nursing relatives through illnesses, overseeing their deaths, teaching the Stephen children
their lessons (at least until the boys went away to
public school), caring about the welfare of the
poor in her role as Lady Bountiful often to the
point of exhaustion. She died in 1895, when
Woolf was 13. Julias daughter Stella, then 26,
was expected to minister to Leslies grief and to
embody the feminine sympathy required by his
pessimistic temperament. It was with difficulty,
then, that Stella obtained permission to marry;
she died in 1897, three months after her wedding.
These two deaths precipitated Woolfs early
breakdowns; more importantly, however, they
shaped her writing in two profound ways.
In her unpublished Sketch of the Past (written
in 1939), Woolf admits that her shock-receiving
capacity is what makes me a writer (1976, 72).
The intuition that influences her view of the
work of art is that behind the cotton wool of
our unthinking daily lives is hidden a pattern;
that we I mean all human beings are connected with this; that the whole world is a work
of art; that we are parts of the work of art . . .
[T]here is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven;
certainly and emphatically there is no God; we
are the words; we are the music; we are the thing
itself (72). It is almost a truism to say that what
made early twentieth-century writers modern
was their imposition of aesthetic order on the
chaos around them. Woolfs memoir makes it
clear that this truism was at least partly true
for her.
Julia Stephens laborious nursing, Stellas two
years of self-sacrifice to Leslies demands (a role
that Vanessa would play for seven years after
Stellas death), Leslies sometimes angry, sometimes sentimental outbursts, often about money,
often about the lack of sympathy, called the
Victorian family profoundly into question.
Doubtless it gave rise to the feminism we see
expressed most incisively in her two book-length
works of non-fiction, A Room of Ones Own and
Three Guineas. At the same time, childhood
memories (particularly summers at St. Ives in
Cornwall) infuse works like Jacobs Room, To the
Lighthouse, and The Waves, providing some of her
novels most luminous moments. This ambivalence toward the past is similarly modern.
The year 1904 marked new beginnings. Shortly

after Leslie Stephens death that year, Vanessa and
Thoby organized a move out of proper Hyde Park
Gate to less hide-bound Bloomsbury. Vanessa
and Virginia scandalized conventional friends
and relatives by sitting up until midnight discussing truth, beauty, and the good with
Thobys Cambridge friends. Thus began Bloomsbury, whose official cast included Saxon SydneyTurner, man of letters; Clive Bell, art critic;
Desmond MacCarthy, literary critic and novelist;
Lytton Strachey, biographer and man of letters;
Duncan Grant, painter; Leonard Woolf, writer
and political theorist (then a civil servant on leave
from Ceylon); John Middleton Murray, literary
critic; and John Maynard Keynes, economist.
Bloomsburys boundaries would remain quite
permeable and would later include on its fringes
T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield,
and Roger Fry. (More complete biographies of
these figures can be found in Husseys indispensable Virginia Woolf AZ, 1995.) Certainly
Bloomsbury represented significant intersections
in British letters and art; its members, while
untraditional in their views and practices, carried
weight and had influence.
Also in 1904, Virginia began to write. While her
major reputation would be as a novelist, her
writing life began with reviews and essays, often
published anonymously in the womens pages of
the Guardian or the Times Literary Supplement.
She was a generous reviewer, understanding the
implicit contract between the writer and reader,
and evaluating, for example, popular romances
according to their generic conventions. Her critical practice is thus more in touch with the
common reader (the title of two collections of
essays she wrote to encourage readers conversations with what they read), than a critic such as
T. S. Eliot. Melba Cuddy-Keane, in Virginia
Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere
(2006), argues that Woolfs essays have a social
project: she wrote about literature to inculcate
good reading practices, and she did so because
she believed that an educated public is crucial to
the success of democratic society (2).
Her essays were on subjects as varied as
Haworth Parsonage, a description of a visit to
the home of the Brontes (Essays 1: 59); the way
the events of World War I seemed disconnected
from the person in the street (The War from the
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
Street, Essays 3: 35); and her beloved London,

which she returned to time and again, most
famously in Street Haunting (1970, 2036),
and a series of essays written for the British Good
Housekeeping (19312) and collected in The
London Scene (1975). Andrew McNeillie, in his
exhaustively annotated edition of Woolfs essays
(volume 5, edited by Stuart Clarke, is slated for
publication in 2010), argues that Virginia Woolf
was arguably the last of the great English essayists
and that her art [is] expressed in a fluent, witty
and unwaveringly demotic prose (Essays 1: ix).
Beginning most noticeably with her review of
Percy Lubbocks The Craft of Fiction in 1922,
Woolfs essays mark her concern both with the
changing form of the novel in response to the
pressures of history and with trying to articulate a
view of the work of art that balances its formal and
aesthetic independence with its integral place in
peoples lives.
In 1912 Virginia accepted Leonard Woolfs
marriage proposal, though with clearly expressed reservations. Their marriage has been
the subject of much controversy. Leonard is
variously depicted as someone who controlled
her, enforcing periods of quiet away from London and curtailing her social life, particularly
during her recurring periods of mental illness, or
as the man who, admiring of her genius and
patient with the largely asexual nature of their
relationship, made her work possible. There is
more evidence, including Woolfs suicide note,
for the latter view.
Woolfs first two novels are formally conventional, though their plots examine changing relationships between men and women attendant
on womens entry into the workforce and their
demands for suffrage. The Voyage Out was drafted
and redrafted between 1908 and 1915, when it was
published by her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth
in 1915. A novel about a young womans sexual
coming of age (it is often read as a disguised
portrait of Virginias struggle with her own sexuality), it nevertheless ends with the heroines
death rather than her marriage. Periods of mental
breakdown followed Woolfs marriage to Leonard
and its publication. During her convalescence
from the second of these, Woolf began her longest
novel, Night and Day (1919). The novels conventionality has been criticized, but Woolf maintains that it was a kind of studio exercise, allowing
403
her to learn how the realist novel works by

copying from plaster casts (Letters 4: 231).
In 1917 Leonard and Virginia bought a small
printing press and a booklet on how to use it for
less than 20. Thus the Hogarth Press was born
out of a desire to give Virginia something to do
with her hands as well as to provide a venue for
shorter works that publishers would not consider.
Their first publication consisted of stories written
by both Leonard (Three Jews) and Virginia
(The Mark on the Wall). (See Woolmer 1976
for the scope of the presss offerings.) The press
would go on to publish Katherine Mansfields
Prelude, T. S. Eliots Poems (1919), and The
Waste Land (1922), as well as all of Virginia
Woolfs novels after Night and Day. They later
took on the publication of the papers of the
International Psychoanalytic Institute, including
the works of Freud in English, putting paid to the
judgment that the press ministered to a selfindulgent and insular group of writers. It is
unlikely that a commercial press would have
risked the possible charge of obscenity attendant
on publishing Freud.
Hogarth Press permitted Woolf to become an
experimental novelist, liberating her from the
editorial expectations of Duckworth. Her experiments with form in The Mark on the Wall
(1917), Kew Gardens (1919), and An Unwritten Novel (1920) translated into similar experiments with the novel, first manifested in Jacobs
Room (1922). An elegy for her brother Thoby,
who died in 1906 of typhoid contracted during a
trip to Greece, it is a novel of development that is
characterized by Jacobs absence and the elusiveness of his character a form appropriate to its
elegiac subtext. The room of the title suggests that
in some ways the culture that contains Jacob his
family, his time at Cambridge, the literary milieu
of London, his fascination with all things Greek
and with Greece itself is more easily represented
than character. Here, as in An Unwritten Novel
and Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, Woolf questions whether we ever really know others. At the
same time, Woolf historicizes the novels reading
of character, suggesting that the machinery of the
war has created an unseizable force that has
gone hurtling through the nets of the novel,
leaving the form torn to ribbons.
Jacobs Room evinces several preoccupations
that would mark, to a certain degree, all of Woolfs
404
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
subsequent work. The first is her sense that both

World Wars altered the human condition and
experience in some profound and inescapable
way. As a consequence, even autobiographical
novels such as both Jacobs Room and To the
Lighthouse would have their time frames altered
to include the war. Scenes from her most popular
novel, The Years (1937), would be set in basements during air raids. Her final novel, Between
the Acts (1941), would consider how we understand and how we create history on the eve of
World War II. Her concern with wars effect is
closely related to her careful historicizing of all her
characters lives.
The second is her concern for a more aesthetic
and meaningful relationship between her ideas
and the forms of her novels, one less preoccupied
with plot which she suggested in her modernist
manifesto, Modern Fiction, doesnt reflect the
lives we live: The mind receives a myriad impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides
they come, an incessant shower of innumerable
atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves
into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old . . . Life is not a set of gig
lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us
from the beginning of consciousness to the end
(1984 [1925], 150).
The rest of her career was characterized by
attempts to create forms for her works that fully
elucidate her subjects; her working out of the
forms of her works are recorded in her diaries
and her letters. (See Hussey 1995 for thorough
discussions of the genesis of each of her novels.)
Of Jacobs Room, for example, she writes in her
diary long before she knows what her subject
will be this afternoon [I] arrived at some idea of
a new form for a new novel . . . [T]he approach
will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding;
scarcely a brick to be seen, all crepuscular, but the
heart, the passion, humor, everything as bright as
fire in mist . . . Then Ill find room for so much . . .
What the unity shall be I have yet to discover: the
theme is a blank to me; but I see immense
possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less
by chance 2 weeks ago (Diary 2: 1314). Working
on To the Lighthouse, she asserts I will invent a
new name for my books to supplant novel. A
new by Virginia Woolf. but what? [sic]
Elegy? (Diary 3: 34). When she worked on The

Waves, she writes Why not invent a new kind of
play . . . prose yet poetry; a novel & a play (Diary
3: 128). The Years and Three Guineas began their
radical lives as an essay novel.
The form of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolfs
second experimental novel, makes use of focalization that is handed off like a baton in a relay
between characters who hear the same sounds or
view the same sights over a single day in London
(a strategy she will use again in To the Lighthouse).
In this way, the novel formally echoes the thematic balance between the intimacy of love and
friendship that connects individuals with both the
necessity and the ache of isolation. In her diary,
Woolf wrote, I want to give life & death, sanity &
insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to
show it at work, at its most intense (Diary 2: 248).
The main narrative arc follows Clarissa Dalloway,
who is to give a party in the evening, a party she
views as a creative offering to her community of
friends; at the same time, however, Clarissa contemplates her isolation from her husband, from
her daughter, from her one-time suitor, Peter
Walsh. The second narrative arc follows Septimus
Warren Smith, a young man suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder after serving in World
War I, who is misunderstood and thus isolated by
a medical establishment that advises him to get
out of his funk by taking an interest in cricket.
The arcs of the novel are connected when Smiths
suicide is revealed at Clarissas party and Clarissa
intuits both his isolation and his attempts to
communicate.
Jacobs Room and Mrs. Dalloway set the parameters between which Woolf would work for the
remainder of her writing life. The aesthetic beauty
and formal aptness of her work would be set off by
her desire to criticise the social system. To the
Lighthouse (1927), the novel that has received the
most critical attention, is a study in the flexibility
of focalization, as the thoughts of her cast of
characters meld into one another. No event or
act is recorded outside the perceiving perspective.
The works overall structure is similarly unique:
two narrative sections, The Window and The
Lighthouse, record the intense experiences and
ambivalent thoughts of her cast of characters on
two days 10 years apart. The central Time Passes
section, formally analogous to the line in Lily
Briscoes painting, juxtaposes the metaphysical
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
and epistemological questions of the solitary

walker on the beach with the practical attempts
of Mrs. McNab to restore order to the abandoned
house, just as art creates order from the chaos of
time and experience.
The Waves (1931), in many respects the culmination of her experimental work, takes Woolfs
fascination with the individual perspective and
her expertise with focalization to its extreme. Her
six characters soliloquies are interpolated by
poetic descriptions of the sea during a single day;
the times of day echo the passing phases in the
characters lives. The characters, all close friends,
are never presented talking to one another; any
action is conveyed (as it was in To the Lighthouse)
from their individual perspectives. Thus Woolf
combines intense and poetic expression of her
characters phenomenal experience with a sense
of their isolation and of their fluctuating and
wavering subjectivity.
Placing Woolfs work exclusively in the narrative of modernist experimentation underestimates the importance of her final three novels,
Orlando (1928), The Years, and Between the Acts,
which have received less critical treatment, while
A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas were
viewed by her contemporaries as diatribes. After
her death, her reputation declined, particularly
because her work was censured by the Scrutiny
critics who saw it as an exemplar of Bloomsbury
elitism. Three occurrences in the 1970s conspired to create a new enthusiasm for her writing: the publications of Quentin Bells biography
and her diaries; the rise of feminist criticism in
the academy; and the development of postmodernism and narratology, which highlighted
the kinds of reading strategies necessary to fully
appreciate her craft. Feminism understood the
way Orlando (her paean to her lover Vita
Sackville-West) playfully questioned the efficacy
of gender roles while examining the way a single
individuals transformation from a man into a
woman influenced the shape of the eponymous
characters life. Feminists also saw in The Years
the way womens lives are shaped and misshaped by their historical contexts. Between the
Acts posed a question completely missed by the
Scrutiny critics: what is the role of art in our
understanding of ourselves and our historical
moment? Finally, A Room of Ones Own and
Three Guineas were seen as a brilliantly incisive
405
feminist critique of the patriarchal cultural and

political establishments.
Throughout her life, Woolf experienced
periods of mental illness; Hermione Lee hypothesizes that she coped with manic-depressive
episodes, but also notes that the medication she
was given makes interpretation of her symptoms
problematic. In late 1940 and early 1941, Woolf
was shocked and dismayed by the bombing of
London which included the destruction of her
house in Tavistock Square. She had finished a draft
of Between the Acts, which she thought silly and
trivial. Leonard saw some of the signs of
Virginias distress and arranged a consultation in
late March of 1941 with Octavia Wilberforce, a
friend as well as a doctor. Woolf confessed she
thought she would not write again and that she
could not recover from another period of madness. On Thursday, March 28, she drowned herself, leaving Leonard a touching note.
SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Forster,
E. M. (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Mansfield,
Katherine (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/
Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); World
War I in Fiction (BIF)

Briggs, J. (2006). Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh:
British Library Help for Researchers: www.bl.uk/
reshelp/findhelpsubject/literature/authors/
woolfvirginia/woolf.html accessed Feb. 26, 2010.
Cuddy-Keane, M. (2006). Virginia Woolf, the
Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. New York:
De Gay, J. (2006). Virginia Woolfs Novels and the
Literary Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Dymond, J. (2004). Virginia Woolf Scholarship from
1991 to 2003: A Selected Bibliography. Modern
Fiction Studies, 50(1), 24179.
Froula, C. (2005). Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury
Avant-Garde: War, Civilization. New York:
Goldman, J. (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to
Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hollander, F R. (2007). Novel Ethics: Alterity and Form
in Jacobs Room. Twentieth Century Literature, 53(1),
4066.
406
WORKING-CLASS FICTION
Hussey, M. (1995). Virginia Woolf A-Z: The Essential

Reference to Her Life and Writings. New York: Oxford
University Press.
International Virginia Woolf Society: www.utoronto.
ca/IVWS/, accessed Feb. 26, 2010.
Lee, H. (1997). Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf.
Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Washington
State University, Pullman.
McIntire, G. (2008). Modernism, Memory, and Desire:
T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Monks House Papers. University of Sussex Special
Collections.
Parsons, D. Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James
Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf. New York:
Routledge.
Stelmach, K. (2006). From Text to Tableau: Ekphrastic
Enchantment in Mrs. Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse. Studies in the Novel, 38(3), 30427.
The Virginia Woolf manuscripts. The Henry W. and
Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public
Library.
Woolf, V. (1915). The Voyage Out. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Woolf, V. (1919). Night and Day. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Woolf, V. (1922). Jacobs Room. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Woolf, V. (1927). To the Lighthouse. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1928). Orlando: A Biography. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1931). The Waves. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Woolf, V. (1937). The Years. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1941). Between the Acts. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Woolf, V. (1950). The Captains Death Bed and Other
Essays. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1970). The Death of the Moth and Other
Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1975a). Granite and Rainbow. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1975b). The Moment and Other Essays. New
York: Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1975 80). The Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed.
N. Nicolson.) London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1976). Moments of Being: Unpublished
Autobiographical Writings (ed. J. Schulkind).
London: Chatto and Windus for Sussex University
Press.
Woolf, V. (1977). Books and Portraits (ed. M. Lyon).
London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1977 84). The Diary of Virginia Woolf (ed.

A. O. Bell). New York: Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1984). The Common Reader [1925] (ed. A.
McNeillie). New York: Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1986). The Second Common Reader [1932]
(ed. A. McNeillie). New York: Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (19862010). The Essays of Virginia Woolf,
vol. 1: 19041912; vol. 2: 19121918; vol. 3:
19191924; vol. 4: 19251928 (vols. 14 ed. A.
McNeillie); vol. 5: 19291932 (ed. S. N. Clarke). New
York: Harcourt Brace.
Woolf, V. (1993). A Room of Ones Own and Three
Guineas (ed. M. Barrett). London: Penguin.
Woolmer, H. J. (1976). A Checklist of the Hogarth Press
19171946. London: Hogarth.
Working-Class Fiction
AARON KELLY
To consider working-class fiction is almost to

confront an anomaly. The time and leisure necessary to think and create is nominally the preserve
of social classes other than those consigned to
function only as workers. But the history of working-class writing is a continual contestation of this
division between who has the right to think and
articulate the world and those whose role is only to
labor in order to produce the privilege by which
others create culture. A key early twentieth-century example of such a proletarian author is Patrick
MacGill, an itinerant manual laborer who migrated from Donegal in Ireland to Scotland, and who
eventually became a journalist, a writer, and
fought for Britain in World War I. MacGills
autobiographical novel, Children of the Dead End:
The Autobiography of a Navvy (1914) centers on
Dermod Flynn, a hired laborer or hand, whose
hands are so dirty that he is told he is not meant to
touch books when he first encounters them. This
highly symbolic moment discloses a great deal
about access to literature and education in capitalist society, about who has the leisure of time to
think and write and who does not. Against the
odds, Flynn, as with his creator, does become a
writer. But it is not that Dermod betrays his class so
much as that he radically redefines what it is, what
it is capable of, what it can say and think.
The major contribution to working-class writing and politics in the early twentieth century is
Robert Tressells posthumously published The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914). The

novel is set among artisanal laborers in Musborough, a fictionalized version of Hastings. There is
also an autobiographical dimension to this work
since Tressell (born Robert Noonan) was the
illegitimate son of an Irish policeman who became a migrant artisan in England. The central
character is the committed socialist Owen, who
attempts to convince his fellow workers that they
are the real philanthropists in society; it is they
who give up their labor and time for the benefit
of their bosses. The novel has an unashamedly
political mission: to stop working-class people
from being mugs, dupes of capitalism. It contains diagrams explaining the class system, documents such as timesheets, the use of allegorical
and symbolic structures, and satire, and often
steps out of third-person narrative to directly
confront different readerships. The final chapter,
The End, is also not the end but a beginning: it
looks forward to a socialist future (hence the first
publishers expurgated this incendiary chapter
and it was restored only in later, full editions
from 1955 onward).
Another proletarian writer with connections to
Hastings was Lionel Britton. Unlike authors such
as George Bernard Shaw, who visited the Soviet
Union and left impressed by the workers paradise
that the Communist Party selectively showed
him, Britton had originally traveled to Russia
seeking Soviet citizenship in the 1920s but returned to England thoroughly disenchanted at the
dictatorship he clearly perceived there. The Left
back home really did not want to hear this message and this goes some way to explaining the
neglect of his work. Also a dramatist, Brittons
only novel was Hunger and Love (1931). It is
highly significant in its rewriting of the Bildungsroman, which usually charts the development of
the individual self. The novel details the life of
Arthur Phelps, a working-class lad who comes to
love Shakespeare, science, and philosophy. But
this proletarian intellectual eventually dies in
World War I and here the narrative gives us not
the ascent of the individual subject but its obliteration. Unusually, the individual who is the
focus of this Bildingsroman disappears and we
are left with a blank space filled with collective
slaughter in the trenches. More affirmatively, the
whole novel disrupts individual perspectives,
which are the norm of subjectivity in bourgeois
407
society, and opens up a collective space of enunciation centered on we rather than I.

Indeed, many working-class writers across the
1920s and 1930s recast culture in collective rather
than individual terms as a means of challenging
the individualism of bourgeois society and of
forging a solidarity able to resist the poverty,
workplace degradations, and unemployment of
these decades. Certain areas of work, especially
mines and factories, produced key writers and
solidarities. These fictions include the work of
James C. Welsh, a Lanarkshire miner, whose
novels The Underworld (1920) and The Morlocks
(1924) are more conciliatory in that they urge
bosses to act more responsibly in ameliorating the
brutality of working conditions; and the more
radical work of Harold Heslop, whose The Gate of
a Strange Field (1929) urges revolution rather
than reformism. The South Wales communist
Lewis Jones, who was imprisoned for sedition
during the 1926 General Strike, wrote Cwmardy
(1937) and We Live (1939), sadly dying of exhaustion after completing the latter. Most resonantly,
Jones always maintained that he wrote not as an
individual but as the collective representative of
the community of which he was a part. In terms of
communal rather than personal agency, the communist ex-seaman John Sommerfields May Day
(1936) is striking in how it compiles an almost
cinematic montage of aggregated working-class
perspectives in the run-up to May Day in London,
which advance collective rather than individual
action. London is also the setting for Willy Goldmans East End My Cradle: Portrait of an Environment (1940), which comprises a fragmentary
assemblage of stories and set pieces about slum
life.
There is also a strong body of writing by women
in the 1920s and 1930s that does not always
receive the attention which it deserves. This Slavery (1925), by the mill worker Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, highlights the plight of working-class
women, whose slavery is shown to be the product
of both capitalism and patriarchy. Ellen
Wilkinsons Clash (1929) is the key novel with
regard not only to representations of the General
Strike of 1926 (in which Wilkinson was an active
participant) but also to the importance of both
feminism and socialism for any full redress of the
inequalities of working-class life. As with Carnie
Holdsworth, Wilkinson was a factory worker and
408
she went on to become MP for Jarrow, most

notably taking part in the famous Jarrow March
to London in 1936, which sought to fight unemployment. Wilkinson renegotiates emancipation
in terms both economic and gendered and looks
forward, as traditional mores and demands relent,
to a time when women are freed from class and
patriarchal constraints to assert a new agency and
empowerment. Hannah Mitchell, born on a farm
in Derbyshire, was also a lifelong activist who
argued in her posthumously published autobiography that socialists are not necessarily feminists (1990 [1968], 100). Her short stories are
driven by the belief that the emancipation of
women is a necessary part of the full equality
promised by socialism.
However, some fiction by men was able to
criticize patriarchy. Walter Brierleys Means Test
Man (1935) features an unemployed miner assuming a domestic, traditionally feminized role
looking after his son. Walter Greenwoods Love on
the Dole (1933) suggests that powerless workingclass men do not have to retreat into reactionary
attitudes toward women as a means of asserting
themselves and strives instead to rethink the
demands placed on both men and women by
class and patriarchy. Lewis Grassic Gibbons trilogy A Scots Quair (1992 [19324]) is distinctive
in that, although written by a male author (whose
real name was James Leslie Mitchell), it centers on
a female protagonist, Chris Guthrie. The trilogy
traces the emergence of class consciousness
among agricultural workers in rural Scotland with
the added dimension of gender inequality.
Gibbons work is also notable for its linguistic
radicalism: it dispenses with Standard English and
its narrative rather than merely the speech of the
characters is rendered in demotic.
A distinctively nomadic set of perspectives
emerged in the first half of the twentieth century
from Liverpool in the form of three working-class
writers, all of whom have Irish connections: Jim
Phelan originally hailed from Ireland, while
George Garrett and James Hanley were both born
in Liverpool to Irish parents. Phelan was a tramp
who was convicted of gunrunning for the IRA and
twice had the attendant death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Phelans experience of
prison informs both his novel Lifer (1938) and the
more autobiographical Jail Journey (1940). The
composition of both works helped Phelan pre-
serve his own sanity and integrity while incarcerated. Phelans work was known to Orwell and
Phelans sense of how prison provided a model for
a wider regimentation of society clearly filters into
the writing of Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949). Additionally, Orwells own diary credits
George Garrett as one of the people who guided
him when he was researching The Road to Wigan
Pier (1937). But Garrett deserves to be remembered as more than just a worker who facilitated
someone elses account of working-class life.
Garretts own short stories, which were often
published under the pseudonym Matt Low, brilliantly capture the disruptions of working-class
lives on the seas. So too Hanleys dark, existential
novels and short stories etch out the brutalities
both economic and spiritual of those on the
receiving end of capitalisms effects, of families so
oppressed that their members begin to oppress
one another. Such writers reflect the abject hunger, pain, and despair endured by the working
class through the first half of the century before
the establishment of the Welfare State from 1945
onward and its guiding principles of free health
care, education, and social provision for all.
The austerity of life before, during, and after
World War II was replaced in the 1950s by a new
trend of consumerism. In part, this consumerism
helped the Conservative Party return to power in
place of the Labour government, which had won a
landslide victory in 1945 as part of a mood that the
victory against Fascism should actually mean
something substantial in terms of the plight of
ordinary people. In the 1950s consumer goods
and leisure opportunities that were unheard of
before World War II began to become a feature of
life in general and for working-class communities.
Added to the social, educational, and health
provision facilitated by the Welfare State, a recurrent question in the period was, as Stuart Laing
puts it, what had the new working class to
complain about? (1986, 66). Indeed, in a speech
in 1957 the Conservative prime minister Harold
Macmillan commented that most of our people
have never had it so good (quoted in Campaign
Guide 1964, 173). The Britain that reconstructed
itself after the war still required someone to do the
necessary work, including workers from Ireland
and the former colonies. These economic migrations are culturally reflected by the appearance on
the British literary scene of writers such as the
Trinidadian Sam Selvon, whose The Lonely Londoners (1956) signals the emergence of a new
demographic of migrant workers ghettoized by
both their race and class.
Nonetheless, one of the recurrent tropes in the
fiction of the postwar period is the former
working-class boy taking advantage of the perceived new social mobility to enter bourgeois
life. A paradigmatic example is John Braines
fiction, especially Room at the Top (1957), which
features the character Joe Lampton. But there is
also ambivalence here about the middle-class
values encountered in the journey by which such
characters climb the social ladder. Lampton, like
so many characters of the period, is caught
between the collapse of traditional working-class
life (on which he has turned his back) and the
vacuity of the bourgeois materialism that he
desires and hates in equal measure. Lampton
ends up lost, hollow, and rootless. Alan Sillitoes
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
similarly expresses a disdain for consumerism.
While its protagonist Arthur Seaton is a factory
worker who does not have access to the mobility
of Joe Lampton, this novel makes comparable
social criticisms to Braines fiction. In this case,
Seaton acknowledges that he is materially much
better off than previous generations of his family, but his nihilistic, rebellious hedonism indicts
the saturating conformity of a world standardized by consumerism. The strain of existentialism in Sillitoes work points to an emptiness in
post-World War II working-class life and articulates a strong sense that material improvement is
the bargaining chip by which a new social consensus forestalls any meaningful emancipation of
working-class people politically, spiritually, or
culturally. Sillitoe also uses the short story form
very effectively to depict the alienation of his
antihero characters at odds as much with traditional working-class values as they are with the
bourgeois individualism that is supplanting
them.
Not all the fiction of the 1950s and 1960s tallies
with the prevailing account of a consumerist
society, which, even if its effects deemed negative,
was assumed to have permeated all aspects of life.
Indeed, any consideration of class issues will
always remind us that dominant worldviews are
notable as much by whom they exclude as include.
Barry Hiness novel A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) is
409
an account of Billy Casper, a boy from a broken,

dysfunctional home whose one attempted redemption in life the furtive training of a wild
kestrel is smashed by a brutal, uncaring world
that numbers not only wider figures of social
authority but even Billys own family. If anything,
Hiness utterly excluded and oppressed character
prefigures the emergence of a marginalized and
disenfranchised underclass that emerges in cultural form from the late 1970s to the present.
Furthermore, in addition to the more common
working-class boy encountering bourgeois society tale of these times, there also continued a
workerist tradition of fiction still based on collective solidarity and purpose: the communist Len
Dohertys A Miners Sons (1955) and The Man
Beneath (1957), and the autodidact miner Sid
Chaplins The Leaping Lad (1946) and The Watchers and the Watched (1962).
David Storey, who was the son of a miner, offers
another key voice in the 1950s and 1960s. This
Sporting Life (1960) speaks to the contemporary
vogue for considering the predicament of the
former working-class figure introduced to a supposedly better life, in this instance the ascent of a
professional rugby league player to riches beyond
his wildest dreams but also tormented by a concomitant, restless soullessness. Storeys Flight into
Camden (1961) is distinctive in that it is narrated
by a miners daughter as opposed to a male figure,
while Radcliffe (1963) bravely broaches the repressed issue of working-class homosexuality. In
terms of gender, the 1960s witnessed a number of
key works dealing particularly with the experiences of women. Jeremy Sandforths Cathy Come
Home (1967) traces the descent into homelessness
of a young working-class couple whose children
are eventually taken into state care. The underside
of the apparent liberation and hedonism of the
1960s is also laid bare by Nell Dunns work. Up the
Junction (1963) details a working-class Battersea
milieu in which backstreet abortionists are the
culmination of the supposed emancipation of
women. The working-class characters featured in
this set of vignettes find consolation for their
powerless in sex, alcohol, and racism. Dunns
Poor Cow (1967) centers on the ironically named
Joy whose method of escape is to dream of being a
glamour girl.
A long way from promiscuity, hedonism, and
petty thrills are Raymond Williamss Border
410
Country (1960) and its sequel Second Generation

(1964). Williams, the son of a Welsh railway
worker, is a classic example of the working-class
intellectual who benefited from the principle of
free education in the Welfare State; he went to
Cambridge University and became one of the
leading literary critics and icons of the cultural
Left in his generation. His fiction mediates on the
continuance of class politics and struggle in an
epic realist form and seeks to contextualize contemporary social change historically in terms of
the shifts and convulsions of capitalism rather
than pander to the pleasures and thrills of the
moment. However, from the 1970s to the present
this strong sense of a history to class experience
and indeed to changes and shifts in class increasingly disappeared. One exception is William
McIlvanneys Docherty (1975), which looks back
to a west Scotland mining community in the
1910s and 1920s in order to sustain a tradition
of heroic working-class resistance. Also in Scotland, the 1970s saw the emergence of James Kelman, a Glaswegian writer equally at home in both
the novel and short story forms. There is a distinct
absence of community or collective purpose in
Kelmans work but the perennially alienated individuals who people his stories remind us that
even isolation can transcend itself by returning us
to the social conditions that are its cause.
Kelmans fiction articulates the damage caused
by the sustained assault upon the traditional,
organized working class by the state. This turn
is usually associated with the rise to power of
Margaret Thatcher in 1979, though her marketdriven agenda also finds its roots in the last
Labour government of the 1970s, which secured
loans from the International Monetary Fund in
exchange for massive cuts in public spending. In
other words, the ethos behind the Welfare State
was already under duress before the advent of
Thatcherism. But Thatcher certainly brought this
slow process to a head, as exemplified by her
notorious statement that there is no such thing
as society, only individuals and their families
(quoted in Lash & Urry 34). Her government
directly attacked the Welfare State and the politically organized working class (especially the National Union of Mineworkers during the 19845
strike) and privileged individualism and neoliberal or laissez-faire economics. In fact, successive British governments have continued this
assault not only on the organized working class

but also on the very concept of class itself, on the
idea that class is a determining factor in contemporary society. Hence, John Major, Thatchers
successor as Conservative prime minister in the
1990s, often spoke of his vision of a classless
society (quoted in Childs 272) while Tony Blairs
New Labour administration from 1997 onward
pursued its idea of the Third Way, of a society
supposedly beyond the old polarities of Left and
Right in which everyone was now a stakeholder
and class no longer mattered.
Kelmans fiction castigates this promise of
opportunity and success for all. Against the grain
of notions of social mobility, Kelman darkly
focuses on characters who are displaced but yet
ironically have nowhere to go. This rootless stasis
anticipates the work of the Edinburgh author
Irvine Welsh, whose novel Trainspotting (1993)
unerringly holds a dark mirror up to the individualism of contemporary society in order to unveil
not personal success and achievement but greed,
alienation, drug addiction, and despair. Here, in a
situation where most of Welshs working-class
characters do not actually work, the last vestiges of
traditional, industrial labor and its solidarities are
effaced by internecine bitterness and alienated
escapism. From the perspective of women, Pat
Barkers Union Street (1982) details the disintegration of traditional community life from
womens perspective, while Livi Michaels Under
a Thin Moon (1992) relays the claustrophobic
environment endured by working-class women
in a land of supposed opportunity. In Ireland, the
so-called Celtic Tiger economy was heralded in
terms parallel to those of the Third Way in Britain,
yet the exclusion of many from this apparent
social paradise is reflected in the emergence of
a tradition of gritty realist fiction based in the
housing schemes of north Dublin, as reflected
most popularly in the fiction of Roddy Doyle. In
the North of Ireland, where the Troubles since
1969 have tended to displace class consciousness
into a sectarian or religious view of the struggle,
Frances Molloys fiction stands out. Unfortunately, Molloys work ended with her premature
death. Her novel No Mate for the Magpie
(1985) not only charts the life of a female migrant
worker but is undertaken purely in a vernacular
idiom. This distinctive strategy refuses the normal
linguistic hierarchy in fiction where vernacular is
used only in speech but the narrative is carried by

Standard English. In Molloy, as in Grassic Gibbon
and Kelman, the vernacular voice establishes a
linguistic democracy in which working-class dialect assumes narrative control rather than being
reduced merely to speech and local coloring. All
the aforementioned writers from the 1980s to the
present uncover a stark contradiction in the governing logic of our times: we are asked to accept
that class has disappeared at the same time that we
are told the system that causes it in the first place
capitalism is inevitably here to stay forever. The
work of Kelman, Michael, Welsh, Doyle, and
Molloy continues to insist, firstly, that class most
certainly shifts and changes through history, taking on new forms and identities, but, equally, that
this historical contingency is not synonymous
with the disappearance of class and the onset of
a classless society. If anything, working-class fiction has an increasingly vital role to play in the
present given that mainstream politics has attempted to banish the discourse of class from its
register entirely. It is through such fiction that an
array of voices and experiences clamor to dispute
the consensual assumptions of representative
democracy and neo-liberal economics.
Irish Fiction (BIF); Jewish Fiction (BIF);
Politics and the Novel (BIF); Scottish Fiction
(BIF); Welsh Fiction in English (BIF)
Barker, P. (1982). Union Street London: Virago.
Braine, J. (1957). Room at the Top. London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode.
Brierley, W. (1935). Means Test Man. London:
Methuen.
Britton, L. (1931). Hunger and Love. London: Putnams.
Campaign Guide, The (1964) London: Conservative
and Unionist Central Office.
Carnie Holdsworth, E. (1925). This Slavery. London:
Labor Publishing Co.
Chaplin, S. (1946). The Leaping Lad. London: Phoenix
House.
Chaplin, S. (1962). The Watchers and the Watched.
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Childs, D. (2001). Britain Since 1945: A Political History.
London: Routledge.
Day, G. (2001). Class. London: Routledge.
Doherty, L. (1955). A Miners Sons. London: Lawrence
and Wishart.
411
Doherty, L. (1957). The Man Beneath. London:

Lawrence and Wishart.
Doyle, R. (1992). The Barrytown Trilogy. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Dunn, N. (1963). Up the Junction. London: MacGibbon
and Kee.
Dunn, N. (1967). Poor Cow. London: MacGibbon and
Kee.
Fox, P. (1994). Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in
the Working-Class Novel 18901945. Durham, NC:
Garrett, G. (1999). The Collected George Garrett (ed. M.
Murphy). Nottingham: Trent.
Penguin.
Goldman, W. (1940). East End My Cradle: Portrait of an
Environment. London: Faber and Faber.
Greenwood, W. (1933). Love on the Dole. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Hanley, J. (1931). Boy. London: Boriswood.
Hanley, J. (1935). The Furys. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Haywood, I. (1997). Working-Class Fiction: From
Chartism to Trainspotting. Plymouth: Northcote
House.
Heslop, H. (1929). The Gate of a Strange Field. London:
Brentanos.
Hines, B. (1968). A Kestrel for a Knave. London:
Penguin.
Jones, L. (1937). Cwmardy. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Jones, L. (1939). We Live. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Minerva.
Klaus, H. G., & Knight, S. (eds.) (2000).
British Industrial Fictions. Cardiff: University of
Wales Press.
Laing, S. (1986). Representations of Working-Class Life
19571964. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Lash, S., & Urry, J. (eds.) (1994). Economies of Signs and
Space. London: Sage.
MacGill, P. (1914). Children of the Dead End: The
Autobiography of A Navvy. London: Herbert Jenkins.
McIlvanney, W. (1975). Docherty. London: Allen and
Unwin.
Michael, L. (1992). Under a Thin Moon. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Mitchell, H. (1990). The Hard Way Up: The
Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and
Rebel [1968]. London: Virago.
Mitchell, H. (1993). May Day. In G. H. Klaus (ed.),
Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries: Working
Class Stories of the 1920s. London: Journeyman,
pp. 1412.
412
WORLD WAR I IN FICTION
Molloy, F. (1985). No Mate for the Magpie. London:

Virago.
Phelan, J. (1938). Lifer. London: Peter Davies.
Phelan, J. (1940). Jail Journey. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Sandford, J. (1967). Cathy Come Home. London: Pan.
Wingate.
Sillitoe, A. (1959). The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner. London: W. H. Allen.
Sommerfield, J. (1936). May Day. London: Lawrence
and Wishart.
Longman.
Warburg.
Welsh, J. C. (1920). The Underworld. London: Herbert
Jenkins.
Welsh, J. C. (1924). The Morlocks. London: Herbert
Jenkins.
Wilkinson, E. (1929). Clash. London: Harrap.
and Windus.
Williams, R. (1964). Second Generation. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Worpole, K. (1983). Dockers and Detectives. London:
Verso.
World War I in Fiction

ARIELA FREEDMAN
The literary response to World War I in prose

fiction and memoir was prolific, multifaceted,
and extended. From the memoirs and combat
novels contemporary to the war, to the autobiographies and postwar novels that began to appear
with more frequency after a decades delay, to the
modernist masterpieces of the 1920s that took the
wars civilian impact as their subject, to the celebrated late twentieth-century World War I novels
of Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker, the Great War
has long been a traumatic preoccupation and
source of inspiration for British writers. War
writers wrote from the home front and from the
front lines; they wrote in the heat of the war and
decades after it had finished; they wrote in familiar genres and they broke conventions to explore
new traumas and experiences; they fictionalized
their autobiographies and drew on their lives for
their fictions. In his memoir Blasting and Bombadiering Wyndham Lewis wrote we say pre-war
and post-war as we say BC or AD (1967 [1937], 1).
While both writers and critics may have at times
overstated the degree of the break both with
prewar life and with prewar forms of writing
occasioned by the war, it is clear that World
War I prompted a vast reconsideration both of
Britain and of British writing in response to what
was seen as an unprecedented and unique catastrophe that demanded, in Katherine Mansfields
terms, new expressions, new moulds for our
thoughts & feelings (1991, 2045).
Early critics of World War I literature frequently associated its fiction with the figure of
the soldier-author. In Heroes Twilight (1965)
Bernard Bergonzi focused on the narratives of
heroism and antiheroism of World War I, and
cemented a canon of male soldier-writers as the
privileged documenters of the war experience.
Bergonzis book was followed a decade later by
Paul Fussells influential The Great War and
Modern Memory (1975), which added to
Bergonzis emphasis on the soldier-author a narrative about the development of modernism as a
response to the crisis of World War I, and an
argument about the effect of the war in the
formation of a demystified and ironic literary
style. World War I, Fussell wrote in a formulation
that is still famous, was more ironic than any
before or since (8). Fussells study of the demystified modern voice of the soldier-author had an
early formative influence on literary criticism of
World War I through his vivid portrait of a
collective betrayal that gave birth to a new national literature. Beginning in the 1980s, feminist
critics including Gilbert & Gubar (1988), Claire
Tylee (1990) and Angela Smith (2000a, 2000b)
called attention to the uneven critical emphasis
on male voices from World War I and began the
process of reclaiming female writers. More recently, criticism of World War I fiction has
moved to the recovery of popular fiction and
subaltern accounts, to the application of trauma
theory and the incorporation of cultural studies
(Tate 1998), to post-Fussellian analyses of modernism in relation to the war (Sherry 2003), and
to a more nuanced understanding of the ways
that the demands of propaganda and the forces of
censorship shaped war fiction (Buitenhuis 1987;
Wollaeger 2006).
The war entered British fiction almost as quickly as it became a historical reality. War, complained the Times Literary Supplement as early as
1916, has become as much the stock-in-trade of
the novelist as are treasure islands, pirate schooners, or the Great North Road (Tylee 107). Memoirs and novels featuring the war began to appear
soon after the fighting had begun. Early accounts
of the war tended to emphasize patriotism and
adventure. The Scottish novelist and playwright
John Hay Beith, writing under the pen name Ian
Hay, wrote one of the first soldiers accounts of
the war, The First Hundred Thousand (1916).
Beith, who served as an officer in a K1 battalion
of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, told the
story of an infantry unit of Kitcheners volunteer
army from 1914 to 1915 in the form of a tragicomic picaresque that met the trauma and confusion of the war with humor and military fortitude. His novels preface outlines a tension between memoir and fictionalization that was to be
repeated in much prose fiction on the war; The
characters are all entirely fictitious. he wrote,
but the incidents described all actually occurred
(1916, 1). Other early war novels included H. G.
Wellss bestselling Mr. Britling Sees it Through
(1916), the story of a middle-aged man left at
home while his son fights at the front. John
Buchan used the war as plot device in his
shocker The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), the first
of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, and
returned to Hannays wartime adventures in
Greenmantle (1916) and Mr. Standfast (1919).
Buchans novels, popular among soldiers and
veterans during and after the war, offered both
escapism and an example of personal heroism
that could inspire the men in the trenches. Despite
the appearance of numerous novels and memoirs
during World War I, the most influential literary
representations during the war years were accomplished not through prose fiction but through
poetry. In the years following the war, prose
fiction and memoir would take a more prominent
position as privileged chronicles of the war
experience.
There was little public appetite for war fiction
or memoir in the years immediately after the
Treaty of Versailles. When in 1919 Herbert Read
tried to publish his memoir In Retreat he found
that publishers were not interested in anything
bleak (quoted in Edwards 2005, 15); the book
413
was not published until 1926. One exception was

R. H. Mottrams Spanish Farm trilogy (2005
[191418] ), which told the story of the war
through the multiple perspectives of a Frenchwoman, a young British officer, and a Norwich
bank clerk. Mottrams war trilogy gained considerable acclaim at the time, and in its use of
multiple points of view and intermixing of combatant and non-combatant experiences of the war
prefigured the more self-consciously modernist
experimentation of Ford Madox Ford in Parades
End (1950 [19248] ). The war boom in fiction
occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as
writers gained some distance on their experiences and felt compelled to document them, and
as the reading public developed an appetite for
fictional accounts of a war that was no longer too
fresh and too painful to dwell upon. A number of
the memoirs that appeared in the late 1920s
represented the war from a demystified and
cynical position; Robert Graves in Goodbye to
All That (1929), C. E. Montague in Disenchantment (1922), Edmund Blunden in Undertones of
War (1929), and Wilfred Bion in the posthumously published The Long Weekend (1982)
depicted the war as an act of bad faith that left a
tragic and fraught legacy to the witnesses who
survived it. As Vera Brittain wrote in the preface
to Testament of Youth, It is not by accident that
what I have written constitutes in effect the
indictment of a civilization (1933, 12). Many
narratives had memorial as their explicit purpose; frequently, the books were dedicated to
fallen comrades from the front. By contrast, in
the famous preface to Goodbye to All That,
perhaps the best-known British autobiography
of World War I, Robert Graves presented his
ostensive purpose as to forget. Despite his ambivalence about memorializing the war, Gravess
book is a powerful anti-war account that combines humor with a sense of immediacy in his
portrayal of a battle poorly conceived and poorly
endured; Gravess ironic distance came to exemplify the cynicism of the survivors of the lost
generation.
Even as memoirs of the war were distorted by
what Blunden calls the discolored and
lacunary (p. xii) qualities of memory, many
novels of the war bore the heavy thumbprint of
autobiographical experience. The second and
third volumes of Siegfried Sassoons Memoirs of
414
George Sherston, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

(1930) and Sherstons Progress (1936) told the
loosely camouflaged story of Sassoons service at
the front. Richard Aldingtons Death of a Hero
(1929), while less extensively autobiographical,
was partially based on his experiences on the
Western Front and on his collapsing marriage to
the poet Hilda Doolittle. Death of a Hero incorporated colloquial language, obscenity, and sexuality in its modernist satire of the war years;
Aldington was forced to redact certain passages
in order to avoid censorship. Frederic Mannings
The Middle Parts of Fortune, also heavily based
on its authors service at the front and distinctive
in its emphasis on the soldier rather than the
officer, was published privately in 1929 and
appeared the next year under the suggestively
lewd title Her Privates We in an edition
that expurgated and censored the vernacular
language that lent vividness and authenticity to
Mannings original version. The public interest
in World War I stories evident in the late
1920s was still shaped and contained by the
censors determination of what could and could
not said.
While many of the novels and memoirs of
World War I were written in a realist style, the
style was inflected and modified by the effort of
depicting a deeply traumatic experience. As Paul
Edwards writes, the stress that traditional forms
undergo in these memoirs . . . is sufficient to turn
the writers into something very close to modernists, almost against their will, and in relation to
the war only (15). A few books, however, selfconsciously used the emergent techniques of
modernism in order to represent the experience
of war. David Joness novel/memoir In Parenthesis (1937) was explicitly positioned in relation
to modernist experimentation with language and
style. Joness poetic and labyrinthine juxtaposition of trench warfare with ancient myth, like
Eliots Waste Land, Joyces Ulysses, and Pounds
Cantos, created a modern fragmentary epic that
forced the past and present into unlikely, dissonant juxtaposition. Perhaps the most extended
attempt to merge a modernist poetics with an
account of a soldiers experience of the war and
of postwar life was undertaken in Ford Madox
Fords famous wartime tetralogy, Parades End
(1950 [19248]). Parades End tells the story of
Christopher Tietjens, the last English Tory, an
anachronistic gentleman beset by the tribulations

of the Great War and of modern life. Fords
impressionistic style filters the experience of the
war, vacillating between the front lines and the
home front in order to represent the interweaving of the personal and political. Noted for its
psychological complexity and stylistic virtuosity,
Fords quartet remains one of the great literary
accounts of the war.
The impact of the war was monumental for
women as well as men. As Vera Brittain wrote,
There was no way of escaping that echo; I
belonged to an accursed generation which had
to listen and look whether I wanted to do so or
not (366). Testament of Youth, Brittains impassioned account of her war work and personal
losses, remains among the most influential
chronicles of the war. Some of the earliest books
on the war were by women who served as
nurses, drivers, ambulance attendants, journalists, and witnesses from the home front. In 1915
May Sinclair published Journal of Impressions of
Belgium, based on her weeks with an ambulance
unit at the Belgian front in the first year of the
war; the war later featured prominently in six of
her novels, including the jingoistic Tree of Heaven (1917). Rose Macaulays 1916 novel NonCombatants and Others deftly called attention to
the predicament of the men and women who
remained in London while their friends and
peers fought at the front, while in Bid Me To
Live (1960) H.D. presented her own fictionalized account of the same marriage and wartime
London society that Aldington had memorialized in Death of a Hero. Mary Bordens selfconsciously modernist The Forbidden Zone
(1929) shattered realist narrative to striking and
powerful effect in order to imitate the fragmentation and chaos of the field hospital. In The
Well of Loneliness (1928) Radclyffe Hall told the
controversial story of a female ambulance driver
whose professional freedom leads to sexual selfdiscovery, and in her story An Indiscreet
Journey Katherine Mansfield fictionalized the
tensely exhilarating experience of an affair at the
front. Rebecca West used the new phenomenon
of shell-shock in The Return of the Soldier to
dramatize the lasting effects of the war and the
battles fought on the home front long after the
men had returned, while Dorothy Sayers added
depth to her flippant detective gentleman Lord
Peter Wimsey by using shell-shock both in

character development and as plot device in
perhaps her most complicated and most socially
invested novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928).
Though the war was in some ways, as Vincent
Sherry calls it, the signal event of artistic modernism (113) prominent modernists often incorporated the war in their writing tangentially
and through tropes of indirection. Virginia Woolf
mobilized the trope of absence in a trilogy of
novels that evoked the war; in the first, Jacobs
Room (1922), the empty room of a young man
signals the losses of the war, while in Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) Woolf tells the story of a shell-shocked
veteran who commits suicide alongside a narrative
of a party thrown by the wife of a minister who is
oblivious to his trauma. In the third of these
novels, To the Lighthouse (1928), the war figures
in dreamlike ellipses. The section Time Passes
marks the fissure between pre- and postwar society, while battles and deaths are reported in infrequent, terse square brackets that punctuate the
section like bullet holes. D. H. Lawrences resistance to the war is evident in the Nightmare
section of his novel Kangaroo (1923), which presents a powerful account of forced conscription.
The Great War resonated in the modernist fiction
of the late 1920s and the 1930s, even in the absence
of explicit reference.
World War I has also remained a potent preoccupation for contemporary British authors. In
her award-winning Regeneration trilogy (1996
[19915] ) Pat Barker used fiction and fact to tell
the story of the traumatic effects of the war, while
in The Girl at the Lion dOr (1999) and Birdsong
(1994) Sebastian Faulks mixed the genres of war
novel and romance. Recently, Barker has returned
to World War I in her novel Life Class (2007),
this time telling the story of three young art
students forced to confront the war in their life
and work. As we approach its first centenary
World War I continues to inspire new fictions
and interpretations by writers drawn to make art
out of catastrophe.
SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Historical

Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); The
Novel and War (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
415

Aldington, R. (1929). Death of a Hero: A Novel. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Barker, P. (1996). The Regeneration Trilogy [19915].
London: Viking.
Barker, P. (2007). Life Class. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Bergonzi, B. (1965). Heroes Twilight: A Study of the
Literature of the Great War. London: Constable.
Bion, W. R. (1986). The Long Week-End 18971979:
Part of a Life (ed. F. Bion). London: Free Association.
Blunden, E. (1929). Undertones of War. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, Doran.
Borden, M. (1929). The Forbidden Zone. London:
Heinemann.
Brittain, V. (1933). Testament of Youth: An
Autobiographical Study of the Years 19001925.
New York: Macmillan.
Buchan, J. (1919). Adventures of Richard Hannay,
comprising The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle,
Mr. Standfast. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Buitenhuis, P. (1987). The Great War of Words: British,
American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction
19141933. Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press.
Edwards, P. (2005). British War Memoirs. In V. Sherry
(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of
the First World War. New York: Cambridge
Faulks, S. (1994). Birdsong. New York: Vintage.
Faulks, S. (1999). The Girl at the Lion dOr. New York:
Vintage.
Ford, F. M. (1950). Parades End [19248]. New York:
Knopf.
Fussell, P. (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory.
Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (1988). No Mans Land: The
Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century,
vol 1. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Graves, R. (1929). Good-Bye to All That: An
Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape.
H.D. (1960). Bid Me to Live: A Madrigal. New York:
Grove.
Jonathan Cape.
Hay, I. (1916). The First Hundred Thousand: Being the
Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of K(1). New York:
Grosset and Dunlap.
Jones, D. (1961). In Parenthesis/Seinnyessit e Gledyf ym
Penn Mameu [1937] (intro. T. S. Eliot). London:
Faber and Faber.
Lawrence, D. H. (1923). Kangaroo. London: Secker.
Lewis, W. (1967). Blasting and Bombardiering [1937].
London: Calder and Boyars.
Macaulay, R. (1916). Non-Combatants and Others. New
York: Hodder and Stoughton.
416
WORLD WAR II IN FICTION
Manning, F. (1930). Her Privates We. London: Peter

Davies.
Mansfield, K. (1974). The Complete Stories of Katherine
Mansfield. Auckland: Golden Press.
Mansfield, K. (1991). Letters between Katherine
Mansfield and John Middleton Murry (sel. & ed. C. A.
Hankin). New York: New Amsterdam.
Montague, C. E. (1922). Disenchantment. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Mottram, R. H. (2005). The Spanish Farm Trilogy
19141918. London: Chatto and Windus.
Sassoon, S. (1937). The Complete Memoirs of George
Sherston. London: Faber and Faber.
Sayers, D. L. (1928). The Unpleasantness at the Bellona
Club. New York: Payson and Clarke.
Sherry, V. B. (2003). The Great War and the Language of
Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, M. (1915). A Journal of Impressions in Belgium.
Smith, A. K. (2000a). The Second Battlefield: Women,
Modernism and the First World War. Manchester:
Smith, A. K. (ed.) (2000b). Womens Writing of the First
World War: An Anthology. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Tate, T. (1998). Modernism, History and the First World
War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Tylee, C. M. (1990). The Great War and Womens
Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood
in Womens Writings 191464. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Wells, H. G. (1916). Mr. Britling Sees It Through. New
York: Macmillan.
Nisbet.
Wollaeger, M. A. (2006). Modernism, Media, and
Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945.
Woolf, V. (1922). Jacobs Room. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth.
World War II in Fiction

DAMON MARCEL DECOSTE
Less studied than World War I literature, British

fiction of World War II nonetheless constitutes a
discrete moment in the literary history of the last
century. Rather than soldiers detailing grim disillusion in combat, the fiction of the Second War
focuses on civilians and the home front as the
true agents and battleground of this even more
comprehensive conflict. This fiction is marked by
the anxious anticipation of war, the transposition

of both frontier and enemy to the home front, the
emptiness of victory, and an equation of history
with warfare that produces expectations of more
war to come. The merits of this story, more often
dismissed than analyzed, have only very recently
been recognized. Calder (1969) denies that the
war produced memorable fiction, a position
adopted as axiomatic by various critics (Hewison
1977; Fussell 1989). Muntons (1989) groundbreaking monograph initiated a series of challenges to these assessments, but whether this
fiction will yet figure so prominently in accounts
of the twentieth century as its Great War counterpart remains to be seen.
This wars literary record is distinguished, first,
by its prophetic foretelling. Indeed, fiction of
World War II avoids a narrative of disillusion
largely because the war was a doom forecast long
before the outbreak of hostilities. Variously
dubbed the Literature of Anticipation (Knowles
2), the literature of the prelude (Plain 35), or the
Literature of Preparation (Hynes 341), this
insistent imagining of looming conflict has been
widely identified as peculiar to World War II.
Apart from serving as a harbinger of the war itself,
this fiction also establishes a set of subjects and
treatments that recur through both wartime and
more retrospective literature.
Waughs Vile Bodies outlines a world overshadowed by the certainty of wars return and
culminates with its characters stranded on the
biggest battleground in the history of the world
(1965 [1930], 220). This may be the earliest
anticipatory war fiction, but the 1930s were
punctuated by several subsequent texts of this
sort. Both Greenes A Gun for Sale (1936) and
Orwells Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) deal
with a world expecting, even longing for, a war
that seems very near. The desire for war in these
novels stems not, as in early World War I texts,
from any urge to protect the nation, but rather
from the lust for profit of shadowy arms dealers
on the one hand, and the contrary wish to see the
capitalist system go up in flames on the other.
Smiths Over the Frontier both heralds coming
war with Germany and delineates again a homegrown hunger for war. Smiths Pompey seems to
be prosecuting a war already engaged, if undeclared, and is eager for violence, thus establishing
that the will to power behind Continental fascism
is also ingrained in the British psyche (1989

[1938], 272).
This Literature of Preparation continues to the
very eve of war and beyond, consistently presenting this national character as central to wars
perceived inevitability. Orwells Coming Up for
Air (1939) relates George Bowlings failed attempt
to escape into boyhood memory from a present in
which war is clearly coming. The novels conclusion, which has British planes accidentally bomb
Bowlings home town, suggests again that the war
has come and that the enemy is not only across the
Channel. Woolfs posthumously published Between the Acts retrospectively reconstructs this
moment of anticipation and again fears the home
front is already a battle front and Britons themselves foes. Begun in 1938, set in the summer of
1939, and completed during the Blitz, the novel
deals with characters all too aware of the war that
awaits them, but unable to find a new plot, free
of erotic and martial aggression, by which to live
(Woolf 1990 [1941], 134).
This literature of expectation establishes the
literary war well in advance of September 1, 1939,
and inaugurates British fiction of the Second War
as a record of unsurprising and seemingly
unavoidable cataclysm. By locating the seeds of
war as much in the heart of Britain as in the
ambitions of Nazi Germany, these texts introduce
a set of collapsed binaries that persist through later
war fiction. British fictions war is one, then, in
which heroes are also villains, victims also culprits,
private spaces also political, loving relations violent. Rooting these equations in a view of human
nature as inherently belligerent, this early fiction
presents the coming war as simply the latest
installment of a history fundamentally coterminous with war.
As preparatory fiction demonstrates, British
fictions war is the home-front war, and this focus
is only intensified by the declaration of war.
Britains war begins with what has been named
the phoney war, the funny war, or the Bore
War (Calder 57): seven months virtually devoid
of British military engagement. This was still a
time of anticipation, during which even servicemen found themselves confined to the home
front. Following the evacuation of British forces
at Dunkirk, the war became more deadly, but
especially so, for Britons, at home, with the Battle
of Britain transforming into the Germans sus-
417
tained bombing of urban centers the Blitz in

September 1940. In this way, the reality of war
conformed to the expectations of novels of the
1930s. The fiction of wartime, too, aptly emerges
as a fiction of British homes. Even texts set
offshore, such as Greens Loving (1945) or
Mannings Balkan (1981 [19605] ) and Levant
(1982 [197780] ) trilogies, tend to focus on
conflicts between civilians in domestic space.
Indeed, even works, such as Powells The Valley
of the Bones (1964) and The Soldiers Art (1976),
which focus on soldiers, often situate themselves
on British soil and present the war primarily in
terms of the Blitzs civilian casualties.
The sacrifice and service across class lines mandated by this home-front war helped generate
rhetoric of a battle for the democratic renewal of
Britain. Thus, it was heralded as a Peoples War
of social solidarity and the overthrow of old
hierarchies (Donnelly 37). Such talk is rarer in
the lasting fiction of the period, however. While
Priestleys Daylight on Saturday (1943) pays tribute to munitions workers in such terms, homefront literature more often undercuts claims of
broadening social sympathy, instead depicting
home-front pettiness, fractiousness, and egotism. The wartime prologue of Waughs Brideshead Revisited (1945), with its unflattering portrait of common man Hooper, reveals
Waughs impatience with Peoples War cant.
Similarly, Put Out More Flags (1942) and Men
at Arms (1952) offer visions of a home front
typified not by sacrifice but by tawdry self-seeking, whether centered on the billeting of evacuee
children in the former, or on the possession of a
chemical toilet in the latter.
This warfare between Britons is not strictly a
matter of comedy. Greens Caught (1943) details
the petty intrigues of the Auxiliary Fire Services,
but these are rendered less risible by the fact that
the greatest threat protagonist Richard Roe faces
until the very end of the novel stems not from
some foreign enemy, but from the sister of his
superior, who has abducted his son at the start of
the narrative. Similarly, neither this son, Christopher, nor the children in Greens Loving are cast
as innocent antitheses to German aggression.
Christopher happily imagines he is a German
policeman beating Polish prisoners (2001
[1943], 188), while young Albert of Loving is
described as a little storm trooper after he
418
throttles a peacock (2000 [1945], 39). Wartime

fiction thus treats the domestic as home to the
same violence playing out globally, in a way that
not only blurs the line between us and them,
but also dissolves clear borders between the personal and the political. Repeatedly, the war proves
what prelude literature had already contended:
that the values of private English life mirror and
enable the carnage of public history. As The Heat
of the Day insists, War . . . hasnt started anything
that wasnt there already (Bowen 1976 [1948], 33).
For Bowen, wars devastation has been produced by personal obsessions and the households
that engender them. This is revealed in the death
of Stella Rodneys and Robert Kelways affair,
doomed by Roberts status as a Nazi traitor, a
role Bowen suggests is fashioned for him by his
quintessentially English upbringing. This readiness to discern the fascist at home, even while
foreigners bombard London, is remarkably widespread. Warners The Aerodrome (1941) imagines
a homegrown fascist state, governed by a ruthless,
yet revered Air Force, whose power is sustained by
the civilian Villagers kinship with it and its
adoration of brute force. Greenes Arthur Rowe,
from The Ministry of Fear (1943), also welcomes
wars destruction, hoping the obliteration of the
landscape of his adulthood might free him from
guilt over euthanizing his sick wife. Both this
treacherous readiness to see his nation leveled
and the nature of his crime make him a brother to
Greenes Nazis, especially homegrown Dr. Forester, who is both champion of euthanasia and
willing fifth columnist.
This fear that the greatest enemy is bred by
Britain itself recurs in retrospective war fiction.
The great villains of Waughs Sword of Honour
(195261) are not Germans but Britons like the
aristocratic Ivor Claire, who deserts his command
during the fall of Crete, or the sinister Ludovic,
who murders Major Hound in order to save
himself. Likewise, Mannings protagonists, the
Pringles, are most endangered when they are
almost abandoned in Athens by decamping fellow
Britons (Manning 1981). Ishiguros The Remains
of the Day (1989) extends this thesis late into the
century, its tale of Lord Darlingtons, and the
historical Lord Halifaxs, sympathy with Hitlers
regime helping to make an identification of war
with home-grown treachery a lasting legacy of
British fiction of World War II.
Because of the sense that wars true seeds are to

be found at home, the Second War is seldom
written as culminating in meaningful victory.
Indeed, in some texts it never ends at all. Bowens
Heat of the Day chronicles the Normandy invasion, but stops short of Allied triumph. Waughs
Sword of Honour elides the wars conclusion, its
final volume jumping from German defeat in
Yugoslavia to a postwar reunion of Guy
Crouchbacks Commandos. Powells Military
Philosophers shifts from the autumn of 1944 to
the summer of 1945, omitting narration of Allied
success in Europe. This novel does conclude with
a Victory Service at St. Pauls, yet there is no sense
of having won anything at all: The country, there
could be no doubt, was absolutely worn out
(1991 [1968], 21718). Even Mannings six novels
bring the Pringles tale to a halt a full two years
before the wars end.
Indeed, so far as it looks to the historical outcomes of the war, British fiction presents ostensible victory as a kind of defeat. If, as this fiction has
maintained, war is preordained by a will to power
that defines Britons as much as the enemy, then
unconditional surrender of hostile nations means
only that this most recent installment in historys
cycle of wars has come to an end. The bloody
dynamics that mandate wars repetition have
scarcely been defeated. Thus, even when writers
offer scenes of victory celebrations, they are at
pains to underline how the enemies within persist.
Sparks Girls of Slender Means (1963), for example, concludes with London crowds marking Japanese surrender, but also makes the crowd itself a
fearsome agent of senseless violence. Rather than
shouts of joy, its language is the screams of those
stabbed or molested in its midst.
The view that this global war is ultimately the
projection of personal, though universal, struggles with humanitys own savagery is characteristic of British fiction and leads to texts more
obsessed with the next war than satisfied with
this ones conclusion. Lowrys war-haunted Under the Volcano (1947) concludes by warning that,
even after the war, the garden of the world still
faces imminent destruction. Mannings two trilogies only barely descry a peace understood as
precarious (1982 [197780], 571). Most definitively, Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) imagines a future that only repeats the war just passed,
fought by a Britain become the very totalitarian
monster VE Day had supposedly slain. The nightmare of Ingsoc, born of a homegrown lust for
power, precludes any true victory or end to war.
The achievement of OBriens utopia a boot
stamping on a human face for ever (1976
[1949], 215) means that conflicts with Eurasia
or Eastasia must be perpetual.
Despite decades of critical scorn, this war literature has itself persisted as an object of inquiry.
Recent years have seen the publication of several
studies seeking to establish World War II as a
literary epoch in its own right. This project of
writing the war into literary history begins with
Muntons pioneering study of 1989. Scrutinizing
war fiction through the lens of the Peoples
War, Munton opposes it to interbellum modernism, presenting it as a return to realism, relevance, and progressive politics (1989, 4). This
Peoples War idiom resonates in Hartleys survey of womens war fiction (1997). Hartley argues
this represents a literature of engaged citizenship,
reflecting womens increased wartime involvement in the public sphere (1).
Hartleys work exemplifies a major trend in
scholarship on wartime fiction, namely the focus
on women writers and the extent to which they
offer an alternative record of this war. Such work
all but dominates criticism of the 1990s, which also
welcomed publications by Plain (1996), Schneider
(1997), and Lassner (1998). More focused than
Hartleys, Plains study also charts womens emergence from the domestic sphere, highlighting the
ambivalence of contemporary discourses of womanhood. Schneiders examination of the war/
gender matrix (1997, 8) highlights this fictions
sense that present-day struggles, erotic and military, indicate a history of repetitions. According to
Schneider, womens fiction maintains both that
wars rehearsal is sustained by corrosive notions of
gender and that such rehearsals may be avoided
only if gender norms are radically recast (173).
Finally, Lassner offers womens literary output as a
rebuttal to criticism that dismisses the Second War
as a literary nullity (1998, 1), using this alternate
literary history to modify assumptions about both
Britains war and womens own supposedly default pacifism (22).
The 1990s also saw a modest flourishing of
more thematic studies. Knowles [13] explores
how seven writers make sense of World War II
through the governing metaphor of purgatory.
419
Piettes exploration (1995) is more wide-ranging,

encompassing poetry and POW writings, and
arguing that these texts present the war in terms
of waxing personal and national isolation. Closing
out the decade, Rawlinsons equally ambitious
survey (2000) contends that wartime literature
works to delegitimize discourses that justify military conflict while often replicating the strategies
of these discourses. The new century has seen, in
MacKays work (2007), an important new direction in this developing field. Contra Munton,
MacKay situates the war relative to prewar modernism, on the one hand, and postwar understandings of England, on the other. Insofar as the
literature of this war is shot through with skepticism regarding traditional values and modes of
expression, World War II is, for MacKay, the
really modernist war (2007, 79).
In looking not just to establish the war as a
period worthy of study, but also to clarify how this
period relates to what came before and after,
MacKay opens a promising path for future criticism to pursue. Much remains to be said about the
manner in which wartime literature draws upon
modernist achievements. Even more might yet be
hazarded as to how this moment serves as a bridge
between the high modernism of the 1920s and the
emergent postmodernism of the 1950s. Having
finally discovered the war as a literary-historical
moment, criticism will ensure it becomes entrenched in accounts of the twentieth century if
scholars turn now to making clearer its pedigree
and its issue.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); London

in Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); The
Novel and War (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
World War I in Fiction (BIF)

Bowen, E. (1976). The Heat of the Day [1948]. London:
Penguin.
Calder, A. (1969). The Peoples War: Britain, 19391945.
Donnelly, M. (1999). Britain in the Second World War.
London: Routledge.
Fussell, P. (1989). Wartime: Understanding and
Behavior in the Second World War. New York: Oxford
University Press.
420
Green, H. (2000). Loving [1945]. London: Vintage.

Green, H. (2001). Caught [1943]. London: Harvill.
Greene, G. (1936). A Gun for Sale. London:
Heinemann.
Heinemann.
Hartley, J. (1997). Millions Like Us: British
Womens Fiction of the Second World War.
London: Virago.
Hewison, R. (1977). Under Siege: Literary Life in London
19391945. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Hynes, S. (1979). The Auden Generation: Literature and
Politics in England in the 1930s. London: Faber and
Faber.
Ishiguro, K. (1989). The Remains of the Day. Toronto:
Key Porter.
Knowles, S. (1990). A Purgatorial Flame: Seven British
Writers in the Second World War. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lassner, P. (1998). British Women Writers of World
War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Lowry, M. (1947). Under the Volcano. London:
Jonathan Cape.
MacKay, M. (2007). Modernism and World War II.
Manning, Olivia. (1981). The Balkan Trilogy [19605].
Manning, Olivia. (1982). The Levant Trilogy [197780].
Munton, A. (1989). English Fiction of the Second World
War. London: Faber and Faber.
Orwell, G. (1936). Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London:
Gollancz.
Orwell, G. (1939). Coming Up for Air. London:

Gollancz.
Orwell, G. (1976). Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949].
Piette, A. (1995). Imagination at War: British Fiction
and Poetry 19391945. London: Macmillan.
Plain, G. (1996). Womens Fiction of the Second World
War: Gender, Power and Resistance. New York: St.
Martins.
Powell, A. (1991). The Military Philosophers [1968].
London: Mandarin.
Priestley, J. B. (1943). Daylight on Saturday. London:
Heinemann.
Rawlinson, M. (2000). British Writing of the Second
World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schneider, K. (1997). Loving Arms: British Women
Writing the Second World War. Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky.
Smith, S. (1989). Over the Frontier [1938]. London:
Virago.
Spark, M. (1963). The Girls of Slender Means. London:
Macmillan.
Warner, R. (1941). The Aerodrome. London: Bodley
Head.
Waugh, E. (1942). Put Out More Flags. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1945). Brideshead Revisited. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Waugh, E. (1965). Vile Bodies [1930]. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Waugh, E. (1994). The Sword of Honour Trilogy
[195261]. New York: Knopf.
Woolf, V. (1990). Between the Acts [1941]. London:
Hogarth.
Editors
Patrick ODonnell is Professor of English and American Literature at Michigan State University,
USA. His previous works include Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative (1992),
Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (2000), and The American
Novel Now (Wiley-Blackwell 2010).
David W. Madden is Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, USA. He is
the author of Understanding Paul West (1993) and the editor of Critical Essays on Thomas Berger
(1995).
Justus Nieland is Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He has
written many papers in the fields of modernism, the avant-garde, and film studies, and is
author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (2008).
The Encyclopedia of
Volume II
Twentieth-Century
American Fiction
Volume editors:
Patrick ODonnell, David W. Madden, and
Justus Nieland
Acknowledgments
Patrick ODonnell thanks the Office of the Vice

President for Research and Graduate Studies at
Michigan State University for an IRPG grant, as
well the MSU English Department chair, Stephen Arch, for a research-leave semester both
were instrumental in the completion of the
volume. He thanks Diane ODonnell for her love
and patience throughout. David W. Madden
thanks the California State University, Sacramento, Office of Human Resources for a single-semester sabbatical and the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects for a research
grant that aided in the completion of this project.
He further thanks his chair, Professor Sheree

Meyer, for her encouragement and support, and
he dedicates his work on this project to his wife,
Mary Davis, for all her love, help, and support.
Justus Nieland thanks Sarah Wohlford, Lila Nieland, and Iris Nieland for the everyday joy they
provide. All of the editors wish to acknowledge
the inestimable generosity, good humor, and
fine efforts of the contributors to this volume;
it has been a pleasure to work with them.
Patrick ODonnell, David W. Madden,
and Justus Nieland
Notes on Contributors to Volume II
Victoria Aarons is professor and chair, Department of English, Trinity University, where she
teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. In addition to numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, Aarons is the
author of A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and
Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What
Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant
in American Jewish Fiction, both of which received
a CHOICE Award. A scholar of Holocaust literature, Aarons is a contributor to Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work.
She is the 2006 recipient of the Piper Professor
Award and the 1993 recipient of Trinity Universitys Z. T. Scott Faculty Fellowship.
Joseph Alkana is associate professor at the University of Miami, where he teaches American
literature before 1900. He is the author of The
Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James,
and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1997); coeditor of Cohesion and Dissent in America (1994);
and author of articles for scholarly journals on
American literature and culture.
Carole Allamand is an associate professor of
French literature at Rutgers University. She is the
author of a book on Marguerite Yourcenar and
numerous articles on twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury French and American fiction, and
autobiography.
Thomas C. Austenfeld is professor of American
literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of American Women Writers
and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter,
Stafford, and Hellman (2001), and editor of Kay
Boyle for the Twenty-First Century: New Essays
(2008). He has published scholarly articles on
Katherine Anne Porter, Frank Norris, Derek Walcott, Wallace Stevens, Louise Erdrich, Philip
Roth, and Peter Taylor. He is a contributor to
the annual American Literary Scholarship and was
named Alumni Distinguished Professor at North

Georgia College & State University in 2006.
Peter J. Bailey is Piskor Professor of English at St.
Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where
he chairs the English Department. He is the
author of Reading Stanley Elkin, The Reluctant
Film Art of Woody Allen, and Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updikes
Fiction.
Alexander M. Bain is assistant professor of twentieth-century British and American literature at
the University of Oklahoma. His articles have
appeared in NOVEL and American Literary History, and he is currently working on a book
entitled Making the Heart of the World: Patriotism
and Print Culture from Versailles to Bandung.
Jessica S. Baldanzi teaches American literature,
international literature, graphic novels, and creative writing at Goshen College, where she is an
assistant professor. Her publications include
articles on topics from Jean Toomer to The
Sopranos. She is currently exploring the history
of eugenics in Indiana, and working on a book
about representations of eugenic ideology in the
literature of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries.
Debra Romanick Baldwin is associate professor
at the University of Dallas. While most of her
research is devoted to the work of Joseph Conrad,
she has also published essays on St. Augustine,
Flannery OConnor, and Primo Levi.
Laura Barrett is associate professor of English
literature at Wilkes Honors College/Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter. Her essays on Don
DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Wright Morris, and others have appeared in
Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction
Studies, Papers on Language and Literature, Studies in the Novel, and Western American Literature.
xvi
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
Victor Bascara is associate professor of Asian

American studies in the Department of Asian
American Studies at the University of California,
Los Angeles. He is the author of Model Minority
Imperialism (2006) and various articles, reviews,
and entries on American cultural politics, US
imperialism, critical race theory, and gender and
sexuality.
Ludmia Gruszewska Blaim is an associate professor of English and American literature at the
University of Gdansk, Poland. Her field of interest
is space and genre conventions in modernist and
postmodernist literature. She is author of Wizje i
re-wizje w poezji T. S. Eliota (1996) and Gra w SS.
Poetyka (nie)powiesci Jerzego Kosinskiego (2005),
and coeditor of Texts of Literature, Texts of Culture
(2005) and Eseje o wspoczesnej poezji brytyjskiej i
irlandzkiej (2005).
Martyn Bone is associate professor of American
literature at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of The Postsouthern Sense of
Place in Contemporary Fiction (2005) and editor
of Perspectives on Barry Hannah (2006). He has
published articles in numerous journals including
American Literature, Journal of American Studies,
Comparative American Studies, and Mississippi
Quarterly.
Virginia Brackett is associate professor of English
at Park University, located just north of Kansas
City. She has authored 13 books, including the
award-winning Restless Genius: The Story of
Virginia Woolf and the Facts on File Companion
to 16th and 17th-Century British Poetry. She has
published numerous articles, reviews, and stories
for both adults and young readers and directs the
Park University Ethnic Poetry Reading Series and
the Universitys Honors Program. Brackett received Outstanding Faculty Awards in 2006 and
2008.
Patricia L. Bradley is an associate professor of
English at Middle Tennessee State University. She
is the author of Robert Penn Warrens Circus
Aesthetic and the Southern Renaissance (2004) and
other scholarly articles on Bobbie Ann Mason,
Mark Twain, Nathaniel Ward, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Kate Chopin as well as on Warren. She is the past president of the Robert Penn
Warren Circle and has served on the Circle Board
of Directors and with the Advisory Group to the

Robert Penn Warren Center at Western Kentucky
University.
Judith Brown is assistant professor of English at
Indiana University, Bloomington. She is author of
Glamour in 6 Dimensions: Modernism, Aesthetics,
Culture (2009). Her articles include A Certain
Laughter: Sherwood Andersons Experiment in
Form (2007); Borderline, Sensation, and the
Machinery of Expression (2007); and Cellophane Glamour (2008).
Cedric Gael Bryant holds the Lee Family Professorship in English and American Literature at
Colby College. His scholarly work has appeared
in various academic journals and volumes, including Southern Review, African American
Review, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, and The
Oxford Companion to African American Literature. His current book project explores the gothic
tradition within African American fiction and
poetry in the modernist and postmodernist
periods.
David Buehrer is a professor of English at Valdosta State University, Georgia, where he teaches
courses in modern and contemporary American
fiction, critical theory, and world literature. His
review essay on Joseph Heller appeared in Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A BioCritical Sourcebook, edited by Joel Shatzky and
Michael Taub (1997). He has published numerous articles and reviews on twentieth-century
American and Latin American novelists, including Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garca Marquez, and
Manuel Puig, and in scholarly journals such as
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, and WVU Philological Papers.
Nancy Bunge, a professor at Michigan State
University, is the interviewer and editor of Finding the Words: Conversations With Writers Who
Teach (1985) and Master Class: Lessons from
Leading Writers (2005); the editor of Conversations With Clarence Major (2002); and the author
of Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short
Fiction (1993). She has held senior Fulbright
lectureships at the University of Vienna in Austria, the Free University of Brussels and the University of Ghent in Belgium, and the University of
Siegen in Germany. At Michigan State, she has

won the Teacher-Scholar Award and the Fintz
Award for her teaching.
Stephen J. Burn is the author of David Foster
Wallaces Infinite Jest: A Readers Guide (2003)
and Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism
(2008), and coeditor of Intersections: Essays on
Richard Powers (2008). He is an associate professor at Northern Michigan University.
Michael Butter is junior research fellow in the
School of Language and Literature at the Freiburg
Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. He
has published essays on American and German
literature, film, and popular culture, and coedited
Zeichen der Zeit, a collection of interdisciplinary
essays on semiotics, and American Studies/Shifting Gears, a volume that probes new venues for
European American studies.
Donna M. Campbell is associate professor of
English at Washington State University. She is
the author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and
Naturalism in American Fiction, 18851915
(1997), and her work has appeared in Studies in
American Fiction, Legacy, American Literary Realism, and Studies in American Naturalism. In
addition to the Edith Wharton chapter in Resisting Regionalism, her work on Wharton includes
essays in Jack London: One Hundred Years a
Writer (2002) and Twisted From the Ordinary:
Essays on American Literary Naturalism (2003),
and articles forthcoming in the Edith Wharton
Review and the Journal of Popular Culture.
Benjamin D. Carson is an assistant professor of
English and coordinator of the US Ethnic Studies
Minor at Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater,
Massachusetts. He has published articles on Gerald Vizenor, Ana Castillo, Virginia Woolf, and
Edith Wharton, among other writers, and is
currently editing a collection of essays on Native
American literature entitled Sovereignty, Separatism, and Survivance: Ideological Encounters in the
Literature of Native North America.
Daniela Caselli teaches English and American
literature at the University of Manchester, UK.
She is the author of Becketts Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (2005) and Improper Modernism: Djuna Barness Bewildering
Corpus (2009). Her articles on modernism,
xvii
critical theory, and comparative literature have

appeared in Textual Practice, Journal of Beckett
Studies, Yearbook of English Studies, Critical
Survey, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui, The
Italianist, and Strumenti Critici.
Tom Cerasulo is assistant professor of English
and Shaughness Family Chair for the Study of the
Humanities at Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts. He has published on film adaptations,
on ethnicity, and on the cultural history of American authorship. Recent work appears in Arizona
Quarterly, MELUS, and Studies in American Culture. He is currently writing a book reconsidering
Hollywoods effect on American literary authors.
Hillary L. Chute is junior fellow in literature in
the Harvard Society of Fellows. In addition to
articles and reviews in American Periodicals, Literature and Medicine, Modern Fiction Studies,
PMLA, Postmodern Culture, Twentieth-Century
Literature, and WSQ: Womens Studies Quarterly,
Chute was coeditor of the special issue of Modern
Fiction Studies on Graphic Narrative (2006).
She is the author of the forthcoming book Out of
the Gutter: Womens Contemporary Graphic Narrative, and is associate editor of Art Spiegelmans
MetaMaus.
Deborah Clarke is a professor of English at
Arizona State University. She is the author of
Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture
in Twentieth-Century America (2007); Robbing the
Mother: Women in Faulkner (1994); and numerous articles on twentieth-century American
fiction.
Gavin Cologne-Brookes is professor of American
literature at Bath Spa University. He is the author
of The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to
History (1995). As well as essays on John
Steinbecks legacy in the work of Joyce Carol
Oates, Cormac McCarthy, and Bruce Springsteen,
he has also written Dark Eyes on America: The
Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (2005); coedited Writing and America (1996) with Neil Sammells and
David Timms; and guest-edited a Studies in the
Novel special issue on Oates (2006).
Lauren Coodley attended University of California, Berkeley, majoring in conservation, and has
two masters degrees, in psychology and history,
from Sonoma State University. She has been a
xviii
community college teacher for three decades. Her

books include Napa: The Transformation of an
American Town (2004, rev. 2007); The Land of
Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclairs California (2004); California: A Multicultural Documentary History (2008); and If Not to History: Recovering the Stories of Women in Napa (2009).
David Coughlan is a lecturer in the Department
of Languages and Cultural Studies, University of
Limerick, Ireland. His publications include articles on Paul Auster in Modern Fiction Studies and
on Thomas Pynchon in Critique, and essays in the
edited collections The VisualNarrative Matrix;
Spaces and Crossings; Space, Haunting, Discourse;
and Heroes and Home Fronts. He would like to
acknowledge the support of the Irish Research
Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences in
the writing of his entry on Paul Auster.
Gloria Cronin teaches African American, Jewish
American, womens, and twentieth-century
American literatures, and contemporary theory,
at Brigham Young University. She is editor of the
Saul Bellow Journal and executive director of the
International Saul Bellow Society. She is an executive coordinator of the American Literature
Association, and has served on committees for
the National Endowment for the Humanities. In
1991 her Sixty Other Jewish Fiction Writers (9,000
entries) won the Pozner Bibliography Prize
awarded by the Jewish Library Association. She
has published extensively in the fields of Jewish
American and African American literatures. Her
Encyclopedia of Jewish American Literature (with
Alan L. Berger) is forthcoming from Facts on File.
In 2007 she was named to the Brigham Young
University College of Humanities professorship.
Kirk Curnutt is professor and chair of English at
Troy University Montgomery in Montgomery,
Alabama. He is the author of The Cambridge
Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald and managing
editor of the Fitzgerald Review, published by the F.
Scott Fitzgerald Society. He also serves as vice
president of the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, which is located in Montgomery.
Leland de la Durantaye is the Gardner Cowles
Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Style Is Matter: The
Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007), and
Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009),

as well as articles on twentieth-century literature
and philosophy.
Annette Debo is associate professor of English at
Western Carolina University. She is currently at
work on The American H.D.: Nation and Modernist Identity. Her articles have appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, Paideuma, South
Atlantic Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film and
Video, CLA Journal, and College Literature.
James M. Decker is an associate professor of
English at Illinois Central College. He is author
of Ideology (2003) and Henry Miller and Narrative
Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity
(2005). In addition to contributing numerous
articles to such publications as College Literature
and Style, he is editor of Nexus: The International
Henry Miller Journal. In 2007, Decker received his
colleges Gallion Award for outstanding teaching.
Joseph Dewey is an associate professor of American literature at the University of Pittsburgh
Johnston. In addition to numerous articles on
modern and contemporary American literature
and culture, he is author of In a Dark Time: The
Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of
the Nuclear Age (1992), Novels From Reagans
America (1996), Understanding Richard Powers
(2002), and Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading
of Don DeLillo (2007).
Tamas Dobozy is a professor of twentieth-century American literature in the Department of
English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has published articles on Charles
Bukowski, Mavis Gallant, Philip Roth, Raymond
Carver, Richard Ford, and John Coltrane in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Canadian
Literature, Philip Roth Studies, Critical Survey, and
Genre.
Christopher Douglas is associate professor of
English at the University of Victoria. He is the
author of A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism
(2009) and Reciting America: Culture and Cliche in
Contemporary American Fiction (2001).
Leigh Anne Duck is an associate professor of
English at the University of Memphis. She is
author of The Nations Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (2006), as
xix
well as essays on postplantation literature and

film, the comparative study of Southern US and
South African literature, and the work of William
Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker.
Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona Gale,

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, and
Josephine Herbst (2004), and several articles on
twentieth-century American women writers.
John Dudley is associate professor of English and

coordinator of graduate studies for the English
Department at the University of South Dakota.
He is the author of A Mans Game: Masculinity
and the Anti-Aesthetics of American Literary Naturalism, published in 2004 by the University of
Alabama Press. He has published several articles
on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American
literature and is currently working on a study of
African American literature and culture between
1890 and 1920.
Nikolai Endres is an associate professor of world

literature at Western Kentucky University in
Bowling Green. He teaches great books, literary
criticism, classics, mythology, and gay and lesbian
studies. His research focuses on the classical tradition and includes articles on Plato, Petronius,
Gustave Flaubert, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde,
John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter,
Andre Gide, E. M. Forster, Mary Renault, Gore
Vidal, and others.
John N. Duvall is professor of English and the

editor of MFS Modern Fiction Studies at Purdue
University. Among his books are Race and White
Identity in Southern Fiction (2008), The Identifying
Fictions of Toni Morrison (2000), and Faulkners
Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (1990). He also has edited
several collections, including The Cambridge
Companion to Don DeLillo (2008) and Productive
Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural
Studies (2002).
Jonathan P. Eburne teaches in the Departments
of Comparative Literature and English at the
Pennsylvania State University, where he is Josephine Berry Weiss Early Career Professor in the
Humanities. He is the author of Surrealism and
the Art of Crime (2008).
Justin D. Edwards is professor and head of
English at Bangor University. He is author of
Postcolonial Literature (2008); Understanding Jamaica Kincaid (2007); Gothic Canada: Reading the
Spectre of a National Literature (2005); Gothic
Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American
Gothic (2003); and Exotic Journeys: Exploring the
Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature (2001). He is also
the coeditor of Other Routes: 1500 Years of Travel
Writing by Asians and Africans (2006); Downtown
Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (2005); and
American Modernism Across the Arts (1999).
Julia Ehrhardt is Reach for Excellence Associate
Professor of American Studies and Womens and
Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma
Honors College. She is the author of Writers of
Daylanne K. English is chair of the English

Department and associate professor of African
American literature at Macalester College. She is
the author of Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in
American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
(2004), and has published articles on African
American literature and culture in African American Review, American Literary History, American
Literature, and Critical Inquiry. She is also the
recipient of the MLAs Foerster Prize for her essay
W. E. B. Du Boiss Family Crisis. English is
currently at work on a second book titled Political
Fictions: Time and Justice in African American
Literature.
Mark S. Ferrara is an assistant professor of
English at the State University of New York College
at Oneonta. His recent scholarly work on literary
utopia includes A Religion of Solidarity: Looking
Backward as a Rational Utopia, and Utopia,
Desire, and Enlightenment in Honglou meng,
appearing in the journals Renascence and Mosaic,
respectively. He is the former director of the
Chinese Cultural Exchange Program at Drake
University and has taught in South Korea,
in China, and on a Fulbright Scholarship in
Turkey.
Andre Furlani is associate professor in the
Department of English, Concordia University,
Montreal. His publications are primarily in the
fields of modern and contemporary American,
British, and Canadian literature. He is the author
of Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After, and is
preparing a Wittgensteinian study of Samuel
Beckett.
xx
Samuel Gaustad is a professor of humanities at

Seminole Community College. He has served on
the faculties of Florida Community College at
Jacksonville, Phillips Community College of the
University of Arkansas, University at Albany, and
Hartwick College. Gaustad has contributed articles to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol.
278, and The Continuum Encyclopedia of British
Authors, as well as serving as a contributing editor
for Listener Magazine.
James R. Giles is professor emeritus at Northern
Illinois University. He is the author of nine books,
including The Spaces of Violence (2006); Violence in
the Contemporary American Novel (2000); Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr. (1998); and The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America (1995). He is
also the coeditor of seven books, including five
volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Michael Patrick Gillespie is the Louise Edna
Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University. In addition to his work on the writings of
William Kennedy, he has written books on James
Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and chaos theory as applied to
literary criticism. His latest work, The Myth of an
Irish Cinema, appeared in the fall of 2008.
Mimi Reisel Gladstein is a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she has chaired
the English and Philosophy Departments and the
Department of Theatre, Dance, and Film, and was
first director of womens studies. Gladstein is
president of the John Steinbeck Society of America and the author of three books about Ayn Rand.
Her latest book is The Last Supper of Chicano
Heroes: The Works of Jose Antonio Burciaga, coedited with Daniel Chacon.
William Gleason is associate professor of English
at Princeton University, where he teaches in the
Department of English and the Program in American Studies. A specialist in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century American literature and culture, with particular interest in popular culture,
social history, and material culture, he is the
author of The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in
American Literature, 18401940 (1999), as well as
essays on such figures as Frederick Douglass,
Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edith
Wharton, Thomas Pynchon, Louise Erdrich, and
Charles Johnson.
Sarah Gleeson-White is senior lecturer in US

literature in the Department of English at the
University of Sydney. She is the author of Strange
Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson
McCullers, as well as articles on McCullers, Eudora Welty, Flannery OConnor, and Cormac
McCarthy.
Andrew S. Gross is assistant professor of American literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute of
the Free University of Berlin. His research interests include road narratives, representations of the
Holocaust, and mid-century American poetry.
He has published widely on these and related
fields and is currently completing a book on the
Holocaust and trauma theory.
Huey Guagliardo is professor and coordinator
of English at Louisiana State UniversityEunice.
He edited Perspectives on Richard Ford (2000)
and Conversations With Richard Ford (2001). He
also has published numerous essays, interviews,
and reviews in scholarly journals.
P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) is a professor of
English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
She is author of Reading Louise Erdrichs Love
Medicine, and Story Speaks for Us: Centering
the Voice of Simon Ortiz; editor of Dreams and
Thunder: Stories, Poems and the Sun Dance Opera
by Zitkala-Sa; and coeditor of A Great Plains
Reader. She is a Clan Mother for the Native
American Literature Symposium.
Jaime Harker is an assistant professor of English
at the University of Mississippi. She is the author
of America the Middlebrow: Womens Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between
the Wars, and the coeditor of The Oprah Effect:
Essays on Oprahs Book Club.
Oliver Harris is professor of American literature
at Keele University. He has edited The Letters of
William S. Burroughs, 19451959 (1993); Junky:
The Definitive Text of Junk (2003); The Yage
Letters Redux (2006); and Everything Lost: The
Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2008). The author of William Burroughs
and the Secret of Fascination (2003), he is the
coeditor of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays (2009), as well as the editor of a new edition
of Burroughss novel, Queer (forthcoming in
2010).
Matthew Hart is an assistant professor at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
where he teaches in the Department of
English and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. His work has appeared or is
forthcoming in such journals as American
Literary History, Contemporary Literature,
Modernism/Modernity, and Twentieth-Century
Literature.
Steven Hartman is senior research fellow in
American literature at Uppsala University and
associate professor of Anglophone literature at
Vaxj
o University, both in Sweden. Hartman has
received grants from the Swedish Research Council, the US Fulbright Program, and the Thoreau
Society and Wenner-Gren Foundations and was
selected, on the basis of his short fiction, as the
2001 New York State Thayer Fellow in the Arts.
His literary scholarship and creative writing have
appeared in many journals internationally.
Maria Hebert-Leiter is currently teaching at
Pennsylvania College of Technology and studies
the representation of Louisiana ethnicities in
American literature and contemporary American
ethnic and Southern literature generally. Her
latest book, Becoming Cajun, Becoming American:
The Acadian in American Literature From Longfellow to James Lee Burke, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2009. Her work on
the literature of the US South and Louisiana has
been published in MELUS (Journal of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) and Mississippi
Quarterly.
Scott Henkel is an assistant professor in the
Department of English at Binghamton University,
State University of New York. His writing has
appeared in Workplace: A Journal of Academic
Labor and is forthcoming in the Rodopi Press
collection of essays commemorating the 70th
anniversary of John Steinbecks novel The Grapes
of Wrath, and in the Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review. He is currently working on a book titled
Leaves of Grassroots Politics: Democracy, the
Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas.
Luc Herman teaches American literature and
narrative theory at the University of Antwerp.
Besides publishing widely on Pynchon, he is the
author of Concepts of Realism (1996), and co-
xxi
author and translator (with Bart Vervaeck) of

Handbook of Narrative Analysis (2005).
Peter C. Herman is professor of English literature
at San Diego State University. He is the author of
Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the Political
Imaginary of Early Modern England (2010); Destabilizing Milton: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of
Incertitude (2005); and Squitter-Wits and MuseHaters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance
Antipoetic Sentiment (1996). He has also edited
numerous anthologies, including Approaches to
Teaching Miltons Shorter Poetry and Prose (2007),
Historicizing Theory (2004), and Rethinking the
Henrician Era: New Essays on Early Tudor Texts
and Contexts (1994).
Lisa Hinrichsen is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arkansas, where she
teaches courses on American literature, literary
theory, and the literature of the American South.
She has contributed essays to the Southern Literary Journal, the Journal of Modern Literature, and
Etudes Faulkneriennes, and she is currently finishing a manuscript on the roles that trauma, fantasy,
and misrecognition play in modern and contemporary Southern literature.
Andrew Hoberek is associate professor of English
at the University of MissouriColumbia, where he
teaches courses in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury US literature. He is the author of The
Twilight of the Middle-Class: Post-World War II
American Fiction and White-Collar Work, and the
guest editor of the Fall 2007 special issue of
Twentieth-Century Literature on the topic After
Postmodernism.
Matthew Hofer teaches American and British
modernism at the University of New Mexico,
where he is a member of the English Department
faculty. He has published scholarly work on many
twentieth-century authors, including Langston
Hughes.
Melissa J. Homestead is associate professor of
English and womens and gender studies at the
University of NebraskaLincoln and vice president for membership and finance of the Society
for the Study of American Women Writers. She is
the author of American Women Authors and
Literary Property 18221869 (2005) and essays
on American women authors such as Susanna
xxii
Rowson, Catharine Sedgwick, Fanny Fern, Augusta Jane Evans, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Bess
Streeter Aldrich. With Anne L. Kaufman, she is
working on a study of the creative partnership
between Willa Cather and Edith Lewis.
Alex Hunt is an associate professor of English at
West Texas A&M University. He has published
scholarship on Western and Southwestern American literature, neo-regionalism, eco-criticism,
and multicultural literatures.
Anthony Hutchison is a lecturer in American
intellectual and cultural history at the University
of Nottingham, United Kingdom. He is the author of Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction (2007).
James M. Hutchisson is professor of American
literature and director of graduate studies in
English at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He has written widely on American and
Southern literature, including books on Lewis,
Poe, DuBose Heyward, and the Southern literary
renaissance. His scholarly articles have appeared
in such journals as Studies in the Novel, American
Literary Realism, and Journal of Modern Literature. He was twice winner of The Citadels award
for Outstanding Faculty Achievement in
Scholarship.
Katharine Nicholson Ings is associate professor
of American literature and journalism as well as
director of gender studies at Manchester College,
Indiana. She specializes in literary narratives
about black and white men and women during
the Civil War. Her publications on this topic
include Blackness and the Literary Imagination:
Uncovering The Hidden Hand (1996), and
Between Hoax and Hope: Miscegenation and
Nineteenth-Century
Interracial
Romance
(2006). In addition, Ings has over 10 years of
experience as a copyeditor for W. W. Norton.
Mark C. Jerng is assistant professor of English at
University of California, Davis. He has published
articles on Chang-rae Lee, Kazuo Ishiguro,
William Faulkner, and Charles Chesnutt. He is
currently completing a book manuscript on stories of transracial adoption in American literature.
Scott J. Juengel is associate professor of English at
Michigan State University, where he teaches
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic

literature, as well as the history and theory of the
novel. His work has appeared in ELH, Novel,
differences, Studies in Romanticism, Studies in
Popular Culture, Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation, and other journals.
Kathy Jurado is an assistant professor of English
and affiliated faculty of the Chicana/o-Latina/o
Studies Program at Michigan State University.
She recently received her PhD from the American
Culture Program at the University of Michigan,
where she completed her dissertation titled
Alienated Citizens: Hispanophobia and the
Mexican Im/migrant Body. Her research interests reside in the areas of popular culture, im/
migration studies, and Chicana/o-Latina/o
literature.
Catherine Kasper is an associate professor at the
University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the
author of Field Stone (2005), Notes from the
Committee (2009), and several other works of
fiction and poetry. She is the author of the article
Steven Millhausers American Gothic. She has
worked as an editor and guest editor for several
publications, and currently is coeditor of American Letters & Commentary.
Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative
literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of Redemption: The Life of
Henry Roth (2005), The Translingual Imagination
(2000), and The Self-Begetting Novel (1980); editor of Switching Languages: Translingual Writers
Reflect on Their Craft (2003); and coeditor of
volumes on Don DeLillo, Leslie Fiedler, William
Gass, and Vladimir Nabokov. In 2007 Kellman
was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for
Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book
Critics Circle.
John M. Krafft teaches English at the Hamilton
campus of Miami University. He is a founding
coeditor of the journal Pynchon Notes.
Michael Kreyling is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Among his critical work are three books on Eudora Welty: Eudora Weltys Achievement of Order
(1980); Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and
Diarmuid Russell (1991); and Understanding Eudora Welty (1999).
Daphne Lamothe is an associate professor in the

Department of Afro-American Studies at Smith
College. She is the author of Inventing the New
Negro: Narrative, Culture, Ethnography (2008),
which focuses on the intersection of ethnography
and the African American imagination during the
New Negro Movement. She has also written essays
for a number of publications on Zora Neale
Hurstons use of Vodou imagery to represent
New Negro subjectivity, Jean Toomers incorporation of Gothic figures of racial miscegenation in
Cane, and Gloria Naylors representation of migration and cultural memory in Mama Day.
Hellen Lee-Keller is an assistant professor of
multiethnic literatures at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of several
articles and book reviews on labor history, women
writers, and immigration in scholarly journals
and literary encyclopedias.
Mark Levene teaches English at the University of
Toronto. He has written about Arthur Koestler,
the short story, Canadian literature, and Robert
Stone.
Jonathan P. Lewis is assistant professor of English
at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke,
where he teaches composition and literary studies. He did his doctoral work at the University of
California, Riverside and edited Tomorrow
Through the Past: Neal Stephenson and the Project
of Global Modernization (2006).
Saundra Liggins is an associate professor of
English at the State University of New York at
Fredonia. Her current project involves exploring
the influence of the gothic tradition in African
American literature.
Tiffany Ana L
opez is associate professor of
English at the University of California, Riverside
and editor of Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal
of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Her
books include Growing Up Chicana/o (1993) and
The Alchemy of Blood: Violence as Critical Discourse in U.S. Latina/o Writing (forthcoming).
Her research focuses on issues of violence and
trauma in American literature. Among her
awards, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Award
in Barcelona, Spain and resident fellowships at the
Center for Ideas and Society at the University of
California, Riverside. She gratefully acknowledges
xxiii
Joelle Guzman and Lisette Lasater for their generous and talented research contributions to this
entry.
Gerald R. Lucas is an assistant professor of
English at Macon State College in central Georgia,
where he teaches composition, literature, and
media studies. His interests include speculative
fiction, new media, and online pedagogy. He is a
member of the executive board of the Norman
Mailer Society and serves as deputy editor of the
Mailer Review.
Josh Lukin is a visiting assistant professor in
Temple Universitys English Department and a
faculty affiliate of Temples Institute on Disabilities. He is the editor of Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States
(2008), and coeditor of Fifties Fictions in Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres (2003). He
has contributed chapters to the anthologies
Daughters of Earth: Twentieth-Century Feminist
Science Fiction (2006) and Engaging Tradition,
Making It New: Essays on Teaching Recent African
American Literature (2008). His work has also
appeared in Anarchist Studies, MLN, New York
Review of Science Fiction, Extrapolation, and
Minnesota Review.
David W. Madden is a professor of American and
Irish literatures at California State University,
Sacramento. He is author of Understanding Paul
West (1993) and editor of Critical Essay on Thomas Berger (1995). In addition to numerous articles
and reviews in scholarly journals, he has guestedited two issues of the Review of Contemporary
Fiction on Paul West (1991) and Alan Burns
(1997). Madden was awarded his campuss Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award in 2007
and an Outstanding Teaching Award in 1999.
Joshua J. Masters is an assistant professor of
English at the University of West Georgia. His
articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly,
American Studies, the Journal of Narrative Theory,
Critique, and MAWA Review, and he is currently
completing a manuscript tentatively titled The
Bullet and the Book: The Symbol of the Book and
the Adventure of Writing the American West,
180393.
John T. Matthews is professor of English at
Boston University. He is the author of The Play
xxiv
of Faulkners Language, The Sound and the Fury:

Faulkner and the Lost Cause, and William Faulkner:
Seeing Through the South, as well as numerous
essays on Faulkner, modern American fiction, and
Southern literature. He has recently edited The
Blackwell Companion to the Modern American
Novel, 19001950, and is presently at work on a
book on narrative representations of Southern
plantation history in American literature.
Pamela R. Matthews is professor of English and
associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts at
Texas A&M University. She is the author of Ellen
Glasgow and a Womans Traditions (1994), and
the editor of Perfect Companionship: Ellen
Glasgows Selected Correspondence With Women
(2005) and, with David McWhirter, Aesthetic
Subjects (2003).
Jake Mattox is assistant professor in the Department of English at Indiana University South
Bend. He has published articles and book reviews
in scholarly journals on Martin Delany, Black
Nationalism in the Americas, and the US West.
Adam McKible is associate professor of English at
the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New
York, where he teaches American and African
American literature. He is coeditor, with Suzanne
Churchill, of Little Magazines and Modernism:
New Approaches (2007). He rediscovered and introduced When Washington Was in Vogue by
Edward Christopher Williams (2004) and is the
author of The Space and Place of Modernism: The
Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York
(2002), as well as various essays on modernism,
little magazines, and African American literature.
Marci R. McMahon is an assistant professor of
multiethnic literature at the University of
TexasPan American. Her essays on feminist
history and early-twentieth-century Mexican
American women authors appear in Frontiers:
A Journal of Women Studies; The Hispanic American Literature Volume; and Womens Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal. Her manuscript,
Domestic Negotiations: Chicana Domesticity as
a Critical Discourse of US Literature and
Culture, highlights the fraught relationship between domesticity and nation in several Chicana
literary and visual texts produced in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Sheree L. Meyer is a professor of English and

currently chair at California State University,
Sacramento. In addition to her primary field of
interest in early modern British literature, she is
the author of numerous articles on literary theory
and pedagogy published in journals such as College English, College Literature, and Pedagogy. She
was proud to have the opportunity of offering a
preview lecture on Norman Mailer and meeting
him during his final book tour for Castle in the
Forest.
Carey Mickalites is an assistant professor of
English at the University of Memphis, and
specializes in modernism and twentieth-century
British and American fiction. He has published or
has work forthcoming on Ford, Joyce, and Conrad in Studies in the Novel, the Journal of Modern
Literature, and Criticism.
Tyrus Miller is professor of literature at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author
of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts
Between the World Wars (1999) and Singular
Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-AvantGarde (2009).
Douglas L. Mitchell received his PhD from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is
currently assistant professor of English at the
University of Mobile in Alabama and is the author
of A Disturbing and Alien Memory: Southern
Novelists Writing History (2008).
Deborah M. Mix is an associate professor of
English at Ball State University and the author
of A Vocabulary of Thinking: Gertrude Stein and
Contemporary North American Womens Innovative Writing (2007).
Robert Morace teaches at Daemen College in
Amherst, New York. His publications include
John Gardner: Critical Perspectives (coedited with
Kathryn VanSpanckeren, 1982); John Gardner: An
Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1984); The
Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David
Lodge (1989); Irvine Welshs Trainspotting
(2001); and Irvine Welsh, a study of the Welsh
phenomenon (2007). His Life and Times of
Death and the Maiden won the 1997 Berger Prize
for best theater essay.
Michael P. Moreno is assistant professor of

English: Diversity Emphasis at Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington. In addition to a number of scholarly journal articles on
cross-ethnic literature and the American suburb,
he has contributed to several collections including
Reel Histories: Studies in American Film (2008),
and We Wear the Mask: Paul Lawrence Dunbar
and the Politics of Representative Reality (2009).
He holds a PhD in English from the University of
California, Riverside with emphases in Latina/o
literature, twentieth- and twenty-first-century
American literature, and spatial theory.
Paul Morrison is professor of English and film
studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of
The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and
Paul de Man (1996), and The Explanation for
Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity (2002).
Omri Moses is an assistant professor of English
literature at Concordia University, Montreal. He
is the author of several scholarly essays about
modernist literature and painting, including a
work in progress on Gertrude Steins investment
in lively habits, and its pertinence to the Darwinian account of life.
Roark Mulligan is an associate professor at Christopher Newport University in Newport News,
Virginia, where he teaches literature and writing.
He has authored essays on Theodore Dreiser that
have appeared in American Literary Realism and
Dreiser Studies. Currently, he is editing The Financier for the Dreiser edition and is serving as president of the International Theodore Dreiser Society.
Brenda Murphy is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of
Connecticut. Among her books are The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (2005);
Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism
on Stage, Film, and Television (1999); Tennessee
Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the
Theatre (1992); American Realism and American
Drama, 18801940 (1987); and, as editor, the
Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights (1999) and a special issue of Lit on Mary
McCarthy (2004).
Leonard Mustazza is distinguished professor of
English and American studies at Pennsylvania
State University. In addition to numerous schol-
xxv
arly articles, among them one on Tom Wolfe, he is

the author of nine books, including Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of
Kurt Vonnegut; The Critical Response to Kurt
Vonnegut; and Ol Blue Eyes: A Frank Sinatra
Encyclopedia. His latest book is a two-volume
edition titled The Literary Filmography: 6,200
Adaptations of Books, Short Stories and Other
Nondramatic Works.
Neil Nakadate teaches literature in the Department of English at Iowa State University, where he
received the award for Outstanding Achievement
in Teaching and has been named university professor. He has edited two books on Robert Penn
Warren and has written a critical study of Jane
Smileys fiction (1999). Other publications have
appeared in Aethlon, ISLE, Cottonwood, Flyway,
Mississippi Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Genre, Tennessee Studies in Literature, and
Annals of Internal Medicine.
Justus Nieland is associate professor of English at
Michigan State University, where he specializes in
literary and visual modernisms, the avant garde,
and film studies. He is the author of Feeling
Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (2008),
and co-author of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (2009). His
work has appeared in the journals Modernism/
modernity, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Modernist
Cultures, and Arizona Quarterly, and in the Blackwell Companion to the Modern American Novel.
Margot Norris is Chancellors Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests
include modernist literature and art, James Joyce,
literature and war, and feminism and gender
studies. She is the author of Writing War in the
Twentieth Century (2000), Suspicious Readings of
Joyces Dubliners (2003), Joyces Web: The Social
Unraveling of Modernism (1992), Beasts of the
Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kakfa,
Ernst, and Lawrence (1985), and The Decentered
Universe of Finnegans Wake (1976).
Patrick ODonnell is professor of English and
American literature at Michigan State University.
He is the author of several books on modern and
contemporary fiction, including John Hawkes;
Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in
xxvi
Contemporary American Fiction; Echo Chambers:

Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative; Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia in Contemporary US Narrative; and The American Novel Now: Reading
American Fiction Since 1980. He is coeditor of
Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, editor of New Essays on The Crying of Lot
49, and an associate editor of The Columbia
History of the American Novel. He has provided
the introduction and notes to the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics editions of two works by F.
Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise and The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz
Age Stories.
Kevin Ohi is the author of Innocence and Rapture:
The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and
Nabokov (2005); Henry James and the Queerness
of Style (forthcoming); and numerous articles on
Victorian and American literature, queer theory,
and film. Currently at work on a book entitled
Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Traditions,
he is associate professor of English at Boston
College.
Marc Oxoby has taught English and general
humanities classes at the University of Nevada,
Reno, where he also completed his doctoral work.
He has contributed to Critique, Film & History,
The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, and
other publications. He is also the author of The
1990s (2003), the concluding volume of the
Greenwood Press American Popular Culture
Through History series.
Tim Page is a professor of journalism and music
at the University of Southern California. He won
the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1997. He wrote
or edited more than a dozen books, including
The Glenn Gould Reader, The Unknown Sigrid
Undset, Tim Page on Music, and Parallel Play.
Page became interested in the life and work of
Dawn Powell in 1991 and was instrumental in
the discovery of Powells papers and subsequent
reissue of most of her books. Page has edited
Powells diaries, letters, plays, and short stories,
and written introductions to a half dozen of her
novels. He wrote the biography Dawn Powell
(1998) and edited and annotated the Library of
Americas two-volume collection of Powells
work in 2001.
Linda Palmer is professor emeritus at California

State University, Sacramento, where she was vice
chair of the English Department and director of
writing programs, specializing in Native American writers. She has published works on Leslie
Silko and delivered conference papers on James
Welch, Simon Ortiz, and Linda Hogan. She was
awarded her campus Outstanding Teaching
Award and Outstanding Contribution to the
University Award.
Jennifer Parchesky is assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. Her work on
popular women writers and filmmakers of the
1920s and 1930s has appeared in Legacy, Cinema
Journal, and Film History. She is currently completing a book on middle-class and middlebrow
fiction in the early twentieth century.
Donald E. Pease is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Dartmouth College
and director of the Futures of American Studies
Institute. He is the author of Visionary Compacts:
American Renaissance Writings in Cultural
Context and The New American Exceptionalism,
and the editor of several volumes including
National Identities and Postnational Narratives
and, with Amy Kaplan, Cultures of United States
Imperialism.
Nancy J. Peterson, an associate professor of
English and American studies at Purdue University, focuses on contemporary American literature and culture, with a particular interest in
ethnic American literatures. She is the author of
Beloved: Character Studies (2008) and Against
Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the
Crises of Historical Memory (2001), and editor of
Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches (1997). She serves on the advisory board
for Modern Fiction Studies and has guest-edited
special issues of the journal on Toni Morrison
(2006 and 1993), Racechange and the Fictions of
Identity (2003), and Native American Literature (1999).
Rhonda S. Pettit teaches literature and creative
writing at the University of CincinnatiRaymond
Walters College in Blue Ash, Ohio. In addition to
her scholarship on Parker (A Gendered Collision,
2000; and The Critical Waltz, 2005), she has
published articles on other poets as well as her
own poetry. She is the recipient of writing grants

from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Kentucky
Foundation for Women, and Hedgebrook.
Kathleen Pfeiffer is associate professor of English
and coordinator of the American Studies Program at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is the author of Race Passing and American Individualism (2003) and has edited and
introduced the reissues of Carl Van Vechtens
Nigger Heaven (2000) and Waldo Franks Holiday
(2003). She has published essays in African American Review, Womens Studies, and Legacy; her
forthcoming book is titled Brother Mine: The
Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank.
Jonathan L. Price is a professor of English at
California State University, Sacramento and has
taught contemporary American fiction, film,
composition, and grammar there since 1968. He
has also taught at the University of Rome and
Ramkhamhaeng University in Bangkok. In addition to several articles and presentations on modern and contemporary fiction and poetry, he is the
co-author of two texts, Write in Time (1992) and
Grammar Demystified (2006).
David M. Raabe is professor emeritus of English
at the University of NebraskaOmaha. He has
published a number of articles on American
writers, including Raymond Carver and Ernest
Hemingway.
Paula Rabinowitz is professor of English at the
University of Minnesota. Her books include Black
& White & Noir: Americas Pulp Modernism
(2002) and They Must Be Represented: The Politics
of Documentary (1994). She is currently coediting
a four-volume series with Cristina Giorcelli for
the University of Minnesota Press entitled
Habits of Being: Clothing and Identity, as well
as completing a manuscript on early paperbacks,
popularized modernism, and censorship.
Christopher T. Raczkowski is an assistant professor of English literature at the University of
South Alabama, Mobile. He has authored articles
and essays on noir aesthetics, modernism, and
crime published in Modern Fiction Studies, Studies
in the Novel, and elsewhere.
Nicholas F. Radel is professor of English at Furman University, South Carolina. Coeditor of The
xxvii
Puritan Origins of American Sex (2000), he has

written numerous articles on early modern and
modern literature and sexuality, including early
scholarly and biographical studies of Edmund
White. A new study of White and race is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies.
Robert Rebein is an associate professor of English
and creative writing at Indiana UniversityPurdue University, Indianapolis. He is the author of
Hicks, Tribes, & Dirty Realists: American Fiction
After Postmodernism (2001), as well as numerous
essays and reviews in literary magazines and
journals.
Doug Rice is a professor of creative writing and
film at California State University, Sacramento.
He is the author of Skin Prayer: Fragments of
Abject Memory; A Good Ctboy is Hard to Find;
and Blood of Mugwump. He coedited Federman: A
to X-X-X-X. He is the executive publisher of
Nobodaddies Press and has published numerous
works in journals and anthologies, including
Discourse, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, Gargoyle, and Black Ice. In 2004, Rice was the recipient
of his campuss Presidents Award for Research
and Creative Activity.
Chaunce Ridley is a professor of African American, American, and minority literatures at California State University, Sacramento. His most
recent publications are The Blues, Unamuno,
and the Triumph of Self-Mockingly Examined
Lives in Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man, in Interdisciplinary Humanities (2006); and Tension,
Conversation, and Collectivity: Examining the
Space of Double-Consciousness in the Search for
Shared Knowledge, in Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American
Texts (2005), the latter co-written with CSUS
colleagues Sheree Meyer and Olivia Castellano.
Martin Riker is associate director of Dalkey Archive Press. He received his PhD from the University of Denver, and his critical writing on
contemporary fiction has appeared in numerous
publications.
Terry Roberts is the director of the National
Paideia Center at the University of North Carolina. He is the former editor of the Thomas Wolfe
Review and author of the Literary Masterpieces
volume on Look Homeward, Angel.
xxviii
Sarah Robertson is senior lecturer of American

literature at the University of the West of England,
Bristol. She is the author of The Secret Country:
Decoding Jayne Anne Phillipss Cryptic Fiction
(2007). Along with articles and reviews in scholarly
journals, her work has also appeared in Poverty and
Progress in the U.S. South Since 1920 (2006) and
Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in
Europe Europe in the American South (2007).
Warren G. Rochelle is an associate professor of
English at the University of Mary Washington in
Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the author of
Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth
in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin (2001), and
other articles on Le Guin, as well as other reviews
and articles on science fiction, fantasy, and rhetoric. In addition to his academic work, he has
published two novels, The Wild Boy (2001) and
Harvest of Changelings (2007), as well as short
stories and poetry.
David Roessel is the Yiannos Professor of Greek
language and literature at the Richard Stockton
College of New Jersey. He is the associate editor of
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes and the
coeditor of The Collected Poems of Tennessee
Williams.
Leah Reade Rosenberg is an associate professor
in the English Department at the University of
Florida, where she teaches Caribbean, postcolonial, and Atlantic studies. She is the author of
Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (2007).
Derek Parker Royal is an associate professor of
English at Texas A&M UniversityCommerce as
well as the founder and executive editor of Philip
Roth Studies. His essays on American literature
and graphic narrative have appeared in such
journals as Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Drama, Studies in the Novel,
Critique, MELUS, Shofar, Studies in American
Jewish Literature, and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism. He is the editor of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (2005), and is
also completing a manuscript, More Than Jewish Mischief: Narrating Subjectivity in the Later
Fiction of Philip Roth.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith is assistant professor of
English at Arizona State University. She is the
author of Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire,

and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States
(2008) and the editor of Globalization on the Line:
Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders
(2002). In addition, Sadowski-Smith has published several articles on border theory, literatures
of the USMexico border, the internationalization of American studies, and cross-ethnic approaches to immigration in such journals as
American Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Comparative American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, and
Diaspora.
Jeffrey Santa Ana is assistant professor of English
at Stony Brook University, State University of
New York. He has articles in Signs, positions,
Critical Sense, and Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen. Santa Ana is currently
working on a book entitled Critical Feelings: The
Politics of Emotion and Racial Subjectivity in the
Culture of American Capital.
James Robert Saunders is a professor of English
at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
He is the author of Tightrope Walk: Identity,
Survival and the Corporate World in African
American Literature (1997), and The Wayward
Preacher in the Literature of African American
Women (1995). He is also co-author of Black
Winning Jockeys in the Kentucky Derby (2003) and
Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in
Charlottesville, Virginia (1998), and coeditor of
The Dorothy West Marthas Vineyard (2001).
Bill Savage is a senior lecturer in the English
Department at Northwestern University, where
he teaches twentieth-century American literature.
His teaching and scholarship focus on urban
literature, especially that of his native Chicago,
and the way that writers create a sense of place and
identity. He has coedited two editions of works by
Nelson Algren The Man With the Golden Arm:
50th Anniversary Critical Edition, and the annotated edition of Chicago: City on the Make and he
works as an editor for the University of Chicago
Presss Chicago: Visions and Revisions series of
new non-fiction books about Chicago.
Sohnya Sayres teaches humanities at The Cooper
Union in New York City.
Lynn Orilla Scott is a visiting assistant professor
at James Madison College in Michigan State
University. She is the author of James Baldwins

Later Fiction (2002) and coeditor of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and
Theoretical Essays (2006).
Kerstin W. Shands is professor of English at
S
odert
orn University College in south Stockholm. She is the author of Escaping the Castle of
Patriarchy: Patterns of Development in the Novels
of Gail Godwin (1990); The Repair of the World:
The Novels of Marge Piercy (1994); and Embracing
Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse
(1999). In addition to numerous articles and
reviews in scholarly journals, she has edited three
anthologies: Collusion and Resistance: Women
Writing in English (2002); Notions of America:
Swedish Perspectives (2004, coedited with Rolf
Lunden and Dag Blanck); and Neither East Nor
West: Postcolonial Essays on Literature, Culture
and Religion (2008). She is a member of the
editorial board of the Oxford-based journal Contemporary Womens Writing.
Yuan Shu is an associate professor of English at
Texas Tech University. He has published articles
on Asian American literature and culture in Cultural Critique, College Literature, Amerasia Journal, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and
book collections. He is currently finishing his
book on Chinese American literature.
Robin Silbergleid is an assistant professor of
English at Michigan State University. She is the
author of the chapbook Pas de Deux: Prose and
Other Poems (Basilisk Press), as well as critical
essays on twentieth-century American literature
and popular culture. She is currently working on a
book-length study of Carole Maso.
Ryan Simmons is the author of Chesnutt and
Realism: A Study of the Novels (2006). He lives in
Spokane, Washington and teaches at Spokane
Falls Community College.
Tyrone Simpson is an assistant professor of
English and urban studies at Vassar College. He
was a recipient of the Career Enhancement
Fellowship Award from the Woodrow Wilson
National Fellowship Foundation in 20078. He
is presently completing a manuscript entitled
Writing Apartheid: The Ghetto Imaginary in
Twentieth-Century American Literature.
xxix
Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. is professor of English at

the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has
published work on African American writers in
American Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, Studies in Short Fiction, and elsewhere, as well
as in volumes edited by Harold Bloom, Kimberly
Benston, Arnold Rampersad, Valerie Smith, and
Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. From 1987
to 1999 he was the editor of MELUS: The Journal
of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic
Literature of the United States.
Bill Solomon is associate professor of American
literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is the author of Literature,
Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression (2002). He has published articles in, among
other scholarly journals, American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Modern Fiction Studies. He is
currently working on a book-length project entitled Slapstick Modernism: Experimental Writing
and Silent Comedy, 19091969.
Gary Storhoff is an associate professor of English
at the University of Connecticut, Stamford. He
has published widely on African American and
American literature, and is the author of Understanding Charles Johnson (2004). He is the coeditor with John Whalen-Bridge of the forthcoming
The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature
and American Buddhism as a Way of Life, both by
the State University of New York Press.
Victor Strandberg has published widely on
American authors, including books on Robert
Penn Warren, William James, William Faulkner,
and Cynthia Ozick. He has taught in the Duke
English Department since 1966.
Andrew Strombeck has written on conspiracy
theory, Ishmael Reed, Richard Wright, William
Gibson, and the fundamentalist Left Behind novels. His published work appears in African American Review, Cultural Critique, Postmodern Culture, Science Fiction Studies, and Studies in American Naturalism. Currently completing a manuscript on conspiracy theory and masculinity in the
postwar United States, he is an assistant professor
of English at Wright State University in Dayton,
Ohio.
Thomas Strychacz teaches American literature at
Mills College in California. His work on modernist
xxx
literature includes three books: Modernism,

Mass Culture, and Professionalism (1993);
Hemingways Theaters of Masculinity (2003); and
Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway,
and Lawrence (2007).
Juan A. Suarez is an associate professor of English
at the University of Murcia, Spain. He is the author
of Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (1996);
Pop Modernism (2007), and Jim Jarmusch (2007),
and of essays, in both English and Spanish, on
literature, film, and contemporary visual culture.
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney is associate professor of
English at the College of the Holy Cross. She has
published many essays on Anne Tyler, Edith
Wharton, and other female writers, and coedited
Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women (1993). Sweeney also
studies postmodernist revisions of mysteries,
gothics, ghost stories, and folktales; her work on
detective fiction, in particular, includes the coedited volume Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical
Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999).
An expert on Vladimir Nabokov, she is a past
president of the Nabokov Society and coedits the
Vladimir Nabokov Electronic Forum.
Joseph P. Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions
(2002) and Postmodern Sublime (1995), books
that examine the effects of new technologies on
contemporary American fiction. He edits the
electronic book review, and has edited and introduced William Gaddiss last fiction and collected
non-fiction. His essay on Kate Armstrongs and
Michael Tippits Grafik Dynamo appears in a
catalogue publication from the Prairie Art Gallery, Alberta, and his essay on Mark Amerika
appears at the Walker Art Centers phon:e:me
site, a 2000 Webby Award nominee. Also online
(at the Iowa Review Web) is an essay-narrative
titled Overwriting, an interview, and a review of
his work. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Laura E. Tanner is a professor of English at
Boston College, where she teaches classes on
modern and contemporary American fiction. Her
publications include Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the
Borders of Life and Death (2006), and Intimate
Violence: Reading Rape and Torture (1994), as well
as numerous articles in academic journals includ-
ing American Literature, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and Genre.
Tatiana Teslenko is senior instructor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and lives in
Vancouver, Canada. Her recent publications include books on the rhetoric of genre (Rhetoric and
Ideology of Genre, 2002) and feminist criticism
(Feminist Utopian Novels of the 70s, 2003), and a
textbook (Fundamental Competencies for Engineers, 2006). She teaches professional writing
courses and has designed and launched several
programs for international students. She was the
founder and inaugural director of the Centre for
Professional Skills Development at the UBC Faculty of Applied Science.
Matt Theado is a professor of English at GardnerWebb University in North Carolina. He is the
author of Understanding Jack Kerouac (2000) and
The Beats: A Literary Reference (2003). He has
written numerous articles and reviews on Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers, and he
has been an invited speaker at the Jack Kerouac
Conference on Beat Literature, held in Kerouacs
home town of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Jane F. Thrailkill is associate professor of English
and comparative literature at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A specialist in
literary realism and naturalism, she writes on the
connections between the literature, philosophy,
and biological sciences of the late nineteenth
century. Her essays have appeared in American
Literature, ELH, and Journal of Narrative Theory,
and her book Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and
Emotion in American Literary Realism was published by Harvard University Press in 2007. She is
currently at work on a monograph entitled Talking
Back: The Subversive Child in American Literature.
Anne-Laure Tissut teaches in the English
Department at the Sorbonne University in Paris
as a specialist of contemporary American fiction
and translation. She is Percival Everetts French
translator, and the author of a monograph on
Paul West, Paul West: La Prosea sensations (2001),
as well as of many articles on the most recent
American fiction.
Susan Tomlinson is an assistant professor of
English at University of Massachusetts Boston,
where she teaches courses in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century American literature. She has

published articles and book chapters on Jessie
Fauset, Zona Gale, and Walter White, and she is
completing a book-length manuscript entitled
Keeping It Decent: Jessie Fauset, Virtue, and the
Crisis of New Negro Womanhood.
Bonnie TuSmith is an associate professor of
English at Northeastern University with a PhD
in American studies. She is author of All My
Relatives: Community in Ethnic American Literatures (1993); editor of Conversations with John
Edgar Wideman (1998); and coeditor of American
Family Album: 28 Contemporary Ethnic Stories
(2000); Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy
and Politics (2002); and Critical Essays on John
Edgar Wideman (2006).
Darlene Harbour Unrue is distinguished professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas. Past president of the Katherine Anne
Porter Society, she is the author of Truth and
Vision in Katherine Anne Porters Fiction (1985),
Understanding Katherine Anne Porter (1988), and
Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist (2005).
She has edited This Strange, Old World and
Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter
(1991), Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter
(1997), Katherine Anne Porters Poetry (1996), and
the Library of Americas Katherine Anne Porter:
Collected Stories and Other Writings (2008).
Aliki Varvogli is a lecturer in English and
American literature in the School of Humanities
at the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has
written books on Paul Auster and Annie Proulx,
and articles on Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Jay McInerney,
and others. She is working on a book called
Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction, to be published by Routledge.
Kelley Wagers is an assistant professor of English
at Penn State Worthington Scranton. Her current
research explores relationships between historiography and literary modernism in early twentiethcentury American writing. She has published
articles recently in Arizona Quarterly and Journal
of Modern Literature.
Wendy W. Walters is an associate professor in
the Department of Writing, Literature and Pub-
xxxi
lishing at Emerson College. In 20012, she was a

non-resident fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois
Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard
University. She is the author of At Home in
Diaspora: Black International Writing (2005). Her
other publications include Object Into Subject:
Michelle Cliff, John Ruskin, and the Terrors of
Visual Art; and Writing the Diaspora in Black
International Literature With Wider Hope in
Some More Benign Fluid . . .: Diaspora Consciousness and Literary Expression.
Margaret Earley Whitt is professor of English at
the University of Denver. She is the author of
Understanding Gloria Naylor (1999) and Understanding Flannery OConnor (1995), and editor of
Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement: An
Anthology (2006). In addition to articles on Naylor, OConnor, Carson McCullers, and Zora
Neale Hurston, Whitt is the recipient of all three
of her universitys major outstanding teaching
awards (1990, 1993, 2007).
Keith Wilhite is a lecturing fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University. He has
published articles on John Cheever, Chester
Himes, Walt Whitman, and Richard Wright, and
he is currently working on a book manuscript,
Re-Framing Suburbia: U.S. Literature and the
Postwar Suburban Region.
Jennifer D. Williams is an assistant professor of
English at Michigan State University. She is on
postdoctoral fellowship leave at New York University completing a book on trauma, visuality,
and black subjectivity. Williamss published reviews and articles can be found in Modern Fiction
Studies, American Literature, Southern Literary
Journal, and Africanizing Knowledge (edited by
Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, 2002).
Greg Wright is a visiting assistant professor of
American literature and film studies at Kalamazoo College. His research focuses on issues of
media forms, intertextuality, and adaptation. He
earned his PhD in American literature and film at
Michigan State University in 2007, and his work
has appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture and
the Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
Michael Wutz is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber
State University and the editor of Weber: The
xxxii
Contemporary West. He is the coeditor of Reading

Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology
(with Joseph Tabbi, 1997), the co-translator of
Friedrich Kittlers Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
(with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, 1999), and the
author of numerous essays on American and
British fiction. His new book, Mobilizing Media
Narratives: Literary Case Studies in the Modern
Media Ecology, is forthcoming.
Heide Ziegler teaches American and English
literature at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Her research focus is on modern and
postmodernist literature; she is the author of a

number of books and articles, including John
Barth, and, as editor, Facing Texts: Encounters
Between Contemporary Writers and Critics.
Her time has been almost equally divided
between university administration (as rector
of the University of Stuttgart and president of
the International University in Germany
Bruchsal) and research and teaching at home
and abroad. She founded and directed the
Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies at Monrepos near Stuttgart, where she organized five
international sessions.
Introduction to Volume II
From the perspective of the early twenty-first

century, Ezra Pounds battle cry for twentiethcentury modernism Make It New retains
its currency, even its radicalism, in the heterogeneous and diverse literary environment of
contemporary America. Pounds vexed expression is fraught with complications: as Louis
Menand has recently suggested, for Pounds
own work, the It in Make It New is the old
what is valuable in the culture of the past.1
Superficial novelty, parochialism, and the debased linguistic coin of rhetoric were Pounds
enemies, and in sounding the resonances of
Make It New, he meant, in part, that literature
must be radically disruptive lest it sink into the
oblivion of the status quo. But Pound was also
stumping for an international modernism, not
something that could be conceived within the
national boundaries of the United States or
solely with a concept of America in mind. Yet
the countercurrent in American literature has
always been to link the new with notions of a
discrete, if fractious, identity for American writing: near mid-century, in the preface to one of
the first comprehensive assessments of modern
American literature, Alfred Kazin wrote that
for me the single greatest fact about our modern American writing [is] our writers absorption in every last detail of their American world
together with their deep and subtle alienation
from it.2 In the age of globalization, following
the explosion of the canon and the proliferation
of multicultural literatures after mid-century,
their American world appears chauvinistic
and narrow, yet it reveals a set of tensions felt
by the editors of this volume as we set about
assembling an encyclopedia of twentieth-century
American fiction: the tension raised by deciding

what to include and what to exclude, and thus
deciding between what is symptomatically
new, additive, and what is simply repetitive;
the tension that exists between conceiving of
American writing within the boundaries of the
United States and the knowledge that such
writing in terms of genre, influence, and
historical context can only be fully understood and appreciated within broader
hemispheric, transatlantic, and international
parameters; the tension brought about by recognizing that the very act of producing an
encyclopedia is to participate in formulating
a canon (as is also the case whenever we teach
and make up a syllabus) while acknowledging,
ironically, that any canon, however diverse,
delimits as much as it expands, and excludes
as much as it includes.
Twentieth-century American writing is rich
with such tensions; in retrospect, this writing
seems to be much about these tensions in its
proliferation. Every canon tells a story, and we
believe that the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Fiction, composed of 191 author
entries and 23 topic entries, appropriately pursues multiple narrative lines of flight. One of
these, most assuredly, is the contribution that
twentieth-century American fiction makes to
the twinned, if often ill-defined, and hardly
separable movements of modernism and postmodernism. Often, the differences between
these movements are posed as a contestation
between the high and low, between literary
language or semantic complexity, and the vernacular, popular, or mass-mediated.3 Yet the
writing itself tells a different story: in the novels

422
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II
of Ernest Hemingway or the short fictions of

Sherwood Anderson, the complexities of consciousness and the symbolic fetishes produced
by the unconscious (reflecting the enormous
impact of Freud upon modern writing) are
conveyed through a bare style that informs the
realism of Nelson Algren, Kay Boyle, and Henry
Roth, or defines the hard-boiled vernacular of
noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell
Hammett, and James M. Cain, and, later in the
century, writers as different in their re-creation
of the vernacular as Raymond Carver, Grace
Paley, Charles Bukowski, and James Ellroy. In
Gertrude Steins language experiments erected
upon the plane of the proletarian subject in
Three Lives, there is to be found the attempt to
match word with world (the intersubjective
world of the individuated self) such that language itself becomes a form of embodiment a
project equally reflected in William H. Gasss
stories of Midwestern eccentrics, Annie Proulxs
novels of stranded isolates and found objects,
and Paul Austers wandering detectives of New
Yorks semiotic chaos. Performance, or the act
of self-projection before the crowd, the mass, is
foregrounded in the high-wire stylistics and
multiple vocal embodiments of high modernists such as Djuna Barnes, John Dos Passos,
Jean Toomer, and Nathanael West, and seen as
well in the postmodern writing of William
Gaddis and Don DeLillo, or, quite differently,
Kathy Acker and Carole Maso. The attention to
local, regional detail and the interstices of the
social order combined with experiments in style
that we find in the novels of William Faulkner
can equally be found in the contemporary writing of Cormac McCarthy, John Edgar Wideman,
and Leslie Marmon Silko. In short, one of the
implicit narratives of the Encyclopedia, written
by over 200 hands, is that there are remarkable
continuities between the modern and the postmodern, the prewar and the contemporary, the
literary and the vernacular the latter, to
some degree, indistinguishable in the contemporaneity of American writing across the
century.
There are other stories that inform the assemblage of authors and subjects gathered under the heading of an encyclopedia of modern
American fiction, and to rehearse all of them

here with any specificity would be to replicate,
to a large degree, the substantive and wonderfully varied topic entries included in this volume, which extend the number and range of
authors and works considered in the volume
well beyond those listed in the separate author
entries. Ideally, users of this volume will navigate freely between the author and topic entries
in order to gain access to the sheer proliferation
and diversity of the prose fiction written in the
United States during the twentieth century,
extending into the twenty-first. Under the topic
of Border Fictions, in an essay that discusses
the rich assemblage of fictions that portray the
subjectival states of citizens and immigrants,
borders geographical and symbolic, and the
nomadism that characterizes American life in
the twentieth century, the reader encounters not
only Rudolfo Anaya, Leslie Marmon Silko,
Cormac McCarthy, John Rechy, and Helena
Viramontes, all of whom are also discussed in
separate author entries, but also the border
fictions of Rolando Hinojosa, Alicia Gaspar de
Alba, and Alberto Ros. The Avant Garde
Novel offers a detailed discussion of Gertrude
Stein, whose dazzling early-twentieth-century
experiments inaugurate a fractured genealogy
of vanguard expression that not only enriches
the perspective on Stein to be found when she is
considered as an individual author, but also
places her in relation to such contemporary
writers as William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Lyn
Hejinian, Ben Marcus, and Walter Abish; in the
available cross-hatchings of a project such as
this one, references to many of these writers can
be found in the entries on Modernist Fiction
and Postmodernist Fiction. The stories of
modernism, postmodernism, and the avant
garde can be heard in a different key in such
entries as that on Queer Modernism, which
places such figures as Stein, Willa Cather, James
Baldwin, and Henry James within the evolving
contexts of queer theory as it has emerged over
the last three decades. One discovers in Queer
Modernism an effective mapping of sexuality
and the sexualized body onto the aesthetic
concerns of a modernism that has, for too long,
been severed from a key element of modernity
writ large: to recite Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from

the entry, the chronic modern crisis of homo/
heterosexual definition. Whats more, this elision of sexuality from the terrain of the modern,
a legacy of American modernisms Cold War
critical consolidation, has been repeated in the
striking resurgence of interest in modernism
over the past decade. Reading Queer Modernism, and then returning to the author entries
on Cather, Baldwin, James, and Stein, or coming
to the topic entry having read the separate
author entries, the reader gains an interactive
perspective on modernism as itself a continually
contested aesthetic legacy, one literary critics
and historians today labor to make new by
asking modernism to confess its unstable truths
all over again.
The to-and-fro movement between author
and topic entries yields other insights, additional
stories: the entry on Historiographic Metafiction is premised on the term developed by
theorist Linda Hutcheon to describe the tendency in postmodern prose to portray the writing of
history as a kind of fiction or narrative containing rhetorics and ideologies that reflect our
identities as historical subjects. In the entry on
historiographic metafiction, Hutcheons critical
discovery extends back to the novels of John Dos
Passos and Henry Adams, forward to the very
recent fiction of Mark Danielewski and Jonathan
Safran Foer, and across the range of contemporary writing, including the work of Toni
Morrison, Gerald Vizenor, Paul West, and Maxine Hong Kingston. When read in light of the
entries on Social Realist Fiction or Ethnicity
and Fiction, the insights yielded by reading
twentieth-century fiction historiographically become interwoven with those arising from viewing fiction as bound by a mimetic imperative to
faithfully represent the social order, or as a
negotiation between the assimilative story of the
USs incorporation of ethnic identities and the
fractious, poetic, or performative manifestations
of ethnicity in writing.
In considering the list of topics for the encyclopedia, the editors have attempted to generate
multiple contexts for understanding modern
American fiction, many of them somewhat unfamiliar. Alongside topics devoted to major move-
423
ments and well-known approaches, the reader

will find topic entries about Noir Fiction, which
explores the aesthetics, style, and worldview of
noir perhaps more familiar as a French term
that applies to postwar American film. In this
volume, the term usefully raises the problem of
genre and national boundaries, since the category
has its roots in the gothic tradition and the
mysteries of the nineteenth-century metropolis,
but today designates an unruly cross-section of
twentieth-century writing from the reactionary
pulp fiction of Mickey Spillane or the romantic
idealism of Raymond Chandler, to the materialist
social protest fiction of Richard Wright and Chester Himes, and extending from the high modernism of William Faulkner to the mid-century
modernism of Patricia Highsmith. The Little
Magazines explores those vital venues for the
development of twentieth-century American fiction, the small-circulation literary magazines that
were critical to the evolution of such movements
as the Harlem Renaissance, that provided modern
American writers with an internationalist frame
for their vanguard experiments, and that continue to be critical to contemporary writing,
both in its more traditional and in its riskier
manifestations. WPA and Popular Front
Fiction considers the writing that emerged out
of the Federal Writers Project and proletarian
fiction as essential to our understanding of what
constitutes twentieth-century American fiction;
The Road Novel discusses how the picaresque
tradition and the quest romance have been
transmitted in twentieth- century writing via
that most American of tropes the highway
in novels by figures as diverse as Edith Wharton,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion,
Stephen King, and Sherman Alexie. Once more,
there are multiple pathways to be explored between these entries and topics pursued by others:
to mention a spare few, the grittiness of noir
fiction as it expands the dimensions of twentieth-century realism, the low light of the small
magazines interpenetrating the bright lights of
canonical trade modernism, and the intersections between representations of class and race to
be seen in a wide range of novels that fall under
various categories of naturalist, realist, ethnic,
and proletariat writing.
424
For the editors, one of the most difficult tasks

of this project is to arrive at a delimited list of
authors and topics that navigates between the
representative and the symptomatic. Given that
there were understandable constraints placed upon the number of twentieth-century American
writers who could be included in the encyclopedia, we had to engage in difficult questions about
who and what to include (and, necessarily, who
and what to exclude) when we might have as
easily developed a list of 500 or 1,000 authors and
topics rather than the slightly over 200 that space
allowed. To some degree, the choices became
more difficult and, perhaps to some eyes, more
arbitrary, as we moved toward authors whose
careers began in the latter part of the twentieth
century and continue into the twenty-first. That
process of canonization of which this project is a
part certainly made it clear that, for the first half of
the twentieth century, we would include major
entries on modernists like James, Stein, Hurston,
Faulkner; on epochal events like the World Wars
(The Novel and War); as well as on modernist
fiction, postmodernist fiction, realism, and the
avant garde. But we have also striven to include
entries on important but lesser-known figures of
the first half-century, whose place in the volume
signals some of the revisionist lines of flight
opened by the topics entries. Modernism, as
Pound knew, was always a richly international
phenomenon, and scholars of the field have been
newly attentive to the transnational character of
its circulation and utopian visions. For this reason, weve included not only topic entries like
Expatriate Fiction, or The Little Magazines,
but also the work of undervalued modern experimentalists like Kay Boyle, whose vanguard aesthetic, like that of Pound or Eliot, is only imperfectly American, or the kind of black internationalism glimpsed in the speculative fiction of
George Schuyler, a neglected figure of the Harlem
Renaissance. Here and elsewhere in the early
twentieth century, our choices speak to the expanded field of modernist literary production
that has emerged over the past few decades. This
picture includes modernisms constitutive relationship with the technologies of mass culture, as
seen in Modern Fiction in Hollywood; or the
comic, satirical mode of Dorothy Parker and
Dawn Powell, a mode often sacrificed to preserve

an image of high modernist seriousness; or the
work of bestselling writers like Pearl S. Buck, Edna
Ferber, Ellen Glasgow, and Dorothy Canfield,
whose achievements have been forgotten in the
dismissal of so-called middlebrow writing. But
this more generous reading of Pounds celebration of the new also includes radical writers like
Mike Gold, novelists like Anzia Yezierska, poets
like H.D. and Langston Hughes who also wrote
fiction, and Harlem Renaissance writers like Jessie
Redmon Fauset, Claude McKay, and Carl Van
Vechten. From the modernism you choose, so the
line goes, you get the postmodernism you deserve.
Part of our aim, then, is to show that the fractured
terrain of US literary production in postmodernist fiction need not depend on any illusory wholeness of the modernist project. At mid-century,
writers such as Norman Mailer, James Baldwin,
Ralph Ellison, and Mary McCarthy seem obvious;
others whom we have included, such as Nelson
Algren, James T. Farrell (whose prolific work
spans the decades from the 1930s to the 1970s),
Ayn Rand, and Ann Petry, have acquired considerably less canonical visibility.
As we progress chronologically toward those
writing on the cusp of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, the choices become even harder:
given the remarkable proliferation of multicultural literatures in the United States after World
War II, easily at least a half of the space available
for contemporary writers could have been devoted solely to African American, Chicano/Latino, Asian American, and Native American
novelists. The proliferation of experimental
styles and aesthetics that fall largely under the
rubric of postmodernist writing made any kind
of choice based upon representational criteria
difficult. The large number of significant women
writers in the marketplace again, increasing
dramatically in number and visibility since
World War II posed complex questions for
us about choice. To some extent, our choices as
we moved into the contemporary arena were
increasingly based on an attempt to represent
the proliferate diversity of post-World War II
American writing, and to include as many different kinds of writing, and as many authors
writing within (or writing against) different
traditions and heritages, as possible. Across the

century, we have included writers working primarily in the genre of fiction, though even these
choices become complicated when one considers
that much modern and postmodern writing
crosses generic boundaries and blurs any lines
that might be drawn between, for example,
poetry and fiction. For younger writers, we made
choices based on the bulk of the work produced
up to this point in time, even as we understood
that many of the writers we did not include
because they have produced one or two novels
at present have already established themselves as
important presences going into the twenty-first
century; and, after all, a writer such as Ralph
Ellison produced only one novel in his lifetime,
yet few undergraduate courses on the twentiethcentury American novel fail to take Invisible Man
into account.
We have not attempted to include the enormous range of popular fiction or primarily
genre authors as, once more, the entire space
made available to us could have been taken up
with authors and topics devoted to science fiction, the detective novel, or romance; however,
across the range of topic entries that are offered
here, the reader can find reference to many of the
writers who fall in these categories, particularly
as so many modern and contemporary writers
develop generic hybridities that partake equally
of (the now inseparable) high and low cultural forms. In general, our choices comprise an
attempt to represent the range and diversity of
recent writing in an array that is more symptomatic than totally (and impossibly) representative. To be sure, in selecting the authors to be
covered who wrote the bulk of their work since
World War II, we have been able to rely on some
canonical formations: Thomas Pynchon, Toni
Morrison, Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston,
425
Joan Didion, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Grace

Paley all are, by now, firmly established as
often taught figures whose writing has accrued
a significant amount of critical attention and are
likely to remain in place as amongst the most
important US writers of the twentieth century 50
or 100 years from now (even as the future of the
book, in the first place, is a matter of vigorous
ongoing debate). But others for example,
Carole Maso, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan
Lethem, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Louise Erdrich
are in relatively earlier stages of developing a
body of work that has well begun the process of
acquiring the kind of visibility that is, being
taught, talked about, and written about that
would seem to ensure their vital presence over
the long term. And, finally, there are writers
listed such as David Markson, Rikki Ducornet,
and Maureen Howard, whose work may not have
acquired high visibility and whose names do not
appear on many of the 100 best lists, yet we feel
they are important writers who are contributing
to the vitality of emerging traditions in American
writing.
We thus invite the reader to use the Encyclopedia as a springboard for reading modern and
contemporary American fiction, and for exploring a body of literature that continues to reveal
its complexities and innovations. Going through
the process of making decisions about the list of
authors and topics for the volume has, for the
editors, been an education in its own right, and it
is our hope that readers will find in both the lists
and the content food for thought and motivation for the unfailingly rewarding act of reading
more.
Patrick ODonnell
David W. Madden
Justus Nieland
Notes
1 Louis Menand, The Pound Error, New Yorker, June 9, 2008. At www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/
09/080609crbo_books_menand, accessed Jan. 19, 2010.
2 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942; New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. ix.
426
3 See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987), for a revealing discussion of the interaction of high and low
literatures and cultures across twentieth-century writing, and the collapse of these distinctions across the
divides of modernism and postmodernism.
A
Acker, Kathy
DOUG RICE
Labeled postmodern, plagiarized, literary terrorism, Kathy Ackers writing disturbs commonly
held assumptions about literary aesthetics and
political power. Her writing is diseased a foreign
narrative body that undermines institutional
structures for reading. More than posing metafictional conundrums, Ackers writing explores
the politics of womens bodies and desires as
they have been situated inside the patriarchal
gaze of late market capital. More importantly,
Ackers rewriting of literary history provides
daughters with treasure maps for escaping the
stranglehold of language designed to domesticate
young girls.
Kathy Acker was born Karen Alexander in 1944
(some sources suggest 1948) in New York City
and died in Tijuana, Mexico in 1997. Her father
abandoned her mother before Acker was born.
Her mother committed suicide when Acker
was 30, and these two abandonments figure heavily in her work. At 18, Acker ran away from home
and lived on the streets, working in the sex
industry as a stripper and a voiceover in pornographic films. She studied at Brandeis University
before moving on to the University of California,
San Diego, where she received her BA, and
she taught literature and writing at numerous
universities.
Acker wrote novels, plays, opera librettos, essays, a screenplay, and poetry, and also collaborated with a pair of rock bands. Ackers writing
has many influences, some of which include the
Black Mountain poets, the Beats, punk rock, and

French theorists, and is fueled by a subversive
desire to deconstruct childhood myths designed
by patriarchy.
Her writing confounds genre expectations, inhabiting those liminal spaces of becoming that
transform sentences into lines of flight and writing against stable notions of meaning and identity. Her work blurs and blends various genres,
from autobiography to science fiction, pornography, and childrens stories. By using plagiarism
and cut-up techniques, Acker experiments with
syntax and identities in ways that disturb notions
of ownership.
Her career began by peddling stories on the
streets of New York. She copied stories in order to
expose the ways that language worked on her
body, a theme common to all her writing. Kathy
Goes to Haiti (1988), a twisted Nancy Drew
porn novel, is representative of this critique; as
is Hello, Im Erica Jong (1982), where Acker
parodies acceptable bourgeois notions of sexuality as imagined by the bestselling feminist
author.
In Stein-like fashion, the style of Ackers books
performs their content. Fragmentation and alienation are embodied in broken sentences, syntaxes
fail to clarify intention, and mutilated body parts
clutter sentences in fractured nonsense. The subject of her sentences, her I/eye, and her protagonists are fluid, changing sex and desire to experience the wor(l)d in an other way. Her subjects
often become objects, and her narrative eye observes her narrating I. In rewriting Great Expectations (1983) and Don Quixote (1986), Ackers I

428
AGEE, JAMES
steals male narratives and creates a space for

an avowedly anti-romantic girl to breathe. She
extends her reading into dream spaces that the
original texts fail to make possible and repeatedly
penetrates these texts with autobiographical tales.
Blood and Guts in High School (1984) remains
Ackers most direct attack on the fascism of family
values. From its explicit ink drawings to its transgressive narratives of incest, sexuality, and power,
the novel relentlessly attacks misogyny. Characters challenge readers to hold their gaze, to look
deeper into the ideological structures writing over
female experiences. Some feminists perceived
Ackers explicit writing of sex as further objectifying the female body and have attacked her for
contributing to the very power structures she
critiqued. Nevertheless, Janey, the protagonist,
resists every societal institution that attempts to
control her lust for life.
Her later work, beginning with Empire of the
Senseless (1988), does more than show disrespect
for the literary canon. Here she begins to offer a
way to push critique toward political action. Her
characters remain addicted to sex, need sex, but
push this need beyond being controlled by it.
They make it into a desire that allows for other
actions.
Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996b), the last book
she completed, ends with a pirate grrrl map
leading toward freedom. After ransacking literary
history and beating language down to its originary
core, two ex-prostitute protagonists search for
buried treasures in a matriarchal society and thus
open doors for the reinscription of languages for
female experiences.
Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective, and The Burning
Bombing of America (compiled in Acker 2002b),
written in the early 1970s, appear hauntingly
contemporary. More than simply being urtexts filled with themes that Acker would later
explore more deeply in her mature works, they
provide reflections on these concerns. Ackers
oeuvre is most powerful when read as a whole
project concerned with questioning the limits
of language, taboo, perversion, politics, and
tradition.

Gender and the Novel (AF); Politics/Activism
and Fiction (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)

Acker, K. (1982). Hello, Im Erica Jong. New York:
Contact II.
Acker, K. (1983). Great Expectations. New York: Grove.
Acker, K. (1984). Blood and Guts in High School.
New York: Grove.
Acker, K. (1986). Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream.
New York: Grove.
Acker, K. (1988). Empire of the Senseless. New York:
Grove.
Acker, K. (1990). In Memoriam to Identity. New York:
Grove.
Acker, K. (1991). Hannibal Lecter, My Father.
New York: Semiotext(e).
Acker, K. (1993). My Mother: Demonology. New York:
Pantheon.
Acker, K. (1995). Pussycat Fever (illus. D. DiMassa &
F. Baer). San Francisco: AK Press.
Acker, K. (1996a). Bodies of Work: Essays. London:
Serpents Tail.
Acker, K. (1996b). Pussy, King of the Pirates. New York:
Grove.
Acker, K. (2002a). Essential Acker: The Selected Writings
of Kathy Acker (ed. A. Scholder & J. Winterson).
New York: Grove.
Acker, K. (2002b). Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective
and The Burning Bombing of America. New York:
Grove.
Brulotte, G., & Phillips, J. (2006). Rice, Doug & Acker,
Kathy. In G. Brulotte & J. Phillips (eds.),
Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, vol. 1. New York:
Routledge.
Caspar, B. (dir.) (2008). Whos Afraid of Kathy Acker?
Cameo Films.
Hardin, M. (2005). Devouring Institutions: The Life
Work of Kathy Acker. San Diego: Hyperbole Books.
Hawkins, S. (2004). All in the Family: Kathy Ackers
Blood and Guts in High School. Contemporary
Kocela, C. (2006). Resighting Gender: Butlers Lesbian
Phallus in Ackers Pussy. LIT: Literature
Interpretation Theory, 17(1), 77104.
Scholder, A., Harriman, C., & Ronell, A. (eds.) (2006).
Lust for Life: On the Writing of Kathy Acker.
London: Verso.
Agee, James
JUSTUS NIELAND
The cult of James Agee poet, novelist, journalist,

film critic, screenwriter, and co-creator of Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men (1941), one of the single
most remarkable and radical texts of the twentieth
AGEE, JAMES
century began shortly after his death from a

heart attack in 1955. Two years later, his lyrical
autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family,
was published; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction
in 1958. In the same year, Agee on Film appeared,
and a second volume followed in 1960. These
landmark collections of Agees eccentric and brilliant film criticism would prove decisive for the
mid-century transformation of films cultural
status in the US from mere entertainment or big
business to the centurys most vital and aesthetically promising medium. In 1960, Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men (1941), a nonfictional account of Depression-era Alabama tenant farmers,
was reissued for the first time since its initial
publication, when it had sold a meager 600 copies.
At the dawn of the US Civil Rights Movement, the
book was enthusiastically rediscovered by a new
generation moved by Agee and Walker Evanss
intermedial experiment in the limits of human
sympathy and the extremes of suffering. Agees
literary significance today lies in his success in
testing the aesthetic and political potential of a
uniquely rhythmic, poetic prose. Agees passionate, often hallucinatory style (what he once called
amphibious) exploded conventional aesthetic
boundaries, blurring documentary realism, surrealist automatism, and modernist psychological
interiority, and turning lyrical prose into finely
wrought, synaesthetic experiments in aurality
and visuality.
Born in an upper-middle-class family in
Knoxville, Tennessee in 1909, James Rufus Agee
(known as Rufus at home) was the son of Laura
Tyler Agee, a devout, Anglo-Catholic mother
from a well-to-do Knoxville family, and Hugh
James Agee (Jay), who worked for his wifes
familys construction business. When Agee was 7,
his father was killed in an automobile accident, a
traumatic event fictionally rendered in the titular
death of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The
story of the Follet familys immediate response to
the loss of their vital young father, A Death in the
Family privileges the perspective of Jays young
son Rufus, taken by his father to see a Charlie
Chaplin film in the opening chapters act of
paternal love. While drifting to Jays pious wife
Catherine, who thinks the Tramp is vulgar and
whose faith is shaken by her husbands death,
Agees subjective third-person narration returns
repeatedly to Rufuss attempts to process the
429
complex family dynamics surrounding his

fathers death and ensuing funeral. Agee gives
narrative shape to trauma by interrupting the
progress of the narrative with Rufuss extended,
lyrical memories of his father. The novels affecting, unsentimental portrait of grief lays bare the
internal fractures of the Follet family along the
fault lines of faith and belief, and offers an unflinching critique of Christian hypocrisy. Instead,
Agees brand of carnal humanism opts for the
quotidian, sensual miracles enjoyed by Jay and
blind animal sympathy with the everydayness of
human loss.
After graduating from Harvard in 1932 in the
midst of the Depression, Agee was recommended
by his friend Dwight MacDonald for an editors
job at Fortune, one of the organs of Henry Luces
media empire. Agee would work for Luce in some
fashion through 1948 first as a staff writer at
Fortune in the early 1930s, where he wrote business
stories and idiosyncratic, descriptive essays; then
at Time magazine, where he served as a movie critic
and developed feature articles; and later at Life,
where his seminal, nostalgic essay on silent screen
comedy, Comedys Greatest Era, was published
as a cover story in 1949. During this period, Agee
also published a collection of his poems, Permit
Me Voyage (1934), with Yales Younger Poets
series; devoured Freud, Jung, and James Joyce;
published a moving recollection of his childhood,
Knoxville: Summer 1915, in MacDonalds Partisan Review in 1938 that would find its way into A
Death in the Family; became a regular film critic for
the Nation; wrote a number of screenplays, including those for John Hustons The African Queen
(1951) and Charles Laughtons The Night of the
Hunter (1955); and waged an unsuccessful campaign to woo his cinematic hero, Charlie Chaplin,
to star in Agees remarkable screenplay, The
Tramps New World, in which Chaplins Tramp
is left to rebuild human civilization in the wake of
an atomic catastrophe.
Agees often conflicted labors in the culture
industry also allowed him to work against the
boundaries of media and genre, and to conceive
more innovative crossings between them. Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men remains the most enduring example of Agees media experimentation. In
1936, Agee and Evans were assigned by Fortune to
document the struggles of Alabama sharecroppers. The duo spent three weeks amongst three
430
ALEXIE, SHERMAN
impoverished families, chronicling their lives in

Agees feverish words and Evanss stark, haunting
photographs. Rejected by their editors at Fortune,
the project was expanded and finally published by
Houghton Mifflin to angry and confused reviews.
A work of documentary modernism, Praise is
both a sincere attempt to witness the trials and
humanity of the impoverished families and a
highly self-reflective work of fiction. Agee and
Evans themselves become self-critical characters,
anxious about their inevitable status as privileged,
middle-class voyeurs or spies positioned to
exploit, by visualizing and voicing, the suffering
of others. A work of what Agee called antisociology, Praise is a meditation on the ethics
of representation, parodying the conventions of
the sharecropper book and the naturalist
presumptions of the documentary, and declaring
its own shameful impotence in the face of a tragic
human reality whose depths it can never fully
witness, and which it cant help but turn into art.
In the process, Agee strains against the representational limits of his own prose: If I could do it,
he explains, Id do no writing at all here.
Confined to language, but aimed at Being itself,
Agees prose pushes outside of speech and
toward song, or turns its narrating consciousness
into an instrument of sensuous knowledge or a
mechanical recording device (a bodiless eye), or
merges with the symphonic cries of foxes.
In many senses, Praises experimentalism
testifies to the insight of a young Agee, who,
while a budding poet and cinephile at Harvard,
lamented to Dwight MacDonald how every
kind of recognized art, including writing,
has been worked pretty near to the limit. At
his best, Agee pitched his writing at precisely
that limit.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF);
WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF)

Agee, J. (1934). Permit Me Voyage. New Haven:
Agee, J. (1941). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (photo.
W. Evans). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Agee, J. (1951). The Morning Watch. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Agee, J. (1957). A Death in the Family. New York:

McDowell, Obolensky.
Agee, J. (1958). Agee on Film, vol. 1: Reviews and
Comments. Boston: Beacon.
Agee, J. (1972). Collected Short Prose of James Agee
(ed. R. Fitzgerald). London: Calder and Boyards.
Agee, J. (1985). James Agee: Selected Journalism
(ed. P. Ashdown). Chattanooga: University of
Tennessee Press.
Bergreen, L. (1984). James Agee: A Life. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Entin, J. B. (2007). Sensational Modernism: Experimental
Fiction and Photography in Thirties America.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Lofaro, M. (1992). James Agee: Reconsiderations.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Rabinowitz, P. (1991). Labor and Desire: Womens
Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Stott, W. (1986). Documentary Expression and
Thirties Culture. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Suarez, J. A. (2006). Pop Modernism: Noise and the
Reinvention of the Everyday. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Wranovics, J. (2005). Chaplin and Agee: The Untold
Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay.
Alexie, Sherman
NANCY J. PETERSON
From the moment his first collection of poems

and stories appeared in 1992, SpokaneCoeur
dAlene writer Sherman Alexie was hailed as an
original voice among Native American writers.
In fact, James Kincaid (1992), writing for the
New York Times Book Review, recognized Alexie
as one of the major lyric voices of our time.
Since that auspicious review, Alexie has written
and published four novels, three collections of
short stories, two feature-length films, as well as
several mixed-genre collections and volumes of
poetry. His work has been acclaimed by Native
and non-Native readers, reviewers, and scholars
for its realistic portrayal of reservation life, its
critique of stereotypes and identity politics, as well
as its brilliant deployment of Indian humor.
Born on October 7, 1966, in Spokane,
Washington, Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. grew
up in the town of Wellpinit on the Spokane
Indian Reservation. He is Spokane through his
ALEXIE, SHERMAN
mother and Coeur dAlene through his father.

Today, he lives in the city of Seattle with his wife,
Diane, and their two sons, Joseph and David.
Parallel to Alexies life, his early works typically
are set on the reservation or in the Spokane area
and explore the often thwarted desires of young
Indian men, while his later works are set in Seattle
and use the city to explore the lives of urban
Indians from the homeless to the upwardly
mobile.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,
published in 1993, offers a series of interrelated
stories featuring three characters Victor Joseph,
Thomas Builds-the-Fire, and Junior Polatkin
young Indian men searching for ways to be warriors, leaders, and storytellers in the contemporary
world. Alexie writes about reservation life unflinchingly, detailing such serious problems as
alcoholism, poverty, and despair, while also honoring basketball, stories, humor, and affection as
forces of survival and hope. Several of the stories
depict the strength of Indian women to hold
families together, and the complicated relationships between Indian fathers and sons, a theme
that recurs in Alexies work, is particularly compelling in This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix,
Arizona. This story became the basis for the 1998
acclaimed feature-length film Smoke Signals,
which Alexie wrote the script for and co-produced.
Victor, Thomas, and Junior reappear in
Alexies 1995 novel, Reservation Blues, which begins when the legendary African American
bluesman Robert Johnson comes to the Spokane
Reservation in search of his soul. Johnson relinquishes his guitar, which propels Victor, Thomas,
and Junior to form a band and write songs in a
new musical genre the reservation blues.
The novel Indian Killer, published in 1996,
represents a shift in Alexies work. Set primarily
in Seattle, it narrates the story of a troubled
character named John Smith, who was taken away
from his Native mother at birth and adopted by a
white couple, together with a mystery-detective
plot about a racially motivated series of murders
and hate crimes. Often called his darkest work,
Indian Killer presents a bleak picture of Indian
white relations.
The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) and
Ten Little Indians (2003) have earned Alexie
widespread recognition for his mastery of the
short story form. Many of Alexies recent stories
431
depict situations in which a characters sense of

Native identity is shaped by considerations of
class, gender, and sexuality, as in the acclaimed
title story The Toughest Indian in the World, in
which a journalist of Spokane ancestry, but distanced from his people, has a sexual encounter
with an Indian man, an encounter that is linked to
a desire to see himself as a warrior. Alexies
humane and sympathetic depiction of characters
under duress, a quality that has elicited favorable
comparisons to Raymond Carver, is most notable
in What You Pawn I Will Redeem, a story
from Ten Little Indians that follows a homeless,
alcoholic Indian man on a quest to reclaim his
grandmothers regalia from a pawnshop. This
story was selected for inclusion in both The Best
American Short Stories 2004 and O. Henry Prize
Stories 2005.
Alexies novel Flight (2007b), inspired by Kurt
Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five, depicts a troubled Indian teenager nicknamed Zits, who participates in an armed robbery and becomes unstuck
in time, causing him to drop into climactic moments of American Indian history. Despite his
traumatic journeying, all ends well for Zits, and
Alexie has commented that he wrote Flight to
counteract the anger and bitterness of Indian
Killer. Also published in 2007 was Alexies first
novel targeted toward young adult readers: The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
(2007a). The novel, drawing on Alexies own
experiences, features Arnold Spirit, Jr., who
decides to leave the reservation to go to high
school in a nearby, predominantly white town
and, through various struggles, learns that it is
possible to have two home towns and to walk in
both worlds. Alexie won a 2007 National Book
Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian, and as this recent award indicates,
Alexie occupies an increasingly important place in
contemporary Native American and ethnic
American literatures.
SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The
Road Novel (AF); Vonnegut, Kurt (AF)

Alexie, S. (1992). The Business of Fancydancing: Stories
and Poems. New York: Hanging Loose.
432
ALGREN, NELSON
Alexie, S. (1993). The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in

Heaven. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press;
(expanded edn. New York: Grove Press, 2005).
Alexie, S. (1995). Reservation Blues. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
Alexie, S. (1996). Indian Killer. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
Alexie, S. (1998). Smoke Signals. Los Angeles:
ShadowCatcher/Miramax.
Alexie, S. (2000). The Toughest Indian in the World.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Alexie, S. (2003). Ten Little Indians. New York: Grove.
Alexie, S. (2007a). The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian. New York: Little, Brown.
Alexie, S. (2007b). Flight. New York: Black Cat/
Grove.
Cox, J. H. (2006). Muting White Noise: Native American
and European American Novel Traditions. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press.
Cutter, M. J. (2005). Lost and Found in Translation:
Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the
Politics of Language Diversity. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press.
Grassian, D. (2005). Understanding Sherman Alexie.
Hollrah, P. E. M. (2004). The Old Lady Trill,
the Victory Yell: The Power of Women in Native
American Literature. New York: Routledge.
Kincaid, J. R. (1992). Who Gets to Tell Their Stories?
New York Times Book Review, pp. 1, 2429 (May 3).
Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five, or the
Childrens Crusade. New York: Dell.
Algren, Nelson
BILL SAVAGE
Nelson Algren began his writing career in the

depths of the Great Depression. Like many writers
of his generation, he had been radicalized, and
he set out to write literature which would enable
people to see, and change, the world. But the
world changed in a different direction, and his
career was derailed by the rightward drift of
American literary politics, and so despite his
many accomplishments, he remains an outsider
in American literature, often recalled more for his
affair with Simone de Beauvoir than for literary
accomplishments.
His first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), told
the picaresque story of Cass McCay, a petty
criminal from East Texas, wandering from
New Orleans to Chicagos Century of Progress
Worlds Fair. With his second novel, Never Come

Morning (1942), Algren found his subject matter
and his voice: the Polish American immigrants of
Chicagos near northwest side, and their vernacular languagethe speech of street corners, police
lineups, bars, and back-alley poker rooms. Like
his friends and fellow Chicago realists James T.
Farrell and Richard Wright, Algren staked out his
literary neighborhood, and created an enduring
portrait of industrial Chicago and American culture. His 1947 collection of short stories, The
Neon Wilderness, added to his growing reputation
for finely crafted fiction which engaged with the
key political and social issues of the day. As he
would later write in an afterword to Chicago: City
on the Make, he believed that literature is made
upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the
legal apparatus by conscience in touch with
humanity (81). Throughout his career, Algren
asserted that it was the writers job to give a
voice to the voiceless. Unlike many of his
contemporaries, such as Farrell or Saul Bellow
or his long-time lover, Simone de Beauvoir,
Algren never wrote fiction about writers or
intellectuals; he maintained an unrelenting focus
on Americas outsiders, the Lumpenproletariat,
who suffered from the great secret and special
American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all,
in the one land where ownership and virtue are
one (Man With the Golden Arm, 1949, 19).
Algren made this critique most vividly and
subtly in The Man With the Golden Arm, which
won the first National Book Award; with this
accomplishment, Algren seemed poised to join
the canon of American fiction. Algrens depiction
of Frankie Machine, morphine addict and dealer
in an illegal card game, portrays Chicago on the
edge of its postwar transformation. Frankies
relationships with his wife Sophie, his sidekick
Sparrow, his friend Antek, and his nemesis
Captain Bednar take place in a richly evoked
urban setting changing in ways none of the characters can quite identify. The tragedy of Frankies
life, his inability to live authentically, links the
novel to key works of existentialism, and with its
finely wrought (almost overwrought) prose is a
unique contribution to American literature.
But that contribution would be marginalized
due to the conformist political atmosphere of
McCarthyism, with its Red Scares and blacklists.
Literary culture in America turned away from
ALGREN, NELSON
direct political engagement to the safe academic

haven of formalism, and conservative critics like
Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Podhoretz panned Algrens satiric 1956 novel AWalk
on the Wild Side as warmed-over 1930s proletarian melodrama. This critical attack was ironic,
given that Wild Side is a revision of Somebody in
Boots, made because Algren believed that direct
political fiction was no longer desired or effective
in Eisenhowers America. His grim tragedy
of 1933 became satiric high farce, and yet was
dismissed nonetheless by critics unable or
unwilling to look past its setting, Depression-era
New Orleans, and its cast of hookers, panderers,
con men, and thieves.
This critical reversal left Algren unable to get an
advance to write another big novel. He was not
financially astute, and so had made little money
on the film adaptations of The Man With the
Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. He
also suffered a crisis of faith in his readers, believing that the sort of fiction he wanted to write no
longer had an audience. For most of the rest of his
career, he made a living by reselling old stories to
new magazines, and with occasional journalism
and book reviews. This phase in Algrens career
also shows most clearly what his close friend Studs
Terkel insists is Algrens most salient characteristic: his sense of humor. However dark or brutal
the situation, Algren always sees the humanizing
humor in itthe power of laughter to ridicule
power and injustice, and to enable people to
connect across the barriers of race, ethnicity, and
class which divide them.
Nelson Algrens work combined every key
aspect of American fiction. He had the social
conscience and political intent of the naturalist
writers of his generation, like Conroy, John
Steinbeck, Farrell, and Wright. He expressed
his vision of American urban culture with the
writerly precision and care of the modernists
who were his other models, especially F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Finally, he spoke in
the American vernacular, the rollicking, wideopen language that realists since Mark Twain
had made available to American writers and
readers. He combined these powerful traditions
in a series of novels and short stories which
express a unique vision of America, a dark vision
brightened with humor and an insistence that,
as one character in The Man With the Golden
433
Arm put it, We are all members of one another

(196).
SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); The City in
Fiction (AF); Farrell, James. T. (AF); Naturalist
Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA
and Popular Front Fiction (AF); Wright,
Richard (AF)

Algren, N. (1935). Somebody in Boots. New York:
Vanguard.
Algren, N. (1942). Never Come Morning. New York:
Harper.
Algren, N. (1947). The Neon Wilderness. New York:
Doubleday.
Algren, N. (1949). The Man With the Golden Arm.
New York: Doubleday.
Algren, N. (1951). Chicago: City on the Make. New York:
Doubleday.
Algren, N. (1956). A Walk on the Wild Side. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.
Algren, N. (1962). Nelson Algrens Own Book of
Lonesome Monsters. New York: Lancer.
Algren, N. (1963). Who Lost an American? New York:
Macmillan.
Algren, N.(with Donohue, H. E. F.) (1965).
Conversations With Nelson Algren. New York: Hill
and Wang.
Algren, N. (1965). Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway
All the Way. New York: Putnams.
Algren, N. (1973). The Last Carousel. New York:
Putnams.
Algren, N. (1983). The Devils Stocking. New York:
Arbor House.
Algren, N. (1996). Nonconformity: Writing on Writing.
New York: Seven Stories.
Algren, N. (2009). Entrapment and Other Writings.
Cappetti, C. (1993). Writing Chicago: Modernism,
Ethnography and the Novel. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Drew, B. (1989). Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side.
New York: Putnams.
Giles, J. R. (1989). Confronting the Horror: The Novels
of Nelson Algren. Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press.
Rotella, C. (1998). October Cities: The Redevelopment of
Urban Literature. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Ward, R. E. (2005). Nelson Algren: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press.
434
ANAYA, RUDOLFO
Anaya, Rudolfo
ALEX HUNT
Rudolfo Anaya is known as the godfather of

Chicano literature. Since his 1972 novel Bless Me,
Ultima, he has been a prolific writer of fiction,
non-fiction, drama, and poetry as well as an editor
and scholar. Anayas magical realist fiction is set in
and deeply engaged with the US Southwest and
features Chicano characters, creating a powerful
sense of place. Thematically and stylistically,
Anayas fiction strives for a hybrid fusion of
European and indigenous American ideas and
forms. While his efforts in this respect occasionally go too far in search of Jungian-style universal
archetypes, at his best Anaya balances the experience of common humanity with the culturally and
politically specific concerns of Chicanos of the
American Southwest.
Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya was born in Pastura,
New Mexico in 1937 and grew up in Santa Rosa
before his family moved to Albuquerque, New
Mexico in 1952. He later attended the University
of New Mexico, where he earned a BA (1963) and
an MA in English (1968). After teaching high
school, he became a professor of creative writing
at the University of New Mexico in 1974, a
position from which he retired in 1993.
Bless Me, Ultima is a novel contemporaneous
with the Chicano movement and its cultural
nationalist reappropriation of the Southwest as
Aztlan, the ancestral homeland of the Aztec and
spiritual homeland of Chicanos. Combining the
Bildungsroman and Chicano folklore through
the prism of magical realism, Bless Me, Ultima is
the first-person account of growing up Chicano in
World War II-era rural New Mexico, finding
identity between the institutions of church
and school and between indigenous and colonial
ancestries. The novel won the Premio Quinto Sol
award in 1971 and is the most celebrated of the
Chicano novels of the Civil Rights era.
Bless Me, Ultima was followed by two other
novels, Heart of Aztlan (1976) and Tortuga (1979),
which continue in the Bildungsroman form and
which weave personal, cultural, and mythical
narratives. Heart of Aztlan follows the Chavez
family from rural New Mexico to Albuquerque,
documenting a post-World War II urban migration of Chicanos in the Southwest. Tortuga
narrates the healing process of an adolescent boy
confined to a body cast in a childrens hospital and

involves his spiritual and emotional maturation.
All three novels bear comparison to Anayas early
life experiences. Ultima and subsequent novels
occasionally face criticism from Chicano scholars
and activists seeking a more overtly politically
engaged social realism from Chicano artists,
criticism that Anaya has refuted in favor of
his mythopoetic project of creating Chicano
identity.
In the 1980s, Anayas work demonstrates an
increasingly expansive literary exploration of the
historical, geographical, and imaginative space of
Chicano identity. The novellas The Legend of La
Llorona (1984) and Lord of the Dawn (1987)
and the narrative poem The Adventures of Juan
Chicaspatas (1985) rework Chicano and Mexican
folklore and myth, while A Chicano in China
(1986) is a travelogue of Anayas travels to the
Far East. These works dramatize ideas that Anaya
articulates in essays like The New World Man
(1989) and Aztlan: A Homeland without
Boundaries (1989), republished in The Anaya
Reader (1995a), for the future of Chicanos.
Alburquerque (1992), winner of the 1993 PEN
West award, is noteworthy for its engagement
with the citys political power structure and its
economic development struggles, counterposed
against the story of a young man in search of his
biological parents. Anaya continues with his contemporary Albuquerque setting with the Sonny
Baca detective novel tetralogy Zia Summer
(1995b), Rio Grande Fall (1996), Shaman Winter
(1999), and Jemez Spring (2005) in which Baca
travels the pueblos and barrios solving sinister and
supernatural crimes, inevitably perpetuated by his
archnemesis, Raven. In addition to these recent
works, Anaya has continued his writing of childrens and young adults books, including Elegy on
the Death of Cesar Chavez (2000) and Curse of the
ChupaCabra (2006). Writing for all age groups
and through numerous genres, Anaya continues
to validate and celebrate Chicano experience.
Anayas illustrious career has brought him
much recognition, including the 1997 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western
Literature Association and, in 2001, the National
Medal of Arts in literature and the National
Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award. Anayas
achievement has been his affirmations of Chicano
identity, of cultural hybridity as a source of pride
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD
and strength, and of connection to place. Yet

place, for Anaya, means understanding home as
a global crossroads, a borderlands of ecological,
mythical, and cultural complexity.
SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Ethnicity
and Fiction (AF)
Anaya, R. (1972). Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley: Tonatiuh
International.
Anaya, R. (1976). Heart of Aztlan. Berkeley: Editorial
Justa.
Anaya, R. (1979). Tortuga. Berkeley: Editorial Justa.
Anaya, R. (1984). The Silence of the Llano. Berkeley:
Tonatiuh/Quinto Sol International.
Anaya, R.(with Lomeli, F.) (1986). A Chicano in China.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Anaya, R. (1989). Aztlan: Essays on the Chicano
Homeland. Albuquerque, NM: El Norte.
Anaya, R. (1992). Alburquerque. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.
Anaya, R. (1995a). The Anaya Reader. New York:
Warner.
Anaya, R. (1995b). Zia Summer. New York: Warner.
Anaya, R. (1996). Rio Grande Fall. New York: Warner.
Anaya, R. (1999). Shaman Winter. New York: Warner.
Anaya, R. (2005). Jemez Spring. Albuquerque:
Dick, B., & Sirias, S. (eds.) (1998). Conversations with
Rudolfo Anaya. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Gonzalez-T., C. A. (ed.) (1990). Rudolfo A. Anaya: Focus
on Criticism. La Jolla, CA: Lalo Press.
Fernandez Olmos, M. (1999). Rudolfo A. Anaya: A
Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Gish, R. F. (1997). Rudolfo A. Anaya. In T. J. Lyon (ed.),
Updating the Literary West. Fort Worth: Texas
Christian University Press, pp. 53236.
Hunt, A. (2005). In Search of Anayas Carp: Mapping
Ecological Consciousness and Chicano Myth. ISLE,
12(2), 179206.
Anderson, Sherwood
JUDITH BROWN
Sherwood Andersons writing career took off

with the 1919 publication of his third book,
Winesburg, Ohio, when he was 43. From that
moment, he exerted a profound influence over a
generation of young writers, including Ernest
435
Hemingway and William Faulkner, who looked

to his small-town sketches as a model for modern
American writing. Anderson offered a fresh
approach to characterization, plot, and the frank
depiction of sexuality, and his work expressed
something of the anxiety and loneliness brought
about by an increasingly mechanized twentieth
century. Andersons position in the literary
world, however, would not be evenly sustained
throughout his lifetime or after. Despite his
seven novels, six volumes of essays, two plays,
two collections of poetry, three published collections of stories, and three memoirs, Andersons
enduring legacy remains that of his short story
cycle, Winesburg, Ohio.
Born in Camden, Ohio on September 13, 1876,
Andersons childhood was remarkable only for its
migrations across rural Ohio as his father found
work, first as a harness maker, then as a house
painter. He would move to Chicago in 1896,
taking a number of unskilled jobs before enlisting
as a private in the SpanishAmerican War. This
experience expanded his worldview, allowing him
to see some of the American South, and Cuba. He
returned to Chicago, this time finding work at an
advertising firm, then eventually in 1907 he established a manufacturing business in Elyria,
Ohio, where he moved with his wife and children.
It was at his factory that he made his break from
conventional life on November 27, 1912, an event
that he would later narrate as central in his
formation as a writer. He claimed he faked a
nervous collapse in order to escape his stultifying
life, yet records suggest that Anderson was admitted to a hospital four days after this episode.
Nevertheless, from here he would forge his new
persona as a modern American writer.
Anderson moved back to Chicago and found
himself in an exciting intellectual atmosphere
permeated by socialist discourse and literary ambition. There he met Theodore Dreiser, Carl
Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters,
and Margaret Anderson, and participated in what
would later be called the Chicago Renaissance. He
continued to work in advertising while he wrote
two novels, Windy McPhersons Son (1916) and
Marching Men (1917), and his first collection of
poetry, Mid-American Chants (1918). In these,
Anderson established his lifelong literary interest
in small-town life, the dignity of the laborer, and
the poetry of the vernacular.
436
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD
In the years 1919 through 1923, Anderson

would publish what would prove to be his best
works: Winesburg, Ohio (1919); a novel, Poor
White (1920); and two collections of stories, The
Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Horses and
Men (1923a). Nothing, however, would top
Winesburg, his collection of 23 linked stories that
announced a new approach to fictional technique.
Beginning with The Book of the Grotesque, he
presented an array of eccentric characters (the
grotesques), united in their vivid characterization and air of defeatedness, as well as by a
central character, a young reporter named
George Willard at the cusp of adulthood. Anderson did not shy away from the open depiction of
sexuality something some critics would decry
and suggested a spectrum of sexual desires. His
stories delved into the repercussions of both the
engagement and suppression of desire. Hands,
for example, gives a sympathetic account of
Wing Biddlebaum, whose love for his students
and expressive hands lead to an accusation of
pederasty. Biddlebaum retreats to Winesburg,
where he spends his life trying to quell
the life force of his hands, and thereby his
shame. Winesburg would signal a new era in
American literature, and a commitment to the
inarticulate, frustrated lives lived on the peripheries of society.
Some of these themes carry over to the stories
collected in Triumph of the Egg and Horses and
Men. Andersons stories, in particular, met with
critical acclaim and made him, during this period,
a writers writer. One frequently anthologized
story, The Egg, chronicles the tragicomic life of
a rural man who banks on his deformed chickens
and egg tricks to bring him fortune. Another,
The Man Who Became a Woman, offers the
story of developing adolescent sexuality in
the muscular and sexually charged atmosphere
of the race track. In both, Anderson depicts the
fragility of human experience against a harsh
and money-driven society.
Andersons fascination with literary form and
the depiction of desire would be visible throughout his career. Indeed, he would ask, What of the
sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich
flavor on the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the
skin of women, the play of muscles through the
bodies of men? (1924, 80). In Andersons ques-
tion, one might hear multiple literary influences

at work, including the commitment to the sensual
lives of all men and women advocated by Walt
Whitman. One also hears, in the attention to the
surfaces of wordstheir texture and form
divorced from meaningthe influence of
Gertrude Stein. Anderson befriended Stein,
whom he met on two trips to Europe in the
1920s, and admired her efforts to simplify and
thus cut away the deadening past from the literature of the present. Anderson admired Steins
Three Lives and would share the fascination with
race and sexuality presented in the centerpiece
story, Melanctha. Echoes of D. H. Lawrence
also resonate in Andersons formulation of primitive vitality and his insistence on imagining
sexuality without shame. More than these writers,
however, Andersons work conveys the persistence of loneliness in modern life, and the failed
venture of sex as communication.
By the early 1920s, Anderson had achieved
both financial and critical success. His friends
included the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and
the painter Georgia OKeeffe, and his trips to
Europe brought him into contact with leading
writers, including James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ernest Hemingway, whose
own career was gaining ground, made Anderson
his mentor, as William Faulkner would later do.
Andersons position within the modern literary
movement reached its zenith in the 1920s, and
would enter into a period of steady decline over
the next several years.
This decline may have begun with Andersons
critically panned novel, Many Marriages (1923b),
but certainly the publication of Dark Laughter
(1925) his only bestseller, but a critical flop
harmed his reputation. The novel covered now
familiar ground: the escape of a middle-class man
from the stultifying effects of conventional life
into a primitive playground along the banks of the
Mississippi River. Bohemian modernists meet
naturally vital African Americans in Andersons
narrative, which presents a view of race that was
quickly becoming its own cliche in the 1920s.
Hemingway wrote a parody of the novel, Torrents
of Spring, in 1926 which loudly announced his
break from his former mentor and publicly humiliated Anderson. Despite the appearance of a
third strong collection of stories in 1933, Death in
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD
the Woods, and the particular beauty of its title

story, Andersons readership dwindled throughout the 1930s.
Like the protagonist of Dark Laughter, Bruce
Dudley, Anderson became more peripatetic, leaving Chicago for New York; then New Orleans,
where he lived for a short time with Faulkner; then
moving in 1927 to Marion, Virginia with his third
wife. He built a house he called Ripshin and
bought two newspapers. Anderson threw himself
into newspaper life, writing about all order of
local events, and eventually creating a fictional
reporter named Buck Fever. During this period,
he was divorced and remarried. His interests
turned toward the poor and disadvantaged;
Anderson with his fourth wife began to travel
throughout the South, visiting factories and mills,
and writing about labor conditions. His concern
about poor working conditions found its way into
his writing, including his newspaper sketches in
Hello Towns (1929), his essays collected in Puzzled
America (1935), and his novels Beyond Desire
(1932) and Kit Brandon (1936).
During his lifetime, Anderson published two
autobiographical narratives: A Story Tellers Story
(1924) that chronicled his life up until 1923, and
Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926), in which he
filtered his own experiences through a character
he named Tar Moorehead. Sherwood Andersons
Memoirs (1942) were unfinished at the time of his
death and published posthumously. Anderson
died of peritonitis while en route to South
America on March 8, 1941.
Anderson anticipated the arc of his career in
1924 when he wrote, In the end I had become a
teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I did it
fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly
(1924, 409). Most critics agree with Malcolm
Cowleys estimation that Andersons work was
desperately uneven (Cowley 1992, 1). Any account of Andersons place in literary history
must encompass both this patchwork record and
his undisputed literary success, particularly in the
form of the modern short story. With the publication of a two-volume biography in 2006, new
attention to Andersons contributions to the short
story form, interest in his renderings of race
and sexuality, and a recognition of the significance
of his late writings, there is promise for renewed
study of this important early-twentieth-century
writer.
437
SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Hemingway,

Ernest (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Stein,
Gertrude (AF)
Anderson, S. (1916). Windy McPhersons Son.
New York: John Lane.
Anderson, S. (1917). Marching Men. New York:
John Lane.
Anderson, S. (1918). Mid-American Chants. New York:
John Lane.
Anderson, S. (1919). Winesburg, Ohio. New York: B. W.
Heubsch.
Anderson, S. (1920). Poor White. New York: B. W.
Heubsch.
Anderson, S. (1921). Triumph of the Egg. New York:
B. W. Heubsch.
Anderson, S. (1923a). Horses and Men. New York: B. W.
Heubsch.
Anderson, S. (1923b). Many Marriages. New York:
B. W. Heubsch.
Anderson, S. (1924). A Story Tellers Story. New York:
B. W. Heubsch.
Anderson, S. (1925). Dark Laughter. New York: Boni
and Liveright.
Anderson, S. (1926). Tar: A Midwest Childhood.
New York: Boni and Liveright.
Anderson, S. (1929). Hello Towns. New York: Liveright.
Anderson, S. (1932). Beyond Desire. New York:
Liveright.
Anderson, S. (1933). Death in the Woods. New York:
Liveright.
Anderson, S. (1935). Puzzled America. New York:
Scribners.
Anderson, S. (1936). Kit Brandon. New York:
Scribners.
Anderson, S. (1942). Sherwood Andersons Memoirs.
New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Brown, J. (2007). A Certain Laughter: Sherwood
Andersons Experiment in Form. Modernist Cultures,
2(2), 13244.
Conner, M. C. (2001). Fathers and Sons: Winesburg,
Ohio and the Revision of Modernism. Studies in
American Fiction, 29(2), 20938.
Cowley, M. (1992). Introduction to Winesburg, Ohio.
New York: Penguin.
Ellis, J. (1993). Sherwood Andersons Fear of Sexuality:
Horses, Men, and Homosexuality. Studies in Short
Fiction, 30(4), 595601.
Dunne, R. (2005). A New Book of Grotesques:
Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Andersons
Early Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press.
438
AUSTER, PAUL
Rideout, W. B. (2006). Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in

America, vols. 12. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Townsend, K. (1987). Sherwood Anderson. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Whalan, M. (2002). Dreams of Manhood: Narrative,
Gender, and History in Winesburg, Ohio. Studies in
American Fiction, 30(2), 22948.
Auster, Paul
DAVID COUGHLAN
Paul Auster is a poet, essayist, filmmaker, and,

above all, novelist whose philosophical and frequently metafictional works have won popular
and critical acclaim for the restrained beauty of
their storytelling. Auster was born February 3,
1947 in Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of
Eastern European Jewish immigrants. After graduating from Columbia University, he lived in
France for over three years, returning to New
York in July 1974. Later that same year, he married Lydia Davis, also a writer, with whom he has a
son, Daniel. Accounts of these times, and of the
extreme financial difficulties which marked them,
are given in autobiographical writings in the
collections The Art of Hunger (1997a) and Hand
to Mouth (1997b), while autobiographical allusions appear often in Austers fiction as well.
Between 1974 and 1980, Auster wrote four oneact plays and published six collections of poetry.
Influenced especially by the American objectivists, Paul Celan, and the French surrealists,
Austers poetry has received less critical attention
than his prose. However, it establishes key themes
around language and the self found in his novels
too. Lines written in 1967, The world is in my
head. My body is in the world (Auster 2004a),
affirm that any experience of the world is defined
by the words used to represent it, but that the
material world exceeds the limits of that language.
Auster has the body mediate between words and
world, resulting in recurring motifs in his work of
food and hunger (relating to the ideal transparency of the body), the room (where the body
writes in solitude), and the city (where the body is
alienated from society by the failure of language).
Auster describes the dance-inspired White
Spaces (1979) as his bridge between writing poetry
and writing prose. It also happened that he fin-
ished it on the night his father died, and it was in

response to that loss that Auster wrote his first
published prose work, a memoir, The Invention
of Solitude (1982). Auster came to prominence
with his next three novels, the remarkable City
of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked
Room (1986), together published as The New York
Trilogy (1987a). Termed postmodern detective
stories, these novels play with their generic conventions even as In the Country of Last Things
(1987b), where Anna Blume searches for her
brother; Moon Palace (1989), about the orphan
M. S. Fogg; and The Music of Chance (1990),
about the final consequences of a lost card
game, work as variations on dystopian fiction,
the picaresque, and the road novel, respectively.
Leviathan (1992), about an American terrorist;
Mr Vertigo (1994), about a boy who can fly;
and Timbuktu (1999), a dogs tale, reinforced
his reputation as an original and clever writer.
Although Auster considers himself a realist, the
reality of his novels, influenced by Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Miguel de Cervantes, Knut
Hamsun, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, and
Edgar Allan Poe, includes absurdity, grotesques,
and uncanny doubles. As in The Book of Illusions
(2002) and Oracle Night (2004b), characters are
often removed from the everyday by an inheritance, illness, or loss before chance intervenes to
re-engage them in a process of self-authoring.
That these characters learn to live again might
suggest that despair, nihilism, and hopelessness
no longer motivate his work as Auster once
maintained (Barone 1995), but even the lifesustaining happiness of Nathan Glass at the end
of The Brooklyn Follies (2005) is not unqualified.
Indeed, the pervasively intertextual Travels in the
Scriptorium (2006) concerns a writers guilt and
enforced life sentence in a locked room.
Auster is the recipient of numerous awards. His
work, sometimes accused by American critics of
emptiness or repetitiveness, is applauded in
Europe and widely translated. Auster is himself
a translator; has edited The Random House Book of
Twentieth Century French Poetry (1984), the NPR
National Story Project anthology I Thought My
Father Was God (2001), and Samuel Beckett: The
Grove Centenary Edition (2006); and wrote, under
the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, the crime thriller
Squeeze Play (1982). He has worked as a director
on four films, notably Smoke (1995) with Wayne
THE AVANT GARDE NOVEL
439
Wang, and as a screenwriter on nine, including

adaptations of The Music of Chance (1993) and In
the Country of Last Things (2008). Artistic collaborations include City of Glass: The Graphic Novel
(1994) with Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli,
Double Game (1998) with Sophie Calle, The Story
of My Typewriter (2002) with Sam Messer, and
The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2006) with Glenn
Thomas. His manuscripts have been acquired by
the Berg Collection in the New York Public
Library.
Auster lives and writes in Brooklyn with his
second wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, with whom
he has a daughter, Sophie.
Barone, D. (ed.) (1995). Beyond The Red Notebook:

Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Bloom, H. (ed.) (2004). Paul Auster. Philadelphia:
Chelsea House.
Brown, M. (2007). Paul Auster. Manchester:
Herzogenrath, B. (1999). An Art of Desire: Reading
Paul Auster. Postmodern Studies 21. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); DeLillo, Don

(AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Road
Novel (AF); Spiegelman, Art (AF); Utopian and
Dystopian Fiction (AF)
The term avant garde is typically applied to

works of writing in reference to individual writers
or groups of artists oriented toward a programmatically defined artistic movement, and especially toward one of the competing isms (e.g.,
cubism, futurism, or surrealism) that proliferated
from the early twentieth century on. This orientation toward a movement, or at least toward a
definite theoretical and ideological position expressed by their artistic activity, implies that
certain genres of literature, seen as more suited
to avant garde functions, have tended to be favored over others by these writers. For example,
as critics such as Marjorie Perloff, Janet Lyon,
and Martin Puchner have demonstrated, the new
genre of manifesto appeared tailor-made, both
formally and rhetorically, to express the avant
gardes provocative, activist aspirations. In addition, since avant gardes typically, at least at their
outset, stand in a marginal, oppositional relation
toward mainstream literature and its institutions,
they have usually had to make use of publication
venues with limited readerships and little hope of
commercial support, such as the small press, the
little magazine, and the chapbook. Both for intrinsic and extrinsic reasons, literary avant gardes
have above all favored brief, immediate, and more
rapidly produced forms such as the manifesto
and the lyric poem, as well as forms of theater and
performance that can be staged or published
at little expense, and that directly affect their
audience without further mediation or delay.
Because of its length, the long duration of its
production, its solid tradition of conventions, its
relatively great expense for publisher and reader,
and its indirect communication through fictive

Auster, P. (1982). The Invention of Solitude. New York:
Sun Press.
Auster, P. (1987a). The New York Trilogy. London:
Faber and Faber.
Auster, P. (1987b). In the Country of Last Things.
New York: Viking Penguin.
Auster, P. (1989). Moon Palace. New York: Viking
Penguin.
Auster, P. (1990). The Music of Chance. New York:
Viking Penguin.
Auster, P. (1992). Leviathan. New York: Viking
Penguin.
Auster, P. (1994). Mr Vertigo. London: Faber and Faber.
Auster, P. (1997a). The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces,
Interviews and The Red Notebook. New York:
Penguin.
Auster, P. (1997b). Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early
Failure. New York: Henry Holt.
Auster, P. (1999). Timbuktu. London: Faber and Faber.
Auster, P. (2002). The Book of Illusions. New York:
Henry Holt.
Auster, P. (2004a). Collected Poems. Woodstock, NY:
Overlook.
Auster, P. (2004b). Oracle Night. New York: Henry
Holt.
Auster, P. (2005). The Brooklyn Follies. London:
Faber and Faber.
Auster, P. (2006). Travels in the Scriptorium. London:
Faber and Faber.
Auster, P. (2008). Man in the Dark. New York:
Henry Holt.
The Avant Garde Novel

TYRUS MILLER
440
worlds, the novel has thus often been seen as too

unwieldy, too mediated, and too expensive to be
well adapted to literary avant gardism.
Nevertheless, there are novels that have been
influenced in significant ways by their authors
attempts to realize directly, within the form of the
novel, the artistic innovations of canonical avant
garde movements such as cubism (for example,
Gertrude Stein), dadaism (early William Carlos
Williams, Robert Coatess The Eater of Darkness
[1924]), and surrealism (Mina Loy in her uncompleted novel Insel [1991]). Moreover, there has
been a very strong tendency of writers working
primarily in lyric poetry from Williams and E. E.
Cummings to John Ashbery and James Schuyler
to cross over to the longer prose forms typically
associated with and generically identified as the
novel. Finally, without any direct connection
with particular avant garde tendencies, but affected by the innovative dynamism in form and style
characteristic of twentieth-century art in general,
the conventional form of the novel too has been
subjected to avant gardistic interventions, and
new techniques and contents have been introduced that resonate with the broader activities of
the avant garde.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to assert
that Gertrude Stein stands as a point of departure
for a major part of the avant garde formal and
stylistic innovations developed following her
composition of Three Lives (composed 19056)
and The Making of Americans (composed
19069). Especially in her massive familys
progress The Making of Americans, she not only
exhibited the changes in the character and cohesion of American families as they moved into
twentieth-century modernity, but also dramatized how these modernizing changes dissolved
the infrastructure of traditional narrative at its
social roots: the rhythmic patterning of time that
resided in the continuity of generations and in the
habits of everyday life. Stein began her book with
a more or less conventional family story using an
obtrusive but familiar enough narrator. But by the
time less than a quarter of the novels more than
900 pages have passed, an analytic, schematizing,
typologizing consciousness has taken command,
an authorial arranger who is more concerned
with the abstract combinations of psychological
qualities of her characters than in narratively
developing the fictive persons themselves. Narra-
tive time slows to a halt and a new time takes over:

the time that slowly passes for the reader as the
narrator enumerates the various permutations
that are possible from certain basic emotional
traits. Even this last trace of character, however,
is exhausted in the course of these enumerations,
so that by the last quarter of the novel, any
momentum and interest have shifted to the grammatical and rhythmic variation of the sentences
as such. This transition from a fictional world
occupied by fictive persons to a purely linguistic,
grammatical space in which only words move is
one of Steins most important legacies to twentieth-century writing. In this regard, Steins works
have proven inspirational for many later writers
who occupy a border zone between poetry, performance, and narrative prose, including Robert
Creeleys prose improvisations in Mabel: A Story
(1988), David Antins talk poems set as unpunctuated prose, Robert Ashleys television
opera Perfect Lives, John Ashberys Three Poems
(1991), Ron Sillimans Ketjak (1978) and Tjanting
(1981), and Leslie Scalapinos prose trilogy The
Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion (1997).
Another aspect of Steins work, however,
proved even more germinal for later writers of
the avant garde novel: her nominalistic play with
the conventions of existing and invented genres,
from the novel itself to her unconventional
plays, operas, how to books, portraits,
and valentines. In this regard, however, even at
her most avant garde, she tapped into one of the
deep historical veins of the novelistic genre itself :
its omnivorous borrowing from other sorts of
literary and non-literary discourse and its renewal
of its formal conventions by incorporating discourses apparently foreign to its forms. In the
history of the novel, as the Russian formalist
theorist Viktor Shklovsky and his contemporary
Mikhail Bakhtin both emphasized, a wide range of
formal elements, from philosophical dialogues to
speeches and essays to lyric poetry to folktales
to documentary data, may pass through the wide,
flexible boundaries of this mega-genre. Steins
experimental avant gardism, which moves
between essay and grammatical exercise, from
captured voices to musical sound-play, in this
sense simply updates a highly traditional aspect of
the novel with new material. It also makes this
inner clash of generic elements an important
part of the content of her novels. As
story disappears, the drama of formal elements

clashing and connecting in new ways takes over in
its place.
Steins example of using fragments of different
generic features as constructive building blocks
of new texts proved extremely productive for her
younger contemporaries and those who have
followed her example, up to the present day. For
example, already by the 1920s and 1930s, William
Carlos Williams in his mixed-genre poetry-proseessayistic works such as Kora in Hell (1920),
Spring and All (1923), In the American Grain
(1925), and The Great American Novel (1923),
and e. e. cummings in his novel-memoirs The
Enormous Room (1949) and Eimi (1933), had
added important complements to their more
purely lyric oeuvres, prose works that in many
respects were even more daring and unconventional than their verse. Within this earlier, modernist context, another striking example of a work
that uses generic hybridization as its fulcrum for
literary innovation is Jean Toomers Cane (1923),
which binds together lyrical character sketches,
short narratives, verse, and song in a rhapsodic
form that eschews traditional novelistic structure.
In another vein, Nathanael Wests first short
novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), is a
parodic anatomy whose pseudo-epic hero enters literary history through the anus of the Trojan
Horse and passes through generic realms of philosophical speculation, mystical hagiography, diaries, pamphlets, letters, dramatic dialogue, biography, and the epistolary novel. Such generic
hybrids also inspired later writers like Jack Spicer
in the second part of his poetic sequence The
Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1975), which
is written in Stein-like short books and
chapters and bears the title A Fake Novel About
the Life of Arthur Rimbaud (1965); LeRoi Jones in
The System of Dantes Hell (1973); David Antin in
After the War: A Long Novel With Few Words
(1984); Nathaniel Mackey in his serial epistolary novels Bedouin Hornbook (1993), Djbot
Baghostuss Run (2001), Atet A.D. (2008), and
Bass Cathedral (1982); Kathy Acker in Great
Expectations (1986), My Death My Life by Pier
Paolo Pasolini (1986a), and Don Quixote (1985);
Robert Gluck in Jack the Modernist (1994) and
Margery Kempe (1998); Dodie Bellamy in The
Letters of Mina Harker (1980); and Lyn Hejinian
in My Life and Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
441
(1991), which is formally a book-length sequence

of short verse lyrics.
Another impulse toward innovation in the
avant garde novel and related new prose forms
was the exploration of the new psychology of the
twentieth century as a source of formal and
thematic ideas, including Freudian and other
psychoanalytic conceptions of the unconscious,
psychic automatism, psychopathologies, and
drug experiences. In Kora in Hell, for example,
Williams developed his text out of rapid nighttime improvisations, to which he added commentaries, such as a psychoanalyst might have given to
a dream protocol or a piece of automatic writing.
The title implies that he saw these as a descent into
the infernal underworld of his everyday mind to
recapture something lost or imprisoned there.
A similar metaphor is implied by the title of Djuna
Barness extravagantly stylized novel of obsessive,
unhappy passion, Nightwood (1937). Each of
Barness characters wanders in the dark forest of
their own intense longings their insatiable desire
for love, for possession, for recognition, for redemption, or for oblivion. At the frustrated, tragic
terminus of their quest, Barnes exposes the archaic core of the interior voice that haunted them.
Mixing highly lyrical imagery, ribald and even
obscene satire, and a near-absence of narrative
incident, Barnes captures the inner pulse of characters who have become progressively unmoored
from social norms, and ever more consumed by a
spreading spiritual and psychic darkness. In his
novels Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine
(1969), Nova Express (1969), and The Ticket That
Exploded (1967), William Burroughs utilized a
highly disjunctive cut-up form to create a dystopian science fiction, a satirical world in which
surveillance, torture, drug addiction, and sexual
perversity are all part of a single self-contradictory
system of social control. As he indicated in the
introduction to his Naked Lunch, his intention
was to bring the content of these dark, obscene,
enslaving forces to light, exposing the naked
lunch that corresponded to our bodily and psychic hungers, a frozen moment when everyone
sees what is on the end of every fork (p. xxxvii).
A related field of inquiry, investigating
subjective experience and its divergence from
standard narrative and stylistic conventions of
traditional novelistic prose, might be called
phenomenological in its orientation: relating
442
the writers interests to the forms of immediate

appearance of space, time, speech, bodily feeling,
and the emotions. These concerns connected
strongly with parallel explorations in the visual
and performance arts, as well as in new forms of
technological mediation such as cinema, video,
and digital media. Phenomenological concerns,
for example, constituted a major aspect of classic
modern novels in the use of stream-ofconsciousness techniques. In The Sound and the
Fury (1929), thus, William Faulkner explored
how four different characters, from the mentally
handicapped Benjy to the melancholic Quentin,
experienced their environment in different ways,
emphasizing different sensory aspects and ascribing different meanings to common things and
events. Robert Creeleys novel The Island (1988),
like his short fiction in The Gold Diggers (1988)
and much of his verse as well, sensitively registers
the rises and falls of the characters inner feelings
in ways that mark not just the style of the story,
but also even the description of objective elements such as incident and outer appearance. An
even more radical instance of this phenomenological orientation, directly connected with avant
garde tendencies in the visual arts, is Madeline
Ginss novel Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994),
which takes the deaf-mute figure Helen Keller as
a first-person narrator of her own experience of
the world. With chapters bearing titles such as
Thinking Field, Every Millennium Is an Instant, and Tissues of Density, Gins seeks to
occupy Helen Kellers experienced world from
within, exploring the relations of embodiment,
perception, and language, which stand in a different relation of correspondence than in sighted
people. The manifest forms of visual and auditory
perception, and the linguistic references they
undergird, are not available to Helen Keller; she
must use abstraction, circumlocution, and perceptual and conceptual metaphor to express her
experience of an only partially accessible world. In
doing so, however, Keller gives descriptions that
in turn evoke the conceptual artworks of Madeline Ginss partner, the artist Arakawa, whose
corresponding works are even referenced in notes
to passages of Kellers text. In another mode, Jack
Kerouac in Visions of Cody (1972) and Andy
Warhol in a: A Novel (1968) both utilize the
encounter of the human voice, the tape recorder,
and drugs to transcribe literal instances of speech
and spoken thought, which differ wildly from the

tidied-up patterns of dialogue, response, and
meditation one finds in traditional novels.
A final area of formal experimentation in the
novel is the use of arbitrary constraints to force
language and narration out of its habitual pathways. By setting rules or necessary forms that
must be observed, writers compel themselves to
seek innovative solutions to the compositional
problems thrown up by such restrictions and
regulations. This work has been especially influenced by the novels of the early-twentieth-century
French eccentric Raymond Roussel, who used
puns and other arbitrary linguistic associations
to generate fantastic descriptions and narrative
episodes, and by the French literary circle Oulipo,
the society for potential literature, which explored a wide range of arbitrary formal devices,
algorithms and other mathematical formulae,
and combinatoric techniques to generate new,
unforeseen texts. The most orthodox follower of
Oulipo, indeed an official member of the group, is
Harry Mathews, who in such works as The Conversions (1997) and The Sinking of the Odradek
Stadium (1999) used Oulipian techniques to spin
out strange, humorous quest stories, stories
questing in search of their own object. Another
renowned practitioner of postmodernist metafiction, Gilbert Sorrentino, turned to Oulipian techniques in later works such as his trilogy Odd
Number (1985), Rose Theatre (1987), and Misterioso (1989). These techniques offered him new
ways of exhibiting the self-reflexive relations of
texts to themselves and other texts, which was a
typical concern of Sorrentinos pre-Oulipian texts
as well. Walter Abish, in texts such as Alphabetical
Africa (1974) and 99: The New Meaning (1990),
explored the tensions between particular contents
and abstract systems, alphabetical or numerical,
governing how these contents were selected,
sorted, and arranged. A more recent example of
this sort of avant garde novel is the interconnected
story collection by Ben Marcus, The Age of
Wire and String (1995). Utilizing both constraints
and Rousselian-type transformations, Marcus
builds up uncanny episodes and objects that seem
to resemble one another in tangible but irrational
ways. This lends the stories a surface coherence
and completeness, while leaving enigmatic their
ultimate explanation and meaning. This effect is
typical of all the novels of this type, which conjoin
arbitrary structural or formal features with the

motivated structure of a narrative. The reader
experiences an odd mixture of rational and irrational features, of surface clarity and deeper obscurity, foiling any attempt on her part to make
definitive sense of the fictive world the novel
presents.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF);
Abish, W. (1974). Alphabetical Africa. New York:
New Directions.
Abish, W. (1990). 99: The New Meaning. Providence,
RI: Burning Deck.
Acker, K. (1982). Great Expectations. Barrytown, NY:
Open Book.
Acker, K. (1986a). Don Quixote. New York: Grove.
Acker, K. (1986b). My Death My Life by Pier Paolo
Pasolini. In Literal Madness: Three Novels. New York:
Grove.
Antin, D. (1973). After the War: A Long Novel With Few
Words. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow.
Antin, D. (1976). Talking at the Boundaries. New York:
New Directions.
Ashbery, J. (1977). Three Poems. New York: Penguin.
Ashbery, J., & Schulyer, J. (1969). A Nest of Ninnies.
New York: E. P. Dutton.
Ashley, R. (1991). Perfect Lives. Santa Fe, NM: Burning
Books.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogical Imagination: Four
Essays (trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist). Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Barnes, D. (1937). Nightwood. New York: New
Directions.
Bellamy, D. (1998). The Letters of Mina Harker.
West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Books.
Bok, C. (2001). Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary
Science. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Brooke-Rose, C. (1991). Stories, Theories, and Things.
Burger, M. (ed.) (2004). Biting the Error: Writers Explore
Narrative. Toronto: Coach House.
B
urger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde
(trans. M. Shaw). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Burroughs, W. S. (1959). Naked Lunch. New York:
Grove.
Burroughs, W. S. (1964). Nova Express. New York:
Grove.
Burroughs, W. S. (1967). The Ticket That Exploded.
New York: Grove Press.
443
Burroughs, W. S. (1992). The Soft Machine. New York:

Grove.
Coates, R. (1926). The Eater of Darkness. New York:
Contact.
Creeley, R. (1988). The Collected Prose of Robert Creeley.
cummings, e.e. (1933). Eimi. New York: Sloane.
cummings, e.e. (1949). The Enormous Room. New York:
Modern Library.
Dydo, U. E., & Rice, W. (2008). Gertrude Stein: The
Language That Rises, 19231934. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Faulkner, W. (1929). The Sound and the Fury.
New York: Cape and Smith.
Fredman, S. (1983). Poets Prose: The Crisis in American
Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gins, M. (1994). Helen Keller or Arakawa. New York:
Burning Books.
Gluck, R. (1985). Jack the Modernist. New York:
Gay Presses of New York.
Gluck, R. (1994). Margery Kempe. New York: High Risk.
Hayman, D. (1987). Re-forming the Narrative: Toward a
Mechanics of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Heise, U. (1997). Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative,
and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hejinian, L. (1980). My Life. Providence, RI:
Burning Deck.
Hejinian, L. (1991). Oxota: A Short Russian Novel.
Great Barrington, MA: The Figures.
Jones, L. (Baraka, A.) (1965). The System of Dantes Hell.
New York: Grove.
Kerouac, J. (1972). Visions of Cody. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Loy, M. (1991). Insel (ed. E. Arnold) Santa Rosa, CA:
Black Sparrow.
Lyon, J. (1999). Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern.
Mackey, N. (1986). Bedouin Hornbook. Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press.
Mackey, N. (1993a). Discrepant Engagement:
Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental
Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mackey, N. (1993b). Djbot Baghostuss Run.
Los Angeles: Sun and Moon.
Mackey, N. (2001). Atet A.D. San Francisco: City Lights.
Mackey, N. (2008). Bass Cathedral. New York:
New Directions.
Marcus, B. (1995). The Age of Wire and String.
Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive.
Mathews, H. (1997). The Conversions. Normal, IL:
Dalkey Archive.
Mathews, H. (1999). The Sinking of the Odradek
Stadium. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive.
444
McHale, B. (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York:

Methuen.
Miller, T. (2009). Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and
the Neo-Avant-Garde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Perloff, M. (1986). The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde,
Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago:
Puchner, M. (2006). Poetry of the Revolution: Marx,
Manifestos, and the Avant-Garde. Princeton:
Scalapino, L. (1997). The Return of Painting,
The Pearl and Orion: A Trilogy. Jersey City, NJ:
Talisman.
Shklovsky, V. (1990). Theory of Prose (trans. B. Sher).
Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive.
Silliman, R. (1978). Ketjak. San Francisco: This.
Silliman, R. (1981). Tjanting. Berkeley: Figures.
Sorrentino, G. (1984). Something Said: Essays.
San Francisco: North Point.
Sorrentino, G. (1985). Odd Number. San Francisco:
North Point.
Sorrentino, G. (1987). Rose Theatre. Normal, IL:

Dalkey Archive.
Sorrentino, G. (1989). Misterioso. Normal, IL: Dalkey
Archive.
Spicer, J. (1975). The Collected Books of Jack
Spicer (ed. Robin Blaser). Los Angeles: Black
Sparrow.
Stein, G. (1993). Three Lives. New York: Modern
Library.
Stein, G. (1995). The Making of Americans: Being
a History of a Familys Progress. Normal, IL:
Dalkey Archive.
Toomer, J. (1994). Cane. New York: Modern Library
[1923].
Warhol, A. (1968). a: A Novel. New York: Grove.
West, N. (2006). A Cool Million; The Dream Life of Balso
Snell: Two Novels. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Williams, W. C. (1970). Imaginations (ed. W. Schott,).
New York: New Directions.
Williams, W. C. (1956). In the American Grain.
B
Baker, Nicholson
PATRICK ODONNELL
Born in New York City in 1957, Nicholson Baker

is the author of seven novels that explore the
minutiae of daily life, sexual eroticism, and bodily
functions in writing that is recognized for its
detail and capacity to explore the intricacies of
the interior life. The Mezzanine (1988) is a meticulous description of the thoughts and actions of
an ordinary office worker during a single lunch
hour as he rides up an escalator in a crowded
building. Taking place over a mere 20 minutes,
Room Temperature (1990) records the perceptions and small actions of a man who is bottlefeeding his infant daughter. In these minimalist
narratives, Baker is not so much interested in
portraying stream of consciousness in the manner of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf as he is in
clinically observing the most subtle movements of
the body and the rich associative logic of the
mind. In The Mezzanine, for example, the narrator records that he is carrying a small paper bag
that contains his lunch: this leads to a pages-long
reflection on the history of paper bags, paper
versus plastic straws, and the mom-and-pop
grocery industry, complete with footnotes. The
impact of these early novels comes about through
the accumulation of details and the presentation
of a complete world made up entirely of minute
particulars.
Bakers third novel, Vox (1992), gained considerable notoriety in its portrayal of a phone sex
conversation between a man and a woman. The
novel is primarily composed of the dialogue
between its two interlocutors, and though it
contains its share of erotic fantasies, the focus is

once more on minutiae of the principals lives: the
clothes they are wearing as they talk, their daily
routines, their memories. Vox thus exemplifies
the eroticism of daily life (and, conversely, the
ordinariness of eroticism), and garnered additional attention when it was revealed that Monica
Lewinsky gave the novel to Bill Clinton as a gift.
The Fermata followed in 1994: in this novel, an
office worker who has the fantastic ability to stop
time for brief periods records his erotic adventures with a series of women whom he engages
during these momentary pauses in reality. As in
Vox, it is not erotic or pornographic representations that are the main issue, but the relation
between distance and intimacy, and the attempt
to gain understanding through the observation of
detail. The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998) sounds
like the title of a childrens book, and to some
degree it is in its portrayal of a year in the life of a
precocious and imaginative 9-year-old American
girl who spends a year abroad in England with her
family. Nory brings to the world around her the
same keen sense of observation and attention to
detail that typify Bakers narrators, but these are
filtered through the mind of a child compelled to
tell stories in order to make sense of her world.
Taking place over a relatively lengthy span of time
for a novel by Nicholson Baker, The Everlasting
Story of Nory develops a full-blown character
engaged with the question of what, in life, is
everlasting.
A Box of Matches (2003), titled after the familiar
domestic object that the narrator uses to light his
fireplace each morning, is composed of the daily
reflections of a 35-year-old textbook editor as he

446
BALDWIN, JAMES
approaches the dark wood of the midlife journey.

As in Bakers first two novels, the focus in A Box of
Matches is not on the great philosophical issues or
traumatic memories of the past, but on the seemingly insignificant particulars of daily life; yet
observing in detail the holes in his socks or the
lint in his navel leads the narrator to a comprehension of his place in the world. Checkpoint
(2004) is something of a departure in that it
develops a blatantly political theme. Framed, like
Vox, as a conversation between two characters, the
novel records a volatile discussion between two old
friends: one who reveals his decision to attempt the
assassination of President George W. Bush because of his policies in Iraq, and the other, equally
distressed at Bushs policies, who attempts to talk
his friend down from his plan of action. The novel
raised some controversy given its subject, but like
all of Bakers work, Checkpoint is inductively engaged in understanding the particularities of the
war and how the observation of details leads to
rhetorical stance and political action.
Baker, raised near Rochester, New York, received his BA in philosophy from Haverford
College, and just as his novels imply a philosophy
of minutiae, so too his non-fiction offers a series
of pointed philosophical reflections on books,
objects, and history. U and I: A True Story
(1991) is a compelling account of Bakers encounter with the work of John Updike, and a study of
reading and intertextuality in its depiction of how
the consciousness of one writer is infiltrated by
the specificities of another. The Size of Thoughts:
Essays and Other Lumber (1996) comprises
Bakers reflections on matters and objects often
overlooked, but of considerable significance when
properly viewed: the history of punctuation, the
construction of paper clips, and model airplanes.
Double Fold: The Assault on Libraries and Paper
(2001) discusses the destruction of books in the
era of microfilming and digitalization, and offers
a stirring call for the preservation of all books and
documents in their traditional forms. In Human
Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of
Civilization (2008), Baker studies myriad documents and communications in order to formulate
a controversial argument that World War II was,
in part, instigated by the Allies, and ultimately
unnecessary. In this debatable premise, Baker
relies, as always, on the particulars to offer gravity
and illumination.
SEE ALSO: Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction

(AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Updike,
John (AF)
Baker, N. (1988). The Mezzanine. New York:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Baker, N. (1990). Room Temperature. New York: Grove
Weidenfeld.
Baker, N. (1991). U and I: A True Story. New York:
Random House.
Baker, N. (1992). Vox. New York: Random House.
Baker, N. (1994). The Fermata. New York: Random
House.
Baker, N. (1996). The Size of Thoughts: Essays and
Other Lumber. New York: Random House.
Baker, N. (1998). The Everlasting Story of Nory.
Baker, N. (2001). Double Fold: Libraries and the
Assault on Paper. New York: Random House.
Baker, N. (2003). A Box of Matches. New York:
Random House.
Baker, N. (2004). Checkpoint. New York Knopf.
Baker, N. (2008). Human Smoke: The Beginnings of
World War II, the End of Civilization. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Chambers, R. (1994). Meditation and the Escalator
Principle (on Nicholson Bakers The Mezzanine).
Modern Fiction Studies, 40(4), 765806.
Hall, D. (1995). Nicholson Bakers Vox: An Exercise
in the Literature of Sensibility. Connecticut Review,
17(1), 3540.
Saltzman, A. M. (1999). Understanding Nicholson
Baker. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Baldwin, James
LYNN ORILLA SCOTT
James Baldwin (192487) was a great twentiethcentury American essayist, novelist, and public
intellectual. His work explores the relationship
between racism and sexual inequalities, prefiguring developments in gender theory and queer
studies. In addition to six novels, seven collections
of essays, two plays, two collections of poetry, and
a collection of short stories, Baldwin co-authored
a phototext, a childrens story, and a screenplay.
In addition, his extraordinary speaking ability is
captured in numerous published and recorded
interviews and dialogues.
BALDWIN, JAMES
Baldwin, the eldest of nine children, grew up in

poverty in Harlem. Although close to his mother,
Berdis, and his siblings, Baldwin was terrified of
his puritanical and righteously angry stepfather,
David. At 14, Baldwin experienced a religious
conversion and became a boy preacher in a holiness church. He would later interpret his conversion as a desperate effort to defeat his stepfathers
power, escape the dangers of the street, and flee
the recognition of his own transgressive sexual
desire. These experiences are the focus of much of
Baldwins semiautobiographical writing. His eloquent style was influenced not only by Henry
James, whose work he greatly admired, but also
by the King James Bible, the African American
sermon, and black blues, spiritual, and gospel
music. Although he would break with the church
while he was still a young man, condemning
Christianity for its complicity with slavery and
imperialism, Baldwin would retain his preacherly
voice, employing the jeremiad to shape his moral
vision of a new person and a new nation.
An avid reader and precocious child, Baldwin
was encouraged by his teachers from an early age.
He attended the prestigious, predominately white
and Jewish De Witt Clinton High School, where
he became editor of the literary magazine, The
Magpie, and friends with Richard Avedon (with
whom he collaborated, years later, on the phototext Nothing Personal; Baldwin 1969). After high
school, Baldwin spent a miserable year working in
a defense plant in New Jersey, then moved to the
East Village to begin his career as a struggling
writer, publishing book reviews for the Nation,
New Leader, and Commentary.
Awarded a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship in 1945
with the help of Richard Wright, Baldwin followed Wright to Paris three years later, looking
for refuge from racism and a place to finish his
novel. First, however, Baldwin published his controversial literary manifesto, Everybodys Protest
Novel (1949). Comparing Wrights Native Son
to Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin,
Baldwin argued that both novels reduced human
beings to their social categories and, thus, failed as
art and as protest. Bigger Thomas was just the flip
side of Uncle Tom, one a monster, the other a
victim. In this essay Baldwin conflates a Jamesian
aesthetic of intricately developed character with
the moral/political goal of liberating whites and
blacks from the myth that blacks are not fully
447
human. In Many Thousands Gone (1951),

Baldwin complained that Wright had not represented the relationship that Negroes bear to one
another, that depth of involvement and unspoken
recognition of shared experience which creates a
way of life.
Baldwin would beautifully render this dimension of black life in his semiautobiographical first
novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which
tells the story of John Grimess religious conversion through multiple perspectives and family
histories. Ironically, Baldwin completed this
novel in a remote Swiss village whose inhabitants
had never before seen a black person. Based on
that experience, Stranger in the Village (1953)
meditates on the black writers relationship to
Western culture. Baldwins eloquent rendering
of a complex black subjectivity and intraracial
relationships deeply influenced Toni Morrison,
who, like Baldwin, considers American racial
history and the black experience as central to
questions of national identity.
The essay Notes of a Native Son (1955), like
Baldwins first novel, explores his relationship
with his father and the problem of racial anger,
some dread chronic disease. Appropriately taking its title from Wrights famous novel, Baldwin
frames the essay around his fathers death and
funeral in 1943, the simultaneous birth of his
youngest sister, and the 1943 race riots in Harlem.
Culminating in a paradox, the essay instructs
Baldwin himself and his reader to accept life as
it is, keeping the heart free of hatred and despair, while fighting injustice with all ones
strength an apt anticipation of the challenges
in the coming decade of racial rebellion and white
backlash.
Sonnys Blues (1957), Baldwins most frequently anthologized short story, portrays the
reconciliation of two brothers who represent the
divide between black respectability and the black
artist. The story prefigures major concerns of two
later novels, Tell Me How Long the Trains Been
Gone (1968b) and especially Just Above My Head
(1979), where Baldwin examines relationships
between brothers and the importance of black
music as a means of reconciling a people to a
difficult past and an uncertain future.
Baldwins great theme is the denial of Americas
interracial history and its effect on the private lives
of individuals. At the heart of this denial is the
448
BALDWIN, JAMES
myth of a dangerous and desirable black sexuality,

which has led to a homophobic and misogynistic
notion of masculinity. Preservation of Innocence (1949), an early essay on the problem
of American masculinity, is a thematic blueprint
for Baldwins second novel, Giovannis Room
(1956). Because all of the novels characters
are white, the racial theme wasnt initially
apparent. Yet the whiteness of the protagonist,
David, an American expatriate whose ancestors
conquered a continent, is racially marked. Trying to escape the American version of masculinity,
David flees to Europe only to betray his Italian
lover, Giovanni. This betrayal is part of a larger
failure of love that Baldwin believed to be endemic
to American society. While homosexuality is
explicit in most of Baldwins fiction, for the most
part he avoided the subject in his non-fiction; an
important exception, however, is the late essay
Here Be Dragons (1985c).
After nine years absence, Baldwin returned to
the US in the summer of 1957 to cover the
emerging Civil Rights Movement for Harpers
and Partisan Review. Over the next few years he
made several trips to the American South, writing
two important essays on his early trips: A Letter
from the South: Nobody Knows My Name
(1959) and The Dangerous Road Before Martin
Luther King (1961). These essays focus less on
events than on the psychological effects of changes
in race consciousness and the price being paid by
activists. Baldwin characterizes the South as a
place designed for violence and of private,
unspeakable longings, the place of his
inescapable identity. Other important essays
from this period are The Discovery of What It
Means to Be an American (1959) and The Black
Boy Looks at the White Boy (1961), the latter of
which is Baldwins response to Norman Mailers
The White Negro (1957).
With the publication of The Fire Next Time
(1963), Baldwin gained an international reputation and became a spokesman for the movement.
He appeared on the cover of Time magazine,
brought black intellectuals to meet with Attorney
General Robert Kennedy, traveled across the
country on speaking engagements for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee, organized support for the March on Washington in Paris, and
marched in Selma. In The Fire Next Time, a post-
Christian version of an Old Testament jeremiad,

Baldwin makes rage speak eloquently. Exposing
the criminal white innocence that denies the
reality of black suffering, the essay also cautions
blacks against accepting the white worlds version
of themselves. It ends with a plea to the relatively
conscious whites and the relatively conscious
blacks . . . to end the racial nightmare and achieve
our country. The essay also describes Baldwins
meeting with Elijah Muhammad at the Nation of
Islam (NOI) headquarters in Chicago. Baldwin
had come to NOIs attention following his public
debates with Malcolm X.
During the 1960s, Baldwin characterized himself as a transatlantic commuter. Recent scholarship examines Baldwin as a transatlantic writer,
and considers the significance of the locations
from which he wrote on his work. His third novel,
Another Country (1962), was finished in Istanbul,
where he went to escape pressures he felt in the
United States. The Fire Next Time was conceived
and written from several locations: it was begun in
Switzerland, influenced by a trip to Africa, and
completed in Turkey. His fourth novel, Tell Me
How Long the Trains Been Gone, written mostly in
Turkey and dedicated to the Turkish actor Engin
Cezzar, was much better received there than in the
United States.
Another Country, which draws on Baldwins
experiences in the East Village in the late 1940s,
explores interracial and homosexual relationships. A meditation on the ways intimacy is
affected by racism, homophobia, and gender inequality, it has been called Baldwins novelistic
response to the Civil Rights Movement. Tell Me
How Long the Trains Been Gone (1968b) deals
explicitly with the radicalization of the movement
and the dilemma of a Baldwin-like character, Leo
Proudhammer, who has fallen in love with the
militant, Black Christopher. Blues for Mister
Charlie (1964), a play loosely based on the
Emmett Till case and on another murder that
Baldwin helped Medgar Evers investigate in
Mississippi, is a powerful rendering of the Civil
Rights Movement at the crossroads between
non-violent resistance and militant self-defense.
It also explores the psychology of a white racist
character, as does Baldwins disturbing short
story, Going to Meet the Man (1965).
By the mid-1960s, Baldwins work was negatively reviewed as Black Power propaganda by the
BANKS, RUSSELL
liberal press, which characterized him as bitter

and out of touch with racial progress. Baldwin
wrote a screenplay on the life of Malcolm X for
Columbia Studios, publically defended Angela
Davis, and befriended the Black Panthers. At the
same time, he came under attack by Eldridge
Cleaver and others for his homosexuality;
Baldwins responses to Black Power and to the
attacks on his sexuality have been contentious
issues for literary critics. No Name in the Street
(1972) is Baldwins retrospective essay on his
involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
In the mid-1970s, Baldwin bought a house in
Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southern France. In the
1980s, he made trips to the United States to cover
the Atlanta child murders, the subject of Evidence
of Things Not Seen (1985a), and to teach after
being awarded an honorary degree by the University of Massachusetts. His last two novels, If
Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My
Head (1979), explore the role of the black family
in sustaining the black artist and the importance
of passing on a resistant, black, blues culture to the
next generation. His project of redefining masculinity and exploring the interdependence of individual identities finds its most complete expression in the protagonist of his last novel, Arthur
Montana, a gay gospel singer, and his lover,
appropriately named Jimmy. James Baldwin
died of cancer at home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence
on December 1, 1987. He was 63.
SEE ALSO: Ellison, Ralph (AF); Ethnicity
and Fiction (AF); Expatriate Fiction (AF); James,
Henry (AF); Mailer, Norman (AF); Queer
Modernism (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
Note: All individual essays mentioned are reprinted
in Baldwin (1985c) unless otherwise listed.
Baldwin, J. (1949). Preservation of Innocence. Zero,
1(2), 1422.
Baldwin, J. (1953). Go Tell It on the Mountain. New
York: Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1956). Giovannis Room. New York: Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1962). Another Country. New York: Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1964). Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play.
New York: Dell.
Baldwin, J. (1965). Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1968a). Amen Corner: A Play. New York:
Dial.
449
Baldwin, J. (1968b). Tell Me How Long the Trains Been

Gone. New York: Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1971). A Rap on Race by Margaret Mead
and James Baldwin. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Baldwin, J. (1973a). A Dialogue by James Baldwin and
Nikki Giovanni. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Baldwin, J. (1973b). One Day When I Was Lost: A
Scenario. New York: Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1974). If Beale Street Could Talk. New York:
Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1976). Little Man, Little Man. New York:
Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1979). Just Above My Head. New York: Dial.
Baldwin, J. (1985a). Evidence of Things Not Seen.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Baldwin, J. (1985b). Jimmys Blues: Selected Poems.
New York: St. Martins.
Baldwin, J. (1985c). The Price of the Ticket: Collected
Nonfiction 19481985. New York: St. Martins/
Marek.
Baldwin, J. (1989). Conversations with James Baldwin
(ed. F. L. Standley & L. H. Pratt). Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi.
Baldwin, J., & Avedon, R. (1964). Nothing Personal.
New York: Penguin.
Field, D. (2009). A Historical Guide to James Baldwin.
Harris, T. (1996). New Essays on Go Tell It on the
Mountain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
King, L., & Scott, L. O. (2006). James Baldwin and Toni
Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical
Essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Leeming, D. (1994). James Baldwin: A Biography.
New York: Knopf.
McBride, D. A. (ed.) (1999). James Baldwin Now.
New York: New York University Press.
Miller, Q. D. (ed.) (2000). Reviewing James Baldwin:
Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Scott, L. O. (2002). James Baldwins Later Fiction:
Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press.
Troupe, Q. (ed.) (1989). James Baldwin: The Legacy.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
Zaborowska, M. (2009). James Baldwins Turkish
Decade: Erotics of Exile. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Banks, Russell
ANTHONY HUTCHISON
Born in New Hampshire in 1940, Russell Banks

has risen from humble blue-collar origins to
450
BANKS, RUSSELL
become an increasingly prominent figure in

American letters. Having left college after a few
months in 1959, Banks headed south with the
intention of joining Fidel Castro in the Sierra
Maestra mountains but wound up staying in
Florida, where he accumulated much of the experience of divorce, alcoholism, and violence
that would form the basis of his early fiction.
In the 1970s Banks began publishing short
fiction in small journals. By the end of the decade,
he was supplementing this output with novels
influenced by the playful postmodernist fiction of
the 1960s. Nonetheless, works from this period
such as Family Life (1975a) and Hamilton Stark
(1978a) were equally concerned with the idle
cruelties of families struggling to come to terms
with post-industrial economic and cultural
conditions.
It is thus perhaps unsurprising that Bankss
fiction started to find a more mainstream readership during the greater socio-economic polarization of the Reagan years. The acclaimed story
collection Trailerpark (1981) and the novels
Continental Drift (1985) and Affliction depict the
culturally underrepresented working-class communities of upstate New York and New England
at this time. This work also resonated with the
dirty realism then in vogue, although Bankss
cultural milieu is very much his own. His is the
modern invisible republic of the Northern poor
eking out existences in isolated trailer parks and
decaying family homes built by earlier generations. These are men and women whose American dreams have been eroded by long, unrelenting processes of generational attrition (a fact
ironically affirmed in the title of the 1986 collection, Success Stories). They inhabit histories
marked by frontier hubris and Protestant fatalism. This frequently gives Bankss work a spiritual depth a theological dimension rendered
most explicit in the testimony of a seventeenthcentury Puritan divine that forms the basis of the
allegorical novella The Relation of My Imprisonment (1983).
The fact that Bankss father and three grandparents were Canadian may well explain the
critical distance and the forensic quality of the
cultural diagnoses offered in his work. Yet in these
novels and others, such as The Sweet Hereafter
(1991) in which a small Adirondack town is
devastated by a school bus accident, he also
demonstrates an astonishing capacity to convey

sympathy and a sense of the complex interior lives
of his characters.
Bankss stress on the impact of geography on
human consciousness and his preoccupation with
modes of communal history as they manifest
themselves in parentchild relations are also crucial. In his later fiction, the latter element particularly comes to the fore. Cloudsplitter, his longest
novel, is an impressive fictional depiction of the
life of the radical abolitionist John Brown as
perceived through the eyes of his son Owen. This
approach perhaps modeled on the conflicted
narrative provided in Moby-Dick, directed at
another nineteenth-century monomaniac
yields a profound meditation on the tortuous
racial history of the United States. Cloudsplitter
might be regarded as the most important work of
American historical fiction since Toni Morrisons
Beloved (1987).
Race has always been one of Bankss central
themes. Indeed, aside from Mark Twain and
William Faulkner, it is difficult to think of a white
male writer who has negotiated the issue in as
sustained, unflinching, and intelligent a fashion.
A good degree of significance is attached to
white working-class characters racial attitudes
throughout the short fiction. However, it is in
the novels that scrutiny of the topic becomes at
once more intense and expansive.
Having spent some time in Jamaica in the mid1970s, Banks uses it as the setting for The Book of
Jamaica (1980), an early tale of a US college
professors ill-fated encounter with the Maroon
tribe. The island is also the backdrop for the latter
half of Rule of the Bone (1995), a not altogether
convincing Huck Finn-type yarn that tells of an
American teenagers marijuana-fueled adventures in the US and the Caribbean.
Transnational contexts for African America
also feature in Continental Drift, one narrative
strand of which deals with a young Haitian refugees desperate efforts to make it to the United
States, and The Darling (2004). The latter is the
story of Hannah Musgrave, a 1960s radical, and
her subsequent life underground in the US and
Liberia. The novel is especially powerful in its
depiction of her fraught marriage to a politician in
the West African state and, even more poignantly,
her ultimate estrangement from her African
children.
BARNES, DJUNA
451
Despite much thematic continuity, there has

undoubtedly been a turn toward the historical in
Bankss later work. As a consequence, his subject
matter has become increasingly difficult to predict. The Reserve (2008) bemused a number of
reviewers with its focus on the Depression-proof
1930s aristocracy of the Northeast and a Hollywood-friendly plot that veered toward melodrama. Nonetheless, despite receiving relatively little
attention from literary scholars in the academy,
Russell Bankss work remains among the most
eagerly awaited and widely reviewed outside the
very top rank of American novelists.
Hutchison, A. (2007). Representative Man: John Brown

and the Politics of Redemption in Russell Banks.
Cloudsplitter: Journal of American Studies, 41(1),
6782.
Niemi, R. (1997). Russell Banks. New York: Twayne.
OLoughlin, J. (2002). The Whiteness of Bone: Russell
Banks Rule of the Bone and the Contradictory Legacy
of Huckleberry Finn. Modern Language Studies, 32(1),
3142.
SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF);

Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF);
Working Class Fiction (BIF)
Born in 1892, Djuna Barnes was active as a writer

between 1913 and 1982, the date of her death. Her
most famous work is the now classic modernist
novel, Nightwood (2007 [1936]), first published
with an enthusiastic introduction by T. S. Eliot.
Her experimental oeuvre spans a dazzling range of
genres and media. Her first collection of rhymes
and rhythms, which she illustrated, was published in 1915 (1994 [1915]), and a collection of
short stories, plays, and portraits entitled A Book
appeared in 1923, and was later republished as A
Night Among the Horses (1929). Her illustrated
picaresque novel Ryder (1928) was briefly a bestseller, while the same year she privately distributed in Paris her illustrated Ladies Almanack (2006
[1928]). A sample of her artwork can be accessed
in the volume Poes Mother (1995), while a larger
number of originals are available in the Djuna
Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of
Maryland, College Park. In 1958 Faber and Faber
published her verse play, The Antiphon. Most of
her poems were published posthumously, in 1982
and in 2005.
Barness oeuvre is both an extraordinary example of modernist linguistic and thematic experimentalism and a trenchant critique of key modernist concepts such as authority, heterosexuality,
and literary purity. Fearlessly engaging with
themes spanning from lesbianism to polygamy
and with cultural manifestations ranging from
popular amusement parks to seventeenth-century
poetry, Barness work never exempts itself from
the critical and linguistic dissections it performs.
Between 1913 and the early 1920s, Barnes
regularly contributed as a journalist to New York
newspapers and magazines, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Press, New York World

Banks, R. (1974). Snow. Orem, UT: Granite.
Banks, R. (1975a). Family Life. New York: Avon.
Banks, R. (1975b). Searching for Survivors. New York:
Fiction Collective.
Banks, R. (1978a). Hamilton Stark. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Banks, R. (1978b). The New World. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Banks, R. (1980). The Book of Jamaica. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Banks, R. (1981). Trailerpark. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Banks, R. (1983). The Relation of My Imprisonment.
Washington, DC: Sun and Moon.
Banks, R. (1985). Continental Drift. New York: Harper
and Row.
Banks, R. (1986). Success Stories. New York: Harper and
Row.
Banks, R. (1989). Affliction. New York: Harper and Row.
Banks, R. (1991). The Sweet Hereafter. New York:
HarperCollins.
Banks, R. (1995). Rule of the Bone. New York:
HarperCollins.
Banks, R. (1998). Cloudsplitter. New York:
HarperCollins.
Banks, R. (2000). The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of
Russell Banks. New York: HarperCollins.
Banks, R. (2004). The Darling. New York:
HarperCollins.
Banks, R. (2008a). Dreaming Up America. New York:
Seven Stories.
Banks, R. (2008b). The Reserve. New York:
HarperCollins.
Barnes, Djuna
DANIELA CASELLI
452
BARNES, DJUNA
Magazine, New York Tribune, New York Morning

Telegraph Sunday Magazine, and New York Sun
Magazine. She also wrote, sometimes under pseudonyms, for Vanity Fair and Shadowland. Her
work covers a wide variety of topics and subjects,
from interviews with famous New York stage and
screen personalities and cultural figures (e.g.,
Lillian Russell, Flo Ziegfield, Alfred Stieglitz,
Helen Westley, and Coco Chanel) to short stories
(e.g., The Murder in the Palm-Room: An Adventure with the Woman in Silver and Black and
What Is Good Form in Dying: In Which a Dozen
Dainty Deaths Are Suggested for Daring
Damsels). She also wrote short plays (e.g., The
Death of Life and At the Roots of the Stars) and
critical articles, such as the two pieces on James
Joyce that appeared in Vanity Fair and the Double
Dealer in 1922. While writing for wide-circulation
papers, Barnes also sporadically contributed to
avant garde and little magazines like Brunos
Weekly, the Double Dealer, the Little Review, and,
in Paris, transition. Some of her early plays, including Three From the Earth, Kurzy of the Sea,
and An Irish Triangle, were produced by the
Provincetown Players and performed in New
York between 1919 and 1920. In 1922 she was
sent by McCalls magazine on an assignment in
Paris, where she lived until the outbreak of World
War II; during these two decades she traveled to
Berlin, London, and Hayford Hall (Peggy
Guggenheims country house), frequenting many
literary circles and building a reputation for being
as witty as she was beautiful. In the early 1930s she
was also a contributor to the Theatre Guild Magazine with her illustrated column, The Playgoers
Almanac.
Barnes survived her mythical 1920s self by
living from 1940 onward what she describes as
the life of a Trappist in a studio flat in Patchin
Place, Greenwich Village, New York. Barness
post-1940 reclusiveness is part of her longstanding antipathy toward the cult of the self, which
made her systematically decline requests for interviews and forms of public participation. Barness
correspondence indicates that she relentlessly
discouraged biographical approaches to her work
or legendary reconstructions of her life. Nevertheless, criticism has had much to say about her
long-term relationship with Thelma Wood and
her unconventional upbringing in Cornwall-onHudson, New York, with her larger-than-life
feminist and intellectual grandmother and her

Whitmanesque father, who championed free love
and autarchic educational theories and practiced
bigamy. Both Ryder and The Antiphon stage the
complexities inherent in family dynamics and the
deadly consequences of attempting to love vicariously the bohemian myth of the artist.
Barness oeuvre is committed to a high modernist notion of art as a supremely difficult undertaking; however, it has never been fully absorbed within the literary history of the twentieth
century because of its inherent skepticism toward
literary genealogy and of its staged illegitimate
and belated self-conception. In her correspondence, Barnes often quotes approvingly a clipping
from a German magazine that reads, [H]er work
will not fall into oblivion it was predestined for it
from the outset (Barnes to Cristina Campo,
1969b). The entire Barnes oeuvre makes large use
of intertextual references, from Donne to Middleton, from Blake to Eliot, from Fielding to
Chaucer, from Shakespeare to nursery rhymes,
from Radclyffe Hall to popular genres such as the
almanac. It sabotages novelty in favor of anachronistic recuperations of previous literary ages
and strives to be not modern but avant-garde
(Barnes to Christine Koschel, 1969a). Barness
musical, often ungrammatical use of American
English destroys the possibility of transparency
and naturalness, while her corpus is pervaded by
archaisms that produce a language that is wornout, used, and never innocent. Much has been
made of the obscurity, unintelligibility, difficulty,
and impenetrability of Barness corpus; her difficulty, however, should be read not as elitism or
opacity, but as the figure of the unending complexity that in her work pervades every aspect of
reality.
Gender and sexuality are key components of
this anachronistic, inopportune, and impenetrable modernism, since the obscene quality of
Barness improper modernism has much to do
with authority, femininity, and sexual orientation. Like Miranda in The Antiphon, abused as the
somewhat well-used spinster who stands for
Virgo, Barnes refuses to have herself clapped
between the palms of their approval, rejects the
family as the basis of heterosexual procreation,
dissects the politics of lesbianism, and stages the
tragedy of self-birth and annihilation. A persistent
engagement with genealogy on the thematic level
BARNES, DJUNA
goes hand in hand with a refusal to either acknowledge a literary legacy or produce lawful
offspring, thus openly waging war against linguistic and literary legitimacy.
These characteristics can be seen throughout
her work. Ladies Almanack has been read as a
spoof of Natalie Clifford Barneys expatriate
lesbian coterie in Paris, even though Barnes
always resisted this interpretation. The book is
a visually stunning artifact that follows a monthly structure to produce a potted history and a
mythology of lesbianism, a narrative of the dealings of the circle of Evangeline Musset, and an
implacable dissection of the class and sexual
politics at work within the group. Both popular
and sophisticated, the almanac is an example
of the playful way in which Barnes equivocates
with the languages of the past (from the fifteenth
to the eighteenth centuries in this case) and of
the power of her biting satire. Importantly, this
text neither offers up lesbianism as a spectacle
nor uncritically celebrates these early experiments in communitarian lesbian life.
Defined by Barnes as a female Tom Jones, her
1928 picaresque novel Ryder makes the most of
learnedness, intertextuality, and equivocation.
Ryder is Joycean in its use of neologisms but
spurns Ulyssess mythological scaffolding and
boldly uses a bigamous family as the threadbarest
of frameworks. The novel sports epistolary
chapters and a long Chaucerian poem, and opens
with a long biblical injunction; however, its own
Jesus mundane is a parody of a Whitmanian
hero who has misread Emerson. It is a great
American novel in commerce with England, and
an originally illustrated modernist work whose
Rabelaisian bawdiness marks the pervasive instability of meaning.
When Nightwood was first published, it was
hailed as an ambitious and extraordinary experimental novel but not universally liked. The novel
narrates the love between Nora Flood and the
restless Robin Vote, meet of child and desperado, whom even Noras boundless love cannot keep still; the story of Guido Volkbein, whose
barony is fabricated and progeny doomed; and
the wanderings of Dr. Matthew-mighty-grainof-salt-Dante-OConnor, the cross-dressing unlicensed practitioner, whose magnificent wit,
ingenuity, and desperation are expressed in his
soliloquies. Like its characters, Nightwood dis-
453
obeys all the rules it lies down, tainting modernist

purity with baroque inscriptions and lamentations of biblical proportions. A novel which challenges the very structure of the genre, Nightwood
produces a language both modernist in its experimentalism and ancient in its use of literary
sources. Its unexpurgated sentences deflower
themselves, questioning their origins and destiny,
metamorphosing under our eyes through a seductive and tormenting game of mirrors, repetition, and similes.
The Antiphon is a play in three acts, published
after much internal debate at Faber and Faber
and translated into Swedish in 1960 by Dag
Hammarskj
old (then secretary-general to the
United Nations) and Karl Ragnar Gierow. It
premiered at Stockholms Royal Dramatic Theatre on February 17, 1961. The play revolves
around the history of the Burley Hobbs family;
in Acts I and II, Miranda, Jack, her attendant (later
to be revealed as Jeremy, one of her brothers), the
two brothers Elisha and Dudley, uncle Jonathan
Burley, and Augusta, the mother, narrate stories
about the absent characters (Titus Higby Hobbs
of Salem, the father; Victoria, the grandmother;
and Tituss mistresses) and times gone by
(Augustas childhood, Mirandas Parisian years).
This most impossible cabinet drama of the century (Barnes to Janet Flanner and Solita Solano,
n.d.) was not written as the well made drama is
written but as she had to write it, for nothing
and nobody (Barnes to Emily Coleman 1958).
Miranda is the melancholic woman placed center
stage: she is scorned by her brothers; she writes
her savage comedies in French (II: 147); and she
makes her mother exclaim, May God protect us!
I wonder what youll write / When I am dead
and gone (III: 209). The play concludes with
the tragic death of mother and daughter on a
gryphon-shaped bed/carriage.
By confronting us with complexity and difficulty, by interrogating the relation between
modernity and the past, and by denaturalizing
sexuality and textuality, Barness oeuvre is an
extraordinary example of twentieth-century
American experimental literature.
Expatriate Fiction (AF); Gender and the
Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
Queer Modernism (AF)
454
BARTH, JOHN

Barnes, D. (1923). A Book. New York: Boni and
Liveright.
Barnes, D. (1928). Ryder. New York: Liveright.
Barnes, D. (1929). A Night Among the Horses. New York:
Liveright.
Barnes, D. (1958). [Correspondence to Emily
Coleman]. Aug. 23. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special
Collections, University of Maryland, College Park.
Barnes, D. (1969a). [Correspondence to Christine
Koschel]. April 15. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special
Collections, University of Maryland, College Park,
series II, box 10, folder 47.
Barnes, D. (1969b). [Correspondence to Cristina
Campo]. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections,
University of Maryland, College Park, series II, box 2,
folder 43.
Barnes, D. (1982). Creatures in an Alphabet. New York:
Dial Press.
Barnes, D. (1987). I Could Never Be Lonely Without a
Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (ed. A. Barry,
foreword and commentary D. Messerli). London:
Virago.
Barnes, D. (1989). New York (ed. with commentary A.
Barry, foreword D. Messerli). Los Angeles: Sun and
Moon.
Barnes, D. (1994). A Book of Repulsive Women: 8
Rhythms and 5 Drawings [1915]. Los Angeles: Sun
and Moon.
Barnes, D. (1995). Nightwood: The Original Version and
Related Drafts (ed. C. J. Plumb). Normal, IL: Dalkey
Archive.
Barnes, D. (1995). Poes Mother (ed. D. Messerli).
Barnes, D. (1998). Selected Works of Djuna Barnes:
Spillway/The Antiphon/Nightwood [1962]. London:
Faber and Faber.
Barnes, D. (2005). Collected Poems with Notes Towards a
Memoir (ed. P. Herring & O. Stutman). Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Barnes, D. (2006). Ladies Almanack [1928] (afterword
D. Caselli). Manchester: Carcanet.
Barnes, D. (2007). Nightwood [1936] (new intro. J.
Winterson, pref. T. S. Eliot). London: Faber
and Faber.
Barnes, D.(n.d.). [Correspondence to Janet Flanner and
Solita Solano]. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special
Collections, University of Maryland, College Park.
Broe, M. L. (ed.) (1991). Silence and Power:
A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (afterword
C. Stimpson). Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Cagidemetrio, A. (1979). Una Strada Nel Bosco:
Scrittura e Coscienza in Djuna Barnes. Vicenza:
Neri Pozza.
Caselli, D. (2009). Improper Modernism: Djuna Barness

Bewildering Corpus. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Frank, J. (1996). The Widening Gyre. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Goody, A. (2007). Modernist Articulations: A Cultural
Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein.
Miller, T. (1999). Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and
the Arts Between the World Wars. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Parsons, D. (2003). Djuna Barnes. Horndon: Northcote
House.
Wallace, J.-A., & Elliott, B. (1994). Women Artists and
Writers: Modernist (Im)positionings. London:
Routledge.
West, P. (1990). The Havoc of This Nicety (Djuna
Barnes). Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 16(1), 15764.
(Reprinted as an Afterword in Djuna Barnes, Ryder.
Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1995.).
Barth, John
HEIDE ZIEGLER
John Barths role in defining and shaping literary

postmodernism has been essential: the epoch may
be conceived as having begun with the publication
of his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1967
[1960]). This novel contains all the elements that
later critics have listed as marking the transition
from late modernism to a new (American) period
in the old art of storytelling: rewriting history in
ironic fashion (in the case of The Sot-Weed Factor,
the history of colonial Maryland), parodying the
American quest for identity (through the heros
literal preservation of his innocence), and transcending the boundaries between different genres
(in this case, between the poem The Sot-Weed
Factor of one Ebenezer Cooke, first published in
1708, and Barths mid-twentieth-century novel of
the same title). To be an exponent of this new era
in which self-reflexivity increasingly came to pervade all traditional narrative devices has been
Barths self-appointed mission ever since. Despite
his indebtedness to non-US writers like Lawrence
Sterne, Gustave Flaubert, Jorge Luis Borges, and
Italo Calvino, Barths stance is nevertheless that of
a decidedly contemporary American writer who
mainly works his own corner of the land: Maryland, its Eastern Shore, and Chesapeake Bay. Here
he writes and rewrites his fictions in order to
create his own great narrative cycle.
BARTH, JOHN
John Simmons Barth was born on May 27,

1930, in Cambridge, Maryland. After attending
Cambridge High School, Barth, in the summer of
1947, entered the Juilliard School of Music in New
York City, where he studied harmony and orchestration for a few months. Later in 1947, he entered
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he
took a BA in 1951 and an MA in 1952. From 1953
to 1972, Barth taught at Pennsylvania State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Boston University. In 1973, he accepted
the post of professor in the graduate writing
seminars at Johns Hopkins, thus returning both
to his alma mater and to Maryland. When he
retired from that position, he and his second wife,
the regular dedicatee of all his books since their
marriage in 1970, moved to their present home on
the Eastern Shore in Chestertown, Maryland
whence they often sail the waters of Chesapeake
Bay, the planets largest estuarine system (2008,
154), and beyond. John Barths fiction has won
the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud
Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime
Achievement Award.
Living at the center of a world that permits
reaching out to other times and places, Barth
ambitiously set out to develop his own chain of
being. From the tale of the anonymous minstrel of
the Third Book of the Odyssey (eighth century
BCE) who was marooned on a lonely island in the
Aegean by Agamemnons rival, Aegisthus, and
who, according to Barth in Lost in the Funhouse
(1968), invented all of the literary genres and set
his fictions afloat in nine amphorae to be deciphered by future generations of readers; to the
re-orchestration of Scheherazades One Thousand
and One Nights (collected between the eighth and
the sixteenth centuries CE in Baghdad and in
Cairo), especially the stories of Sindbad the Sailor,
in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991);
up to autobiographical present-day Chesapeake
Bay cruising stories, Barth has become more and
more obsessed with waterways and voyages as a
means to connect literary tradition and his own
fictions.
For an understanding of the beginnings of
literary postmodernism, two essays by John Barth
have for a long time served as landmarks: The
Literature of Exhaustion (1968) and its corrective, The Literature of Replenishment (1979),
both published first in the Atlantic Monthly and
455
later collected in The Friday Book (1984). The core

message of the first essay is that the forms and
modes of art live in human history and are
therefore subject to used-upness, at least in the
minds of significant numbers of artists in particular times and places: in other words, that artistic
conventions are liable to be retired, subverted,
transcended, transformed, or even deployed
against themselves to generate new and lively
work (1984, 205). The second essay exfoliates
this statement by maintaining that postmodernist
fiction is the synthesis or transcension of the
antithesis of premodernism and modernism.
Reading The Literature of Exhaustion as a
manifesto on the end of literature is, therefore,
clearly a misreading; however, the message that
Barth himself seemed to send with his first collection of short fictions, published in the same
year (Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape,
Live Voice), appears to validate that nihilistic
suspicion. Its Frame-Tale, a M
obius strip which
turns upon itself, endlessly repeating, Once upon
a time there was a story that began, did not seem
to promise a healthy future for postmodernist
writers who also wanted to be masters of the
storytellers art. To undo this impression and to
prove instead that the true postmodernist writers
work is marked by Umberto Ecos double
coding, which accepts the challenges of the past
and extends them in the playful and ironic reinventions of the present, have been Barths endeavors ever since.
At first, Barths novels seemed to come in pairs,
an impression shared by the author himself at
least up to the publication of LETTERS (1979), an
epistolary novel that brings together the main
characters of his former books as writers of letters
to each other, abetted by the (capital A) Author
himself who, by calling into question the role of
implied author, liberates his characters from the
restrictions of their former textual positions.
Thus, The Floating Opera (1967a [1956]) and The
End of the Road (1958), both written in 1955, have
often been dubbed existentialist novels, or novels
of black humor. Todd Andrews, the narrator of
The Floating Opera, interprets the unexplained
suicide of his late father as the reason for having
lost faith in the value of free will, ultimately
coming to the conclusion that nothing has intrinsic value (1967a [1956] 223), including living
or taking ones own life. Jacob Horner, in The End
456
BARTH, JOHN
of the Road, succumbs to the mythotherapy of

his black doctor, which involves the contingent
use of any number of myths as a therapeutic
framework for ones choices, thereby deliberately
negating any absolute values. In LETTERS, however, Todd Andrews manages to have a relationship with Jeannine, who is possibly his daughter,
offspring of a more or less acknowledged adulterous triangle in The Floating Opera; thus, at
70 years of age, he reverses his former attitude,
maintaining, Nothing has intrinsic value . . .
which is as much as to say: Everything has
intrinsic value! (1979, 96).
In retrospect, it becomes clear that the
mythotherapy of The End of the Road harks
forward to the myth of the Wandering Hero in
Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus
(1966), and even to the Perseid and
Bellerophoniad of Chimera (1972), and that
the intertextual relationship between Todd
Andrews and Jacob Horner resembles that of
Ebenezer Cooke and Henry Burlingame in The
Sot-Weed Factor. John Barths novels and series of
short fictions, in other words, do not come in
pairs, but in narrative cycles, and the main topic of
his fictions is not nihilism, but innocence (and its
counterpart, wise experience). The Sot-Weed
Factor is a mid-twentieth-century novel that
echoes late-seventeenth-century English and acknowledges Henry Fieldings The History of Tom
Jones as its literary precursor. Barths hero fails as a
character, but eventually, with the help of his midtwentieth-century mentor, who in the novel takes
the form of Henry Burlingame III, succeeds as a
writer. Ebenezer is a naive and programmatically
virginal tobacco factor, or trading agent, misadventuring in the New World. His artificially
sustained innocence, which rests on unfounded
idealism, is challenged time and again by his harsh
encounters with reality; but when he understands
that arrested development is potentially disastrous not only to himself but also to those related
to him, he marries the former whore Joan Toast,
thereby also regaining his lost estate. Meanwhile
Burlingame, Barths proxy in the conquest of
Marylands past, has been creating his own fictitious and playful reality in the interstices of
recorded history, thereby proving history itself to
be a kind of fiction. With this monumental work
about North Americas colonial past and the
locale of tidewater Maryland, as well as the several
differences between art and life, Barth had found

his voice as a postmodern writer. He has been
both Ebenezer Cooke and Henry Burlingame in
all the fictions he has written since, although those
two characters, like innocence and experience, art
and life, tend to become more and more indistinguishable as Barths life cycle and his tale cycles
progress.
All of Barths fictions are long stories, even
those that claim to be collections of short stories
or novellas, like Lost in the Funhouse, Chimera, On
With the Story: Stories (1996); The Book of Ten
Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2005); Where
Three Roads Meet (2005); or The Development
(2008), because Barth creates a new fictional
universe for each of his books, which he then
inhabits for several years. Yet while his books are
about, for instance, the myth of the Wandering
Hero, formerly and in present times; the role of
the storyteller over the course of the centuries;
identity and the frame-tale; the function of endings in art and in life; Borgesian forms of intertextuality; or the relationship of author and reader
as that of lovers, they are also self-reflexively
focalized upon their own language and processes
and narrative architecture.
The myth of the Wandering Hero, who is all of
us, writ large (in Further Fridays, 1995, 269), is
most clearly expounded in Giles Goat-Boy, and
parallels Barths own sense of adventure at that
time of his life, the High Sixtiesthe adventure
of a transcendental, life-changing and even culture-changing sort (268). Giles Goat-Boy not
only has been sired by a computer, but also is
dictating his life story to that very machine, a life
story that combines tragic and mystic aspects by
way of the comic.
Scheherazade, the storyteller for whom storytelling is an existential ground situation, is met
by the author himself in the Dunyazadiad.
When they mutually come up with the idea that
the key to the treasure is the treasure (in Chimera,
1972, 11), the author is translated from his desk to
her library. He then proceeds to tell Scheherazade
the stories of her One Thousand and One Nights
day after day, which she in turn tells to King
Shahryar at night. Similarly, in The Last Voyage of
Somebody the Sailor, a twentieth-century New
Journalist drops out of his American century
into Sindbads. Through the telling of stories,
an intertextuality is established that not only
BARTH, JOHN
confuses the notion of literary precursor and

successor, but also compensates the original loss
of virginity (or narrative authenticity) by replenishing the reader with what amounts to a virgin
story that is also about the loss of virginity.
The frame-tale begins to figure in Lost in the
Funhouse, not only in the M
obius strip of FrameTale but also in an intricate story about the loss of
identity, called Menelaiad, a series of seven
concentric stories-within-stories, so arranged that
the climax of the innermost precipitates that of the
next tale out, and so on, until the narrative voices
can no longer remember their own time and place.
Tales-within-tales can also be found in The Tidewater Tales (1987) and The Book of Ten Nights and
a Night. In a sense, each further book by John
Barth frames his former ones, re-cycling former
themes and characters by establishing one more
concentric tale. Endings in Barths fictions therefore are not of metaphysical importance, as exemplified in the Bellorophoniad, the last of the
three novellas of Chimera, where the last incomplete sentence is reincorporated into the tale itself:
Its no Bellerophoniad. Its a [Chimera] (1972,
308); nor do they carry significance as linguistic
transformations, because they may also be rebeginnings, as in Sabbatical: A Romance (1982):
If thats going to be our story, then lets begin it at
the end and end at the beginning, so we can go on
forever. Begin with our living happily ever after
(1982, 365).
Finally, the authors conviction that writing and
reading, or telling and listening, are literally ways
of making love is first revealed in Dunyazadiad,
the first of the Chimera novellas; it has been
informing Barths fictions ever since, connecting
art and life in various forms of passionate
virtuosity (1972, 24). However, this is the stance
of the professional storyteller, and the relationship
is that of author and ideal reader. Barths real
readers find their place in the image of The Floating
Opera. This is the name of a showboat that used to
travel around the Virginia and Maryland tidewater
areas in the 1930s. Todd Andrews, the narrator of
Barths first novel, imagines a showboat which
would drift along the shores of Chesapeake Bay
and keep a play going continuously while the
audience would sit along both banks. The showboat metaphor tends to reappear in Barths fiction,
in the title of the partly autobiographical book
Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994) and
457
again, in extensive realistic detail, in Coming

Soon!!! A Narrative (2001). It connects with many
of Barths amateur interests: sailing practicalities first and foremost among them, but also
science, music, and present-day American politics
and economics.
SEE ALSO: Barthelme, Donald (AF);
Coover, Robert (AF); Gass, William H. (AF);
Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Minimalist/
Maximalist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction
(AF); The Road Novel (AF)
Barth, J. (1958). The End of the Road. New York:
Doubleday.
Barth, J. (1966). Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New
Syllabus. New York: Doubleday.
Barth, J. (1967a). The Floating Opera [1956]. New York:
Doubleday.
Barth, J. (1967b). The Sot-Weed Factor [1960]. New
York: Doubleday.
Barth, J. (1968). Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print,
Tape, Live Voice. New York: Doubleday.
Barth, J. (1972). Chimera. New York: Random
House.
Barth, J. (1979). LETTERS: A Novel. New York:
Putnams.
Barth, J. (1982). Sabbatical: A Romance. New York:
Putnams.
Barth, J. (1984). The Friday Book: Essays and Other
Nonfiction. New York: Putnams.
Barth, J. (1987). The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. New
York: Putnams.
Barth, J. (1991). The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.
Barth, J. (1994). Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera.
Barth, J. (1995). Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures,
and Other Nonfiction 19841994. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Barth, J. (1996). On with the Story: Stories. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Barth, J. (2001). Coming Soon!!! A Narrative. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Barth, J. (2004). The Book of Ten Nights and a Night:
Eleven Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Barth, J. (2005). Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas.
Barth, J. (2008). The Development: Nine Stories. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Clavier, B. (2007). John Barth and Postmodernism:
Spatiality, Travel, Montage. New York: Peter Lang.
458
BARTHELME, DONALD
ODonnell, P. (1986). Passionate Doubts: Designs of

Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Scott, S. D. (2000). The Gamefulness of American
Postmodernism: John Barth & Louise Erdrich. New
York: Peter Lang.
Tobin, P. (1992). John Barth and the Anxiety of
Continuance. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Ziegler, H. (1987). John Barth. London: Methuen.
Barthelme, Donald
PATRICK ODONNELL
Donald Barthelme (193189) is, along with writers such as John Barth and Robert Coover, one of
the founders of postmodernist American writing.
Working primarily, but certainly not exclusively,
in the genre of the short story, Barthelmes fictions, while sometimes considered to be elaborate
conceptual constructions, are better conceived as
jazz riffs on a theme or idea, even a single word,
that layer discourses and images from an encyclopedic realm of disciplines and knowledge.
Barthelmes narratives are often examples of postmodern pastiche, in which a single story can
reference dozens of previous works across the
range of Western literature through parodic citation. The son of a professor of architecture,
Barthelmes stories can be thought of as architectural experiments on the levels of form and genre
that contain, at times, noisy, multidiscursive linguistic forays that challenge the boundaries of
form.
Born in Philadelphia, Barthelme spent much
of the early part of his life in Houston, Texas,
where his father taught at the University of
Houston. The eldest son in a family of writers
(his two brothers, Frederick and Steven, are both
well-published writers and teachers of creative
writing), Barthelme studied philosophy and art
at the University of Houston, and began a career
as, briefly, a journalist, and then a writer of
fiction, publishing his first story in 1961 while
serving for a short period as director of the
Contemporary Art Museum in Houston. He
moved to New York City and published his
first of many stories with the New Yorker in
1963. Over the course of his career, Barthelme
authored over 100 stories; taught at Boston

University, the University of Buffalo, and the
City College of New York; and was one of the
founding members of the creative writing program at the University of Houston. Barthelme
was the recipient of numerous awards during his
career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Book Award, and National Institute of Arts
and Letters Award.
Barthelmes first collection of stories, Come
Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), provided clear indications of the eclectic, genre-bending, ironic elements that would come to characterize his work:
A Shower of Gold is an absurdist tale of a game
show contestant; Me and Miss Mandible offers
excerpts from the diary of a precocious, and
possibly insane, sixth grader who harbors adult
desires for his schoolteacher; and The Viennese
Opera Ball is an assemblage of conversations,
descriptions, and narratives on an unlikely assortment of topics ranging from abortion to the
building of Islamabad. A second collection of
stories, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
(1968b), established Barthelme as one of the
leading experimental writers of the time. Published following the appearance of his first novel,
Snow White (1967), a contemporary fractured
fairy tale based on the classic story, Unspeakable
Practices contains several of Barthelmes signature
stories, including The Indian Uprising, in
which scenes of troubled domestic life become
intertwined with a contemporary revolution in
Paris and episodes from the Wild West; Robert
Kennedy, Saved from Drowning, presented as a
series of disconnected scenarios from the life and
times of one K., who is the image of the public
man; and The Balloon, which depicts the sudden and sublime manifestation of an ever-growing air-filled object over New York City.
Barthelmes first collection of non-fiction,
Guilty Pleasures (1968a), is a parodic take on
numerous topics, including television, contemporary popular writing, and science; several short
story collections followed as Barthelme hit the
peak of his writing, including City Life (1970),
which contains the notable language experiments
of Bone Bubbles and Brain Damage, as well as
Views of My Father Weeping, a fragmented,
displaced account of fatherhood which was a
frequent subject of concern for Barthelme given
his own deep, problematic relationship with his
BELLOW, SAUL
father. Subsequently, Barthelme collected stories

in Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), and Great
Days (1979), and his first comprehensive collection, Sixty Stories, was published in 1981.
Barthelmes second novel, The Dead Father
(1975), amplifies his interest in fatherhood and
paternity in a narrative of a father-cyborg whose
monstrosity is equaled only by his outlandish
absurdity. A third novel, Paradise (1986), is a
domestic satire about a middle-aged architect
who seemingly has all he can desire when three
young women move into his apartment. In the
last several years of his life, Barthelme continued
to write prolifically, publishing the story collections Overnight to Many Distant Cities in 1983, the
illustrated stories of Sams Bar in 1987 and a
second comprehensive collection, Forty Stories,
in 1987; a novel, The King (1990), offering another
contemporary take on classic stories in this case,
the tales of King Arthur was published posthumously. Barthelme also published plays, a childrens book, and numerous pieces that could be
classified variously as fiction, parable, parody,
essay, or fragment; some of these are included in
the posthumous The Teachings of Don B. (1992)
and Not-Knowing (1997).
Certainly one of the most inventive of contemporary American writers, Barthelmes work continues to exert considerable influence on a number of younger experimental writers, including
Donald Antrim and Ben Marcus.
SEE ALSO: Barth, John (AF); Coover, Robert
(AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
459
Barthelme, D. (1975). The Dead Father. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Barthelme, D. (1976). Amateurs. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Barthelme, D. (1979). Great Days. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Barthelme, D. (1981). Sixty Stories. New York:
Putnams.
Barthelme, D. (1983). Overnight to Many Distant Cities.
New York: Putnams.
Barthelme, D. (1986). Paradise. New York: Putnams.
Barthelme, D. (1987a). Forty Stories. New York:
Putnams.
Barthelme, D. (1987b). Sams Bar. New York:
Doubleday.
Barthelme, D. (1990). The King. New York: Harper and
Row.
Barthelme, D. (1992). The Teachings of Don B.: Satires,
Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of
Donald Barthelme. New York: Turtle Bay Books.
Barthelme, D. (1997). Not Knowing: The Essays and
Interviews of Donald Barthelme. New York: Random
House.
Couturier, M. (1982). Donald Barthelme. New York:
Methuen.
Klinkowitz, J. (1991). Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition.
Maltby, P. (1991). Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme,
Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
McCaffery, L. (1982). The Metafictional Muse: The
Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and
William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Molesworth, C. (1982). Donald Barthelmes Fiction: The
Ironist Saved from Drowning. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press.
Stengel, W. B. (1985). The Shape of Art in the Stories of
Donald Barthelme. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press.

Barthelme, D. (1964). Come Back, Dr. Caligari. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Barthelme, D. (1967). Snow White. New York:
Atheneum.
Barthelme, D. (1968a). Guilty Pleasures. New York:
Barthelme, D. (1968b). Unspeakable Practices,
Unnatural Acts: New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Barthelme, D. (1970). City Life. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Barthelme, D. (1972). Sadness. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Bellow, Saul
GLORIA L. CRONIN
Saul Bellows fiction dominated the American

literary scene during the 1960s and 1970s, as Jewish
American literature came into the literary mainstream. Novelist, short story and novella writer,
essayist, playwright, and memoirist, he set most
of his works in Chicago, and wrote out of the
Midwestern realist tradition of Theodore Dreiser
and Ernest Hemingway. Nearly all of his works
feature male personae (only one female) who
460
BELLOW, SAUL
anguish over the legacy of early modernist nihilism, reflect on the immigrant Jewish American
experience, explore the fraught issues of twentiethcentury American masculinities, depict the high
comedy of failed heterosexual romance, and
wrangle incessantly with the religious issue of
transcendence. By 1976, when he was awarded
the Nobel Prize, he had created what critics identified as the quintessential modern American
urban literary voice.
Born in Lachine, Montreal, Canada on June 10,
1915, Saul Bellow was the fourth child of
Abraham and Lescha (Liza) Belo, a Jewish couple
who emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia in
1913. In working-class Lachine, the Bellows had
their first experience with the North American
melting pot of Ukrainians, Russians, Italians,
Greeks, Hungarians, and Poles. In 1918, the
family moved to Montreal and finally to Chicago,
where Bellow entered the ethnic locale of the
North Side Jewish poor, a group whose presence
would mark nearly all of his fiction. Out of this
ethnic mix Bellow created the urban American
voice of late-twentieth-century America. Ernest
Hemingways monumental literary reputation
during the 1940s was a major goad to Bellow,
who rejected the successors of high modernism
who were content with recycling the pathological
modernist despair and nihilism typical of high
modernism. He understood the genuine despair
of the early modernists, but questioned their
philosophical dismissal of the question of transcendence and death. Displacing alienation ethics,
crisis mentality, absurdism, nihilism, and fears of
the imminent collapse of Western civilization
become the intellectual hallmarks of Bellows
work. His sharp awareness that careless intellectuals and artists could easily undermine belief, the
human contract, humane values, and civilization
itself lies at the root of his later political
conservatism.
Dangling Man, Bellows first novella, appeared
in 1947. Joseph, his prototypical protagonist, is
primarily interested in his own sensibility. His
striking self-ironic narcissism, the exclusion of the
female voice, the exclusively homosocial male
world, and the often comic misogyny of such a
protagonist are repeated throughout his fiction.
Joseph quarrels with friends and relatives, lives
unashamedly off the earnings of his faithful wife,
despises her for her lack of intellectuality, suc-
cumbs to fits of paranoia and anger, engages in a

desultory affair, hates the physical decay of his
elderly neighbors, and is increasingly haunted by
death anxieties. Finally, Joseph admits, his romantic retreat into his own psyche has merely
imprisoned him within his own four walls. No
sublime enlightenment occurs within this miserably urban version of Walden Pond.
The Victim (1949), also written to a European
and Flaubertian standard, explores victimization
and paranoia within the hellish, nightmare world
of anti-Semitic 1940s America. As it captures the
atmosphere of the immediate post-Holocaust
Jewish American moment, it culminates with Asa
Levanthal, like Joseph before him, admitting his
dependency on love and friendship and accepting
himself as that eternal Jew who must indeed
become his brothers keeper.
These two brilliant early works earned Bellow
much literary attention and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1948). By 1953 his breakthrough novel,
The Adventures of Augie March, appeared, featuring a first-generation Jewish American picaro, who comes of age in the transitional world
of Depression-era Chicago immigrants. The
novel presents a rich series of Hogarthian portraits of Jewish immigrant neighbors and relatives, including March; his brother, Simon; and
their gentle and witless mother, Grandma
Lausch, a true Bolshevik, along with her everpresent poodle, Winnie. It is a rich Dreiserian
chronicle of Bellows early immigrant neighborhoods, but more importantly, it is the novel in
which he parts with his European literary precursors and finds his own voice and subject
matter. He would later be embarrassed about
the unabashed ebullience and optimism of the
book.
Seize the Day (1956), Bellows most read and
anthologized book, belongs to the era of the first
two victim novellas, as evidenced by its setting in
the sepulchral Hotel Gloriana, populated almost
entirely by decrepit, disapproving fathers of
American capitalism, and its classic Jewish schlemiel, the hapless Tommy Wilhelm, who begs his
arrogant and unloving father for help. A type of
Willy Loman, Tommy is jobless and estranged
from his wife and children. All of Bellows subsequent protagonists would find themselves at odds
with the entrepreneurial culture of American
capitalism and the men it breeds. Tommy is clearly
BELLOW, SAUL
at the beginning of a spiritual quest for something

other than money and success.
Henderson the Rain King (1959), possibly
Bellows most loved book, contains hilarious
parodies of Joseph Conrads and Hemingways
renditions of Africa, the colonial adventure novel,
and modernist literary aesthetics. It is an anthropologically rendered comic analysis of the antiromantic philosophical and aesthetic assumptions of literary modernism. While it reveals all
the classic colonialist racial ideologies of Western
modernism, it also steadily inserts Bellows only
WASP character, Eugene Henderson, as a burlesque of the Hemingway hero, the romantic
questing artist-hero of the Stephen Dedalus variety, and also a version of that emerging literary
figure, the ugly American. A violinist and pig
farmer, Henderson is an ex-marine and a menopausal social outcast who is metaphysically earnest, bumbling, and egocentric. Like his Eliotic
Fisher King forebears, he romantically believes
that there is a curse on the land that he must cure.
He is Bellows comic answer to a generation of
early modern writers heavily steeped in anthropology, structuralism, and primitivism, who had,
in his opinion, reacted with exaggerated disappointment to the failed promises of Rousseauistic
romanticism. With his initials E. H., his heavy
drinking, his .357 magnum rifle, his private firing
range, his fascination with African safaris, and his
participation in a foreign war, Henderson is also
Bellows attempt to historicize and thus render
passe the gigantic Hemingway mythos. Since
Hemingways was the principal literary reputation standing in the way of his own rise to fame,
with Henderson the Rain King Bellow announced
that its time had come and gone.
In 1962 Bellow joined the prestigious Committee on Social Thought at the University of
Chicago and remained there for most of his life.
Here he finished Herzog (1964), his massively
conceived Joycean masterpiece. Herzog is a victimized divorce and failed academic whose grand
treatise on romanticism will never be finished, far
less published. Bellow critiques the errors of the
modernist philosophical tradition; records his own
profound shock at discovering Sondras (in reality
Alexandra Tschacbasov, his second wife) affair
with their mutual friend, Jack Ludwig; and registers
his deep depression over this latest divorce. Herzog
is the quintessential self-ironic, self-justifying
461
Bellow hero intellectual, vain, tearful in full

intellectual, spiritual, and financial crisis.
Throughout 1965 Bellow continued to garner
honors for Herzog, including the prestigious International Prize. As he worked on his subsequent
short fictions and next novel, he traveled in 1967
to Israel to report on the Six Day War for Newsday
magazine; the book account was later published in
1976. Mosbys Memoirs and Other Stories, his first
short story collection, appeared in 1968, the same
year he received the French honor of Chevalier de
lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres and an important
award from Bnai Brith. Mr. Sammlers Planet
(1970), his most criticized novel, appeared in
1970. It depicts 1960s New York City at the height
of the student radical movement and features the
misogynous, racist Mr. Sammler, a classic Old
World Western Civ literary thinker, European
aristocrat, and Holocaust survivor. Sammler, the
petted son of a Polish aristocrat, and humanly
aloof Bloomsbury Anglophile, is caught on the eve
of World War II as he accompanies his wife and
daughter to Europe to help his wife settle her
fathers estate. The Nazi invasion subsequently
destroys his family and leads to his near death in
an extermination pit. When Sammler and his
unhinged daughter are reunited after the war,
Sammler is nearly incapable of love and empathy.
Only at the novels end is Sammler able to take
responsibility for his damaged daughter and realize and reclaim human feeling. This is Bellows
first explicit fictional treatment of Holocaust
history, a subject he would apologize repeatedly
for neglecting as he entered his last decade. Despite its relative unpopularity, Mr. Sammlers
Planet won the National Book Award. That same
year Bellows play, The Last Analysis, was performed at an off-Broadway theater and closed
after just five unsuccessful weeks.
Humboldts Gift (1975) registers Bellows final
disapproval of much of psychotherapy and
Freuds notions of the unconscious. The novel
reflects its heros avid reading of anthroposophists Rudolph Steiner and Owen Barfield, as well as
a summary of the power of the crassly material
American experience to threaten the inner life of
the American artist. Charlie Citrine, a Chicago
writer and intellectual with a taste for low pursuits, gangland excitement, and pneumatic young
women, is so spiritually depleted that at mid-life
he has nearly lost his poetic gifts. In part, Charlie is
462
BELLOW, SAUL
Bellows tribute to the beloved, defeated, and

deceased friends of his early life, Delmore
Schwartz and Isaac Rosenfeld, in the figures of
Charlie Citrine and his friend Humboldt.
In 1976, the year Saul Bellow received the Nobel
Prize for Literature, he finally published To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, which presents firsthand accounts of many interviews with
Israeli personalities, a chronology of his stay in
Israel, fictional stories, reported conversations,
travelogues, bits of essays, and pieces of public
addresses. It earned for Bellow disapprobation as
a neoconservative and many negative reviews
from critics, who accused him of political neutrality and lack of sympathy for Zionism, Israel,
and Islam. Some were furious at what they called
his international political naivety, while others
thought the book lacked a unifying vision and
political commitment.
The Deans December (1981) lacks the balancing comedy of Humboldts Gift in attempting to
deal with racism, urban violence and decay, and
the fate of the poor in Americas increasingly
impoverished inner cities. Dean Albert Corde
attempts a Houdini-like escape from false sociological and economic descriptions of human experience. Like Charlie Citrine, Corde also tries to
resist the modernist nightmare, to read for signs
of an ultimate reality beyond dismal quotidian
experience, and to explore the possibility of a
Platonic home-world. This task, he realizes, requires he build a powerful buffer zone between
himself and all outer manifestations of disorder.
His angst stems largely from the sheer unknowability of Truth and the sheer concoctedness of
what passes for academic and media-based versions of reality. From the vantage point of Romania, Corde makes his comparison of Bucharest
and Chicago in what becomes a twentieth-century
tale of two cities living under two different
kinds of fascism in which entire human groups
are essentially canceled, and in which moral decay
is only too evident. Bellows counterpointing of
the fascist regime in Bucharest with capitalist
democracy in raw Chicago was received with
shock and critical outrage.
A second collection of short stories, Him With
His Foot in His Mouth (1984), was followed by
another novel, More Die of Heartbreak (1987),
which contains some of the old Bellow energy and
comedy, but falls short of the intellectual scope of
Herzog or Humboldts Gift. It is an amusing

Prufrockian lament about failed men and absent
mermaids, and is loaded with self-ironic misogynous love-lore, comic characters, botched loves,
and fatal forays into the danger zones of sex and
romance.
In 1989 two novellas, A Theft (1989b) and The
Bellarosa Connection (1989a), appeared simultaneously as paperbacks. A Theft stages yet another
Bellow comic opera on the failed dynamics of the
heterosexual pair, this time with Bellows first
female protagonist. Clara Velde, a woman raised
on old-time countrified Midwestern religious
values yet four times divorced and still in love
with her elusive lover, Ithiel Regler, is still romantically convinced of the viability of the heterosexual human pair. Regler, on the other hand, is the
classic running man, unable to commit to any
notions of romantic love. Here Bellow rehearses
once again the classic comic evasions of the male
lover, the social chaos of Gogmagogsville, the
seeming impossibility of higher synthesis, the
human comedy of sexual desire, and other familiar themes.
The Bellarosa Connection features the end-oflife moral drama of an unnamed narrator who
tries desperately, through memory, to recapture a
lost relationship with the remarkable and mysterious Sorella Fonstein and her husband, Harry.
Sorella, an overweight American Jewess who
missed out on early romance, has ultimately
married Harry, a Holocaust survivor brought out
of Italy by the infamous and now totally indifferent Billy Rose. The narrator, obsessed with repenting of his own American Jewish amnesia
about the consequences of the Holocaust, tries
to find the couple. Burdened by the knowledge
that he has lived more through memory than
through actual relationships, he realizes a moral
lack he can never redress. The Bellarosa Connection would appear to be Bellows mea culpa on his
own human neglect of the living and of the subject
of the Holocaust in his fiction.
It All Adds Up, Bellows essay collection, appeared amid mixed reviews in 1994, followed
three years later by The Actual (1997), another
novella, which tells the familiar story of a seemingly lost adolescent love of one who may well
have been Harry Trellmans Platonic actual.
Trellman, worldly, brilliant, and a grand noticer
of things, is invited to notice on behalf of
BELLOW, SAUL
another grand old noticer, Sigmund Adletsky.

Since Adletsky is now socially exiled and bored,
Harry will be his intellectual informer and brain
trust. Adletsky discerns Harrys unrequited adolescent love for Amy Wustrin and brings the two
together in their advancing years, representing
another of Bellows explorations of the Platonic
idea of finding ones actual.
His last work, Ravelstein (2000), is an autoethnographic fiction, ostensibly written as a memorial to the late Allan Bloom of the University of
Chicago. Here Chick (Bellow) poses as the great
biographer Boswell, writing a Johnsonian tribute
to his late friend Ravelstein. In his manuscript
Chick can also imagine himself more fully as he
chronicles his special brotherhood with Ravelstein. Like Saul Bellow and Allan Blooms famous
friendship, this too is a friendship of two famous
first-generation Russian Jewish American intellectuals. In it Bellow enacts his own recovery of
what it means to be the son of Russian Jewish
immigrants and his own distinctly Jewish voice
and anxiety. A thoroughly voiced and performative text, Ravelstein is full of one-liners and
Catskill comedian gags which capture a distinctly
first-generation Jewish American wit, neuroses,
manners, ethical humanism, and intellectual passion. Late in life, it would appear, Bellow, long
estranged from his own father and brothers, and
burdened with the weight of numerous other
failed male friendships, finally finds his Jewish
soul-mate and brother in the quirky dying
Ravelstein. The book produced much criticism
from those who considered Bellow had outed
his friend, who had never actually come out to
his friends and colleagues.
Saul Bellows status in the post-World War II
period of American literature can only be compared to that of Ernest Hemingway or William
Faulkner. One of the most written-about fiction
writers of twentieth-century American literature,
he has analyzed exhaustively the effects of American cultural anxiety with the age of technology,
rationalism, existentialism, and secularism. He
has consistently defended the embattled masculine Self of Western metaphysics, affirmed Judeo-Christian religious and ethical values, and
explored the high comedy of problematic heterosexual relations in our age. Likewise, he has
enumerated multiple, defeating masculinities
to which the American male is heir. He has mostly
463
failed to deal adequately with femininity and

people of color, a failing he shares in common
with most of the male writers of his generation.
However, it is the complexity of Bellows failure
that is of particular interest, since his protagonists
are not Bellow, but comic constructions whose
inadequacies their author makes more than apparent and which are also apparent to themselves.
Bellows death on April 5, 2005 raises the
question of just how many posthumous works
might yet appear. Apparently he never finished his
rumored work-in-progress, All Marbles Still Accounted For, and no doubt the large deposit of
papers at the University of Chicago Regenstein
Library will reveal a rich collection of unpublished
manuscripts.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Dreiser,
Theodore (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF);
Jewish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF);
Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SELECTED READINGS

Atlas, J. (2000). Bellow: A Biography. New York:
Random House.
Bach, G. (ed.) (1995). The Critical Response to Saul
Bellow. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Bach, G., & Cronin, G. (eds.) (2000). Small Planets:
Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction.
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Bellow, S. (1944). Dangling Man. New York:
Vanguard.
Bellow, S. (1947). The Victim. New York: Vanguard.
Bellow, S. (1953). The Adventures of Augie March.
New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1956). Seize the Day. New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1959). Henderson the Rain King. New York:
Viking.
Bellow, S. (1962). The Last Analysis. New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1964). Herzog. New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1968). Mosbys Memoirs and Other Stories.
New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1969). Mr. Sammlers Planet. New York:
Viking.
Bellow, S. (1975). Humboldts Gift. New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1976). To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal
Account. New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1982). The Deans December. New York:
Harper.
Bellow, S. (1984). Him With His Foot in His Mouth and
Other Stories. New York: Harper.
464
BERGER, THOMAS
Bellow, S. (1987). More Die of Heartbreak. New York:

Morrow.
Bellow, S. (1989a). The Bellarosa Connection. New York:
Penguin.
Bellow, S. (1989b). A Theft. New York: Penguin.
Bellow, S. (1992). Something to Remember Me By. New
York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1994). It All Adds Up. New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (1997). The Actual. New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (2000). Ravelstein. New York: Viking.
Bellow, S. (2001). Collected Stories. New York: Viking.
Bradbury, M. (1982). Saul Bellow. New York: Methuen.
Cronin, G. L. (2001). A Room of His Own: In Search of
the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow. Syracuse:
Cronin, G. L., & Siegel, B. (eds.) (1994). Conversations
with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Friedrich, M. M. (1995). Character and Narration in the
Short Fiction of Saul Bellow. New York: Lang.
Fuchs, D. (1984). Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision.
Goldman, L. H. (1983). Saul Bellows Moral Vision: A
Critical Study of the Jewish Experience. New York:
Irvington.
Berger, Thomas
DAVID W. MADDEN
Thomas Berger is a rare figure in modern American

literature a writer who has worked steadily since
the publication of his first novel, living entirely by
his pen. Berger has shunned publicity, granted few
interviews, and devoted himself to one fictional
experiment after another. Although he rejects the
labels of comic writer or social critic, his novels are
among the most relentlessly ironic and incisive of
any modern American writer.
Thomas Louis Berger was born July 20, 1924 in
Cincinnati, Ohio. His education at the University
of Cincinnati was interrupted by service in the
United States occupation forces in Germany at
the close of World War II. This experience was
crucial to the writing of his first novel, Crazy in
Berlin (1958), which featured a hapless protagonist, Carlo Reinhart, whom Berger returned to in
three more novels Reinhart in Love (1962), Vital
Parts (1970), and Reinharts Women (1981).
As Reinhart ages, American culture undergoes
various upheavals, and while the protagonist
often stumbles and fails, he is a perfect barometer
of social instability.
Jack Crabbe, another easily overlooked nobody, is the central figure in Little Big Man
(1964), Bergers most acclaimed work. Here Berger experiments with the possibilities of a subjective narrator who speaks in a wild, unlettered, but
remarkably expressive idiom inspired by a minor
character from a Saroyan play. The novel is an
acerbic reevaluation of the myth of the West in
which Manifest Destiny presumably improves
lives and a national culture. As Crabbe oscillates
between the white and Native American worlds,
Berger is even-handed in his treatment of each
culture; however, there is no question that the
relentless exploitativeness of whites will lead to
the extermination of the Cheyenne and other
tribes but doom America to its own worst proclivities. Berger returns to his 113-year-old narrator in a sequel, The Return of Little Big Man
(1999), which traces more of his adventures in a
rapidly vanishing frontier.
A persistent theme in Bergers works is the
intrusion of crime and criminality in the lives of
ordinary, unprepossessing figures. Killing Time
(1967), modeled on a police procedural, reveals
law enforcement to be as ethically bankrupt as the
criminal. Who Is Teddy Villanova? (1977) and its
sequel, Nowhere (1985), follow another of
Bergers classic losers, Russell Wren, a former
English graduate student who is equally unskilled
at solving crimes and mastering the hard-boiled
argot. Meeting Evil (1992) and Suspects (1996)
are sinister examinations of the ways in which
ones exposure to threats and violence can
reveal unacknowledged capacities for violence of
ones own.
Berger has also revealed a marked interest in the
seemingly ordinary lives of bourgeois figures
simply trying to survive life in small towns. The
first of these novels, Sneaky People (1975), is a
Bildungsroman in which a young boy comes to the
uncomfortable conclusion that no one, including
his demure mother, is precisely who he or she
appears to be. The ironic dichotomy between
appearance and essence is more outrageously
developed in Neighbors (1980), a tour de force
in which a complacent suburbanite, Earl Keese,
has his quiet life invaded by new neighbors, Harry
and Ramona, outrageous embodiments of the id
who challenge everything Keese has taken for
granted. The Feud (1983), like Sneaky People, is
another return to the Depression era of Bergers
BORDER FICTIONS
youth, but there is little nostalgia in this modern

depiction of the Montagues and Capulets as
residents of neighboring towns quickly go to
virtual war over the most ridiculous of misunderstandings. Once again, a young naf is caught in
the middle and must come of age without the
guidance of any mature adult.
Berger has long insisted that each of his novels
is a homage to another writer, a particular style, or
a distinct genre. Examples of these include Regiment of Women (1973; a homage to Orwells
1984), Arthur Rex (1978; Malorys Morte
dArthur), Orries Story (1990; the Oresteia), and
Robert Crews (1994; Defoes Robinson Crusoe).
The imitations are never slavish or simply parasitic reworkings offered for a few cheap laughs. In
every case, Berger uses his sources to create brilliant counterpoints between the sensibilities and
values of one era and another.
Berger has received various awards, among
them a Dial Fellowship (1962) and the Western
Heritage and Richard and Hinda Rosenthal
Awards in 1965 for Little Big Man. In 1982 he
received the Ohioana Book Award for Reinharts
Women and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in
1984 for The Feud. In 1986 he was honored with a
doctor of letters degree by Long Island University.
The City in Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction
(AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
Berger, T. (1958). Crazy in Berlin. New York: Scribners.
Berger, T. (1962). Reinhart in Love. New York:
Scribners.
Berger, T. (1964). Little Big Man. New York: Dial Press.
Berger, T. (1967). Killing Time. New York: Dial Press.
Berger, T. (1970). Vital Parts. New York: Baron.
Berger, T. (1973). Regiment of Women. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Berger, T. (1975). Sneaky People. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Berger, T. (1977). Who Is Teddy Villanova? New York:
Delacorte.
Berger, T. (1978). Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel.
New York: Delacorte.
Berger, T. (1980). Neighbors. New York: Delacorte.
Berger, T. (1981). Reinharts Women. New York:
Delacorte.
Berger, T. (1983). The Feud. New York: Delacorte.
465
Berger, T. (1985). Nowhere. New York: Delacorte.

Berger, T. (1988). The Houseguest. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Berger, T. (1990). Orries Story. Boston: Little, Brown.
Berger, T. (1992). Meeting Evil. Boston: Little, Brown.
Berger, T. (1994). Robert Crews. New York: Morrow.
Berger, T. (1996). Suspects. New York: Morrow.
Berger, T. (1999). The Return of Little Big Man. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Landon, B. (1989). Thomas Berger. Boston: Twayne.
Madden, D. W. (ed.) (1995). Critical Essays on Thomas
Berger. New York: G. K. Hall.
Schulz, M. F. (1973). The Politics of Parody; and, the
Comic Apocalypses of Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas
Berger, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover. In
Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic
Definition of Man and His World. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, pp. 6690.
Trachtenberg, S. (1978). Berger and Barth: The Comedy
of Decomposition. In S. B. Cohen (ed.), Comic Relief.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 4569.
Weber, B. (ed.) (1983). Special Issue Honoring Thomas
Berger. Studies in American Humor, 2(12): 1152.
Border Fictions
CLAUDIA SADOWSKI-SMITH
The existence of fictional representations of US

national boundaries can be traced back to the very
creation of hemispheric borders in the nineteenth
century. But the production of fiction about US
national boundaries has surged at the turn of the
twenty-first century in the context of dramatic
changes in this geography. As defined here, border
fiction encompasses narrative productions about
US borders that are set at the seams of the United
States and one of its neighboring nations. Because
its border settings are so closely interlinked with
its subject matter, this fiction could not easily be
moved to another place without distortion or loss
of significance. Border texts thus illustrate the
mutual constituency of a particular place and its
representation just as depictions of border
regions are affected by the specificities of the
geopolitical boundary, the border landscape itself
is also shaped by human projection and (often
contesting) representations.
In currently dominant critical usage, border
fiction tends to be equated with literature produced by US Chicana/o writers, that is, by
members of an ethnicized group that was created
466
BORDER FICTIONS
with the 1848 redrawing of the Mexico/US border.

Chicana/o literary production is also generally
linked to the US Southwest, understood as border
territory, as a consequence of the 1950s1970s
Chicano activist and cultural-nationalist struggles
for inclusion into full US citizenship. This activism
largely took place in the border states of California,
Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The culturalnationalist version of Chicano civil rights struggles
was also firmly grounded in the US Southwest as it
articulated land claims in the idea of a Chicana/o
homeland, Aztlan, located in this area. In the
founding document of Chicanismo, El Plan
Espiritual, the poet Alurista supported such territorial claims by declaring Chicana/os to be the
descendants of the Aztecs, the aboriginal inhabitants of (parts of) the Southwest before they
migrated to todays Mexico.
Despite these close connections between
Chicana/o literary production and the US Southwest, however, only a surprisingly small number
of Chicana/o literary works deal explicitly with
the Mexico/US border (Alarcon 1992, 65). These
works include texts by authors like Gloria Anzaldua, Aristeo Brito, Norma Elia Cantu, Dagoberto
Gilb, Rolando Hinojosa, Arturo Islas, Miguel
Mendez, Americo Paredes, John Rechy, Alberto
Alvaro Ros, and Helena Mara Viramontes. Their
writing employs the border as theme and setting,
while also contributing to the areas longstanding
symbolic value as a signifier of the mythic Chicano homeland Aztlan and Chicana/o culture.
Originally published in 1974, though as the
author claimed finished well before the start of
Chicana/o civil rights struggles, Miguel Mendezs
Peregrinos de Aztlan (translated as Pilgrims in
Aztlan in 1992) adds to the cultural-nationalist
myth of Aztlan a quite contemporary emphasis
on the transnational character of the Mexico/
US borderlands. Set in Tijuana and in the
Californian and Arizonan portions of the US
Southwest near Yuma and Sonora the novel
chronicles the transformation of a peasant, rural,
and agricultural world by new economic realities.
These changes include realignments affected
by the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the enormous demographic growth of the Southwest
and of northern Mexican border cities throughout
the 1960s, both of which provided the context for
the creation of a Mexican (American) migrant
culture.
The more numerous Chicana/o border fiction

from the 1980s and 1990s largely disposes of the
image of Aztlan in favor of the notion of borderlands, which is a space related to but not identical
with the Mexico/US border. The notion of borderlands serves to highlight the result of the
shifted geopolitical border and ongoing Mexican
(im)migration into the United States the formation of hybrid Chicana/o cultures and identities. The most famous border text from this
period, Anzalduas Borderlands/La Frontera
(1987), poetically refigures the US Southwest and
its designation as Aztlan in the explicitly transnational notion of la frontera in order to theorize
questions of Chicana identity. Borderlands/La
Frontera opens with a geographical focus on the
Texas/Chihuahua borderlands, whose division by
the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has served
as the model for narratives about Aztlan. But the
book quickly moves beyond observations of new
border realities including border militarization,
the surge in the number of export-processing
factories in Mexican border towns, and the transformation of ranching by large agricultural corporations along the US part of the borderlands
to questions of Anzalduas identity as a Chicana.
To theorize divisions inherent in this identity,
Anzaldua metaphorically employs the fortified
border, writing that the fence is running down
the length of my body, /staking rods in my flesh,
/splits me splits me /me raja me raja / This is my
home /this thin edge of barbwire (1987, 23).
Work by Alberto Ros and Norma Cantu from
the same time period also employs a thematic
focus on the Mexico/US border territory to
examine notions of multiple boundaries and Chicana/o life. Ros is the author of various books
and chapbooks of poetry, collections of short
stories, and a memoir. Much of Ross poetry,
two short story collections The Curtain of Trees
(1999b) and The Iguana Killers (1984) as well as
Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (1999a) take place
in southern Arizona and perform periodic border
crossings into Mexico. Even though Capirotada
often acknowledges the ongoing hardening of the
international boundary, the memoir emphasizes
the permeability of the border, especially in the
cultural and mental realms. The short story The
Child in Iguana Killer is particularly noteworthy
for its focus on the politically charged issue of
drug smuggling across the Mexico/US border.
BORDER FICTIONS
Norma Cantus Cancula, which she calls a

fictional autobioethnography, is an account of
the authors upbringing in the late 1940s to mid1960s along the south Texas/Nuevo Leon border,
particularly in the twin cities of Laredo and Nuevo
Laredo. Similar to Anzalduas and Ross approach to the Mexico/US border, Cantu describes
the Laredo metropolitan area as a territory without divisions that has shaped the creation of a
hybrid Mexican American identity. To trace
the border-crossing family traditions that have
provided the context for Cantus upbringing,
Can cula employs an experimental form of memoir, in which photographs and narratives are
mismatched, and pictures omitted or retouched.
While many of the 1980s and 1990s Chicana/o
border writers have continued publishing, new
writing about the Mexico/US boundary, such
as Ito Romos El Puente The Bridge (2000),
Richard Yanezs El Paso del Norte (2003), and
Lucrecia Guerreros Chasing Shadows (2000),
places Chicana/o communities more explicitly in
relation to a border geography that has been
reconfigured by forces of globalization. El Puente
focuses on environmental effects of the maquiladora industry created in the context of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The
books individual vignettes explore the lives of
14 women, who become part of a crowd that
gathers at the international bridge to watch the
river change color as a sign of protest against
environmental pollution. The more loosely connected stories in Yanezs El Paso del Norte are set
in El Pasos working-class neighborhood Ysleta,
which is located less than a mile from the Zaragoza International Bridge. The transnational
geography of Ysleta not only marks divisions
between Mexico and the United States, but also
signifies internal differences among the Mexican
majority population of El Paso. Rio Grande, the
last story in the collection, explores the effects of
border militarization on Mexican American residents. The interconnected stories in Lucrecia
Guerreros Chasing Shadows are also held together
by their geographical focus on a fictional border
town named Mesquite, located in Arizona. Individual characters lives intersect in the neighborhood of Frontera Street, which is located literally
along the border.
While this work focuses on the US side of the
border, fictionalized accounts of the surge in the
467
murders of women in Mexicos border town

Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, by two Chicana
authors Alicia Gaspar de Albas Desert Blood:
The Juarez Murders (2005) and Stella Pope
Duartes If I Die in Juarez (2008) move more
explicitly across the international boundary into
the northern Mexican borderlands. Desert Blood
recounts the growth in femicide since 1993 from
the point of view of a Chicana/o protagonist. The
novel emphasizes not only the role of Mexican
elites, but also the existence of US victims and the
possible involvement of US-based sexual offenders and US enforcement agencies in the killings.
If I Die in Juarez focuses on the fate of three
Mexican women who become involved with a
woman-killing cartel in Ciudad Juarez. Because it
is less interested in symbolic questions of cultural
and identity formation, this recent Chicana/o
border literature about US and Mexican border
cities creates fewer opportunities for the persistent conflation of the symbolic and literal meanings of the national boundary.
In addition to border literature written by
Chicana/o authors, literary productions by or
about indigenous, Asian-descended, white,
Mexican, and Canadian border dwellers, which
have traditionally not been associated with the
label of border fiction, have also explored developments in US border regions. Leslie Marmon
Silkos novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) spans
500 years and several locations in the United
States and Mexico, including the border states
of Arizona, Texas, California, New Mexico, Baja
California, and (on the Mexico/Guatemala border) Chiapas. Almanac fictionalizes mass border
crossings by Mexican Indians and landless war
refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador into
Tucson, Arizona, where they demand the return
of indigenous land and the free passage of people
across national borders. The novel articulates an
understanding of national boundaries as ancestral
homelands, that is, geographies that are sacred,
home to deities, ceremonial sites, and generations
of ancestors, even when histories of displacement
or the loss of the homelands may be part of a
particular tribal or national experience. Set in
Baja California and Mazatlan, Mexico and in Los
Angeles, Japanese American writer Karen Tei
Yamashitas novel Tropic of Orange (1997) depicts
growing intersections among various communities in the border region and in Los Angeles, a city
468
BORDER FICTIONS
whose urban sprawl reaches and is shaped by

the international boundary. As it traces the
lives of seven characters over the course of a week,
the novel highlights connections among inhabitants of border areas who are separated by ethnicity and class status, and focuses especially on
parallels among Asian- and Mexican-descended
communities.
Examples of fiction about US borders by
white US American authors include Cormac
McCarthys border trilogy All the Pretty Horses
(1992), The Crossing (1994), and Desert of the
Plains (1998) as well as his more recent novel No
Country For Old Men (2005); Susan Straights
Highwire Moon (2001); George Rabasas Floating
Kingdom (1997); and T. Coraghessan Boyles The
Tortilla Curtain (1995). While McCarthys trilogy
focuses on border crossings by Anglo protagonists into Mexico, No Country for Old Men explores the effects of transnational drug smuggling
on the Texan border region. Straights Highwire
Moon is set in the fictional California town of Rio
Seco and explores the separation (and eventual
reunification) of a Mexican Indian farm worker,
who is forcibly repatriated to Mexico, with her
daughter in the United States. Rabasas Floating
Kingdom fictionalizes the relationship between a
white teenager from Texas and a Mexican family
living on an island in the middle of the Rio
Grande that separates the United States and
Mexico. Boyles The Tortilla Curtain highlights
the divided nature of California by juxtaposing a
pair of wealthy, liberal suburbanites with undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in Los
Angeles.
In addition to fiction written by US authors,
work about the northern Mexican borderlands
by Mexican authors has also surged since the
1980s. Examples include work by Rosina Conde,
Federico Campbell, Victor Zuniga, Sergio Gomez
Montero, Humberto Felix Berumen, and Luis
Humberto Crosthwaite. Of this work, Campbells
Tijuanenses (1989), translated as Tijuana: Stories
on the Border (1995), and Condes Women on the
Road (1994) are readily available in English
translation. Mexico City-based writer Carlos
Fuentess The Crystal Frontier (La Frontera de
Cristal; 1995) also addresses changes along the
northern border.
Some examples of English-language fiction
about the Canada/US border include work by
authors Thomas King, Guillermo Verdecchia,

Jeannette Turner Hospital, and Kelly Rebar. Born
and raised in the United States, Thomas King
moved to Canada to work as a professor of Native
studies and now self-identifies as a native Canadian author. Some of Kings short fiction collected in One Good Story, That One (1993) and his
border trilogy Medicine River (1991), Green
Grass, Running Water (1993), and Truth and
Bright Water (2000) are set on or near a Blackfoot reservation located on the border between
Alberta and Montana, and emphasize indigenous
peoples relationships to this national boundary.
In addition to this work, a growing list of
detective fiction is also set in US border regions.
Some examples include work by Chicano writer
Rolando Hinojosa as well as by Mexican authors
Paco Ignacio Taibo II (La Vida Misma [1987],
os de
translated as Life Itself in 1995; and Suen
Frontera [1990], translated as Frontera Dreams in
2002) and Gabriel Trujillo Munozs Tijuana City
Blues (1999). Using the pseudonym Hartley
Goodweather, Thomas King has also produced
detective fiction set along the US portion of the
Canada/US border.
The fiction mentioned here represents only a
fraction of available work on US borders. But this
writing by a wide variety of authors about multiple border communities complicates the persisting conflation of border literature with work by
Chicana/o authors as well as the prevailing symbolic view of borders in US literary studies.
Gender and the Novel (AF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF)

Alarcon, J. S. (1992). The Border: To Cross at the
Crossroads in Three Chicano Literary Texts. In A.
Ramrez & J. Villarino (eds.), Chicano Border Culture
& Folklore. San Diego: Marin, pp. 6575.
Anaya, R. A., & Lomel, F. A. (eds.) (1989). Aztlan:
Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque, NM:
Academia/El Norte.
Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The
New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.
Boyle, R. C. (1995). The Tortilla Curtain. New York:
Viking.
BOYLE, KAY
Brito, A. (1990). The Devil in Texas El Diablo en Texas

(trans. David William Foster). Tempe, AZ: Bilingual
Press/Editorial Biling
ue.
Calderon, H., & Saldvar, J. D. (eds.) (1991). Criticism in
the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature,
Culture, and Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Campbell, F. (1995). Tijuana: Stories on the Border
(trans. Debra A. Castillo). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Cantu, N. E. (1995). Cancula: Snapshots of a Girlhood
en la Frontera. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press.
Conde, R. (1994). Women on the Road. San Diego: San
Diego State University Press.
Fuentes, C. (1997). The Crystal Frontier: A Novel in Nine
Stories (trans. Alfred Mac Adam). New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Gilb, D. (1990). The Magic of Blood. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press
Guerrero, L. (2000). Chasing Shadows: Stories. San
Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Hinojosa, R. (1987). Klail City. Houston: Arte
Publico.
Hinojosa, R. (1990). Becky and Her Friends. Houston:
Arte Publico.
Hospital, J. T. (1985). Borderline. New York: E. P.
Dutton.
Islas, A. (1990). Migrant Souls: A Novel. New York:
Morrow.
King, T. (1993). Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto:
Harper.
King, T. (2000). Truth and Bright Water. Toronto:
Harper.
Mendez, M. M. (1992). Pilgrims in Aztlan (trans. David
William Foster). Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/
Editorial Biling
ue.
Paredes, A. (1958). With His Pistol in His Hand: A
Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
mez: A
Paredes, A. (1990). George Washington Go
Mexicotexan Novel. Houston: Arte Publico.
Rabasa, G. (1997). Floating Kingdom. Minneapolis:
Coffee House Press.
Rebar, K. (1989). Bordertown Cafe. Winnipeg: Blizzard.
Rechy, J. (1963). City of Night. New York: Grove.
Ros, A. A. (1984). The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of
the Heart. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Ros, A. A. (1999a). Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir.
Ros, A. A. (1999b). The Curtain of Trees: Stories.
Romo, I. (2000). El Puente The Bridge. Albuquerque:
469
Saldvar, J. D. (1997). Border Matters: Remapping

American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Silko, L. (1991). Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Straight, S. (2001). Highwire Moon. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
TaiboII, P. I. (1994). Life Itself (trans. Beth Henson).
New York: Mysterious Press.
TaiboII, P. I. (2002). Frontera Dreams: A Hector
Belascoaran Shayne Detective Novel (trans. Bill
Verter). El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos.
Trujillo Munoz, G. (1999). Tijuana City Blues: Tres
Novelas Cortas. Mexico City: Sansores y Aljure.
Verdecchia, G. (1993). Fronteras Americanas/American
Borders. Vancouver: Talonbooks.
Viramontes, H. M. (1985). The Moths and Other Stories.
Houston: Arte Publico.
Viramontes, H. M. (1995). Under the Feet of Jesus.
Yamashita, K. T. (1997). Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis:
Coffee House Press.
Yanez, R. (2003). El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border.
Reno: University of Nevada Press.
Boyle, Kay
THOMAS C. AUSTENFELD
Kay Boyle (190292) considered writing, personal

integrity, and political activism as inseparable. A
modernist who helped revolutionize literary style,
she was also a woman who chose sexual freedom
but embraced motherhood. An expatriate in
France and Austria from 1923 to 1941 and a keen
observer and critic of totalitarianism in Austria
and Germany, she also became a historically
thoughtful chronicler of the American occupation of Germany after 1945. She was victimized by
loyalty-security hearings in 1952, taught at San
Francisco State University from 1962 to 1979, and
protested against the Vietnam War. Boyle wrote
short fiction, novels, essays, poems, and memoirs.
By revising Robert McAlmons Being Geniuses
Together 19201930 and interspersing her own
chapters to reissue the book in 1968, she became
one of the historiographers of modernism.
Among her close literary associates were William
Carlos Williams, Emanuel Carnevali, Samuel
Beckett, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Eugene
Jolas, Marianne Moore, Robert Carlton Brown,
and Howard Nemerov. Artist and activist (in
470
BOYLE, KAY
Sandra Spaniers words) through eight decades,

Boyle embodies many of the contradictions of the
twentieth century but also helped write its literary
history.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota and raised in
Cincinnati, Kay Boyle was initiated into the world
of art, literature, and politics by her mother,
Katherine Evans Boyle, who took her to the
Armory Show in 1913. Their close relationship
is acknowledged in a motherdaughter pair in
Boyles first novel, Process, completed in 1925 and
long considered lost until discovered and published in 2001. Process experiments with streamof-consciousness technique and synesthesia; its
prose is often suggestive of lyric poetry. After
working on Broom with Lola Ridge in New York
and meeting William Carlos Williams, Boyle
married Richard Brault, a French exchange student, and accompanied him to Brittany. Boyles
next four novels are fictional transformations of
autobiographical and biographical occurrences:
Plagued by the Nightingale (1966 [1931]) investigates the cross-cultural drama of an American
daughter-in-law upsetting traditional social
structures in a French family; Gentlemen, I
Address You Privately (1991 [1933]) is an opaque
story of homosexual love steeped in the atmosphere of a northern French coastal town; Year
Before Last (1969 [1932]) is based on Boyles
relationship with the dying poet Ernest Walsh,
editor of This Quarter, who fathered a child she
bore in 1927; and My Next Bride (1986 [1934])
arises from Boyles experiences in Raymond
Duncans Neuilly colony. In these years, Boyle
was a major contributor to Eugene Jolass journal
transition as well.
Divorced from Brault and married to Laurence
Vail, Boyle spent the early 1930s mostly in the
South of France and then in the French and
Austrian Alps, with a sojourn in England. Death
of a Man (1989 [1936]), an early and astute
fictional analysis of fascisms dangerous attraction, is one of her best novels, though it was
received doubtfully at the time. Death of a Man
signals her breakthrough into an almost
prescient (Hatlen 1989) political consciousness
as well as a sure hand in style. Psychological
analysis of characters takes precedence over autobiography from here forward, yet Boyles emotional investment in France also produced such
potboilers as Primer for Combat (1942) and
Avalanche (1944). Boyles short stories of the

1930s propelled her to national visibility in the
New Yorker, Harpers, and the Saturday Evening
Post. Boyle returned to the United States in 1941,
divorced Vail, and married the Austrian expatriate Baron Joseph von Franckenstein in 1943.
Living with Franckenstein in occupied Germany
after the war, Boyle assembled The Smoking
Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (1951) and
later published a novel called Generation Without
Farewell (1960), in which the German protagonist, Jager, becomes Boyles most eloquent test
caseamong manyfor the redemptive potential of the human spirit.
Boyle and Franckenstein suffered professional
setbacks after congressional hearings in 1952.
Boyle eventually found a new home in San Francisco, where she taught and opened her house to
social causes she supported. Her anti-Vietnam
War stance and imprisonment are fictionalized
in The Underground Woman (1975). For her
entire life, Boyle consistently remained a critical
American, a Francophile, and a supporter of
young writers and progressive causes. She embodied what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called
rooted cosmopolitanism (1998, 91).
SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); The Little
Magazines (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF)

Appiah, K. A. (1998). Cosmopolitan Patriots. In P.
Cheah & B. Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking
and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, pp. 91114.
Austenfeld, T. (ed.) (2008). Kay Boyle for the TwentyFirst Century: New Essays. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher
Verlag Trier.
Boyle, K. (1936). The White Horses of Vienna and Other
Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Boyle, K. (1940). The Crazy Hunter: Three Short Novels.
New York: Harcourt Brace.
Boyle, K. (1942). Primer for Combat. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Boyle, K. (1944). Avalanche. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Boyle, K. (1946). A Frenchman Must Die. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Boyle, K. (1947). Monday Night [1938]. New York: New
Directions.
Boyle, K. (1948). 1939. New York: Simon and Schuster.
BRAUTIGAN, RICHARD
Boyle, K. (1951). Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar

Germany. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Boyle, K. (1960). Generation Without Farewell. New
York: Knopf.
Boyle, K. (1962). Collected Poems. New York: Knopf.
Boyle, K. (1966). Plagued by the Nightingale [1931].
Boyle, K. (1969). Year Before Last [1932]. Carbondale:
Boyle, K. (1970). Testament for My Students and Other
Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Boyle, K. (1975). The Underground Woman. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday.
Boyle, K. (1985). Words that Must Somehow Be Said (ed.
E. Bell). San Francisco: North Point.
Boyle, K. (1986). My Next Bride [1934]. London:
Virago.
Boyle, K. (1989). Death of a Man [1936]. New York:
New Directions.
Boyle, K. (1991). Gentlemen, I Address You Privately
[1933]. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press.
Boyle, K. (1992). Fifty Stories (intro. L. Erdrich). New
York: New Directions.
Boyle, K. (2001). Process (ed. S. Spanier). Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Elkins, M. (1993). Metamorphosizing the Novel: Kay
Boyles Narrative Innovations. New York: Peter Lang.
Elkins, M. (ed.) (1997). Critical Essays on Kay Boyle.
Hatlen, B. (1989). Introduction. In K. Boyle, Death of a
Man. New York: New Directions.
Koch, D. V. (1980). Kay Boyle. In K. L. Rood (ed.),
American Writers in Paris, 19201939. Detroit: Gale,
pp. 4656.
Mellen, J. (1994). Kay Boyle: Author of Herself. New
Spanier, S. W. (1986). Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist.
Brautigan, Richard
DAVID W. MADDEN
Richard Brautigan is a controversial figure

remembered by some as a symbol of the hippie
movement, by scholars as a serious literary figure,
and by many critics as a benign mediocrity. He
published 11 novels, nine volumes of poetry, and
one collection of short stories and developed a
distinctive style that was unmistakably his own.
Brautigan was born on January 30, 1935 in
Spokane (some say Tacoma), Washington to
Bernard F. and Lula Mary Brautigan. He never
471
attended college, and there is some dispute as to

whether he even graduated from high school, but
in 1956 he moved to San Francisco and hovered
on the edges of the Beat movement, writing
poetry. He turned to writing fiction in the early
1960s and later became a frequent contributor to
the fledgling Rolling Stone magazine.
The identifiable Brautigan style was a combination of poetic concision and Hemingwayesque
minimalism. He typically relies upon strong, eccentric images arranged in a seemingly random,
associative manner. His narratives are divided
into multiple, brief chapters with often curious
titles that emphasize the mundane, commonplace, or trivial.
His first completed novel, Trout Fishing in
America (1967), established his reputation and
marks the zenith of his creative abilities. Although
it was originally published by a small press, the
book found an audience with young readers and
catapulted Brautigan to international fame. On
the surface the 47 abbreviated chapters seem
random and the plot discontinuous. However,
there are a number of interrelated narratives, the
most conventional of which is a camping trip
throughout Idaho where the narrator and his
family stop at various fishing locations. The book
is also a meditation on the American pastoral
myth and the prospects for renewal in a landscape
that is rapidly vanishing or abused.
A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964)
offers a more conventional plot with a wild misfit,
Lee Mellon, inveigling the narrator, Jesse, to visit
him in Big Sur. They live in abject poverty,
romance a pair of women, and generally wreak
havoc. Brautigan has always championed misfits
and oddballs, and Lee Mellon, who believes himself descended from a Confederate general, essentially secedes from the competitive quest for
success to live a spontaneous, untrammeled life.
As Terence Malley argues, Mellon is a parody of
the self-reliant American hero.
In Watermelon Sugar (1968) is an adult fantasy
of a commune, existing some time after a cataclysm that has obliterated all signs of civilization.
Another subjective narrator relates the communitys efforts at survival against tigers and an
absurd outlaw gang in a place called iDeath, where
inhabitants lead simple, uncomplicated lives. The
Abortion: An Historical Romance (1971) also centers on a recluse who works in a library housing
472
BUCK, PEARL S.
unpublished books until he is rocked from his

routines and must help his girlfriend obtain an
abortion in Mexico. The narrative is diffuse and
often uneventful and marks the beginning of
Brautigans artistic decline.
In the 1970s he turned to genre fictions The
Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974),
Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), and
Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942
(1977) which have moments of inspiration but
lack much seriousness. The exception is Willard
and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery
(1975), which revolves around three parallel narratives that coalesce in tragedy at the novels close.
The Tokyo-Montana Press (1980), with its 31
sections, appears to be a reprise of Trout Fishing,
but with little success. The book has no clear
narrative thread, and the observations, while
whimsical and abrupt, are often banal and trivial.
The last novel published in his lifetime, So the
Wind Wont Blow It All Away (1982), is the best of
his later works. It centers on a narrators reflections about poverty, marginalization, and an
accidental shooting, all of which haunt him
throughout his life. The elegiac tone and tight
construction are impressive, though the book
garnered little critical attention and sold poorly.
His last novel, published posthumously, An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey (2000), offers another meditation on mortality, isolation, and the
failure of intimacy.
In October 1984 Brautigan committed suicide,
leaving no note but clearly despondent over his
life and diminished career. He will, however, be
remembered for his audacious imagination and
insistence on creative potentiality and personal
freedom. His novels stand in the forefront of
postmodern metafictionality and consistently
feature a bevy of self-reflective techniques. The
subjective narrators, lonely outsiders, frequent
asides to the audience, and self-conscious comments on the novels construction all remind one
of contemporaries such as Kurt Vonnegut and
Donald Barthelme. Trout Fishing has sold over 3
million copies and shows no signs of vanishing
from the literary landscape.
Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist
Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Vonnegut, Kurt (AF)

Abbot, K. (1989). Downstream from Trout Fishing in
America: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan. Santa
Barbara, CA: Capra Press.
Barber, J. F. (ed.) (2006). Richard Brautigan: Essays on
the Writings and Life. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Boyer, J. (1987). Richard Brautigan. Boise, ID: Boise
State University Press.
Brautigan, I. (2000). You Cant Catch Death: A
Daughters Memoir. New York: St. Martins.
Brautigan, R. (1964). A Confederate General from Big
Sur. New York: Grove.
Brautigan, R. (1967). Trout Fishing in America. San
Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation.
Brautigan, R. (1968). In Watermelon Sugar. San
Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation.
Brautigan, R. (1971). The Abortion: An Historical
Romance. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Brautigan, R. (1974). The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic
Western. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Brautigan, R. (1975). Willard and His Bowling Trophies:
A Perverse Mystery. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Brautigan, R. (1976). Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese
Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Brautigan, R. (1977). Dreaming of Babylon: A Private
Eye Novel, 1942. New York: Delacorte.
Brautigan, R. (1980). The Tokyo-Montana Press. New
York: Delacorte.
Brautigan, R. (1982). So The Wind Wont Blow It All
Away. New York: Delacorte.
Brautigan, R. (2000). An Unfortunate Woman: A
Journey. New York: St. Martins.
Chenetier, M. (1983). Richard Brautigan. New York:
Methuen.
Foster, E. H. (1983). Richard Brautigan. New York:
Twayne.
Malley, T. (1972). Richard Brautigan: Writers for the
Seventies. New York: Warner.
Mellard, J. M. (1980). The Exploded Form: The
Modernist Novel in America. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Buck, Pearl S.
JAIME HARKER
Pearl S. Buck continues to inhabit a kind of critical

purgatory. A beloved, bestselling novelist whose
writing career spanned over 40 years and 100
books, Buck has remained in print, and refused
to fade away into hellish obscurity like so many
interwar popular novelists. Her 1938 Nobel Prize
keeps her just on the edge of critical acceptability.
BUCK, PEARL S.
Critics, however, refuse to accept her into paradise, insisting that, for her literary sins (melodrama, sentimentality, popularity, and activism) she
continue in limbo, neither art nor trash. This
critical ambivalence is unfortunate, because
Bucks literary, cultural, and political significance
is unparalleled in twentieth-century letters.
Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia in 1892,
but her spiritual and cultural home was China.
The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, Buck
grew up at the intersection of Chinese and American culture. As she stated in a controversial
address to the Presbyterian Mission Board, By
birth I am an American, by belief I am a Christian,
but by culture, I am Chinese. The belief fell away,
and the Americanness increased when, in her
forties, she returned to the United States for good;
yet her cultural identification with China continued throughout her life. Fluent in Chinese, Buck
developed her authorial voice based on the model
of Chinese folk novels. This led to a problem of
categorization for Bucks critics, although recent
interest in transnational work provides another
paradigm with which to make sense of her career.
Bucks first book, East Wind, West Wind
(1930), was sent to every publishing house in
New York before being accepted by the brandnew John Day Company. Publisher Richard
Walshs gamble paid off handsomely with the
publication of her first novel, The Good Earth
(1931). The success of the novel is legendary;
Book of the Month Club judge Dorothy Canfield
read the novel on the train back to Vermont, and
insisted that they select it an action that sent
Pearl Buck, an unknown writer living in China,
into literary stardom. From then on, Buck was
feted by highbrow moderns as well as middlebrow
popularizers a liminal status that continued
through her biographies of her missionary parents (The Exile [1936a] and Fighting Angel
[1936b]) and additional novels: two sequels to
The Good Earth, Sons (1932), and A House Divided
(1935).
Her 1938 Nobel Prize transformed Buck into
an affront to many of those highbrow writers who
coveted the honor for themselves. The chorus of
dissatisfaction with Bucks success only grew
louder as time went on and the New Critics
confronted the popular appeal of Buck. But
Bucks cultural influence continued throughout
the late 1930s and early 1940s. Her 1939 novel,
473
The Patriot, was lauded in the New Republic as an

exemplary Popular Front text, mixing fictional
appeals with progressive political activism. She
also published nonfiction articles in a variety of
forums, advocating against racial discrimination
in the United States and against imperialism
abroad. During World War II, she argued that
American racism and British imperialism were
hurting the war effort, and she linked anti-racism
and anti-imperialism with American nationalism.
Bucks post-Nobel career has received scant
critical attention, which is a shame, because she
continued to be a productive writer from the
1930s until her death in 1973, publishing over
70 books. Buck continued to advocate for racial
equality, even when the politics of the Cold War
made anti-Communism more important than
anti-imperialism. Despite losing access to the
periodicals that she enjoyed in the 1930s and
1940s, Buck used her Cold War novels to explore
miscegenation, critique American foreign policy,
and teach Americans about the complex history of
Asian nations, all within the genre confines of love
triangles, epic journeys, and melodramatic plots.
From critiques of American racism and the embrace of miscegenation (The Angry Wife [1947],
The Hidden Flower [1952], and The New Year
[1968]) to historical and political primers on
Korea (The Living Reed [1963]), India (Mandala
[1970]), and China, both past (Imperial Woman
[1956]) and present (Letter from Peking [1957]
and Three Daughters of Madame Liang [1969])
including one of the first fictional critiques of the
Cultural Revolution Buck insisted on the significance of her brand of progressive middlebrow
authorial identity.
Bucks continued relevance today lies in her
conscious efforts to merge popular fiction with
liberal activism, and to promote this aesthetic as
both a Chinese tradition and an American ideal.
SEE ALSO: Canfield, Dorothy (AF); Cather,
Willa (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA
and Popular Front Fiction (AF)
Buck, P. (1930). East Wind, West Wind. New York:
John Day.
Buck, P. (1931). The Good Earth. New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1932). Sons. New York: John Day.
474
BUKOWSKI, CHARLES
Buck, P. (1936a). The Exile. New York: John Day.

Buck, P. (1936b). Fighting Angel. New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1939). The Patriot. New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1947). The Angry Wife. New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1951). Gods Men. New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1952). The Hidden Flower. New York: John
Day.
Buck, P. (1956). Imperial Woman. New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1957). Letter from Peking. New York: John
Day.
Buck, P. (1963). The Living Reed. New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1968). The New Year. New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1969). Three Daughters of Madame Liang.
New York: John Day.
Buck, P. (1970). Mandala. New York: John Day.
Conn, P. (1996). Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography.
Harker, J. (2007). America the Middlebrow: Womens
Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship
Between the Wars. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press.
Leong, K. (2005). The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck,
Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the
Transformation of American Orientalism. Berkeley:
Liao, K. (1997). Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge Across
the Pacific. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Lipscomb, E., Webb, F. E., & Conn, P. (eds.) (1994). The
Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a
Centennial Symposium (intro. P. Conn). Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Schaeffer, R. (1999). Women and International
Relations: Pearl S. Bucks Critique of the Cold War.
Journal of Womens History, 11(3), 15175.
Yoshihara, M. (2002). Embracing the East: White
Women and American Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bukowski, Charles
TAMAS DOBOZY
Charles Bukowski, author of novels, poetry, short

stories, journalism, drama, comic books, travel
writing, and screenplays, emerged to prominence
in the 1960s, and was a counterculture figure who
wrote about urban life in southern California,
notably Los Angeles. Variously identified as an
heir of the Beats, a dirty realist, and even an
author in the transcendentalist tradition, Bukowski plays with a generic ambiguity between
fiction and autobiography to present a fatalistic
but comic view of the American underclass. His
work is associated with the stereotype, portrayed

in the film Barfly (Schroeder 1987), of the chronically and unrepentantly drunk, unemployed,
street-fighting, iconoclastic author, an image promoted by Bukowskis work, though not without
irony, especially in the novel Hollywood (1987)
and the poems of Septuagenarian Stew (1990),
which treat the disparity between the myth and
reality of Bukowski, particularly his later financial
and commercial success.
Henry Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920 and died on
March 9, 1994 in San Pedro, California. His
family immigrated to the United States in
1923. While Bukowski published fiction early on,
his first important publications were poetry, collected in Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected
Poems 19461966 (1988) and Burning in Water,
Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 19551973
(1974). These poems, written in free verse, address poverty, alcoholism, gambling, disease, sex,
violence, and aesthetics in a style at once colloquial and lyrical. They are notable for their direct,
unsentimental treatment of the underclass milieu, as if drawn directly from Bukowskis personal experiences.
Bukowskis later poetry in collections such as
Love Is a Dog From Hell: Poems 19741977 (1977)
and You Get So Alone at Times It Just Makes Sense
(1986) witness a gradual stripping away of the
early lyricism, a willful arbitrariness of line breaks,
and a treatment of greater banality (taking
showers, typing, listening to the radio, going to
the race track) that celebrates the everyday while
testing literatures capacity to address it. They are
also an assault on the conventions of poetry itself,
undermining its exalted status to critique the
expectations that readers place on art.
Frequently acknowledging his debt to Hemingway, Bukowskis prose is laconic, even crude,
equating its rejection of embellishment with writing from the gut, suggesting that artifice masks
an ugly, banal reality. Bukowski thus conflates his
aesthetic with an ethical imperative: a style is
true insofar as it offers as little redemption and
meaning as reality does. This sets his work squarely within the tradition of realism, whose emphasis
on mimesis resulted in a prose conflicted between
creating art and telling it like it is. Bukowski
was an influence on later writers of minimalism
and realism such as Raymond Carver, and
BUKOWSKI, CHARLES
participated in the rejection of the experimentation that occupied American fiction in the 1960s.
Like his poetry, Bukowskis novels are ostensibly drawn from his experiences, and frequently
feature the alter ego Henry Chinaski from the
early chapbook Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts (1965). Chinaski is a
chronic outsider whose refusal to live by middleclass conventions both alienates and empowers
him. The works are frequently structured as picaresques, alternating between social criticism
and slapstick adventure. Ham on Rye (1982) deals
with Chinaskis fractious relationship with his
father and difficult adolescence in Los Angeles
during the Great Depression. Post Office (1971)
and Factotum (1975) detail experiences in the
labor force, humorously voicing a disdain for
material gain and the soul-destroying machinery
of the workplace. Women (1978) examines
Bukowskis rise to celebrity at age 50 and dwells
on the romantic and sexual entanglements that
came with it. Like much of Bukowskis writing,
Women has been criticized for misogyny, a claim
Bukowski celebrated rather than denied, saying
that the charge lent fame to his career. The late
Pulp (1994), the last novel to be published in
Bukowskis lifetime, parodies the hard-boiled
novels of writers such as Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler to grotesque extremes, including the appearance of aliens, a personification
of death, and a search for the still-living French
author Louis-Ferdinand Celine, along with
Bukowskis chosen milieu of low-life bars, street
brawls, and the underclass. Its vision is arguably
the most nihilistic of all his works.
Other important Bukowski texts include Notes
of a Dirty Old Man (1969), a generic hybrid of
fiction, commentary, and journalism, collecting
the columns he penned for the underground Los
Angeles newspaper Open City. These columns,
many of which read like short stories, detail
Bukowskis cynical outlook on establishment religion and politics while sympathizing with the
poor and disenfranchised. Shakespeare Never Did
This (1979) recounts a book tour in Europe.
Collections of correspondence, The Bukowski/
Purdy Letters (1983), Screams from the Balcony
(1993), and Beerspit Night and Cursing (2001),
illuminate Bukowskis literary tastes and his critical reception of much of contemporary American
writing.
475
SEE ALSO: Carver, Raymond (AF); Hemingway,

Ernest (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
Brewer, G. (1997). Charles Bukowski. Woodbridge, CT:
Twayne.
Bukowski, C. (1965). Confessions of a Man Insane
Enough to Live With Beasts. Bensenville, IL: Mimeo/
Publishers of Ole.
Bukowski, C. (1969). Notes of a Dirty Old Man.
Hollywood, CA: Essex House.
Bukowski, C. (1971). Post Office. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1974). Burning in Water, Drowning in
Flame: Selected Poems 19551973. Santa Rosa, CA:
Black Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1975). Factotum. Santa Rosa: Black
Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1977). Love Is a Dog From Hell: Poems
19741977. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1978). Women. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1979). Shakespeare Never Did This. San
Francisco: City Lights.
Bukowski, C. (1982). Ham on Rye. Santa Rosa, CA:
Black Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1983). The Bukowski/Purdy Letters
19641974. Sutton West, ON: Paget.
Bukowski, C. (1986). You Get So Alone at Times It Just
Makes Sense. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1988). Roominghouse Madrigals: Early
Selected Poems 19461966. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1989). Hollywood. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1990). Septuagenarian Stew: Stories and
Poems. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1993). Screams from the Balcony:
Selected Letters 19601970. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (1994). Pulp. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow.
Bukowski, C. (2001). Beerspit Night and Cursing: The
Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri
Martinelli 19601967. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow.
Harrison, R. (ed.) (1994). Against the American Dream:
Essays on Charles Bukowski. Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow.
Richmond, S. (1996). Spinning Off Bukowski.
Northville, MI: Sun Dog.
Schroeder, B.(dir.) (1987). Barfly. Los Angeles: Warner
Brothers.
476
BURROUGHS, WILLIAM
Burroughs, William
OLIVER HARRIS
William Burroughs (191497) is widely recognized as one of the most original, innovative, and
culturally influential writers of the twentieth century. At the same time, his place in the academy
and within American literary history has remained highly problematic and controversial, a
position that has three principal causes. First,
while Burroughs initially emerged in the late
1950s as part of the Beat generation, even that
context was more apparent than real and became
increasingly tenuous as a result of his longstanding expatriation, which lasted for a quarter of a
century until the mid-1970s. Second, both the
uncompromising sexual and political content of
Burroughss writing and the sensational drama of
his personal life brought him in conflict with the
law, which guaranteed his status as a countercultural icon while deterring serious academic attention. And third, Burroughss relationship to
American literary history has been complicated
by the radical experimental methods in several
media that he developed during the decade he
lived in Paris and London, and that came largely
out of European avant garde art traditions. Significantly, the first book-length critical studies
appeared not in America but in England and
France.
William Seward Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, the heir to
two families that played significant roles in the
modernization of corporate America. His paternal grandfather perfected the modern adding
machine and founded the international company
that bore the Burroughs name, while his maternal
uncle, Poison Ivy Lee, also achieved national
fame as one of the pioneers of modern public
relations. After attending Harvard during the
1930s, Burroughss subsequent trajectory inverted the expectations of his class and so established his identity as a disaffected insider. His
homosexuality further alienated him from the
social and religious values of his background, and
led him away from the career promises of official
culture and toward a milieu of outcasts and
nonconformist artists.
Following graduate studies in anthropology at
Columbia and Harvard, Burroughs settled in
New York in the early 1940s, where he moved

in a circle of students, street criminals, and drug
addicts. Here he met Joan Vollmer, who became
his common-law wife, and befriended Allen
Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, acting as an elder
mentor figure for the would-be writers and
fellow founders of the Beat generation. While
this New York scene has become one of the most
familiar episodes in American literary history
and popular culture, Burroughss own writing
did not begin seriously until the end of the
decade, when, after moving first to Louisiana
and then Texas, he settled with Joan and their
two young children in Mexico City. The accidental shooting death of his wife there, in September
1951, confirmed Burroughss notoriety and exile
from America.
Although only the first was published at the
time, Burroughs wrote two comparatively realist
autobiographical novellas in Mexico, Junkie
(2003a [1953]; later republished as Junky) and
Queer (1985). A seemingly cool and ironic work of
reportage, the former documented his life as a
heroin addict, while the latter dramatized his
experience as a homosexual. Each constituted an
implicit blast against the moral and political order
of Cold War America, but Burroughss persona as
the Ugly American in Queer, given to manic
flights of sadistic fantasy, more significantly anticipated the unsettling and ambiguous politics of
his later work, especially to do with race and
religion in Naked Lunch (2003b [1959]). Published as a pulp paperback, Junkie did not receive
any critical attention, but during the 1950s Burroughs was already achieving an underground
reputation through the writing of Ginsberg and,
especially, Kerouac.
In 1953, Burroughs left Mexico for a long
expedition through the jungles of South America
to discover yage, a hallucinogen long used by
native peoples but barely studied by Western
science. The result was In Search of Yage (later
published in The Yage Letters [1963]), a short
hybrid text that combined picaresque satire with
ethnography. Its epistolary format (largely contrived from original journals) was also significant
as a sign of Burroughss unique investment of his
creative energy in correspondence during the
1950s, mainly through regular long-distance letters to Allen Ginsberg.
BURROUGHS, WILLIAM
Burroughss most important and influential

work, Naked Lunch, grew out of the next four
years, which he spent in Tangier, then a colonially
administered International Zone and haven for
Western outcasts. Naked Lunch is often labeled a
story about drug addiction, but this is wildly
simplistic and ignores the origins of much of the
text, obscuring the desire-driven creativity behind
its sexual content. For while Burroughs struggled
with a desperate narcotics addiction, his most
famous novel (or, more properly, anti-novel) was
paradoxically the result of his protracted failure to
sustain conventional linear narrative or to impose
a stable and coherent structure. Instead, he produced material that parodied various pulp genres,
showing an extraordinary command of idiom,
and a multitude of politically and sexually explosive satirical fragments of fantasy he termed
routines. The final collage form of Naked Lunch
was inseparable from the rehearsal of these routines in Burroughss letters to Ginsberg, his
would-be lover, and then the haphazard circumstances of his manuscripts editing. Naked Lunch
was a significantly collaborative and contingent
venture, benefiting first from the editorial input
of Kerouac and Ginsberg in Tangier, and then the
artist Brion Gysin and others in Paris, where
Burroughs moved in early 1958. This long and
exotic history of production would become mythologized as a key part in the novels popular
reception.
The unbridled dystopian content of Naked
Lunch, as well as its challenging form, led to
publication in Paris rather than America. However, Olympia Press in Paris published
Burroughss book only after the appearance of
episodes in American little magazines had caused
a scandal and generated publicity. Burroughss
confrontation with obscenity laws and the books
subsequent trial in Boston (resolved in his favor
only in 1966) firmly established Naked Lunch in
the tradition of works such as Ulysses, as a crucial
test case of cultural change in terms of literary
freedom from censorship.
Following Ginsbergs Howl (1956) and Kerouacs On the Road (1957), Naked Lunch became
the dark, third key text of the Beat generation.
However, its publication in 1959 coincided with a
dramatic shift in Burroughss work and allegiances, as he took the aesthetic innovations of
477
Naked Lunch to an entirely new level with his

development, in partnership with Gysin, of
cut-up methods. In the tradition of dada and
surrealist practices of the 1920s, and coinciding
with a more general postwar revival of collage
techniques and chance operations, Burroughs invested the splicing and recombination of texts with
quasi-magical, scientific, and political aims. He
also applied cut-up methods beyond the text to
produce scrapbooks, photomontages, tapes, and
films. Announcing a radical assault on traditional
definitions of authorship and the ambitions of
a literary career, the wraparound band attached
to the multiauthor pamphlet that launched the
method, Minutes to Go (1960), declared its avant
garde aim: Un reglement de comptes avec la
literature.
The brinkmanship of Burroughss enthusiasm
for his experimental methods was highly productive, resulting in a trilogy of novel-length works
and a mass of short texts in various formats that
circulated through the burgeoning little magazines of the 1960s and established Burroughs as a
singular countercultural presence. His trilogy,
whose chronology became confused through constant revisions, comprised The Soft Machine (1968
[1961, 1966]), The Ticket That Exploded (1967
[1962]), and Nova Express (1964). Minimally
structured through an apocalyptic science fiction
conspiracy scenario that pitted Nova Police
against Nova Criminals, these three highly discontinuous texts integrated the radical methods
of their production into a revolutionary call to
sabotage the power structures of reality based
on language, or the word virus. Burroughss
trilogy thereby combined a strident didacticism,
advocating an insurgency against Control, with
an extraordinarily complex and challenging textual experience, by turns poetic, shocking, repetitive, inspiring, and disturbing.
Toward the end of the 1960s, Burroughss
experimental project began to suffer from a law
of diminishing returns, and sales. Although he
and Gysin produced an illustrated volume of cutup collage and theory, The Third Mind, it would
not be published until 1978, and The Wild Boys
(1971) was his last novel to use cut-up texts to any
great extent. This novel, a utopian queer fantasy of
terrorist boy heroes, also saw a return to more
sustained narrative and marked a period of
478
BURROUGHS, WILLIAM
transition in his oeuvre. Burroughs summarized

his theories of politics and writing in The Job
(1970), but the direction of his oeuvre was on
the point of major change, a shift that coincided
with his decision to leave London in the early
1970s and return, after 25 years abroad, to
America.
Burroughss identity in his homeland had not
advanced significantly since the days of his
mythologization by the Beats, but when he settled
in New York in 1974, he began to reinvent his
image and reputation as a writer. Moving in
celebrity avant garde and rock music circles, in
1978 Burroughs was feted at the Nova Convention held in his honor, where figures from Laurie
Anderson to Frank Zappa and from John Cage to
Timothy Leary confirmed his totemic status and
reasserted his cultural influence.
Under the guidance of James Grauerholz, and
relocating with him to Kansas, Burroughs published a final major trilogy of novels, beginning
with Cities of the Red Night in 1981. Generally
regarded as his most consistently impressive
work since Naked Lunch, the novel interwove
a series of genre narratives stamped with
Burroughss trademark political conspiracies
and satirical humor. The Place of Dead Roads
and The Western Lands completed the trilogy.
Although these were Burroughss last major
works, the 1980s and early 1990s were more
remarkable for his own new career as an exhibiting artist and, above all, for the fertility of his
influence on other innovative writers, artists,
and musicians, from William Gibson and Keith
Haring to U2, which led to numerous important
collaborations. Now a key figure in postmodern
culture, Burroughs began to receive sustained
critical attention, but gained only an ambivalent
place in the canon, a situation he embraced.
Twenty years ago, they were saying I belonged
in jail, he said after his induction into the
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in
1983. Now theyre saying I belong in their club. I
didnt listen to them then, and I dont listen to
them now (Morgan 1988, 13).
SEE ALSO: Acker, Kathy (AF); Kerouac,
Jack (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer
Modernism (AF); Utopian and Dystopian
Fiction (AF)

Burroughs, W.(with Beiles, S., Corso, G., & Gysin, B.)
(1960). Minutes to Go. Paris: Two Cities.
Burroughs, W. (1964). Nova Express. New York: Grove.
Burroughs, W. (1967). The Ticket That Exploded [1962].
New York Grove.
Burroughs, W. (1968). The Soft Machine [1961, 1966].
London: Calder and Boyards.
Burroughs, W. (1971). The Wild Boys. New York:
Grove.
Burroughs, W.(with Gysin, B.) (1978). The Third Mind.
New York: Viking
Burroughs, W. (1981). Cities of the Red Night. New
York: Henry Holt.
Burroughs, W. (1984). The Place of Dead Roads.
New York: Henry Holt.
Burroughs, W. (1985). Queer. New York: Viking.
Burroughs, W. (1987). The Western Lands. New York:
Viking.
Burroughs, W. (1993). The Letters of William S.
Burroughs, 19451959 (ed. O. Harris). New York:
Viking.
Burroughs, W. (2003a). Junky: The Definitive Text of
Junk (ed. O. Harris). New York: Penguin.
Burroughs, W. (2003b). Naked Lunch: The Restored
Text (ed. J. Grauerholz & B. Miles). New York: Grove.
Burroughs, W. (2006). The Yage Letters Redux
(ed. O. Harris). San Francisco: City Lights.
Harris, O. (2003). William Burroughs and the Secret of
Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Johnson, R. (2006). The Lost Years of William S.
Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. College Station:
Texas A&M Press.
Lydenberg, R. (1987). Word Cultures: Radical Theory
and Practice in William S. Burroughs Fiction.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Lydenberg, R., & Skerl, J. (1991). William S.
Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception:
19591989. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press.
Morgan, T. (1988). Literary Outlaw: The Life and
Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry
Holt.
Murphy, T. (1997). Wising Up the Marks:
The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley:
Russell, J. (2001). Queer Burroughs. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Schneiderman, D., & Walsh, P. (2004). Retaking the
Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of
Globalization. London: Pluto.
Skerl, J. (1985). William S. Burroughs.
Boston: Twayne.
BUTLER, OCTAVIA
Butler, Octavia
PEZ
TIFFANY ANA LO
Octavia Butler is heralded as the first African

American female writer of science fiction and
fantasy, also termed speculative fiction. Her published works include 12 novels, a novelette, and
one collection of stories; only two of her novels
(Kindred and Fledgling) were written to stand
alone, with all others envisioned as part of a
collection of books: the Xenogenesis trilogy, the
five-volume Patternist series, and Parable of the
Talents and Parable of the Sower. Butler began
writing science fiction out of frustration with the
genres glaring lack of female protagonists and
ethnic minorities. Her work is acclaimed for its
bold projections of future worlds driven by complex explorations of race, sexuality, spirituality,
and violence as foundational in shaping people
and building community.
Butler was born on June 22, 1947 in Pasadena,
California and died February 24, 2006. She studied
at California State University, Los Angeles, and has
credited the Open Door Program of the Screen
Writers Guild and the Clarion Science Fiction
Writers Workshop as influential in her development as a writer. As a young woman she witnessed
the dramatic cultural shifts in an era of segregation
and a revolutionary Civil Rights Movement.
Her landmark novel, Kindred (1979), was inspired by Butler grappling with emotions elicited
by the Black Power movement and the complexities of racial violence. Here she creates a black
woman, married to a white man, who is transported from her established life in multicultural
Los Angeles in 1976 to antebellum Maryland,
where she must negotiate the hazards of slavery
on an American plantation owned by a distant
relative. The novels events culminate in her being
challenged to save the life of a would-be slave
master in order to preserve her own family line.
While some critics read the novel as a cross-genre
work that blends the slave narrative with science
fiction, Butler refuses the latter category and
prefers the term grim fantasy to clarify her use
of time travel as a means to grapple with technology and with the grim role of violence in American history. While Butlers writing is studied
across disciplines, Kindred remains her most
widely taught work.
479
Throughout her career, Butler eschewed labels,

preferring to position herself as a writer engaged
with the vast array of human experience.
Through characters capable of changing race,
gender, and species, her work challenges the
imposition of boundaries on thinking about
identity by showing the value of embracing complexities and contradictions. Notably, her characters often face the test of balancing a quest for
personal strength with accountability to community, something consistently positioned as paramount to survival.
Butlers Xenogenesis trilogy Dawn (1987),
Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989) takes
place after a war has nearly destroyed the human
race. The few survivors owe their lives to the
Oankali, a highly evolved, though seemingly
monstrous and parasitic, alien race who interbreed with humans to rebuild an assuredly resilient society. Butlers prequel, Wild Seed (1980),
the last book in her Patternist series, follows over
hundreds of years the immortal characters of
Anyanwu, a shape-shifter, and Doro, a being who
kills and takes over the bodies and identities of
others. The novel explores their efforts to build
life on earth, while all five novels in the series are
devoted to the historical resonance of their legacy.
The two-part series Parable of the Sower (1995)
and Parable of the Talents (1998) explores the role
of spirituality in matters of identity and community. The first novel tracks the development and
urgency of the Earthseed religion (built on the
belief that God is Change) during extreme times
of violence, while the second focuses on the
postwar conflicts in the aftermath, including
generational resentment. Her final novel, Fledgling (2005), presents a protagonist, an amnesiac
adult female vampire, with the physical appearance of a black child. Her struggle to regain
memory is intertwined with her need to build a
community that will provide the physical and
emotional support required for her survival.
Butlers portraits of people of color as rich
contributors to a burgeoning technoculture have
distinctly added to the evolution of science fiction,
most especially the subgenre Afrofuturism,
and her work has provided a launching point for
posing urgent questions in American cultural
studies. A leading scholar of Butlers writing
extrapolates the term Chicanafuturism as a
480
BUTLER, OCTAVIA
means of further exploring both the promise and

the limits of technology for communities of color
(Ramirez 2008).
Butlers writing has been recognized through
numerous prestigious awards. She is the recipient
of a MacArthur Fellowship (1995), a Hugo Award
in science fiction (1984), and Nebula Awards for
her novella Bloodchild (1984) and her novel Parable of the Talents (1999). In 2000, she received a
lifetime achievement award from PEN American
Center.
Butler, O. (1976). Patternmaster. New York:
Doubleday.
Butler, O. (1977). Mind of My Mind. New York:
Doubleday.
Butler, O. (1978). Survivor. New York: Doubleday.
Butler, O. (1979). Kindred. New York: Doubleday.
Butler, O. (1980). Wild Seed. New York: Doubleday.
Butler, O. (1984). Clays Ark. New York: St. Martins.
Butler, O. (1987). Dawn. New York: Warner.
Butler, O. (1988). Adulthood Rites. New York: Warner
Butler, O. (1989). Imago. New York: Warner.

Butler, O. (1995). Parable of the Sower. New York:
Warner.
Butler, O. (1998). Parable of the Talents. New York:
Seven Stories.
Butler, O. (2000). Liliths Brood. New York: Warner.
Butler, O. (2005). Fledgling. New York: Warner.
Butler, O. (2007). Seed to Harvest. New York: Warner.
Govan, S. Y. (1986). Homage to Tradition: Octavia
Butler Renovates the Historical Novel. MELUS,
13(12), 7986.
Govan, S. (2005). Going to See the Woman: A Visit
with Octavia E. Butler. Obsidian III, 67(21),
1439.
Helford, E. R. (1994). Would You Really Rather Die
Than Bear My Young? The Construction of Gender,
Race, and Species in Octavia E. Butler. African
American Review, 28(2), 25971.
Keating, A. L., & Mehaffy, M. (2001). Radio
Imagination: Octavia Butler on the Poetics of
Narrative Embodiment. MELUS, 26(1), 4576.
Ramirez, Catherine S. (2002). Cyborg Feminism: The
Science Fiction of Octavia Butler and Gloria
Anzaldua. In M. Flanagan & A. Booth (eds.), Reload:
Rethinking Women and Cyberculture. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Ramirez, Catherine S. (2008). Afrofuturism/
Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin. Aztlan, 33(1), 18594.
C
Cain, James M.
DAVID W. MADDEN
Remembered for his early novels and tough-guy

style, James M. Cain was a prolific author whose
career spanned 58 years as a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, short story writer, and novelist. Although he suffered from obscurity in his
last 25 years, Cains novels and the film adaptations of his works have continually fascinated
audiences and spawned imitators. Key elements
of this popularity are his swift-paced plotting,
hard-boiled dialogue, and commonplace characters whose worlds change radically when confronted with the possibility of the fulfillment of
their dreams.
Born July 1, 1892 in Annapolis, Maryland, Cain
was the first of five children of James and Rose Cain.
After graduating from college, he eventually settled
on journalism and published some short stories in
magazines. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
became a popular and critical success and illustrates
some of the fictional practices central to his works.
The outstanding feature is his tough-guy style,
which relies upon a subjective realism of a lowerclass world presented in the idiom of those at the
bottom. Middle-class ethics and traditional morality are luxuries for Cains characters; they
represent individuals following overwhelming
impulses, struggling in a world that frustrates
the free expression of those drives.
A friend coined the term love-rack to describe these figures, and here Cain found his
fictional formula. He often joins a pair of lovers
out of lust or greed as they commit murder,
separate, and reunite, either triumphing or more

often succumbing to some form of punishment.
In Cains world, the most ordinary, even lawabiding, people commit crimes because they
dream forbidden dreams. In Postman, he blends
these elements masterfully, producing a work that
is as taut as any written by his contemporaries
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. A
drifter, Frank Chambers, takes a temporary job,
falls in love with his employers wife, kills the man,
and then escapes justice. When he and Cora
reunite, they distrust one another, then reconcile,
and she dies in an ocean accident. Chambers is
executed for her death, though he is guiltless.
The novels success led to a Hollywood screenwriting career and other compelling fictions,
such as Double Indemnity (1936), which presents
Walter Huff, an insurance agent who falls in love
with a clients wife, sells her an accident policy on
her husband, and then conspires to murder the
man. Deciding that the wife will betray him,
Huff plots her murder but is shot instead. Like
his best works, Double Indemnity further explores
the possibilities inherent in using a first-person
narrator who reviews and evaluates his past
actions.
Serenade (1937) centers on a destitute baritone,
John Howard Sharp, who falls in love with a sultry
Mexican prostitute and enjoys success in Hollywood but remains frustrated that he has betrayed
his true talent. The novel is full of exaggerated
homo- and heterosexual liaisons, distrust, and
overripe melodrama that reinforce the Cain formula of individuals whose lives are suddenly
transformed by overwhelming passion.

482
CANFIELD, DOROTHY
Mildred Pierce (1941), another of Cains most

famous works, is a novel that departs from previous fictions with its objective narrator and female
protagonist. Pierce is a determined woman who
divorces her feckless husband, raises two children,
and eventually launches a successful business.
When a former lover romances her daughter,
Pierce descends into bankruptcy and reunites
with her first husband. In spite of its melodramatic structure, the novel stands as a paean to
the middle class struggling through the Depression and largely eschews the love-rack formula.
Instead, the novel concentrates on an ordinary
persons desire to rise above mediocrity and
transcend individual limitations.
Exaggerated and improbable as the plot may
be, The Butterfly (1947a) is the best of Cains
experiments in regional fiction, and its conciseness is a major reason for its success. Here Cain
returns to a rapidly paced, first-person narrative,
which emphasizes the rule that Cain is at his best
with a subjective narrator. Replete with moonshine, sexual temptation, and incest, the novel is
no match for Faulkners, but Cains inversion of
the love-rack, to include family members, allows
him to explore tortured characters who pay a
steep price.
In 1948 Cain published the more ambitious
The Moth, another chronicle of the Depression,
whose plot extends over 35 years. The novel is a
Bildungsroman that follows the fortunes of a child
prodigy whose singing ambitions are thwarted
and who is forced to embark on a life of rootless
wandering. Through all his vicissitudes, like
Mildred Pierce, Jack Dillon remains an optimist.
The Moth, Cains longest work, is nevertheless
diluted by the realists compulsion to include
extraneous details that devolve into episodic
rambling.
On October 27, 1977, at the age of 85, Cain died
in Hyattsville, Maryland. Film adaptations of his
works and an influential biography led to a resurgence of interest in his career in the 1980s. Cain
will always be remembered as a writer who both
defined and epitomized the hard-boiled style. As a
technique, it represents a fitting fictional response
to an era in which longstanding values and ideals
were called radically into question.
SEE ALSO: Chandler, Raymond (AF); Hammett,
Dashiell (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood
(AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Social-Realist

Fiction (AF)
Cain, J. M. (1934). The Postman Always Rings Twice.
New York: Knopf.
Cain, J. M. (1937). Serenade. New York: Knopf.
Cain, J. M. (1941). Mildred Pierce. New York: Knopf.
Cain, J. M. (1942). Loves Lovely Counterfeit. New York:
Knopf.
Cain, J. M. (1943). Three of a Kind (includes Double
Indemnity). New York: Knopf.
Cain, J. M. (1944). The Embezzler. New York: Avon
Library.
Cain, J. M. (1947a). The Butterfly. New York: Knopf.
Cain, J. M. (1947b). Sinful Woman. New York: Avon.
Cain, J. M. (1948). The Moth. New York: Knopf.
Cain, J. M. (1950). Jealous Woman. New York: Avon.
Cain, J. M. (1951). The Root of His Evil. New York:
Avon.
Cain, J. M. (1962). Mignon. New York: Dial Press.
Fine, R. (1992). James M. Cain and the American
Authors Authority. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Frohock, W. M. (1950). The Novel of Violence in
America: 19201950. Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press.
Hoopes, R. (1982). Cain: The Biography of James
M. Cain. New York: Henry Holt.
Madden, D. (1970). James M. Cain. New York: Twayne.
Marling, W. (1995). The American Roman Noir:
Hammett, Cain, and Chandler. Athens: University
of Georgia Press.
Nyman, J. (1998). Hard-Boiled Fiction and Dark
Romanticism. New York: Peter Lang.
Skenazy, P. (1989). James M. Cain. New York:
Continuum.
Canfield, Dorothy
JENNIFER PARCHESKY
From the 1910s to the 1950s, Dorothy Canfield

was a leading figure in American literature and
culture, authoring 11 novels, 18 non-fiction
books (published under her married name, Dorothy Canfield Fisher), and hundreds of stories and
essays. Her fiction focuses on individual psychological and moral development within realistic
social settings. Although she explored controversial issues gender roles, industrialization, war,
and civil rights her accessible style and ability
to connect new ideas with traditional values of
CANFIELD, DOROTHY
family, community, and democracy appealed to

mainstream audiences. As a long-time member of
the Book of the Month Club Board of Selection
and spokesperson for a variety of progressive
organizations, she helped shape American taste
and opinion: Eleanor Roosevelt praised her in
1935 as one of the 10 most influential women in
America.
The settings of Canfields fiction reflect three
very different backgrounds the Midwest, Europe, and Vermont. Born in 1879 in Lawrence,
Kansas, where her father was an economics professor, she also lived in Lincoln, Nebraska (where
he became university chancellor) and attended
Ohio State University (where he was president).
These years were interspersed with extended sojourns in Europe with her artist mother and at
the Vermont homestead of her fathers family.
After earning a PhD in romance languages at
Columbia in 1902, she began to publish short
fiction. In 1907, she published her first novel,
Gunhild; married John Fisher; and moved to
Arlington, Vermont in search of a simpler life
and more authentic community. Many aspects of
her biography particularly the familys move
during World War I to France, where John served
in the ambulance corps and Dorothy worked
with refugees are fictionalized in The Deepening
Stream. Despite many national and international
involvements, Canfields life and work remained
centered in Vermont until her death in 1958.
As the title of her child-rearing book SelfReliance suggests, Canfield was profoundly influenced by the Emersonian tradition of democratic
individualism, particularly as developed by
John Dewey and other progressive educators.
Throughout her writing, Canfield contrasts the
moral value of meaningful work for women,
men, and children with the hollow satisfactions
of consumer culture. Many of her characters
renounce wealth and leisure to embrace a simpler
life of productive labor.
Her first bestseller, The Brimming Cup (1921),
was lauded as the other side of Main Street,
a counter to Sinclair Lewiss contemporaneous
satire of small-town life. Although the intelligent,
artistic heroine is tempted by a cosmopolitan life
of romance and culture, she ultimately embraces
the deeper satisfactions of family and community
life in a small Vermont village. Canfields next
bestseller, The Home-Maker (1924), depicts an
483
unhappy family transformed by a reversal of

gender roles: the active, energetic wife pursues
a sales career while the children thrive under the
care of her thoughtful, nurturing husband. In
a postsuffrage era increasingly accepting of
womens work outside the home, the novel created a sensation with its radical suggestion that
a man might find fulfillment in domesticity.
But Canfield is probably best remembered for
her portraits of Vermont as an exemplar of American democracy, a view epitomized in her popular
childrens novel Understood Betsy (1917) and the
historical memoir Vermont Tradition (1953).
Although some critics have suggested that her
idealization of this ethnically homogeneous state
inadvertently aligned her with racist movements,
Canfield herself was a lifelong supporter of civil
rights. Many of her novels feature characters
who fight for social justice, most notably Seasoned
Timber (1939), in which a Vermont school principal rallies townsfolk and trustees to reject a
major endowment conditioned on the exclusion
of Jewish students.
Canfields fiction sold well throughout her
lifetime and was frequently anthologized and
taught in schools. Yet while her works were
beloved by readers, modernist critics dismissed
her realist style as old-fashioned and her celebration of everyday life as sentimental. In recent
years, however, both her fiction and Book of the
Month Club work have gained attention from
scholars who see her as an exemplar of an unjustly
ignored middlebrow culture and an important
lens through which to examine the changing tides
of American social and cultural history in the first
half of the twentieth century.
SEE ALSO: Buck, Pearl S. (AF); Gender and
the Novel (AF); Lewis, Sinclair (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF)
Canfield, D. (1907).
Henry Holt.
Harcourt Brace.
Harcourt Brace.
Harcourt Brace.
Gunhild. New York: Henry Holt.

Understood Betsy. New York:
The Brimming Cup. New York:
The Home-Maker. New York:
Her Sons Wife. New York:
484
CARVER, RAYMOND
Canfield, D. (1930). The Deepening Stream.

Canfield, D. (1939). Seasoned Timber. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Ehrhardt, J. C. (2004). Writers of Conviction: The
Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield
Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, and Josephine Herbst.
Fisher, D. C. (1916). Self-Reliance: A Practical and
Informal Discussion of Methods of Teaching SelfReliance, Initiative and Responsibility to Modern
Children. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Fisher, D. C. (1953). Vermont Tradition: The
Biography of an Outlook on Life. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Fisher, D. C., & Madigan, M. J. (1996). The Bedquilt
and Other Stories. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press.
Fisher, D. C., & Washington, I. H. (2000). Early Stories
of Dorothy Canfield. Weybridge, VT: Cherry Tree
Books.
Between the Wars. Amherst: University of
Parchesky, J. (2000). The Business of Living and the
Labor of Love: Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Feminism,
and Middle-Class Redemption. Colby Quarterly,
36(1), 2947.
Parchesky, J. (2002). You Make Us Articulate:
Reading, Education, and Community in Dorothy
Canfields Middlebrow America. In B. Ryan & A. M.
Thomas (eds.), Reading Acts: U.S. Readers
Interactions with Literature, 18001950. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, pp. 22958.
Washington, I. H. (1982). Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A
Biography. Shelburne, VT: New England Press.
Wright, E. J. (2007). Home Economics: Children,
Consumption, and Montessori Education in
Dorothy Canfield Fishers Understood Betsy.
Childrens Literature Association Quarterly, 32(3),
21330.
Carver, Raymond
DAVID M. RAABE
Raymond Carver, whose tightly controlled, compelling style gripped readers and inspired writers,
provided the main impetus for the revitalization
of the short story in English during the last quarter
of the twentieth century. Resisting critical categorizing, he rose from humble beginnings to national acclaim and international fame.
Carver was born May 25, 1938 of working-class

parents in the lumber mill town of Clatskanie,
Oregon and grew up in Yakima, Washington.
Married and with a family as a teenager, he
persistently produced stories and poems throughout the loving but conflictive relationship. He was
locked into a series of low-paying jobs which
delayed his formal education but provided subject
matter for his stories, many of which deal with
what one critic calls hardscrabble domesticity
(Nesset 1995, 11). At Chico (California) State
College in 1959, Carver found a conscientious
writing mentor in novelist John Gardner, also a
model for Carvers subsequent teaching. Carver
graduated from Humboldt State College in 1963
and spent the next year at the Iowa Writers
Workshop with a small stipend. A style-forming
period with first publications in little magazines
was followed by association with amputative
editor Gordon Lish and broader-circulation
exposure.
Carvers first major-publisher story collection,
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (McGraw-Hill,
1976), received a National Book Award nomination. His next book established his reputation:
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
(Knopf, 1981). The stories had been harshly
slashed by Lish, but Carver did some restoration
in subsequent versions. Cathedral (Knopf, 1983)
revealed work of a more expansive style and a less
abject life view. Finally came Where Im Calling
From (1988). The latter two collections were
nominated for the National Book Critics Circle
Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Among Carvers
other honors were a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a
Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award
from the American Academy and Institute of Arts
and Letters, and a Brandeis University Creative
Arts Award. Carver taught at a number of US
universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Texas at El Paso;
and Syracuse University.
A long-time smoker and drinker, Carver barely
survived an onslaught of acute alcoholism and
quit drinking in 1977. He was separated from
his first wife in 1978 and spent his last 10 years
with poet Tess Gallagher. In May 1988, Carver
was inducted into the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters. In June, he and
Gallagher married, and he succumbed to lung
cancer in August.
CARVER, RAYMOND
Carver acknowledged literary debts to such

forebears as Flannery OConnor and Ernest
Hemingway, but he most identified with Anton
Chekhov. Carvers last story, Errand, which
shows a new direction for his writing, puts the
death of Chekhov in a moving fictional frame.
Critics have invoked or invented many appellations to try to characterize Carvers subjects and
style: blue collar or dirty realism, or Kmart
fiction, for example. More than most writers,
he has suffered the indignity of being pushed
into ill-defined pigeonholes. Some labels border
on the silly: post-postmodern modernist,
miniaturist, etc. Only one ism comfortably
embraces Carvers fiction. He was a realist, disdaining gimmicks or the experimentation of the
mid-twentieth century.
Generalities about his characters have been
overly harsh: fringe figures, marginal lives of
hardship and squalor, unhappily estranged . . .
disillusioned . . . battered . . . alienated, selfdestructive . . . lifes losers. Part of this misperception stems from Poes dictum, which Carver
knew and followed, that a story or poem should
concentrate on a single emotion or effect. Since
conflict is what drives most stories, Carvers
people are usually presented in moments of stress
or confusion, without contrastive pleasure or
satisfaction. Carver said in a magazine profile,
I never felt the people I was writing about were so
bad off. Know what I mean? The waitress, the bus
driver, the mechanic, the hotel keeper. God, the
country is filled with these people. Theyre good
people. People doing the best they could (quoted
in Weber 1990 [1984], 92).
Carvers typical setting is domestic: 34 of 67
stories center on the household, while another 22
have domestic backgrounds like recent divorce.
In 14, husbandwife conflict is the principal plot
focus, but in 20 a couple is facing a problem
together. As for money or its lack, Carvers early
poverty (two bankruptcies) does not show up in
his stories as much as is commonly thought. In
only three are the principals desperately poor.
Most are middle-class or in an irrelevant economic
situation.
The Carver protagonist often finds himself
(or herself) in an encounter with someone or
something unusual. But critics who see the plots
as bizarre ignore the fact that they are mundane
situations that could arise in anyones life
485
dealing with earwax build-up or talking to a fat

man things which can be life-altering or even
life-threatening in a Carver story but well within
the creative purview of realism. His focus is on the
emotion which the situation evokes.
Carvers fiction has been translated into more
than 20 languages. His growing popularity with
academics and non-academics alike is evidence
of skillfully depicted slices of life, presented with a
full array of tools available to the accomplished
literary artist.
SEE ALSO: Gardner, John (AF); Hemingway,
Ernest (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF);
OConnor, Flannery (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF)

Adelman, B., & Gallagher, T. (1990). Carver Country:
The World of Raymond Carver. New York: Scribners.
Campbell, E. (1992). Raymond Carver: A Study of the
Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Carver, M. B. (2006). What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait
of My Marriage to Raymond Carver. New York:
St. Martins.
Carver, R. (1976). Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
New York: McGraw-Hill.
Carver, R. (1981). What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love. New York: Knopf.
Carver, R. (1983). Cathedral: Stories. New York: Knopf.
Carver, R. (1985). Where Water Comes Together with
Other Water. New York: Random House.
Carver, R. (1988). Where Im Calling From. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press.
Carver, R. (1996). All of Us: The Collected Poems.
New York: Vintage.
Carver, R. (2001). Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected
Fiction and Other Prose. New York: Vintage.
Halpert, S. (1995). Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Meyers, A. (1995). Raymond Carver. New York:
Twayne.
Nesset, K. (1995). The Stories of Raymond Carver: A
Critical Study. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Stull, W. L., & Carroll, M. P. (eds.) (1993).
Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of
Raymond Carver. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra.
Weber, B. (1990). Raymond Carver: A Chronicler
of Blue-Collar Despair [1984]. In M. B. Gentry &
W. L. Stull (eds.), Conversations With Raymond
Carver. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
pp. 8497.
486
CASTILLO, ANA
Castillo, Ana
BENJAMIN D. CARSON
Since the publication of The Mixquiahuala Letters

in 1986, Ana Castillo has become one of the most
recognized Chicana voices in American literature.
While Castillo has not been afraid to experiment
stylistically, the central concerns of her work have
remained constant. In her six novels, one collection of short stories, five poetry collections, and
two plays, and her seminal collection of essays on
Xicanisma, Castillo consistently addresses racial,
social, and economic injustice; the consequences
of environmental degradation; the plight of immigrants; the inescapable pull of sexual desire and
love; and the importance of family and traditions
and the equally abiding need for individual
autonomy.
Ana Castillo was born into a family of Mexican
immigrants in Chicago on June 15, 1953. In 1975
Castillo graduated with a BA in art and secondary
education from Northeastern Illinois University,
and in 1979 she earned an MA in Latin American
and Caribbean studies. In 1991 she received a
PhD in American studies from the University of
Bremen, Germany. Along with Norma Alarc
on
and others, Castillo co-founded the literary
magazine Third Woman and has since been a
contributing editor to Third Woman and Humanizarte magazines.
Castillos creative work could be characterized
as border fiction. Castillos characters are nomadic, moving back and forth across both literal
and metaphorical borders. Winner of the American Book Award in 1987, The Mixquiahuala
Letters, an epistolary novel, records Teresas
search for identity as she and her friend Alicia
travel across the US/Mexican border. Like so
many characters in Castillos fiction, Teresa is in
search of an identity. Teresa and Alicia travel to
Mexico in search of a cultural home but soon
realize that integrating into Mexican culture
despite looking like mestizas is more difficult
than they anticipated. Teresa realizes that selffashioning requires negotiating with society and
the ideology to which it adheres, and the society
Teresa encounters in Mexico threatens to restrict,
silence, and marginalize her.
Castillos second novel, Sapagonia (1994
[1990]), follows the sexually carnivorous Maximo
Madrigal on a bohemian journey from Sapagonia

to Paris to New York to Chicago and Los Angeles.
Sapagonia, Castillo explains, is a distinct place in
the Americas where all mestizos reside, regardless
of nationality, individual racial composition, or
legal residential status. While Sapagonia descends into political chaos and violence, resulting
in the death of his grandparents, Maximo goes in
search of stardom, first as a musician, then as a
sculptor, all the while indulging in the pleasures
of the flesh, primarily with Pastore Ake, a musician and composer. Even though Maximo is the
central character in the novel, the narrative is told
from multiple points of view.
In her 1993 novel So Far From God, Castillo
creates an ironic allegory by revising an early
Christian story involving Sophia (Wisdom) and
her three daughters, Fe (Faith), Esperanza
(Hope), and Caridad (Charity). So Far From
God, like The Mixquiahuala Letters and Sapagonia, is stylistically inventive. Combining poetry,
folk literature, recipes, indigenous remedies for
various ailments, social and political commentary, along with a fragmented and disjunctive
style, this magic-realist novel subverts essentialist notions of the self and challenges dominant ideologies, making it, in both form and
content, a powerful work of political and aesthetic expression.
Castillos Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999) is
about an aging flamenco dancer who is struggling to come to terms with the reality that the
polio she contracted as a child has returned
to end her career as a dancer. But more importantly, this is a novel about living and loving
intensely. The Guardians (2007), too, is about
love, but it is about the love of a sister for a
brother and a son for a father (and God). When
Reginas brother Rafa goes missing after trying to
enter the US via Mexico, Regina and her nephew
do everything in their power to find him. The
Guardians brings together all of the major
themes that have concerned Castillo since the
publication of The Mixquiahuala Letters, and,
thus, embodies all of the attributes that make
Castillo one of the finest contemporary American authors.
and Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
CATHER, WILLA
Cather, Willa
Alarc
on, N. (1989). The Sardonic Powers of the
Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo.
In A. Horn-Delgado, E. Ortega, N. M. Scott, &
N. Saporta Sternbach (eds.), Breaking the Boundaries:
Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Amherst:
Castillo, A. (1979). The Invitation. Berkeley:
Third Woman.
Castillo, A. (1984). Women Are Not Roses. Houston:
Arte Publico.
Castillo, A. (1986). The Mixquiahuala Letters.
Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Biling
ue.
Castillo, A. (1993). So Far From God. New York: Plume.
Castillo, A. (1994). Sapagonia: An Anti-Romance in
3/8 Meter [1990]. New York: Anchor.
Castillo, A. (1995a). Massacre of the Dreamers:
Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Plume.
Castillo, A. (1995b). My Father Was a Toltec and
Selected Poems: 19731988. New York: Norton.
Castillo, A. (ed.) (1996a). Goddess of the Americas:
Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York:
Riverhead Trade.
Castillo, A. (1996b). Loverboys: Stories. New York:
Norton.
Castillo, A. (2000a). I Ask the Impossible: Poems.
New York: Anchor.
Castillo, A. (2000b). My Daughter, My Son, the Eagle,
the Dove. New York: Dutton Juvenile.
Castillo, A. (2000c). Peel My Love Like an Onion.
New York: Anchor.
Castillo, A. (2005a). Psst . . .: I Have Something to
Tell You, Mi Amor: Two Plays. San Antonio, TX:
Wings Press.
Castillo, A. (2005b). Watercolor Women/Opaque Men: A
Novel in Verse. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press.
Castillo, A. (2007). The Guardians. New York:
Random House.
Castillo, A. (with Alarc
on, N., & Moraga, C.) (eds.)
(1993). Third Woman: The Sexuality of Latinas.
Berkeley: Third Woman Press.
Madsen, D. L. (2000). Contemporary Chicana
Literature: Bernice Zamora, Ana Castillo, Sandra
Cisneros, Denise Chavez, Alma Luz Villanueva, Lorna
Dee Cervantes. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Mujcinovic, F. (2004). Postmodern Cross-Culturalism
and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana
Castillo to Julia Alvarez. New York: Peter Lang.
Spurgeon, S. L. (2004). Ana Castillo. Boise, ID: Boise
State University.
Yarbo-Bejarano, Y. (1992). The Multiple Subject in
the Writing of Ana Castillo. Americas Review,
20, 6572.
MELISSA J. HOMESTEAD
487
Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels

representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cathers 10 novels and scores
of short stories produced over a career spanning
50 years actually range widely over space and time,
from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentiethcentury New York. A social conservative who
proudly identified herself as one of the backwardlooking, her experiments with fictional form and
her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with
modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cathers body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement to a single
descriptive formula that have secured her
reputation as a major American novelist.
Born Wilella Cather in Back Creek, Virginia in
1873, Cather moved with her family to Webster
County in south-central Nebraska in 1883. After
a year living on a farm, the family moved to the
county seat of Red Cloud, where Cather attended
high school. She then attended the University of
Nebraska in the state capital of Lincoln, majoring
in English and working both on student publications and professionally as a journalist (primarily
writing theater and book reviews). After her
graduation in 1895, she spent a year doing journalistic writing and looking for work before moving to Pittsburgh in 1896 to take an editorial
position at a regional womens magazine. The
magazine was short-lived, but Cather stayed on
in Pittsburgh, returning to journalism and then
turning to high school teaching to give herself
more time to write fiction. She finally left Pittsburgh in 1906 to accept an editorial position at
McClures Magazine in New York City, which
became her primary residence until her death.
She did not make her final break from McClures
until 1912, becoming a full-time creative artist
for the first time when she was nearly 40 years old.
She died in New York City in 1947.
Willa Cathers life and works represent a number of seemingly irresolvable contradictions.
She is best known for two Nebraska novels, My

Antonia
(1918) and O Pioneers! (1913), but she
lived in Nebraska barely more than a decade,
and the majority of her fiction is set outside of
488
CATHER, WILLA
Nebraska. Feminist critics have found the strong

female heroines of her Nebraska pioneer novels
and of The Song of the Lark (1915) compelling, but
Cather never embraced feminism, and two of her
novels most admired by critics in her own day and
today, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and
The Professors House (1925), focus on the lives of
men. Her primary affective ties throughout her
life were with other women, and late twentiethand early twenty-first-century critics have interpreted her fiction through the theoretical lenses
of lesbian and gay studies and queer theory.
Critics and biographers remain strongly divided,
however, on the question of Cathers sexual identity, and her fiction includes no overt representations of same-sex intimacy.
Later in her career, Cather sometimes downplayed, or even denied the existence of, much of
her early short fiction. However, she was still in
college when her first short story appeared in a
national magazine, and she had been publishing
short fiction for two decades by the time her first
novel, Alexanders Bridge (1912), appeared. Much
of Alexanders Bridge takes place in drawing
rooms in Boston and London, as Bartley Alexander, an engineer, becomes entangled in an extramarital affair while building an innovative bridge
in Canada. The novel ends with the collapsing
bridge taking the life of its designer. Cather later
dismissed Alexanders Bridge as a shallow studio
picture produced under the influence of Henry
James and Edith Wharton. Her first short story
collection, A Troll Garden (1905), likewise features a number of artist tales in the manner of
James; however, the line between her Nebraskan
and Jamesian fiction is not wholly distinct. For
instance, A Wagner Matinee takes place in
Boston and is narrated by a Boston lawyer, but
he spent much of his childhood in Nebraska. His
aunt, who comes to Boston to settle family business, is a former Boston conservatory piano teacher who left her career to follow her husband to
Nebraska, where she has spent decades as a poor
farm wife. The Sculptors Funeral reverses the
geographical trajectory of A Wagner Matinee,
but again crosses the artist tale and prairie fiction
as the student of a world-famous sculptor accompanies his mentors body from Boston home to
his bleak Kansas home town for burial.
O Pioneers!, the novel Cather claimed as her real
first novel in opposition to Alexanders Bridge,
continues to define her in the public imagination

as a prairie novelist who focuses on strong immigrant heroines (thus in 2002, Cather was paired
with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Edna Ferber in a
White House symposium on Women and the
American West). However, O Pioneers! also
marks the beginning of Cathers experiments with
novelistic form. Although heroine Alexandra
Bergson successfully masters the prairie that defeated her fathers agricultural enterprise, Cather
does not write a social-realist novel representing
the work of farming. Instead, Cather represents
Alexandra as a visionary artist of the land, with the
years of labor converting unplowed farmland into
a large and prosperous farm absent in the novel.
Cather also created what she called a two part
pastoral, complexly intertwining Alexandras
story with that of the doomed love affair between
Alexandras brother Emil and a married neighbor,
Marie Shabata.
The Song of the Lark (1915) is also set largely in
the American west, but Cather again connects
West and East in the life of an artist. Heroine
Thea Kronborg, the child of Swedish immigrants,
grows up in Moonstone, Colorado, but on her
journey to a career as a major opera singer, she
moves to Chicago, then New York, and even
Europe, before returning to New York as a performer. In between, she makes a significant trip
to the American southwest, where she discovers
her true vocation as a singer, having trained
primarily as a pianist. Cather later regretted the
full-blooded method she employed in this conventionally and chronologically plotted novel,
and when she prepared a collected edition of her
works in the 1930s, she heavily revised and shortened The Song of the Lark, her longest novel.

While her next novel, My Antonia,
is set entirely
in a thinly fictionalized version of Webster County, Nebraska, a key portion of the novel, its
introduction, takes place on a train between New
York and Nebraska. The introductions narrator
(implicitly Cather herself) discusses Nebraska
childhood memories with Jim Burden, who also
grew up in Nebraska, but who lives and works in
New York. The introduction thus frames the main
body of the novel as a printed version of Jims
manuscript reminiscences about his childhood
and his friendship with Bohemian immigrant

Antonia
Shimerda. This was not the first time
that Cather had written in a mans voice. After she
CATHER, WILLA
left McClures Magazine, she ghostwrote the

memoir of S. S. McClure, who had lost control
of the magazine bearing his name. Despite the

novels title, My Antonia
is as much about Jim

Burden as it is about Antonia,
and like O Pioneers!
the book violates novelistic convention. The

novel combines fragments of Jims and Antonias
intertwined, yet very different, life stories. Furthermore, oral storytelling occasions repeatedly
disrupt the novels forward movement.

Positive responses to My Antonia
from cultural
arbiters such as H. L. Mencken seemingly cemented Cathers reputation as a major American
novelist. However, her World War I novel One
of Ours (1922) incurred the wrath of highbrow
critics, while also gaining her a much larger
readership than she had previously enjoyed.
Based loosely on the experiences of her cousin
G. P. Cather, more than half of the novel is set in
Nebraska, where protagonist Claude Wheeler
feels stifled and frustrated. For Claude, the battlefields of France are a convenient escape from a
disastrous marriage, and in the comradeship of
his fellow soldiers, and especially violinist David
Gerhardt, he finds the meaning and purpose he
could not find in rural Nebraska. Like Cathers
cousin, Claude dies relatively early in the American engagement on the ground in France, and
Cathers protagonist is thus spared the postwar
disillusionment that colors the fiction of John Dos
Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and others. Mencken
unfavorably compared the French section of
One of Ours to Dos Passoss unambiguously ironic
and anti-war novel Three Soldiers (1921), and
modern critics of One of Ours remain divided on
the question of whether Cather treats Claudes
perspective ironically.
One of Ours was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
fiction, but Cathers subsequent novels of the
1920s continue to receive more critical attention
and approbation than One of Ours. In the brief
and elegiac A Lost Lady (1923), Cather returned
to nineteenth-century Nebraska, shifting her focus from European immigrant farmers to the
entrepreneurial American class of railroad
builders. Title character Marian Forrester is married to Captain Daniel Forrester, a moving force
behind the Burlington and Northern railroad that
crossed Nebraska and enabled its development.

As in My Antonia,
readers see the main female
character through the eyes of a male character.
489
Orphaned Neil Herbert is studying the law in the

office of his uncle in the small town of Sweet
Water, and he idolizes and idealizes Marian as a
representation of the communitys pioneer era.
As her husband loses his physical vitality to
repeated strokes and his assets in a bank failure,
Neil expects Marian to devote herself entirely to
her husband and to the past, but Marian finds
sexual fulfillment outside of marriage and accommodates herself to the new economic order.
Our last glimpse of the widowed Marian Forrester
living happily in Argentina with her second husband suggests that she is far from lost, even if
Neil insists on framing her that way.
The Professors House and Death Comes for the
Archbishop are Cathers most formally experimental novels and her most insistently focused
on relationships between men. Godfrey St. Peter
is a university history professor contemplating
a move from one house to another, and he is
similarly caught between his vague dissatisfaction
with his marriage and haunting memories of his
student Tom Outland, who died while serving in
the Foreign Legion in World War I. The first and
the third sections of the novel take place in the
fictional present after Toms death; the second
and central section, however, presents Tom
speaking in the first person as he tells St. Peter
the story of how he and a male friend discovered
the ruins of a Native American community of cliff
dwellers while working as cowboys.
Both A Lost Lady and The Professors House
helped to recover Cathers reputation with critics.
Death Comes for the Archbishop both solidified
Cathers reputation for innovation and technical
mastery and marked a turn to the past and history
that would fuel attacks on her from the Left in the
1930s. Set during the early days of New Mexicos
territorial annexation to the United States, Death
Comes for the Archbishop traces the careers of two
French priests sent to establish a new apostolic
vicarate. As contemporary reviews recognized,
the novels organization is more visual and spatial
than narrative and plotted, and Cather subsequently identified the murals of French painter
Puvis de Chavannes as an important influence on
her technique.
The deep love between Bishop Jean Latour and
Father Joseph Vaillant, their love of God and the
Catholic Church, and Cathers engaged and respectful representation of Catholicism led many
490
CATHER, WILLA
readers to believe that Cather herself was a Catholic. Cather was not a Catholic, but her next novel,
Shadows on the Rock (1931), only intensified such
assumptions, as Cather turned even further back
into North American history to the intensely
Catholic community of seventeenth-century
Quebec, a frontier community built on both
literal rock and the rock of religious faith. The
relationship between apothecary Euclide Auclaire
and his patron Count Frontenac is important to
the novel, but the domestic world of his young
daughter, Cecile, takes center stage. Indeed, the
novels celebration of Ceciles kitchen as central to
the preservation of French culture on foreign soil
led male critics on the Left to dismiss the novel
and to lament Cathers retreat into the past and
bourgeois domesticity. Despite such critical attacks, and despite the fact that the novel is visually
organized and largely plotless, digressing through

oral storytelling occasions like My Antonia,
tens of
thousands of ordinary readers embraced the novel. As a result, Shadows was Cathers first novel to
reach the bestseller list, coming in at number two
for the year behind Pearl Bucks The Good Earth.
Throughout her career, Cathers fiction appeared in magazines. For instance, all of her
novels of the 1920s were serialized in magazines
before appearing as books, and the fiction she did
not collect for book publication sometimes presents an instructive contrast to her novels and
collected fictions of the same period. In the teens,
for instance, while she was writing her prairie
novels, many of her short stories were set in New
York City, including a series of stories she anticipated publishing together under the title Office
Wives. In Obscure Destinies (1932), a collection of
three long short stories first published in the
Womans Home Companion and the Ladies Home
Journal, Cather returned to Nebraska as subject
matter, writing stories deeply grounded in her
childhood experiences and the lives of her family
and friends. Her slender novel Lucy Gayheart
(1935) (serialized in the Womans Home Companion) represents another layer of return in
Cathers late career. Not only is the novel set in
central Nebraska, but also it repeats, in both a
lighter and more melancholic vein, the story of
a young womans artistic development, which
Cather first explored in The Song of the Lark.
Cathers last finished novel continued her
turn to family history, but the southern family
history that is only tangentially visible in earlier

fiction. Jim Burden in My Antonia
is from the
South, but his story begins when he is on his way
to Nebraska, his southern childhood quickly
receding into memory. Old Mrs. Harris (collected in Obscure Destinies) represents Grandmother Harris and her daughter Victoria
Templeton as displaced southern ladies struggling to understand the social mores of the
snappy little Western democracy of a Nebraska
small town, but, again, the South is only a
memory. Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)
turns back the clock before Cathers birth to a
fictionalized version of her familys pre-Civil
War history in Virginia. The troubled relationship between Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert and
her slave (and probable niece) Nancy Till is at the
center of the novel. Sapphiras husband Martin,
her adult daughters, and her nephew all become
implicated in a struggle over control of Nancys
budding sexuality. Cather anatomizes Sapphiras
psyche in unflinching detail, stripping the
relation between mistress and slave of any supposed patina of romance, a fictional psychological journey praised by Toni Morrison in
Playing in the Dark (1992). The novels firstperson epilogue, however, in which Cather wrote
herself into the story, has troubled modern
critics. Recalling Nancys postwar return
from Canada to visit her aging mother from
her perspective as a child, Cather turns Nancys
story into a white southern girls most prized
possession.
At the time of her death in 1947, Cather was
working on yet another historical novel about
French Catholics, Hard Punishments, set in medieval Avignon. Cather named as her executor
Edith Lewis, a magazine editor and advertising
copywriter with whom she shared a home in
New York City for 38 years. In accord with
Cathers wishes, Lewis destroyed all but a few
pages of the manuscript of Hard Punishments.
Lewis arranged for publication of a few short
stories that remained in manuscript at the time
of Cathers death as The Old Beauty and Others
(1948).
SEE ALSO: Dos Passos, John (AF); Gender and
the Novel (AF); James, Henry (AF); Modernist
Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Wharton,
Edith (AF)
CHABON, MICHAEL

Carlin, D. (1992). Cather, Canon, and the Politics of
Reading. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Cather, W. (1905). The Troll Garden. New York:
McClure, Phillips.
Cather, W. (1912). Alexanders Bridge. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Cather, W. (1913). O Pioneers! Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Cather, W. (1915). The Song of the Lark. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.

Cather, W. (1918). My Antonia.
Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Cather, W. (1920). Youth and the Bright Medusa.
New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1922). One of Ours. New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1923). A Lost Lady. New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1925). The Professors House. New York:
Knopf.
Cather, W. (1926). My Mortal Enemy. New York:
Knopf.
Cather, W. (1927). Death Comes for the Archbishop.
New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1931). Shadows on the Rock. New York:
Knopf.
Cather, W. (1932). Obscure Destinies. New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1935). Lucy Gayheart. New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1936). Not Under Forty. New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1940). Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1948). The Old Beauty and Others.
New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1949). Willa Cather on Writing: Critical
Studies on Writing as an Art. New York: Knopf.
Cather, W. (1986). Uncle Valentine and Other Stories:
Willa Cathers Uncollected Short Fiction, 19151929.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Cather, W. (with McClure, S. S.) (1914). My
Autobiography [ghostwritten]. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes.
Goldberg, J. (2001). Willa Cather and Others. Durham:
Jewell, A. (ed.) (N.d.). The Willa Cather Archive.
University of NebraskaLincoln. At http://cather.
unl.edu, accessed Jan. 19, 2010.
Lindemann, M. (1999). Willa Cather: Queering
America. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lindemann, M. (ed.) (2005). Cambridge Companion
to Willa Cather. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
OBrien, S. (1987). Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice.
Romines, A. (ed.) (2000). Willa Cathers Southern
Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
491
Rosowski, S. J. (1986). The Voyage Perilous: Willa

Cathers Romanticism. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Skaggs, M. M. (ed.) (2000). Willa Cathers New York:
New Essays on Cather and the City. Cranbury, NJ:
Stout, J. (2000). Willa Cather: The Writer and
Her World. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia.
Swift, J. N., & Urgo, J. R. (eds.) (2002). Willa
Cather and the American Southwest. Lincoln:
Trout, S. (2002). Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather
and the First World War. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Urgo, J. R. (1995). Willa Cather and the Myth of
American Migration. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Williams, D. L. (2001). Not in Sisterhood:
Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the
Politics of Female Authorship. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Woodress, J. (1987). Willa Cather: A Literary Life.
Chabon, Michael
PATRICK ODONNELL
The author of seven novels, two short story

collections, and a collection of essays, Michael
Chabon is a writer committed to exploring genres
and writing entertaining, serious fiction that contains protagonists who are experiencing complex
personal and social conflicts at various stages of
life. Born in Washington, DC in 1963 of Jewish
parents and growing up as a teenager in Pittsburgh, Chabon now lives in Berkeley, California
with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, who is also a
novelist, and four children. Chabons first novel,
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which he began
as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, was originally written as his MFA thesis at
the University of California, Irvine. It is the story
of Art Bechstein, a recent college graduate who
engages in affairs with both male and female
partners, thus confronting his own sexual and
social identity in ways reminiscent of F. Scott
Fitzgeralds novel of the youth generation in the
wake of World War I, This Side of Paradise (1920).
Chabons next work, Wonder Boys, reflects his
own difficulties in writing a second novel: its
492
CHABON, MICHAEL
protagonist, Grady Tripp, a novelist and college

professor suffering from writers block, is at a
crossroads in his life. Having spent seven years
attempting to complete a follow-up to his prizewinning first novel, Tripp discovers that his mistress, the chancellor of the college at which he
teaches, is pregnant; meanwhile, his wife has
walked out on him, his 2,500-plus-page unfinished manuscript sits unattended, and he is compelled to deal with one of his students, a budding
author with deep personality problems, who has
stolen an armful of Marilyn Monroe collectibles
from the chancellors house and accidentally
killed her dog in the process. The comic action
of the novel takes place over a weekend, and
portrays the interwoven personal and professional crises of a character whose life is chaotic and
unresolved. A successful film version of the novel
starring Michael Douglas, Francis McDormand,
and Toby McGuire was released in 2000.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,
Chabons most ambitious novel to date, appeared
in 2000. The novel reflects Chabons fascination
with comics and the history of newspaper comic
strips; it portrays the decades-long collaboration
between a comic strip illustrator, the Czech-born
Joe Kavalier, and a strip writer, Sam Clay, born in
Brooklyn. Kavalier and Clay ascend to prominence during the Golden Age of comics during
the 1930s and 1940s; their relationship and professional success unfold primarily against the
backdrop of the Great Depression and World
War II, but the novels historical sweep extends
back to the legends of the Jewish golem arising
in sixteenth-century Prague and considers the
differences between the protagonists childhoods
growing up in America and Europe. Like Wonder
Boys, Kavalier & Clay depicts the interrelationship
of personal and professional crises paralleling the
complex relation between imagined and historical
worlds. The novel won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize
for fiction. The two novels that followed achieved
less visibility: Summerland (2002) is a novel for
young adults, a fantasy about a boy growing up on
a small island who becomes involved in worldsaving adventures; The Final Solution (2004) is
a relatively slim detective novel titled in homage
to A. Conan Doyle, and starring an elderly detective who investigates a murder and the disappearance of a young German Jewish refugees talking
parrot in wartime England.
The Yiddish Policemans Union (2007b) is also,

in many respects, a detective novel, but it returns
to the epic dimensions of Kavalier & Clay in the
alternative history story of a crime committed in
the Federal District of Sitka, which has been
created in Alaska as a temporary Jewish homeland
following World War II and the quick defeat of
attempts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. In
the novels historical present, the district is about
to revert to Alaskan control, and the question of
what will happen to the people, customs, and laws
of the temporary Yiddish-speaking state is up in
the air. Amidst this uncertainty, homicide detective Meyer Landsman is called upon to investigate
the murder of a former chess prodigy who has
fallen on hard times and dies in the same seedy
hotel where Landsman resides. Like most of
Chabons protagonists, Landsman is experiencing
combined personal and professional difficulties:
he has just left his wife, his sister has died recently
in a mysterious plane crash, and his future as a
homicide cop in the shifting sands of the Federal
District is uncertain. As the labyrinthine plot
unfolds, it becomes clear that the death of
Landsmans sister is somehow connected to the
murder case which ripples outward to the political history of the Federal District and the
approaching diaspora of its people. This ambitious and entertaining novel is often comic in tone
while engaging the reader in more sober reflections on the current situation in the Middle East
and the fate of the Jewish people.
Chabons most recent work, Gentleman of the
Road (2007a), is a picaresque novel originally
published serially in the New York Times Magazine. The novel is set in the Middle East of the
tenth century and relates the wild adventures of
two Jewish bandits as they travel the world in
search of victims. In addition to his novels,
Chabon has published A Model of the World and
Other Stories (1991); Werewolves in Their Youth:
Stories (1999); and Maps and Legends (2008), a
collection of essays. He is a contributing editor
to McSweeneys, and was one of the writers for
the superhero film Spiderman 2, directed by
Sam Raimi.
SEE ALSO: Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel
(AF)
CHANDLER, RAYMOND

Chabon, M. (1988). The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
New York: Morrow.
Chabon, M. (1991). A Model of the World and Other
Stories. New York: HarperCollins.
Chabon, M. (1995). Wonder Boys. New York: Villard.
Chabon, M. (1999). Werewolves in Their Youths: Stories.
New York: Picador.
Chabon, M. (2000). The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random House.
Chabon, M. (2002). Summerland. New York: Hyperion.
Chabon, M. (2004). The Final Solution: A Story of
Detection. New York: HarperCollins.
Chabon, M. (2007a). Gentlemen of the Road. New York:
Random House.
Chabon, M. (2007b). The Yiddish Policemans Union.
New York: HarperCollins.
Chabon, M. (2008). Maps and Legends. New York:
McSweeneys.
Chute, H. (2008). Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the
Framing of Comics. Modern Fiction Studies, 54(2),
268301.
Meyers, D. G. (2008). Michael Chabons Imaginary
Jews. Sewanee Review, 116(4), 57288.
Singer, M. (2008). Embodiments of the Real: The
Counterlinguistic Turn in the Comic-Book Novel.
Critique, 49(3), 27391.
Chandler, Raymond
DAVID W. MADDEN
Although he came to writing novels accidentally,

Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, proved
that fictional entertainments could rise to the level
of serious art. Chandler wrote in the hard-boiled
style of the day, but extended the idioms possibilities through sharp wit, exaggerated metaphors, and subjective narration. Chandler also
brought an astringent social criticism to his works
that revealed a sharp intellect and probing insight.
All of this was accomplished in only seven novels,
two dozen short stories, and some articles and
screenplays.
Born July 23, 1888 in Chicago, Illinois, he was
the only child of Maurice and Florence Chandler,
Chandlers parents separated, and his mother
relocated to London for his education. He served
in the Canadian Army in World War I and then
the Royal Air Force, and after his discharge began
a career in the California oil business, in which
he was initially successful until his dismissal for
493
drinking and erratic behavior. In 1933 Black Mask

magazine published his first story, and he continued writing for the pulps until the publication
of his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the success
of which propelled him into an equally successful
career as a Hollywood screenwriter.
In his first novel Chandler presents Philip
Marlowe, a Los Angeles private detective who
would become the quintessential Chandler hero
in each of his other works. Marlowe is not a typical
detective, being a man of some education and
refined sensibilities. Chandlers model came from
Arthurian romance, and Marlowe is presented
as a modern knight, a man of chivalric instincts
who typically enters cases for neither money nor
revenge but out of a sense of personal justice.
Further, like a knight, Marlowe remains aloof
from women, often regarding them as distractions or potent threats to his mission.
Marlowes stringent ethics bring him forever
into conflict with both police and criminals. The
police are often sloppy, incompetent, or vicious,
and Marlowe accords them little respect and spares
them no criticism. The criminals mobsters,
killers, small-time hustlers, and so on are
depicted as morally bankrupt and exploitative. In
a world where the police are lazy or inefficient and
where the criminals are allowed to run roughshod
over the populace, Marlowe sees himself as the last
line of resistance to pure chaos.
The Big Sleep establishes the outlines for the
other novels and some consistent concerns. Set in
Los Angeles, Chandlers metaphor for a society
obsessed with money and thrills, Marlowe takes
an extortion case that reveals the utter corruption
of a seemingly respectable family, and the same
general situation pertains in The High Window
(1942), revealing Chandlers exploration of the
nexus between wealth and corruption. While
plotting is never Chandlers strong suit, he rebels
against what he sees as the limitations of the
traditional detective fiction formula plot-driven
puzzles that end predictably with the discovery of
the villain and the restoration of a violated world.
These two novels end with Marlowe withholding
information and feeling soiled by his association
with the families.
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Lady in the
Lake (1943) center on disguised identities and
hidden pasts. In each, self-serving, dangerous
women kill to preserve their new personae, and
494
CHEEVER, JOHN
each reveals Marlowes great strength wise-guy

dialogue, his most potent weapon. In all the
novels, he rarely draws a gun or strikes anyone,
but he is never averse to verbally reducing an
adversary. The novels also feature some compelling character studies. The theme of altered or
hidden identities continues in The Little Sister
(1948), which could be described as Chandlers
Hollywood novel. An air of unreality pervades
relationships and the plot itself, and as the bodies
pile up and identities shift, Marlowe admits he
feels like an audience to a performance.
The Long Goodbye (1954) has an elegiac tone
and is a compelling study of friendship deceived.
Again Chandler creates an amoral world with
Marlowe cast as the lone defender of a forgotten
ideal. For the first time, Marlowe is depicted as
having close personal attachments, in a brief
friendship with Terry Lennox, whom he must
dismiss for moral defeatism, and a love affair with
Linda Loring. Chandlers concern once more is
with character development and detailed psychological analysis, and the novel, though it has its
murders, is less an exercise in detection than in
ethical questioning.
Playback (1958), his last novel, is a disaster,
poorly written, thinly developed, and lifeless. By
this time Chandlers wife had died, and he was
suffering from bouts of alcoholism, declining
health, and professional frustration. Shortly after
accepting the presidency of the Mystery Writers
of America, he died on March 26, 1959.
Chandler was first and foremost a stylist, someone who brought to a popular genre a sense of
moral seriousness and social scrutiny. In these
ways he was indebted to Ernest Hemingway and
the urban fictions of Theodore Dreiser, but he was
no imitator, though he spawned legions of
acolytes.
SEE ALSO: Cain, James M. (AF); Detective/
Crime Fiction (WF); Dreiser, Theodore (AF);
Hammett, Dashiell (AF); Hemingway,
Ernest (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF);
Noir Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
Chandler, R. (1939). The Big Sleep. New York: Knopf.
Chandler, R. (1940). Farewell, My Lovely. New York:
Knopf.
Chandler, R. (1942). The High Window. New York:

Knopf.
Chandler, R. (1943). The Lady in the Lake. New York:
Knopf.
Chandler, R. (1949). The Little Sister. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Chandler, R. (1954). The Long Goodbye. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Chandler, R. (1958). Playback. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Chandler, R. (1950). Trouble Is My Business.
Chandler, R. (1952). Pick-Up on Noon Street. New York:
Pocket Books.
Chandler, R. (1953). Pearls Are a Nuisance. London:
Hamish Hamilton.
Chandler, R. (1964). Killer in the Rain. London:
Hamish Hamilton.
Durham, P. (1963). Down These Mean Streets a Man
Must Go: Raymond Chandlers Knight. Chapel Hill:
Gross, M. (ed.) (1978). The World of Raymond
Chandler. New York: A & W.
Hiney, T. (1997). Raymond Chandler: A Biography.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
MacShane, F. (1976). The Life of Raymond Chandler.
Marling, W. (1986). Raymond Chandler. Boston:
Twayne.
Phillips, G. D. (2000). Creatures of Darkness: Raymond
Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Speir, J. (1981). Raymond Chandler. New York:
Ungar.
Thorpe, E. (1983). Chandlertown: The Los Angeles of
Philip Marlowe. London: Vermilion.
Wolfe, P. (1985). Something More Than Night: The Case
of Raymond Chandler. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press.
Cheever, John
KEITH WILHITE
Hailed as the Ovid of Ossining and the Chekhov

of the Suburbs, John Cheever emerged as one
of Americas most popular writers after World
War II. Though an accomplished novelist,
Cheever made his name as a short story writer,
best exemplified by his long association with
the New Yorker. His fiction embraces the
absurdity and irresistible allure of a pastoral
vision in the modern era of alienation and
dispossession.
CHEEVER, JOHN
Cheever was born on May 27, 1912 in Quincy,

Massachusetts, a town that served as a model for
St. Botolphs in The Wapshot Chronicle (1957),
which won the National Book Award, and its
sequel The Wapshot Scandal (1964). Between
1943 and 1982, he published five novels and seven
collections of short stories, including the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Stories of John Cheever (1978).
Before his death in 1982, he was awarded the
National Medal for Literature by the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His
New England childhood, his relationship with his
brother, his life in Manhattan and Westchester
County, and his struggles with alcohol exercised
an extraordinary influence over his work.
Cheevers fiction draws on romantic and modern traditions in American literature. Scholars have
long read the influence of Thoreau, Emerson,
Whitman, and Hawthorne in his writing, pointing
specifically to Cheevers use of allegory and the way
his work draws upon symbols and figures from
Christianity and classical mythology (Coale 1982;
Meanor 1995). His virtuoso talents as a short story
writer also place him among the modern masters of
American short fiction Anderson, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and OConnor and his thematic
explorations of family, alienation, and infidelity
anticipate aspects of John Updikes and Raymond
Carvers work.
The stories collected in The Enormous Radio
(1953) and The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958)
established themes Cheever would return to
throughout his career: couples ensconced in tenuous marriages, urbanites and suburbanites
struggling to maintain their social and economic
standing, and families laboring under the weight
of history and genealogy. The Cain and Abel
conflict in Goodbye, My Brother dovetails with
the cosmic struggle between fundamental dualisms in his work: light and dark, life and death,
earthly beauty and spiritual suffering. The storys
recurring mythic patterns (Meanor, 1995, 43)
also establish the restorative power of nature as an
important strain in his fiction. The fantastic blend
of realism and surrealism distinguishes The
Enormous Radio as an important transitional
piece in the development of Cheevers literary
style. The Shady Hill collection solidified his
reputation as a chronicler of suburban life
(Donaldson, 1988, 170) and contains some of
his most widely read pieces: The Country
495
Husband, The Five-Forty-Eight, O Youth

and Beauty! and the title story. These stories
offer nuanced explorations of spiritual, psychological, and economic insecurity, embodied in the
quasi-pastoral setting the characters inhabit.
Cheevers Wapshot novels trace the slow disintegration of the Wapshot family through financial insolvency, sexual affairs, alcoholism, and
suicide. Many of the dualisms and mythic strains
of Goodbye, My Brother are writ large in the
Wapshots fall, but there is also a distinctly Cold
War feel to these works. The novels introduce
themes of bisexuality and guilt through the character Coverly Wapshot, and Cheevers depictions
of suburbia turn decidedly menacing. The suburban community in which Coverly and his wife live
is built around the missile site where he works.
The loss of Edenic innocence, represented by the
Wapshot home in St. Botolphs, gives way to a
vision of homogeneous homes overshadowed by
the destructive power of nuclear war.
This darkness reaches its apex in his third novel,
Bullet Park (1969), in which the characters Paul
Hammer and Eliot Nailles reprise Cheevers
trademark dualism to more sinister effect. Unlike
Shady Hill, the suburb of Bullet Park seems
devoid of community, and the State Hospital for
the Criminally Insane lingering in the background
suggests the irrevocable presence of danger within
this suburban haven. Bullet Park is also the setting
for Cheevers iconic story, The Swimmer. The
story recounts Neddy Merrills journey across the
swimming pools of affluent suburban homes and
is, in many ways, the apotheosis of Cheevers
investment in mythic patterns and the central
importance of geography. But the final image of
a forlorn and dispossessed Merrill undercuts the
symbolic restorative power of water one finds in
earlier works.
Cheevers final two novels, written after he had
overcome his addiction to alcohol, embrace
themes of renewal and rebirth. Bisexuality plays
a central, liberating role in Falconer (1977). Where
Coverly Wapshot agonized over latent homosexual desires, Zeke Farraguts homosexual relationship with Jody frees him from the physical and
spiritual isolation of his life in prison a transition that, as reflected in his Journals, indicates a
change in Cheevers thinking about his own bisexuality. Oh, What a Paradise It Seems (1982)
further explores themes of renewal in a story that
496
CHESNUTT, CHARLES W.
literalizes the loss of an Edenic landscape through

environmental degradation. But the coda paragraph posing questions about criminals who
have escaped punishment, complicity, and selfincrimination reaffirms a central ambivalence
and ambiguity to Cheevers work at the end of
his accomplished career.
SEE ALSO: Anderson, Sherwood (AF);
Carver, Raymond (AF); Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF);
Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modernist Fiction
(AF); OConnor, Flannery (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF); Updike, John (AF)
Aubry, T. (2003). John Cheever and the Management
of Middlebrow Misery. Iowa Journal of Cultural
Studies, 3, 6483.
Beuka, R. (2004). Finding the Worm in the Apple.
In SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscapes
in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 65106.
Bosha, F. J. (ed.) (1994). The Critical Response to John
Cheever. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Cheever, J. (1953). The Enormous Radio, and Other
Stories. New York: Funk and Wagnalls.
Cheever, J. (1957). The Wapshot Chronicle. New York:
Harper.
Cheever, J. (1958). The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, and
Other Stories. New York: Harper.
Cheever, J. (1964). The Wapshot Scandal. New York:
Harper and Row.
Cheever, J. (1969). Bullet Park. New York: Knopf.
Cheever, J. (1977). Falconer. New York: Knopf.
Cheever, J. (1978). The Stories of John Cheever.
New York: Knopf.
Cheever, J. (1982). Oh, What a Paradise It Seems.
New York: Knopf.
Cheever, J. (1991). The Journals of John Cheever.
New York: Knopf.
Coale, S. (1982). Cheever and Hawthorne: The American
Romancers Art. In R. G. Collins (ed.), Critical Essays
on John Cheever. Boston: G. K. Hall, pp. 193209.
Donaldson, S. (1988). John Cheever: A Biography.
Meanor, P. (1995). John Cheever Revisited. New York:
Twayne.
OHara, J. E. (1989). John Cheever: A Study of the Short
Fiction. Boston: Twayne.
Waldeland, L. (1979). John Cheever. Boston: Twayne.
Wilhite, K. (2006). John Cheevers Shady Hill, or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Suburbs.
Studies in American Fiction, 34(2), 21539.
Chesnutt, Charles W.
RYAN SIMMONS
Charles W. Chesnutt is widely regarded as the

most significant African American fiction writer
between the end of slavery and the Harlem Renaissance. The author of five books published
between 1899 and 1905, and the recipient of
accolades from William Dean Howells and other
important contemporaries, Chesnutts literary
career nonetheless failed to meet his expectations.
While his two short story collections (both published in 1899) were critically well received and
commercially promising, his subsequent novels
were marked by mixed reviews and increasingly
disappointing sales. Moreover, more of Chesnutts
books were rejected than accepted by publishers
during his lifetime, leaving the bulk of his short
fiction uncollected, and six of his novels
unpublished, at his death. Most of these writings
have been brought into print during a late-twentieth-century renaissance of Chesnutt scholarship
instigated by books such as William L. Andrewss
The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980)
and Eric J. Sundquists To Wake the Nations: Race
in the Making of American Literature (1993). These
critics built Chesnutts reputation by demonstrating his effectiveness in using literature as a tool for
political advocacy. His most lasting legacy,
however, may arise from a characteristic explored
by later critics such as Dean McWilliams and
SallyAnn H. Ferguson: Chesnutts very contemporary perspective on race, which not only decries
racism (or, according to critics such as Ferguson,
fails sufficiently to decry racism) but also regards
racial categories themselves as constructed and
deeply political.
Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio
to biracial parents, Andrew and Ann Maria Chesnutt, both of whom were covertly involved in the
anti-slavery movement. At age 8, he moved with
his family to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where
he was educated at a Freedmans Bureau school
until 1872, when his mother passed away and his
fathers business failed. At that time he put aside
his own formal education and became a teacher,
later taking the position of principal of the Fayetteville Normal School. In 1878 he married Susan
Perry, a teacher. After an abortive run for local
political office, which he abandoned due to the
racial slurs often directed at him, Chesnutt moved

to New York City, and then to Cleveland, in 1883.
He worked in a railroad office and as a legal
stenographer while studying law, and passed the
bar in 1887.
His ambitions, however, were now directed
toward writing. In an 1880 journal entry, Chesnutt voiced his desire to become an author,
describing a high, holy purpose, which he regarded as not so much the elevation of the
colored people as the elevation of the whites
for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so
insidious as to pervade a whole nation . . . a barrier
to the moral progress of the American people.
This theme, that racism harms all Americans
black and white, but in unequal severity would
be explored by Chesnutt throughout the 50 years
of his writing career, during which he attempted
to persuade a primarily white readership that
understanding and rectifying racism were in their
own interests.
Chesnutts first significant publication, a short
story titled The Goophered Grapevine, appeared in 1887 in the Atlantic Monthly. The story,
like his subsequent conjure tales, utilizes a dualnarration framework in which a prosperous white
Northerner, having moved to the South to accommodate his wifes poor health, recounts a tale
by a former slave, Julius. Written primarily in
Juliuss voice, the story appeals to contemporary
readers tastes for the kind of dialect fiction that
Joel Chandler Harris had popularized in the
Uncle Remus tales, and does not overtly challenge
conventional narratives about African Americans.
Chesnutt, however, introduced a new element
in the framing device narrated by the white
Northerner, John: as recent critics have pointed
out, the conjure stories operate on multiple
levels. In most of the stories, Julius employs
narrative skill to acquire some desired end (such
as a church for former slaves), frequently taking
advantage of Johns obtuseness in doing so;
John is unable to recognize the full import of
the story even as he relates it.
Narrative that operates on two levels, the overt
and covert, became a hallmark of Chesnutts
fiction, which often appeals to popular tastes
while subtly undercutting the racial codes upon
which they rely. Of all his works, the conjure
tales, in which this strategy is especially notable,
received the lions share of critical appreciation
497
during the late twentieth century, just as they

received the most popular attention during the
late nineteenth century. Chesnutt, however, did
not remain satisfied in producing dialect writing,
and began to publish stories that focused on the
lives of middle-class, Northern, African Americans,
many of whom like Chesnutt himself were
light-skinned enough to consider passing as
whites. Although he published numerous short
works during the late 1880s, in the 1890s he
devoted himself primarily to producing a book.
He was unsuccessful in several such attempts:
a proposed collection of his conjure tales; two
novellas set in the South, Mandy Oxendine and
Rena; and a Northern novel, A Business
Career, were all rejected by publishers.
Finally in 1899, two volumes of short fiction
appeared: The Conjure Woman, comprising most
of Chesnutts dialect stories, and The Wife of His
Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, which
contains his relatively politically overt stories of
Northern blacks. An additional book, a biography
of Frederick Douglass, was also published that
year. Buoyed by his success, Chesnutt sold his
legal stenography business and pursued a career
as a full-time writer between 1899 and 1902.
Initially, Chesnutts hopes for the future
seemed attainable. In 1900, a revised and extended
version of Rena, now titled The House Behind
the Cedars, was published by Houghton Mifflin,
which accepted it in place of another submitted
Chesnutt novel, The Rainbow Chasers. The
latter work the only Chesnutt novel that remains
unpublished deals obliquely with racial
passing by creating a female protagonist who
seems subtly marked as a light-skinned African
American, although the novel never directly refers
to her as such. In The House Behind the Cedars, the
message is less covert or, put another way, the
covert nature of the protagonists racial identity is
explicitly, rather than implicitly, a theme of the
novel. The House Behind the Cedars plots the fates
of John and Rena Walden, siblings who elect to
pass as white, and whose respective fates (John
prospers, and Rena perishes) seem to indicate
their authors attunement to the role of gender
as well as race in determining social agency.
The novel sold barely well enough to justify the
publication of a second one. For his follow-up,
Chesnutt selected as his subject the Wilmington,
North Carolina riots of 1898, in which a white
498
supremacist minority violently usurped local political control by terrorizing, and in several instances murdering, the towns African American
population. He returned to North Carolina to
research the brutal events, and the resulting novel
weaves together documentary evidence and deeply imagined personal perspectives, including in
a partially sympathetic portrayal that of the
white supremacist instigator of the riot. In rendering the events of Wilmington in fictional form,
Chesnutt aspired to produce a work comparable
to Uncle Toms Cabin, a novel that could expose
to a mass audience the reality of racial injustice in
the South. Although The Marrow of Tradition is
often regarded as his best novel, and generated
some controversy when published, it did not
sell well, and Chesnutt returned to the business
of legal stenography. He completed two more
novels in the next few years, Evelyns Husband
(a South Seas adventure which was rejected) and
The Colonels Dream, the latter an unflinching
analysis of capitalism in the South.
In The Colonels Dream, Chesnutts protagonist, a Confederate officer turned wealthy Northern businessman, returns to his Southern home
and attempts to revitalize its economy by infusing
it with capitalist principles. Despite his confident
prediction of success, his ambitions are thwarted
by the Souths prevalently feudalistic political
economy, and by power relations which the
colonels romantic perspective prevents him from
comprehending. Among the novels more striking
assertions is the claim that racism which hinders
the colonels ability to properly hire or motivate
workers is incompatible with capitalism.
The Colonels Dream is perhaps Chesnutts most
challenging novel, formally as well as thematically. Nonetheless, with few exceptions, both
Chesnutts contemporaries and recent critics have
regarded The Colonels Dream as Chesnutts worst
novel, and its poor sales effectively ended the
authors career as a novelist.
Chesnutt continued, however, to give lectures,
to write non-fiction essays on racism and other
issues, and to write fiction. He replaced W. E. B.
Du Bois as a member of the Committee of Twelve
for the Advancement of the Interests of the Negro
Race beginning in 1905, and also served locally in
the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) and (in various formal
and informal capacities) as a consultant and
public voice on issues of race. In 1910, he also

became a member of Clevelands Rowfant Club,
an exclusive social club that had previously blackballed him on the basis of race; he accepted the
invitation despite having satirized the Rowfant
Club in his story Baxters Procrustes.
Although very little of his fiction saw print
during this period, Chesnutt did compose at least
two more novels before his death from arteriosclerosis in 1932: Paul Marchand, F.M.C.
(c. 1921), a depiction of the injustices faced by
a free man of color in 1820s New Orleans, and
The Quarry (c. 1928), an account of an exceptional young man of the modern age who, raised as
an African American, discovers that he is white.
Both novels were rejected, and Chesnutt made
only passing mention of his continuing literary
ambitions when he received the Spingarn Medal
of the NAACP in 1928, choosing instead to assume the role of an elder statesman in African
American literary history. He described himself
then as the first man in the United States who
shared his blood, to write serious fiction about the
Negro. Recent critics have corrected Chesnutts
perception that he was the first in this regard
citing the examples of William Wells Brown,
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Frances E. W. Harper,
and others but they have largely embraced his
self-concept as an important pioneer.
SEE ALSO: Du Bois, W. E. B. (AF); Ethnicity
and Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF);
Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern
Novel (AF)
Andrews, W. (1980). The Literary Career of Charles
W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press.
Chesnutt, C. W. (1905). The Colonels Dream.
New York: Doubleday, Page.
Chesnutt, C. W. (1993). The Journals of Charles
W. Chesnutt (ed. R. H. Brodhead). Durham, NC:
Chesnutt, C. W. (1997). To Be an Author: Letters
of Charles W. Chesnutt, 18891905 (ed. J. R.
McElrath Jr. & R. C. Leitz III). Princeton, NJ:
Chesnutt, C. W. (1999). Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and
Speeches (ed. J. R. McElrath Jr., R. C. Leitz III, & J. S.
Crisler). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
CISNEROS, SANDRA
Chesnutt, C. W. (2002a). An Exemplary Citizen:

Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 19061932
(ed. J. R. McElrath, Jr., R. C. Leitz III, & J. S. Crisler).
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Chesnutt, C. W. (2002b). Stories, Novels, and Essays
[1905] (ed. W. Sollors). New York: Library of
America.
Chesnutt, H. M. (1952). Charles Waddell Chesnutt:
Pioneer of the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Duncan. C. (1999). The Absent Man: The Narrative
Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio
University Press.
Ellison, C. W., & Metcalf , E. W., Jr. (1977). Charles
W. Chesnutt: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Ferguson, S. H. (2002). Chesnutts Genuine Blacks and
Future Americans. In S. H. Ferguson (ed.), New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Keller, F. R. (1978). An American Crusade: The Life
of Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Provo, UT: Brigham
Young University Press.
McElrath , J. R., Jr. (ed.) (1999). Critical Essays on
Charles W. Chesnutt. New York: G. K. Hall.
McWilliams, D. (2002). Charles W. Chesnutt and the
Fictions of Race. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Pickens, E. W. (1994). Charles W. Chesnutt and
the Progressive Movement. New York: Pace
University Press.
Render, S. L. (1980). Charles W. Chesnutt. Boston:
Twayne.
Simmons, R. (2006). Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of
the Novels. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Sundquist, E. J. (1993). To Wake the Nations: Race in the
Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press.
Wilson, M. (2004). Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W.
Chesnutt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Wonham, H. B. (1998). Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study
of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Cisneros, Sandra
VIRGINIA M. BRACKETT
The protagonist of Sandra Cisneross The House

on Mango Street reflects Cisneross childhood
experience, moving often within the poverty of
the barrio. The novels popularity and adoption
in countless classrooms allowed many readers to
discover for the first time a voice with which they
identified. With that novel, Cisneros captured an
enormous audience and led a group of Chicana/o
voices that would greatly affect the landscape of
reading in the English language.
499
Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954 in

Chicago to native Mexican parents. Later answering why she began writing, Cisneros stated,
I am the only daughter in a family of six sons.. . .
That explains everything (1990, 34). The isolation her characters suffer mirrors that of her
youth, as her family moved often between
Mexico and Chicago, resulting in her lack of
attachment to either culture. However, later in
the University of Iowa graduate writing program
she realized her dissonance could afford her a
valuable narrative point of view differing from
that of others.
As she worked on The House on Mango Street in
1980, she released 100 copies of a poetry collection
titled Bad Boys and also received the first of two
National Endowment for the Arts awards. Relocating to Europe, Cisneros worked full-time on
the novel, which she published in 1984. A hybrid
collection of poetry and fiction, My Wicked,
Wicked Ways, followed in 1987. Her coy cover
photo elicited accusations of Chicana stereotypes.
Cisneros countered that the photo represented
independence and power, like her writing. In 1991
she set a precedent for a Chicana, receiving
$100,000 from Random House for Woman Hollering Creek, which earned a Lannan Literary
Award. She published Loose Woman in 1994 and
won a 1995 MacArthur Fellowship. Cisneros settled in San Antonio, comparing its influences by
both Mexico and the United States to her own
influences by dual cultures. She debuted her 2002
novel, Caramelo, in Chicago. A self-described
slow writer, she states on her website that she
continues working on numerous projects.
Cisneross writing expresses independence
from expectations of Chicanas and women in
general. Her characters adopt bold, uninhibited
voices, and she often mixes English with Spanish.
Her style reflects her story, yet her characters
search for their own voices strikes a universal
chord with readers.
In The House on Mango Street the narrators
name, Esperanza, means hope in Spanish, an
emotion she symbolizes for her readers. Esperanza
struggles courageously against ethnic stereotypes
promoted by her teachers and gender stereotypes
forced by her Chicano culture. Ultimately, her
desire to write overcomes the repressive barrio life
that threatens to block her imaginative and literal
escape. A Bildungsroman, the story empowers
500
THE CITY IN FICTION
Esperanza through her traditionally male

adventurer role. Esperanza gains independence,
yet readers understand she will return to the
barrio, her inspiration and her heart. Single chapters have been widely anthologized for high school
and college texts. Cisneros labels the stories lazy
poems (1987, 79). One Booklist critic wrote that
her loose and deliberately simple style, mixing
poetry with prose, at times annoys readers with
its cuteness. Others, however, believe that her
apparent randomness represents a skilled
exploration of themes (Booklist 281). Carol
Muske values Cisneross effortless slide from poetry to prose, writing that the movement proves
utterly spontaneous, even volatile, a rose-inthe-teeth passion refashioned to contemporary
taste. The novel won the Before Columbus American Book Award.
According to Cisneros, My Wicked, Wicked
Ways represents a liberating self-view. She credits
Catholicism for the guilt she suffered when attempting to conceive of herself as a sexual being
and has stated that through writing, she hoped to
dismiss her haunting past. However, she eventually realized that she could write about her hardearned coexistence with her ghosts. She wanted to
counter the tradition labeling strong women evil
or insane, blaming religion for that negative
perception. Woman Hollering Creek and Loose
Woman represent her dismantling of gender
stereotypes.
Caramelo delighted critics with its use of
magic realism and Spanglish to shape its
narrator, Lana, who survives through an instinct for story. Her epiphany occurs outside
a locked Catholic church, emphasizing a paradox of religion. While Cisneros rejects Catholicisms ritual, her characters do express
their spirituality through application of the
imagination.
Cisneros is a Chicana whose non-traditional
style challenges readers to embrace that difference and to learn from it. She enjoys writing
poetry and fiction, explaining that when words
come easily, they appear as fiction, and when
more difficult to form, they generally take the
shape of poetry.
SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Ethnicity and
Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF);
Realism/ Magical Realism (WF)

Aranda, P. E. R. (1990). On the Solitary Fate of Being
Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-Three: An
Interview with Sandra Cisneros. Americas Review,
19(1), 65.
Buckendorff, J. (2008). Fathers Death Opened New
Insights for Caramelo Author Sandra Cisneros.
Seattle Times. At http://community.seattletimes.
nwsource.com, accessed June 3, 2008.
Cisneros, S. (1980). Bad Boys. San Jose, CA: Mango.
Cisneros, S. (1985). My Wicked, Wicked Ways.
Bloomington, IN: Third Woman.
Cisneros, S. (1987). Do You Know Me? I Wrote
The House on Mango Street. Americas Review,
15(1), 71.
Cisneros, S. (1988). The House on Mango Street.
Cisneros, S. (1990). Only Daughter. Glamour,
pp. 2568 (Nov.).
Cisneros, S. (1991). Woman Hollering Creek and Other
Stories. New York: Random House.
Cisneros, S. (1994). Loose Woman. New York: Knopf.
Cisneros, S. (2002). Caramelo. New York: Knopf.
Ganz, R. (1994). Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings
and Beyond. MELUS, 19(1), 1929.
Muske, C. (1995). The House on Mango Street [book
review]. Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 20, 40923.
Parks, M. (2004). Mango Street Was Path to Finding
Herself, Hispanic Author Reveals. Arkansas
Democrat Gazette, pp. 55ff. (April 18).
Review of the House on Mango Street, by Sandra
Cisneros. Booklist (1984), p. 281 (Oct. 15).
Reardon, P. T. (2002). Escape from the City. Chicago
Tribune, sec. 5, pp. 1ff. (Oct. 22).
Sandra Cisneros. At www.sandracisneros.com, accessed
June 3, 2008.
The City in Fiction

TYRONE SIMPSON
Challenging the romantic precept that only nature affords the tranquility hospitable to the
artists muse, many writers of the past century
have found an aesthetic resource in the built
environment of the city. So different from the
rural and agrarian spaces that gave it raw materials
to process, and from the suburban tracts that
would give its middle managers refuge, the twentieth-century city, and its dynamic impact on
American character, demanded comprehension.
By making the metropolis their central preoccu-
THE CITY IN FICTION
pation, twentieth-century writers described the

profound change that industrial modernity
wrought upon city life, and the ways a renewed
infrastructure gave birth to the agoraphobia that
organizes postmodern urbanity. In limning the
impact of either market regime, these artists
captured the crisis of a new urban order: the
extent to which city life enabled or frustrated a
functional social order and facilitated the urban
dwellers belonging to or alienation from the
American mainstream.
Skeptical of urban modernity, the nineteenthcentury romantics desired to insulate themselves
from the corruptive forces and money imperatives of capitalism. The bottom line, to them,
seemed to contort irredeemably our sense of
human value. Urban writers of the past century
were not so quick to leave capital to its own
devices. They chose instead to linger on its machinations and have their imaginations feed upon
its effects. They found that the city was equipped
with its own romantic raw materials. The majesty
of an urban skyscraper, the picturesque of the
boulevard and its imposing monuments, the frenetic throng of midtown, the blinding luminescence of an opera house marquis, the scattered
refuse of a glutted back-alley garbage can, or the
shocking spectacle of human desperation that
the indigent brought to view all have proven
amenable to poetry and inspired prose. Art
resided in the city. It only required a courageous
and sensitive observer to bring it to awareness.
Unsurprisingly, several journalists people the
ranks of urban litterateurs: writers as diverse as
Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Upton Sinclair, Michael
Gold, and Colson Whitehead all scribbled at one
time in their careers for the popular press. Other
writers like Chester Himes and Hubert Selby, Jr.
became notorious for their slumming, hopeful
that ethnography would shore up their palpable
talent for realism and its occasional absurdities.
If a politic motivated such endeavors, it was not
always a progressive one. Urban writers were
flâneurs of the first order. They inhabited urban
terrain like bourgeois ghosts, virtually unseen
chroniclers of the human environment that they
sought to sublimate in print. Most were prophets,
like Whitehead, whose parable, The Intuitionist
(1998), promises in addition to technological
progress the arrival of a postracial future that
will delay itself no longer. Others, writing much
501
earlier in the century, presaged less cosmopolitan

imaginings. The Wasteland (1922), T. S. Eliots
city-phobic eulogizing of European supremacy
in the wake of World War I, vilifies rather than
celebrates the ethno-cultural intermingling facilitated by modern transportation and modernitys
unmoored social relations. The poems alternate
title, He Do the Police in Different Voices,
deployed a vaudevillian and minstrelized vernacular to speak more candidly to another impulse
important to urban writing: to discipline in word
and verse those people and places that resist
authoritarian rule in real life.
One prototype for urban literature of the twentieth century can be found in Edgar Allan Poes
The Man of the Crowd (1840), a tale that sets the
template for creative urbanists like Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, both revered documentarians of Pariss rise in the mid nineteenth
century. Perched behind the window of a London
coffee shop, the hero finds himself titillated by the
orgy of activity before his eyes, not merely because
it presents a stunning spectacle, but because the
unharnessed humanity he views falls squarely
within the bounds of his cognition. In a quasierotic experiment in knowledge and legibility, he
breaks the crowd into types, and, in cataloguing
the pickpockets, street peddlers, and clerks that
ignite the city, produces a taxonomy that brings its
myriad parts and participants under his psychic
control. The protagonist becomes obsessed with
understanding a man that defies his typology, and
leaves the safety of the cafe to track him until his
curiosity is satisfied or he is undone. The pursuit
ends in a sector that wore the worst impress of the
most deplorable poverty, and the exasperated
narrator closes the tale with the epigrammatic
concession that began it, posed ominously in
German, Es lasst sich nicht lesen (It does not
permit itself to be read). Before arriving at this
despairing terminus, the protagonist experiences
the crowd, the coffee shop, a bazaar, a gin-shop, an
unlit alley, a ghetto, and all the unseemly urban
types imaginable the monied, the exploited, the
impoverished, and the unwashed. Poe demonstrates that the organizing principle of the city is
veneer the tricks of clothing, cosmetics, concrete,
glass, and light that hide the horrors that the built
city is prone to produce.
The twentieth century of literary urbanism
began in earnest with the German immigrant
502
THE CITY IN FICTION
Theodore Dreiser, who extended Poes project in

Sister Carrie (1900), a novel about a young female
naf that tries her fate in the metropolitan spaces
of Chicago and New York. Here, Dreiser demonstrates the organic affinity between urban writing
and naturalist literary production. Predicated on
the idea that multiple forces, irreducible to reason
alone, govern mans will, naturalism features
human creatures who strive within the behemoth
of the city only to stumble upon serendipity or
misfortune. Dreiser attributes the once-genteel
businessman Hurstwoods fateful choice of theft
to the undeniable truth that [m]en are led by
instinct before they are regulated by knowledge
(184). It is the failure of rationality at the moment
of embezzlement that forces him to uproot himself from Chicago, the home of both his social
and commercial networks and his illicit romantic
liaison with Carrie, and move to the unfriendly
environs of metropolitan New York, where
Hurstwood finds himself bereft of his status,
friendships, and financial well-being. Naturalisms penchant for urban determinism
warps human will decidedly: it moves Norriss
McTeague (McTeague, 1899) to kill his wife Trina
over lottery money; it pressures Richard Wrights
Bigger Thomas (Native Son, 1940) to kill the white
debutante he befriends and chauffeurs around
the city; it fails to keep a junkie, Nelson Algrens
Frankie Majcinek (Man With a Golden Arm,
1949), from the drugs that most certainly will kill
him; it impels Petrys heroine Lutie Johnson (The
Street, 1946) to brain an unsuspecting suitor
to death; and it leads Gloria Naylors Lorraine
(The Woman of Brewster Place, 1980) to stray
down the alleyway that will most certainly orchestrate her violent rape.
Urbanists writing in non-naturalist modes in
the first half of the century continued to explore
the walled city so important to Dreiser. The city
spawned petty prejudices that, in turn, begat ingroup and out-group politics. As spatial host to
state and market, the city was the primary arena
for forging (or undermining) citizenship and
social belonging. Migrants of various ethno-racial
strands were aware of this and sought cities to
have their Americanness tested and judged.
Artists portrayed the trial variously. Eliots The
Wasteland seems to insist that what made the
city unreal were the undesirability and thus
certain failure of the multicultural experiment
that the urban enabled. This was the attitude of

the Old New York characters that populated
Edith Whartons The Age of Innocence (1920) and
the avowed xenophobes, like Tom Buchanan,
who orchestrated the tragedy in F. Scott
Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby (1925). Nathanael
Wests The Day of the Locust (1939) showed that
the salubrious escape from the encroachment
of non-Anglos that Los Angeles promised was as
fantastical as the Hollywood plots the culture
industry compulsively concocted.
Writers depicting the plight of those who found
their Americanness in question and subject to
judgment complained in whatever accents they
could. Jean Toomers Cane (1923), for example,
argued that the Northern cities that swelled
following the Great Migration threatened to domesticate the raw humanity that defined and
valorized the blackness of Southern blacks. Anzia
Yezierskas Bread Givers (1928) demonstrated
that the Polish immigrant craved clean living and
American whiteness at the regrettable expense
of ethnic community, and Michael Golds Jews
Without Money (1930) cast immigrant striving as
a struggle that could only be ennobled by class
activism. Possibly the most vivid contemplation
of the city as site of confrontation and difference
is Flannery OConnors gothic short story, The
Artificial Nigger (1955). In it, the Heads a white
grandfather and grandson leave their idyllic
town with the intent of tutoring the younger in
the certain cultural blight that is the city. The stain
of modernity is figured not only as urban but
also quite explicitly as black. In addition to wandering into the Negro district and suffering a
strange enchantment by a bosomy black woman,
the Heads are mesmerized at the storys denouement by a black lawn jockey that rests in the front
yard of a lavish home in the white part of town.
OConnors tale seems to posit not only black
commodification as the central practice of modernity, but also that contact with the other,
particularly the mediated and artificial type, is
certain. Indeed, from Eliot to OConnor, urban
literature suggests that the citys social borders
will be transgressed, regardless of the obstacles
contrived to prevent it.
The Negro figurine raises two other concerns
germane to the centurys urban writing. First is
the prominence of media and mass culture as
formative influences on urban life. Fitzgerald
THE CITY IN FICTION
and Wright are responsible for two of the most

famous billboards of American fiction: that of
Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and State Attorney
Buckley. The former, conspicuous during the
train ride from West Egg to New York, signals
the novels preoccupation with the corruptive
pursuit of profit. The latter, arrogantly situated
in the Chicago Black Belt, broadcasts the colonial
stranglehold the suburbs command over the ghetto and the intent to incarcerate those who dare
challenge the present arrangement of racial power. As significant as billboards was the popular
press. Wright, like his predecessor and fellow
traveler John Dos Passos (in his U.S.A. trilogy,
19306), made newspaper copy central to the
technique of insinuating the official story and
its ideological nature into his depiction of the city.
Toomer and Nella Larsen (Quicksand, 1928), like
Eliot, felt that the minstrel was the preeminent
mass artist of urban modernity. More often the
butt than the brain of the joke, the minstrel signals
in their texts the horror of what black character
can become under market pressure. In a similar
vein, musicianship is central to the urban imaginations of James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912) and Petry. Johnsons
New York City shows how sophisticated the allegedly low art of ragtime truly is. And for Petry, a
black womans desire for a singing career remains
the only protection against her certain ghetto ruin.
Whether it was to communicate or entertain,
the imagined city often came equipped with the
means to keep its masses captivated and enthralled.
Its mass culture kept the urban order intact by
mediating human desire into the least volatile
expressive channels possible.
Urban writers were sensitive to the fact that the
citys capacity to enchant made it a site of artifice
and dissemblance. Georg Simmels claim that in
the city, man is tempted to adopt the most
tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically
metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness attested to the citys
coziness with the phony, as soberly as Salingers
Holden Caulfield would (Catcher in the Rye,
1965, 57). Others dramatized how urban masquerade broadened the possibilities for both individual self-fashioning and observer misconstruction. Dreiser makes clear that Carrie Meeber
only experiences true comfort when she is Carrie
Madenda, the stage alias that allows her to be
503
everything but herself. Golds young hero

Mikey fancies himself an immigrant Buffalo Bill,
a persona that allows him to brave the treacherous
terrain of ethnic warfare. Sandra Cisneross
Esperanza (The House on Mango Street, 1984)
and James Baldwins John Grimes (Go Tell It on
the Mountain, 1953) both find their ego ideal in
the femme fatale of film noir. Larsen, Yezierska,
and Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go,
1945) demonstrate that the most viable public
option for the ethnic heroine is to racially pass
because being reified as an exotic is too excruciating to bear. Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man (1952)
is the consummate study in urban impostorship
and subterfuge. The character Rinehart provides
the eponymous hero with an object lesson in the
multiple impersonations that the signifier of
blackness affords: one could be pimp, preacher,
or numbers runner without anyone discovering
the charades. Rineharts example, when juxtaposed with the protagonists pirating of electricity
from an underground hideout, insists that the
citys ethos of manufacture enables the camouflage of the self in both body and space.
Wests Locust demonstrates how Los Angeles
takes this ethos to a nightmarish extreme. The
challenge for the protagonist Tod Hackett is to
represent artistically an environment saturated by
representation. As all the Angelenos are settlers
from elsewhere, the culture of Los Angeles is
an ersatz hybrid of imports. In the category of
authenticity, people fare even worse. Like
Hackett himself, they are struggling, if not failed,
artists, maladroit thespians who cannot satisfy
Hollywoods demand for performance and
fiction in other words, people who do not
represent well. West shows how frustrated desire
multiplies in this environment of secondrate artifice, and culminates with a riot in the
middle of the Hollywood streets undeniable
evidence of the American dreams vacuity and its
promise to disappoint deeply. Eliots unreal city
comes alive in Wests tale, only to reveal itself to be
as dead and deadening as the poet predicted.
Changes in the metropoliss mode of production and the advances in communication and
transportation technology have accentuated certain concerns of the modernist city and continued
to preoccupy urban writers in the postmodern
period. Writers have tended to focus more on
the abject spaces of the urban ethnic enclaves,
504
THE CITY IN FICTION
like Naylors Brewster Place, that mid-century

project of urban renewal amputated from the
metropolitan center. This preoccupation is coupled with the profound anxiety over representation anticipated in Wests Los Angeles. The fax,
the television, and the Internet, in addition to
trains, planes, and automobiles, have hastened
the mobility of people and culture. More so than
in previous decades, the origins of things like
architectural styles are unknown. Disorientation plagues an epoch in which mere hours separate breakfasting in Chicago and Dubai. With our
sense of time and space so confounded, we are
able solely to reckon with surfaces, appearances,
and signs, if they sit still long enough for us to
apprehend them. Epistemological doubt and uncertainty are inevitable.
Junot Dazs short story collection Drown
(1996) meditates on the cognitive insecurity that
comes with transplanting oneself from the Caribbean to an American city. While psychically trying
to resolve two spaces the one left and the one
adopted Diazs characters face the additional
spatial challenge of determining whether they
need to move again: from the marginal urban
spaces that the US reserves for them to more
comfortable sites of assimilation. The drugdealing hero learns from his former best friend
and shoplifting accomplice, Beto, that the best
thing to do is leave the neighborhood. What
seems to forestall the protagonists flight is the
vexing knowledge that his friend is gay and has
enlisted him in clandestine homosexual activity
before leaving for school. To follow him in ghetto
departure, the tale suggests, is to risk an ethnic
unmanning that the hero may not be willing to
undergo. Like the other literary urbanists interested in the immigrant story like Yezierska,
Gold, Henry Roth, and Abraham Cahan early
this century; and Paule Marshall, Philip Roth,
Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, and Grace Paley
in its latter stages Daz shows that negotiation of
the American city requires costly and sometimes
painful identitarian change.
John Edgar Widemans urbanism, in contrast,
describes the disastrous results of those who are
not able to abandon the cities that incarcerate
them. Both Philadelphia Fire (1990) and Two
Cities (1998) argue that the matter of representation specifically underwrites postmodern ghettoization. The stigmatization of the inner city as a
lawless, degenerate culture of violent music, broken families, and gang warfare defrocks ghetto
denizens of the ability to gain the support of a
hardhearted, more neoliberal American society.
In the latter novel, the hero, Mr. Mallory, is a war
veteran turned photographer who finds the camera to be a viable counter to the unflattering
representations that provide a rationale for the
enclaves spatial banishment. Mallory takes to
flânerie, traversing the cities of Pittsburgh and
Philadelphia documenting black male trauma for
the aesthetic appreciation of anyone who would
care to view the photos and be moved by them.
Anxieties about representation have inspired
Ernesto Quin
~ onez (Bodega Dreams, 2000) and
Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker, 1995) to refashion
the Gatsby assimilation myth to explore other
ethnic struggles for urban belonging. In distinct
contrast to the tale of Jay Gatz, however, both
Quin
~ onez and Lee create characters that are not
only metonyms for their ethnic communities,
but also community builders who surreptitiously
engage politics, finance, and real estate to shift
power into the hands of the people for whom they
strive. These writers thus imagine an ethnic response to the forces of urban globalism. In Native
Speaker, the protagonist Henry Park works for a
suburban-based spy agency, avowedly contracted
by transnational corporations, that seeks to monitor ethnic insurgency all over the world. His
particular target on this occasion is a Korean
American politician named John Kwang, whose
flawless and gallant Americanism poses not only
an eerie prototype for Barack Obama but also the
threat of fostering too much hope among the
ethnic residents of Queens. The politician has
secretly expanded the Korean ggeh (private banking system) to scores of non-white New Yorkers
and by doing so has secured the electoral fealty of
its participants.
These private maneuvers are not to disrupt the
impeccable image of Kwang as a media darling.
Betraying the narratives preoccupation with mediation are the lengthy meditations on bilingualism throughout the story, as well as the detailed
mappings Kwangs machine conducts of the city
in the interest of pristine photo opportunities for
the savvy pol. The scene highlights the extent to
which media are used to parcel the city into
mobile and consumable parts, building a narrative of the metropolis from fragments of imagery
COOVER, ROBERT
that the privileged premeditate. Poes frantically

perambulatory protagonist, some 155 years later,
has given way to a bigger brother, one whose
surveillance practices and mechanically reproduced reports on the city require much less
human vigilance. Wideman, Quinonez, Lee, and
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49, 1965)
suggest that in urban writing of the twenty-first
century, it is not merely telling the story of the
city that will be of interest, but also what technological means will be deployed to do so.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist
Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian
Fiction (AF)
505
Realism in Widemans Two Cities. In B. TuSmith &

K. Byerman (eds.), Critical Essays on John Edgar
Wideman. Nashville: University of Tennessee Press,
pp. 22139.
Simpson, T. (2009). The Love of Colour in Me:
Anzia Yezierskas Bread Givers and the Space
of White Racial Manufacture. MELUS, 34(3),
93114.
West, N. (1933). The Day of the Locust. In Miss
Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. New York:
New Directions.
Wirth-Nesher, H. (2008). City Codes: Reading the
Modern Urban Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Coover, Robert
PATRICK ODONNELL

Bremmer, E. S. (2005). Unreal City and Dream
Deferred: Psychogeographies of Modernism in
T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes. In L. Doyle &
L. Winkiel (eds.), Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism,
Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
pp. 20625.
Daz, J. (1996). Drown. New York: Riverhead.
Dreiser, T. (2006). Sister Carrie. (ed. D. Pizer). New
York: Norton.
Eliot, T. S. (2003). The WasteLand and Other Poems
(ed. F. Kermode). New York: Penguin.
Highmore, B. (2005). Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in
the Material and Symbolic City. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lee, C.-R. (1995). Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead.
Lehan, R. D. (1998). The City in Literature: An
Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley:
North, M. (1994). The Dialect of Modernism: Race,
Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature.
OConnor, F. (1955). The Artificial Nigger. In A Good
Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories. New York:
Harcourt Brace pp. 96125.
Poe, E.A. (1969). The Man of The Crowd.
In T. O. Mabbott (ed.), Collected Works of Edgar
Allan Poe: Vol. IV. Cambridge, MA: Belknap,
pp. 13445.
Simmel, G. (1969). The Metropolis and Mental
Life. In Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities
(ed. R. S. Sennett), New York: Appleton,
pp. 4760.
Simpson, T. (2006). And the Arc of His Witness
Explained Nothing: Black Flanerie and Traumatic
A leading member of the group of high postmodernists of the 1970s and 1980s which includes John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William H.
Gass, and Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover has
continued for over 40 years to write fictions that
challenge the conventions of form and genre
while serving as sharp critiques of social norms,
religious piety, and political hegemony. Coover
was born in Charles City, Iowa on February 4,
1932; raised in the Midwest, he received a BA in
Slavic studies from Indiana University, served in
the US Navy for several years, then studied for the
MA in the humanities from the University of
Chicago. Coover has held a number of teaching
positions at Bard College, the University of Iowa,
and Princeton; since 1980, he has taught in the
distinguished creative writing program at Brown
University, and is the recipient of awards from
the Guggenheim Foundation, the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller
Foundation, and the National Endowment of
the Arts. His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), features a small-town prophet and a
religious cult; it won the prestigious William
Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first
novel. Since then, Coover has published over
20 novels and novellas, and has been a strong
advocate for experimental writing and hypertext
fiction.
In a succession of novels and stories following
his first, Coover established himself as a writer
whose comedic and critical gifts are unparalleled
506
COOVER, ROBERT
among contemporary writers in the service of

social satire. The Universal Baseball Association,
Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1967) is the story of a
man who invents an imaginary baseball league
and simulates the creation of a world in determining the fate of its inhabitants. Decades in
advance of popular computer simulation games,
Coovers novel is a satiric parable of the powers
and failures of a god. Pricksongs & Descants (1969)
remains, perhaps, Coovers most widely read
work; as its title indicates, it is a collection of
twisted, dark, and erotic fairy tales and fables that
includes a contemporary version of Hansel and
Gretel, a story that plays upon erotic stereotypes
of baby sitters, and a hilarious, phallic version
of The Tempest in The Magic Poker. The Public
Burning (1977) is Coovers most avowedly political novel: it portrays the antics of Tricky Dick
Nixon during the Cold War 1950s and the events
surrounding the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy
trails and execution, and it embodies a barbed
attack on US political institutions, nationalism,
and global ambitions.
In Geralds Party (1986), Coover turns to a
smaller stage in the narrative of a house party
gone terribly wrong as dead bodies are discovered
and erotic chaos takes place. The pun on death
in the title of Pricksongs & Descants indicates one
of Coovers key interests which finds its most
extensive articulation in Geralds Party: the relation between mortality, the body, and the erotic.
A Night at the Movies: or, You Must Remember
This (1987) is one of Coovers most vibrant
fictions; it is a collection of stories and scenarios
organized according to the kind of multigenre
billings to be found at an old-fashioned cinema
and offers a send-up of movie stereotypes as well
as deconstructing, as Coover does throughout his
work, the permeable boundary between reality
and fantasy. The title of Pinocchio in Venice (1991)
reveals yet again Coovers interest in the fractured
fairy tale; in this version, the human Pinocchio is
an aging scholar who returns to his Venetian
birthplace as he is slowly becoming wooden
again a reversal that allows Coover the opportunity to mediate on death and the illusion of
living happily ever after. A fairy tale Sleeping
Beauty is the pretext for a novella on misfortunes and reversals of desire in Briar Rose (1996a).
In Johns Wife (1996b), Coover turns toward
contemporary suburbia in a novel about the
paradoxes of domesticity and worldly ambition.

Ghost Town (1998) is a mock western full of
derailed stereotypes and mutable eccentrics, and
is one of the purest examples of the parody of
genre in Coovers opus.
Coovers recent novels include The Adventures
of Lucky Pierre: Directors Cut (2002), which parodies pornographic movies in its reels featuring
a male porn star acting in nine films directed by
women; and A Child Again (2005), a collection
of 18 stories that offer comic and absurdist variations on legends, folk tales, and fairy tales.
Coovers inventiveness and narrative energy have
operated at a high level throughout his career;
his zest for experimenting with traditional narrative forms is unceasing and always serves as a
provocation to the reader to reconsider cultural
assumptions and values.
SEE ALSO: Barth, John (AF); Barthelme, Donald
(AF); Gass, William H. (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF); Realism/
Magical Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGSTED READINGS

Anderson, R. (1981). Robert Coover. New York:
G. K. Hall.
Coover, R. (1966). The Origin of the Brunists.
New York: Viking.
Coover, R. (1967). The Universal Baseball Association,
Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. New York: Random
House.
Coover, R. (1969). Pricksongs & Descants. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Coover, R. (1977). The Public Burning. New York:
Viking.
Coover, R. (1980). A Political Fable. New York: Viking.
Coover, R. (1982). Spanking the Maid. New York:
Grove Press.
Coover, R. (1983). In Bed One Night and Other Brief
Encounters. Providence, RI: Burning Deck.
Coover, R. (1986). Geralds Party. New York: Linden.
Coover, R. (1987). A Night at the Movies: or, You
Must Remember This. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Coover, R. (1991). Pinocchio in Venice. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Coover, R. (1996a). Briar Rose. New York: Grove.
Coover, R. (1996b). Johns Wife. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Coover, R. (1998). Ghost Town. New York: Henry Holt.
COOVER, ROBERT
Coover, R. (2002). The Adventures of Lucky Pierre:

Directors Cut. New York: Grove.
Coover, R. (2004). Stepmother. San Francisco:
McSweeneys.
Coover, R. (2005). A Child Again. San Francisco:
McSweeneys.
507
Cope, J. I. (1986). Robert Coovers Fictions.

Evenson, B. (2003). Understanding Robert Coover.
Gordon, L. G. (1983). Robert Coover: The Universal
Fictionmaking Process. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press.
D
Dahlberg, Edward
BILL SOLOMON
Though his status remains that of a minor figure

in the history of American letters, Edward
Dahlbergs fictional practice and critical ideas
inspired several prominent writers in the periods
before and after World War II. He began his
career in the Depression era as an autobiographical novelist, and was classified somewhat inaccurately at this time as a participant in the left-wing
movement known as proletarian literature. By the
early 1940s, he had started to devote his energies
exclusively to criticism, ultimately producing a
fascinatingly idiosyncratic though infrequently
read body of critical work. Toward the end of
his career, having returned to narrative prose, he
received considerable praise for a highly stylized
memoir of his youthful experiences.
Born in Boston in 1900, Dahlberg had a tumultuous early life, accompanying his struggling
mother (who deposited him in the Jewish Orphan
Asylum in Cleveland for a year) as she moved
from Kansas City to New York in search of a
financially stable existence. These events supplied
the subject matter for his two finest novels, Bottom
Dogs (1930) and From Flushing to Calvary (1932),
the publication of which earned him a reputation
as one of the most promising young writers to
come of age after the collapse of the stock market.
However, his lack of commercial success led him
shortly thereafter to refashion himself as an outrageously scathing, eccentric artist of critical
prose, a transformation first marked in 1941 by
the publication of Can These Bones Live. The most
highly regarded of his later work in this critical

mode was The Sorrows of Priapus (1957). Upon
the appearance of Because I Was Flesh (1964), the
work generally regarded as his masterpiece, his
career had come full circle.
The adventures of Lorry Lewis, Dahlbergs
fictional alter ego, provided a template for an
emergent set of writers determined to record the
specificity of everyday life within socially marginal
communities, and from the point of view of those
marginalized. (In his preface to Bottom Dogs,
D. H. Lawrence praised the young writers skillful
and thorough rendering of the characters degraded consciousness.) At the level of content and
formal technique, Bottom Dogs influenced,
among others, James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren,
Henry Miller, and Richard Wright, and it was
subsequently considered by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(who later reissued it under the City Lights imprint) to be a direct precursor of Jack Kerouacs
On the Road. The importance of Dahlbergs greatly underappreciated From Flushing to Calvary
derives in part from its effort to extend the
aesthetic legacy of modernist experimentation;
but Dahlbergs second novel is equally distinguished as a comic, yet sympathetic, portrait of
the artists mother, and it is on this basis that
Allen Ginsberg recognized its affinity with his
own Kaddish (1961). Dahlbergs rather unsuccessful third and final fiction, For Those Who
Perish (1934) composed during the brief period
of time that he aligned himself politically with the
Communist Party is remembered primarily as
the first American novel to draw attention to the
rising threat of fascism in this country.

DANTICAT, EDWIDGE
Published in 1929, Dahlbergs first piece of

literary criticism, Ariel in Caliban, is notable as
a provocative attempt to formulate a machine
aesthetic. However, if at the onset of his career
Dahlberg argued in support of a literature attuned
to urbanindustrial modernity, from the 1940s on
he devoted his energies to denouncing mechanization and city life, alongside mass culture, as the
conditions of collective degradation. Do These
Bones Live (1960 [1941]) was the first in a series
of critical performances in which he adopted the
stance of a lonely, outraged prophet in the wilderness, railing against humankinds ongoing alienation from nature and engagement in impure,
because non-procreative, acts of sexuality. Can
These Bones Live is additionally significant as a
decidedly non-academic reappraisal of nineteenth-century American literature. Published in
the same year as F. O. Matthiessens canonical
account of the period (American Renaissance;
1941), Dahlbergs study is unique in that it abandons all claims to scholarly objectivity, exhibiting
instead a profound emotional investment in those
artists he perceived to be neglected and abused.
Dahlbergs most passionate identification was
with Herman Melville, an interest he shared with
Charles Olson, whom Dahlberg had met and
befriended in the late 1930s. In fact, Olson not
only dedicated Call Me Ishmael (1947) to
Dahlberg but also, in Projective Verse (1950),
parenthetically attributed a crucial component of
his new poetic credo to his former mentor. It was
as a result of Dahlbergs relentless instructions
that Olson discovered, as he later put it, how to
make one perception lead directly to another. And
when Dahlberg was in the process of leaving Black
Mountain College, where he had briefly secured a
teaching appointment in 1948, he managed to
convince Olson to serve as his replacement.
In 1964, Because I Was Flesh garnered Dahlberg
considerable attention. Though a return to the
subject matter of his first two novels, he now
recalled the events of his youth with inimitable
linguistic virtuosity and dazzling erudition. The
triumph was, however, short-lived, and by the
time of his death 13 years later his work was again
known only to a select few. The general ignorance
of his achievement persists unabated today.
SEE ALSO: Algren, Nelson (AF); The City in
Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF);
509
Farrell, James T. (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);

Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
Billings, H. (ed.) (1968). Edward Dahlberg: American
Ishmael of Letters. Austin, TX: Roger Beacham.
Dahlberg, E. (1930). Bottom Dogs. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Dahlberg, E. (1932). From Flushing to Calvary.
Dahlberg, E. (1934). Those Who Perish. New York:
John Day.
Dahlberg, E. (1956). The Sorrows of Priapus. New York:
New Directions.
Dahlberg, E. (1960). Can These Bones Live (originally
published as Do These Bones Live, 1941). New York:
New Directions.
Dahlberg, E. (1964). Because I Was Flesh: The
Autobiography of Edward Dahlberg. New York:
New Directions.
Dahlberg, E. (1989). Samuel Becketts Wake and Other
Uncollected Prose. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey
Archive.
DeFanti, C. (1978). The Wages of Expectation: A
Biography of Edward Dahlberg. New York: New York
University Press.
Matthiessen, F. O. (1941). American Renaissance: Art
and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman.
Solomon, W. (2002). Literature, Amusement, and
Technology in the Great Depression. New York:
Williams, J. (ed.) (1970). Edward Dahlberg:
A Tribute. New York: Northwestern University
Press.
Danticat, Edwidge
HELLEN LEE-KELLER
Edwidge Danticat has earned critical acclaim

writing about the Haitian diaspora in the United
States. By focusing on intimate stories of the lives
of poor and working-class families, Danticat calls
attention to the profound impact that international political events have on individual lives.
Since publishing her first book in 1994 at 25 years
old, she has added three novels, one collection of
short stories, two childrens books, and two nonfiction works. In addition to editing two volumes
of collected stories, she has had her short stories
510
DANTICAT, EDWIDGE
published in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has co-produced one documentary and
acted in two films.
Edwidge Dantica was born in 1969 to Andre
and Rose Dantica in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hoping to secure economic stability and physical
safety in the United States, her parents fled during
President Francois Papa Doc Duvaliers regime
(195771). Upon arrival, a clerical error changed
the family name to Danticat. Because of strict
immigration policies regarding Haitians, Danticat and her brother were unable to join their
parents and two US-born siblings for 10 years.
Danticat graduated from Barnard College in 1990,
majoring in French literature, and earned an
MFA at Brown University in 1993.
A native French and Haitian Creole speaker,
Danticat began writing in her adopted language,
English. While her first influences in Haitian
schools were largely French writers, such as Victor
Hugo, once Danticat arrived in the US, she found
inspiration from writers such as Paule Marshall
and Maya Angelou. At 18 years old, she published
an essay, which would later become the basis
for her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994).
Her second book, Krik? Krak!, a collection of short
stories, and her next two novels, The Farming
of Bones (1998) and The Dew Breaker (2004),
firmly established Danticat as a versatile writer,
with command over a variety of genres and
styles and with an ability to portray a variety of
perspectives.
Danticat intricately crafts stories of private
individuals embedded in the complex historical,
political, and economic connections between
the US and Haiti. Her poignant narratives move
between the past and present. They frequently
employ flashbacks to situate the main storyline in
a broader history and across national boundaries
by incorporating the Haitian Creole, Spanish,
French, and English languages. These stylistic
devices work together to highlight the personal
aspects of larger social issues, such as immigration
and exile to the US, the violent physical and sexual
repercussions of corrupt Haitian politics, the
struggle for survival that working-class rural men
and women face in Haiti, and the endurance of
emotional bonds in transnational families.
Themes of hope and despair figure prominently in Danticats literary corpus. On one hand, her
writings celebrate the strength of family ties, the
close bonds among women, and an optimism for

Haiti and Haitian people. They are frequently set,
on the other hand, against a background of the
physical and mental toll of sugar-cane farming,
the emotional distance and strain on families
resulting from emigration and exile, the lingering
traumas of physical and sexual violence, and the
economic despair individuals encounter because
of political corruption. For instance, in The Farming of Bones, Danticat sets a love story between two
Haitian exiles living in the Dominican Republic
amidst deadly anti-Haitian violence peaking in
1937. Another example occurs in The Dew Breakers (2004), in which Danticat places a former
tonton macoute, or member of Duvaliers brutal
paramilitary police force, at the center of the
story about a young woman coming to terms with
her familys secret past. Danticats sharp critique of
political abuses are not only reserved for Haiti, but
also directed at her adopted country. The memoir
Brother, Im Dying is largely an account of her
uncles untimely death while being held by immigration officials in Florida; it thus belies the promise of the US as a land of freedom and safety.
Danticat was named a MacArthur Foundation
fellow in 2009. She won a National Book Critics
Circle Award in 2007 for her autobiography
Brother, Im Dying; an American Book Award in
1999 for The Farming of Bones; a Story Prize in
2004 for The Dew Breaker; a Lila WallaceReaders
Digest Foundation Grant in 1996; and a Pushcart
Short Story Prize in 1995. She has been nominated
for several distinguished literary awards: a National Book Award for Brother, Im Dying in 2007
and for Krik? Krak! in 1995, as well as a National
Book Critics Circle Award in 2004 and a PEN/
Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2005 for The Dew
Breaker. Danticat resides on the edge of the Little
Haiti section of Miami with her spouse and daughter.
Marshall, Paule (AF); Postcolonial Fiction of the
West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF);
Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
Chancey, M. J. A. (1997). Lepousa Fe Viv: Female
Identity and the Politics of Textual Sexuality in
Nadine Magloires Le Mal de Vivre and Edwidge
DAVENPORT, GUY
Danticats Breath, Eyes, Memory. In Framing

Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
pp 10433.
Danticat, E. (1994). Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York:
SoHo Press.
Danticat, E. (1995). Krik? Krak! New York:
SoHo Press.
Danticat, E. (1998). The Farming of Bones. New York:
SoHo Press.
Danticat, E. (guest ed.) (2000). The Beacon Best of 2000:
Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and
Cultures. Boston: Beacon.
Danticat, E. (ed.) (2001). The Butterflys Way: Voices
From the Haitian Diaspora in the United States.
New York: SoHo Press.
Danticat, E. (2002a). After the Dance: A Walk Through
Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. New York: Crown
Journeys.
Danticat, E. (2002b). Behind the Mountains. New York:
Orchard.
Danticat, E. (2004). The Dew Breaker. New York: Knopf.
Danticat, E. (2005). Anaconda, Golden Flower.
New York: Scholastic.
Danticat, E. (2007). Brother, Im Dying. New York:
Knopf.
Davis, R. G. (2001). Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle:
Forging Community in Edwidge Danticats Krik?
Krak! MELUS, 26(2), 6581.
Francis, D. A. (2004). Silences Too Horrific to
Disturb: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge
Danticats Breath, Eyes, Memory. Research in African
Literatures, 35(2), 7590.
Lyons, B. (2003). An Interview With Edwidge Danticat.
Contemporary Literature, 44(2), 18398.
Mardorossian, C. M. (2005). Reclaiming Difference:
Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism.
Renda, M. A. (2001). Taking Haiti: Military Occupation
and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 19151940.
Davenport, Guy
ANDRE FURLANI
By the time he started publishing fiction in the late

1960s, Guy Davenport (19272005) had already
made a career as a scholar, translator, and editor
of modern and classical literature. As a typesetter
he had produced the first edition of Ezra Pounds
Canto 110 and illustrated several books and periodicals. It was by assimilating this versatility to
fiction that Davenport pioneered a hybrid form
511
eluding classification. A typical story, laid out as

a collage, combines realist and documentary narrative with scholarship, visual imagery, captions,
and decontextualized citation. It is the collage
method of Ezra Pounds The Cantos transposed to
fiction, and it yielded eight volumes of fiction,
including some of the finest and most original of
postwar American stories.
Davenport entitled his second collection of
essays Every Force Evolves a Form (1987a), and
this Shaker maxim became a credo. He assumed
that a new subject entails a new form, and hence he
essayed many, including the travelogue (e.g., The
Antiquities of Elis), memoir (Ithaka), journal
(The Death of Picasso), letter (The Chair),
postcard (Belindas World Tour), dramatic
monologue (A Field of Snow on a Slope of the
Rosenberg), adventure tale (Robot), propaganda piece (Bronze Leaves and Red), eclogue (On
Some Lines of Virgil), decasyllabic mime (We
Often Think of Lenin in the Clothespin Factory),
biblical legend (Jonah), and utopian romance
(The Jules Verne Steam Balloon).
Davenports facility was such that he could
treat a subject in a variety of forms. A touchstone
in several essays, the pre-Socratic philosopher
Heraclitus is the subject of an eponymous story
(in Tatlin! [1974]) and a painting, while his extant
fragments are translated in Herakleitos and Diogenes (1979). Franz Kafka is the subject of one
of his finest essays (The Hunter Gracchus), a
portrait (reproduced in Reeces A Balance of
Quinces), and four stories, including the first he
published, The Aeroplanes at Brescia.
His fiction assemblages of fact and necessary
fiction, he called his first collection, Tatlin!
abounds in the recombination and conjunction of
recovered texts and artifacts: The Trees at Lystra
from Acts of the Apostles, The Lavender Fields
of Apta Julia from a Bernard Faucon photograph, Mesoroposthonippidon from Diogenes
Laertes account of Diogenes, and The Concord
Sonata from Henry Thoreaus journals.
Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier incorporates
pen-and-ink collages, apian lore, Dogon tribal
cosmology, Charles Fouriers utopian projections, and firsts: the Wright Brothers first flight,
Jacques-Henri Lartigues first camera, and Gertrude Steins first car. Like his later The Bowmen
of Shu, it is an elegy for the modern renaissance
that, for Davenport, perished in World War I.
512
DAVENPORT, GUY
Although he was a native of Anderson, South

Carolina living in Lexington, Kentucky, the
Southern setting of these last two stories is an
exception. After graduating in English and classics
from Duke University in 1948 and leaving to
study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar,
he ceased writing fiction about the South, which
he had been publishing in the Duke Archive. And
when he returned for good in 1966 to teach
English literature at the University of Kentucky,
it did not revive that impulse. Davenport resisted
autobiography and self-disclosure, assailing expressivist theories of creativity and insisting on
textual autonomy.
What he trawls for in his classical and modern
European locales is the archaic. To write about
Pounds support of fascism, he tells a story largely
about a persecuted Roman stoic (C. Musonius
Rufus); to write a eulogy to the poet Lorine
Niedecker, he adapts a Bronze Age lyric by Alcman. To write about the Vietnam War, this
member of the Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg
retells, from Plutarch, a Roman infantrymans
anecdote of the Etruscan campaign (The Juno
of the Veii). Davenport celebrates the archaic as
an exemplary unity of intellectual, creative, and
sexual drives. Both the Neolithic painters and the
French teenagers who discover their murals in
the caves of Lascaux are, in Robot, enlightened
primitives that is, primitive to the very distinction between mind and body. The characters
in Davenports erotic idylls are portrayed as
intellectually enhanced by their sexual liberality.
Davenport grants a primary place to erotic curiosity, free of prurience or taboo, and thereby
affirms an ideal of reciprocating human
freedom.
The pastoral is a zone of such freedom, and
Davenport rescues it from both reactionary nostalgia and postmodern irony. In Concert
Champêtre in D Minor, bright teens initiate an
uncouth reprobate into their intellectual and
erotic sodality, and redeem him. In The Bicycle
Rider a similar attempt fails, because of the
effects of 1960s drug culture. In The Death of
Picasso a Dutch philosopher and his recidivist
ward share a rugged island retreat, where the
youth has as much to teach as the professor.
The recipient of an award for fiction from the
American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters, a PEN Translation Prize for 7 Greeks
(1980), as well as a MacArthur Fellowship,

Davenport also wrote a book on the still life and
a monograph on Balthus, translated the sayings
of the ancient Egyptians and those of Diogenes
and (with Benjamin Urrutia) Jesus, edited two
volumes of O. Henrys fiction, published an
exegesis of The Cantos, and contributed the
New Books column to Harpers. His selected
verse and translations appeared as Thasos and
Ohio. Two collections of correspondence (with
the publisher-poets James Laughlin and Jonathan Williams) show the same combination of
verbal and visual originality, deep erudition, and
high spirits.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Stein, Gertrude (AF)
Bawer, B. (1984). Guy Davenport: Fiction a la Fourier.
New Criterion, 3(4), 814.
Davenport, G. (1974). Tatlin! Six Stories. New York:
Scribners.
Davenport, G. (1979). Da Vincis Bicycle: Ten Stories.
Davenport, G. (1981a). Ecologues: Eight Stories.
Davenport, G. (1981b). The Geography of the
Imagination: Forty Essays. San Francisco:
North Point.
Davenport, G. (1984). Apples and Pears and Other
Stories. San Francisco: North Point.
Davenport, G. (1987a). Every Force Evolves a Form.
Davenport, G. (1987b). The Jules Verne
Steam Balloon: Nine Stories. San Francisco:
North Point.
Davenport, G. (1989). The Balthus Notebook.
New York: Ecco.
Davenport, G. (1993). A Table of Green Fields: Ten
Stories. New York: New Directions.
Davenport, G. (1996). The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories.
Furlani, A. (2007). Guy Davenport: Postmodern
and After. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Hoepffner, B. (1995). Guy Davenport: LUtopie

Localisee. Paris: Editions
Belin.
Reece, E. A. (1996). A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings
and Drawings of Guy Davenport. New York:
New Directions.
Sullivan, J. J. (2002). Guy Davenport: The Art of
Fiction CLXXIV. Paris Review, 163, 4287.
DELANY, SAMUEL R.
Delany, Samuel R.
JOSH LUKIN
Samuel R. Delany is a radical gay black New York

critic and novelist who has written, famously and
influentially, on the role of race, sexual orientation, New York City, and semiotics in his life and
in US society. Styling himself a Marxist but deeply
influenced by Michel Foucault and deconstruction, he has brought a poststructuralist and classconscious sensibility to works of science fiction
and fantasy. Outside of those genres, he has
published three volumes of pornography, four of
memoir, three of literary fiction, and eight of
criticism. Delany was born on April 1, 1942 and
lived as a professional writer from the mid-1960s
until 1988; since then, he has earned his living as
a university professor.
Delany chose early on to focus his energies on
writing science fiction because mainstream publishers thought his brands of narrative experimentation would be unacceptable and alienating to
an early 1960s reading public; he published his
first science fiction novel at the age of 20. He
began to receive substantial attention in 1967,
when his interstellar adventure Babel-17 earned
him the first of his four Nebula Awards from the
Science Fiction Writers of America. The novels
plot addresses the extent to which language determines human beings interpretation of, and
conduct in, the world. The year 1967 also saw the
composition of Delanys ninth novel, Nova, which
would be published successfully a year later; in the
interval, however, a prominent science fiction
editor refused to serialize it, explaining that readers were not ready for a story about a black starship
captain. In 1968, overflowing with rage over the
sexual politics of pre-Stonewall America, Delany
wrote Hogg, a pornographic novel about a young
boys submissive relationship with a professional
rapist; over 25 years later, it was finally published
to some acclaim (1995 [1968]).
Sexual libertarianism, racism, and class antagonism all collide in Delanys 1975 novel Dhalgren,
an 800-page work that sold over a million copies
in its first 16 years in print. Set in an unnamed US
city that has been mysteriously abandoned by the
forces of government to the forces of nature, its
population decimated, and its people assembling
into impromptu gangs for mutual aid, Dhalgren
513
is in part a science-fictional depiction of American cities that had been gutted by economic
decline; hence its characters are mostly bohemian
squatters and members of the urban underclass
rather than the galactic superheroes and futuristic
bureaucrats who populate much science fiction.
But Delany was not trying to challenge old conventions of science fiction from outside the genre;
he sees his work as having been in dialogue with
the works of his science fiction contemporaries,
Thomas Disch, Joanna Russ, and Ursula Le Guin.
Delanys focus on marginal characters who do
not aspire to be mainstream produces work at
odds with the postmodern tradition of paranoia
in US novels: a character such as Gorgik the
Liberator in the Return to Neveryon tetralogy
(197987) does not start out believing in a just,
comforting, and meritocratic world; perceive that
he is excluded from it; and conclude that the rules
of success are being withheld from him by a
conspiracy. Instead, he understands that learning
the rules in whatever social stratum he finds himself is the most urgent of tasks, but approaches that
task as a practical matter of his own survival, rather
than evidence that someone is denying him his
due. This open-minded autodidacticism is the only
mode in which he can survive: the conviction of
entitlement that goes with assuming ones middleclass status to be natural or deserved shows up
in Delanys novels as a most destructive psychopathology. His 1976 novel Trouble on Triton shows
how a narcissistic angry white man such as are
dominant in the present-day world would fare in a
society more equitable than our own.
Delanys post-1990 fiction explicitly contests
the irrational social taboos, mental categorizations, and emotional barriers that block productive interclass contact and mutual respect in
society. The Mad Man, a long novel that details
the promiscuous intellectual and sexual lives of
a young gay black scholar in 1980s New York,
dramatizes the potential for community and
compassion that could accompany the demystification of sex and other bodily realities. Atlantis:
Three Tales begins with a rich lyrical novella,
Atlantis: Model 1924, that builds up to a fantasized meeting between a black adolescent,
based closely on Delanys father, and the poet
Hart Crane on the Brooklyn Bridge; the subsequent tales address issues of aesthetics, sex, and
514
DELILLO, DON
morality in fictionalized accounts of Delanys own

experiences. 2007s Dark Reflections (2007) tells
the story of an elderly gay black poet whose times
and temperament collided so as to deprive him of
fulfilling human contact, sexual or otherwise, for
most of his life.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF);
Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Le Guin,
Ursula (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Queer Modernism (AF); Russ, Joanna (AF);
Govan, S. Y. (1984). The Insistent Presence of

Black Folk in the Novels of Samuel R. Delany.
Black American Literature Forum, 18(2), 438.
Jackson, E., Jr. (1995). Strategies of Deviance: Studies
in Gay Male Representation. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Sallis, J. (ed.) (1996). Ash of Stars: On the Writing of
Samuel R. Delany. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Tucker, J. A. (2004). A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R.
Delany, Race, Identity, and Fiction. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
DeLillo, Don
Broderick, D. (1994). Reading by Starlight:

Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Delany, S. (1966). Babel-17. New York: Ace.
Delany, S. (1968). Nova. New York: Ace.
Delany, S. (1975). Dhalgren. New York: Bantam.
Delany, S. (1976). Trouble on Triton. Hanover, NH:
Delany, S. (1978). Tales of Neveryon. New York:
Bantam.
Delany, S. (1982). Neveryona, or: The Tale of Signs
and Cities. New York: Bantam.
Delany, S. (1984). Stars in My Pocket, Like Grains of
Sand. New York: Bantam.
Delany, S. (1985). Flight from Nevery on. New York:
Bantam.
Delany, S. (1987). Return to Neveryon. Hanover, NH:
Delany, S. (1994). The Bridge of Lost Desire [reprint of
Return to Neveryon]. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press.
Delany, S. (1995). Atlantis: Three Tales. Hanover, NH:
Delany, S. (1995). Hogg [1968]. Normal, IL: FC2.
Delany, S. (1996). Triton [reprint of Trouble on Triton].
Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
Delany, S. (2002). The Mad Man [1996]. Rutherford,
NJ: Voyant.
Delany, S. (2003). Aye, and Gomorrah: and Other
Stories. New York: Vintage.
Delany, S. (2007). Dark Reflections. New York: Carroll &
Graf.
Fox, R. E. (1987). Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black
Postmodernist Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka,
Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York:
Greenwood.
Freedman, C. (2006). About Delany Writing:
An Anatomical Meditation. Extrapolation:
A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 47(1),
629.
JOHN N. DUVALL
Don DeLillo is one of the most significant contemporary American novelists. Depicting an age
of media and advertising saturation in which
politics have been reduced to sound bites and
images, his fiction has often felt eerily prescient
about contemporary crises. Published in 1985 just
after the environmental disaster in Bhopal, India,
White Noise seemed to many like an uncanny
commentary on the event. Since Players (1977),
which imagines a plot to blow up the New York
Stock Exchange, DeLillos fiction repeatedly has
explored the possibilities of terrorism on American soil, so much so that his fiction almost seems
to have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks on the
United States. But to see DeLillo merely as a kind
of contemporary Nostradamus is to miss what is
central to his work. His most important fiction
invites the reader to think historically. DeLillo
may write about American postmodernity, but in
his belief that the novel may help the engaged
reader to think historically there remains a decidedly high modernist belief in the power of art
to create a critical purchase on the present.
This modernist undercurrent to DeLillos postmodernism is not surprising given his admiration
for William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and
especially James Joyce.
The son of an Italian immigrant, DeLillo was
born in a working-class, Italian American, North
Bronx neighborhood of New York City in 1936.
Although a lapsed Catholic, DeLillo acknowledges that his religious upbringing has prompted
his interest in the eschatological. DeLillo writes
with a sense of the mystery of life and often seems
DELILLO, DON
to seek the possibility of a sustaining communion,

however secular or provisional that communion
may be. After attending Fordham University and
earning a BA in communication arts in 1958, he
took a position with a Madison Avenue advertising agency, where he worked until 1964. DeLillos
understanding of the imbricated nature of capital
and advertising, therefore, comes from firsthand
experience.
Working as a freelance writer, DeLillo began
drafting his first novel, Americana, in 1966, though
it would not be published until 1971. Here, a
young television executive, David Bell, leaves his
job for the road in order to find himself. End Zone
(1972), his second novel, is allegorical: college
football players at a school in Texas embody
various philosophical positions that explore resonances between the language of football and nuclear warfare. In Great Jones Street (1973), DeLillo
examines a media hungry for celebrity content.
When rock star Bucky Wonderlick leaves his band
mid-tour, his star status only grows. DeLillos
most ambitious early novel is Ratners Star
(1976). It focuses on the 14-year-old mathematical
genius, Billy Twillig, who joins Nobel Prize-winning scientists in an underground desert think
tank. Encompassing the history of mathematics,
the novel ultimately has Billy discover that humanity is not constantly evolving but moving in
cycles with periods of devolving. Satiric and full of
paranoid conspiracies, DeLillos fiction from the
1970s is largely apprentice work. At their best these
novels play with the conventions of genre, particularly the thriller as a vehicle for social commentary. However, had DeLillo stopped writing at this
point, we would remember him today as an imitator of Thomas Pynchon.
In 1979, DeLillo was awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship and spent the next three years in
Greece. This time abroad seems to have fundamentally broadened his perspective, and he became a more worldly writer. Since then, satire has
become a progressively more muted note in his
fiction, as his prose grows more deliberate and
crafted. Of his 14 novels, six were published in the
1970s, while eight have appeared between 1982
and 2007. His first novel after his time abroad is
the underappreciated The Names (1982), a kind
of The Sun Also Rises for the post-Vietnam generation. Set in Greece, the novel explores an
expatriate community of British and American
515
corporate workers. Although the main character,

James Axton, stumbles onto an ancient death cult
and ultimately finds he has been an unwitting
agent of the CIA, The Names is about language
and the possibility of meaning.
Despite the leap in power and sophistication of
The Names, DeLillos major breakthrough came
with the publication of White Noise in 1985. This
comic novel blends several genres the academic
novel, the domestic novel, and the environmental
disaster narrative to satirize American consumer culture and identify its latent fascist impulses.
The main character, Jack Gladney, is chair of the
Department of Hitler Studies at an expensive
liberal arts college. When a chemical spill forces
the evacuation of the college town of Blacksmith,
Jacks direct exposure to the toxic cloud turns his
fear of death into an obsession.
The absurdity of Jacks world is a function of
the extent to which simulacra and simulation
dominate almost every aspect of the characters
lives. DeLillos depiction of American postmodernity embodies the notion of French sociologist
Jean Baudrillard that models of reality no longer
represent the world but rather constitute it. This
is nowhere clearer than with the emergency
preparedness organization known as SIMUVAC,
which models responses by staging disasters;
however, when the actual disaster occurs,
SIMUVAC uses the occasion to rehearse their
simulation.
Jack himself is a kind of simulation, the worldfamous scholar of Hitler who neither reads nor
speaks German. His status as simulacrum helps
mark White Noise as the historical novel manque.
Because his area of expertise is Nazi aesthetics,
Jack misses the horror of Hitler and the Holocaust
and repeatedly fails to make connections between
the American present and the Nazi past. Of
DeLillos subsequent novels, the only one that
has such a satiric edge is Cosmopolis (2003), which
follows billionaire financial expert Eric Packer in
his self-indulgent, self-destructive limousine ride
across Manhattan for a haircut.
Libra (1988) marks DeLillos turn to history
proper. The novels chapters alternate between a
chronologically ordered biography of Lee Oswald
and a conspiracy among rogue CIA agents to stage
a simulated assassination of President Kennedy
that, as more people become involved, morphs
into the actual assassination in Dallas, Texas. The
516
DELILLO, DON
timelines of the two plots converge in the moment

that Kennedy is killed. As a metafictional umbrella over these two narratives is the CIA analyst,
Nicholas Branch, whose role doubles DeLillos,
since the character is charged with the impossible
task of writing a definitive account of the assassination that would both supplement and supplant
the Warren Commission Report. Mao II (1991)
also has a metafictional element in its treatment
of terrorism. Its central character, the reclusive
novelist Bill Gray, worries that the terrorist now
fills a role that the novelist once played, namely,
the ability to reshape mass consciousness.
Unquestionably, DeLillos masterwork is Underworld (1997), his sprawling 728-page history of
the Cold War. The prologue particularly is a tour
de force that unpacks a massive historical irony: if
October 3, 1951, is remembered in America, it is
for Bobby Thomsons ninth-inning, three-run
homerun that gave the Giants the National League pennant rather than for the days importance
to the Cold War. On this same day, the Soviet
Union exploded its second nuclear device, which
confirmed for US intelligence Russias nuclear
capability. Seen from three points of view an
African American teenager, Russ Hodges (radio
announcer for the Giants), and a group consisting
of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shore,
and J. Edgar Hoover the post-game celebration
figures the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. From
this day, DeLillo traces a 40-year history of the
ownership of the ball Thomson hit and the social
and environmental costs of Americas dubious
victory in the Cold War.
Throughout, DeLillo imagines the responses of
various outsider artists to the threat of a secular
apocalypse, from Russian filmmaker Serge Eisenstein and underground comic Lenny Bruce to a
subway graffiti artist. If DeLillos early novels may
be compared to Pynchons, Libra and Underworld
are more akin to E. L. Doctorows self-conscious
blending of history and fiction in The Book
of Daniel and Worlds Fair, a kind of postmodernism that critic Linda Hutcheon has termed
historiographic metafiction.
Since Underworld, DeLillo has worked on a
smaller scale but continues to imagine a transforming role for art in the media age. The Body
Artist (2001) examines the life of Lauren Hartke,
a performance artist, in the aftermath of the
suicide of her husband and continues DeLillos
exploration of mystery and language. Shortly after

her husbands death, Lauren finds a young man in
her house who apparently cannot speak; however,
beginning with single words he ultimately begins
channeling phrases that Laurens dead husband
spoke. Whether this man is a ghostly presence or
Laurens delusion is unclear, but her interactions
with him enable her most triumphant artist performance by the novels end.
DeLillos most recent novel explores the aftermath of terrorist attacks on America. Falling Man
(2007) begins immediately following the collapse
of the World Trade Center. Keith Neudecker, a
lawyer who escapes from the North Tower, wanders injured and confused to the apartment of his
estranged wife, Lianne. Through the couples
attempted reconciliation, DeLillo stages trauma
at both the personal and national levels. In addressing 9/11, DeLillo works with a similar problem that Theodor Adorno addressed in the aftermath of World War II. For Adorno, poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric. The question Adorno raises
concerns the role of aesthetics and the limitations
of representation. DeLillos meta-artistic reflection on this topic comes through his imagined
outsider performance artist, David Janiak, who
becomes known as Falling Man. Shortly after the
destruction of the towers, Janiak begins staging
unannounced falls from various structures
throughout Manhattan. His falls are arrested by
ropes and harnesses so that he hangs suspended in
the attitude of freefall.
Janiaks disturbing art depends on the images
of people who jumped from the World Trade
Center on 9/11, but his art is not simply representational; instead, it carries an element of
witness precisely because of its effect on his unsuspecting audience. When Lianne happens to see
one of Falling Mans performances, it erases all
distance between artistic re-enactment and the
actual horrific moment when people chose to
jump rather than burn to death. For her, then,
witnessing Falling Mans performance is not a
representation of the horror of 9/11; it is the
horror of 9/11 itself. Three years later, Lianne
reads an obituary of Janiak and realizes that he
had been staging the suppressed image of 9/11,
a stunningly composed photo by an AP photographer of a man falling to his death. The photo
ran on September 12, 2001 in the New York Times
and syndicated around the country, causing
DICK, PHILIP K.
517
outrage from readers that the image was immoral,

a voyeuristic invasion of this mans privacy. The
photo came to be known as Falling Man. This
visual intertext underscores that Janiaks art,
like DeLillos, does not produce a final healing
of collective wounds but probes at hidden recesses
of memories of that day.
Lentricchia, F. (ed.) (1991). Introducing Don DeLillo.

Osteen, M. (2000). American Magic and Dread: Don
DeLillos Dialogue With Culture. Philadelphia:

Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist
Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas
(AF); Television and Fiction (AF)
Dick, Philip K.

Boxall, P. (2006). Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction.
London: Routledge.
Cowart, D. (2002). Don DeLillo: The Physics of
Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
DeLillo, D. (1971). Americana. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
DeLillo, D. (1972). End Zone. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
DeLillo, D. (1973). Great Jones Street. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
DeLillo, D. (1976). Ratners Star. New York: Knopf.
DeLillo, D. (1977). Players. New York: Knopf.
DeLillo, D. (1978). Running Dog. New York: Knopf.
DeLillo, D. (1985). White Noise. New York: Viking.
DeLillo, D. (1988). Libra. New York: Viking.
DeLillo, D. (1991). Mao II. New York: Viking.
DeLillo, D. (1992). The Names. New York: Knopf.
DeLillo, D. (1997). Underworld. New York: Scribners.
DeLillo, D. (2001). The Body Artist. New York:
Scribners.
DeLillo, D. (2003). Cosmopolis. New York: Scribners.
DeLillo, D. (2007). Falling Man. New York: Scribners.
DePietro, T. (ed.) (2005). Conversations with Don
DeLillo. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Dwey, J. (2006). Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading
of Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Duvall, J. N. (ed.). (2008). The Cambridge
Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hutcheon, L. (1989). The Politics of Postmodernism.
London: Routledge.
Keesey, D. (1993). Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne.
LeClair, T. (1987). In the Loop: Don DeLillo and
the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
GREG WRIGHT
Philip K. Dick was a popular and prolific writer

of science fiction, and many of his critically
acclaimed novels are associated with Californias
leftist counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.
During his lifetime, he published 36 novels and
over 100 short stories. Nine of Dicks novel manuscripts were published posthumously.
Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in
1928 and graduated from high school in Berkeley.
He briefly attended the University of California,
Berkeley, dropping out before completing his first
semester. Dick initially experimented with novels
featuring realistic settings and domestic conflict,
but he eventually found success as a science fiction
writer. He published his first novel, Solar Lottery,
in 1955.
Many of Dicks common themes the respective natures of reality, humanity, divinity, and free
will emerge in his early novels. Dicks style mixes
theoretical musings with a dark sense of humor,
and he addresses the philosophical implications
of concepts such as entropy, artificial intelligence,
and the borders of what makes us human. Dick
wrote at a frenetic pace due to financial pressures,
and his creativity and intelligence materialize less
through his repetitive stock characters than
through his unconventional, unpredictable plots
and his ability to transform the tropes of science
fiction into serious metaphysical considerations.
In Dicks fiction, the everyday world is an illusion,
and such collective fantasy might be due to recreational drugs, political conspiracy, or even a
deitys intervention.
Dicks first major critical success was The Man
in the High Castle (1962), an alternate history in
which the Axis powers win World War II and
divide the US between Germany and Japan.
In Martian Time-Slip (1964) and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Dick utilizes the
setting of Martian colonies to explore unreliable
518
DICK, PHILIP K.
perceptions of time and space, through, respectively, an individuals mental disorder and several
colonists consumption of hallucinogens. Now
Wait for Last Year (1966) likewise centers on a
drug that enables time travel, and the novels
backdrop of an interplanetary war imitates Cold
War politics. Fears of nuclear holocaust also
appear among Dicks themes, and several of his
stories occur in the aftermath of nuclear war,
including 1965s Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We
Learned to Get Along After the Bomb, in which
survivors must adapt to the new social order,
the toxic levels of radiation, and the mutations
such radiation engenders.
Many of Dicks complicated plots involve
layers of unreliable realities. For instance, Ubik
(1969) depicts a world in which the dead can
exchange broadcasts with the living; however,
their communications are subject to static interference and an eroding sense of shared reality.
Similarly, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
(1974) concerns a celebrity protagonist who finds
himself in an unstable reality, suddenly unable to
prove his own existence within a repressive police
state. In Dicks sole non-science-fiction novel
published during his lifetime, Confessions of a
Crap Artist (1975), the skewed perceptions of a
crank amateur scientist lead him to conclusions
that counter the experiences of those around him.
Dick habitually consumed illicit drugs and was
married five times, and such life experiences
greatly impacted his writing. But perhaps the
most influential period in Dicks life was in
1974, when he received a series of visions. Dick
attributed these experiences to a higher power he
called VALIS, an acronym for Vast Active Living
Intelligence System. Dick spent years recording
and interpreting the information of his visions,
and they inspired much of his later work, including VALIS (1981), a largely autobiographical
novel featuring an unreliable narrator who calls
himself sometimes Horselover Fat and sometimes
Philip K. Dick.
Beyond bringing literary respectability to science fiction, Dicks writing has also had tremendous influence on film. To date, nine films have
been adapted from Dicks short stories and novels, the most renowned being Ridley Scotts
Blade Runner (1982), based on Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty
hunter tracking androids who blur the line of
humanity; Paul Verhoevens Total Recall (1990),

loosely based on We Can Remember It for You
Wholesale (1966), about a man who purchases
artificial vacation memories and ultimately destabilizes his own sense of reality; Steven
Spielbergs Minority Report (2002), based on a
1956 short story about a detective who uses
clairvoyants to prevent future crimes, only to find
himself falsely under suspicion for murder; and
Richard Linklaters animated A Scanner Darkly
(2006), based on Dicks 1977 novel (1977b) about
an undercover narcotics officer who becomes
addicted to a schizophrenia-inducing drug that
splits his personality until he winds up informing
on himself.
In addition to other critical awards and accolades, Dick won the Hugo Award in 1963 for The
Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell
Memorial Award in 1975 for Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said. In 1982, Philip K. Dick died in
Santa Ana, California of heart failure following
a stroke.
SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Noir Fiction
(AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Speculative
Fiction (AF)

Dick, P. K. (1962). The Man in the High Castle.
New York: Putnams.
Dick, P. K. (1964). Martian Time-Slip. New York:
Ballantine.
Dick, P. K. (1965a). Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got
Along After the Bomb. New York: Ace.
Dick, P. K. (1965b). The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch. New York: Doubleday.
Dick, P. K. (1966). Now Wait for Last Year. New York:
Doubleday.
Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dick, P. K. (1969). Ubik. New York: Doubleday.
Dick, P. K. (1974). Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
Dick, P. K. (1975). Confessions of a Crap Artist.
New York: Entwhistle.
Dick, P. K. (1977a). The Best of Philip K. Dick.
New York: Del Rey.
Dick, P. K. (1977b). A Scanner Darkly. New York:
Doubleday.
Dick, P. K. (1981). VALIS. New York: Bantam.
DIDION, JOAN
Palmer, C. (2003). Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and

Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Robb, B. J. (2006). Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick
on Film. New York: Titan.
Robinson, K. S. (1989). The Novels of Philip K. Dick.
Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
Warrick, P. S. (1987). Mind in Motion: The Fiction
of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Didion, Joan
DAVID W. MADDEN
Joan Didion established her initial literary reputation as an avatar of the new journalism, and the
techniques she developed in her essays, particularly her elliptical, minimalist style, she applied to
her fiction. Didion is known for her jaundiced
eye, penetrating insights, and general dissatisfaction with the direction of modern American life
and politics. She has been labeled a provincialist,
existentialist, and arch-conservative, but she is
first and foremost her own person, a writer with
a distinctive style and vision.
Didion was born on December 5, 1934 in
Sacramento, California to Frank and Eduene
Didion. After graduating from the University of
California, Berkeley in 1956, she moved to New
York City and spent the next eight years working
at Vogue magazine. During that time she wrote
her first novel, Run River (1963), a chronicle of
a disintegrating farm family in the Sacramento
valley. The novel is reminiscent of Faulkner in its
depiction of an insular world where longstanding
traditions give way to a new, more commercial
world order. A Southerner, Ryder Channing, is
Didions ironic version of a carpetbagger who
arrives to establish real estate dealerships. He
seduces, and then abandons, Martha McClellan
and later turns his attention to her sister-in-law,
Lily. Suicide, financial ruin, and murder follow
and destroy the McClellans, who stand as symbols
of a rapidly vanishing California.
Her second novel, Play It As It Lays (1970), is set
in southern California and centers on Maria
Wyeth, a minor film actress who suffers an abortion and mental collapse. When she is not aimlessly traveling the freeways, she wanders among
lovers and memories that reveal a life of radical
519
instability. In the preface to her first collection

of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968),
Didion reveals her unifying theme as that of
atomization, her coinage for a society rapidly
fragmenting. Conditions of social chaos and disintegration run through her entire canon, in both
fiction and non-fiction.
A Book of Common Prayer (1977) further develops the theme of atomization by concentrating
on Charlotte Douglas, middle-aged mother of a
would-be terrorist who has retired to a fictitious
Central American country, where she sadly
awaits the daughter who will never arrive. Douglas is another of what one critic has described as
Didions characteristic neurasthenic heroines
who suffer disasters and typically participate in
their own dissolution. The novel employs one of
Didions most ambitious experiments: it is told
by a subjective narrator, Grace, another American
expatriate, who does not know Charlotte intimately yet somehow divines her deepest thoughts
and emotions.
Democracy (1984) features another female
protagonist, Inez Christian Victor, wife of a
senator ambitious to be president and lover to
a man involved in counterintelligence and political intrigue. As her children drift off into the
social unrest of the 1960s and her father is
arrested for murder, the protagonists world
disintegrates, and the novel parallels Americas
misguided adventures in Vietnam. Unlike other
Didion heroines, Victor eventually leaves her
dysfunctional family with her lover, only to be
abandoned when he dies, and she elects to reside
in Kuala Lumpur, where she devotes herself to
Vietnamese refugees.
Twelve years later, after more freelance journalism and three works of non-fiction, Didion
published her fifth novel, The Last Thing He
Wanted (1996), which deals once more with
Central America (Didion had published Salvador
in 1983, an excoriating view of a corrupt and
vicious political regime) and a reporter, Elena
McMahon, who abruptly quits her assignment
covering the 1984 presidential campaign to visit
her ailing father in Florida. The father is another
of Didions shadowy international figures who
runs guns to Nicaragua and inveigles his daughter
to accompany a shipment to Costa Rica and
collect his fee. Soon she is enmeshed in a world
of conspiracies, assassinations, and quasi-military
520
DIXON, STEPHEN
operations. McMahon is a now familiar Didion

protagonist; however, the novel has a forced
quality and is the least successful of her fictions.
After moving to New York in the late 1980s,
Didion returned to native California in Where I
Was From (2003), a book she had been working
on for decades that traces her family ties to the
Golden State (some ancestors were among the
original Donner Party). Didion mourns, once
again, the decay of the place that legions regard
as Edenic but that to her is now a locale of greed
and exploitation. Two years later, as her daughter
lay gravely ill, her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, suddenly died of a heart attack.
Didion coped with her grief by writing The Year
of Magical Thinking, a powerful memoir of their
extraordinarily close life (the two acted as each
others advisor and were collaborators on many
film scripts). The work won a National Book
Award in 2005.
Didion has generated mixed reviews from
critics and scholars, but has also enjoyed considerable notoriety and honors. In addition to
awards, she has been recognized with the Gold
Medal, Belles Lettres and Criticism, by the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in honor
of her distinguished writing career (2005), and a
National Book Award medal for her Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters in 2007.
SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Didion, J. (1963). Run River. New York:
Obolensky.
Didion, J. (1968). Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
New York: Farrar, Straus.
Didion, J. (1970). Play It As It Lays. New York:
Farrar, Straus.
Didion, J. (1977). A Book of Common Prayer. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Didion, J. (1979). The White Album. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Didion, J. (1983). Salvador. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Didion, J. (1984). Democracy. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Didion, J. (1992). After Henry. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Didion, J. (1996). The Last Thing He Wanted. New York:

Knopf.
Didion, J. (2001). Political Fictions. New York: Knopf.
Didion, J. (2003). Where I Was From. New York: Knopf.
Didion, J. (2005). The Year of Magical Thinking.
New York: Knopf.
Friedman, E. G. (ed.) (1984). Joan Didion: Essays
and Conversations. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review
Press.
Henderson, K. (1981). Joan Didion. New York: Ungar.
Loris, M. (1989). Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the
Art of Joan Didion. New York: Peter Lang.
Reaves, G. (2001). Mapping the Private Geography:
Autobiography, Identity, and America. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Stout, J. P. (1990). Strategies of Reticence: Silence and
Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather,
Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Winchell, M. (1980). Joan Didion. Boston: Twayne.
Dixon, Stephen
PATRICK ODONNELL
Even though he did not publish his first volume of

stories until he was 40, Stephen Dixon (b. 1936) is
the prolific author of 14 novels and 13 collections
of short stories; has been twice nominated for a
National Book Award; and is the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards,
and an American Academy and Institute of
Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction. Despite that,
he is not as well-known as comparable contemporary writers such as Grace Paley and Donald
Barthelme, perhaps because much of his work
requires readers invested in the complexities of
Dixons intricate monologues, often going on for
hundreds of pages without breaks, as well as in the
ironies and mordant humor of his work.
Dixon was born in New York City and graduated from the City College of New York in 1958;
after several years spent as a radio reporter, he
entered the creative writing program at Stanford
University. Before becoming a teacher of creative
writing, he served in a number of occupations
(bartender, technical writer, artists model, department store salesman, bus driver, and cab
driver) that inform his work, especially its evocative patois and habits of speech. Dixon married
the noted translator, Anne Frydman, and began
DIXON, STEPHEN
teaching in the Writing Seminars at Johns

Hopkins University in 1981; he retired from Johns
Hopkins in 2007, and continues an active career
of writing stories and novels.
Dixons early works include the novels Work
(1977) and Too Late, and stories collected in No
Relief (1976), Quite Contrary: The Mary and Newt
Story (1979), and 14 Stories (1980). The title story
of the last volume cited in this list (14 Stories) is
characteristic: it is a series of interconnected
vignettes depicting the lives of New York inhabitants whose stories come into contact when the
bullet of a man who has just shot himself flies
through the window of his apartment onto the
roof of a brownstone blocks away. The story
evinces Dixons interest in contingent narratives
that form around objects or accidents; indeed,
accidents and their consequences, and the countervailing quest for purpose and closure in life,
constitute the ironic dialectic of many of Dixons
novels and stories.
The succession of Dixons next four novels
established him as a significant contemporary
writer whose work is equally inventive and demanding: Fall and Rise (1985), Garbage (1988a),
Frog (1991), and Interstate (1995). Of these, the
latter two are particularly notable: Frog, a finalist
for the National Book Award, is a labyrinthine
series of stories, fantasies, and scenes from the
life of Howard Tetch, college professor, and the
related stories of his family, ancestors, and associates. Containing, in one instance, a single paragraph that runs over 100 pages, Frog is Joycean
in its verbosity and its linguistic play, and unique
in its portrait of a complex character who is
variously revolting and seductive. Interstate is a
Rashomon-like narrative that recounts from eight
different perspectives a tragic event in which a
child riding in a car is shot and killed by a random
gunman; here, the human need to understand and
control the irrational and accidental is compellingly delineated. During this period, and despite
the considerable energies required by the writing
of big novels, Dixon published the story collections Movies (1983), Time to Go (1984), The Play
and Other Stories (1988b), Love and Will (1989),
All Gone (1990), Friends (1990), and Long Made
Short (1994).
After the mid-1990s, Dixon continued to publish a succession of impressive novels. Gould:
A Novel in Two Novels (1997) is the extended,
521
run-on monologue of Gould Bookbinder, a writer

trapped by and attempting to overcome his own
sexual desires; 30: Pieces of a Novel (1999b) continues Goulds narrative, and completes the portrait of a character who stands, like Philip Roths
Zuckerman, as Dixons alter ego. I. (2002) and
End of I. (2006) also offer a writer/alter ego as the
protagonist of interconnected stories about an
aging writer who reflects on the complex, painful,
yet fulfilling relationships of his life. Phone Rings
(2005) begins when a brother receives a phone call
about the death by freak accident of his brother; in
Meyer (2007), Dixons protagonist suffers from
the unlikely malady (for Dixon) of writers block.
Of the short story collections published during
this time in which Dixon was clearly focusing
on the novel, Sleep (1999a) is the most notable: a
collection of Dixons stories over the last quartercentury, it features protagonists who reflect at
length on the small incidents, seemingly meaningless incidents of life a forgotten kiss goodbye, a
slipping hairpiece, a mote in the eye during a daily
drive to work. Many readers will not have the
patience for the elaborate stories of inner life spun
out at length (even typographically) in Dixons
work, but for those who do, they are rewarded with
a deepened comprehension of the relation between the noise and busyness of the contemporary
world and the multifarious mental landscapes
we have developed to cope with it.
SEE ALSO: Barthelme, Donald (AF); Paley,
Grace (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Roth,
Philip (AF)
Barry, J. (2007). The End of U: Novelist Stephen Dixon
Talks About Writing, Reading, and Retiring from
Johns Hopkins. Baltimore City Paper. At
www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id13229,
accessed Dec. 21, 2009.
Dixon, S. (1976). Work. Ann Arbor: Street Fiction.
Dixon, S. (1977). No Relief. Ann Arbor: Street Fiction.
Dixon, S. (1978). Too Late. New York: Harper and
Row.
Dixon, S. (1979). Quite Contrary: The Mary and
Newt Story. New York: Harper and Row.
Dixon, S. (1980). 14 Stories. Baltimore: Johns
Dixon, S. (1983). Movies: Seventeen Stories.
522
DOCTOROW, E. L.
Dixon, S. (1984). Time to Go. Baltimore: Johns

Dixon, S. (1985). Fall and Rise. San Francisco:
North Point.
Dixon, S. (1988a). Garbage. New York: Cane Hill.
Dixon, S. (1988b). The Play and Other Stories.
Minneapolis: Coffee House.
Dixon, S. (1989). Love and Will: Twenty Stories.
New York: Paris Review Editions.
Dixon, S. (1990). All Gone: 18 Short Stories. Baltimore:
Dixon, S. (1991). Frog. Latham, NY: British American.
Dixon, S. (1994). Long Made Short. Baltimore:
Dixon, S. (1995). Interstate. New York: Henry Holt.
Dixon, S. (1997). Gould. New York: Henry Holt.
Dixon, S. (1998). The Stories of Stephen Dixon.
Dixon, S. (1999a). Sleep. Minneapolis: Coffee House.
Dixon, S. (1999b). 30: Pieces of a Novel. New York:
Henry Holt.
Dixon, S. (2002). I. New York: McSweeneys.
Dixon, S. (2005). Phone Rings. Hoboken, NJ:
Melville House.
Dixon, S. (2006). End of I. New York: McSweeneys.
Dixon, S. (2007). Meyer. Hoboken, NJ:
Melville House.
Klinkowitz, J. (1984). The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction
as Language/Language as Fiction. Carbondale:
Stephens, M. (1986). The Dramaturgy of Style: Voice
in Short Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Doctorow, E. L.
MICHAEL WUTZ
E. L. Doctorow has the honor of being among a

small cadre of American novelists admired by a
wide international readership and scholars. Thoroughly anchored in a post-World War II American context, and often investigating the popular
myths and self-constructions of America, Doctorows literary sensibilities address current global
political and cultural concerns: the intersection of
official and unofficial history, the relays between
print culture and post-print media, literature and
the discourses of science and technology, as well as
the notion of narrative as a system of knowledge
(Morris 1999, 172). While Doctorow understands
the novelist as an archaeologist of unacknowl-
edged knowledge, the novelist him- or herself

transmutes such leftovers into forms of telling
knowledge that speak volumes about a cultures
historical moment.
Born and raised in New York City within a
secular humanist and Jewish cultural milieu,
Doctorow often uses the city as an urban microcosm for the larger national and international
themes that are at the center of his fiction. For
that reason, his narratives tend to have suggestive
allegorical overtones with a wide swath of signification akin to Nathaniel Hawthornes romances,
and offer a running commentary on current
developments. Often associated with a liberal
tradition that has strong sympathies for the Left,
Doctorow is careful not to infuse his fiction with
overt politics and ideology. On the contrary, while
his work often figures as a counter-narrative to
the narratives of state power, he has repeatedly
asserted that the novel is the province of art that
has no place for propaganda.
Doctorow began his examination of the idea(l)
of America, its myths and history, with Welcome
to Hard Times (1960), a parody of the classic
Western, and has continued this narrative investigation by focusing on critical cultural moments:
The Book of Daniel (1971) deals with the Rosenberg trial, mapping the prevailing national sensibilities in the wake of McCarthyism; Ragtime
(1975), Doctorows first international bestseller,
looks at turn-of-the-twentieth-century politics,
racism, and immigration in the manner of a
pastiche; The Waterworks (1994) shows the dark
underbelly of postbellum prosperity and the perpetual balancing act of an ethical science in the
genre of the mystery novel; and Loon Lake (1980)
and Billy Bathgate (1989) interrogate the myth of
the self-made man in the (under)world of crime.
Often, it is through the lens of a distant historical
event that Doctorow reflects on the present, by
laying bare the gap between Americas idealistic
promise and its political and cultural reality.
At the same time, philosophical and theological
speculations are never far away, as in City of
God (2000), in which fictional and historical
voices (among them, Einstein and Wittgenstein)
ruminate about the imponderables of the universe. More recently, Doctorow has returned
to the subject of history in The March (2005),
which reconstructs Union General William
DOCTOROW, E. L.
T. Shermans monumental march from Atlanta to

Savannah toward the end of the Civil War which
left both hope and destruction, a new political
order yet profound social disorientation, in its
wake.
Doctorows work has, not surprisingly, been
identified with the notion of historiographic
metafiction (Hutcheon 88), given his profound
interest in the narrative representation and
reconstruction of history. The chronological dislocations, multiple ruptures, and polyphonic
narratives similarly suggest a postmodern understanding of novel writing, as does Doctorows
epistemological inquiry into the nature of textuality and memory. His rise to prominence in the
1970s would also seem to connect him with a
more postmodern sensibility, as would his deep
interest in literary form. Doctorow himself, however, has routinely dismissed such associations,
preferring to disarmingly call himself a postpost-modernist (Morris 1999, 193) and referring
to a literary tradition that is distinctly (pre)modernist. Aside from numerous allusions to earlier
novelists, Doctorow has written introductions
and forewords to reissued editions of the work
of Jack London, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Sinclair
Lewis. His literary affinities are symbolically embedded in his two first names Edgar and Lawrence which derive from Edgar Allan Poe and
D. H. Lawrence, and he regards fiction as an
ancient way of knowing, the first science (Morris
1999, 181). Fundamentally oral without presuming to be oracular, narrative fiction for Doctorow
is capacious and encyclopedic with the intent of
offering pertinent cultural critique in the service
of human betterment.
As the recipient of many distinguished prizes,
among them the National Book Award, two
National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/
Faulkner Award for Fiction, the William Dean
Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, and the National Humanities Medal,
Doctorow has written himself into the canon of
American literature. He embodies the virtues of a
classical storyteller who is singularly capable of
rendering his cultural diagnoses in ambitious and
lyrical and powerful and ever-changing narratives
that have rightly made him an international
bestseller.
523
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Dos Passos,

John (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF);
Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF)
Bloom, H. (2001). E. L. Doctorow. London:
Chelsea House.
Doctorow, E. L. (1960). Welcome to Hard Times.
Doctorow, E. L. (1971). The Book of Daniel. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (1975). Ragtime. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (1980). Loon Lake. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (1984). Lives of the Poets. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (1985). Worlds Fair. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (1989). Billy Bathgate. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (1994). The Waterworks. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (2000). City of God. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (2002). Lamentation 9/11
(pref. K. Annan; photos by D. Finn). New York:
Ruder Finn.
Doctorow, E. L. (2003). Reporting the Universe.
Doctorow, E. L. (2004). Sweet Land Stories. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (2005). The March. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (2006). Creationists: Selected Essays,
19932006. New York: Random House.
Harpham, G. G. (1985). E. L. Doctorow and the
Technology of Narrative. PMLA, 100, 8195.
Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism.
London: Routledge.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Morris, C. D. (1991). Models of Misrepresentation:
On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi.
Morris, C. D. (ed.) (1999). Conversations with E. L.
Doctorow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Wutz, M. (2003). Literary Narrative and Information
Culture: Garbage, Waste, and Residue in the Work
of E. L. Doctorow. Contemporary Literature, 44(3),
50135.
524
DOS PASSOS, JOHN
Dos Passos, John

JUSTUS NIELAND
John Dos Passos (18961970) published 13 novels

over the course of his life, and more than a dozen
non-fictional works, including histories, biographies, books of social and political criticism, and
travel writing. Dos Passos is best known today as
the author of the novel trilogy U.S.A. (19306), a
dazzling combination of modernist technique,
Popular Front politics, Whitmanian epic vision,
and sharp social satire that put him on the cover of
Time magazine in 1936. But Dos Passos is equally
notorious for the transformation of his political
sentiments and its impact on his art. Arguably the
most visible US left-wing novelist in the 1930s
his radical vision shaped by international vanguards across the arts by the end of his life,
Dos Passos was a gentleman farmer and Goldwater Republican. He died nostalgic for Americas
vanished colonial past, skeptical of collectivismas-bureaucracy, receptive to his fathers theories
of Anglo-Saxon supremacy (set forth in Dos
Passos, Sr.s 1903 political treatise The AngloSaxon Century and the Unification of the English
Speaking People), and despairing of the future of
democracy in Americas mediated-image culture.
Yet the themes and preoccupations of his major
work from the 1920s and 1930s the destruction
of idealistic individuals by wartime bureaucracies,
the power of modern mass culture to shape and
deform historical truth and reality, the imperial
ambitions of finance capital, and the hollowness
of citizenship in a nation pervaded by seekers of
the big money are as germane to Dos Passoss
early anarchic democratic vision as they are to his
fiery late libertarianism. While his version of the
US national epic today seems narrow and oldfashioned in light of more recent, hemispheric
approaches like those of Leslie Marmon Silkos
Almanac of the Dead or Eduardo Galleanos
La Memoria Del Fuego trilogy, his self-aware
technical mastery of the historical novel decisively influenced the historiography of the postmodern novel, and played a central part in
recent critical attempts to embed literary modernism in the heady visual cultures of the early
twentieth century.
Born John Rodrigo Madison, the well-heeled
child of Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison and John
Randolph Dos Passos the son of a Portuguese

immigrant and prominent New York City corporate lawyer the young Dos Passos traveled
extensively in Europe with his ailing mother. He
attended Choate boarding school before enrolling
at Harvard University in 1912, where he studied
European languages and literature, wrote poetry
and fiction, and was exposed to aesthetic modernism. Dos Passoss first two fictions, One Mans
Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921),
are loosely based on the authors postcollegiate
duty in the NortonHarjes volunteer ambulance
service during World War I. One Mans Initiation
offers an episodic account of the war focalized
through the sensitive perceptions of Martin
Howe. A romantic young man, Howe finds his
idealism destroyed by the cruel discrepancy between
the jingoistic lies of wartime propaganda and the
brutal realities of trench warfare. Stylistically, the
novel is indebted to the unshrinking naturalism of
Stephen Cranes The Red Badge of Courage, and Dos
Passos was forced to cut a number of the novels
offensive passages before it could be published in
England. But in the novels celebrated, poetic renderings of wars chaos as a disorienting sensory
event, Dos Passos draws on the impressionist intensity of Walter Pater and James Joyce, and anticipates
the more overly paratactical, modernist style of
Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A.
More immediately, the novella prepared Dos
Passos for Three Soldiers, a book begun during his
travels in Spain, completed in Paris, and reportedly rejected by 14 publishers before eventually
finding its way into print. An influential protest
against human lives wasted in inhuman wartime
bureaucracies, Three Soldiers tracks the Great
Wars steady destruction of three privates:
Andrews, a Harvard-educated composer; Fuselli,
a San Francisco optical worker; and Chrisfield, an
Indiana farm boy. From diverse cultural and
economic backgrounds and of discrepant temperaments, these three soldiers are both individuals and types. As representatives of broader
cross sections of American life, the men signal
Dos Passoss incipient tendency toward epic
forms of novelistic character, where individuals
exemplify the stories of larger groups or sociohistorical currents, and are often less psychologically developed or rounded as a result. In this
novel as in fellow ambulance corps member
DOS PASSOS, JOHN
and Harvard pal e. e. cummingss The Enormous

Room (1922) what is typical of military life,
besides his hollow nationalism, is anti-individualism and its deadening brand of hierarchical
social organization. War, as Dos Passoss chapter
titles indicate, is not politics by other means, but
the work of dehumanizing Machines that place
soldiers Under the Wheels. Within these gears,
the three soldiers are doomed: Fuselli contracts
venereal disease and is court-martialed for it;
Chrisfield kills a hated commanding officer, is
consumed by paranoia over the crime, and eventually deserts; and Andrews, abused by the military police and sent to a labor battalion, escapes to
join his French girlfriend only to be later arrested
and sentenced to prison. Today regarded as Dos
Passoss first major novel, in the United States
climate of postwar optimism many contemporary
reviewers decried the yellowness of Three Soldiers antimilitarism and antinationalism. But the
books despairing tone would influence later war
novels like Norman Mailers The Naked and the
Dead and James Joness From Here to Eternity.
Dos Passos followed Three Soldiers with Streets
of Night (1923), a now-overlooked novel about
sexual desire explored through the love triangle
between three cultured bourgeoisie: Fanshaw
McDougan, a sexually conflicted Harvard art
teacher who fantasizes about marrying Nancibel
(Nan, Dos Passoss first major female character)
but is also attracted to David Wendell (Wenny),
an anthropology graduate student. Tormented
by the oppressive religious values of his father,
Wenny kills himself. Fanshaws homoerotic desire
for Wenny is, after the suicide, displaced onto his
attraction to the erotic spectacle of romanticized
laborers and vagabonds, who stand in for the
sexual vitality lacking in the alienated bourgeois
protagonists, enervated by genteel norms. While
not an explicitly political novel, Streets of Night
marks Dos Passoss first celebration of the laborer
and of the erotic freedom of vagabondage, and
a provocative challenge to conventional sexual
identities.
Manhattan Transfer (2000 [1925]), published
by Harper and Brothers to mixed reviews, is
arguably his single greatest novel and one of the
most exhilarating modernist treatments of urban
modernity ever written. Sinclair Lewis extolled it
in an early review, [I]t may be the foundation of
a whole new school of novel-writing (quoted in
525
2000 [1925], 68). Steeped in the visual idioms of

the transatlantic avant garde (cubism, impressionism, and expressionism) that Dos Passos had
been grappling with in his painting and writing at
least since his response to the New York Armory
Show in 1914, Manhattan Transfer is an experimental paean to the sensual frenzy of New York
City. It takes the dynamic, chaotic pulse of a
metropolis throbbing with desire; explores the
lure of the citys erotic nexus of sex, commodification, and personal advancement; limns the
semiotic excess and distraction of a polis bound
by advertising; and measures the psychological
toll of a public world dominated by spectacle
and technologies of mass publicity like the
newspaper.
Reminiscent of both Virginia Woolfs Mrs.
Dalloway (1922) and James Joyces Ulysses (1922),
Manhattan Transfer expands those novels focus
from a single day in the life of a city to a historical
sweep of roughly 25 years, beginning around
1900 and continuing through the heyday of the
jazz age. Like the city, the book is a swirling
vortex of energy populated by a multitude of
desperate strivers: journalists, tramps, actors,
dancers, Bowery bums, politicians, prostitutes,
shady lawyers, bootleggers, flapper bandits, and
desperate garment workers on the verge of class
consciousness. These characters experience dizzying reversals of fortune, find their fates linked
to larger economic cycles of boom and bust, and
are like the reader carried breathlessly
through the dynamic spaces of a city whose only
laws are chance, contingency, and the novels one
certainty: Goddam its hell to be broke (2000b
[1925] 138). The novels breathless, fragmented
narrative and impressionistic prose style attentive to the dense physical texture of light, sound,
and smell in the city have been characterized as
not only kaleidoscopic but also specifically
cinematic. This is evident in Manhattan Transfers titular tendency to cross-cut between panoramic views of the city and novelistic close-ups
of its individual characters, and in the way Dos
Passoss sensitive prose approximates an inhuman recording mechanism. As an admiring
D. H. Lawrence described it, If you set a blank
record revolving to receive all the sounds, and a
film-camera going to photograph all the motions
of a scattered group of individuals, at the point
where they meet and touch in New York, you
526
DOS PASSOS, JOHN
would more or less get Mr. Dos Passoss method

(quoted in 2000 [1925], 75).
Interested in the teeming, discontinuous life
of a city rather than the gradual development of
individual characters, Manhattan Transfer is
punctuated by ellipses and abrupt cuts between
the ups and downs of its individual characters,
who often disappear only to reemerge, transformed, years later. The French immigrant
Congo, for example, begins the book destitute,
fresh off the boat, and announces, A workingman has no country. Im going to be an American
citizen. But just as democracy is synonymous
with commercial freedom to the books captains of industry, so is US citizenship, for Dos
Passoss eager immigrant, tantamount to fat
pockets: Congo reappears first as a lovable bootlegger, and later is remade as Armand Duval,
a Park Avenue swell (2000 [1925], 145). Here,
and through the intertwined stories of the novels
two protagonists Ellen Thatcher, an aspiring
actress, and Jimmy Herf, an idealistic journalist
Dos Passoss satirical mode establishes a number
of themes that will come to dominate the cynical
socio-political vision of the U.S.A. trilogy. Ellen,
born in the novels opening pages, tells her doting
accountant father early on that shed love him
more if he were rich. Her serial sexual relationships with several of the novels male characters,
loveless forms of social advancement to which
masculine idealism falls victim, confirm the bankruptcy of her desire. Dos Passos links her to many
of the ills of urban modernity insincerity, theatricality, emotional frigidity, and the commodification of human personality in a fashion
typical of male novelists gendering of modernity.
If Ellen is both femme fatale and a familiar sign of
modern mass culture as woman, she also embodies a moribund distance from history and politics. Jimmy Herf, by contrast, begins the novel as
a sheltered member of the upper middle class,
but gradually descends the social scale into the
throng of city life in a search of meaning and
authenticity. Jimmys path in the novel enmeshes
him in the reified world of the newspaper, chasing
after sensationalistic stories; eventually, what remains of his personality is alienated by the mechanisms of mass publicity, and he loses his faith
in words (2000 [1925], 310). The loss is doubled
by the unhappy end of his marriage to Ellen, who
admits she is only capable of loving dead things,
and divorces him to marry a wealthy and corrupt

lawyer. In the novels ambivalent final pages
Jimmy, almost 30 and anxious to live, takes
a ferry out of the city and hitches a ride on a
furniture truck to an uncertain future.
Of Jimmys position within Manhattan Transfers despairing picture of a public world, Mike
Gold, founder of the left-wing New Masses, explained that in order to help Jimmy out of his
crisis of middle-class bewilderment, Dos Passos
must read history, psychology and economics
and plunge himself into the labor movement
(quoted in 2000 [1925] 74). Following Manhattan
Transfer, Dos Passos would undergo precisely
the radicalization called for by Gold. Early in
1926, he joined the editorial board of Golds New
Masses and, with leftist activist and dramatist
John Howard Lawson, agreed to serve as director
of the radical New Playwrights Theatre in
New York. Also in 1926, Dos Passos was involved
in a textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey and
traveled to Boston to interview the Italian
anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
in prison. Working to secure a new trial, Dos
Passos reported on the case in New Masses, and
wrote a defense pamphlet Facing the Chair:
Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn
Workmen published shortly before their execution in August 1927. Over the next five years,
which spanned the publication of the first two
novels of U.S.A., Dos Passos became, in Michael
Dennings terms, Americas most visible radical
novelist, campaigning for political prisoners, supporting striking miners, and writing accounts of
his travels to Mexico and the Soviet Union (164).
Published as a three-volume set in 1938, U.S.A.
consists of three novels: The 42nd Parallel (1930),
Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money
(2000 [1936]). The trilogy stands as the fictional
culmination of Dos Passoss turn toward the Left,
a central text of the Popular Front, and one of
the most ambitious technical experiments in a
kind of modernist historiography, blending history, fiction, and autobiography, and joining
modernist formal explorations of novelistic subjectivity to the avant garde montage aesthetics
of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevelod Pudovkin. As
historical novels, the books move from 1893 to
1929, and the formal architecture of the trilogy
consists of four interspersed fictional modes 68
Newsreels, collages of newspaper headings,
DOS PASSOS, JOHN
ads, and popular song lyrics; 51 Camera Eye

sections, lyrical, impressionistic prose poems;
27 biographical portraits of major historical figures like Thorstein Veblen, Henry Ford, Big Bill
Haywood, and Isadora Duncan; and fictional
narratives that focus on 12 major characters a
number of whom appear in several of the novels
drawn largely from the middle classes (public
relations maestros, social workers, labor leaders,
migrant workers, interior designers, and aspiring
actresses), and hundreds of minor characters.
While the trilogy, especially its first two books,
testifies to the strength of Dos Passoss democratic
hopes by satirically foregrounding the very failures of labor and the utopian aspirations of
many of his characters, the trilogy ends, with The
Big Money (2000a), in considerable political cynicism. Alright then, a late Camera Eye section
concludes, we are two nations. By 1934, Dos
Passos had become increasingly critical of Marxist
party politics and Stalinist communism, and The
Big Money, while widely praised, was also critiqued for its pessimism about left-wing causes.
One cannot appraise the politics of U.S.A.
without grappling with its flashy literary technique. The trilogys various discursive modes
make clear that the novels are in many ways about
the relationship between politics, discourse, and
historicity. The voice of the people emerges only
negatively, in its silencing, distortion, or manipulation by the technicians and technologies of
modern mass media whose public operations are
mimicked in the ahistorical hash of the Newsreels;
or whose power is extolled or challenged in the
Biographies; or whose refusal of history and
memory is combated in the lyrical privacy of the
Camera Eyes, recording, paradoxically, dimensions of life unseen by the camera. As a result,
modern experience itself in U.S.A. splits between
the atomized subjectivity of the Camera Eyes
and the ahistorical collective consciousness of
the Newsreels (North 2005). This dark picture of
modernity, in which visuality is inherently reifying, alienating, and ahistorical, becomes especially clear in The Big Moneys story of Hollywood
actress Margo Dowling, another figure of mass
culture as feminized inauthenticity. Amidst the
faux populist depredations of Margos spectacular public world, The Big Money in a famous
late Camera Eye section decries the befouling of
Americas clean words by strangers who have
527
turned our language inside out, and extols how

the old American speech of immigrants and
haters of oppression is new tonight in the voices
of a beaten nation (2000 [1936], 371, 372).
Dos Passoss ambivalence about the linguistic
renewal of Americas national promise in the
blood of oppressed immigrants today rings somewhat hollow, given U.S.A.s white, middle-class
focus and its unwillingness to inhabit fully a
proletarian environment, or to imagine, in its
character narratives, stories of race or immigration as central to its account of nationhood.
Despite its technical genius and passionate critique of the dispossession of the masses, in its
skepticism about mass culture and in the exclusions to its story of the nation, U.S.A. foreshadows
the conservative strains in Dos Passoss thinking
that would only deepen in his late period, beginning with his District of Columbia trilogy (published as a three-volume set in 1952). Here,
Dos Passoss fictional vision was supplemented
by his prolific non-fictional work historical and
biographical studies of Americas colonial past
and works of political and social philosophy
marked by racialist nationalism and, during the
Cold War, an increasingly strident libertarianism.
The District of Columbia trilogy is loosely united
through the Washington, DC, Spotswood family.
Adventures of a Young Man (1939), the novel that
would mark Dos Passoss break with the Left and
his turn toward an increasingly vehement anticommunism, is a picaresque narrative protagonized by the hopeful Glenn Spotswood, whose
idealism leads him to join the Communist Party.
Glenn eventually becomes critical of the exploitive and abusive party politics he witnesses, is jailed
as a Trotskyite, and is eventually released only to
be led to his death on a party mission. Number
One (1942) critiques the power mongering of a
loosely fictionalized Huey Long, whose abuses of
the democratic process are seen through Glenns
older brother, Tyler Spotswood. The Grand
Design (1949), arguably the strongest book in the
trilogy, is a devastating anatomy of Washingtonian bureaucracy at the height of the New Deal;
Dos Passoss new skepticism about Roosevelts
liberalism is most acute in the novels parallel
between Roosevelts deft manipulation of the
American citizenry through his fireside
chats and the more obviously dubious work of
powerful radio commentator and member of the
528
DREISER, THEODORE
Washington elite, Herbert Spotswood, father of

Glenn and Tyler.
In the 1950s, Dos Passos returned to the autobiographical mode of the early war novels, only
now Dos Passoss character Jay Pignatelli became,
in Chosen Country (1951) and The Great Days
(1958), an obvious surrogate for the authors
conservative political and social views. And the
collage technique that energized the epistemological uncertainty of Dos Passoss great modernist
work in the 1920s and 1930s became a tool of
moral and ethical dogmatism. In Midcentury
(1961), perhaps the finest novel from Dos Passoss
late period and the last book published in his
lifetime, Dos Passos returns to the formal structure of U.S.A. (the Newsreels have been renamed Documentaries, and the Camera Eye
label has been dropped for more pontificating
prose poems). However, the hermeneutics of
suspicion about language, which redounded to
Dos Passoss own epic vision in U.S.A. and made
its critique of national paralysis all the more
self-reflexive, has all but vanished. Midcenturys
dexterous form serves the books hectoring critique of one more bureaucratic bogeyman
here labor unions and their perversion of
brotherhood. Near the end of his career, Dos
Passoss modernism had lost its faith in the future,
his satire finally hardening into despair.
Gold, Mike (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF);
Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Mailer,
Norman (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
The Novel and War (AF)
Dos Passos, J. (1923). Streets of Night. New York: Doran.

Dos Passos, J. (1930). The 42nd Parallel. New York:
Harper.
Dos Passos, J. (1932). 1919. New York: Harcourt.
Dos Passos, J. (1939). Adventures of a Young Man.
Dos Passos, J. (1943). Number One. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Dos Passos, J. (1949). The Grand Design. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Dos Passos, J. (1954). Most Likely to Succeed. New York:
Prentice Hall.
Dos Passos, J. (1958). The Great Days. New York:
Sagamore.
Dos Passos, J. (1961). Midcentury. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Dos Passos, J. (1975). Centurys Ebb: The Thirteenth
Chronicle. Boston: Gambit.
Dos Passos, J. (2000a). The Big Money [1936]. New
York: Houghton Mifflin.
Dos Passos, J. (2000b). Manhattan Transfer [1925].
New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Magny, C. E. (1972). The Age of the American Novel: The
Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Wars [1947]
(trans. E. Hochman). New York: Ungar.
Maine, B. (1988). Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage.
London: Routledge.
North, M. (2005). Camera Works: Photography and
the Twentieth-Century Word. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Pizer, D. (1988). John Dos Passoss USA: A Critical
Study. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Sartre, J.-P. (1974). John Dos Passos and 1919 [1936].
In Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays
(ed. A. Hook). Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, pp. 619.
Dreiser, Theodore
ROARK MULLIGAN
Carr, V. S. (1984). Dos Passos: A Life. Garden City, NY:

Doubleday.
Casey, J. C. (1998). Dos Passos and the Ideology of
the Feminine. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Denning, M. (1996). The Decline and Fall of the Lincoln
Republic: Dos Passoss U.S.A. In The Cultural Front:
The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth
Century. London: Verso, pp. 16399.
Dos Passos, J. (1920). One Mans Initiation: 1917.
Dos Passos, J. (1921). Three Soldiers. New York:
Doran.
Born into an immigrant family that suffered financial hardships, Theodore Dreiser (18711945)
brought a new perspective to American letters,
realistically depicting a changing urban landscape.
As the author of eight novels, including Sister
Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925),
Dreiser was a pioneer of literary naturalism,
graphically capturing the monetary and cultural
forces that transformed American cities.
The twelfth of 13 children (three died in infancy), Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana.
His father, John Paul Dreiser, immigrated to the
DREISER, THEODORE
United States from Mayen, Germany, where he

had trained as a weaver. His mother, Sarah Maria
Schanab, was born on a Mennonite farm outside
of Dayton, Ohio her family was of Czech
ancestry, but she was disowned at 17 when she
married John Paul and converted to Catholicism.
Theodore Dreisers birth on August 27, 1871
marked a divide in the familys history. Before
1871, the Dreisers had been relatively prosperous,
with the father managing and at times owning a
share of woolen mills, but after Theodores birth,
the family suffered a number of financial setbacks
when the father lost work due to a head injury, a
mill fire, and a bankruptcy. Theodore viewed his
father as an inept authoritarian who was zealously
religious and who imposed unrealistic expectations on his wife and children. Economic pressures forced the family to move often and to
separate, with the mother and younger children
often living apart from the father and older
children. To support her family, Sarah ran rooming houses and washed neighbors clothes, but she
was as unsuccessful at business as her husband.
The traumatic events of his youth provided
Dreiser with painful memories that would fill his
novels and shape his views. When he was still a
boy, Dreisers sister Mame (Mary Frances) became
pregnant. The father of Mames child, a wealthy
lawyer, would not marry the underaged girl, but
he did help the family Mame would serve as the
model for the title character in Dreisers second
novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911). A few years later, at
the age of 10, Dreiser remembered seeing his
brother Paul for the first time. Fourteen years
older than Theodore, Paul had left the family to
sing with various minstrel shows and had changed
his last name to Dresser. To support his mother
and siblings, Paul settled in Evansville, Indiana,
where he lived with a madam in a house of
prostitution and performed at the local theater.
A love triangle involving Paul may have resulted
in a child, which would have forced Paul to move,
leaving his mother and siblings to fend for themselves again. Their sister Emma, who had been
living in Chicago, ran off with L. A. Hopkins he
had stolen money from his employers saloon.
Emma and Hopkins became the models for Carrie
Meeber and George Hurstwood in Dreisers first
novel, Sister Carrie. Before the Dreisers left Evansville, Theodores sister Sylvia became pregnant
and was forced to move to New York because the
529
wealthy young father refused marriage or support. As a shy and isolated youth, Theodore
Dreiser suffered greatly through these events.
Later, he dramatized this suffering powerfully and
honestly in novels and autobiographies.
The Dreisers social and economic problems
encouraged the children, including Theodore, to
leave home as soon as possible. After dropping
out of high school and moving to Chicago, Dreiser struggled to find and keep employment, but a
former teacher (Mildred Fielding) rescued him
by paying for a year at Indiana University. With
this limited education, Dreiser was able to return
to Chicago, where he began his writing career as a
journalist at the Daily Globe. An ambitious young
man, he quickly moved to a more respected paper
in St. Louis, the Globe-Democrat. With a strong
desire for success and recognition, Dreiser moved
east, first to Toledo, Ohio, then to Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where he worked for the Pittsburgh
Dispatch. By 1895, at the urging of his brother
Paul, who was now a nationally known singer
and songwriter, Dreiser moved to New York City.
Unable to support himself as a freelance journalist, Dreiser accepted an offer from Paul to edit
Evry Month, a musical journal published by
Howley and Haviland. For two years, Dreiser
successfully managed this magazine, learning to
write and edit for a broad audience. By the time
he left Evry Month, Dreiser was regularly selling
his own articles to popular magazines, such as
Cosmopolitan, Munseys, and Ainslees, earning a
good living as a freelance magazine writer before
he turned to fiction.
Dreisers first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells
the story of a young woman (Carrie Meeber) who
leaves a small Midwestern farm town for Chicago
where she, like Dreiser and his sisters, seeks
opportunities. Dissatisfied both with the lowpaying work available and with life in her sisters
modest home, Carrie accepts money and shelter
from Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman. She
eventually develops a relationship with Drouets
friend, George Hurstwood, and unwittingly departs Chicago for New York after Hurstwood
absconds with funds from the saloon that he
manages. In New York, Hurstwood fails and
eventually commits suicide, but Carrie succeeds
as an actress. The novel is seen as a groundbreaking work of realism that depicts the struggles of
a young woman in urban America. Carrie enters
530
DREISER, THEODORE
romantic relationships without the sanction of

marriage. In 1900, when the novel was first published, her behavior, especially her success at the
end of the novel, violated conventional narrative
patterns. Despite a number of good reviews,
Dreiser was devastated by the novels reception
and sales he sank into a depression that lasted
almost three years, during which he was unable to
complete his second novel or write for magazines.
Again, his brother Paul interceded, arranging for
Dreiser to visit a rehabilitation center, where
exercise aided in his recovery. By 1904, Dreiser
returned to New Yorks magazine world, proving
himself to be a superb editor of womens magazines. And by 1907, Butterick hired Dreiser as
editor of three magazines, including The Delineator. This same year, Sister Carrie was successfully
republished. As an editor and author, Dreiser was
earning a good living and gaining the recognition
that he had long desired, but his editing career
was to end abruptly.
Forced to resign his position at Butterick after
a scandal involving the daughter of a co-worker,
Dreiser turned his immense energies to writing
books. Between 1911 and 1916, a time when he
was questioning if he could support himself as a
creative writer, he published seven full-length
works: Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier (1912),
A Traveler at Forty (1913), The Titan (1914a),
The Genius (1915), Plays of the Natural and
Supernatural (1916b), and A Hoosier Holiday
(1916a). Throughout his life, Dreiser continued
to write at an extraordinary rate he published
more than 28 volumes, including novels, collections of poems, short stories, biographical
sketches, autobiographies, travel narratives, plays,
literary criticism, political commentary, and philosophical reflections. Dreisers works vary greatly
in both structure and content. For example, his
first two novels draw on autobiographical materials, but his Trilogy of Desire (The Financier, The
Titan, and The Stoic) required extensive research
because these novels realistically chronicle the
life of Frank Cowperwood, an American robber
baron whose character is based on a historical
figure, Charles T. Yerkes.
In An American Tragedy (1925), written 25
years after Sister Carrie, Dreiser again challenged
social and literary conventions by sympathetically
and realistically depicting a murderer, Clyde
Griffiths, who is executed for killing his pregnant
girlfriend. Clyde, like Dreiser and his siblings,

grew up in a poor, religious family, longing for
escape and success. At his uncles factory, Clyde
develops an intimate relationship with a fellow
worker, Roberta Alden, as he slowly climbs the
towns social ladder. When the daughter of a
wealthy manufacturer finds him attractive, Clyde
determines to rid himself of Roberta, but she is
pregnant. On a trip to a mountain lake, Clyde
murders Roberta in a rowboat, but he is caught,
tried, and executed. The novel assiduously explores Clydes degree of guilt. Despite the works
realistic exploration of taboo subjects (premarital
sex, birth control, abortion, class conflict, and
capital punishment), critics and the public
praised this long novel (over 800 pages). Dreiser
was 54 when he finally enjoyed the success of this
bestseller, but after completing An American
Tragedy, a work that influenced authors such as
Norman Mailer and Richard Wright, he wrote
very little fiction.
During the 1930s, although he published no
novels, Dreisers productivity did not slow; his
interests merely shifted. He collected and arranged research materials and notes for a philosophical work that was to be his magnum opus,
Notes on Life, a work that he never completed. In
trying to find answers to the great philosophical
questions, Dreiser turned to religious, scientific,
political, philosophical, economic, and supernatural sources, taking in and blending divergent
beliefs into a philosophical system that was not
always consistent but that was thought-provoking and sincere. Always searching and never
resting, Dreiser dedicated his life to his art,
attempting to discover and communicate the
realities and mysteries of life. Shortly before his
death on December 28, 1945 at age 74, Dreiser
was still completing two novels that he had
begun decades earlier: The Bulwark (1946) and
The Stoic (1947).
Since his death, Dreisers short stories have
appeared in college anthologies, and his many
works are read by scholars, but he is now best
known as the author of Sister Carrie (1900) and
An American Tragedy (1925), two works that
redefined the American novel. As a writer, Dreiser
honestly faced the world and realistically depicted
what he saw and felt. In narrating the struggles of
a farm girl in an urban setting and in chronicling
the struggles of a hapless young man who seeks
DU BOIS, W. E. B.
social advancement, Dreiser achieved a level of

literary realism that transformed American
fiction.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Mailer,
Norman (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Norris,
Frank (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Wright,
Richard (AF)

Dreiser, T. (1900). Sister Carrie. New York:
Doubleday and Page.
Dreiser, T. (1911). Jennie Gerhardt. New York:
Harper.
Dreiser, T. (1912). The Financier. New York: Harper.
Dreiser, T. (1914a). The Titan. New York: John Lane.
Dreiser, T. (1914b). A Traveler at Forty. New York:
Century.
Dreiser, T. (1915). The Genius. New York: John Lane.
Dreiser, T. (1916a). A Hoosier Holiday. New York:
John Lane.
Dreiser, T. (1916b). Plays: Natural and Supernatural.
New York: John Lane.
Dreiser, T. (1918). Free and Other Stories. New York:
Boni and Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1919a). The Hand of the Potter. New York:
Boni and Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1919b). Twelve Men. New York: Boni and
Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1922). A Book about Myself. New York:
Boni and Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1923). The Color of a Great City. New York:
Boni and Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1925). An American Tragedy. New York:
Boni and Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1927). Chains. New York: Boni and
Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1928). Moods: Cadenced & Declaimed.
Dreiser, T. (1929). A Gallery of Women. New York:
Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1931). Dawn. New York: Liveright.
Dreiser, T. (1946). The Bulwark. New York:
Doubleday.
Dreiser, T. (1947). The Stoic. New York: Doubleday.
Dreiser, T. (1986). DreiserMencken Letters, 2 vols.
(ed. T. P. Riggio). Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Eby, C. (1998). Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of
the Status Quo. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press.
Elias, R. H. (1949). Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature.
New York: Knopf.
531
Fishkin, S. F. (1985). From Fact to Fiction: Journalism

and Imaginative Writing in America. Baltimore:
Lehan, R. (1969). Theodore Dreiser: His World and
His Novels. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Loving, J. (2005). The Last Titan: A Life of
Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Michaels, W. B. (1987). The Gold Standard and the
Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the
Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Newlin, K. (ed.) (2003). A Theodore Dreiser
Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Pizer, D. (1975). Theodore Dreiser: A Primary and
Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Pizer, D. (1976). The Novels of Theodore Dreiser:
A Critical Study. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Salzman, J. (ed.) (1972). Theodore Dreiser: The Critical
Reception. New York: David Lewis.
Swanberg, W. A. (1967). Dreiser. New York: Bantam.
Zanine, L. J. (1991). Mechanism and Mysticism: The
Influence of Science on the Thoughts and Works of
Theodore Dreiser. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B.
KELLEY WAGERS
During a career that spanned much of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in nearly
every genre while aiming each of his varied texts
at solving the vast social problem he identified
in 1900: The problem of the twentieth century,
he said, is the problem of the color line. Taken
as a whole, Du Boiss 22 monographs, countless
essays, and multiple editorial and collaborative
projects outline the major questions, methods,
and debates that continue to comprise black
cultural history and theory. Du Bois researched
and represented African and African American
experiences within international frames; investigated the material and psychological causes
and effects of racism; reflected and, at times,
upheld gender and class divisions; and traversed
the lines between social theory and practice. He
interrogated the boundaries between science and
art, employed textual and musical modes of
communication, and sought, especially by way
532
DU BOIS, W. E. B.
of education and intellectual work, justice and

redress for people of color worldwide. Du Boiss
description of double-consciousness, a condition of and response to racist society, is central to
twentieth-century literary history even as it continues to shape psychological and sociological
studies of race.
While Du Bois is more often recognized as a
historian and essayist, he wrote five novels over
the course of his career and included fictional
sketches within his major books of essays. Like his
non-fiction, Du Boiss fiction is foremost concerned with confronting the history of racist
societies and achieving economic and social
justice. Du Bois made frequent use of the intersections between autobiography, sociology, history, and literature, whether by extending and
amplifying his arguments with personal experience, crafting autobiographical protagonists, or
bringing historical figures directly onto the stage
of his novels.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born
in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February
23, 1868. Like many of his fictional protagonists,
Du Bois was identified early on as an exceptional
student and pursued education as a primary goal.
He earned degrees from Fisk University (where he
encountered the Fisk Singerss influential performances of African American spirituals), Harvard
College and Harvard Graduate School (where he
studied with American philosopher William
James), and attended Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In 1895, he became the first black
scholar to receive a PhD from Harvard. Du Bois
taught for two summers in Tennessee and at
Wilberforce University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University before holding
foundational positions within the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His
lifelong study of economic and social justice led
eventually to involvement with Marxism and
communism, affiliations which contributed to
his indictment by the US government in 1951.
He became a citizen of the newly independent
Ghana shortly before his death on August 27,
1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
Du Boiss opposition to racial segregation,
along with his commitment to classical education
and the arts, sometimes spurred debates with
other prominent black leaders, most famously
Booker T. Washington. Du Bois opposed

Washingtons turn-of-the-twentieth-century plan
for seeking racial equality through industrial
training and economic independence. Work,
culture, liberty, all these we need, not singly
but together, Du Bois argued (1903, 15). In
addition to teaching and public speaking (vocations typically shared by his protagonists),
Du Bois used publishing including his contributions to the major publications of the period
and his positions as founder and editor of others
(Horizon, The Crisis, Phylon) in order to seek
economic, political, educational, and cultural
opportunities for black people immediately and
at once.
In 1896, Du Boiss doctoral thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United
States of America, 16381870, a groundbreaking
documentary study of the United States participation in the international slave economy,
was published as the first volume of Harvards
Historical Monograph Series. His next study, The
Philadelphia Negro (1899), provides an exhaustive
description credited as the first example of
sociological scholarship of the dire conditions
in which black Philadelphians were living at
the time.
Du Boiss next book, The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), in many ways marks a change in his
scholarly research and writing methods. For this
collection of 14 essays and sketches, he abandoned
the apparently objective voice of the historian
and social scientist for a more emotive, personal,
and directly political address. Du Bois later recalled his discovery that he could not be a calm,
cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were
lynched, murdered and starved (1940, 67). Yet
The Souls of Black Folk also develops the strategies
of his earlier studies: Du Bois revised several
chapters from his prior publications and further
used cultural texts as modes of political argument.
He prefaced each chapter with the musical score
of an African American spiritual (texts he referred
to as sorrow songs) and a quotation from a
white author, and he included a fictional sketch,
Of the Coming of John.
The two major theoretical tools the concept
of double-consciousness and the image of the
veil which Du Bois presents in Souls are also
meetings of scientific and literary methods.
Du Bois described double-consciousness as the
DU BOIS, W. E. B.
split in self-knowledge brought about by living in

racist society. One ever feels his two-ness, he
wrote, an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring
ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength
alone keeps it from being torn asunder (1903,
11). By showing the resolution of this division as
necessary not just for African American citizens
but also for the larger American nation, Du Bois
theorized a debilitating psychological state as well
as an important position for critique. Novelists
and poets among them James Weldon Johnson,
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard
Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alice
Walker have since adapted and criticized the
Du Boisian double-consciousness, a condition
critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a fundamental
aspect of modernity itself. The image of the veil
likewise identifies the subtle and overt divisions
drawn in racist societies. The images changeability the veil obscures and reveals, prohibits and
protects indicates the complex task of translating racist structures into language.
While Du Bois returned most obviously to The
Souls of Black Folks style and method in its sequel,
Darkwater (1920), and Dusk of Dawn (1940),
Souls also outlined the key historical moments
that Du Bois would expand in later studies and
novels. He pursued the topic of African Americans centrality to United States history in The
Gift of Black Folk (1924), which focuses on artistic
and literary production, and Black Folk Then
and Now (1939). His Black Reconstruction
(1935) reveals the replacement of the American
slave industry with the new slavery of the working class and identifies African Americans as
primary actors working toward democratic
ideals in the post-Civil War South (724).
Du Bois meanwhile investigated international
economic and social systems with equal thoroughness. In The Negro (1915), he presented a
fully global view of black cultural history, emphasizing racial identity as a constantly evolving
collectivity bound by historical experience rather
than geography. His African studies, including
his pageant, The Star of Ethiopia (1913), two
volumes titled Africa (1930), Color and Democracy (1945), and The World and Africa (1947),
likewise examine global economic structures and
cultural histories as they develop a transnational
sense of black identity.
533
The novels Du Bois wrote during these years

coincide with the development of literary modernism, but the topics rather than the style or form
of his fiction reflect the eras emphasis on innovation. The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) tracks
the post-Civil War cotton industry in the US,
especially the plot of Northern business and
Southern aristocracy to disenfranchise and separate black and white labor groups. While Quest
presents new aspects of Du Boiss views on
women Zora Cresswell, a child of the swamp
(1911, 33), surpasses her more conventionally
educated male counterpart as a social and political leader it also confirms the view of readers
who criticize Du Boiss emphasis on the need to
master the Western canon more than recognize a
vibrant black folk culture in order to confront the
contradictions of modernity.
Du Boiss Dark Princess (1928) moves related
themes to an international stage. Exiled to Europe
by race-based prejudice in the 1920s US, the
protagonist, Matthew Towns, joins an effort
orchestrated by the high-born Princess Kautilya
of the title to unite people of color in a revolt
against white supremacy worldwide. Du Bois
again pursues politics and history alongside fantasy and romance by developing characters at
once real and symbolic; their acts register as
world movements (1928, 17). In this sense, the
novel illustrates his controversial 1926 claim that
all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite
the wailing of the purists (Sundquist, 1996, 328).
Du Boiss most ambitious fictional project, The
Black Flame trilogy, incorporates major events
in US and world history from 1876 to 1956. The
Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School
(1959b), and Worlds of Color (1961) follow several
generations in the male line of a black family, the
Mansarts, although these characters often step
aside while Du Bois revisits historical events and
topics, including Reconstruction, the Atlanta riots
(also the subject of Du Boiss most famous poem,
A Litany of Atlanta [1906]), educational reform,
colonialism, and pan-African and global politics.
In a postscript to his 1957 novel, Du Bois drew
together his historical and fictional endeavors as
a strategy still crucial to contemporary African
American literary history. Confronted by the
eternal paradox of history the unavoidably
incomplete effort to know the past Du Bois saw
the use of imagination as a critical means of
534
DUCORNET, RIKKI
redress. In a historical field where one finds

much omitted, much forgotten, much distorted, the writer must use fiction in order to
interpret the facts (1957, 229).
SEE ALSO: Baldwin, James (AF); Ellison,
Ralph (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF);
The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Hughes,
Langston (AF); Hurston, Zora Neale (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction
(AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
Aptheker, H. (1989). The Literary Legacy of W. E. B.
Du Bois. White Plains, NY: Kraus International.
Bhabha, H. (2004). The Black Savant and the Dark
Princess. ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance,
50(13), 13755.
Blight, D. (1994). W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle
for American Historical Memory. In G. Fabre &
R. OMeally (eds.), History and Memory in
African-American Culture. New York: Oxford
Carby, H. V. (1998). Race Men. Cambridge, MA:
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1896). The Suppression of the African
Slave-Trade to the United States os America, 1638
1870. New York: Longmans, Green.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1899). The Philadelphia Negro.
Boston: Ginn.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk.
Chicago: McClurg.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1909). John Brown. Philadelphia:
George W. Jacobs.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1911). The Quest of the Silver Fleece:
A Novel. Chicago: McClurg.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1915). The Negro. New York:
Henry Holt.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1920). Darkwater: Voices
From Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Howe.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1924). The Gift of Black Folk.
Boston: Stratford.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1928). Dark Princess: A Romance.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1939). Black Folk Then and Now.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1940). Dusk of Dawn: An Essay
Toward an Autobiography of a Races Concept.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1945). Color and Democracy.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1947). The World and Africa.
New York: Viking.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1957). The Ordeal of Mansart.
New York: Mainstream.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1959a). In Battle for Peace: The
Story of My 83rd Birthday. New York: Masses &
Mainstream.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1959b). Mansart Builds a School.
New York: Mainstream.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1961). Worlds of Color. New
York: Mainstream.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1968). The Autobiography of
W. E. B. Du Bois (ed. H. Aptheker). New York:
International.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lewis, D. L. (1993). W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of
a Race, 18681919. New York: Henry Holt.
Marable, M. (1986). W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical
Democrat. Boston: Twayne.
Rampersad, A. (1976). The Art and Imagination of
W. E. B. Du Bois. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Smith, S. M. (2004). Photography on the Color Line:
W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. Durham:
Stepto, R. (1979). From Behind the Veil: A Study of
Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Sundquist, E. (ed.) (1996). The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois
Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zamir, S. (1995). Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and
American Thought, 18881903. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Ducornet, Rikki
PATRICK ODONNELL
The prolific author of seven novels, four short

fiction collections, and several volumes of poetry,
essays, and childrens books, Rikki Ducornet
is one of the most inventive of contemporary
American writers. Like fellow travelers John
Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Angela Carter, she
is fascinated with the play, eroticism, and origins
of language throughout her work. Born in Canton, New York in 1949 and raised in an academic
environment, she received a degree in fine arts
from Bard College in 1964; in addition to being
DUCORNET, RIKKI
a writer, Ducornet is an artist who has illustrated

a number of books by such figures as Robert
Coover and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as her own.
Ducornet taught for many years at the University
of Denver, and is currently writer-in-residence at
the University of LouisianaLafayette. She is the
winner of several writing awards, including the
prestigious Lannan Literary Award in Fiction
and an award from the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters.
Ducornets first four novels The Stain (1984),
Entering Fire (1986), The Fountains of Neptune
(1992), and The Jade Cabinet (1993) comprise
her Tetralogy of Elements, with each novel associated, consecutively, with the elements of earth,
fire, water, and air. The Stain, set in nineteenthcentury France, is a phantasmagoric narrative of
eroticism and violence charting the youth and
maturation of its protagonist, born with a fatal
birthmark that consigns her to a life of rejection
and often horrific adventure. Entering Fire, also
partially set in France (where Ducornet lived
for several years), takes place in the twentieth
century, and narrates the strange, separate, but
homologous life-journeys of a father and son, the
former an obsessive botanist who discovers an
exotic woman in the midst of the Amazon jungle,
and the latter raised by his mother in Europe,
a fascist madman whose dystopian hell serves as
the polar extreme of the paradise his father has
discovered in South America. In The Fountains of
Neptune, a man who has been in a coma for 50
years recounts his childhood in a French seaside
village in a hallucinatory vision that discovers the
connection between dream and memory. The Jade
Cabinet is an allegory of memory, set in Victorian
England and relating the lives of two sisters
(Etheria and Memory) who have been raised by
a father, Angus Sphery, bent upon discovering
or inventing a primal language that will become
the native tongue for his children. The novel
contains a cast of eccentric characters, including
the remarkable Hungerkunstler, or hunger artist
(recollecting Kafkas tale of that title), a female
creature obtained by Sphery who supposedly
speaks the primal language he has searched for
all of his life. In all of the novels of the tetralogy,
language is the real protagonist, which in
Ducornets fiction gains density and materiality
as her characters navigate worlds that continuously verge upon the realm of the unconscious.
535
In subsequent fictions, Ducornet has expanded

this terrain. Especially notable amongst her short
fiction collections, The Complete Butchers Tales
(1994) is a hybrid assemblage of 54 short pieces
containing exotic, often bizarre narratives that
move between the mundane and the unimaginable. Phospher in Dreamland (1995) is an epistolary novel recounting the history of an imaginary
island, Birdland, a cross between Prosperos
realm in Shakespeares The Tempest and Jonathan
Swifts Laputa, the floating island of Gullivers
Travels where Reason is king and the butt of
Swifts satire. In Ducornets novel, youth, isolation, and the instruments of vision combine to
enable a unique world where fantasy and reality,
and science and the imagination, merge. The
Fanmakers Inquistion (1999a) portrays the
relationship between the Marquis de Sade, imprisoned for sexual crimes, and Gabrielle, a
fanmaker who is being interrogated for her
friendship and collaboration with the infamous
philosopher of eroticism. The novel is, like all of
Ducornets fiction, a defense of the pleasures of
the mind and body against the repressive forces
of the social order. Ducornets most recent novel,
Gazelle (2003), is set in Cairo and tells the story
of a young girl navigating the relationship between warring parents, an intellectual father who
represents the mind and a philandering mother
who represents the body, corporeality, and the
erotic. Indeed, Ducornets fiction as a whole can
be viewed as an exploration and deconstruction
of the Cartesian relation between mind and body,
and the pleasure that arises when they meet in
language and dream.
SEE ALSO: Carter, Angela (BIF); Coover,
Robert (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF);
Hawkes, John (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
Ducornet, R. (1986). Entering Fire. San Francisco:
City Lights.
Ducornet, R. (1989). The Fountains of Neptune.
Toronto: McClelland and Steward.
Ducornet, R. (1993). The Jade Cabinet. Normal,
IL: Dalkey Archives.
Ducornet, R. (1994). The Complete Butchers Tales.
Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives.
Ducornet, R. (1995). Phospher in Dreamland.
536
DYBEK, STUART
Ducornet, R. (1995). The Stain [1984]. Normal, IL:

Dalkey Archives.
Ducornet, R. (1997). The Word Desire. New York:
Henry Holt.
Ducornet, R. (1999a). The Fanmakers Inquisition.
Ducornet, R. (1999b). The Monstrous and the
Marvelous. San Francisco: City Lights.
Ducornet, R. (2003). Gazelle. New York: Knopf.
Ducornet, R. (2008). The One Marvelous Thing.
Matthews, J. H. (1989). Rikki Ducornets
Non-Nonsense Almost-Fairy Tales. Symposium,
42(4), 31228.
Moore, S. (1998). Reveries of Desire: An
Interview With Rikki Ducornet. Bloomsbury
Review, 18, 1112.
Review of Contemporary Fiction. (1998). Essays
(by S. Gregory, R. Williams, A. Guttmann, R.
Martin, L. Diamond-Nigh, G. Covi, & W. Motte)
[special part-issue], 18(3), 110230.
Dybek, Stuart
BILL SAVAGE
Stuart Dybek has taken what many people dismiss

as the dull gray lead of Chicagos post-industrial
landscape and transmuted it into fictional and
poetic gold. Raised in Chicagos South Side Pilsen
neighborhood, as its dominant population shifted
from Eastern European immigrants and their
descendants to Latin American immigrants and
theirs, Dybek attended Catholic schools, graduated from Loyola University and the University of
Iowa Writers Workshop, and served in the Peace
Corps. He has had a distinguished career teaching
creative writing at Western Michigan University,
its Prague Summer Program at Charles University, and Northwestern University.
Despite his many literary awards O. Henry
Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, inclusion in
The Best American Short Stories and The Best
American Poetry collections, and in 2007 a
MacArthur Genius Award relatively few critics
have written about Dybeks fiction. The most
astute approach to Dybeks work comes from
Carlo Rotella, who identifies Dybek as the postindustrial heir of earlier Chicago neighborhood
novelists James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, and
Nelson Algren. Like his Chicago forebears,
Dybek has staked out a particular slice of urban

turf as his own.
Dybek reimagines the Chicago tradition to
express the post-industrial city and its myriad
beauties and brutalities. His characters inhabit
and interpret the landscape of ethnic urban villages transformed by postwar deindustrialization,
white flight, neighborhoods obliterated for urban
renewal, and familiar streetscapes bulldozed for
expressways. In stark contrast to much of the
Chicago literary tradition, his work especially
in his first two short story collections, Childhood
and Other Neighborhoods (1980) and The Coast of
Chicago (1991) has a dreamlike, hallucinatory
quality that has been compared by reviewers to
the magic realism of many Latin American and
Eastern European writers. For instance, Dybeks
first published story, The Palatski Man (1971),
portrays a brother and sister who follow a streetcart sweets vendor from Sunday mass at their
parish church through an archetypal urban landscape of slums, decayed railroads, and abandoned
factories and warehouses to a hidden riverside
encampment where all of the citys wandering
outcasts gather in almost sacred communion.
Rich religious imagery informs the storys
depiction of the mundane city as rife with beauty
and mystery.
Dybek forges his stories magic from a sense of
musical tone and dream logic, rather than the
more directly surrealistic approach usually associated with magic realism. His aesthetics derive
from film; musical traditions from classical to
jazz, blues, and rock; and the Russian, Irish, and
American short story canon of writers like Anton
Chekhov, James Joyce, and Sherwood Anderson.
In his later fiction, I Sailed with Magellan
(2003), Dybek creates a novel-in-stories which
revolves around two brothers, Perry and Mick
Katzek; their relationships with each other, their
parents, and their neighborhood; and the vast
changes that took place in American culture
from the 1950s through the 1970s. Compared to
Dybeks earlier stories, the tone of the mystic and
the elegiac in Magellan is muted, but persists
nonetheless.
What most distinguishes Dybeks literary approach is his rejection, or complication, of formal
genre distinctions so often made between novel
and short story collection, memoir and fiction,
fiction and poetry. As an accomplished writer in
DYBEK, STUART
all of these genres, Dybek prefers to begin with

Unidentified Written Objects, which start in no
particular genre, and only in the process of writing
settle into more recognizable generic shapes. His
embrace of the lyric informs his fiction with a
poetic sense of figurative language and mythic
metaphor far beyond anything associated with
realism or the Chicago tradition. For instance,
in the multipart story Nighthawks in The Coast
of Chicago, he reimagines Orpheus as a GI gone
AWOL, a conga drummer seeking his lost love
down tunnels beneath Chicagos subway by invoking the help of a Santera god.
Yet Dybeks sense of magic never strays too far
from the real world and its everyday concerns.
Nighthawks also depicts an unemployed young
man using Chicagos Art Institute bathrooms to
prepare for fruitless job interviews, always drawn
past the Impressionists to Edward Hoppers
titular painting. This blend of the mythic and
mundane is the key feature of Dybeks literary
neighborhood.
And nowhere does he express this better than
in the short story Blight, from The Coast of
Chicago. Blight tells of four friends coming of
age in Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
searching for a sense of identity and place after
their neighborhood was declared an official
blight area (1991, 42). Where so much of the
Chicago tradition sees the city as inherently limiting, for Dybeks characters it is a grid of possibilities. They transform the industrial viaducts
537
and abandoned cars so symbolic of urban decay

into improvisational musical instruments, and
explore the city from one end to the other, in
search of beauty, moments of ecstasy inspired
by art and architecture, and the presence of the
natural world within the built environment. By
being open to the beauty of the urban landscape
and the memories it offers and withholds, Dybeks
characters achieve fleeting moments of aesthetic
transcendence. Throughout his fiction and his
poetry and memoirs Dybek also offers such
moments to his readers.
SEE ALSO: Algren, Nelson (AF); Anderson,
Sherwood (AF); The City in Fiction (AF);
Farrell, James T. (AF); Joyce, James (BIF);
Wright, Richard (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READING
Dybek, S. (1980). Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.
New York: Viking.
Dybek, S. (1991). The Coast of Chicago. Boston:
Faber and Faber.
Dybek, S. (2003). I Sailed with Magellan. New York:
Dybek, S. (1979). Brass Knuckles. Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press.
Dybek, S. (2004). Streets in Their Own Ink. New York:
Rotella, C. (1998). October Cities: The Redevelopment
of Urban Literature. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
E
Elkin, Stanley
PETER J. BAILEY
If being a writers writer meant not selling many

books, Stanley Elkin wasnt interested. It was the
expansiveness of his imagination and his delight
in producing fierce language that made him
a writer so widely admired and celebrated by his
literary contemporaries but that, simultaneously,
reduced his accessibility to a popular audience.
His reputation as Americas funniest serious
writer increased his appeal, but Elkin maintained that producing schtick never was his
major objective in writing fiction. He was drawn
primarily toward creating a palimpsest of metaphor right there on the page. . . Thats where
the fun of writing is for me. . . What I enjoy
about fiction the great gift of fiction is that it
gives language an opportunity to happen
(Bernt & Bernt 16). Between 1964, when he
published Boswell: A Modern Comedy, his first
novel, and 1995, when Mrs. Ted Bliss appeared,
Elkin published 14 works of fiction and an essay
collection, Pieces of Soap, all of which gave
language extravagant opportunities to happen.
Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Zelda Feldman
Elkin and Philip Elkin, a costume jewelry salesman whose mastery of commercial rhetoric
significantly influenced the fiction his son would
write, Elkin grew up on the South Shore of
Chicago. He attended the University of Illinois,
where he received his BA and MA. In 1953, he
married Joan Marion Jacobson, whose husband
he remained for 42 years, dedicating all but three
of his 15 books to her. Elkin spent 19557 in the

Army, returning to the University of Illinois
following his discharge and receiving his PhD in
English in 1961. In 1960, Elkin accepted an
instructorship at Washington University in St.
Louis, commencing an institutional commitment
which would continue until his death and would
see him named Merle King Professor of Modern
Letters in 1983.
Because perception and its precise evocation
were so central to Elkins aesthetic, his characters
often experience moments ofextraordinary vision.
Jake Greenspahn, a grocer who has recently
lost his son in Elkins most widely anthologized
story, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers,
thinks, Death was an education.. . . On the street,
in the store, he saw everything. Everything. It was as
if everybody else were made of glass. Why all of
a sudden was he like that? (1965, 9). Ben Flesh, the
protagonist of The Franchiser, who very descriptively suffers from the multiple sclerosis that
afflicted Elkin, wonders, where did he get these
ideas? how had vision come to perch on his eyes like
pince-nez? (1976, 215). The novels implicit
answer is that Fleshs visionary experiences and
moments of rhetorical exhilaration are pathologically induced, symptoms of the degeneration of
the nervous system that makes the perceptions
possible. When Ellerbee dies and rises to Heaven in
Elkins most popular novel, The Living End, he
notices a change in both his perception and his
language: the angel of death reminds Ellerbee that,
when he was on earth, he had a vocabulary of
17001800 words, before asking him, Who am I?

ELKIN, STANLEY
An eschatological angel, Ellerbee said shyly.

One hundred percent, the angel of death
said. Why do we do that?
To heighten perception, Ellerbee said, and
shuddered. (1979, 25)
Heightened perception is both the means and
the end of much of Elkins fiction, which was no
less interested in precisely depicting unrealities
(for example, the neurological illusions generated
by Ben Fleshs disease) as it was committed to
reproducing the shop talk of the everyday world
(such as Dick Gibsons radio apprenticeship in
The Dick Gibson Show or the mayoral duties of
Bobbo Druff in The MacGuffin).
Elkin insisted that George Mills, his most ambitious novel and winner of the National Book
Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1983, had been
so exhausting to compose seven years in the
writing that it was the last fiction hed ever write.
The novel followed the blue-collar Millses over
10 centuries and through four countries, creating
Elkins most lavish and expansive literary stage
upon which to make language happen. Watching
a British TV news report about doomed children
visiting Disney World, however, confounded his
resolution to cease writing fiction, and Stanley
Elkins The Magic Kingdom resulted. In memory
of his son, whom he had subjected to endless
medical procedures in the futile hope of saving his
life, Eddy Bale organizes a dream holiday to
Disney World for seven fatally ill children. The
children find little magical in this kingdom, but it
inspired from Elkin a level of magic realism only
fragmentally present in his novels outside The
Living End, while prompting him, in contrast to
his practice of remaining within his protagonists
point of view, to enter the perspectives of all the
adults and children traveling to Florida, creating
a textured fabric of funny and deeply sympathetic
characters. If The Magic Kingdom has become
Elkins most respected novel, it is also because,
like The Franchiser and sections of George Mills,
it addresses the theme that gradually eclipsed
language as Elkins central literary preoccupation.
As the physician accompanying the dying kids to
Disney World reflects, Disease, not health, was at
the core of things; his idea of pith and gist and soul
obsolete now, revised downward to flaw, nubbin,
rift; incipient sickness the seed which sent forth its
539
contaged shoots raging through the poisoned

circuits of being (1985, 64).
SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Jewish
Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
Bailey, P. J. (1985). Reading Stanley Elkin. Urbana:
Bailey, P. J. (1995). A Hat Where There Never
Was a Hat: Stanley Elkins Fifteenth Interview
[in Elkin special issue]. Review of Contemporary
Fiction, 15, 1526.
Bernt, P., & Bernt, J. (1976). Stanley Elkin on
Fiction: An Interview. Prairie Schooner, 50(1),
1425.
Dougherty, D. C. (1991). Stanley Elkin. Boston:
Twayne.
Duncan, J. L. (1976). A Conversation With
Stanley Elkin and William H. Gass. Iowa Review,
7(1), 4876.
Elkin, S. (1964). Boswell: A Modern Comedy. New York:
Random House.
Elkin, S. (1965). Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers.
Elkin, S. (1967). A Bad Man. New York: Random
House.
Elkin, S. (1971). The Dick Gibson Show. New York:
Random House.
Elkin, S. (1976). The Franchiser. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Elkin, S. (1979). The Living End. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Elkin, S. (1982). George Mills. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Elkin, S. (1985). Stanley Elkins The Magic Kingdom.
Elkin, S. (1991). The MacGuffin. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Elkin, S. (1995). Mrs. Ted Bliss. New York:
Hyperion.
LeClair, T. (1976). Stanley Elkin: The Art of Fiction LXI.
Paris Review, 66, 5486.
ODonnell, P. (1986). The Wor(l)d Made Flesh:
Stanley Elkins The Franchiser. In Passionate
Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary
American Fiction. Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press.
Sanders, S. (1975). An Interview With Stanley Elkin.
Contemporary Literature, 16(2), 13145.
Wilde, A. (1981). A Map of Suspensiveness: Irony in
the Postmodern Age. In Horizons of Assent:
Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic
Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
540
ELLISON, RALPH
Ellison, Ralph
CHAUNCEY RIDLEY
Despite a distinguished and vastly more prolific

career as an essayist, Ralph Ellison is best known
as a novelist. Rarely in any tradition has an
authors first and only novel achieved the enduring eminence of Invisible Man. Published in
March 1952, it won the 1953 National Book
Award. In 1965, a Book Week poll voted it the
post-World War II novel most likely to endure:
Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita took second, followed
by J. D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye; Saul
Bellow was voted the most important novelist. In
1978, a Wilson Quarterly poll affirmed the Book
Week results by voting Invisible Man the most
distinguished American novel since World War
II. By 2002, it had been translated into 20 languages, and over a million copies had been sold
since Ellisons death on April 16, 1994.
He was planning a second novel as early as
1951, and the first published fragment, And
Hickman Arrives, appeared nine years later in
the inaugural issue of Saul Bellows journal, The
Noble Savage (1960). By 1967, other journals had
published six additional fragments, and Ellison
felt nearly satisfied with one novel distilled from
part of an envisioned three-volume novel, but
a house fire destroyed the only copy of that hardwon distillation. He never again came so close to
completing a second novel, although for the
remainder of his life, he continued to revise
and expand that three-volume opus. From the
middle section of that work, John F. Callahan his
literary executor cobbled together Juneteenth
(1999), the title taken from a fragment serialized
in two issues of Quarterly Review of Literature
(1965a).
From 1937 to the end of his life, Ellison published 75 signed essays, reviews, and keynote
addresses, collecting nearly half in Shadow and
Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). The
Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995) appeared
posthumously. Edited by Callahan, it includes
a preface by Saul Bellow, all of Shadow and Act
and Going to the Territory, and 20 previously
uncollected or unpublished essays.
Born to Lewis and Ida Ellison on March 1, 1913
in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Ralph Waldo
Ellison was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson
(180382), the abolitionist, poet, and transcendentalist philosopher highly esteemed among
educated African Americans aspiring to the middle class at the turn of the twentieth century.
Then, Lewis Ellisons accidental death in 1916
plunged Ida, Ralph, and Idas newborn, Herbert,
into poverty. Forty-eight years later, from a lectern at the Library of Congress, Ralph redeemed
that middle-class gesture of naming in the address, Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A
Writers Experience in the United States
(1964), a confidently self-mocking meditation
upon his own and Americas efforts to live up to
the hopes and history resonant in their names.
In the meantime, Ida, although educated,
became a maid to support the family, which was
forced to move, often suddenly, to poorer neighborhoods and new school districts, delaying
Ralphs progress through elementary school. By
1924, Ida had buried a second husband and
married a third (she died in 1937), but Ralph
retained his fathers name, and his last moments
with Lewis Ellison haunt the surreal rapture of
violent ritual in Tell It Like It Is, Baby published
in The Nation (1965b) and reprinted in The
Collected Essays.
Although generally an average student, he
excelled at the trumpet through Oklahoma Citys
impressive Frederick Douglass High School
music program, winning a music scholarship to
Tuskegee University in 1932. For lack of travel
funds, he hopped freight trains, arriving on campus with two head wounds due to trouble with
bulls, that is, railroad security. He never disclosed further details, but his rough passage from
Oklahoma to Alabama inspired his first known
short story, Hymies Bull (1937), written in
Harlem. He made no apparent effort to write for
publication in college, yet he voraciously read
literature and criticism from the library, a habit
cultivated since childhood, when he pored over
copies of Vanity Fair Ida brought home from
cleaning jobs.
In 1936, incidental to shifting his emphasis
from performance to orchestral composition, he
lost his scholarship. He then moved to New York
City to earn tuition money. There, through Alain
Locke, he met, impressed, and befriended poet
Langston Hughes, who widened his literary horizons. Ellison also showed promise as a sculptor,
ELLISON, RALPH
completing two busts and starting a torso

during several glamorous weeks as Richmond
Barthes first protege. He never resumed his music
studies, although he is one of the founders of
jazz criticism, and his celebrated essay The Little
Man at Chehaw Station (1977) pays homage to
his mentor at Tuskegee, concert pianist Hazel
Harrison.
In 1937, Hughes brokered him an introduction
to Richard Wright. With some distinctive poems
to his name, with Blueprint for Negro Writing
(1937) hot off the typewriter, and with the unsold
manuscript of Cesspool (published posthumously
as Lawd Today) in his briefcase, Wright recently
had left Chicago to assume leadership of the
Harlem Bureau of the Daily Worker and of the
journal New Challenge. Within three years, after
Uncle Toms Children (1939) and Native Son
(1940), Wright would become one of the most
famous writers of his generation.
Impressed by Ellisons fluent grasp of American
and European literature, Wright mentored him,
shared drafts of works in progress, and assigned
him a book review of Waters Turpins These Low
Grounds appearing in the inaugural issue of New
Challenge (1937). When Wright persuaded him to
attempt a short story, he wrote Hymies Bull,
slated to appear in the second issue, but New
Challenge folded abruptly; the story appears
posthumously in Flying Home and Other Stories
(1996). His apparently effortless transition from
music and sculpture to polished, professional
prose indicates that he learned more from
castoff copies of Vanity Fair, the dated collection
of reference books and Readers Digest at the
Oklahoma City library annex for Negroes
(housed in a former pool hall), and three years
at Tuskegee than anyone free to use Oklahoma
Citys state-of-the-art Carnegie Public Library,
which remained whites only throughout
Ellisons youth.
By 1938, he was working for the Federal
Writers Project and freelancing reviews and stories. Appearing in Direction (September 1939), his
first published story, Slick Gonna Learn, is most
significant for its independence from the Manichaean racial vision often attributed to Wright.
Slick, a name implying a talent for getting into and
out of trouble, has been tortured by the racist
police who are transporting him to an isolated
spot to murder him, when a call for all cars to put
541
down a riot in town interrupts. The cops race off

after dumping him, bleeding and broken, onto the
pavement. Then, a white truck driver rescues him,
the storys title implying that Slicks confusion
before the racially irreconcilable conduct of the
white police and white truck driver is temporary.
By 1944, Ellison had published 20 reviews and
seven short stories and coedited four issues of
Negro Quarterly. Flying Home, his most important story of that period, appeared in Edwin
Seavers Cross-Section: A Collection of New
American Writing (1944) in the company of
Wrights The Man Who Lived Underground,
Arthur Millers The Man Who Had All the Luck,
and an early fragment of Norman Mailers The
Naked and The Dead. Of all his early fiction, the one
that best anticipates the comedy of Invisible Man,
Flying Home, redeems Todd an unjustly maligned and abused Tuskegee airman not with rage
or pathos, but with a sharecroppers bluesy anecdote and the cathartic mockery of a surreal little
laughing man, artistically complementing Ellisons
evolving blues aesthetic theory.
In June 1941, at the Fourth American Writers
Congress, he surmised that the blues lyric was
a profoundly cathartic tragic form, a theory
greeted with derision by Communist Party conference organizers. Later, in his famous review of
Black Boy, Richard Wrights Blues (1945), he
more confidently formulates the blues impulse to
finger the jagged grain of open wounds and
transform the ensuing laughter-through-tears into cathartic, tragicomic lyricism. This elegantly
calls to mind the structure of many traditional
blues lyrics (i.e., retrospective tales or episodes
framed by refrains of self-mocking, and 20/20
hindsight). In interviews from the 1950s and
1960s, he credits, especially, the divine laughter
in Miguel Unamunos A Tragic Sense of Life with
helping him to fathom the deep, existential
meaning of secular, blues laughter-through-tears.
His Jamesian introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man (1981) offers
a more figurative account of how experience too
tragic for tears yields his discovery of his own
blues voice.
Invisible Man (1952) is the fullest artistic
flowering of that blues aesthetic. Unmarked by
a name, the hero-narrators prologue and
epilogue frame his first-person, retrospective narrative with self-mocking hindsight: cognizance of
542
ELLISON, RALPH
his complicity in his own psychic and physical

wounding. Thus, he fingers the jagged grain of
those wounds and, to paraphrase Ellisons
Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke (1958),
the ensuing laughter-through-tears transforms
his ethical descent into a process of rising to
self-critical insight and authentic agency.
The prologue opens with the hero complaining
that, above ground, he is invisible because others
refuse to see past the color of his skin, so for
a while he has resided underground in an abandoned and brightly lit coal cellar (powered by
electricity stolen from Monopolated Power and
Light). Then sloe gin, grass, and a recording of
Louis Armstrongs What Did I Do to Be So Black
and Blue? induce a surreal vision: a hellfire-anddamnation preacher affirming that blackness,
indeed, plunges one into the Melvillean whales
belly of binary racial consciousness yet dismissing
blackness as an essence preceding existence. The
prologue closes with the heros callow query,
What did I do to be so blue? His story follows,
rife with laughter (of his grandfather, the drunken
veteran in a roadhouse, those attending his surreal
castration scene, etc.) mocking his avid pursuit
of any orthodoxy millionaire trustees at one
moment and communists the next that might
launch him as a national leader. Thus, he awakens
to the nightmare he has made of his existence.
Dostoevskys antihero in Notes From the Underground being an obvious precursor to the voice
from underground addressing the surface world,
European writers further influence is evident in
that narratives rewriting of the picaresque. Alienated and adrift in a world of random encounters
and multiple setbacks, invisible man wanders
through a series of episodic adventures, encountering memorable characters along the way such
as the self-serving college president A. Herbert
Bledsoe, the socially conscious Mary Rambo, the
tragic Tod Clifton, the indomitable Ras the
Exhorter/Destroyer, and the members of the
Brotherhood. Nevertheless, reminiscent of jazz
or blues flights of improvisation that return to
repeating, thematic refrains, each hopeful new
prospect collapses into violent farce due to the
same inauthentic motives: each a verse, so to
speak, in his picaresque blues narrative.
By the epilogue, now eschewing all orthodoxy,
rank, or any other limit, his self-abnegating innocence is behind him. Before him is boundless
existential freedom, and hence responsibility: his

decision to undertake a socially responsible role
back in the world foreshadowed by the sharecropper, Jim Trueblood, of all people. After fleeing
several hours into the deep forest following his
dream sin of raping his daughter in his sleep,
Trueblood collapses in fatigue and shame, then
sings a soulful blues, whereupon he rises to assume full responsibility for his crime. He returns
home, risks lynching and prison, endures daily
rigid scorn both within and outside his home, and
pursues an absurd career as a one-man freak
show: the pariah, on display most days outside
his log cabin, netting large tips to support his
family in return for recounting his tale of crime
and blues redemption to whites less interested in
cathartic aesthetics and ethics than details of
bestial black lust.
The final words of the epilogue do not disclose
the heros imminent socially responsible role.
Rather, they ponder the universal significance of
the self-mocking blues singer that restores the
will to face the world by purging, not sin, but the
self-abnegating and socially toxic innocence of
unexamined lives.
Hickman, the itinerant black preacher in Juneteenth, is also prone to blues laughter issuing from
knowledge too tragic for tears, but most emphatic
in that novel is its dialogic meditation on
Americas love/hate race relations. An imaginatively indirect, Faulknerian dialogue between
Hickman and the white senator, Bliss an effectively comatose victim of an assassination
attempt recollects the extreme gesture of Blisss
mother; out of regret for a brutal racist incident,
she hands over her white infant boy to Hickman
for upbringing. The dialogue recalls Blisss mimicry of Hickmans signature black style of ministry,
by means of which he becomes a charismatic child
preacher and, decades later, a racist senator. Thus,
no less than optic white paint (the whitest
manufactured pigment in Invisible Man) is
a result of Lucius Brockways secret drops of
a black catalyst that seem to grow blacker before
mixed into each gallon, Blisss racist articulation
of white difference derives from signature black
rhetorical sources.
Bliss calls to mind another crucial figure in
Invisible Man, the chameleon Bliss Proteus
Rinehart, no less an aesthetically beautiful yet
pitiless embodiment of the American melting pot:
ELLISON, RALPH
a coldhearted pimp, reverend, runner, gambler,

briber, lover, and so on who thrives in ceaseless
transformation. The ambivalence of Bliss and
Rinehart connotes the melting pots ambivalence;
more an impersonal, democracy-prodded force
than a pluralistic ideal, the melting pot facilitates
spectacular transformations and interweavings of
diverse peoples while inflaming fears of gross
miscegenations and other crises of tribal identity,
which the cynical and self-serving can exploit.
Ellison considered the hopes and hazards of the
melting pot for decades, most notably in his
American Book Award address, Brave Words
on a Startling Occasion (1953), and the essays
The Novel as a Function of American Democracy (1967) and The Little Man at Chehaw
Station (1977).
From within that tension, he evolves general
ethics and aesthetics. In his Address at the Whiting
Foundation (1992), he ethically challenges novelists to help a racially divided nation live up to the
ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, and the Bill of Rights: touchstones
of the conviction that, here, social categories
are open and one is not only presumed free to
transform oneself but also encouraged to do so.
Aesthetically, his prose aspires to an eclectic range
of experience and erudition, for the ubiquitous
and preeminently American little man at Chehaw
Station, as a reader, demands revelations of the
fluid, ever-shifting interconnections between
the diverse wellsprings of American identity.
One of the founders of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and National
Public Broadcasting (NPR/PBS), Ellison was
elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters in 1964. President Lyndon Johnson
awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1969. The
following year, Andre Malraux, then French minister of culture, dubbed him Chevalier de lOrdre
des Arts et des Lettres. Five years later, Oklahoma
City opened the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library and,
in 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded him
the National Medal of the Arts.
SEE ALSO: Baldwin, James (AF); Bellow,
Saul (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF);
Hughes, Langston (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
Naturalist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF);
WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF);
543

Note: All cited essays are reprinted in Ellison (2003).
Baker, H. A. (1984). The Blues, Ideology, and Afro
American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Bloom, H. (ed.) (1986). Modern Critical Views: Ralph
Ellison. New York: Chelsea House.
Byerman, K. (1986). Fingering the Jagged Grain. Athens:
Dostoevsky, F. (1961). Notes From the Underground.
New York: Signet.
Ellison, R. W. (1937). Creative and Cultural Lag. New
Challenge, 2, 901.
Ellison, R. W. (1939). Slick Gonna Learn. Direction, 2
(5), 1011, 14, 16.
Ellison, R. W. (1944). In a Strange Country. Tomorrow,
3, 4144.
Ellison, R. W. (1960). And Hickman Arrives. The Noble
Savage, 1, 549.
Ellison, R. W. (1964). Shadow and Act. New York:
Random House.
Ellison, R. W. (1965a). Juneteenth. Quarterly Review of
Literature, 13(34).
Ellison, R. W. (1981). Invisible Man. New York:
Vintage.
Ellison, R. W. (1986). Going to the Territory. New York:
Random House.
Ellison, R. W. (1996). Flying Home and Other Stories
(ed. J. Callahan). New York: Random House.
Ellison, R. W. (1999). Juneteenth (ed. J. Callahan).
Ellison, R. W. (2003). The Collected Essays of
Ralph Ellison (ed. J. Callahan). New York:
Modern Library.
Ellison, R. W., & Murray, A. (2000). Trading Twelves:
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert
Murray. New York: Modern Library.
Graham, M. (ed.) (1995). Conversations With Ralph
Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Jackson, L. P. (2002). Ralph Ellison: Emergence of
Genius. New York: John Wiley.
Posnock, R. (ed.) (2005). The Cambridge Companion to
Ralph Ellison. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rampersand, A. (2007). Ralph Ellison: A Biography.
New York: Knopf.
Seaver, E. (ed.) (1944). Cross-Section: A Collection of
New American Writing. New York City: L. B. Fischer.
Steele, S. (1976). Ralph Ellisons Blues. Journal of Black
Studies, 7(2), 15168.
Turpin, W. (1937). These Low Grounds. New York:
Harper.
Unamuno, M. (1972). A Tragic Sense of Life (trans. A.
Kerrigan). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
544
ELLROY, JAMES
Wright, J. S. (2006). Shadowing Ralph Ellison. Jackson:

Wright, R. N. (1937). Blueprint for Negro Writing.
New Challenge, 1, 5365.
Ellroy, James
CAROLE ALLAMAND
James Ellroys panoptic study of corruption far

exceeds the boundaries of noir fiction. Beginning
with Browns Requiem in 1981, his novels have
gradually broadened in scope, moving away from
the inner world of psychopaths to reveal the
underworld of twentieth-century America. Born
on March 4, 1948 in Los Angeles, Lee Earle Ellroy
is no stranger to societys darkest corners. When
he was 10, his mothers partially undressed body
was found in a bush near their home in El Monte,
a stocking wrapped around her neck. After his
fathers death in 1965 and successive expulsions
from high school, the Army, and his apartment,
Ellroy drifted into vagrancy and petty crime. His
twisted journey through LA parks, slums, rehab
clinics, and jails, from Jean Ellroys unsolved
murder to a career as a crime fiction writer, is
depicted in his memoir My Dark Places.
Even when they were centered on murder cases,
Ellroys early plots challenge the hard-boiled
genre with their relentless subversion of the distinction between law enforcers and lawbreakers.
Inspired by Joseph Wambaughs realistic depiction of urban life and human weakness, Ellroys
seedy streets rarely fail to corrupt those who walk
them. Burglary, perjury, and assault are daily
routine for officers who, like L.A. Noirs Lloyd
Hopkins, sometimes kill in the name of justice.
The line between heroes and villains is further
blurred as Ellroys cops often share a traumatic
past with the killers they pursue. Both Crazy
Lloyd and the Hollywood Slaughterer were
raped as youths, while Jacob Herzog, Because the
Nights legendary policeman, falls prey to his
mirror image, the mad psychiatrist John Havilland, himself the son of a sadistic killer. If this keen
interest in his characters early life experiences,
reminiscent of Ross Macdonald, gives Ellroys
investigations the depth of psychopathology, it
also uncovers the personal motives behind all
police work that ultimately compromise true case
resolution. With bleaker endings than Dashiell

Hammetts, Ellroys novels attest to the impossibility of order and closure.
Ellroys widely acclaimed The Black Dahlia
offers a fictional resolution to the gruesome
1947 murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short,
Jean Ellroys admitted symbiotic substitute.
Taking corruption a step further, the opening
volume of the L.A. Quartet is the harrowing tale
of cops losing not only their integrity, but
their minds and lives as well. Warped by guilt
over harming or failing to save a loved one,
LAPD partners Dwight Bucky Bleichert and Lee
Blanchard perpetuate the very injustice they seek
to expiate. Blowing immorality up to mythical
proportions, the Quartet works hard too hard
for some at dismantling the great taboos of
Western culture through its array of incestuous
relationships, graphic scenes of dismemberment
or disfiguration, and episodes of cannibalism and
infanticide.
The Black Dahlia also marks a shift in Ellroys
literary career as historical events and personages
are woven into the novels thread, in this case with
the Zoot Suit Riots and Hollywoods backstage.
Foraying deeper into institutional bribery, the
entertainment business, and city planning, The
Big Nowhere laces together the 1950s Red Scare
and a conspiracy between organized crime and
the police, while L.A. Confidential and White Jazz
imagine the fraudulent foundation of LA landmarks such as Disneyland, the California freeway
system, and Dodgers Stadium. As politics move to
the fore of this ambitious chronicle, it is exposed
as a collusion of grudge, greed, and prejudice. To
depict this intricate network of interests, Ellroy
creates polyphonic narratives where multiple
points of view are expressed through registers
ranging from tabloid prose to police communication, from 1950s gangster slang to ethnic
speech. The need to shorten the manuscript of
L.A. Confidential, the cycles most complex novel,
allegedly spurred Ellroys use of a terser style
consisting of short declarative sentences and
hyperfocalized narration. This staccato prose is
pushed to an experimental, if not dissuasive, level
in White Jazz, Ellroys last ode to the City of Fallen
Angels.
America was never innocent, Ellroy declares
in his preface of American Tabloid, a masterful
demythicization of the Camelot years. The plot,
ERDRICH, LOUISE
spanning 1958 to 1963, follows two FBI agents

and one ex-cop through the conspiracies and
crimes behind the Bay of Pigs and, ultimately,
JFKs assassination. Devoted to the unsung
legbreakers of history, the first volume of
Underworld U.S.A. projects the corruption that
plagued the LAPD onto the CIA, the FBI, and the
White House while retaining Ellroys hallmarks:
a three-strand plot involving morally unredeemable agents haunted by their past and a telegraphic
or documentary style fashioned after news headlines, conversation transcripts, or official records.
The Cold Six Thousand continues to expose
politics as crime, through Vegas casinos and
CIA-sponsored heroin labs in Vietnam, during
the five years that led to the assassinations of
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
The last installment of Ellroys alternate history
of America, Bloods a Rover (2009), should
secure his place, next to Don DeLillo, Philip
Roth, and Thomas Pynchon, among the most
provocative voices in contemporary American
literature.
Hammett, Dashiell (AF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Mystery/Detective/Crime
Fiction (BIF); Noir Fiction (AF)

Allamand, C. (2006). A Tooth for a Private Eye: James
Ellroys Detective Fiction. Journal of Popular Culture,
39(3), 34964.
Cohen, J. (1996). James Ellroy, Los Angeles and the
Spectacular Crisis of Masculinity. Women: A Cultural
Review, 7(1), 115.
Ellroy, J. (1981). Browns Requiem. New York: Avon.
Ellroy, J. (1982). Clandestine. New York: Avon.
Ellroy, J. (1984a). L. A. Noir or the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy,
vol. 1: Blood on the Moon. New York: Mysterious
Press.
Ellroy, J. (1984b). L. A. Noir or the Lloyd Hopkins
Trilogy, vol. 2: Because the Night. New York:
Mysterious Press.
Ellroy, J. (1986a). A Killer on the Road. New York:
Avon.
Ellroy, J. (1986b). L. A. Noir or the Lloyd Hopkins
Trilogy, vol. 3: Suicide Hill. New York: Mysterious
Press.
Ellroy, J. (1987). L. A. Quartet, vol. 1: The Black Dahlia.
545
Ellroy, J. (1988). L. A. Quartet, vol. 2: The Big Nowhere.

Ellroy, J. (1990). L. A. Quartet, vol. 3: L.A. Confidential.
New York: Knopf.
Ellroy, J. (1992). L. A. Quartet, vol. 4: White Jazz. New
York: Knopf.
Ellroy, J. (1995). Underworld U.S.A., vol. 1: American
Tabloid. New York: Knopf.
Ellroy, J. (1996). My Dark Places. New York: Knopf.
Ellroy, J. (2001). Underworld U.S.A., vol. 2: The Cold Six
Thousand. New York: Knopf.
Ellroy, J. (2009). Underworld U.S.A., vol. 3: Bloods
a Rover. New York: Knopf.
Horsley, L. (1998). Founding Fathers: Genealogies of
Violence in James Ellroys L.A. Quartet. Clues: A
Journal of Detection, 19(1), 13961.
Jayanti, V. (2003). James Ellroys Feast of Death.
Asheville, NC: Dokument Films.
Silet, C. P. (1995). Mad Dog and Glory: A Conversation
with James Ellroy. Armchair Detective, 28(3), 23844.
Wolfe, P. (2005). Like Hot Knives to The Brain: James
Ellroys Search for Himself. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Erdrich, Louise
NANCY J. PETERSON
Louise Erdrichs compelling portrayal of contemporary urban and reservation Ojibwe characters
has earned her a central place in the Native
American literary renaissance that began in
1969, when N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) won the
Pulitzer Prize and inspired a generation of Native
writers. From 1984 to 2008, Erdrich has published
12 novels, two memoirs, three volumes of poetry,
as well as three young-adult novels and a picture
book geared for younger readers. Erdrich is a
prolific and accomplished chronicler of stories
involving Ojibwe characters and their neighbors,
on and off the reservation, and she is also highly
regarded as a stylist, noted for the lyrical prose
rhythms of her novels.
Born Karen Louise Erdrich in Little Falls, Minnesota on June 7, 1954, Erdrich is Ojibwe (Turtle
Mountain Band) on her mothers side and
German on her fathers side. Erdrich grew up
mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her
parents were employed by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs. In 1972, Erdrich was in the first class of
women to be admitted to Dartmouth College in
New Hampshire; there she met Michael Dorris
546
ERDRICH, LOUISE
(Modoc), a faculty member in anthropology who

founded the Native Studies program. Erdrich and
Dorris married in 1981, and were co-authors
and collaborators until their marriage failed and
Dorris committed suicide in 1997.
Erdrichs first novel, Love Medicine (1993
[1984]), was published to great acclaim. It introduces several major families the Kashpaws,
Pillagers, Lamartines, Nanapushes, and Lazarres
that reappear in other novels. It focuses on the
generation coming of age in the 1980s but flashes
back to episodes set 40 and 50 years earlier to weave
a series of connections that have shaped presentday conflicts and crises, both personal and tribal.
The Beet Queen (1986) focuses primarily on the
town of Argus, adjacent to the reservation, but for
her subsequent novels Tracks (1988), The Bingo
Palace (1994), and Tales of Burning Love (1996)
Erdrich develops stories related to the Ojibwe
families and characters introduced in Love
Medicine.
Like Toni Morrison, Erdrich has been influenced by the interlinked characters and stories of
William Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County. In
Erdrichs North Dakota, the casinos and Native
communities of the reservation adjoin the beet
fields and butcher shops of towns settled primarily by German immigrants. Like Faulkners
Snopeses, Bundrens, and Compsons, Erdrichs
Morrisseys, Nanapushes, and Kashpaws lead
complicated daily lives that take on epic dimensions and come to represent the history of an
entire region. Also, like Faulkner, Erdrich has
forged her own distinctive literary style: she employs a lyricism that heightens the meaningfulness
and potency of even the most ordinary objects and
circumstances.
Critics have admired Erdrichs ability to juxtapose the real and the magical, the ordinary and the
strange, the historical and the mythical. While
some readers have described her fiction as employing aspects of magic realism, Erdrichs later
novels often include notes pointing to a historical
or factual basis for some extraordinary elements.
Because of Erdrichs adept ability to create
novels that shift fluidly from present to past and
back again, as well as her tendency to employ
multiple narrative perspectives in one novel, some
of Erdrichs work falls under what scholars have
termed historiographic metafiction. Erdrich is
concerned with the way that Native American
history has been marginalized, and the loss

of Ojibwe traditions, language, and land forms
a central theme in her novels.
In 1998, Erdrich published The Antelope Wife,
a novel set in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the first
of her novels not to focus on the families introduced in Love Medicine. Since then, Erdrich has
published five other novels, two that extend the
stories of characters introduced in previous novels
(The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
and Four Souls), and three others that focus on new
characters (The Master Butchers Singing Club, The
Painted Drum, and The Plague of Doves). In all of
her work, Erdrich creates a strong sense of place
(location and time) that shapes her characters in
significant ways, she portrays the pull of love and
desire in sometimes astonishing ways, she develops a fierce critique of injustice, and she leavens her
most serious episodes with moments of humor.
The thread that links all of her characters Natives
and non-Natives alike is their endurance and
tenacity. Throughout her works, Erdrich portrays
tremendous hardships and disappointments, but
her emphasis lies firmly on what enables people
to survive.
Erdrich has also written two memoirs: The Blue
Jays Dance chronicles her struggle to balance
motherhood and her work as a writer, while Books
and Islands in Ojibwe Country narrates a physical
and spiritual journey into the islands and waters
lying between northern Minnesota and Ontario.
Erdrich brings the accomplished lyrical prose
style and the marvelous storytelling ability of her
novels into these non-fiction works.
Faulkner, William (AF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Momaday, N. Scott (AF);
Morrison, Toni (AF)

Beidler, P. G., & Barton, G. (2006). A Readers Guide to
the Novels of Louise Erdrich, rev. edn. Columbia:
University of Missouri Press.
Chavkin, A. (ed.) (1999). The Chippewa Landscape of
Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press.
Chavkin, A., & Chavkin, N. F. (eds.) (1994).
Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
ETHNICITY AND FICTION
Erdrich, L. (1986). The Beet Queen. New York: Henry

Holt.
Erdrich, L. (1988). Tracks. New York: Harper.
Erdrich, L. (with Dorris, M.) (1991). The Crown of
Columbus. New York: HarperCollins.
Erdrich, L. (1993). Love Medicine [1984]. New York:
Henry Holt.
Erdrich, L. (1994). The Bingo Palace. New York:
HarperCollins.
Erdrich, L. (1995). The Blue Jays Dance: A Birth Year.
Erdrich, L. (1996). Tales of Burning Love. New York:
HarperCollins.
Erdrich, L. (1998). The Antelope Wife. New York:
HarperFlamingo.
Erdrich, L. (2001). The Last Report on the Miracles at
Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins.
Erdrich, L. (2003a). Books and Islands in Ojibwe
Country. Washington, DC: National Geographic.
Erdrich, L. (2003b). The Master Butchers Singing Club.
Erdrich, L. (2004). Four Souls. New York:
HarperCollins.
Erdrich, L. (2005). The Painted Drum. New York:
HarperCollins.
Erdrich, L. (2008). The Plague of Doves. New York:
HarperCollins.
Hollrah, P. E. M. (2004). The Old Lady Trill, the Victory
Yell: The Power of Women in Native American
Literature. New York: Routledge.
Peterson, N. J. (2001). Against Amnesia: Contemporary
Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory.
Wong, H. D. S. (ed.) (2000). Louise Erdrichs Love
Medicine: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Ethnicity and Fiction

VICTOR BASCARA
Ethnicity, as an idea, forms a productive throughline for the literary history of twentieth-century
American fiction. The changing fate of ethnicity,
whether it is celebrated, assimilated away, or
futilely eschewed, charts the cultural politics of
the American century. In terms of literary movements, ethnicity is commonly associated with
realism, naturalism, and regionalism, that is, with
literary movements that are presumed to emphasize content over form. Ethnicity, in this way of
thinking, functions as a source from which content emanates via an otherwise transparent text.
547
And so various elements become visible in the

form of ethnic traces distinct cultural markers
and practices that set off an identifiably ethnic
group from other groups. A list of those traces
would include everything from food, religion,
language, and fashion choices to aesthetic priorities, architecture, and kinship structures. But
ethnicity is also a vital component of modernist
and postmodernist experiments in representation, for ethnicity can be appreciated not only as
a source of material but also as an epistemological
standpoint that makes manifest the heterogeneity
of perspectives that twentieth-century fiction
has drawn upon to give critical expression to
America.
The arc of the twentieth century, viewed from
the standpoint of ethnicity, sketches out a hesitant
hope for melting-pot uniformity, leading to disillusionment in the face of deep and persistent
factionalization. Despite the fact of conspicuous
stories of social mobility, even for the ethnically
marked, American civilization continued to be
materially and ideologically maintained by its
historical intersections of class formation and
gendered racialization. Out of those ethnic problems, the mid to late twentieth century witnessed
the emergence of pluralistic mosaic and salad
bowl models. The promises and pitfalls of neoliberal globalization continue to test those models in
ever larger frames. Rather than exhaustively catalog the many works that engage with ethnicity
and fiction, two influential studies, considered
together, may serve as reasonably representative
of the critical discourse on the cultural politics of
fiction and ethnicity: Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (1983), and Lisa Lowes
Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural
Politics (1997). Although it emerges from Southeast Asian studies, Andersons book has shaped
the study of nationalism more broadly through its
examination of the epistemologies and institutions that produce national consciousness out of
diverse populations across vast geographical terrain. And Lowes book, while principally about
Asian America, offers far-reaching formulations
for tracing the culture of contradiction that
emerges when national culture and the US state
struggle to imagine community against terms
and conditions upon which (late) capitalism has
relied, such as race, class, and gender.
548
Two related themes then play out through

ethnicity in twentieth-century American fiction:
the ability or inability to conflate calcified barriers
of race into ethnicities that can be shed, and the
hopes and horrors that are pinned on the persistence of ethnicity in the face of a mainstream US
national consciousness. In appreciating these two
themes, we can appreciate the role of fiction in
shaping ethnicity and the role of ethnicity in the
shaping of fiction.
From the turn of the twentieth century to the
1920s, ethnicity falls out of favor as modernist
experimentation develops and ascends. While
American poetry has generally had more prominence in these experiments, ethnic fiction,
particularly stories of immigrant assimilation and
other forms of uneasy adjustment, became an
important genre in the social institution of
the novel. Two experimental, non-fictional texts
from the turn of the century threw down
a gauntlet to challenge the capacities of fiction:
Jacob Riiss How the Other Half Lives: Studies
Among the Tenements of New York (1980) and
W. E. B. Du Boiss The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
Riiss thinly veiled reformist sensibilities and
observational acuity, along with photographic
documentation, proved every bit as engaging as
any invented realities. Indeed, the realness of his
subject matter and the vividness and partiality of
his narration anticipated everything from the
cynical hard-boiled noir detective and postwar
alienation to twentieth-century incarnations
of the flanêur and postmodern irony. The great
majority of Riiss subjects were marked by their
ethnicity in his study, as indeed they were in
social and economic practice. New York becomes
a stand-in for the nation and its racial and ethnic
problems.
Du Boiss The Souls of Black Folk both embraced and exceeded the methods of the nascent
social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology. He infused these methods of analysis with
the autobiographical, the historical, and even the
musical, giving textual form to an epistemology
systematically marginalized and marked as the
antithesis to the Wests thesis. Perhaps a third
topically pertinent but formally less adventurous
text can be added to this list of influential nonfiction renderings of ethnicity at the turn of the
century: Theodore Roosevelts The Rough Riders.
Roosevelts narrative holds up an image of diver-
sity of ethnicity amidst sameness of purpose. The

Riders can be considered the Platonic ideal of
functional American heterogeneity, realized in
the form of a military unit of volunteers fighting
shoulder to shoulder for the liberation of Cuba
from Spanish rule, and to avenge the alleged
Spanish sinking of the USS Maine.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, these
three texts clarify how the form and content
of American fiction is integrally linked to the fate
of ethnicity. By taking up the issue of how the
other half lives, Riis and Du Bois show how how
it feels to be a problem can mean how it feels to
have ethnicity. And when fiction takes up these
matters, the results test the capacities of representation and of the nation itself. Gertrude Steins
Three Lives (1909), particularly Melanctha, is an
instance of experimentation intersecting with
ethnicity. The storys monotonous narration
conveys a sense of being trapped in a cycle of
reproduced social relations, pathologized as individuated failure. F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great
Gatsby (1925) concerns, among other things, the
familiar trope of American reinvention. And
ethnicity is seen as the millstone around the neck
of Fitzgeralds titular Trimalchio of West Egg. The
doffing of one ethnicity contained in the name
Gatz and the donning of another the more
Anglophilic Gatsby is the classic abortive
attempt to outrun ones roots. In both Steins
and Fitzgeralds texts, the genres they take on,
short story and novel respectively, are to some
extent reinvented to express the experience
of ethnicity. The short story and the novel
become media of incommensurability and failure, instead of artworks that manage to incorporate the individual into the nation, however
elegantly or messily. While neither of these texts
is overtly political, they draw on ethnicity to
articulate the inequalities and illusions of the
American dream for those for whom ethnic
difference is a personal characteristic and a historical inheritance.
The more overtly political fiction of the early
twentieth century, particularly the writing generally associated with literary naturalism, such as
Jack Londons The Call of the Wild (1903), White
Fang (1906), and The Sea Wolf (1904); Upton
Sinclairs The Jungle (1906); and Frank Norriss
McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901), focuses
on the impersonality of a universe that obeys only
the harsh laws of nature. With the notable exception of The Jungles Lithuanian American protagonist, overtly ethnic characters do not occupy the
center of these narratives. Vaguely unmarked
whiteness is reproduced, emphasizing a blankness
of character in the face of forces larger than private
will and community sentiment.
With the onset of the Great Depression and the
social upheavals and possibilities that such a crisis
brings, ethnicity returns as both a problem and
a source of alternative visions at a time when
alternative visions are badly needed. California
writer John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath
(1939) is the most ironically monumental text
about the hard times of the 1930s and 1940s,
a period which witnessed an unquestionable flowering of leftist cultural production. The Joads,
while not bearing any version of ethnicity tied to
Old World traditions (as do, say, the Bohemian
Shimerdas of Willa Cathers prairies in My
Antonia [1918]), embody the emergence of a new
regionalist ethnicity rooted in New World conditions. As Okies, they fashion an ethnicity forged
in both the privations of natural disaster and the
man-made dispossession made possible through
the failures of finance capitalism to sustain the
family farm as a business model. As the Okies
migrate westward to California, their ethnicity
is made brutally operational as they become the
target of exploitation, fear, and hatred; at the same
time, they adhere to their identities as a source of
community and morality in the face of alienation
and immorality.
Chicagos prolific Richard Wright rose to
national attention by giving expression to the
explosive convergence of regionalism, race, and
political economy. His autobiographical Black
Boy (1945), especially in its fuller form as American Hunger (1977), his novel Native Son (1940),
and his Blueprint for Negro Writing, are
all searing indictments of the failures of both
capitalist-conservative and socialist-progressive
positions in American political debates about
post-Emancipation, urbanizing African Americans. Bigger Thomas, Wright himself, and the
idea of Negro writing, provide complex and
compelling evidence of the dynamics of racial and
ethnic difference and the maintenance of the
American underclass. In hindsight, it is possible
to see how Wright, even before Ralph Ellisons
Invisible Man (1952), dramatizes the shift away
549
from 1930s socialism as an answer to the problems of American inequality and toward the
heterogeneous postwar political coalitions that
would usher in the New Left on the ruins of the
Old.
For some World War II-era writers, the solidarity of the anti-fascist cause makes ethnicity and
class position disposable in American fiction. A
book like John Herseys A Bell for Adano (1944)
draws on the trope of the innocent abroad as
a vehicle for Americanism. Victor Joppolo is not
only an American in occupied Italy, but also an
Italian American. He is both knowing and wideeyed, the very embodiment of post-isolationist
America. The war may have begun with the
winning over of Humphrey Bogarts expatriate
left-winger Rick Blaine in Casablanca, a loyalist
participant in the Spanish Civil War and gun
runner to Ethiopia, but it ends with the everyman
Joppolo, who endures the comical foibles of
Italian villagers unlearning fascism with the help
of an ethnic American soldier who presages the
predicament of the Jack Lemmon-esque postwar
middle manager.
The early postwar years are known for their
fabled conformity and prosperity. Despite and
because of this conformity, this era would produce masterpieces of countercultural literature,
such as Jack Kerouacs On the Road (1957) and
Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man. Even J. D.
Salingers The Catcher in the Rye (1951) taps into
the periods growing skepticism of the overwhelming pressure to adhere to unsustainable
social, economic, and political conditions. And,
fittingly, those are the texts of that era that were
and are celebrated. Kerouacs motley assemblage
of itinerants in Eisenhowers America is the latest
edition of Roosevelts Rough Riders, an ethnically
diverse but ideologically uniform band of siblings.
They carry on the tradition of a functional or
at least not dysfunctional diversity. Holden
Caulfield, while about as non-ethnic as one
can get, nevertheless continues to reach across
the ethnic divide by being discontented with
the hypocrisy demanded of him. His failure to
reconcile his behavior with his beliefs becomes
an analogous form of ineradicable ethnicity that
leads to his breakdown. What may seem to be
individually pathologized as the failure of one
northeastern prep school adolescent becomes
a stand-in for any constituency similarly at cross
550
purposes with the round hole available to their

collective square peg. The continued postwar
appeal (and cinematic adaptations) of the noir
literature of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett,
and Raymond Chandler is of a piece with
Holdens desire to be drawn into the underbelly
of the presentable and decidedly non-ethnic
America of the Cleavers and Ozzie and Harriet.
Sensational and scandalous crime fiction then can
be understood as a form of literature about ethnic
difference difference explored not only through
the actual depiction of urban diversity but also
through the desired disillusionment of mainstream, unmarked America, drawn to the Hades
in its midst.
Ellisons Invisible Man is the most sustained
and devastating examination of the alienated
individual, ethnicity, or class unable to reconcile
himself, herself, or itself with the historically
sedimented and deeply interested order of things
as they are. The unnamed narrator is an
African American young man from the South
who makes his way from disgrace at a historically
black college to prominence in the Brotherhood
(the Communist Party) in New York City to
a state of isolation and hibernation. The novels
narrative ends with the race riot that occasioned
the narrators subterranean occlusion, and an
epilogue that speculates on the possibility of the
alienated racial/ethnic individual on the threshold of reentering the above-ground world. And on
the occasion of the narrators return and all that it
may symbolize, the era loosely called the 1960s is
born.
The 1960s, broadly understood, occasions the
emergence of the New Left social movements that
enshrine ethnicity as a source of power. The much
commented-upon flowering of self-determining,
self-affirming, identity-based mobilizations in the
US would include movements like Black Power,
Brown Power, Yellow Power, La Raza, Aztlan, the
American Indian Movement, Womens Liberation, Stonewall/Gay Rights, and the Third World
Liberation Front, among others. Ethnic fictions
role in characterizing and inspiring these times is
arguably less central than the power of nonfiction and other art forms such as music, visual
art, and film. Key non-fiction works, such as those
by Frantz Fanon, Betty Friedan, Herbert Marcuse,
Eldridge Cleaver, Truman Capote, and Rachel
Carson, were literary and intellectual bombshells
exploding the complacency of the postwar era.

Ethnic literature of this era, particularly loosely
autobiographical works, gave voice to protest and
articulated the contemporary condition and its
origins. Paule Marshalls pioneering Brown Girl,
Brownstones (1959) tells a coming-of-age story of
Selina Boyce, a daughter of Barbadian immigrants
in 1930s Brooklyn. As with Marshalls later fiction, Brown Girl, Brownstones weaves together
personal and family dramas with larger economic,
social, and historical concerns. Selina rejects her
communitys embrace of mainstream, capitalistic
ideals and embraces instead a more critical and
artistic future. Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird
(1960) is perhaps the great example of this use
of autobiographical social protest literature.
Widower Atticus Finch, who believes that Tom
Robinson will get a fair trial in 1930s Alabama, is
the hero of progressive ideals. Lees novel manages to avoid saccharine sentimental ideals by
having the single dad Finch thoughtfully compromise his ideals in a way that generations of the
novels readers have approved of. Lees novel thus
becomes a radical critique of the terms by which
raced and classed differences have functional
meaning. And it offers a potentially ruthless and
devastating solution that shakes enlightenment
liberalism to its very foundations.
The 1980s and 1990s turn the ethnic empowerment of the 1960s and 1970s into multiculturalism and its defanging of difference, for better or
for worse. Ethnicity is seen mainly as a private
family matter; over are the days of turning for
public and even governmental means to redress
racial and ethnic inequalities. The extremely popular writings of Amy Tan, Terry MacMillan, and
E. Lynn Harris continue to find a readership that
finds these more conservative visions of ethnic
difference palatable. Tans The Joy Luck Club
(1989) was era-defining. It offered four sets of
paired stories about mothers and daughters,
whose intergenerational tensions and resolutions
successfully negotiate the trials and tribulations
of being ethnic in America. Here, intrafamilial
ethnicity is the source of both the problems and
their solutions. Shame about ones ethnicity in the
second generation and shame about ones immigrant ethnic mother are eventually overcome in
an affirmation of being Chinese American. But,
broadly speaking, any ethnicity could be imagined
as that source of shame-cum-pride.
With the turn of the twenty-first century,

ethnicity empowered the fictions of globalized
neoliberalism through ethnic cosmopolitanism.
But it also demonstrated the limitations of utopian conceptions of a world aligned through
markets but deferential to alternative, yet contained, cultural practices. Jessica Hagedorns
Dogeaters (1991), with its collage-like form and
fever-dream vision of postcolonial Manila,
exploited both the capaciousness as well as the
limitations of the novel form to represent Philippine and Philippine American conditions. At
a moment when a global village ideal was reaching
its apex, the representability of ethnicity in American fiction got both a shot in the arm and a shot in
the head. Philip Roths American Pastoral (1998)
is similarly epic, taking on the rise and fall of
Jewish American industrialist Seymour Swede
Levov. The story of his life and his ethnicity is
a powerful through-line for appreciating the
waxing and waning of US industrialization, as
postwar urban blight, deindustrialization, Cold
War decolonization, and desegregation reach into
the life of one Newark-based glove manufacturer.
That story, like that of ethnicity in twentiethcentury American fiction more broadly, reads like
a tragedy. It remains to be seen whether the
twenty-first century will reap the transformative
catharsis such a tragedy can produce.
SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodemist
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso.
Cain, J. M. (1947). Double Indemnity. New York: Avon.
Capote, T. (1994). In Cold Blood: A True Account of
a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York:
Vintage.
Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. New York: Fawcett
Crest.
Cather, W. (1988). My Antonia. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Chandler, R. (1992). Farewell, My Lovely. New York:
Vintage.
Cleaver, E. (1967). Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill.
DuBois, W. E. B. (1999). The Souls of Black Folk. New
York: Norton.
551
Ellison, R. (2002). Invisible Man. New York: Random

House.
Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth. New York:
Grove Press.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1991). The Great Gatsby. New York:
Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. New York:
Norton.
Hagedorn, J. (1990). Dogeaters. New York: Pantheon.
Hammett, D. (1974). The Maltese Falcon. New York:
Universe.
Harris, E. L. (1994). Invisible Life. New York: Anchor.
Hersey, J. (1946). A Bell for Adano. New York: Modern
Library.
Kerouac, J. (1957). On the Road. New York: Viking.
Lee, H. (1960). To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia:
Lippincott.
London, J. (1962). The Call of the Wild. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
London, J. (1973). White Fang. Avon, CT: Heritage.
London, J. (1992). The Sea Wolf. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Lowe, L. (1997). Immigrant Acts: On Asian American
Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
MacMillan, T. (1992). Waiting to Exhale. New York:
Washington Square.
Marcuse, H. (1964). The One-Dimensional Man: Studies
in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies.
Boston: Beacon.
Marshall, P. (1959). Brown Girl, Brownstones. New
York: Random House.
Norris, F. (1982). McTeague: A Story of San Francisco.
New York: Penguin.
Norris, F. (1986). The Octopus: A Story of California.
New York: Penguin.
Riis, J. (1997). How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among
the Tenements of New York. New York: Penguin.
Roosevelt, T. (1961). The Rough Riders. New York: New
American Library.
Roth, P. (1998). American Pastoral. New York: Vintage.
Salinger, J. D. (1994). The Catcher in the Rye. New York:
Penguin.
Sinclair, U. (1985). The Jungle. New York: Penguin.
Stein, G. (1970). Three Lives. New York: Peter Owen.
Steinbeck, J. (1976). The Grapes of Wrath. New York:
Penguin.
Tan, A. (1989). The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnams.
Wright, R. (1945). Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and
Youth. New York: Harper.
Wright, R. (1977). American Hunger. New York: Harper
and Row.
Wright, R. (2004). Blueprint for Negro Writing. In The
Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
New York: Norton pp. 140310.
552
EUGENIDES, JEFFREY
Eugenides, Jeffrey
PATRICK ODONNELL
A writer attentive to the eccentricities and hazards

of middle-class life and coming of age in America,
Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of two novels and
a spate of short stories that have catapulted him
into visibility as one of the premiere young novelists of the post-1980 generation. Born in Detroit,
Michigan in 1960 and raised in the affluent suburb of Grosse Point, Eugenides attended Brown
University as an undergraduate (where as an
aspiring writer he would have encountered John
Hawkes and Robert Coover), and received the
MFA in creative writing from Stanford University. He currently resides with his wife and daughter
in Princeton, New Jersey.
Eugenidess first novel, The Virgin Suicides
(1993), is set in his native Grosse Point. Told
from the perspective of an anonymous narrator
who grew up with the five daughters of the Lisbon
family, the novel is a story of a fall from grace
and the false utopia of normalcy. The Lisbons are
a Catholic, middle-class family who, to all outward appearances, seem to live quietly successful
lives behind the facade of a well-kept house
located in a safe, orderly suburban neighborhood.
The five beautiful Lisbon daughters ranging
from the oldest, Therese, who is 17, to the youngest, Cecilia, who is 13 appear to be happy
teenagers, if somewhat mysterious and reclusive,
a club unto themselves. But everything changes
when Cecilia first attempts a failed suicide by
slashing her wrists, then leaps from a window
and dies horrifically, impaled on a fence post,
suggesting the utter reversal of fortune that has
descended upon the Lisbon family and the whitepicket-fence neighborhood of Grosse Point.
Following the suicide and the spreading
rumors about what caused Cecilia to take her
life, the Lisbon family becomes more reclusive
even as they become a source of greater attention
and fascination to their neighbors. The Lisbon
house literally begins to fall apart, and the
remaining four girls are rarely seen outside the
house (they are taken out of school by their
mother in order to help them recover from the
tragedy). The narrator, one of a group of teenage
boys who form an unofficial club of their own
as they become increasingly enamored with
the increasingly mysterious Lisbon daughters,

recounts a succession of months in which the
boys communicate with the girls by playing records over the phone. In the novels stunning
climax, the boys are invited to visit the Lisbon
girls, but shortly after their arrival, the four Lisbon
daughters commit mass suicide (one daughter
survives the attempt for a few days, but subsequently dies in the hospital). This inexplicable act
of self-destruction haunts the boys lives into
adulthood, and as the narrator looks back on this
traumatic incident of his adolescence, he reflects
upon the death of innocence and the potential for
destruction lying just beneath the surface of the
normal. The Virgin Suicides was made into a film
directed by Sofia Coppola in 1999.
The illusion of normalcy and the non-normative is also at the center of Middlesex (2002), which
won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The
novels narrator and protagonist is Calliope Stephanides, who is born and raised as a girl but who
discovers, at the age of 14, that she is hermaphroditic (possessing female sex organs but male
chromosomes) and who chooses to become male,
thus necessitating a complicated and painful
operation. In many ways, Middlesex is a mutation
of the classic Bildungsroman the novel of the
young man growing up as it recounts multiple
family stories of Cals family migrating from
a small Greek village to Detroit, and Callies youth
and adolescence in Motown during the 1960s
and 1970s. Told from the perspective of Cal at the
age of 41, the novel observes the quest for identity
under difficult circumstances as Callie/Cal experiences the extremes of gender confusion and the
pressure to conform to the expectations and
norms of the sexuality into which one has been
born. Eugenidess protagonist embodies the idea
that ones gender is both a biological and social
construction, and that patterns of behavior and
desire are both innate and imposed from without.
In paralleling Cals story to the story of his grandparents immigration to America, the novel also
suggests that the family story is one of mutation,
adaptation, and assimilation over time one in
which difference and alterity are vital parts.
Eugenidess short stories have appeared in
notable venues such as the New Yorker, Granta,
Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart
Prize annual. Like his novels, Eugenidess stories
EVERETT, PERCIVAL
often reflect the odd interactions of family life

beneath the veneer of the everyday, and the ways
in which domesticity and normalcy conflict
with the idiosyncrasies of identity. Eugenides
has also written a number of important introductions to reissues of key contemporary
novels, including John Hawkess Second Skin,
Saul Bellows Humboldts Gift, and Peter
Handkes A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; he has
edited an anthology of short stories entitled My
Mistresss Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories
From Chekhov to Munro (2008). Eugenidess
non-fiction includes an interest in contemporary photography, and he has contributed to
volumes on the German photographer Thomas
Demand and the American model architect
and photographer James Casebere. Focusing
on interiority and perspective, Eugenides is
notable amongst contemporary American novelists for his attention to domestic realism
and psychological detail while charting the
strange adventures of identity, in postmodernist
senses, as mutable and always in the process of
becoming.
SEE ALSO: Coover, Robert (AF); Gender and
the Novel (AF); Hawkes, John (AF);

Cohen, S. (2007). The Novel in a Time of Terror:
Middlesex, History, and Contemporary American
Fiction. Twentieth Century Literature, 53(3),
37195.
Eugenides, J. (1993). The Virgin Suicides. New York:
Eugenides, J. (1997a). Air Mail. In E. Annie Proulx
(ed.), The Best American Short Stories 1997. New
York: Houghton Mifflin.
Eugenides, J. (1997b). The Speed of Sperm. Granta, 54.
At www.granta.com/Magazine/54 (by subscription).
Eugenides, J. (1999). Timeshare. In The Pushcart Prize
XXIII. New York: Pushcart, pp. 12738.
Eugenides, J. (2002). Middlesex: A Novel. New York:
Eugenides, J. (2005). Early Music. New Yorker, pp. 729
(Oct. 10).
Miller, L. (2002). Interview with Jeff Eugenides. Salon
(Oct. 10). At www.salon.com/audio/interview/2002/
10/15/eugenides/index.html accessed Jan. 19, 2010.
553
Person, L. (2005). Middlesex: What Men Like in Men.

American Literary History, 17(4), 75364.
Womack, K., & Mallory-Kani, A. (2007). Why Dont
You Just Leave It Up to Nature? An Adaptationist
Reading of the Novels of Jeffrey Eugenides. Mosaic,
40(3), 15774.
Everett, Percival
ANNE-LAURE TISSUT
Percival Everett is a novelist whose varied work

escapes categories. It is formally inventive, is
intellectually challenging, and abounds in crosscultural references, from Greek antiquity to
European philosophers via American music, pop
culture, history, and current events. He is first and
foremost a storyteller whose narratives offer deftly
created suspense, often unresolved endings, as
well as fully realized figures. His recurring concerns are intolerance, cruelty, the uncertainties
of identity, and, more recently, creation and
the production of meaning. His canon includes
17 novels, three collections of short stories,
a childrens book, and a collection of poems, and
has been translated into four languages.
Everett was born in Columbia, South Carolina
in 1956, and majored in philosophy and biochemistry at the University of Miami. He is the
recipient of several literary awards and has
served as a judge for many. He currently teaches
fiction writing at the University of Southern
California.
Increasingly his focus is on the functioning
and dysfunctioning of language as well as on its
relation to truth and our perception of reality, in
which the major and lasting influence of Ludwig
Wittgenstein is evident. From his earliest novels,
Everett plays with the vacillation between the real
and unreal, thus puzzling readers. While he
refuses to be viewed simply as a black writer, his
work addresses the issues related to ethnic identity
but without focusing on them exclusively. References to the African American literary tradition
abound to Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison,
and Richard Wright among references to many
others, such as Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, and
Greek philosophers.
Zulus (1990b) is a futuristic tale with apocalyptic undertones, offering a highly poetic and
554
EVERETT, PERCIVAL
subtle play of language. In a society in which all

but one woman have been sterilized, language
seems to be the only means left for renewal, as
suggested by the introductions to each chapter,
consisting in poetic elaborations around the
letters of the alphabet taken successively.
A number of his novels follow the pattern of
detective stories, namely, Walk Me to the Distance
(1985), The Body of Martin Aguilera (1994),
Watershed (1996), Glyph (1999), and most recently Wounded (2005). Glyph narrates the comic
adventures of a baby who will not speak but can
read the most complex philosophical treatises
and write abstract poems, later published in the
collection re: f (gesture). Through the story of his
abduction by secret agents who hope to use him as
a spy, Everett reflects on the act of signification.
Everett regards the novel as that closest to his way
of thinking, while he sees Wounded as his most
experimental, because he had rarely explored the
realistic genre before.
Erasure (2001a) is probably his most notorious
novel, or at least the book that established him in
Europe, and deals with issues of identity and the
artists dilemma and between creative honesty
and compromising ones art under financial pressures. The question of literary categorization is
explicit in this novel: should a rewriting of Greek
mythology or tragedies by an African American
writer be classified as African American fiction?
In The Water Cure (2007), the major questions
underlying Everetts work as a whole come to the
fore, such as how meaning is produced. The
narrators young daughter has been raped and
murdered, and he takes revenge upon the presumed culprit by submitting him to water board
torture. The novel is a denunciation of the United
States culture of violence and international
military interventions, especially the war in Iraq.
The reader is led to wonder about communication and the fact that a man can make no sense
and still have the senselessness of his utterances be
true (2007, 66). In addition to explicitly addressing the issue, the narrator produces paragraphs
in a private argot reminiscent of Finnegans Wake.
Such questioning is complemented by Everetts
important work as a painter, and his admission
that he is drawn to this art form as an alternative
to language. Throughout The Water Cure, the
reader is compelled to invent new reading modes,
which question not only ones relation to text and
its understanding but also the very notion of genre

as an organizing principle.
Everett has been investigating all literary
genres, from poetry to the epistolary pastiche,
with the hilarious A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond: As
Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid
(2006), co-written with James Kincaid, as well as
more intellectual and philosophical investigations in Glyph, Erasure, and The Water Cure. His
short stories are typically open-ended and surreal,
characterized by fantastic accounts of facts. His
latest novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2008), plays
with the construct of Sidney Poitier and the
notions of identity and misunderstandings due
to language structures.
Berben-Masi, J. (2004). Percival Everetts Glyph.
Prisons of the Body Physical, Political and
Academic. In M. Fludernik (ed.), In the Grip of
the Law: Trials, Prisons and the Space Between
(intro. M. Fludernik). Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
pp. 22339.
Eaton, K. (2006). Deconstructing the Narrative,
Language, Genre, and Experience in Erasure. Nebula,
3(23), 22032.
Everett, P. (1990a). For Her Dark Skin. Seattle: Owl
Creek.
Everett, P. (1990b). Zulus. Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent
Press.
Everett, P. (1997). Frenzy. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf.
Everett, P. (1999). Glyph. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf.
Everett, P. (2001a). Erasure. Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England.
Everett, P. (2001b). Grand Canyon, Inc. San Francisco:
Versus.
Everett, P. (2004a). American Desert. New York:
Hyperion.
Everett, P. (2004b). A History of the African-American
People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond: As Told to
Percival Everett and James Kincaid. New York:
Akashic.
Everett, P. (2005). Wounded. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf.
Everett, P. (2006). re: f (gesture). Los Angeles: Red Hen.
Everett, P. (2007). The Water Cure. St. Paul, MN:
Graywolf.
Everett, P. (2008). I Am Not Sidney Poitier. St. Paul, MN:
Graywolf.
EXPATRIATE FICTION
Julien, C., & Tissut, A.-L. (eds.) (2007). Reading Percival

Everett: European Perspectives. Tours, France: PUFR.
Kincaid, J. (ed.) (2005). Percival Everett [special issue].
Callalloo, 28(2), 292381.
Maniez, C., & Tissut, A.-L. (eds.) (2007). Percival
Everett: Transatlantic Readings. Paris: Le Manuscrit.
Ramsey, W. M. (2005). Knowing Their Place: Three
Black Writers and the Postmodern South. Southern
Literary Journal, 37(2), 11939.
Sanchez-Arce, A. M. (2007). Authenticism, or the
Authority of Authenticity. Mosaic, 40(3), 13955.
Expatriate Fiction
MATTHEW HART
At its simplest, the term expatriate fiction

identifies narratives written by Americans who
happen to live overseas; more narrowly, it refers to
fiction in which the fact of an authors residence
abroad is matched by a concern with how modern
life is shaped by the crossing of national borders
and the interaction of diverse cultures. An example of the first type is Edith Whartons Ethan
Frome (1911), which despite its New England
setting was written in France (and begun as
a French-language composition). The second
group is nicely illustrated by Djuna Barness
Nightwood (1936) a work of American fiction,
largely composed in an English country house,
which finds its subject matter in the world of the
Parisian avant garde. Indeed, the formal and
linguistic estrangement of a novel like Nightwood
is partly due to the way that, by the beginning of
the twentieth century, cities like Paris and London
were home to a bewildering array of different
languages and peoples. In the artistic quarters of
such cities, not only was the expatriate artist an
increasingly common social type, but also the
experience of a foreign person in an unfamiliar
city becomes a metaphor for our encounter
with the deeper alienations of modern literature
(Williams 1989, 3748).
However, it is finally difficult to maintain
a hard distinction between wholly and merely
circumstantial expatriate fiction. Richard Wrights
The Outsider (1953), for instance, follows the
Wharton example by being written in Paris and
set in the US. But as a meditation on African
American subjectivity, it mixes the authors
555
homegrown experience of racial politics with

the existentialist worldview that flowered
in postwar France. The situation is still more
different when one considers Patricia Highsmiths Ripliad series (five novels published
between 1955 and 1991). While the first volume
in the series, The Talented Mr. Ripley, predates
Highsmiths move from New York to Europe
by several years, it nevertheless offers a profound meditation on the way that, taken to
violent extremes, the desire to reinvent the self
outside the boundaries of the nation can exact a
terrible price on all involved. For the orphaned
American youth Tom Ripley, the journey from
New York to Italy is a crucial stage in the
annihilation of his past and of himself, a metaphorical self-slaughter that joins a cosmopolitans
love for European high culture with a distinctly
vernacular taste for murder (Highsmith 1955,
111). Such liminal texts point to the difficulty of
erecting a taxonomical barrier between narratives
that are expatriate in origin or theme.
Although expatriate narratives account for
a small proportion of twentieth-century American
fiction, many of the countrys leading fiction
writers have lived abroad. Take, for example, the
American literary community in Paris, which
has at times possessed a luminosity befitting the
so-called City of Lights. In the years between
the World Wars, Paris was home to such talents
as Sherwood Anderson, Barnes, Emily Coleman,
John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon,
Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and Wharton herself. And not only novelists decamped to the city
that has been called the capital of the literary
world . . . an idealized city where artistic freedom
could be proclaimed and lived (Casanova 1994,
24). Even restricting the list to Americans alone,
the group of modernist-era expatriates includes
the poets e. e. cummings, Eugene Jolas, and Ezra
Pound; visual artists like Man Ray and Alexander
Calder; patrons and publishers such as Sylvia
Beach and Mary Phelps Jacob; and performers
of the stature of Josephine Baker and Isadora
Duncan. This phenomenon was repeated to
a lesser degree after World War II, when African
American writers like Wright, James Baldwin,
and Chester Himes left Jim Crow America and
Norman Mailer studied at the Sorbonne. In both
periods, the American presence in Paris came in the
556
EXPATRIATE FICTION
wake of the countrys involvement in global conflagrations that (through combat service or experience in the vast auxiliary machinery of total war)
introduced thousands of men and women to the
pleasures of life overseas, teaching them new languages and habits of mind, and letting them reap
the foreign fruits of American victory.
While Hemingway wrote that there is never
any ending to Paris, the modernists were in fact
only continuing a long tradition of literary expatriation (Hemingway 1964, 211). Benjamin
Franklin famously spent long years in England
and France; nineteenth-century novelists like
James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel
Hawthorne also spent considerable time in Europe; and a generation before Hemingway, Henry
James established a critical and commercial market for narratives about the American encounter
with the Old World. Indeed, between early and
late novels like Roderick Hudson (18756) and The
Golden Bowl (1904), James made the clash between American naivety and European cynicism
one of the principal themes of his writing.
Europe was not, however, the only destination
for American writers. The literary and humanitarian career of Pearl S. Buck carries the unmistakable
stamp of her experiences in China. Highsmith
lived in Mexico City before going to England
and France, while that city was briefly home to
Beat Generation novelists like Jack Kerouac and
William S. Burroughs. In mid-twentieth-century
Africa, Paul Bowles and Jane Auer Bowles were
instrumental (along with non-Americans like
Andre Gide) in setting up a literary colony in the
International Zone of Tangiers. And the Bowleses
would later be followed to Morocco by the everperipatetic Burroughs, who was later visited by
Kerouac and their poet friends Allen Ginsberg and
Gregory Corso.
If expatriatism is a relatively common fact and
theme of American literature, readers have nevertheless disagreed about its broader social and
literary-historical meanings. For some, expatriatism is just a matter of perspective. Considering
a trip to the Alps for winter, for instance, Hemingway muses, Maybe away from Paris I could
write about Paris as in Paris I could write about
Michigan (1964, 7). In this context, residence
abroad involves no anxiety about American
culture; it is just a technical precondition for
authentic American writing. For others, the pres-
ence of American writers overseas symbolizes

the new energy and maturity of the national
literature, which in the twentieth century came
to rival or even surpass more established
national traditions such as those of the English
and French. This is something that T. S. Eliot
celebrated when in 1953 he compared expatriate
writers to the American robin, whose transatlantic flights provide a metaphor for the increasing
influence of US literature on the British tradition
(Eliot 1965, 4360). And as Hugh Kenner showed
in his influential readings of modernism, far from
being a sign of a continuing debt to the Old
World, American expatriatism can be interpreted
as a sign that the nations writers had escaped
literary provincialism and joined the supranational tradition of literary modernism. For
Kenner, then, Henry Jamess residence in England
represents the last gasp of the British capitals
claim to occupy the symbolic center of the Anglophone world, a pretension that the expatriate
modernists finally laid to rest (Kenner 1984, 525).
Yet not everybody expressed such confidence
in the merits of expatriatism. William Carlos
Williams pointed out the expatriates apparent
obeisance to European culture when he wrote,
Paris will be more than slightly abashed to find
parodies of the middle ages feted as the peak of
the new American writing (1971, 26). Meanwhile,
the Pulitzer Prize winner Vernon Louis Parrington
(1927) refused to judge James with the generosity
of hindsight, interpreting his expatriation as sign
that he remained indifferent to the vivid grotesqueries of the country he had left behind.
Even Eliot is far from consistent on this question.
For whatever his later confidence in the ability
of expatriate Americans to affect the European
scene, in 1921 he justified his move to London by
referring to the history of English civilization the
implication being that while English culture may
be on the wane, America had nothing to merit the
name (Eliot 1988, 431). Eliot was far from the
first to worry that the US was infertile soil for
artistic creation. Fenimore Cooper, for instance,
combined the patriotic sentiment that Americans
shall never get to be the thoroughly manly
people we ought to be, until we cease to look to
European opinions, with the contrary observation that if any man is excusable for deserting his
country, it is the American artist (quoted in
Bradbury 1978, 27).
EXPATRIATE FICTION
These disagreements point to the debate about

whether a national literature is best served by
cultivating foreign experience or encouraging the
development of an autarchic literary culture.
Looking back on the twentieth-century American
novel, however, it seems like the stakes of this
argument are as much social and political as
aesthetic. Dos Passoss sojourns in France, Spain,
and Russia did not, for instance, prevent him
from writing the U.S.A. trilogy (1938), which
harnesses the formal techniques of the international avant garde to advance a patriotic and
populist brand of left-wing politics. Nor does
Andersons later life in France somehow make
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) any less important to the
literary history of the American Midwest.
Ambivalence about the social meanings of
expatriatism seems to inhere, however, in the very
meanings of the word. As an adjective or noun,
expatriate denotes the condition of choosing to
live in a foreign country; its verb form, however,
refers to the act of forcing a person or group to
leave their native land. In this sense, the word
implies an uneasy mix of freedom and coercion.
Yet expatriate has very different connotations
from other words in the lexicon of migration.
Whereas the exile, emigre, or refugee is generally
presumed to have escaped from physical or spiritual oppression, the expatriate is more typically
pulled to a foreign country than compelled to
leave home. And unlike the immigrant who tries
to assimilate to a new country, the expatriate is
defined by remaining out of place. This is partly
a matter of having dollars to spend in countries
whose economies are malformed by underdevelopment, war, or colonialism. As we see in Paul
Bowless Let It Come Down (1952), the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a city like Tangiers is
created not by the merging of discrete cultures,
but by the maintenance of social and economic
distinctions between national groups. Sitting in
a fashionable bar in the International Zone,
Bowless American protagonist casts his eye
across the crowd and easily separates the
Moroccans, Germans, and English from his fellow
countrymen, who carry their wealth with recognizable ostentation (1952, 801). Though an
expatriates acquaintance may be broad, and her
palette diverse, she remains unmistakably national, like Gertrude Stein driving her Model T Ford
around interwar France. And, indeed, as Stein
557
wrote in Paris France (1940), [W]riters have to

have two countries, the one where they belong
and the one in which they live really. The second
one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it
is not real but is really there (1970, 2). Expatriatism, then, is often figured as a kind of
distinction or liberty. There is first of all the
freedom to travel or to live in a manner one could
not afford at home. But expatriate fictions also
celebrate the imaginative freedom of occupying
more than one place at one time: a romantic
dualism between home and abroad that enables
the ability to conceive oneself as beyond nationality or, alternatively, as at home in all nations
(Caesar 1995, 110).
Such freedoms, however, are not easily won.
This is the subject of Baldwins Giovannis Room,
which offers a darker take on expatriatism than we
find in Stein. Baldwins narrator, David, has come
to France from America. He is the scion of the
men who conquered a continent (1956, 3). He
also happens to be gay, and Baldwins narrative
tells the story of his fateful affair with Giovanni,
a young Italian immigrant whom he loves but
eventually abandons, with terrible consequences.
Given the pressure on David to live up to his
heritage, his residence in France is a contradictory
mixture of self-betrayal and an ecstatic attempt
to live freely, under a foreign sky, with no-one to
watch, no penalties attached (1956, 8). On the
night before he leaves his rented house in the
French countryside, David recalls how he left
America to find myself; but as he surveys the
wreck of his life, he notes with bitter irony that if
I had had any intimation that the self I was going
to find would be the same self from which I had
spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed
at home (1956, 31). At the level of plot and
character, then, Giovannis Room suggests the
social and imaginative limits of expatriatism. For
Baldwin, expatriate life is a condition in which
the human subject is encouraged to float free of
tradition and circumstance. But in a society that
still polices human behavior and desire, such
freedoms will inevitably founder against the tendency to internalize social conventions, crashing
against the unconscious self that (as David puts
it) is trapped in the room with me, always has
been, and always will be, and . . . is yet more
foreign to me than those foreign hills outside
(1956, 14).
558
EXPATRIATE FICTION
Davids failure to escape the presumed judgment of his ancestors points to the way, as Stein
would appreciate, that expatriate fictions are
often more about America than the countries in
which they are set. With this irony in mind, it may
be appropriate to expand the category of
expatriate fiction one more time so that it
includes not just narratives written by (or about)
Americans abroad but also the texts of foreign
nationals resident in the US, especially when their
writing engages American culture from the perspective of one who is simultaneously intimate
and alien. The late novels of the Anglo-American
novelist Christopher Isherwood fall into this class,
especially a work like A Single Man (1964), whose
classically English protagonist is more than familiar with subjects like the basic American dogma
that it is always a good morning (1978, 381; italics
in original). Along with German writers like
Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, Isherwood
formed part of an important 1940s community
of European expatriates in the US. Unlike the
Germans, however, Isherwood remained in
California after the war, taking American citizenship and becoming a major figure in the gay
subculture of the west coast. The admission of
a writer like Isherwood to the canons of American
expatriatism clearly risks doing damage to
both his native Englishness and the specificity of
American literature; nevertheless, his writing
serves to remind us of the way all expatriate
writings trouble the autonomy of national literary
traditions.
As a veteran of expatriate scenes in California
and Berlin (see Isherwood 1945), Isherwood
now seems to belong to a bygone age, when the
realization of cosmopolitan dreams meant longdelayed visas, arduous steamboat journeys, and
hours at the poste restante. In the present day,
telecommunications and cheap foreign travel
have made it easier to travel abroad without
having to make a lifestyle of the experience. At
the same time, however, these same processes
have made it easier for immigrants to (and from)
the US to maintain contact with their home
countries. One result of these changes may be
that distinctions between expatriate and domestic
fiction will give way to a new emphasis on the
dynamism of twenty-first-century culture, where
a British-born Indian-American writer like Jhumpa Lahiri can live in the US for three decades, write
narratives about the immigrant experience,

and still be considered by India Today (1999) as
a representative of the new generation of Non
Resident Indians, whose lives abroad are no barrier to a primary identification with subcontinental culture. There are, of course, profound
limits to such transnational flows, many of them
functions of the great power still in the hands
of nation-states and national economies (Lionnet
& Shih 2005). But in an age of globalization,
the literary-historical taxonomy of expatriate
fiction is likely to become more diffuse and
overdetermined than ever.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Modernist
Baldwin, J. (1956). Giovannis Room. New York: Dial
Press.
Benstock, S. (1986). Women of the Left Bank: Paris,
19001940. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bowles, P. (1952). Let It Come Down. New York:
Random House.
Bradbury, M. (1978). Second Countries: The Expatriate
Tradition in American Writing. Yearbook of English
Studies, 8, 1539.
Braddock, J., & Eburne, J. (eds.) (2005). Paris, Capital of
the Black Atlantic [special issue]. MFS: Modern
Fiction Studies 51(4).
Caesar, T. (1995). Forgiving the Boundaries: Home as
Abroad in American Travel Writing. Athens:
Campbell, James. (2003). Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright,
James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left
Bank. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Casanova, P. (2004). The World Republic of Letters
(trans. M. B. DeBevoise). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Eliot, T. S. (1965). To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber
and Faber.
Eliot, V. (ed.) (1988). Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1.
Gopnik, A. (ed.) (2004). Americans in Paris: A Literary
Anthology. New York: Library of America.
Hemingway, E. (1964). A Moveable Feast. New York:
Macmillan.
Highsmith, P. (1955). The Talented Mr. Ripley. New
York: Coward-McCann.
Isherwood, C. (1945). The Berlin Stories. New York:
New Directions.
Isherwood, C. (1978). A Single Man. New York: Bard/
Avon.
EXPATRIATE FICTION
Kennedy, G. J. (1993). Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and

American Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kenner, H. (1984). The Making of the Modernist
Canon. Chicago Review, 34(2), 4961.
Kenner, H. (1998). The Elsewhere Community.
Concord, ON: Anansi.
Lionnet, F., & Shih, S. (eds.) (2005). Minor
Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Parrington, V. L. (1927). Main Currents in
American Thought, vol. 3: The Beginnings of
559
Critical Realism in America, 18601920. New

York: Harcourt, Brace.
Stein, G. (1970). Paris France. New York: Liveright.
Williams, W. C. (1971). Imaginations. New York: New
Directions.
Williams, R. (1989). The Politics of Modernism: Against
the New Conformists (ed. T. Pinkney). London:
Verso.
Zwerdling, A. (1998). Improvised Europeans: American
Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New
York: Basic Books.
F
Farrell, James T.
BILL SAVAGE
Despite that fact that James T. Farrell wrote 27

novels, scores of short stories and essays, and
more than a dozen collections of literary criticism,
he is at once remembered and forgotten primarily
for one work, the Studs Lonigan Trilogy (19325).
Farrells vast accomplishments have faded away
due to two otherwise contrary trends in literary
criticism and canon construction. Early in his
career, Farrell was lauded as a crucial new voice
in American letters, representing the experience
of Irish Americans and other Chicagoans in realistic fiction which could trace its roots to the
plain-language directness of writers like Theodore
Dreiser. But such praise came back to haunt leftist
writers, as the formalist canon makers of the
postwar period rejected such fiction in favor of
the highly wrought modernism of writers like
Faulkner and Hemingway.
When that formalist canon was in turn supplanted by a broader one which incorporated and
valorized literature by women, African Americans, and writers from marginalized groups,
Farrells fiction remained on the sidelines despite
its engagement with many of the key topics of this
new canon, especially the construction of ethnic
and racial identities in American cities. The Irish,
having become the most assimilated ethnic immigrant group, were no longer perceived as marginal enough for inclusion in canons of American
outsiders.
Yet Farrell and his milieu were only one
generation removed from the bitterest anti-Irish
prejudice of the nineteenth century, and the

conflicted identity politics that prejudice
produced. They had to face one overarching
question: does their Irishness, often seen as
coterminous with Catholicism, keep them out
of the American mainstream, as Protestant antiimmigrant forces in the culture would assert? Or
are they able to negotiate the complexities of
being at once both Irish and American? Possessing a broadly inclusive interest in the world,
Farrell offered complex fictional answers to these
dilemmas of ethnic identity. Charles Fanning,
Farrells most astute critic, identifies the two sorts
of characters Farrell most often portrayed: the
artist as an urban Irish American . . . and working
class urban Americans who lives are thwarted by
limited self-awareness (1998, p. xxi). The two
sides of this conflict are played out in Farrells two
monumental works, the Studs Lonigan Trilogy and
the ONeillOFlaherty Pentalogy (193654), together known as the Washington Park Cycle.
Critics have long misread the Studs Lonigan
Trilogy in terms of both its aesthetics and its
ideology. Under the influence of Joyce, Dos Passos, and other modernists, Farrells portrait of
Washington Park uses stream of consciousness as
well as the intertextual interpolation of newspapers, films, and other discourses. Farrells realism deftly combines careful observation of the
environment with modernist literary technique.
The Trilogy is also mistakenly thought to depict
working-class Irish life. This happens only in
flashbacks, as the Lonigan family has risen from
immigrant poverty to the middle class. William
Lonigan, Sr. owns his own contracting company

FAULKNER, WILLIAM
and the family home in Washington Park. Studss

sisters get good educations and advance in life
while he drinks himself to death at an early age.
The obverse of Studss tragic narrative is the
story of Danny ONeill, the Irish American intellectual. Farrell depicts the conflict between American intellectual culture and the personal, religious,
and political pieties and prejudices that defined
much of Irish American culture. In doing so,
Farrell asks an essential American question: how
do we understand ethnic identity?
Near the end of Judgment Day (1935), the final
work of the Trilogy, Farrell portrays an array of
what could be, in lesser hands, Irish American
stereotypes: the sentimentalist, the drunk, and the
cop. Early in the Great Depression, Old Man
Lonigan faces two crises: the bank with all his
savings has failed, the bank which holds his
mortgage is demanding payment for his building,
and his son is deathly ill. Blaming the banking
crisis on international Jews, he drives back to
the neighborhood of his youth, now African
American, and goes to his old parish church to
pray. Exhausted, he drives around, sentimentally
remembering his childhood, until he encounters a
Leftist political demonstration and the son of his
friend, now a policeman on the beat. Lonigan is
shocked to find that young Jim Doyle protects the
Red marchers from the hostile crowd on the
sidewalk and sympathizes with the unemployed
blacks, Jews, and Italians whom Lonigan dismisses as scum of the earth. Afterward, Lonigan
repairs to a speakeasy, where alongside an older
immigrant who sings for whiskey, he drinks himself into oblivion, unable to face any of the
catastrophes in his life.
Who, in this telling episode, is the real Irish
American? The devout but weak businessman?
The ancient drunk? The politically progressive
police officer? Farrell suggests all of them, and
none. No one subject position can include all of
the potential ways of being Irish or American.
Priests, politicians, drunks, and brawlers occupy
one corner, but in the other you have reformers,
intellectuals, writers, and labor organizers. The
stereotypes that the Irish community itself promotes to advance into the American middle class
are as limiting as those imposed on Irish immigrants by the bigoted WASPs who kept the famine
generation immigrants living in shanty towns
outside the Chicago city limits.
561
But Farrells fiction extends beyond the question of Irishness. In a career spanning five decades, he depicted the material struggles and the
inner lives of African Americans and Jews, men
and women, the powerful and the powerless, as
they attempt to find their way in Chicago and
beyond.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Dreiser,
Theodore (AF); Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF);
Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modernist Fiction
(AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF)
Branch, E. M. (1996). Studs Lonigans Neighborhood and
the Making of James T. Farrell. Newton, MA: Arts
End.
Farrell, J. T. (1932). Young Lonigan. New York:
Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1934). The Young Manhood of Studs
Lonigan. New York: Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1935). Judgment Day. New York:
Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1936). A World I Never Made.
New York: Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1938). No Star Is Lost. New York:
Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1940). Father and Son. New York:
Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1943). My Days of Anger. New York:
Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1945). League of Frightened Philistines.
New York: Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1947). Literature and Morality. New York:
Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1954). The Face of Time. New York:
Vanguard.
Farrell, J. T. (1998). Chicago Stories (ed. C. Fanning).
Landers, R. K. (2004). An Honest Writer: The Life and
Times of James T. Farrell. San Francisco:
Encounter.
Faulkner, William
JOHN T. MATTHEWS
William Faulkners signature novel The Sound

and the Fury (1929) captures the tumult of a
collapsing world giving way to a new. Set across the
first quarter of the twentieth century, in the fictional
562
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
town of Jefferson, center of the imaginary Mississippi county Faulkner called Yoknapatawpha, The
Sound and the Fury displays in four isolated segments the breakdown of the once distinguished
Compson family. Descendants of planter gentry,
the present generation of Compsons has been
reduced to three hopeless brothers a mental
deficient (Benjy), a melancholic suicide (Quentin),
and a resentful failure (Jason) and their sister
Caddy, a renegade from Southern decorum. The
reader inhabits the mentalities of one pitiable
martyr to lost causes after the next. Even the most
innocent Compson brother proves a monster of
selfish incomprehension, while another dwells in
fantasies of a defunct past, and the last cant figure
out how to translate former privilege into the
future. The novel bursts open in its final section,
with the servant Dilsey celebrating new hope in
precincts unappreciated by the Compsons: the
black church where faith grows from a collective
determination to be free. Faulkners great subject
was the realization that the plantation Souths
eternal verities, finally surrendering to the
upheavals of modernity, had never been other than
illegitimate; his great artistry, an experimental
method that slowed things down to comprehend
change.
Born in 1897, Faulkner came of age with the
Great War (191418). Following an abortive attempt to train as a combat pilot with the Royal Air
Force in Toronto in 1918, he returned to Oxford,
Mississippi, where he chafed under small-town
proprieties. Faulkner already burned with literary
ambition, and he began devouring the latest
modern literature. Fleeing occasionally to the
more cosmopolitan New Orleans, he was taken
up by a set of bohemian artists and intellectuals.
He published a volume of poems, The Marble
Faun (1924), imitative of the French Symbolists;
contributed prose sketches and reviews to The
Double-Dealer, an avant garde journal; and completed his first novel, Soldiers Pay (1926), the
story of a wounded pilot who returns from
the war unfit to resume life in his Southern
home town. Donald Mahon is literally blinded
to the revolution in social, especially sexual,
mores overtaking provincial America. Soldiers
Pay resembles other novels of postwar anxiety
like Hemingways The Sun Also Rises (1926), as it
also shows off modernist narrative techniques
indebted to Joyce.
Strong reviews encouraged the first-time novelist, and by 1927 he had published Mosquitoes.
Aboard a yacht, writers, artists, patrons, and
aspirants talk endlessly about art, while visions
of sex romp through their heads. Faulkner
modeled characters on the novelist Sherwood
Anderson and an assortment of other French
Quarter acquaintances including a funny little
dark man named Faulkner, a beachcomber
obsessed with female anatomy. The mood of the
book is caricature, self- and otherwise. It clears
space for the swerve in Faulkners career that
created Faulkner: a return to Mississippi both
literal and imaginative where he would lead the
rest of his life.
Anderson had advised the aspiring writer to
concentrate on the material he knew best what
Faulkner later called his little postage-stamp of
native soil. In his next book, Faulkner embraced
the region in what he understood as its entirety
its rambunctious history as well as its stressful
modernization. He sent the manuscript, entitled
Flags in the Dust, to his cutting-edge publisher,
Horace Liveright, who had welcomed Faulkners
first two novels. Flags sought to tell the sprawling,
intertwined stories of an elite planter community
too many stories, Liveright decided. He returned
the manuscript to the shocked author, recommending sizable cuts. Pared down, the novel was
published as Sartoris (1928). (The original manuscript was discovered after Faulkners death and
printed in 1975 as Flags in the Dust.) After the
bitter experience of rejection, Faulkner claimed,
he wrote his next book, the uncompromising The
Sound and the Fury, for his own pleasure. The
Sound and the Fury remains preoccupied with
the plantation gentry, even as it develops an
artistic method that distances the author from
stories too close to his own familys. The Falkners
(so spelled before William added the u)
counted among its legends the Civil War hero,
lawyer, and sometime author William Cuthbert
Falkner, as well as his son, Faulkners paternal
grandfather, also a lawyer, and founder of
Oxfords first bank. Sartoris mocks Southern
plantocracy while lamenting its passing; The
Sound and the Fury sees more deeply into the
regions tragic past and accepts its demise as just.
Faulkner had now located the topics that would
engage him over the next decade: the ruinous
consequences of the Souths foundation as a
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
slaveholding plantation economy. The original

crime: the seizure of lives and land, perpetrated
as the outrages of Indian extermination and
chattel slavery; its collateral damage: the physical,
emotional, and moral integrity of all it touched,
from mangled victims to corrupted beneficiaries.
In his next novel, Sanctuary (1929), Faulkner
confronts the monster not quite head-on.
The story centers on a horrific episode in the life
of a young woman, Temple Drake, the daughter
of a prominent judge. With her well-born but
feckless escort, she abandons a college outing and
the two of them end up trapped in a bootleggers
camp at the so-called old Frenchmans Place, an
abandoned plantation mansion where Popeye
bases his operations. Temple is assaulted by
Popeye, who, since he is impotent, uses a corn cob
to defile her. Compelled by a related sympathy for
Caddy Compson, who turns fugitive from the
velvet-gloved misogyny of racial and sexual untouchability, Faulkner conjures the nightmare of
rampant Southern paternalism: a beast that
thinks it is entitled to everything it touches all
black people, white women, the land under the
guise of protecting them for their own good.
Faulkner had himself been prevented from marrying his young sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, by
her father, a judge. (When Estelle eventually
divorced her first husband, she and Faulkner
wed but disastrously, with finances, alcohol,
and infidelity destroying, without ending, their
marriage.)
Faulkner extends his survey of outworn Southern ways in a novel that turns to the plight of poor
white farmers in the 1920s, As I Lay Dying (1930).
The Bundren family suffers a blow when Addie,
wife of Anse and mother to a brood, dies after a
short illness. The family nearly spirals out of
control as they execute Addies last wish: to be
buried in her home town of Jefferson, a 40-mile
trip to be undertaken despite a flood that immobilizes the whole county. The crisis engulfing
the family feels like a fable of Southern modernization, the maternal relation to the land failing,
agricultural workers forced toward wage labor
and commodity consumption, migration toward
towns precipitated, social life reordered by
modern state imperatives like public education,
womens political and professional enfranchisement, and military conscription. The novel
explores such upheaval as a series of interior
563
monologues, each character idiosyncratically

processing the shock of the new.
Faulkners determination to write about the
failings of Southern society organized his output
during the 1930s and early 1940s. In one half of its
bicameral plot, Light in August (1932) takes up a
character who could belong to the Bundren family: Lena Grove, an orphan, gotten pregnant as a
teenager, and abandoned to the open road when
her fiance deserts her. Faulkner crosses the
wayward white girl with another fugitive: a misfit
named Joe Christmas, raised as white but plagued
by a suspicion that he has black ancestry. The
novel charts the combustible mixture of uncertain
race and unpoliced female desire. The resulting
explosion pits the mad, violent enforcement of
discredited beliefs about racial and sexual difference against an embryonic tolerance toward new
composite forms of family, race, and sexuality.
The shadow of the Souths plantation history
will persist long into the future, the narrator of
Light in August prophesies, as the memory of
racial violence and guilt. Faulkner does not let
the subject go either, returning to the curse of
slavery behind modern white supremacy and
segregation, economic inequity, desecration of
the land, and the violation of marriage and
family. Faulkner next searches out the origins
of Yoknapatawpha. In Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), Faulkner reconstructs the story of the
South in epitome through the career of Thomas
Sutpen, the countys foremost antebellum
planter. Descending as a child with his family
from Virginias mountains to a Tidewater plantation, where he suffers a traumatic insult that
teaches him his place as a brute laborer,
Sutpen determines to rise to a position of domination himself. He launches his design in
Haiti as overseer of a sugar plantation, sustains
a temporary setback when a first marriage produces a child of apparent mixed race, then
attains mastership in Mississippi even turning
away the repudiated son who threatens to undo
the work of decades by seeking his daughters
(and the suitors half-sisters) hand in marriage.
Faulkner draws on all his experiments with narrative form in this vastly plotted and elaborately
structured novel; a handful of narrators take responsibility for relaying the story, each working
complex purposes to shape their versions to the
needs of both teller and auditor. The principal
564
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
narrators of Sutpens story turn out to be Quentin

Compson and his father Jason, who struggle to
place their cynicism and despair, respectively, in
the context of regional flaw rather than simple
personal failure. Faulkners huge sentences arc and
revolve around the realities that no participant
actor or teller wants to confront, the story told
and retold without resolution.
Faulkners plantation project continues into
The Unvanquished (1938), a volume of related
short stories set around the Civil War in which
Faulkner explores the rejection of ideals that once
supported the antebellum regime. Notions like
the violent defense of honor, or the gentility of
gender roles, get exposed as elements of an ideology safeguarding planter interests, and readily
swept away when economic and social conditions
change after the war. In Go Down, Moses (1942),
another cycle of short stories, Faulkner probes
even more deeply to imagine the unspeakable sins
at the core of the plantation system. Those are
figured here as the conjoined crimes of miscegenation and incest, old Carothers McCaslin taking
a slave woman as a concubine, then eventually
fathering a child by the daughter of that union.
That the origin of Southern ideals was pollution of
the foulest kind provokes Faulkners severest
condemnation of his regions hubris, self-delusion, and heartless rapacity. Faulkner nowhere
renders the violence of slavery as its victims
experienced it, as Toni Morrison does, for example, but his imagining of moral turpitude so utter
renders a judgment against its perpetrators as
unforgivable. Go Down, Moses is remarkable in
the Faulkner canon, however, for noticing the
variety of ways black people tried to resist their
white oppressors. Such habits of non-compliance
carried into the post-Emancipation era, as growing self-assertion and acts of courageous defiance.
To challenge racial mistreatment, Lucas Beauchamp, a descendant of those slave women and
old Carothers McCaslin, ironically claims the
authority of his white ancestor. In Go Down,
Moses he is one of the few persons, black or white,
who gets his way; in Intruder in the Dust (1948),
which focuses on Lucass frame-up for the murder
of a white man, he is that rarest of Negroes in the
modern South, one who is exonerated and released after a false arrest. Faulkner struggles in this
novel to engage the Civil Rights Movement in the
Deep South; here he sympathizes with victims of
racial injustice, sees the bankruptcy of gradualist

rhetoric about desegregation, yet cannot imagine
what social equality would look like. A film
version of Intruder, shot in Oxford with Faulkner
as advisor, appeared a year later, and was taken to
represent growing support for desegregation
among educated white Southerners.
A town middle class that begins to separate
from those stuck in tenancy and menial wage
labor interests Faulkner in another major work:
the trilogy devoted to the rise and abrupt end of
Flem Snopes, The Hamlet (1940), The Town
(1957), and The Mansion (1959). The Snopes saga
was key to Faulkners conception of Yoknapatawpha from the outset; theres a first try at telling the
clans story dating from the mid-1920s, in which
the Snopeses preoccupation with making money
as merchants epitomizes the force revolutionizing
the plantation-centric South. Over the course of
the three novels, Flem follows an arc of inexorable
success: he first apprentices himself to Will Varner, a farm credit and supply merchant who takes
to speculating in land. Beating his competitors
routinely, often underhandedly, Flem goes on to
amass interests that eventually deliver him the
presidency of a bank in Jefferson. His chief antagonist, V. K. Ratliff, an itinerant sewing-machine
salesman who represents a strain of ethical capitalism, discovers that resistance is futile. In the
1950s, the two later novels of the trilogy put
Snopes-style materialism in the context of the
postwar American Way, contextualizing the brutal free marketry on display among numerous
Snopeses as a sobering qualification of the defense
of American freedom and democracy.
Displaced poor whites had appeared in other
novels by Faulkner during the 1930s. Pylon (1935)
portrays the exotic lives of barnstorming aviators.
Narrated by a repressed newspaperman, who
grows fascinated by a menage of participants in
a New Orleans air show, Pylon entertains modes
of modern living unimaginable on the ground.
The pilot, his stuntman, a mechanic, their moreor-less shared wife, and the child theyve borne
would outrage the decent folks of the towns where
they alight and make a buck if they stayed long
enough. Like the reporter, Faulkner is entranced
by individuals who seem to do what they want to,
but, unlike the narrator, Faulkner doesnt romanticize their condition. Beneath the barnstormers
nomadic thrill-seeking remains the grind of
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
poverty and constant insecurity. Faulkner measures similar gaps between proletarian nomadism
and bourgeois restlessness in The Wild Palms
(1939). After a decade of working on and off for
Hollywood studios, Faulkner conceived a novel
that would put the kind of cultural fantasy confected by the movies into conflict with the harsh
realities of Depression-era America. The Wild
Palms is a double narrative, one strand set in
1927 during the Great Flood of the Mississippi
River, the other set 10 years later. The novels
narrative oscillates between a plot in which a
young couple runs off together in defiance of
middle-class conventions (the woman abandons
her husband and children), and a counterplot in
which a furloughed convict works to rescue flood
victims. Faulkner probes the recesses of self-deception and selfishness structuring modern consumer America, while he also touches on the
pitiful condition of workers during the 1930s.
Outrage at modern materialism fuels Faulkners
unusual Requiem for a Nun (1950), a play hybridized by long prose histories fronting each of the
three acts. Here, on the threshold of the Cold War,
Faulkner resituates the story of the South within
the larger story of nation and continent. Horrified
at the possibility that the superpowers might
trigger mutual nuclear destruction, Faulkner
yields to jeremiad. Like the Mississippi frontier
that was once its advance edge, the nation has been
conceived in greed, established through colonial
conquest, and perfected in a union devoted to
acquisition. The dramatic sections counterpoint
the resumed story of Temple Drake, joined here by
a black servant woman who has murdered Temple
and her husbands infant child in a misguided
attempt to keep the couple from separating.
Neither the historical panorama of national injustice nor the staging of individual remorse leads to
any catharsis; bereavement remains unappeased,
guilt unredeemed.
Faulkners concentration on his own region
however much he was depicting universal truths
about human nature by writing about a particular
place continues to produce powerful effects in
two late works: a massive meditation on global
empire called A Fable (1954), and a minor last
novel about the persistence of American innocence, The Reivers, published in 1962, the year of
his death. That book has struck many readers as a
congenial valedictory with a Huck Finn-like
565
protagonist embroiled in a plot to steal a race

horse. The story is a bit more complicated,
though, because the child-narrator ends up seeing
beneath the high jinx to a stratum of human
suffering, much of it the surprising survival of
traditional Southern abuses of the weak. Still, the
novel does feel like a quiet afterthought given
the magnitude of A Fable. Faulkner considered
A Fable one of his greatest achievements, a verdict
few readers have endorsed. Battling poor health,
desperate finances, a ruined marriage, and artistic
doubts, Faulkner took 10 years to write the book.
Its kernel is a fictionalized version of a famous
Christmas truce observed on both sides of the
trenches on the European front during World
War I. The prose style and narrative structure are
hugely ambitious. Sentences come dense in the
usual Faulknerian manner, though less with the
onrush of psychological association found in
earlier works than with the patient description
of vast interconnectivity: between industrial,
financial, and military elites fashioning a new
transnational power structure; between the US
South and other postcolonial places; and between
groups of resisters mobilizing to prevent the
installation of modern empire as an outgrowth
of earlier European American colonialisms.
Faulkner organized the book around an act of
such resistance: the messianic mission of a young
soldier who brings the war to a halt momentarily.
The sections of the novel hang on the scaffolding
of the Holy Week calendar leading up to Easter:
hence the fable. The novel Faulkner considered
his magnum opus won the National Book Award
and Pulitzer, recognitions accorded by the US
cultural establishment once Faulkner had been
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.
Faulkners reputation enjoyed a global dimension nearly from the beginning, with enthusiastic
reception by French intellectuals like Jean-Paul
Sartre in the 1930s. His writing has been widely
influential all over the world, distinctively on
Latin American novelists of the Boom generation like Gabriel Garca Marquez and Mario
Vargas Llosa, but also on writers of the Caribbean,
Africa, China, and the Middle East. Faulkner was
an accomplished writer of short stories, too, many
of which have become global landmarks of the
genre: A Rose for Emily, That Evening Sun,
The Bear, Dry September, Barn Burning,
and numerous others. Faulkners achievement,
566
FAUSET, JESSIE REDMON
however, rests on the bedrock of major novels like

The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in
August, and Absalom, Absalom! which should
remain permanently among the nations most
significant fiction.
Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
Morrison, Toni (AF); The Southern Novel (AF)
Minter, D. L. (1980). William Faulkner: His Life

and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Schwartz, L. (1988). Creating Faulkners Reputation:
The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press.
Sundquist, E. (1983). Faulkner: The House Divided.
Weinstein, P. (1992). Faulkners Subject: A Cosmos
No One Owns. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Williamson, J. (1993). William Faulkner and Southern
History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Aboul-Ela, H. (2007). Other South: Globalization,
Faulkner, and the Mariategui Tradition. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
Bleikasten, A. (1990). The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkners
Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in
August. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Blotner, J. (1984). Faulkner: A Biography. New York:
Random House.
Faulkner, W. (1950). Collected Stories of William
Faulkner. New York: Random House.
Faulkner, W. (1979). Uncollected Stories of William
Faulkner (ed. J. Blotner). New York: Random House.
Faulkner, W. (1985). Novels 19301935. New York:
Library of America.
Library of America.
Library of America.
Library of America.
Library of America.
Glissant, E. (1999). Faulkner, Mississippi (trans. B. Lewis
& T. C. Spear). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Godden, R. L. (1997). Fictions of Labor: William
Faulkner and the Souths Long Revolution. New York:
Gray, R. J. (1994). The Life of William Faulkner:
A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell.
Irwin, J. T. (1975). Doubling and Incest/Repetition and
Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner.
Ladd, B. (1996). Nationalism and the Color Line in
George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William
Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Matthews, J. T. (2009). William Faulkner: Seeing
Through the South. Oxford: Blackwell.
Millgate, M. (1968). The Achievement of William
Faulkner. New York: Random House.
Fauset, Jessie Redmon

SUSAN TOMLINSON
Jessie Redmon Fauset (18821961) was a novelist,

essayist, andpoetwho, as literary editor ofThe Crisis
magazine, helped shape the Harlem Renaissance.
Fauset was born in Camden County, New
Jersey, a descendant of free eighteenth-century
African American Philadelphians. She finished
the Philadelphia High School for Girls, graduated
Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell in 1905, and completed an MA at the University of Pennsylvania in
1919. She also took postgraduate courses at the
Sorbonne. While teaching classics at M Street
High School (later renamed Dunbar High
School) in Washington, DC, Fauset began writing
short fiction, poetry, and essays for The Crisis,
the magazine published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), and edited by Fausets mentor,
W. E. B. Du Bois. As the magazines literary editor
(191926), Fauset advised and promoted emerging younger authors like Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes, whose earliest published poems
appeared in The Brownies Book, the NAACP
childrens magazine Fauset founded in January
1920 and edited until it folded in December 1921.
Her editorial choices for The Brownies Book and
her non-fiction contributions to The Crisis reflect
Fausets interest in the African diaspora, and in
1921 she served as a delegate to the Second PanAfrican Congress. After resigning from The Crisis,
Fauset taught French and Latin at DeWitt Clinton
High School in New York until her retirement
in 1944. She died of heart failure in Philadelphia
in 1961.
FAUSET, JESSIE REDMON
In a 1932 interview, Fauset admitted to studying magazines like the Saturday Evening Post to
analyze and isolate the germ of popular writing.
Her four novels use accessible plot devices to
explore challenging themes like racism and gender politics. Critically dismissed for decades as
genteel, melodramatic idealizations of the black
bourgeoisie, Fausets novels are now recognized
as formally and thematically innovative interrogations of social respectability, sexual double
standards, and the impact of mass-produced
culture on identity, agency, and desire. Her
characters affluence often protects them from
the more brutal consequences of white supremacy; nevertheless, they must negotiate the legacy
of slavery and the subtler psychological assaults
of internalized racism and class and color
hierarchies.
Fausets first novel, There Is Confusion (1924),
whose launch party was described by historian
David Levering Lewis as a dress rehearsal for the
Harlem Renaissance, depicts a group of African
American New Yorkers who come of age on both
the Broadway stage and the frontlines of World
War I. Its protagonists dancing career serves as a
paradigm for the novels exploration of gender
and class performance and its integration of
classical form with modernist improvisation.
Plum Bun (1929), Fausets critically and commercially most successful work, depicts Angela Murray, a light-skinned artist who passes for white in
Greenwich Village bohemia in hopes of finding
social fulfillment and economic security. Written
at the height of both the New Negro and New
Woman artistic and political movements, Plum
Bun explores both movements conflicts and limitations. After an unhappy sexual relationship
with a bigoted aristocrat, Angela finds in her work
the authority that enables her to come out as a
black woman and to give artistic voice to that
experience.
Like Fausets earlier novels, The Chinaberry
Tree (1995 [1931]) depicts the romantic, familial,
and professional struggles facing a black woman
artist, in this case a successful dressmaker whose
fashion designs refashion femininity itself. Its
protagonists design innovations mirror not only
her negotiations of respectability and taste but
also Fausets own efforts to maintain her artistic
and political integrity in an increasingly conservative literary marketplace. In her fourth and final
567
novel, Comedy: American Style (1995 [1933]), the

intricacy and intimacy of family dynamics offer an
allegory of public and political silence and complicity by depicting well-intentioned, even sympathetic characters whose refusal to confront a
mothers race hatred results in a rejected sons
suicide. Beyond its critique of color privilege
and its satire of the black bourgeoisie, Comedy:
American Style explores the public, potentially
murderous consequences of personal indifference
and inaction.
SEE ALSO: Du Bois, W. E. B. (AF);
Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Harlem
Renaissance (AF); Hughes, Langston (AF);
Hurston, Zora Neale (AF); Larsen, Nella (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Toomer, Jean (AF)

Carby, H. V. (1987). Reconstructing Womanhood:
The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist.
Christian, B. (1980). Black Women Novelists: The
Development of a Tradition, 18821976. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Cullen, C. (ed.) (1993). Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of
Verse by Negro Poets [1927]. New York: Citadel.
duCille, A. (1993) The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text,
and Tradition in Black Womens Fiction. New York:
Fauset, J. R. (1989). There Is Confusion [1924]. Boston:
Northeastern University Press.
Fauset, J. R. (1990). Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral
[1929]. Boston: Beacon.
Fauset, J. R. (1995). The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of
American Life [1931]. New York: G. K. Hall.
Fauset, J. R. (1995). Comedy: American Style [1933].
between the Wars. Amherst: University of
Knopf, M. (ed.) (1993). The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem
Renaissance Stories by Women. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Kuenz, J. (1999). The Face of America: Performing Race
and Nation in Jessie Fausets There Is Confusion. Yale
Journal of Criticism, 12, 89111.
Lewis, D. L. (1981). When Harlem Was in Vogue.
McDowell, D. E. (1985). The Neglected Dimension of
Jessie Redmon Fauset. In M. Pryse & H. J. Spillers
568
FERBER, EDNA
(eds.), Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and

Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
McDowell, D. E. (1995). The Changing Same: Black
Womens Literature, Criticism, and Theory.
McLendon, J. Y. (1995). The Politics of Color in the
Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.
Sherrard-Johnson, C. (2007). Portraits of the New Negro
Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem
Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Starkey, M. L. (1932). Jessie Fauset. Southern Workman,
61, 21720.
Sylvander, C. W. (1981). Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black
American Writer. Troy, NY: Whitson.
Tomlinson, S. (2003). An Unwonted Coquetry:
The Commercial Seductions of Jessie Fausets
The Chinaberry Tree. In L. Botshon & M. Goldsmith
(eds.), Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American
Women Writers of the 1920s. Boston: Northeastern
Wall, C. A. (2001). Histories and Heresies: Engendering
the Harlem Renaissance. Meridians, 2(1), 5976.
Ferber, Edna
WILLIAM GLEASON
One of the most popular writers of the first half of

the twentieth century, Edna Ferber succeeded in
multiple genres, including the short story, the
novel, and drama. Her fictions, which typically
feature strong, hardworking female characters
and are often set within vibrant American regional landscapes, were also frequently adapted to
stage and screen, giving her a cultural presence
like few writers of her era.
Edna Jessica Ferber was born in Kalamazoo,
Michigan in 1885, daughter of a Jewish Hungarian
immigrant father and an American-born mother.
After several short-term moves, the family lived
in Ottumwa, Iowa for seven years, until the
towns relentless anti-Semitism drove them to
resettle in Appleton, Wisconsin when Ferber
was 12. After high school Ferber worked as
a journalist before her health gave out, but
during her convalescence she began writing
fiction, leading eventually to her first published
story in 1910. Over the next 53 years Ferber
would publish a dozen novels, another dozen
collections of short stories, 10 plays, and two

memoirs, making her not only one of the most
popular American writers but also one of the
most prolific.
After publishing her first novel, Dawn OHara:
The Girl Who Laughed (1911), and first short story
collection, Buttered Side Down (1912), Ferber
found her first major success with a series of
stories about an enterprising businesswoman
named Emma McChesney, one of the first of her
type in American fiction. Republished in book
form in three volumes (Roast Beef Medium in
1913, Personality Plus in 1914, and Emma
McChesney & Co. in 1915), the McChesney stories
could have become Ferbers lifelong bread and
butter; but Ferber decided to retire McChesney
rather than become straitjacketed by the demands
of a serial character. Over the next decade her
fictions explored new territory while revisiting
certain familiar themes. In 1917, for example,
Ferber published Fanny Herself, a semiautobiographical novel about a Jewish businesswoman
who struggles to reconcile her financial ambition
with her religious soul. With The Girls (1921)
Ferber tried the type of multigenerational novel that
she would later find conducive to the often sprawling
historical sagas she took great pleasure in researching
and writing, such as Cimarron (1930), a tale of the
Oklahoma Territory; Great Son (1945) on the Seattle
frontier; Giant (1952), set in larger-than-life Texas;
and Ice Palace (1958), about Alaska.
Ferber crossed from popular success to critically acclaimed author with the publication of So
Big (1924), a story of the clash between artistic and
commercial values set in and around turn-of-thetwentieth-century Chicago, which won Ferber the
1925 Pulitzer Prize. She followed this achievement with a novel about the Mississippi River that
would become perhaps her best-known story
Show Boat (1926) albeit primarily through its
adaptation as a Broadway musical the following
year. Ferber would actually have two stories on
the stage in 1927, as her own co-written drama,
The Royal Family, her second collaboration with
playwright George S. Kaufman (with whom she
would eventually write half a dozen plays, including Dinner at Eight in 1932 and Stage Door in
1936), also debuted on Broadway. Along with
Kaufman and other writers such as Dorothy
Parker, Ferber also became a member of the
famously acerbic 1920s New York literary circle,
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT
the Algonquin Round Table. Ferbers cultural

reputation (and celebrity) was only heightened
by the frequent translation of her writings to the
silver screen. By the 1930s it must have seemed
as though there were a new film or two based
on Ferbers work released every year. Between
1928 and 1939, 14 motion picture adaptations of
Ferbers writing were produced, including two
versions of Show Boat.
In 1939 Ferber published the first of two
memoirs, A Peculiar Treasure, which she would
reissue in a revised edition in 1960, just three
years before releasing a second autobiography,
A Kind of Magic (1963). Although her critical
reputation declined late in her career, as critics
faulted her work for being too melodramatic,
she remains for many readers an inspiring
and enduring chronicler of the lives of strong
women and a champion of the underdog. She
died of stomach cancer in New York City in 1968
at age 83.
SEE ALSO: Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Parker, Dorothy (AF);

Campbell, D. (2003). Written With a Hard and
Ruthless Purpose: Rose Wilder Lane, Edna Ferber,
and Middlebrow Regional Fiction. In L. Botshon &
M. Goldsmith (eds.), Middlebrow Moderns: Popular
American Writers of the 1920s. Boston: Northeastern
University Press.
Ferber, E. (1911). Dawn OHara: The Girl Who Laughed.
New York: Stokes.
Ferber, E. (1912). Buttered Side Down. New York:
Stokes.
Ferber, E. (1913). Roast Beef Medium. New York:
Stokes.
Ferber, E. (1914). Personality Plus. New York: Stokes.
Ferber, E. (1915). Emma McChesney & Co. New York:
Stokes.
Ferber, E. (1917). Fanny Herself. New York: Stokes.
Ferber, E. (1921). The Girls. New York: Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1924). So Big. New York: Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1926). Show Boat. New York: Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1930). Cimarron. New York: Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1931). American Beauty. New York:
Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1935). Come and Get It. New York:
Doubleday.
569
Ferber, E. (1941). Saratoga Trunk. New York:

Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1945). Great Son. New York: Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1952). Giant. New York: Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1958). Ice Palace: New York: Doubleday.
Ferber, E. (1960). A Peculiar Treasure [1939].
Ferber, E. (1963). A Kind of Magic. New York:
Doubleday.
Ferber, E. with Kaufman, G. S. (1927). The Royal
Family. New York: Doubleday, Doran.
Ferber, E. with Kaufman, G. S. (1932). Dinner at Eight.
New York: Samuel French.
Ferber, E. with Kaufman, G. S. (1936). Stage Door.
New York: Doubleday, Doran.
Gilbert, J. G. (1978). Ferber: A Biography. New York:
Doubleday.
Gleason, W. (1996). Find Their Place and Fall in Line:
The Revisioning of Womens Work in Herland and
Emma McChesney & Co. Prospects, 21, 3987.
Shapiro, A. R. (2002). Edna Ferber, Jewish American
Feminist. Shofar, 20(2), 5260.
Shaughnessy, M. R. (1977). Women and Success in
American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber.
New York: Garden Press.
Sol, A. (2003). Art, Ethnicity, and the New Woman in
Edna Ferbers Fanny Herself. Studies in American
Jewish Literature, 22, 1208.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
KIRK CURNUTT
Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and

Tender Is the Night (1934) two keystones of
modernist fiction Francis Scott Fitzgerald
(18961940) was the poet laureate of the jazz
age, a term he popularized to convey the postWorld War I eras newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores. Fitzgerald first
rose to fame at 23 by chronicling those changes in
This Side of Paradise (1920b). Before the age of 30
he published his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby,
but his artistic maturity was stymied for a decade
by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental
illness of his wife, Zelda Sayre (190048). By
the time he completed Tender Is the Night, the
Depression had rendered the Roaring Twenties
irrelevant, and Fitzgerald was considered a
has-been. A half-decade later, he died in semiobscurity, considered a failure, despite publishing
160 short stories in his 20-year career. Only
posthumously would critics appreciate his merits,
570
although understanding of his talent would compete with popular interest in his life and marriage.
Fitzgeralds main themes are ambition and loss,
discipline versus self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class. Much like Ernest
Hemingway and William Faulkner, his work
is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive
prose style. Whereas Hemingways is sparse and
Faulkners veers toward psychological abstraction, Fitzgeralds is intensely poetic to the point
of rhapsodic, elevating his laments into veritable
threnodies for the sureties and stable values that
he felt modernity superannuated.
Born September 24, 1896, Fitzgerald suffered
from a lifelong inferiority complex that he later
claimed distinguished him from Hemingway, his
chief rival. I talk with the authority of failure, he
insisted; Ernest with the authority of success
(1979, 318). His sense of defeat was the product of
several formative setbacks that became the building blocks of his fiction. The son of an unsuccessful businessman who had to rely upon his wifes
inheritance to support his children, Fitzgerald was
sensitive to his familys outsider status among
the monied elite of his native St. Paul, Minnesota.
An indifferent student, he found his craving for
recognition hampered by poor grades that interfered with his extracurricular pursuits of popularity, especially after he flunked out of Princeton
University in 1917. Nor were his aspirations for
military heroism any more successful. Although
commissioned as a second lieutenant during the
Great War, he described himself as the armys
worst aide-de-camp (1945, 85) largely because
he preferred writing his first novel to tactics and
training. As his 1936 story I Didnt Get Over
suggests, the fact that he never saw combat the
Armistice arrived as his infantry regiment was
preparing to ship abroad was an additional
lifelong regret.
Of even greater influence were his early romantic disappointments. Fitzgeralds desire for acceptance in the haute monde led him to court debutantes from whose circles he was doomed to be
rejected. At 19, while dating Ginevra King, the
daughter of a wealthy Illinois banker, he overheard a family member of hers (accounts differ as
to whom) remark, Poor boys shouldnt think of
marrying rich girls (1973b, 17). Two years later,
while he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in
Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre declined his
initial marriage proposal because of his poor

career prospects. These snubs combined to
become his most characteristic plotline, which
typically revolves around the efforts of young
men of humble backgrounds to prove themselves
worthy of the daughters of a wealthier class. That
Fitzgerald explored this theme both farcically
(The Offshore Pirate [1920a]) as well as tragically (Winter Dreams [1922b], and The Great
Gatsby) is indicative of how thoroughly his
perceived unworthiness stamped him.
Because Fitzgerald promoted his fiction as
autobiographical, early critics tended to dismiss
him as a facile writer. Yet he never would have
attracted the wide audience he did during his peak
years of popularity (19205) had he not possessed
a talent for presenting personal milestones as
representative of his peers collective experience.
This Side of Paradise sold upwards of 50,000
copies because protagonist Amory Blaines
thwarted ambitions are depicted as generational
dilemmas: his failures in love and college are
attributed not simply to personal shortcomings
but also to the sweeping changes of modern life,
which caused young people to grow up to discover all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths
shaken (1920b, 260). With its unflattering portraits of adults and unrepentant vignettes of teenage initiation rituals drinking and petting, most
notoriously Paradise gave voice to postwar
youth by offering a realistic treatment of adolescent disaffection. In doing so, the book established the template for such twentieth-century
coming-of-age novels as J. D. Salingers The
Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Sylvia Plaths The
Bell Jar (1963) works that, like Paradise, resist
the traditional Bildungsroman model by declining
to conclude with their heroes entering adulthood.
More immediately, both the novel and
Fitzgeralds earliest short stories most published
in the Saturday Evening Post popularized a
character type with which he remains inexorably
associated: the flapper. With their bobbed hair,
knee-baring skirts, and unapologetic coquetry,
heroines such as Paradises Rosalind Connage,
Marcia Meadow in Head and Shoulders, Ardita
Farnam in The Offshore Pirate, and Sally Carrol
Happer in The Ice Palace (all 1920a) modeled
for female readers a self-consciously rebellious
subcultural identity that freed them from the
strictures of Victorian femininity. Nowhere is
that freedom more obvious than when a character

invokes Louisa May Alcott in Bernice Bobs Her
Hair (also 1920a): Oh, please dont quote Little
Women! Marjorie Harvey responds: What
modern girl could live like those inane females?
(33). Fitzgerald capitalized upon adult worries
over flaming youth by entitling his first story
collection Flappers and Philosophers (1920a), and
his second Tales of the Jazz Age (1922b), and by
opining on adolescent mores in interviews and
articles. Even after the vogue for flappers faded, he
remained fascinated with youth. Between 1927
and 1931, he wrote a series of 13 juveniles for
the Post that follow Basil Duke Lee and Josephine
Perry through their late teens. Although nowhere
near as well known as Gatsby or Tender, these
pieces, posthumously collected as The Basil and
Josephine Stories (1973a), offer as nuanced a portrait of the paysage moralise as one will find on any
shortlist of young-adult classics.
Despite his fixation with youth, Fitzgerald
knew that to be regarded as more than a flapper
novelist, he must reach beyond his immediate
generational focus to address broader cultural
concerns. One interest that allowed him to do
this was money. Keenly aware of the expanding
consumer market, he examined the ways in which
the Victorian values of hard work and frugality
were losing their moral valence to a new mindset
of abundance and leisure-time indulgence. At
times, he parodied the previously unimaginable
wealth amassed by barons such as John D.
Rockefeller. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
(1922b) tells the fantastical story of the worlds
richest man, who lives on a mountain-sized diamond in the Montana Rockies. The irony is that
Braddock Washingtons net worth is far from
stable, for his diamond is so large that if it were
offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out
of the market, but also, if the value should vary . . .
there would not be enough gold in the world to
buy a tenth of it (1920a, 193). Washington must
thus keep the diamonds existence secret, which in
turn requires him to either imprison or kill anyone who trespasses upon his Xanadu-like estate
a commentary on not only the cutthroat extremes
to which men like Rockefeller were said to go
to protect their fortunes from the volatility of
commodity markets, but also the increasingly
abstract and transitory nature of monetary values
themselves.
571
In other cases, Fitzgerald preferred to moralize

rather than satirize. His second novel, The
Beautiful and Damned (1922a), traces the decay
of an upper-class New York couple, Anthony and
Gloria Patch, as they await an inheritance from
Anthonys wealthy grandfather. Without any
guiding motivation in life, Anthony and Gloria
succumb to drink, concupiscence, and adultery,
their degeneration only accelerating after they
discover themselves excluded from their patriarchs will. Heavily influenced by naturalist fiction, The Beautiful and Damned is marred by
didactic authorial intrusions and a confusing
ending whose irony escaped many contemporary
readers. (The Patches win a legal battle that recovers their lost fortune, but only after a breakdown that renders Anthony an invalid.) Yet,
despite its flaws, the novel captures the fear that
prosperity encouraged laxity and dissipation.
Fitzgerald would explore this theme more successfully in his most anthologized short story,
Babylon Revisited (1931). Charles Wales is a
more sympathetic character than Anthony Patch
because he recognizes how the extravagance afforded by the bull market cost him his family and
landed him in a sanitarium. Even if his nostalgia
for reckless living undermines his insistence that
he has regained his moorings, his regret inspires
incisive criticism of how affluence distorted his
sense of reality: The snow of twenty-nine wasnt
real snow, Charlie concludes. If you didnt want
it to be snow, you just paid some money (1920a,
633). In still other efforts, Fitzgerald trumpeted
the Protestant work ethic as intently as any Babbittesque Rotarian that Sinclair Lewis might
skewer. One of his most widely read stories during
his lifetime, George Jacksons Arcady (1924),
concerns a disillusioned businessman who discovers how many lives he has benefited by epitomizing the virtues of honorable effort and civic
giving. Although virtually forgotten today, this
proto-Its a Wonderful Life tale was deemed so
inspirational that in 1928 it was republished in
pamphlet form as part of a series promoting
public readings of motivational texts.
One reason that Fitzgeralds critiques of Roaring Twenties mores continue to resonate has to do
with what critics call his dual perspective or
double vision. His work does not merely sermonize against easy money and irrational exuberance. Instead, it acknowledges their appeal
572
with great empathy, allowing readers to experience their allure rather than condemning them
from a distance. The result, as Malcolm Cowley
observed, is a mixture of a maximum of immersion combined with a maximum of critical
attachment that creates a beguiling aura of ambiguity (9). The pinnacle of this trait is The Great
Gatsby, in which narrator Nick Carraway stands
both inside and outside of the action, at once
enabling the enigmatic, nouveau riche Jay Gatsby
in his quest to win back lost love Daisy Fay
Buchanan with a fortune built from bootlegging
and shady bonds while recognizing the unlikelihood of its success. Whether attending Gatsbys
lavish Long Island parties, traveling into New
York City with Daisys philandering husband,
Tom, or lending Gatsby his cottage for a rendezvous with Daisy, Nick is implicated in the intrigue
in ways he cannot admit, especially when he is
prone to make statements such as [e]very one
suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal
virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few
honest people that I have ever known (1925, 59).
Whether such comments are meant sincerely or
ironically is impossible to determine, suggesting
that the dramatis personae are so caught in the flux
of uncertainty that pragmatism and willful blindness have become their survival mechanism. In
the end, The Great Gatsby conveys a world so
prone to cynical expedience and plausible deniability that the optimism of its titular hero can
only seem tragically naive.
The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgeralds
crowning achievement because of its stylistic and
structural concision. Both This Side of Paradise
and The Beautiful and Damned suffer from episodic forms that dilute their drama, while characterization is frequently conveyed through omniscient exposition rather than organic development. By narrowing the temporal scope of his
timeline (the story occurs over the summer of
1922) and employing Nick Carraway as an observer-narrator, Fitzgerald was able to both intensify and internalize the tensions surrounding
Gatsbys pursuit of Daisy. At once imagistic,
dream-like, and profoundly sad, the novel contains several of the most evocative symbols in all of
American literature, including the green light at
the end of Daisys dock, the valley of ashes that
separates Long Island from New York City, and
the disembodied eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that
peer out from an abandoned billboard. The plot,

moreover, asks to be read on different thematic
levels: ostensibly a love story, Gatsby explores the
limits of self-making, the delusions of materialism, and the intangibility of aspiration in a supposedly classless society. In the final paragraphs
Fitzgeralds most cited passage Gatsbys ambition is even elegized as an expression of the
American Dream:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic
future that year by year recedes before us. It
eluded us then, but thats no matter tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
farther.. . . And one fine morning
So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past. (1925, 189)
Fitzgeralds other major novel, Tender Is the
Night, is the obverse of Gatsby in almost every
imaginable way. Written over the course of a
tempestuous nine-year period that saw the author
handicapped by alcoholism and Zeldas descent
into mental illness, the book is chaotic, nonchronological, and fraught with ruminations
and rhetorical sideshows that expound upon
the historical, cultural, and philosophical import
of its action (1994, 467). Nevertheless, the story of
the degeneration of a promising psychologist, Dr.
Dick Diver, and his unstable wife, Nicole Warren,
explores how the ruptures of modernity render
past ideals of character obsolete. On one level, the
book refutes the Great Man theory of historical
progressivism, showing how the moral fiber of
Romantic destiny in which Fitzgerald wanted to
believe had given way to fashionable decadence
and self-destruction. It also captures the peculiar
placelessness of the 1920s globalization, depicting the drift of privileged Americans who expatriated to Europe (much as Fitzgerald and Zelda
did throughout the second half of the decade).
Although Tender was at best a middling success
when first published, its stature has grown over
the years, with critics looking to its tangled subplots to appreciate how diverse phenomena
shaped the eras sense of fragmentation. Based
closely on Zeldas hospitalization in various Swiss
sanitariums, Nicoles treatment for schizophrenia
invites exploration of the psychoanalytic concepts
of transference and countertransference in her
and her husband-doctors mutual dependency.
Dick Divers infatuation with ingenue actress

Rosemary Hoyt, meanwhile, illustrates the role
of the cinema in fostering the unreality of modern
life. Even the leitmotif of romantic warfare is
illustrative, suggesting how the Great War militarized everyday interaction including the battle
between the sexes.
After Tender, Fitzgerald only attempted one
more novel. The Last Tycoon remained unfinished at the time of his December 21, 1940
death, however. Posthumously published a year
later, it is notable for its treatment of the
Hollywood studio system in which the author
had intermittently toiled since the mid-1920s.
As such, it is the culmination of several notable
stories that explore his ambivalence toward
both the industry and the medium, including
Jacobs Ladder (1927), Magnetism (1928),
and a series of 193940 tales featuring failed
public relations flak Pat Hobby. Fitzgeralds
non-fiction is also considered a major part of
his oeuvre, in particular the Esquire triptych
The Crack-Up, which ignited controversy in
1936 for its beguiling confessions of squandered
talent. His more commercial short stories
once derided as distractions from his serious
work are increasingly recognized for their
craft and wit. Although Fitzgerald will remain
best known for the elegiac melancholy of The
Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, his short
fiction reveals that he was as adept at comedy
and fantasy as at tragedy a testament to the
breadth and range of his talent.
SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); Faulkner,
William (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF);
Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Modernist
Fiction (AF)
Berman, R. (1994). The Great Gatsby and Modern
Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Blazek, W., & Rattray, L. (2007). Twenty-First Century
Readings of Tender Is the Night. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press.
Bruccoli, M. J. (2002). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 2nd
rev. edn. New York: Carroll and Graf.
Bryer, J. R., Prigozy, R., & Stern, M. R. (2003). F. Scott
Fitzgerald in the Twenty-First Century. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press.
573
Curnutt, K. (ed.) (2004). An Historical Guide to F. Scott

Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press.
Curnutt, K. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to
F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Cowley, M. (1951). The Double Man. Saturday Review
of Literature, 34, 910, 424.
Donaldson, S. (1983). Fool for Love. New York:
Congdon and Weed.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1920a). Flappers and Philosophers.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1920b). This Side of Paradise.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1922a). The Beautiful and Damned.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1922b). Tales of the Jazz Age. New York:
Scribners.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1923). The Vegetable. New York:
Scribners.
Scribners.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1926). All the Sad Young Men.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1934). Tender Is the Night. New York:
Scribners.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1935). Taps at Reveille. New York:
Scribners.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1941). The Last Tycoon. New York:
Scribners.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1945). The Crack-Up (ed. E. Wilson).
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1962). The Pat Hobby Stories
(ed. A. Gingrich). New York: Scribners.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1973a). The Basil and Josephine
Stories (ed. J. R. Bryer & J. Kuehl). New York:
Scribners.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1973b). F. Scott Fitzgeralds Ledger:
A Facsimile (intro. M. J. Bruccoli). Washington, DC:
NCR Microcard/Bruccoli Clark.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1979). The Notebooks of F. Scott
Fitzgerald (ed. M. J. Bruccoli). New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1989). The Short Stories of F. Scott
Fitzgerald: A New Collection (ed. M. J. Bruccoli).
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1994). F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in
Letters (ed. M. J. Bruccoli). New York: Scribners.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (2002). Dear Scott/Dearest Zelda:
The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
(ed. J. R. Bryer & C. W. Barks). New York:
Scribners.
Mangum, B. (1991). A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art
of F. Scott Fitzgeralds Stories. New York: Garland.
Mizener, A. (1951). The Far Side of Paradise. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
574
FOER, JONATHAN SAFRAN
Nowlin, M. (2007). F. Scott Fitzgeralds Racial Angles

and the Business of Literary Greatness. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Petry, A. H. (1991). Fitzgeralds Craft of Short Fiction:
The Collected Stories, 19201935. Tuscaloosa:
Prigozy, R. (ed.) (2002). The Cambridge Companion to
F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Foer, Jonathan Safran

ALIKI VARVOGLI
Jonathan Safran Foer is a young Jewish American

novelist who is already establishing himself as an
important voice in American letters. His first
novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), was published to critical acclaim when he was only 25, and
five years later he was selected as one of Granta
magazines Best of Young American Novelists.
In addition to his two novels to date, he has also
published numerous stories as well as edited
anthologies of new writing and introduced reissues of classic works of literature.
Foer was born in Washington, DC in 1977. He
attended Princeton University, where he studied
with Joyce Carol Oates, who has been one of his
many high-profile champions. In 1999 he traveled
to Ukraine to research his grandparents history
during World War II, hoping to write a nonfictional account of his experience. As he later
admitted, the trip was ill planned and did not
provide him with any answers. It did, however,
give him the idea for the book that finally became
Everything Is Illuminated. The novel won critical
acclaim, and Foer was hailed as one of the most
significant authors to emerge in the beginning of
the twenty-first century. The book won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First
Book Award, and was later made into a film
directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah
Wood.
Everything Is Illuminated tells the story of a
character called Jonathan Safran Foer who travels
to Ukraine in order to meet the woman who,
according to his family, had saved his grandfather
from the Nazis. Foers is one of the first American
novels written by the grandchildren of Holocaust
survivors, and his contribution is significant
because each generation has to face the task of
finding new ways of writing about a subject that

has long been deemed unrepresentable, but has
nevertheless been treated by many Jewish American authors. Foer has approached the subject
using innovative textual strategies, as well as
weaving other significant themes into the novel.
The book consists of three parts: one narrated by
Jonathans Ukrainian guide and translator, Alex
Perchov; another consisting of Alexs letters
to Jonathan; and a third strand comprising
Jonathans fictional account of the history of the
shtetl of Trachimbrod. The structural complexity
of the novel reinforces the theme of intercultural
communication in the era of globalization. Alexs
idiosyncratic use of English is very funny, but
more seriously it emphasizes the work of translation and interpretation that the reader also has to
engage with in order to appreciate the novel. It is
also significant that Jonathan, the supposed protagonist in the novel, is actually absent from the
text: we catch glimpses of him through Alexs
account, and we read his Trachimbrod book as
he sends the chapters to Alex. More generally, the
novel can be placed within the tradition of
the postmodernist American novel. The author
uses familiar novelistic tropes and motifs such as
the heros quest journey, the buddy road trip, the
epistolary novel, and magic realism, and by blending these ingredients he draws attention to continuity and innovation in novel writing. The
books copyright page also contains a twist on
the familiar disclaimer, explaining how the author
uses historical events fictitiously, thus aligning
himself with historiographic metafiction, which is
also employed in his next novel.
Foer clearly doesnt shy away from big, difficult
themes, and his second novel deals with the events
of September 11, 2001. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) tells the story of Oskar Schell,
a precocious 9-year-old whose father died in the
World Trade Center. Like its predecessor, the
book relies on a series of narrative and structural
innovations, which can be read as the authors
attempt to find new modes of expression suitable
for new realities. The choice of the name Oskar
brings to mind one of the most memorable
narrator-characters in world literature, G
unter
Grasss Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum
(1959). Once again, then, the book foregrounds
its own literariness and its indebtedness to
previous novels, not only through this example
FORD, RICHARD
of intertextuality, but also through its innovative

use of photographs, illustrations, and typographic
experiments. Though inevitably some critics will
condemn these devices as gimmicks, it should be
noted that the predominantly visual nature of the
World Trade Center attacks has necessitated new
modes of novelistic expression, and therefore
Foers contribution can be seen as important in
that respect.
Foer has published stories in the New York
Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and
elsewhere. He has also edited a collection of new
writing called A Convergence of Birds: Original
Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph
Cornell (2001). He is married to novelist Nicole
Krauss, and he continues to write.
Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); Oates,
Joyce Carol (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
Feuer, M. (2007). Almost Friends: Post-Holocaust
Comedy, Tragedy, and Friendship in Jonathan
Safran Foers Everything is Illuminated. Shofar, 25(2),
2448.
Foer, J. S. (2001). A Convergence of Birds: Original
Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph
Cornell. New York: Distributed Art.
Foer, J. S. (2002). Everything Is Illuminated. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Foer, J. S. (2005). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Mason, W. (2005). Like Beavers. London Review of
Books (June 2). At www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n11/wyattmason/like-beavers, accessed Jan. 19, 2010.
Varvogli, A. (2006). Underwhelmed to the
Maximum: American Travellers in Dave Eggerss
You Shall Know Our Velocity and Jonathan Safran
Foers Everything Is Illuminated. Atlantic Studies,
3(1), 8395.
Ford, Richard
HUEY GUAGLIARDO
Richard Ford ranks as a major figure among

American writers of the post-World War II generation. Fords works of fiction repeatedly explore
issues of human loneliness, isolation, and despair;
and his characters, typically caught up in the
575
absurd violence and randomness of existence in

the postmodern world, experience dislocation
and marginalization as they struggle to forge
connections with other human beings on the
lonely edge of life. Fords project, thus, clearly
places him in the tradition of the existential
literature of alienation. As astute observations of
contemporary society and its peculiar afflictions,
his narratives of alienation also invite examination in a cultural context.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi on February 16,
1944, Ford learned at an early age to accommodate displacement and uncertainty. When he was
8 years old, his father suffered a heart attack, and
the family moved from its home in Jackson into a
hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas run by Fords
grandfather. Life in the hotel, with its permanence
amid transience, provided an important formative experience for Ford, who would later become
somewhat notorious for his restless nature. Days
after Fords sixteenth birthday his traveling salesman father suffered a fatal heart attack, and just
two years later Ford began his own peripatetic
adult life by traveling to Michigan, where he
enrolled at Michigan State University, majoring
in hotel management. He later changed his major
to English, graduated, and joined the US Marine
Corps (from which he was discharged after contracting hepatitis). After a brief stint working in
New York for American Druggist as assistant science editor and attending Washington University
Law School in St. Louis, Missouri for one semester,
Ford married his college sweetheart, Kristina
Hensley. Unemployed and without serious prospects, he decided to pursue a career as a writer by
enrolling in the University of California, Irvines
MFA program. He was awarded the degree in
1970, having studied with Oakley Hall and E. L.
Doctorow. Unsuccessful in his attempts to publish
his short fiction, Ford began work on a novel.
A Piece of My Heart (1976) received a nomination for the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best
First Novel, but its rural Mississippi/Arkansas
setting and eccentric characters led some critics
to describe it as a poor imitation of William
Faulkner. Ford decided at that point never again
to write another novel set in his native South, and
has resisted the Southern writer label ever since.
As if to escape the comparisons to Faulkner, Ford
chose Mexico as the setting for his second novel,
The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). The story
576
FRANK, WALDO
concerns Harry Quinn, an emotionally disabled

Vietnam veteran trying to free his ex-girlfriends
cocaine-smuggling brother from prison.
Although neither of Fords first two novels was
commercially successful, they received many
favorable reviews, and they introduced themes
and concerns that the author would explore
throughout his career.
Following the publication of The Ultimate
Good Luck, Ford, disappointed by his inability to
find a significant readership and despondent over
his mothers death, decided to quit writing fiction
and to begin a career as a sports journalist for a
New York magazine called Inside Sports. When
the magazine folded in 1982, he began working on
The Sportswriter, the novel that introduced his
best-known character, suburban Everyman Frank
Bascombe, and provided the breakthrough Ford
needed to finally establish his reputation as a
serious writer. The Sportswriter (1986) was followed by Rock Springs (1987), a critically acclaimed volume of short stories, and Wildlife
(1990), a short coming-of-age novel in which
Ford used the stark landscape of Montana to
develop his existentialist themes. The story of
Frank Bascombe continued with Independence
Day, which in 1995 became the first book to win
both the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award.
Women with Men (1997), a collection of three
novellas, and A Multitude of Sins (2002), a volume
of short fiction, are works that deal with one of
Fords recurring subjects, the isolation and loneliness resulting from dissolving relationships.
With the publication of his third Frank Bascombe book, The Lay of the Land (2006), Ford
completed a trilogy of novels offering the most
extensive and penetrating commentary on contemporary American culture since John Updike
chronicled the life of Rabbit Angstrom in a
four-book sequence spanning several decades.
Like Updikes Rabbit series, Fords Bascombe
novels were published at roughly 10-year intervals. While the introspective and somewhat
solipsistic Frank serves as narrator-protagonist
for all three novels, it is clear that Ford has his
eye not only on Franks inner landscape, but also
on the American landscape, with the suburban,
middle-class culture of New Jersey serving as a
microcosm.
The major literary influences upon Ford include fellow Mississippian Faulkner, and two
members of Gertrude Steins Lost Generation,

Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as the
French Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert
Camus, and practitioners of the novel of alienation such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme,
Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Frederick Exley,
Joseph Heller, and Walker Percy.
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Southern
Novel (AF); Updike, John (AF)
Duffy, B. (2008). Morality, Identity and Narrative in the
Fiction of Richard Ford. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Ford, R. (1976). A Piece of My Heart. New York: Harper
and Row.
Ford, R. (1981). The Ultimate Good Luck. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Ford, R. (1986). The Sportswriter. New York: Knopf.
Ford, R. (1987). Rock Springs. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
Ford, R. (1990). Wildlife. New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press.
Ford, R. (1995). Independence Day. New York: Knopf.
Ford, R. (1997). Women with Men. New York: Knopf.
Ford, R. (2002). A Multitude of Sins. New York: Knopf.
Ford, R. (2004). Vintage Ford. New York: Vintage.
Ford, R. (2006). The Lay of the Land. New York: Knopf.
Guagliardo, H. (ed.) (2000). Perspectives on Richard
Ford. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Guagliardo, H. (ed.) (2001). Conversations with Richard
Ford. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Lee, D. (1996). About Richard Ford. Ploughshares,
22(23), 22635.
Walker, E. A. (2000). Richard Ford. New York: Twayne.
Frank, Waldo
KATHLEEN PFEIFFER
As novelist, playwright, cultural critic, social commentator, editor, and mentor to younger writers,
Waldo Frank sought to influence the development of a more organic, democratic American
literature in the twentieth century. Though he
longed for recognition as a novelist, particularly
in relation to his pioneering efforts to develop the
lyric novel in his early fiction, Frank will probably best be remembered for the clarity and
insight of his critical writing about American
FRANK, WALDO
culture and for his passionate advocacy of Latin

American writers to US audiences.
Waldo David Frank, named after Emerson and
Thoreau, was born into a non-observant Jewish
family in 1889 in Long Branch, New Jersey.
A precocious student, he graduated Phi Beta
Kappa from Yale in 1911, earning a simultaneous
BA and MA in three years. He helped found the
Seven Arts little magazine in 1916, where as literary editor, he discovered Claude McKay and
Sherwood Anderson.
Franks first novel, a lengthy semiautobiographical Bildingsroman titled The Unwelcome
Man (1917), was among the first to employ
Freudian psychology deliberately to inform the
protagonists interior monologue. The Dark
Mother (1920) also experimented with psychological concepts, offering a nuanced and mystical
account of male friendship that has often
been cited as an early example of homosexual
literature. Frank experimented with non-linear
narrative form in two structurally innovative and
thematically related works, Rahab (1922b) and
City Block (1922a). Each of these novels deviated
dramatically from traditional narrative, juxtaposing story lines and characters against each other
and against classical literary traditions. Both also
examined sexuality, with Rahab focusing on a
procuress and the prostitutes she attends, and
City Block examining, among other things, the
sexual infidelity of a married couple and the
sexual activity of a priest. Because both Frank
and his publisher Horace Liveright feared
prosecution from the New York Society for the
Prevention of Vice, City Block was published
privately. Frank also wrote the psychological
thriller Chalk Face (1924a), a murder mystery
that also manipulated Freudian tropes. Holiday
(1923), his evocative story of a Southern lynching,
is probably the most important and best remembered from this period, not only because of its
significance to the Harlem Renaissance, but also
because he wrote it during his friendship with
Jean Toomer, whom he mentored and advised
while Toomer wrote Cane. Viewed by Frank and
Toomer as companion pieces, Holiday and
Cane were published on the same day, both by
Boni and Liveright.
Frank published novels throughout his life,
including The Death and Birth of David Markand
(1934), a sequel to The Dark Mother; The Bride-
577
groom Cometh (1938), which traces the maturation of protagonist Mary Donald with marked
New Testament imagery; Summer Never Ends
(1941), a love story between a middle-aged
man and a much younger woman; Island in the
Atlantic (1946), an examination of Jewish identity
in America that also fictionalized his own
fathers life; The Invaders (1948), which fictionally
imagines the import of the atom bomb on individual identity through a series of interpersonal
invasions; and Not Heaven (1953), a collection
of short stories that are unified only in their
theme of examining some aspect of hell on earth.
All of these works represent Franks attempts to
develop what he called the lyric novel, a direct
expression of subjectivity that employs modernist
literary techniques; Franks fiction generally experiments with form and often evokes some mystical vision. His novels received mixed reviews
from critics who struggled with Franks mysticism
and his disjointed, elliptical style.
Franks critical writing proved more culturally influential than his fiction, particularly
works like Our America (1919) and The Rediscovery of America (1929b), both of which called
for an organic American art form. Always
politically active, Frank also lectured extensively prior to his death in 1967. His writings on
Cuba have proven prophetic and his advocacy
of Latin American writers makes him a formidable critical presence in Latin America even
today. In all of his lifes writing and work,
Frank embraced Walt Whitmans vision of the
artist as American cultures priest, and he saw
creativity and writing as revolutionary activities that had the potential to reinvigorate
American democracy.
SEE ALSO: Anderson, Sherwood (AF); The
Harlem Renaissance (AF); McKay, Claude (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF);
Toomer, Jean (AF)

Bittner, W. (1958). The Novels of Waldo Frank.
Carter, P. J. (1967). Waldo Frank. New York:
Twayne.
Frank, W. (1917). The Unwelcome Man. Boston: Little,
Brown.
578
FRANZEN, JONATHAN
Frank, W. (1919). Our America. New York: Boni and

Liveright.
Frank, W. (1920). The Dark Mother. New York:
Boni and Liveright.
Frank, W. (1922a). City Block. Darien, CT: privately
printed.
Frank, W. (1922b). Rahab. New York: Boni and Liveright.
Frank, W. (1923). Holiday. New York: Boni and
Liveright.
Frank, W. (1924a). Chalk Face. New York: Boni and
Liveright.
Frank, W. (1924b). Salvos: An Informal Book about
Books and Plays. New York: Boni and Liveright.
Frank, W. (1926a). Time Exposures, by Search-Light.
Frank, W. (1926b). Virgin Spain. New York: Boni and
Liveright.
Frank, W. (1929a). New Years Eve: A Play. New York:
Scribners.
Frank, W. (1929b). The Rediscovery of America.
Frank, W. (1931). America Hispana. New York:
Scribners.
Frank, W. (1932). Dawn in Russia. New York:
Scribners.
Frank, W. (1934). The Death and Birth of David
Markand. New York: Scribners.
Frank, W. (1937). In the American Jungle. New York:
Farrar and Rinehart.
Frank, W. (1938). The Bridegroom Cometh. London:
Gollancz.
Frank, W. (1940). Chart for Rough Water. New York:
Doubleday.
Frank, W. (1941). Summer Never Ends. New York:
Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
Frank, W. (1943). South American Journey. New York:
Frank, W. (1944). The Jew in Our Day. New York: Duell,
Sloan and Pearce.
Frank, W. (1946). Island in the Atlantic. New York:
Frank, W. (1948). The Invaders. New York: Duell, Sloan
and Pearce.
Frank, W. (1951). Birth of a World: Bolivar in Terms of
His Peoples. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Frank, W. (1953). Not Heaven. New York: Hermitage
House.
Frank, W. (1957). Bridgehead: The Drama of Israel.
New York: Braziller.
Frank, W. (1958). The Rediscovery of Man. New York:
Braziller.
Frank, W. (1961). Cuba: Prophetic Island. New York:
Marzani and Munsell.
Terris, D. (2003). Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and
the Critique of Racial Voyeurism. In H. Hathaway,
J. Jarab, & J. Melnick (eds.), Race and the Modern

Artist. New York: Oxford, pp. 92114.
Trachtenberg, A. (ed.) (1973). Memoirs of Waldo
Frank. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press.
Franzen, Jonathan
KEITH WILHITE
Named one of Twenty Writers for the 21st

Century by the New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen
has published critically acclaimed works of
fiction and non-fiction since his debut novel, The
Twenty Seventh City (1988), earned the Whiting
Writers Award. His non-fiction essays effectively
unite the genres of memoire and cultural critique,
while his fiction, though decidedly postmodern in
influence and ambition, draws on longstanding
traditions of narrative realism and naturalism. To
date, he has published three novels and two
collections of non-fiction.
Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois
on August 17, 1959 and raised in Webster Groves,
a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated
from Swarthmore College and studied in Berlin as
a Fulbright Scholar. To fund his early writing
efforts, Franzen worked in the seismology department at Harvard University, an experience he
would draw on for his second novel, Strong
Motion (1992). The acclaim for his first two novels
was surpassed by the popular and critical success
of The Corrections (2001). His third novel won the
National Book Award and brought Franzen some
unwanted notoriety for his part in the now-infamous Oprah Book Club scandal. His disparaging remarks concerning Oprah Winfreys selection of The Corrections for her televised reading
group caused a minor tempest in the media.
Responses ranged from ad hominem attacks
against Franzen to more thoughtful reflections
on popular culture, female readership, and literary value (Chronicle 2001).
Franzens first two novels utilize the presence
of pervasive conspiracy networks to intertwine
the personal and political strands of his fiction.
The Twenty-Seventh City is set in a fictionalized
version of St. Louis, and the metropolitan area is
under siege by terrorists. The mastermind behind
the terror campaign is the new police chief,
FRANZEN, JONATHAN
S. Jammu. Her public support for a contentious

citycounty reunification plan disguises a clandestine real estate scheme to garner wealth and
political power. Martin Probst, a contractor famous for building the Gateway Arch, heads
the opposition to the proposed plan and stands
in as the imperfect but stalwart opponent of
unchecked greed in the novel. Franzens detailed,
wide-angle depictions of St. Louis level a compelling critique against contemporary urban planning and civic apathy.
The conspiracy in Strong Motion is orchestrated
by a chemical company whose toxic waste-dumping practices trigger a string of earthquakes in the
Boston area. The relationship between the two
central figures, Louis Holland and Renee Seitchek,
allows Franzen to explore a range of fraught
topics: gender roles, abortion rights, religious
fanaticism, greed, consumerism, and the possibility for redemption in an era of generalized guilt
and malaise. Strong motion refers to the shaking near the epicenter of an earthquake, motion
that is easy to record but reveals little about the
quake itself. This phenomenon serves as the
novels controlling metaphor: the characters can
register the symptoms of their strained relations
and always partial contentment but fail to fathom
the vague desires and fears that underlie them.
In 1996, Franzen published Perchance to
Dream, an essay that has shaded responses to
all his subsequent work. Later collected as Why
Bother? in How to Be Alone (2003), the essay
descries the decline of the social novel and
laments the diminished capacity of serious writing to engage serious readers. The piece has been
cited as evidence of Franzens elitism and criticized for its narrow definition of literary value
(Marcus 2005), but the essay thoughtfully examines the possibility of preserving a community of
readers and writers in an era of atomized
privacy (Franzen 2003, 90, 70). Toward the end
of the piece, Franzen cites his correspondence
with Don DeLillo to reassure himself that serious
writing still matters, but the conclusion also
recapitulates a more fundamental tension in
Franzens work between the novel as art and the
novel as social commentary (Wood 2004).
This tension drives The Corrections, an ambitious, sharply written novel, equally committed
to human drama and cultural critique. The
plot revolves around the Lambert family and
579
the increasingly scattered lives of its respective

members. Enid Lambert desperately wants her
children to return to St. Jude for one last
Christmas before their father, Alfred, succumbs
to Parkinsons disease. Her children, though, will
do almost anything to avoid their parents and
the Midwestern suburb of their youth. The
corrections of the title is the novels leitmotif.
Gary, Chip, and Denise Lambert envision their
respective lives as corrections to those of
their parents, but they unavoidably end up as
nuanced repetitions. Enid wants her children to
be corrections, to accomplish things she could
not, but she cannot overcome her disappointment in their choices. And, finally, correction as
the countrys prevailing ethos provides material
for the novels askance look at capitalism, antidepressants, and biotechnology (Wood 2024).
Since 2001, Franzen has primarily published
non-fiction. How to Be Alone brings together
essays on a wide range of topics: his fathers
Alzheimers, privacy, prison, reading habits, urbanism, suburban sprawl, and the Oprah Book
Club. The Discomfort Zone (2006) collects some of
his more recent non-fiction pieces from the
New Yorker, including reflections on selling his
mothers house, his adolescence in the Midwest,
and the dissolution of his first marriage in an essay
about bird watching.
In both his fiction and non-fiction, Franzen
develops incisive portraits of contemporary
American consciousness: experiences of loss, isolation, and redemption; the inescapable bonds of
family; rampant materialism and corporate greed;
and detailed portraits of homes, cities, and metro
regions in various degrees of decline. He continues to write for the New Yorker while working
on his next novel.
DeLillo, Don (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF);

Annesley, J. (2006). Market Corrections: Jonathan
Franzen and the Novel of Globalization.Journal
of Modern Literature, 29(2), 11128.
Chronicle of Higher Education (2001). Deconstruct This:
Jonathan Franzen and Oprah, a Novelist, a
580
FRANZEN, JONATHAN
Talk-Show Host, and Literature High and Low, p. B4

(Nov. 30).
Franzen, J. (1988). The Twenty-Seventh City. New York:
Franzen, J. (1992). Strong Motion. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Franzen, J. (2001). The Corrections. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Franzen, J. (2003). How to Be Alone: Essays. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador.
Franzen, J. (2006). The Discomfort Zone: A Personal
History. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Marcus, B. (2005). Why Experimental Fiction
Threatens to Destroy Publishing: Jonathan Franzen,
and Life as We Know It: A Correction. Harpers,

pp. 3952 (Oct.).
Rebein, R. (2007). Turncoat: Why Jonathan Franzen
Finally Said No to Po-Mo. In N. Brooks &
J. Toth (eds.), The Mourning After: Attending the
Wake of Postmodernism. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
pp. 20122.
Rohr, S. (2004). The Tyranny of the Probable: Crackpot
Realism and Jonathan Franzens The Corrections.
Amerikastudien/American Studies, 49(1), 91105.
Wood, J. (2004). Jonathan Franzen and the Social
Novel. In The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the
Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
pp. 195209.
G
Gaddis, William
JOSEPH P. TABBI
An encyclopedia entry on William Gaddis, himself

a foremost encyclopedic author (Burn 2007),
had better begin by narrowing the range. The
field Gaddis set out to explore at length, in The
Recognitions (1955), can be said to have been
roughly congruent with the contemporary
wasteland delineated a generation earlier in
poetry by T. S. Eliot, namely, the entire heritage
of literary, visual, musical, and religious arts
that were being reconsidered, reformed, and to
some extent used to shore up the ruins of
postwar society. What was formulated for the
first time, by Eliot and his modernist compeers,
became redoubled, and partly parodied, in The
Recognitions, which became a reference point for
a post-World War II generation of US writers
and an important precursor to an emerging,
postmodernist aesthetic in literature.
By the time, 20 years later, that Gaddis published his next novel, the National Book Awardwinning JR (1975), the arts have disappeared as a
subject of encyclopedic, essayistic reflection. The
party talk, office talk, and street talk that, in the
first novel, served as a counterpoint to the narrative become the narrative in JR. And the arts,
rather than something to be practiced, reproduced, revered, or reviled, become mere topics
of conversation even among the artists, musicians, and authors who are the main characters.
Eliots project of literary modernization, by now,
has been completed. The fragmented condition of
the literary and aesthetic tradition, however,
has made the arts suitable for colonization by

another, equally important force in Gaddiss
works: namely, the rise of corporate capital and
its expansion worldwide.
But not only the rise: that story was being told
already by John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser,
Frank Norris, and the entire line of American
naturalist writing. It would be revisited by Robert
Coover in Johns Wife (1996), Don DeLillo in
Cosmopolis (2003), Richard Powers in Gain
(1998), and Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day
(2006) among many other authors a generation
or two after Gaddis, whose work they acknowledge
and develop. What distinguishes Gaddis from his
peers and precursors, however, is the insight that
corporate capital, today as never before, has become uniquely, deviously personalized. The granting to corporations of rights normally given to
individuals, and the American love of innovation
and belief in progress, could be replicated in
narrative fiction by attributing to a single person
the entire force and direction of modern capital.
Mark Twain had already given the spirit of accumulation and entrepreneurship to his adolescent
hero, Tom Sawyer. Gaddis would succeed in
attributing the entire system of corporate capital
to a fatherless eighth grader from Long Island, the
irrepressible J. R. Vansant, an unkempt 11 year
old whose penny stock and defaulted bond operations [blossom] into a vast and perilous financial
empire (JR Up to Date, in Gaddis 2002b).
William Gaddis was born in Long Island to
Edith and William Gaddis Sr. on December 29,
1922. Like his character J.R., like Otto in The
Recognitions (Auto), like the artist turned art

582
GADDIS, WILLIAM
forger Wyatt Gwyon (another W.G.), and like

the jack-of-all-trades Jack Gibbs, Gaddis grew up
not knowing his father, and he commuted to
boarding schools in Connecticut. He attended
Harvard University, was dismissed in 1945, and
then, against the explicit advice of his Harvard
professors to avoid journalism, worked a stint at
the New Yorker, traveled, and then settled in his
mothers carriage house to draft The Recognitions.
The novel was read with excitement by a circle of
contemporaries (first among them Alan Ansen,
who gave Gaddis use of his New York apartment
in the fall of 1953 and, on returning from Europe,
read the 1,000-plus-page manuscript straight
through in a day and a half). The book was widely
if unevenly reviewed, a fate anticipated by Gaddis
in the novel, where one critic is seen carrying a
heavy volume through the streets of Greenwich
Village. When asked if hes really reading the
book, the critic answers, Hell no, Im just reviewing it. The novels commercial failure compelled Gaddis, now married and a father, to take
up a career in corporate writing. That self-same
carriage house in Long Island would be one of the
settings in JR, where the youthful Edward Bast
composes, and fails to complete, a grand opera
which diminishes, in time, to a cantata, then a
small piece for an orchestra, and finally a composition for an unaccompanied cello: a small voice
against the din.
Though some critics have read this progression
as a valiant persistence on the part of Bast, and by
extension on Gaddiss part, JRs distinctly multivoiced, dialogical, formally compact, but streaming narrative tells a different story of the relations
between creativity and capital, money and text,
The Literary Imagination and the Imagination
of the State (one of Gaddiss occasional essays
published posthumously; 2002b). JR appeared at
the end of a period of vast, postwar economic
expansion, the era of Keynesian economics. Of
course the novel reenacts the rapid growth and
satirizes the excess of an era, but in its form
and content JR remains wholly, unrelentingly
within the constraints of the postwar economy,
insinuating its collapse and to an extent, arguably,
anticipating the next, neoliberal phase where
the entire world becomes militarized and growth
is an end in itself. Already in JR, in 1973, a novel
that aspires to epical, encyclopedic scope no
longer needs to reference a world outside power
and money, not when military and government

organizations, motivated by interests of security
and power, have themselves extended to all
forms of daily life in all developed cities of
the world.
At the end of The Recognitions, a repentant
Wyatt could exclaim, Thank God there was the
gold to forge, when he is reassured that the
Hieronymous Bosch painting in his childhood
home was authentic. The distinction between
originality and fakery, however tilted toward
the latter in The Recognitions, is still upheld. So
is the gold standard in the world economy, up
to the supercession of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1973, two years before the appearance of
JR. As paper money no longer required any
grounding representation in convertible gold,
money could more easily breed money, and
this free-floating, interchangeable, and worldspanning realm of signification is captured not
only by what happens and what is said in Gaddiss
novel about money. The novels form, a continuing stream of text spoken by multiple voices
through every available medium, is suited to the
hypermobility and literally endless accumulation
of transnational capital.
Another innovation that occurred in the year of
JRs appearance (1975) was the publication by
Bill Gates and Paul Allen of a version of the
computer language BASIC for the Altair and for
Microsoft. There was, of course, nothing new
or revolutionary about this from a scientific or
technological perspective. The innovation was
entirely in the financial realm: by charging money
for the software, Gates in effect. . . invents closed
source (Pease, in press). In this way, code itself,
what otherwise attaches to real, observable operations, could be hidden and so technology itself
could move into the same privatized sphere as
finance, generating its own demands, its own
economy, and objects meant to be experienced
not actively, in their creation, but as self-breeding
sources of entertainment and instruction (and a
peculiar sort of instruction, not about the world
but increasingly about the objects, instruments,
and devices themselves).
The cybernetic metaphor, already familiar in the
early novels of Thomas Pynchon, becomes something more than a metaphor in Gaddiss later
work. The entire infrastructure of communication
and transportation technologies becomes a set of
GADDIS, WILLIAM
channels through which language courses the

authors own language, in bridge passages that
take the reader from scene to scene, as well as the
dialogue of characters. Language itself in this way
becomes not just communicative but also operational in ways that are developed further in the
firebrand religion of Carpenters Gothic (1985) and
the legal language in A Frolic of His Own, which
netted Gaddis his second National Book Award
in 1994.
And not only religious and legal language, but
also the language of every profession, which
Harry, the corporate lawyer in Frolic, calls a
conspiracy against the public, every profession
protects itself with a language of its own.
In Gaddiss late work, there are no longer any
children among the characters they exist outside the narrative action, playing hockey, for
example, with a fallen pigeon at the start of
Carpenters Gothic. Nature exists, tooth-in-claw,
for Gaddis, though for the most part its conveyed through programs running through the
night on the Nature Channel, which Gaddis
presents in Frolic alongside quotations from
Longfellows Hiawatha (By the shores of Gitche
Gumee . . .).
There is, in the late work, nobody around to
hear the poet who, as late as Gaddiss own childhood, might have appeared (with the essays of
Emerson) in leather-bound, mass-produced volumes even in rural households, like the one
depicted in the opening chapter of The Recognitions. There are no town carpenters in Gaddiss
America of the late twentieth century, nobody
like the grandfather who tells stories to Wyatt
in his Connecticut boyhood, or the distracted
father, Reverend Gwyon, who seeds his sermons
with philosophical, mystical, and anthropological heresies. No children, and no invented
fathers, appear after The Recognitions and JR to
fill the lack in Gaddiss own upbringing. By the
time of his final, posthumously published work
of fiction, Agape Agape (2002a), Gaddis regards
the ages ideal child, every four year old with a
computer, everybody his own artist. In an age of
semi-autonomous technology and self-breeding
money, the arts can be reduced to varieties of
self-expression, modes of possessive individualism. But Gaddis resisted that capitulation, in
writing, until the time when he could say, and
do, nothing more.
583
SEE ALSO: Coover, Robert (AF);

DeLillo, Don (AF); Dos Passos, John (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF); Powers, Richard (AF); Pynchon,
Thomas (AF)

Abadi-Nagy, Z. (1987). The Art of Fiction: An Interview
With William Gaddis. Paris Review, 105, 5589.
Brunel, J.-L., & Gresset, M. (eds.) (1994). William
Gaddis, Profils Americaines, no. 6. Montpellier,
France: Press Universite Paul-Valery.
Burn, S. (2007). The Collapse of Everything: William
Gaddis and the Encyclopedic Novel. In J. Tabbi &
R. Shavers (eds.), Paper Empire: William Gaddis
and the World System. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, pp. 4662.
Commes, G. (1994). The Ethics of Indeterminacy in
the Novels of William Gaddis. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida.
Gaddis, W. (1955). The Recognitions. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Gaddis, W. (1975). JR. New York: Knopf.
Gaddis, W. (1985). Carpenters Gothic. New York:
Viking.
Gaddis, W. (1994). A Frolic of His Own. New York:
Poseidon.
Gaddis, W. (2002a). Agape Agape. New York: Viking.
Gaddis, W. (2002b). The Rush for Second Place:
Occasional Essays. New York: Penguin.
Johnston, J. (1990). Carnival of Repetition: Gaddiss
The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory.
Knight, C. J. (1997). Hints and Guesses: William
Gaddiss Fiction of Longing. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Kuehl, J., & Moore, S. (eds.) (1984). In Recognition of
William Gaddis. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press.
LeClair, T. (1989). The Art of Excess: Mastery in
Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Moore, S. (1982). A Readers Guide to William Gaddiss
The Recognitions. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Moody, R. (ed.) (2003). William Gaddis: A Portfolio
[special issue]. Conjunctions, 41.
Moore, S. (1989). William Gaddis. Boston: G. K. Hall.
ODonnell, P. J. (1992). His Masters Voice: On
William Gaddiss JR. Postmodern Culture, 1, 2
(online). (Also in Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in
Modern Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1992.)
584
GAINES, ERNEST J.
Pease, A. (in press). Time Is Money, Money Is Text. PhD

diss., University of Florida.
Tabbi, J. (1995). The Technology of Quotation: William
Gaddiss JR and Contemporary Media. Mosaic,
28(4), 14364.
Tabbi, J., & Shavers, R. (eds.) (2007). Paper Empire:
William Gaddis and the World System. Tuscaloosa:
Weisenburger, S. (1995). Fables of Subversion: Satire
and the American Novel 19301980. Athens:
Woolf, P. (1997). A Vision of His Own: The Mind
and Art of William Gaddis. Madison: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press.
Gaines, Ernest J.
MARIA HEBERT-LEITER
With his attention to storytelling techniques and

the verisimilitude of his characters voices, Ernest
J. Gaines has effectively captured the realities of
rural African American life in his fiction. Through
his use of regional dialect and tragicomedy,
he offers insight into the world of a twentiethcentury American South still in need of change
and African American men still in search of pride
and justice.
Born in Oscar, Louisiana on January 15, 1933,
Ernest J. Gaines lived his first 15 years with his
aunt Miss Augusteen Jefferson, who did not have
the use of her legs and so moved by way of her
powerful arms, an example of the strength of
African American women that would become a
core component in such characters as Miss Jane
Pittman. He lived in the River Lake Plantation
quarters where he witnessed the racial and social
structure unique to Louisiana, and he listened to
the stories of the older residents, which later
became inspiration for his fiction and influenced
his characteristic use of first-person narration.
At 15, Gaines moved to California to live with
his mother and stepfather and benefit educationally. Here he took advantage of the public library
and discovered the writers who would greatly
influence his work, such as John Steinbeck, Willa
Cather, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, and James Joyce,
among others, which he has revised to address
African American life in the South, particularly in
Louisiana. Gaines attended junior college and
served in the Army for two years before complet-
ing his education at San Francisco State College.

After winning a writing fellowship to Stanford
University, he completed his graduate work with
classmates such as Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, and
Tillie Olsen.
Gaines returns to the Louisiana of his past by
setting his work in fictional Bayonne, St. Raphael
Parish, and has remarked that he began writing so
that the voices of his aunt and the people of the
quarters could be heard. Not only does he capture
these voices, but also he records the ethnic mix of
Louisiana Creoles, Creoles of Color, Cajuns,
African Americans, and other communities and
the social structure from this interethnic situation. Such interconnections are illustrated
through Gainess use of 15 narrators of various
ages and ethnicities to relate the story of a Cajuns
murder and of decades-old injustices in A Gathering of Old Men (1983). Through such characters,
he captures the complexity of humanity and the
history of race relations in the South. Similarly in
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971a),
the title character not only relates one hundred
years of Southern racial history, but also presents
an oral history of how a former slave lived to join
the Civil Rights Movement.
In recognition of his contribution to twentiethcentury American literature, Gaines was offered
the position of writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1983. He has
also been recognized nationally and internationally as a MacArthur Fellow (1993), Chevalier de
lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres (in France, 1996),
and Louisiana Writer of the Year (2000). Additionally, he has received a National Endowment
for the Arts grant (1967), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971), and a National Humanities Medal
(2000).
While these awards honor Gainess achievement, works such as Catherine Carmier (1964), Of
Love and Dust (1967), Bloodline (1968), A Long
Day in November (1971b), and In My Fathers
House (1978) provide readers with a compelling
message about the interwoven reality of humanity. In particular, A Lesson Before Dying (1993),
which received the 1993 National Book Critics
Circle Award, relates the story of two African
American men and the development of their
relationship, as college-educated Grant Wiggins
teaches Jefferson how to become a man while
Jefferson awaits execution for a murder he did not
GARDNER, JOHN
commit. As with all of Gainess work, an involved

story of mutual education unfolds, as both characters learn the meaning of being a man in the
1940s South.
While Gaines has downplayed African American literary influences, scholars have studied
A Lesson Before Dying as engaging Richard
Wrights Native Son in a rural Louisiana context,
furthering Gainess significant contribution to
modern literature. In October 1997, this novel
was chosen as a selection of Oprahs Book Club,
demonstrating the wide appeal of his fiction.
The Southern Novel (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
585
Gaines, E. J. (1993). A Lesson Before Dying. New York:

Knopf.
Gaudet, M., & Wooton, C. (1990). Porch Talk with
Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writers Craft.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Gaudet, M., & Young, R., (eds.) (2005). Mozart and
Leadbelly: Stories and Essays. New York: Knopf.
Hebert-Leiter, M. (2006). A Breed Between: Racial
Mediation in the Fiction of Ernest Gaines. MELUS,
31(2), 95118.
Lowe, J., (ed.) (1995). Conversations with Ernest Gaines.
Gardner, John
ROBERT MORACE

Babb, V. M. (1991). Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne.
Beavers, H. (1995). Wrestling Angels Into Song: The
Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson.
Byerman, K. (2005). Bearing Witness: The Recent
Fiction of Ernest Gaines. In Remembering the
Past in Contemporary African American Fiction.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
pp. 3853.
Carmean, K. (1998). Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical
Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Clark, K. (2002). Reimagining Richard: Ernest J. Gaines
and the Neo-Masculinist Literary Imagination.
In Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines,
and August Wilson. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, pp. 6593.
Doyle, M. E. (2002). Voices From the Quarters: The
Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
Estes, D. (ed.) (1994). Critical Reflections on the Fiction
of Ernest J. Gaines. Athens: University of Georgia
Press.
Gaines, E. J. (1964). Catherine Carmier. New York:
Atheneum.
Gaines, E. J. (1967). Of Love and Dust. New York:
Dial Press.
Gaines, E. J. (1968). Bloodline. New York: Dial Press.
Gaines, E. J. (1971a). The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman. New York: Dial Press.
Gaines, E. J. (1971b). A Long Day in November. Random
House.
Gaines, E. J. (1978). In My Fathers House. New York:
Knopf.
Gaines, E. J. (1983). A Gathering of Old Men. New York:
Knopf.
During a career that spanned over a dozen years,

John Gardner went from being one of the most
versatile and highly regarded new fictionists of
the early 1970s to one of the most controversial
and reviled by decades end. As protean as he was
prolific, the Lon Cheney of contemporary
fiction became a John the Baptist railing against
the decadent literature of his time while zealously
advocating the straight and narrow road of
moral fiction, based on heroic action and eternal verities.
Gardner was born in 1933 and raised on a dairy
farm near Batavia in western New York. The death
of his younger brother, Gilbert, in 1945 in a
farming accident profoundly affected Gardner,
who held himself responsible and believed he
could have saved his brother. Following his own
death in a motorcycle accident in 1982, Gardners
mother speculated that Gardner wrote so much
because he was in effect writing for two, himself
and Gilbert. Gardner not only wrote enough for
two people (novels, short fiction, poetry, libretti,
plays, childrens literature, translations, and academic criticism) but also wrote as two, and the
Jekyll and Hyde aspect of his personality manifests itself in the trajectory of his overall career and
forms the basic structure of his fiction, starting
with his first published novel.
In Resurrection (1966), James Chandler, a philosophy professor dying of leukemia, returns
from the West Coast to his home town, Batavia,
struggling physically and mentally against the
disease that will kill him and professionally
586
GARDNER, JOHN
against fashionable existentialism and positivism.

Although set in ancient Sparta, The Wreckage of
Agathon (1970) attracted greater attention because of its apparent relevance to America during
the Vietnam War. The philosopher Agathon rails
against the draconian Spartan leader, Lykourgos,
but struggles as well with his own many failures in
a novel in which the cynical antiheros narrative
alternates with chapters written by his naive and
still idealistic disciple, Demodokus.
Grendel (1971), a retelling of Beowulf from
the monsters point of view, put Gardner on the
literary map and fit perfectly the spirit of the
postmodern times times which included decidedly contemporary reworkings of familiar stories:
myths (John Barth), fairy tales (Robert Coover
and Angela Carter), and Bible stories (Ted
Hughes). Excluded from the human community,
Grendel is drawn to the Shapers art and the hero
Beowulf on one hand and to the Dragon and his
existential worldview on the other. Much the
same conflict appears in The Sunlight Dialogues
(1972), Gardners longest, most intricate, and
most interesting work, a philosophical cops and
robbers story cum family saga set again in Batavia,
pitting the glum and rather dim police chief, the
novels unlikely hero, against the brilliant but
destructive Sunlight Man, a local boy gone bad,
an idealist-turned-cynic. Where the Sunlight Man
failed to save his sons from fire and his wife from
madness, Fred Clumly strives to save his community (he fails) and to solve the mystery that the
Sunlight Man represents.
Jason and Medeia (1973a), another retelling
again focusing on personal failings and betrayals,
written in verse; Nickel Mountain (1973b), a
pastoral novel set in upstate New York and filled
(as Gardners fiction often is) with grotesques;
and The Kings Indian (1974), a collection of
parodies and pastiches, underscore Gardners
immense range. With the publication of October
Light (1976), the play of contending forces becomes more narrowly focused and less ambiguously (and therefore more didactically) presented.
The spat between an elderly brother and sister
mirrors the conservative and liberal (Republican
and Democratic) strains in America as well as in
Gardner and the divide (as Gardner sees it)
between moral fiction and its opposite: the novel
October Light and the trash novel within it
that the sister reads after being locked in her room
by her cantankerous and emotionally and

physically constipated brother. For all its
comedy, October Light is, as its title suggests,
deeply elegiac, not least in an old mans coming
to terms with his many failings and skeletons in
the family closet.
The conservatism evident in October Light
becomes more pronounced in Gardners tablethumping polemic, On Moral Fiction (1978),
parts of which began appearing the same year
and much of which was either written or revised as
his marriage crumbled, his troubles with the
Internal Revenue Service began, and he recovered
from colon cancer surgery. Flailing at fellow
writers as different as John Barth and Saul Bellow,
the messianic Gardner sloppily argues that art is
a tragic-comic holding action against entropy,
should grope for meaning, and should present
valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth
keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the
possible which can inspire and incite human
beings toward life affirmation as opposed to
destruction or indifference. Gardners manifesto, or jeremiad, was a shot fired from the conservative side early in the culture wars, one from
which his writing and his reputation have
never recovered. Freddys Book (1980), The Art
of Living (1981, mainly of interest for the story
Resurrection, about Gilberts death), and
Mickelssons Ghosts (1982) all reflect the influence
of his moral fiction thesis. Even the many critical
studies that appeared after his death have stressed
the moral side of Gardners work and thus downplayed the more dialogical and conflicted quality
of his best work.
SEE ALSO: Barth, John (AF); Bellow,
Saul (AF); Carter, Angela (BIF); Carver,
Raymond (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
Chavkin, A. (ed.) (1990). Conversations with John
Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Ekelund, B. G. (1995). In the Pathless Forest: John
Gardners Literary Project. Uppsala: University of
Uppsala Press.
Gardner, J. (1966). The Resurrection. New York:
Gardner, J. (1970). The Wreckage of Agathon. New York:
Harper and Row.
Gardner, J. (1971). Grendel. New York: Knopf.
GASS, WILLIAM H.
Gardner, J. (1972). The Sunlight Dialogues.

New York: Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1973a). Jason and Medeia. New York:
Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1973b). Nickel Mountain: A Pastoral Novel.
New York: Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1974). The Kings Indian: Stories and Tales.
New York: Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1976). October Light. New York: Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1978). On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic
Books.
Gardner, J. (1980). Freddys Book. New York: Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1981). The Art of Living and Other Stories.
New York: Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1982). Mickelssons Ghosts. New York:
Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1983). On Becoming a Novelist. New York:
Harper and Row.
Gardner, J. (1984). The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for
Young Writers. New York: Knopf.
Gardner, J. (1986). Stillness and Shadows (ed. N.
Delbanco). New York: Knopf.
Howell, J. M. (1993). Understanding John Gardner.
Morace, R. A. (1984). John Gardner: An Annotated
Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland.
Silesky, B. (2004). John Gardner: Literary Outlaw.
Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin.
Gass, William H.
HEIDE ZIEGLER
William H. Gass is an acclaimed essayist, novelist,

and short fiction writer. His writing ideal Write
so as to become primary denotes the special
quality of all of his texts (2006, 33). His work can
superficially be classified according to the categories mentioned above, but they tacitly erode all
genres from within. Unremittingly following
Ezra Pounds modernist philosophical rule to
make it new, Gass describes himself as a late
modernist; founded upon a radical formalist aesthetic, his work contests much in the postmodern
worldview, including many of its anti-formal
assumptions.
Based on a lifelong endeavor to understand the
structure and function of metaphor he earned
his PhD in philosophy from Cornell University in
1954 with a dissertation titled A Philosophical
Investigation of Metaphor Gass employs selfreflexive imagery to substantiate all his writings.
This imagery creates a thing-like, self-sufficient
587
quality for his art. In this, Gasss work extends

what Rainer Maria Rilke termed Ding-Gedichte,
or thing poetry. Gass proclaims himself a Rilke
junkie, and Rilkes Duino Elegies, the only texts
he has ever tried seriously to translate, have given
him his innermost thoughts. In 1999 he published Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of
Translation.
Gass does not believe in the roll call of the
canonical Great Books, although he believes in
great books, most of them of European origin.
Indeed, he claims to believe in very little else
some music, some paintings, a few buildings,
perhaps (2006, 36) yet he is a very astute
observer of his own American culture, and he
faithfully translates, edits, and interprets the texts
he has read and absorbed from other cultures
for his American audience. Gass has a genius for
reading comparable to Virginia Woolfs (one
of his three literary heroines, alongside with
Gertrude Stein and Colette), and a genius for
dialogue that can almost be called Socratic.
William Howard Gass was born in Fargo,
North Dakota in July 1924. He taught philosophy
at Purdue University before moving to Washington University in St. Louis, where he became a
professor of philosophy (196978) and the David
May Distinguished University Professor in the
Humanities (197999). He also founded and
directed the universitys International Writers
Center (19902000). Gass retired in 2000, and in
November 2006 a chair was established in his
name in the Center for the Humanities at
Washington University in St. Louis. Gass has
received many honorary degrees and literary
awards, including being named Doctor of Humane
Letters at Kenyon College and Washington
University, among several others. His awards
extend from the Longview Foundation Prize for
Fiction in 1959 to the O. Henry Award for short
stories in 2007. He won the prestigious National
Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for
Habitations of the Word (1984), Finding a Form
(1996), and Tests of Time (2002), and the American Book Award for The Tunnel (1995). In 1982,
he was elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and in 1983 to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1997, he
received a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and in the following year his star
was placed on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
588
GASS, WILLIAM H.
Gass has always valued character over plot, not

as an adherent of psychological realism, but in
the sense of creating self-sufficient sensibilities
on the page. In his first novel, Omensetters Luck
(1966), the charismatic protagonist, Brackett
Omensetter, so wins over the hearts and minds
of the three narrators Israbestis Tott, Henry
Pimber, and Jethro Furber that, despite their
radically different worldviews, they become but
the mouthpieces for Omensetters luck and his
divine simplicity. In Willie Masters Lonesome
Wife (1968b), this concept is taken further: the
main character of the title, the source of physical
and spiritual inspiration to her husband, who is
named William, thus echoing the prenomens
of Shakespeare, Wilhelm Meister (Johann
Wolfgang von Goethes fictional alter ego), and,
ultimately, Gass himself, is muse to and partner in
her husbands struggles with a long literary, valuesetting tradition. Here, the three masters are joined
by others over the centuries, all of them male and
overbearing, before Willie Masterss promiscuous
wife makes her twentieth-century appearance in
the form of a triumphant democratic language,
an American amalgam of the voices of a new
Cassandra and a new Messalina.
In 1995, Gass published his long-awaited novel,
The Tunnel, on which he had been working for 26
years, and which he subsequently recorded as an
audio book (2005). It is a novel about the fascism
of the heart, a monologue of 650 pages rendered
by the middle-aged, Midwestern American historian William Frederick Kohler, who recreates,
in an ironically perverted recollection in tranquility, the events in Hitlers Germany which he has
witnessed as a student and later as a member of
the American occupational army. The tunnel
which he digs from his house while he is writing
the introduction to his book, Guilt and Innocence in Hitlers Germany, leads nowhere, and
Gass denies that there is light at the end of it,
since fascism needs but the right historical, political, and cultural conditions in order to erupt
anywhere in the world. Yet Kohler is not simply
the hero or antihero of his tale, but its narrator
as well, and the local soil which he digs from his
own tunnel becomes the stunning words of his
multilayered narration, his narration itself an
excavation site of the (literary) history of mankind and a mirror of our present-day condition
humaine.
The two short fiction collections, In the Heart of

the Heart of the Country (1968a) and Cartesian
Sonata and Other Novellas (1998), demonstrate
how Gasss concept of metaphor has developed
over three decades. Whereas metaphor in the
first collection retains the mystery inherent in
the strictly visual, it becomes rhythm in the
second, musical language within a sonata-like
structure. The enumeration of facts and the
lists of visual details in the celebrated title story
of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,
with their slight modifications when the
protagonists angle of vision changes, serve to
both hide and reveal the mystery and despair of
the human heart; the jargon of the real estate
dealer in Icicles becomes ineffectual before his
obsession with the perfect image of the icicles
hanging from the roof of his house, which he will
lose while they melt away. The dichotomy between mind and body, which Descartes introduced into philosophy, becomes orchestrated in
Cartesian Sonata. In one of the novellas, Emma
Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishops, Emmas
infatuation with the great American poet causes
her body to become ever more transparent until
she can become the receptacle of a poetic language
that leaves individuality and its vicissitudes
behind; she becomes self-sufficient, like music.
Interestingly, Gasss novel-in-progress is called
Middle C.
Gass has revived the tradition of the literary or
philosophical essay of the eighteenth century,
only to transform it into something radically new.
His six collections of essays together with his long
essay called On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
(1976) have, in their collective impact, created a
new genre. The six essay collections so far, Fiction
and the Figures of Life (1971), The World Within
the Word (1978), Habitations of the Word, Finding
a Form, Tests of Time, and A Temple of Texts
(2006), all concentrate, as the titles indicate, on
the role of language in our life. In each essay, the
language takes its cue from the subject that is
being treated, and it re-creates that subject within
the confines of language.
Gasss essays can be crudely subdivided into
three main categories: the metafictional essays,
highly philosophical in that they also reflect upon
the language they employ; the cultural-historicalpolitical essays that best exhibit his interests as a
contemporary American; and the review essays,
GASS, WILLIAM H.
which usually strive to ground those American

interests in a European tradition.
Gasss metafictional essays often are also his
most personal ones. Essays like The Ontology of
the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words
(in 1978); The Soul Inside the Sentence (in
1985); the title essay of Finding a Form; and The
Nature of Narrative and Its Philosophical Implications (in 2002) seem to bespeak their own
epistemological topics. The theses Gass expounds
in these essays, however, are anchored very
soundly in Gasss own experiences as a writer,
for writers to him, though as various as books
themselves, are all obsessed, as he says in The
Soul Inside the Sentence: incorruptible and
patient, too, with a passion for perfection as
far as their work is concerned vain as flowers
(1985, 117). And in Finding a Form, although
conceding that all the world may be a stage for
those who can act in it, he tells the reader that for
him the world became a page (1996 33) early
on, and since we contemplate what we cannot
control, he contemplates the world through
words. This Lockean attitude, rigorously subjecting the content of his most lofty theses to the
unpretentious control of his own experience,
turns these essays into some of the most convincing written in the English language today.
Gasss cultural-historical-political essays are
his most controversial. Called forth by the social
and political plight of the writer in our contemporary world, they may be overly fulminacious
in consequence (2002, 127) as Gass is ready to
admit. But essays like Pulitzer: The Peoples
Prize, where Gass contends that the Pulitzer
Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity
and almost never misses (1996, 3); or The
Writer and Politics. A Litany (in 2002), where
Gass names the historical forces which have been
arrayed against writers so far, demonstrate that
Gass is indeed, for all his European leanings and
enthusiasms, a full-blooded American, suffering
from the influence of accidents based on birth,
blood, and color; from the ignorance and fear
expressed in superstitions, gossip, bigotry, and
parochialism; and from faith in money and inexhaustible greed.
A prominent group within Gasss essays is his
review essays, which have often appeared in
Harpers. Gass tends to review monographs on
or biographies of literary personages whom he
589
admires enough to have raised one or more pillars

for them in A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary
Pillars (1991). And he reaffirms his choices by
redoubling reviews, thereby enhancing the
authors fame over the years. Thus, the views he
has expounded on Henry James in In the Cage
and The High Brutality of Good Intentions
(in 1971) are taken up again and perfected in a
review essay, which Gass wrote for Harpers in
August 2008 on a new James biography by Sheldon Novick. Gasss literary life has thus become a
history of the development of his own imagination the sequence of his review essays comparable to the series of Prefaces James wrote for the
New York edition of his works. Other examples of
his observations about the flowering of literary
excellence are his essays on, amongst many others,
Gertrude Stein, Colette, Katherine Anne Porter,
Malcolm Lowry, and Franz Kafka.
SEE ALSO: James, Henry (AF); Modernist
Stein, Gertrude (AF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
Gass, W. H. (1966). Omensetters Luck. New York:
Gass, W. H. (1968a). In the Heart of the Heart of the
Country. New York: Harper and Row.
Gass, W. H. (1968b). Willie Masters Lonesome Wife.
New York: Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (1971). Fiction and the Figures of Life.
New York: Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (1976). On Being Blue: A Philosophical
Inquiry. Boston: Godine.
Gass, W. H. (1978). The World Within the Word.
New York. Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (1985). Habitations of the Word: Essays.
Gass, W. H. (1995). The Tunnel. New York: Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (1996). Finding a Form. New York:
Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (1998). Cartesian Sonata and Other
Novellas. New York: Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (1999). Reading Rilke: Reflections on the
Problems of Translation. New York: Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (2002). Tests of Time. New York: Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (2006). A Temple of Texts. New York:
Knopf.
Gass, W. H. (2008). The Masters Voice: Henry Jamess
Curriculum Vitae. Harpers, pp. 7582 (July).
Holloway, W. L. (1990). William Gass. Boston: Twayne.
590
GENDER AND THE NOVEL
Kellman, S. G., & Malin, I. (eds.) (1998). Into

The Tunnel. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
McCaffery, L. (1982). The Metafictional Muse:
The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and
William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Salzman, A. M. (1986). The Fiction of William Gass:
The Consolation of Language. Carbondale: Southern
Ziegler, H., & Ball, S. (eds.) (2004). William H. Gass
[special issue]. Review of Contemporary Fiction,
24(3).
Gender and the Novel

DEBORAH CLARKE
It is hard to say anything about the twentiethcentury American novel without talking about
gender. Whether one is looking at the alleged
machismo of Ernest Hemingway or Norman
Mailer; at Edith Wharton, purported to have
welcomed the label of a self-made man; at
William Faulkners deft maneuvering between
male and female and black and white; at Toni
Morrisons rewriting of Ralph Ellison; or at Jane
Smileys revision of King Lear, it becomes clear
that the twentieth-century American novel is
shaped by gender. Its not surprising, given the
tumultuous battles of the sexes that raged
throughout the century, to see sexual tension
dominate the literary landscape. But twentiethcentury American fiction is marked by more than
sexual tension; it is engaged with nothing less than
the redefinition of how gender is constructed and
what it means. This struggle is energized by the
increasing number of increasingly respected
women writers who emerge onto the scene. The
damned mob of scribbling women who showed
up Hawthornes limited marketability evolve into
the formidable talent and popularity of a
Wharton or a Cather. Once American women
writers break into the ranks of the elite, the novel
will never be the same again. And the explosion
of non-white writers, particularly in the latter part
of the century, reminds us that gender is also
always raced.
One of the first things to note is that the
imposition of categories that are both chronological and ideological has often skewed our understanding of the material itself. Modernism and
postmodernism, while very useful concepts, tend

to define the century in terms that privilege
masculinity and male writers, thus intertwining
a kind of macho ethos into the twentieth-century
novel and doing a disservice to our understanding
of the fiction. The era is not so easily categorized
or labeled. As Henry Adams noted in 1903, The
child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new
world which would not be a unity but a multiple
(Adams, 300). One could hardly find a more
prescient comment regarding the multiplicities
of gender developed by the novelists of the ensuing century. The novelists of the first half of the
century ceaselessly explore gender as a series of
performances, questioning its definition, its role,
and its very existence. When Hemingways Frederick Henry likens soldiers carrying ammunition
to pregnant women in A Farewell to Arms (1929),
and Faulkners Joe Christmas of Light in August
(1932) realizes that he feels even within him the
voices of African American women, any notion of
stable gender identity vanishes.
Such instability is anticipated at the start of the
century. Kate Chopins The Awakening (1899)
and Theodore Dreisers Sister Carrie (1900) make
clear that the old rules of what it means to be a
woman no longer apply. Chopins Edna Pontellier
not only repudiates marriage, declining to be one
of her husbands possessions, but also resists
maternity, refusing to become one of the
mother-women whose lives are defined by their
children: The children appeared before her like
antagonists who sought to drag her into the souls
slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way
to elude them (Chopin, 300). To identify maternity as slavery and to posit suicide as an alternative
to motherhood constitute a momentous shift in
one of the most powerfully held assumptions
about female identity, opening up the possibility
of defining gender as a cultural rather than biological construct. Yet this possibility is as yet
unfulfilled; if it takes death to escape maternity,
gender roles are still as powerful as ever. Theodore
Dreiser extends the challenge, defying maternity
and sexual morality. By twisting the classic fallen
woman tale into a rags-to-riches success story for
the woman while the man falls into disgrace and
death, he further questions assumptions about
gender identity. Sister Carrie in the novel of that
title, despite living with two different men, somehow avoids pregnancy and finds fame and fortune
on the stage, and it is Hurstwood who pays the

price for the sexual fall. Dreiser may go on to
deeper explorations of fallen women and sexual
morality in his later work, culminating in An
American Tragedy (1925), but his characters, from
Carrie to Clyde Griffiths, all reflect the ways that
changing gender expectations open up new social
possibilities. As Edith Whartons work also makes
clear, underestimating the impact of changing
times on both male and female identity leads to
trouble; in The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart
finds her idealized vision of female morality increasingly untenable in a highly competitive marketplace. The age of innocence, if it ever did exist,
has passed.
This questioning of gender helps to launch the
modern novel, with Gertrude Stein and Sherwood
Anderson embedding instability into the narrative structure itself. Steins Three Lives (1909),
with its focus on three women both coopted by
and resistant to gender roles, can be seen as an
inaugural text of the modern American novel. The
disjunctive form underscores the lack of grounding in time, space, and identity. Thus despite its
association with male writers, modernist fiction
offers a choice venue in which experimentation
with gender can play out. Modern fictions frequent emphasis on tormented individualism
highlights the ways that gender contributes to
modernist angst; if gender is under question,
then, as Yeats puts it, things fall apart. Hemingways often cited hypermasculinity reveals the
uneasiness of masculine identity as his male protagonists try to chart a course in a culture in which
manhood is imperiled not only by war but also by
social change. In Faulkners work, masculinity
and gender is even more fragile; Quentin
Compson kills himself in The Sound and the Fury
(1929) at least in part because he cannot accept a
world in which his sisters sexuality highlights his
own impotence, and Joe Christmas of Light in
August is castrated in an attempt to redraw both
racial and sexual boundaries in the town of Jefferson. Faulkners women characters prove just as
interesting and unstable; indeed, Christmas is profoundly troubled by Joanna Burden because it
seems like I was the woman and she was the
man. Eula Varner of The Hamlet (1940) embodies
femininity to the extent that it becomes ludicrous,
a kind of playing with mimesis, to echo Luce
Irigarays words. If perfect womanhood is
591
monstrous, then gender undoes identity as much

as it defines it.
One only needs to look to Willa Cather to
appreciate the instability of not just masculinity
and femininity, but also gender itself. Homosocial
relations in her fiction tend to bear far greater
weight than the heterosexual romance. Replete
with problematic visions of heterosexuality,
from stories of brides thrown to wolves in My
Antonia (1918) to Godfrey St. Peters emotional
retreat to live without delight at the end of The
Professors House (1925), Cathers work opens up
the possibility of a third space, a way of defining
the self beyond the standard gender dichotomy.
We see similar interests in Nella Larsens Passing
(1929), where the relationship between Clare and
Irene is far more powerful and passionate than
eithers largely companionate marriage.
Indeed, one of the most fascinating elements of
gender in early-twentieth-century fiction is its
intersection with race. James Weldon Johnsons
ex-colored man (The Autobiography of an ExColored Man, 1912) equates his racial awareness
with his beauty, aligning femininity with blackness. This reflects a bitter racial reality, in which
African American men were constructed either as
emasculated or as hypermasculine beasts (a threat
fulfilled in Richard Wrights Native Son (1940)),
while women were jezebels or mammies. Just as
Johnson interrogates this assumption, so Larsens
portrayal of veiled lesbian desire opens up a
different form of African American femininity.
While Helga Crane, protagonist of Larsens
Quicksand (1928), fears and is ultimately
doomed by sexual desire, Zora Neale Hurston
celebrates both the black female body and female
desire in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Faulkner probably offers the most tormented
view of the connection between race and gender
in Joe Christmas, who identifies his possible
blackness with femininity, and Charles Bon, presented as a cultured yet effeminate man. In both
cases, the hint of blackness reveals the fragility
of a masculinity culturally defined as white. More
than any other factor, race problematizes gender.
If gender is destabilized in the first half of the
century, it becomes both reified and unhinged
toward the latter part. In Jack Kerouacs On the
Road (1957) and Mary McCarthys The Group
(1962), the primary focus is on male or female
bonding rather than relations between the sexes.
592
While Kerouacs Dean Moriarty is rarely without

a woman, the relationship between Sal and Dean,
rather than any of the multiple heterosexual
affairs, constitutes the heart of the novel. There
is little hint of homoeroticism, but there is a clear
sense that men define themselves via other men, as
a rugged masculinity returns in these immediate
postwar years, though, unlike in Hemingway, it is
manifested not so much in the manly endeavors of
war or bullfighting but first in rebellion and then,
increasingly, in suburbia. The issue of what it
means to be a man in postwar America comes
under scrutiny as the nation attempted to construct a vision of family and gender largely based
on a nostalgic vision of the way we never were,
as Stephanie Coontz puts it. Kerouacs rebels give
way to Philip Roths tortured protagonists looking to negotiate Jewish masculinity and eventually
to Chang-rae Lees Native Speaker (1995), where
Doc Hata finds himself tormented by the memories of Korean sex slaves during his time as a
Korean health aide for the Japanese army, an
experience that suggests that to be a man is to
be a rapist or, at least, tacitly to condone it. By
empathizing with the Korean women victims,
Hata constructs a pseudo-feminine identity, but
even that proves difficult as his adopted daughter
flaunts her sexuality and body, reminding him
that gender means more than empathy. It is
shaped by ethnicity and history, grounded in the
body. In Independence Day (1995), Richard Fords
Frank Bascombe, the sports writer turned realtor,
embodies a kind of gender transformation, from
the masculinity of sports to the increasingly pinkcollar field of real estate. Now houses rather than
physical prowess become the arena in which
masculinity plays out, a marked transformation
from nineteenth-century associations of women
with the home; the reconfiguration of gender
reflects a re-gendering of American culture.
Just as race problematized gender in the early
twentieth century, the increased visibility of nonwhite writers furthers that process as the century
progresses and gender becomes a complex set of
negotiations between culture and the body. Ralph
Ellison and Toni Morrison redefine gender in a
way that reflects the oppression that white culture
has imposed upon African American identity.
Ellisons invisible man (Invisible Man, 1952)
becomes a trickster, recognizing that his survival
depends on invisibility rather than a fully
embodied black manhood. To be an African

American man means being able to negotiate
through multiple roles and masks, as performance trumps any sense of an essential self.
Morrison responds to Ellisons exploration of
the trials of black manhood in her first novel,
The Bluest Eye (1970), both rewriting the Jim
Trueblood incest scene from the perspective of the
daughter, and laying out the ways that femininity is
shaped by Shirley Temple and white baby dolls.
Pecola Breedlove may be destroyed by the valuation of whiteness but the narrator, Claudia, survives, possibly due to her desire to destroy white
baby dolls rather than to become them. As mass
media and popular culture play an increasing role
in defining gender, Morrison reveals the damage
done by such categorization, reminding us that
there is no such thing as a standard definition.
Where Kate Chopin destabilized gender by suggesting that not all mothers are mother-women,
Morrisons Beloved (1987) completely reconfigures what it means to be a mother; motherlove
may be fierce and instinctual, but it is also shaped
by circumstance and history. For an affluent white
woman to see maternity as slavery reflects a very
different experience of womanhood than that of
the slave herself. As Morrison so astutely puts it,
Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer. From
Chopin to Morrison, there can be no such thing
as an essential stable gendered identity.
Other non-white writers also remind us that
gender is both embodied and culturally constructed. Native American writers such as Leslie
Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich point out that
gender categories set down by Anglo culture do
not apply to indigenous peoples in a world created
not by God the Father but by Thought Woman, a
world often populated by strong women and
nurturing men. Silkos Tseh in Ceremony
(1977), both woman and sacred mountain, redefines gender as a mixture of body and spirit.
Maxine Hong Kingston notes the confusing and
complex negotiations among Chinese, American,
and Chinese American meanings of both masculinity and femininity in Woman Warrior (1976)
and China Men (1980). Latino/a writers also
reflect how American cultural pressures attempt
to enforce stereotypical gender codes, illustrated
in Christina Garcias Dreaming in Cuban (1992),
where the characters attempt to determine how
gender shapes ones ethnic identity and how
nationality shapes gender. In this novel, the intersection of politics and gender reminds us of the
power and limitations of American hegemony
in defining men and women. Contemporary culture may open up new opportunities, but it does
not eradicate oppression based on gender.
The ultimate refiguring of gender is found in
Leslie Feinbergs Stone Butch Blues (1993) and
Jeffrey Eugenidess Middlesex (2002). Feinbergs
exploration of the transgendered Jess, who defines
herself as a he-she, explodes not so much gender
as gender dichotomy. The twentieth century may
have expanded the realms of masculinity and
femininity, but Feinberg suggests that the categories themselves have lost any grounded meaning.
With medical technology that now enables sex
change, gender becomes a kind of floating signifier, something one practices, as Judith Butler
famously proclaimed in Gender Trouble (1990).
While Eugenidess Cal reminds us that the body
still determines gender, that body may also reflect
the collapse of gendered (and sexed) difference.
Eugenides bases a narrative of family and immigration around Cal/Callie, a biological hermaphrodite, making clear that regardless of how it is
defined and constructed, gender is still embedded
at the heart of twentieth-century American fiction.
So much has been written on gender and
twentieth-century fiction that it is impossible to
give a complete overview. Some of the most
interesting work is likely found in studies of
individual authors; virtually every major author, both male and female, has been examined
through a gendered perspective. In 1983 Paul
Lauters Reconstructing American Literature
(1983) helped to open up new texts to consider.
Generally, by the 1980s, a growing output of
feminist criticism and theory had begun analyzing
women writers, women characters, and, following
Helene Cixouss Laugh of the Medusa, (1981)
lecriture feminine, a female voice, regardless of the
sex of the writer. Some groundbreaking studies
and anthologies, not necessarily confined to
American fiction, such as Barbara Christians Black
Feminist Criticism (1985), Gloria Anzald
uas
Making Face, Making Soul (1990), and Paula
Gunn Allens Spiderwomans Granddaughters
(1989), brought literature by women of color
into play, reminding white feminists that gender
could not be considered separately from race and
ethnicity. Eve Sedgwicks Between Men (1985),
593
though it focused on British literature, helped

to launch queer studies and reopened the field of
masculinity, furthered by her next book,
Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Rita Felskis
The Gender of Modernity (1995), building on
Andreas Huyssens After the Great Divide
(1986), examined the ways that modernity itself
was gendered, with mass culture associated with
the feminine and high art with the masculine.
Susan Jeffordss The Remasculinization of
America (1989) argued that in the aftermath of
the Vietnam War masculinity was reinscribed,
reversing a move toward the feminizing of
American culture. As scholars became increasingly cognizant of the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and culture, a wide range of
multifaceted approaches emerged, such as Siohban Somervilles Queering the Colorline (2000)
or Lauren Berlants The Queen of America Goes
to Washington City (1997). Indeed, it is a rare
piece of criticism or theory that does not acknowledge the impossibility of considering the
twentieth-century American novel without taking into account the all-pervasive influence of a
multiplicity of gendered identities.
Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
Adams, H. (1961). The Education of Henry Adams.
[1918]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Aldama, F. L. (2005). Brown on Brown: Chicano/a
Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity.
Allen, P. G. (ed.) (1989). Spiderwomans
Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary
Writing by Native American Women. Boston: Beacon.
Anzald
ua, G. (1990). Making Face, Making Soul
Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by
Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.
Balsamo, A. (1996). Technologies of the Gendered Body:
Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Berlant, L. (1997). The Queen of America Goes to
Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship.
Bow, L. (2001). Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion:
Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American
Womens Literature. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
594
GILMAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Carby, H. V. (1998). Race Men. Cambridge, MA:
Chopin, K. (1899). The Awakening. New York:
Herbert S. Stone.
Christian, B. (1985). Black Feminist Criticism:
Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York:
Pergamon.
Cixous, H. (1981). The Laugh of the Medusa.
In E. Marks & I. de Courtivron (eds.), New French
Feminisms. New York: Schocken.
Coontz, S. (1992). The Way We Never Were: American
Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books.
de Lauretis, T. (1987). Technologies of Gender.
Felski, R. (1995). The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge,
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal
Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism,
University Press.
Jacobs, S.-E., Thomas, W., & Lang, S. (eds.) (1997).
Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity,
Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Jardine, A., & Smith, P. (eds.) (1987). Men in Feminism.
Jeffords, S. (1989). The Remasculinization of America:
Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Kimmel, M. (1996). Manhood in America: A Cultural
History. New York: Free Press.
Lauter, P. (ed.) (1983). Reconstructing American
Literature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues. Old Westbury, NY:
Feminist Press.
McDowell, D. (1995). The Changing Same: Black
Womens Literature, Criticism, and Theory.
Murray, R. (2007). Our Living Manhood: Literature,
Black Power, and Masculine Ideology. Philadelphia:
Rubenstein, R. (1987). Boundaries of the Self: Gender,
Culture, Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Saldvar-Hull, S. (2000). Feminism on the Border:
Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley:
University Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet.
Showalter, E. (1991). Sisters Choice: Tradition and

Change in American Womens Writing. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Somerville, S. B. (2000). Queering the Colorline: Race
and the Invention of Homosexuality in American
Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Trask, M. (2003). Cruising Modernism: Class and
Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

JANE F. THRAILKILL
Despite a life span (18601935) roughly coinciding with that of Sigmund Freud, the American
writer Charlotte Perkins Gilmans abiding interest was in the physiology of everyday life the
impingements of work and play on human nerves,
muscles, and brain. Her focus on the body makes
Gilmans work startlingly apt in a twenty-firstcentury culture more congenial to neuroscience
than psychoanalysis. A poet, writer, activist, publisher, and major figure on the lecture circuit
during the Progressive era, Gilman advocated a
practical feminism (she called it humanism) that
stitched together domestic theory, socialist economics, and the new evolutionary biology. In her
fiction as well as her social philosophy, she turned
a naturalists eye to the paradoxes of modern life:
pampered children sickened by a civilized diet
of unwholesome food, refined men and women
whose stone age domestic arrangements left
them exhausted and depleted, and upstanding
husbands whose unpaid wives and mothers were
locked in a sexuo-economic relation in which
they bartered human affection for financial
support (1998 [1898], 142). As did her literary
contemporaries Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and
Edith Wharton, Gilman anatomized the forces
that battered human beings and sculpted their
fates. Unlike other writers of naturalist fiction,
however, Gilman focused on the environmental
forces close to indeed, in the home that took
their toll on the human organism. Her social
philosophy and literary practice were tempered
by an unshakable conviction that human beings
had the power to modify and improve upon what
she called our androcentric culture.
Gilmans faith in the efficacy of reform had
deep hereditary roots. Baptized Charlotte Anna
Perkins (Gilman was the name of her second

husband, who was also her first cousin), she was
descended from the Beechers, a family of influential ministers, educators, writers, abolitionists, and
womens rights advocates in antebellum America,
including Harriet Beecher Stowe. Gilman, who
came of age in a rapidly industrializing US, was
also influenced by the sociology of Thorstein
Veblen and Frank Lester Ward and the evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Charles
Darwin. These thinkers supported her sense that
generations of stultifying gender roles had artificially shaped not just social practices but also
the female body itself.
Socialist in program and utopian in spirit,
Gilmans goal was nothing less than the reconstruction of the human body and the body politic
in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. Of her
first published book, a collection of poems entitled In This Our World (1974 [1893]), Gilman
wrote, I dont call it a book of poems. I call it a
tool box. It was written to drive nails with
(Scharnhorst 40). Though inspired by Walt
Whitmans democratic, body-oriented poetics,
Gilmans verse displayed none of his formal innovation, tending instead toward ballad meter
and traditional rhyme schemes, conventional imagery, and quotidian domestic topics. Gilman,
however, gives these elements a subversive twist,
as when she exposes the scullery reality of married
life in To the Young Wife: To be a kitchenmaid, be called a queen / Queen of a cook-stove
throne?
The belief that there is a malleable, reciprocal,
and potentially perfectible relationship between a
person and her cultural milieu is at the conceptual
core of Gilmans wide-ranging, women-centered
writings. Her renowned gothic short story The
Yellow Wallpaper (1998 [1892]) traces the effects of oppressive domestic routines on the body
and mind of a young housewife. Gilmans other
gothic tales, including The Giant Wisteria
(1891), The Rocking Chair (1893), and The
Unwatched Door (1894; all in Gilman 1995),
center on physical structures strangling vines,
heavy furniture, airless rooms that dont merely
symbolize but also actively engender womens
domestic suffocation. The Yellow Wallpaper,
however, stands out in Gilmans oeuvre for its
narrative conceit and aesthetic power. The story is
cast as a series of first-person journal entries that
595
give the reader access to the unnamed womans

unhinging mind as she lies exhausted in a prisonlike room, observing the sulfurous wallpapers
incoherent pattern that lolls like a broken neck
and two bulbous eyes [that] stare at you upside
down (1998, 7). The narrative ends abruptly in a
surreal scene that fractures the realist conceit of
the retrospective journal entry, as the maddened
wife (believing herself to be freeing a shadowy
woman locked behind the wallpapers design)
creeps over the prostrate body of her swooning
husband.
Some contemporary critics have read the tales
denouement as a womans victory over patriarchy, but Gilman herself saw it as a portrait of
utter mental ruin, a cautionary rather than
triumphant tale (1968, 4(10): 271). By contrast,
most of Gilmans other short stories present
fictional case studies that sketch a domestic problem a musical wife dispirited by child rearing
(Making a Change), a listless woman disabled
by chronic nerves (Dr. Clairs Place) and
depict the practical changes necessary to bring
about health and happiness. (These, like many of
Gilmans stories, were first published in The
Forerunner, the magazine that she wrote, edited,
and published herself from 1909 to 1916; see
Gilman 1968.) Whereas writers like Sarah Orne
Jewett and Kate Chopin isolate their central characters to explore the new psychological terrain of
female desire, Gilmans social realism explores the
practical world of apartment buildings, bustling
boarding houses, artist colonies, and places of
business. Her stories frequently involve a twist
that reveals the twisted logic underpinning
normal social behavior. In The Cottagette, for
instance, an artists dutiful housekeeping has
the ironic effect of estranging her fiance, who
finally begs her to let him cook and clean so
she can return instead to her lovely work and
a happy marriage to him (1995, 137). In this
and other tales, Gilman seems to rewrite her
own youthful first marriage to fellow artist
Walter Stetson, whom she left along with their
young child, Katherine after suffering a postpartum nervous breakdown and the Weir
Mitchell rest cure, like the protagonist in The
Yellow Wallpaper.
The didactic impulse in Gilmans fictional
writing takes full-blown form in her utopian
novels, which are written in the first person from
596
the point of view of an initially skeptical man

who slowly realizes the wisdom of sweeping social
changes catalyzed by innovative women. Moving
the Mountain (1999 [1911]) portrays the return of
a man lost for 30 years in the Himalayas to the
now-socialist, feminist United States of 1940,
where there is [no] poverty, no labor problem,
no color problem, no sex problem, almost no
disease, very little accident, practically no fires
(54). Herland (1999 [1915]) goes a step further,
literally dropping (by airplane) three male explorers into a society of physically robust women
benignly managed by Over-Mothers, a place
where children are raised collectively and reproduction (girl children only) is achieved by parthenogenesis. The narrator, Vandyck Jennings,
eventually marries a Herlander named Ellador;
the dystopian novel With Her in Ourland (1999
[1916]) narrates their return to a US rife with war
fever, profanity, and religious intolerance. Explicitly committed to edifying readers and short on
dramatic propulsion, these works nonetheless
encapsulate social philosophy in the interchange
of dialogue, underscoring Gilmans belief in the
power of collective wisdom and communal
action in helping to imagine, design, and create
a humane and livable world.
Gilmans thinking (including her lapses into
xenophobia and even racism) is rooted in the
optimistic materialism of the late nineteenth century. Women, she argued in her groundbreaking
work Women and Economics (1998 [1898]), had
been historically relegated to a place of subservience to men, diminishing their powers of selfdetermination and natural inclination to work,
enfeebling their bodies, and narrowing their
minds. Employing the language of horticulture
and evolutionary biology, Gilman proposed that
the female sex, once freed from stultifying traditional roles through the socialization of housework, could actively engage in what she called
humaniculture (1968, 1:8). What Diantha Did
(2005 [1912]), a short novel serialized in The
Forerunner (1968), casts these insights into fictional form. Defying her husband, a melancholic
young housewife trains herself in domestic management and runs a successful housekeeping
company and manages to win back her husband
in the end.
Gilman often treated fiction as the handmaid of
sociology, using her stories as a call to arms or to
picture what miniature domestic revolutions

might look like. She also recognized that social
reform would itself engender fresh fields of
fiction, new plots centering on young women
balancing work and family, mothers lifelong
relationships with their children, women who
love women, and middle-aged women with a
passion for their careers. The story Gilman was
not able to tell the one adumbrated by Kate
Chopin, dominated by Freud, and given rich
expression by writers like Zora Neale Hurston
and H.D. was the still inchoate tale of womens
sexual pleasure and desire. As she describes in her
autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman (1935), she had no patience for depth
psychology or theories of the unconscious. Her
short novel The Crux (2003 [1911]), Gilmans
most explicit literary treatment of physical passion, centers on the diseased aspects of human
sexuality, representing an innocent woman who
barely eludes the embrace of a syphilitic man.
Gilman gave expression to womens fervor for
self-expression, professional work, civic duty,
and even motherhood; her social vision did not,
however, encompass what the modernist writer
D. H. Lawrence called the dark forest of the
human soul, its irrational passions and wild longings. For this, twentieth-century readers would
need to turn to other sources.
Hurston, Zora Neale (AF); Modernist Fiction
(AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
(AF)
Bauer, D. M. (ed.) (1998). Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Bedford.
Davis, C. J. & Knight, D. D. (eds.) (2004). Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and
Intellectual Contexts. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press.
Gilman, C. P. (1904). Human Work. New York:
McClure, Phillips.
Gilman, C. P. (1911a). Our Man-Made World, or, Our
Androcentric Culture. New York: Charlton.
Gilman, C. P. (1911b). Three Women: A One-Act Play.
Forerunner, 2, 115123, 134.
Gilman, C. P. (1968). The Forerunner, vols. 1.17.12
(Nov. 1909Dec. 1916). New York: Greenwood.
GLASGOW, ELLEN
Gilman, C. P. (1972). The Home: Its Work and

Influence [1903]. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Gilman, C. P. (1974). In This Our World [1893].
New York: Arno.
Gilman, C. P. (1976). His Religion and Hers: A Study of
the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers
[1923]. Westport, CT: Hyperion.
Gilman, C. P. (1990). The Living of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman: An Autobiography [1935] (intro. Ann
Lane). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press
1990.
Gilman, C. P. (1991). Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
A Nonfiction Reader (ed. L. Ceplair). New York:
Gilman, C. P. (1994a). Benigna Machiavelli. Santa
Barbara, CA: Bandanna.
Gilman, C. P. (1994b). The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman (ed. D. D. Knight). Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia.
Gilman, C. P. (1995). The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other
Stories (ed. R. Shulman). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gilman, C. P. (1996). The Later Poetry of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman (ed. D. D. Knight). Newark:
University of Delaware Press.
Gilman, C. P. (1997). Unpunished: A Mystery
(ed. C. J. Golden & D. D. Knight). New York:
Feminist Press.
Gilman, C. P. (1998). Women and Economics: A Study of
the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a
Factor in Social Evolution [1898]. Berkeley:
Gilman, C. P. (1999). Charlotte Perkins Gilmans
Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain [1911],
Herland [1915], and With Her in Ourland [1916]
(ed. M. Doskow). Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press.
Gilman, C. P. (2003). Concerning Children [1900].
Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.
Gilman, C. P. (2003). The Crux [1911] (ed. D. Seitler).
Gilman, C. P. (2005). What Diantha Did [1912].
Karpinski, J. B. (ed.) (1992). Critical Essays on Charlotte
Perkins Gilman. New York: G. K. Hall.
Lane, A. (1990). To Herland and Beyond: The Life and
Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York:
Pantheon.
Lawrence, D. H. (2003). Studies in Classic American
Literature [1923] (ed. E. Greenspan, L. Vasey, &
J. Worthen). New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Scharnhorst, G. (1985). Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Boston: Twayne.
597
Wells, K. (1999). A Guide to Research Materials:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Domestic Goddesses
(Aug. 23). At www.womenwriters.net/
domesticgoddess/CPGguide.html, accessed
Sept 16, 2008.
Glasgow, Ellen
PAMELA R. MATTHEWS
Although Ellen Glasgow had her quarrels with the

twentieth century, her long and productive career
in American letters contributed to defining its
literary and social character by attending to literary form and to issues such as regionalism and
nationalism, gender and feminism, and class and
race. Glasgows published work spans the decades
from the end of the nineteenth centurys realism
and naturalism through high modernism to the
complexities of post-World War II prosperity
in the US. Beginning with her first story to appear
in print (1895) and ending with posthumous
publications, her work includes 20 novels, more
than a dozen short stories, poems, essays on her
own novels, an autobiography, and many newspaper and magazine articles. Glasgow collected
several prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer
Prize for In This Our Life (1941) in 1942. Twice,
her novels appeared in collected editions. Despite
her common lament that her work was never
adequately valued, in fact, Glasgow was a staple
of twentieth-century American literature by the
late 1920s.
Ellen Anderson Glasgow or Ellen Anderson
Gholson Glasgow, as she later referred to herself in
honor of her mothers family name was born on
April 22, 1873 in Richmond, Virginia, where she
died in 1945 in the house at One West Main Street
she inhabited for nearly 60 years. Growing up
female in a traditional Southern household, she
was largely self-taught, and was proud of her
eclectic reading in literature, philosophy, and
economics. The influences of some of her favorites the Stoic philosophers, Charles Darwin, and
Thomas Hardy, for example can be seen especially in her early work. She never married, loved
dogs, and traveled extensively. By her account, she
began writing at age 7, and extant childhood
manuscripts attest to her early dedication to her
craft. She shares with many of her contemporaries
598
GLASGOW, ELLEN
self-consciousness about writing and the labor

required to perfect it.
Glasgow escapes some of the categories she
seems most obviously to fit. A Southern writer,
she nonetheless rebelled against what she saw as the
Souths anti-intellectualism, its ability to ignore
realities (which she termed evasive idealism),
and its backward-looking tendency. A homebody,
she also traveled widely, finding New York and
London especially congenial. A fictional realist,
Glasgow yet could not accept the stark depictions
of life in some contemporary novels, which she
thought merely vulgar. She exposed class inequities
that benefited her and condemned racial distinctions that formed her daily context. Insofar as
contradictory impulses can be said to characterize
literary modernism in the twentieth century, the
difficulty of neatly categorizing Glasgow defines
her as one kind of modernist. Current assessments
often address Glasgows work in the context of
feminism, of revaluations of regionalism, or of
Southern literature or popular fiction. Rarely have
scholars addressed Glasgow as a modernist, a
consideration that might yield fruitful insights for
both Glasgow and modernist studies.
Especially in early novels such as The Descendant
(1897) and The Wheel of Life (1906), characters
struggle to succeed in inhospitable environments.
Several novels, such as The Voice of the People
(1900) and The Romance of a Plain Man (1909),
focus on life in the South after the Civil War. In
other works, women seek personal fulfillment,
often amidst relationships with men who lack
understanding. Among these last are some of
Glasgows best novels, including Virginia (1913),
Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comedians
(1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The
Sheltered Life (1937).
In A Certain Measure, Glasgows 1943 collection of essays on her novels, she grouped her work
into Novels of the Commonwealth, Novels of the
Country, and Novels of the City. Although her
earlier division of six novels into the Novel of
Character and the Tragicomedy of Manners
might seem very different, together these categories reveal Glasgows fictional commitment to
exploring the effects of place and the meaning of
character, both within the context of the manners
that always fascinated her. Her enduring themes
class and status, persecution and social justice,
triumph over adversity, humor, and feminism
are treated in the context of a belief in fate

powerfully shaped by place and character.
Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF);
Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern
Novel (AF)
Glasgow, E. G. (1897). The Descendant. New York: Harper.
Glasgow, E. G. (1898). Phases of an Inferior Planet.
New York: Harper.
Glasgow, E. G. (1900). The Voice of the People.
Glasgow, E. G. (1902a). The Battle-Ground. New York:
Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1902b). The Freeman and Other Poems.
Glasgow, E. G. (1904). The Deliverance. New York:
Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1906). The Wheel of Life. New York:
Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1908). The Ancient Law. New York:
Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1909). The Romance of a Plain Man.
Glasgow, E. G. (1911). The Miller of Old Church.
Glasgow, E. G. (1913). Virginia. New York: Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1916). Life and Gabriella. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1919). The Builders. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1922). One Man in His Time. Garden
Glasgow, E. G. (1923). The Shadowy Third and Other
Stories. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1925). Barren Ground. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1926). The Romantic Comedians.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1929). They Stooped to Folly. Garden
Glasgow, E. G. (1932). The Sheltered Life. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday.
Glasgow, E. G. (1935). Vein of Iron. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Glasgow, E. G. (1941). In This Our Life. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Glasgow, E. G. (1943). A Certain Measure: An
Interpretation of Prose Fiction. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Glasgow, E. G. (1954). The Woman Within. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
GOLD, MIKE
Glasgow, E. G. (1958). Letters of Ellen Glasgow

(ed. B. Rouse). New York: Harcourt Brace.
Glasgow, E. G. (1963). The Collected Stories of Ellen
Glasgow (ed. R. K. Meeker). Baton Rouge: Louisiana
Glasgow, E. G. (1966). Beyond Defeat: An Epilogue to an
Era (ed. L. Y. Gore). Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia.
Glasgow, E. G. (1988). Ellen Glasgows Reasonable
Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings (ed. J. R. Raper).
Glasgow, E. G. (2005). Perfect Companionship: Ellen
Glasgows Selected Correspondence With Women
(ed. P. R. Matthews). Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press.
Godbold, E. Stanly Jr. (1972). Ellen Glasgow and the
Woman Within. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press.
Goodman, S. (1998). Ellen Glasgow: A Biography.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Pess.
Gold, Mike
DAVID ROESSEL
In his essay Toward Proletarian Literature,

Mike Gold declared, I am not an individual;
I am all that the tenement group poured into
me during those early years of my spiritual
travail (Folsom 65). The claim summarizes
Golds own artistic approach and the critical
stance he would adopt toward the writing of
others. In his view, the new socialist and revolutionary author spoke not as an intellectual, but
for the collective. Art was a weapon to be used in
the class struggle, and while skill was indeed
important, artistic excellence without a commitment to communal values was simply introspective navel-gazing. Some have taken Gold as
an unreflective voice of the Communist Party
line. But Gold gravitated to socialism and
then communism because of their similarity to
the shared life of the tenement that was in his
blood.
Mike Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich in the
Jewish East Side of New York in 1893. Although
he had a tendency in his later years to exaggerate
his familys situation and his lack of educational
training, the family certainly struggled financially
when Gold was in his teens. Golds literary apprenticeship was with Greenwich Village radical
institutions, especially the magazine The Masses
599
and the theater group the Provincetown Players.

Indeed, Gold spent much of the 1920s trying to
recreate the atmosphere of these institutions
through their new, more proletarian versions
the New Masses magazine and the New Playwrights Theatre. In 1920, having embraced communism, he took the name of Mike Gold. While
his stated reason for the name change was to
avoid the draft by going to Mexico in the last
year of World War I, the switch also exemplified
his new, revolutionary approach to literature and
politics.
In 1930, Gold published the book that made his
literary reputation, Jews Without Money. In this
novel, as in much of his fiction, Gold conveys the
reality and resilience of the New York tenement of
his early life without making an overt political
message until the very end. The book has become
part of the Gold conundrum, for although it is
fiction, it has gained a reputation as memoir.
Some critics have tried to psychoanalyze Gold
through factual discrepancies of the book for
example, he erases a brother and invents a sister.
Such speculation is legitimate as long as the
liberties of a novelist are taken into account.
While Gold explores the realities of tenement life,
he has a tendency to romanticize the world of
poverty in a way that other proletarian realists of
the 1930s, like James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck,
and Richard Wright, would avoid. Jews Without
Money is read now more as an account of the
lost world of the Jewish East Side than as a protest
novel.
Golds literary influence, however, extended
far beyond the praise he received for Jews
Without Money, especially in the early 1930s. As
an editor and contributor to the New Masses magazine and a columnist for the Daily Worker, Gold
strove to become the Mencken of the Left a critic
whose biting perspective would help shape the
direction of American literature. But his seemingly
inflexible politics caused him to be viewed by some
as simply a Soviet mouthpiece. So, while he published several books based upon his articles and
columns including Change the World! (c.1937)
and The Hollow Men (1941) only Jews Without
Money has remained in print.
Golds influence waned during World War II,
and all but disappeared afterward. During the
McCarthyism of the late 1940s, he took his family
to live in France. He returned to New York in
600
GORDON, MARY
1950, and moved to San Francisco in 1955. He

died there in 1967, never having completed the
second novel to follow Jews Without Money.
Measuring Golds achievement through his one
published novel misconstrues his output, as his
newspapers columns alone run in the thousands
of pages. Literary criticism has forgiven many a
writer for fascist sympathies, but to a large degree
it still marginalizes Gold for his communist
convictions.
At the end of his life, Gold was neither bitter nor
despondent about his personal situation or the
state of the world. This may seem surprising, as at
the end of Jews Without Money he speaks to a
revolution that will destroy the East Side when
you come, and build a garden of the human spirit
(316). And yet for Gold it was the Jewish East Side
itself that was the garden of the human spirit,
and he must stay in the tenement and make a
new and truer [art] there. Here was the central
dilemma for Gold: the success of revolution he so
desired would destroy the world that made him
who he was.
Farrell, James T. (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF);
Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular
Front Fiction (AF)

Aaron, D. (1961). Writers on the Left: Episodes in
American Literary Communism. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Bloom, J. (1992). Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike
Gold and Joseph Freeman. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Folsom, M. (1972). Introduction. In M. Gold, Mike
Gold: A Literary Anthology (ed. M. Folsom).
New York: International.
Gold, M. (c.1929). 120 Million. New York:
International.
Gold, M. (1930). Jews Without Money. New York:
International.
Gold, M. (c.1937). Change the World! New York:
International.
Gold, M. (with Blankfort, M.) (1936). Battle Hymn.
New York: Samuel French.
Gold, M. (1941). The Hollow Men. New York:
International.
Gold, M. (1954). The Mike Gold Reader. New York:
International.
Gold, M. (1972). Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology

(ed. M. Folsom). New York: International.
Wald, A. (2002). Exiles From a Future Time:
The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century
Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Gordon, Mary
DAVID W. MADDEN
With the publication of her first novel, Mary

Gordon emerged as a serious, confident, outspoken voice in contemporary American fiction.
An impeccable stylist, she explores the twisted
coils of familial and domestic experience. Although she shuns the attention, she is one of the
most incisive writers of Catholic life in America,
as well as being an important feminist voice.
Mary Gordon was born on December 8, 1949
on Long Island, New York. The only child of
David and Anna Gordon, she grew up in a
devout Catholic family and attended Barnard
College and Syracuse University. She married
anthropologist James Brian and, after that marriage ended, married Arthur Cash, with whom she
has had two children. She held a number of
temporary teaching positions before being
named the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of
English at Barnard.
Final Payments (1979), her first novel, presents
Isabel Moore, a 30-year-old woman who has
devoted her life to an ailing father who dies and
leaves his daughter adrift in the world. Isabel
enters two ill-fated relationships, and out of a
sense of penance for the failure of those liaisons,
she once again relinquishes her freedom to an
older person who cannot appreciate her. The
Company of Women (1980) examines some of
the same issues and reveals the quintessential
Gordon themes of self-sacrifice, devotion, and
claustrophobia. Developing a more complex
narrative structure of multiple points of view,
Gordon follows the maturation of Felicitas Taylor
and the intimate circle of adult women who
nurture and encourage her independence. Like
Isabel Moore, Felicitas submits herself to an exploitative partner and suffers ostracism when
she becomes pregnant. Once again, obedience to
church and men and a desperate attempt to escape
confinement define her character.
GORDON, MARY
Men and Angels (1985) represents a departure

from an overt Catholic perspective, yet Gordons
concern with the Christian obligation to love
others, even the seemingly unlovable, prevails.
This novel is built on a complex series of parallels
and oppositions of characterizations, structure,
and themes. In the figures of Anne Foster and
Laura Post, Gordon pits maternity against religiosity, devotion against rejection, and independence against subjugation. The experiment with
multiple points of view is taken further as the
novel revolves around ruminations, journals, letters, and accounts of the lives of the principal and
secondary characters.
The Other Side (1989) and Pearl (2005) offer
intricate examinations of Irish American experience. The first is Gordons most complicated
work, a chronicle of five generations of a family
involving 20 characters and stretching from
Ireland to New York. The central characters
Vincent and Ellen Costelloe MacNamara
are emigres from an Ireland that had grown
inhospitable. Whereas Vincent is a kind, forgiving, and patient man, his wife is bitter and
intolerant, damaged by a feckless father and a
hostile homeland. They present unsentimental
reactions to the myth of cheerful Irish who
assimilated easily into the American mainstream,
and their uneasy legacy is traced through three
generations. Pearl centers on Pearl Meyers, a
foreign exchange student in Ireland who
chains herself to an embassy flagpole and is
dying of a hunger strike; her mother, Maria,
who tries to save her; and a surrogate father,
Joseph, who seeks to aid them both. Once again
the themes of self-sacrifice and maternal devotion are carefully developed, as is a modern
parable of the Holy Family (note the names)
and the act of martyrdom. Intense subjectivity
further defines the characters and the narrator,
the latter a foregrounded voice that assumes
various postures and often addresses the audience directly.
Spending (1998) is an audacious examination
of gender roles and individual freedom. Monica
Szabo, a moderately successful painter, meets B,
a wealthy commodities broker who admires her
work and submits himself as a patron who wishes
to advance her career and financially support her.
B also becomes both muse and model for a series
of paintings based on Renaissance depictions of
601
the dead Christ, though these are postcoitally

recumbent figures. The paintings launch her
visibility and draw the ire of religious rightwingers. Except for these references to religion,
issues of faith and devotion give way to pure
physical pleasures and Gordons most sustained
piece of erotica.
Along with two collections of short fiction,
she has also written three important works of
non-fiction: Good Boys and Dead Girls: And
Other Essays (1992), which collects 28 essays on
a variety of subjects; and a pair of memoirs The
Shadow Man (1996) and Circling My Mother
(2007) that explore the known and the less
well-known aspects of each of her parents
lives. Besides three honorary doctorates, Gordon
has earned a number of awards, including
the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (1979 and
1981), the Lila WallaceReaders Digest Writers
Award (1992), the O. Henry Award (1983,
1997, 1999), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993),
and the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit
(200810).
Bennett, A. (1996). Mary Gordon. New York:
Twayne.
Bennett, A. (2002). Conversations with Mary Gordon.
Durso, P. K. (2002). Bringing Whiteness Home:
Exploring the Social Geography of Race in Mary
Gordons The Other Side. Modern Language Studies,
32(1), 85102.
Gordon, M. (1978). Final Payments. New York:
Random House.
Gordon, M. (1981). The Company of Women. New
York: Random House.
Gordon, M. (1985). Men and Angels. New York:
Random House.
Gordon, M. (1987). Temporary Shelter. New York:
Random House.
Gordon, M. (1989). The Other Side. New York:
Viking.
Gordon, M. (1992). Good Boys and Dead Girls: And
Other Essays. New York: Viking.
Gordon, M. (1993). The Rest of Life: Three Novellas.
New York: Viking.
Gordon, M. (1996). The Shadow Man. New York:
Random House.
602
GORDON, MARY
Gordon, M. (1998). Spending: A Utopian Divertimento.

Gordon, M. (2005). Pearl. New York: Pantheon.
Gordon, M. (2007). Circling My Mother. New York:
Pantheon.
Labrie, R. (1996). Women and the Catholic Church in
the Fiction of Mary Gordon. English Studies in
Canada, 22(2), 16779.
Peterson, J. S. (2007). What to Do About Motherhood:

Feminist Theory and Feminist Fiction Negotiate
Motherhoods Dilemmas. In S. C. Staub (ed.),
The Literary Mother: Essays on Representations of
Maternity and Child Care. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
pp. 22444.
Sheldon, B. H. (1997). Daughters and Fathers in
Feminist Novels. New York: Peter Lang.
H
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
ANNETTE DEBO
Widely known for her poetry, H.D. also wrote an

impressive body of fiction, demonstrating her
virtuosity in multiple genres, including memoirs,
non-fiction essays, and translations. Her fiction,
or prose poems as H.D. sometimes called them,
echo autobiographically and are preoccupied with
narrative experimentation, applying modernist
techniques like stream of consciousness, montage, repetition, and fragmentation.
Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1886, H.D. grew up in a scientific household, the only girl among five boys. She escaped
her familys middle-class gendered expectations
of her by traveling to Europe in 1911 and remaining there, making her home primarily in England
and Switzerland. She creatively constructed her
family through her daughter Perdita, her lifelong
companion Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman),
and a variety of other lovers. While she always felt
herself to be American, H.D. remained in England
during both World Wars, a generative experience
that both shattered her sense of self and produced
some of her very best writing. She died in 1961 in
Switzerland, and her ashes were placed in Nisky
Graveyard in Bethlehem.
The most critically celebrated of her early novels,
HERmione (1981) is a Bildungsroman about
Hermione Gart, who has failed at Bryn Mawr and
has yet to find her place in the world. In lieu of
college, she becomes engaged to George Lowndes,
a match her family initially resists until they
discover Georges well-dressed and impeccably
mannered family, who, to add to their charms,

own a house on the Riviera. Their growing approval and the demands of an imminent wedding weigh
heavily upon Hermione, who escapes her mothers
conventional life through a relationship with an
entirely unsuitable girl, Fayne Rabb. Faynes family,
which includes only her mother and herself, lives in
a working-class neighborhood, and the erotic tensions between the two girls, while unarticulated, are
not lost upon Hermiones mother. Hermione finally breaks off her engagement, determines to
travel to Europe using money her grandmother
left for her trousseau, and chooses Fayne over
George. She also gradually identifies her talent for
writing, an avenue of possible achievement far
removed from her familys scientific orientation.
Sharing this focus on the development of the female
artist are Asphodel, which chronicles Hermiones
personal and artistic development in Europe, and
Paint It Today (1992) particularly valued as the
most explicitly lesbian of H.D.s novels.
Also set in the 1910s, Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) (1960) offers a portrait of the civilian response to war in the chaos of World War I, and
again explores the development of the female
artist. Julia Ashton, the protagonist, suffers a
procession of losses: her husbands repeated departures to fight at the front in France, the dissolution of Julias marriage brought about by her
spouses infidelities, and the stillbirth of their
child. The novels pages are filled with the demands of blackouts (no light must show or else
one will be fined), little in the way of food (eggs are
saved for breakfast, and only tea is offered to

604
HAGEDORN, JESSICA
visitors), bombings (the streets rock and everyone

heads for shelters), and the ubiquitous soldiers
(movie theaters hold a sea of khaki uniforms
adorned with khaki bandages). As she struggles
to continue her career as a writer, Julias life
unravels with the world around her. Often read
as a roman-a-clef, this novel is rooted in war but
speaks to the female quest for self-fulfillment,
which Julia finds not in the men in her life but
in her creative writing.
H.D. wrote a series of late novels concerned
with the wars, the future, and possible religious
and mythical solutions, the best-known of
which is The Gift (1998). This non-linear text
combines childhood memories with her research
on her family and its Moravian roots, as well as
her experiences in World War II. H.D. often uses
the metaphor of the nautilus shell to represent
her understanding of lifes progression; patterns
repeat but in new ways as one progresses upward
along a spiral path. Thus, the bombing of London not only resurrects past terrors (her fathers
concussion, her childhood move to Philadelphia), but also offers the possibility that she
inherited her familys artistic gift in her writing.
Less than half of H.D.s fiction was published
during her lifetime, but posthumous publication
has made almost all of her work accessible. She
wrote a number of short stories, the three published as Palimpsest (1968) receiving the most
attention because of their availability and Egyptian setting; the rest can be located through
Michael Boughns H.D. A Bibliography (1993).
Critical interest in her late novels continues to
grow as they are published Majic Ring, The
Mystery, and Magic Mirror appeared in print for
the first time in 2009 from the University Press
of Florida.
SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Gender
and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
Boughn, M. (1993). H.D. A Bibliography, 19051990.
Friedman, S. S. (1990). Penelopes Web: Gender,
Modernity, and H.D.s Fiction. Cambridge:
H.D. (1934). The Usual Star. Dijon: Darantiere.
H.D. (1968). Palimpsest [1926]. Carbondale:

H.D. (1980). Hedylus [1928]. Redding Ridge, CT:
Black Swan.
H.D. (1981). HERmione. New York: New Directions.
H.D. (1983). Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) [1960].
Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan.
H.D. (1986). Nights [1935]. New York: New
Directions.
H.D. (1988). The Hedgehog [1936]. New York:
New Directions.
H.D. (1992). Asphodel (ed. R. Spoo). Durham, NC:
H.D. (1992). Paint It Today (ed. C. Laity). New York:
New York University Press.
H.D. (1993). Within the Walls. Iowa City: Windhover.
H.D. (1996). Kora and Ka [1934]. New York:
New Directions.
H.D. (1998). The Gift: The Complete Text
(ed. J. Augustine). Gainesville: University Press of
Florida.
H.D. (2000). Pilates Wife (ed. J. A. Burke). New York:
New Directions.
H. D. (as Alton, Delia). (2007). The Sword Went Out
to Sea: (Synthesis of a Dream) (ed. C. Hogue &
J. Vandivere). Gainesville: University Press
of Florida.
Hagedorn, Jessica
JEFFREY SANTA ANA
Jessica Hagedorn is a Philippine-born American

novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, screenwriter,
and editor. She is best-known for writing fiction
and poetry depicting the consequences of
Spanish and US colonialisms in the Philippines
and among Philippine immigrants. Major themes
in her work include the hybrid culture and
colonial mentality of Philippine people, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Hollywood
fantasies and Third World realities, political
corruption and class society, colonialism and
Catholicism, and the innocence and exploitation
of the poor. Hagedorns best-known works include Dangerous Music (1975), a volume of stories
and poems about her youth in the Philippines
and life as an immigrant in America; Pet Food and
Tropical Apparitions (1981), a collection of vignettes and poems that won the American Book
Award; Dogeaters (1990), her debut novel nominated for the National Book Award about social
HAGEDORN, JESSICA
disorder and corruption in modern Philippine

society; Danger and Beauty (1993), a volume that
combines the poetry and prose from her two
previous collections; The Gangster of Love
(1996), a narrative about a Philippine immigrant
struggling to succeed as a rock n roll musician;
and Dream Jungle (2003a), a novel that associates
the discovery of a lost tribe of natives in Mindanao
with the filming of a Hollywood Vietnam War
movie in the Philippines.
Hagedorn was born on May 29, 1949 in Manila,
Philippines. As a teenager in the 1960s, she immigrated to the US with her mother and siblings.
She grew up in the aftermath of US colonialism in
the Philippines. After nearly 50 years of US rule
beginning with the Philippine-American War in
1898, the Philippines was granted independence
in 1946. Hagedorns work mirrors the impact of
US colonialism through the influence of American popular culture, particularly Hollywood film
and radio, which dominated Philippine life as
an effect of Western cultural imperialism (Lawsin
180). In Dogeaters, Hollywood film and radio
represent Western media blending with Philippine tradition to produce hybrid cultural forms.
The prevalence of Hollywood movies in the narrative depicts every Philippine person as affected
and implicated in colonial hybridity instantiated
by US cultural domination. The novel is a collage
of stories and dreamlike episodes satirizing
Philippine society amid the reign of Ferdinand
Marcos (president of the Philippines from 1965 to
1986). The title of the novel is a racial insult used
by American soldiers for Philippine people during
the early 1900s, referring both to the elites who
tyrannize the poor and to the poor themselves
who have no recourse but to eat dog, considered
a poor mans meal (Balce 55).
Hagedorn followed Dogeaters with The Gangster of Love, a tragicomic novel of a young
Philippine immigrant named Raquel Rocky
Rivera who leaves the Philippines for the US with
her mother and brother in 1970. In America,
Rocky strives to become a rock n roll star in her
eponymous rock band, The Gangster of Love. Yet
her career as a musician is a constant effort to
make enough money to keep her band together.
In the highly competitive music business, her
band struggles to survive, and Rocky, in order to
make a living for herself when not performing,
works in various menial and exploitative jobs.
605
The Gangster of Love is a semiautobiographical

work because it reflects Hagedorns own experience as an artist struggling to maintain creative
integrity while under the industrys pressure to
commercialize and sell out for financial gain. In
Dream Jungle, Hagedorns most recent novel, the
imperialist footprint the US has left in the Philippines continues as an important critical issue.
The novel is a fictional account of the Tasaday
tribe hoax interwoven with an illusory narrative
about the filming of Francis Ford Coppolas film
Apocalypse Now (1979). In Dream Jungle, an
affluent Philippine named Zamora Lopez de Legazpi is a notorious mestizo trickster of Spanish
and Philippine native origins (2003a, 3067).
Legazpi claims to discover the Taobo, a lost tribe
of natives living peacefully alone free from the
exploitative contact of Western civilization and
modern Philippine society. The narrative, like in
Dogeaters, is told from the perspective of various
characters. This effect of multiple points of view
reflects the hybrid effects of Western influence on
Philippine culture and language. As the narrative
shifts and tumbles, it suggests that everybody in
the Philippines has been affected by the imperial
reach of popular media and Hollywood film.
Jessica Hagedorn has emerged as one of the
most important authors in contemporary Asian
American literature. She is internationally respected for writings that depict the complexity
of contemporary Philippine society and the
experience of Philippine immigrants. Claiming
a global readership, Hagedorns work inscribes
and revives the cultural memory of Philippine
people in the diaspora and throughout the world.
Postcolonialism And Fiction (WF);
Balce, N. S. (2001). Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn.
In S.-L. C. Wong, & S. H. Sumida, (eds.),
A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature.
New York: Modern Language Association of
America, pp. 5465.
Hagedorn, J. (1975). Dangerous Music. San Francisco:
Momos.
Hagedorn, J. (1981). Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions.
San Francisco: Momos.
Hagedorn, J. (1990). Dogeaters. New York: Penguin.
606
HAMMETT, DASHIELL
Hagedorn, J. (ed.) (1993). Charlie Chan Is Dead: An

Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction
[1975]. New York: Penguin.
Hagedorn, J. (1993). Danger and Beauty. New York:
Penguin.
Hagedorn, J. (1994). The Exile Within/The Question of
Identity [1975]. In K. Aguilar-San Juan (ed.), The
State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in
the 1990s. Boston: South End, pp. 17382.
Hagedorn, J. (1996). The Gangster of Love. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Hagedorn, J. (1999). Burning Heart: A Portrait of the
Philippines. New York: Rizzoli.
Hagedorn, J. (2003a). Dream Jungle. New York: Viking.
Hagedorn, J. (2003b). Ghost Town. Time, 162(7),
3439.
Hagedorn, J. (2004a). Holy Food [1988]. Alexandria,
VA: Alexander Street.
Hagedorn, J. (2004b). Mango Tango [1977].
Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street.
Hagedorn, J. (2004c). Tenement Lover: No Palm Trees/
In New York City [1981]. Alexandria, VA: Alexander
Street.
Hagedorn, J., & Kim, E. (eds.) (2004). Charlie Chan Is
Dead II: At Home in the World: An Anthology of
Contemporary Asian American Fiction [1975].
New York: Penguin.
Lawsin, E. P. (2000). Interview: Jessica Hagedorn.
In K.-K. Cheung (ed.), Words Matter: Conversations
With Asian American Writers. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, pp. 2139.
Hammett, Dashiell
DAVID W. MADDEN
Dashiell Hammett is often considered the creator

of the hard-boiled detective story, which featured
a distinctive style and a depiction of the detective
as strict professional with a private code of ethics
that is uncompromisable. He de-emphasized the
intricate puzzle construction of classical detective
fictions for stories built on careful character
development, distinctive narration, and gritty
realism.
He was born May 27, 1894 as Samuel Dashiell
Hammett in St. Marys County, Maryland to
Richard and Annie Bond Hammett. The family
eventually settled in Baltimore, where Hammett
attended school but left at age 13. In 1915 he
joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency but
resigned in 1918 to join the Army. After service
he returned to the Pinkertons but again retired in
1920 when diagnosed with tuberculosis. During

his convalescence he began writing short stories,
the most important of which were published in
Black Mask magazine, where his first four novels
also appeared in serial form.
Hammett created a fictional world that
emerged from his detective experiences and from
the social unease of the 1920s. His America is a
chaotic, amoral place, where miscreants, criminals, and gangs run rampant. Set against them are
the detectives, but rather than operating as heroes
dedicated to creating order or dispensing justice,
they are often as amoral in their methods as those
they oppose. The detectives redeeming feature is
their code, a personal sense of ethics that is part
professional, part personal. In these ways, Hammett reminds readers of Ernest Hemingway and
is a forerunner to the existentialist writing after
World War II.
After publishing over 40 stories and various
articles, he published his first novel, Red Harvest
(1929b). Here Hammett extends the development
of his serial detective, the Continental Op, a fairly
nondescript figure known simply by his title, an
operative with the Continental detective agency.
Hammett disdained the conventions of the classical detective novels that often featured suave,
dashing protagonists. The Op is middle-aged,
short, overweight, and utterly unprepossessing
aside from his crafty street smarts and cynicism.
He is called to a Montana mining town by a
newspaper editor who is dead by the time of the
Ops arrival and is hired by the mans father to
clean up the town. The place is thoroughly corrupt, and the Op sets one criminal gang against
the other, provoking a bloodbath and eventually
leaving with no assurance that order will prevail.
His second novel, The Dain Curse (1929a), also
features the Continental Op and is a loosely
arranged collection of four stories. The work is
a decidedly slighter effort, revolving around
drugs, diamonds, blackmail, and a family curse.
The Maltese Falcon (1930) is Hammetts masterpiece for its tight construction, crisp dialogue,
and artful character development. The plot involves a cast of dissemblers who change identities
but share an avaricious interest in a supposedly
priceless statue. The narration is detached and
unemotional, and psychology is revealed through
actions rather than the introspection of monologues. Sam Spade, the protagonist, is morally
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
dubious, willing to use women as sex objects and

manipulate acquaintances to achieve his ends.
The major female character has seduced and lied
to Spade but never deceived him; he willingly sells
her out to maintain his rigidly professional code.
The mystery of the lost statue pales against the
mystery of who Spade is and how he can survive
in a world of violence and deception. Spade, who
appears only in this novel and a few stories,
became Hammetts best-known character thanks
to a radio show and successful film.
The Glass Key (1931) marks another departure
by presenting no detective; instead, Ned Beaumont, a gambler and mob adviser, enters a
murder case for private reasons and finds more
than he bargained for. Hammett again explores
the violence of opposing gangs, sexual dishonesty, and duplicity in high places. The plot is
byzantine as the protagonist seeks first to recover
money he is owed and then the identity of a
killer, who he fears may be his associate. Beaumont is another of Hammetts independent
heroes, a person of flinty individualism who
operates by private standards.
The Thin Man (1934) was Hammetts final
novel and became another overwhelming Hollywood success. It features Nick and Nora Charles
(fictional versions of the author and his lover,
Lillian Hellman), a sophisticated couple who lead,
by social standards of the time, an eccentric life.
Nick has retired from detecting, lives off Noras
inheritance, and continues to chase other women.
Action rotates between speakeasies and aristocratic salons, outbursts of gunplay and brittle,
wry conversation. The tone is often witty and
comic, and again Hammett chooses a first-person
narrator to convey the story.
For the next 28 years he published no fiction,
the reasons for which are mysterious. Some conjecture it was his drinking, his generous royalties,
or his career in screenwriting. His association
with the Communist Party and refusal to answer
questions before a US District Court landed him
six months in a federal prison in 1951 and troubles
with the IRS. Although he died in obscurity,
colleagues such as Raymond Chandler and Andre
Gide regarded him as an incontestably important
figure in modern fiction.
SEE ALSO: Chandler, Raymond (AF); Detective/
Crime Fiction (WF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF);
607
Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Noir

Fiction (AF)
Dooley, D. (1984). Dashiell Hammett. New York:
Ungar.
Gregory, S. (1984). Private Investigations: The Novels of
Dashiell Hammett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Hammett, D. (1929a). The Dain Curse. New York:
Knopf.
Hammett, D. (1929b). Red Harvest. New York: Knopf.
Hammett, D. (1930). The Maltese Falcon. New York:
Knopf.
Hammett, D. (1931). The Glass Key. New York:
Knopf.
Hammett, D. (1934). The Thin Man. New York: Knopf.
Hammett, D. (1966). The Big Knockover
(ed. L. Hellman). New York: Random House.
Hammett, D. (1974). The Continental Op
(ed. S. Marcus). New York: Random House.
Johnson, D. (1983). Dashiell Hammett: A Life.
Layman, R. (2000). Dashiell Hammett. Detroit: Gale.
Layman, R., & Rivett, J. M. (eds.) (2001). Selected Letters
of Dashiell Hammett. Oxford: Counterpoint, 2001.
Marling, W. (1983). Dashiell Hammett. Boston:
Twayne.
Metress, C. (ed.) (1994). The Critical Response to
Dashiell Hammett. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Nolan, W.F. (1969). Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook.
Santa Barbara, CA: McNally and Loftin.
Symons, J. (1985). Dashiell Hammett. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace.
Wolfe, P. (1980). Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell
Hammett. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press.
The Harlem Renaissance

DAYLANNE K. ENGLISH
The Harlem Renaissance was a 1920s flourishing

of African American arts and letters centered in
the Harlem section of New York City. Literature
has long been considered the heart of the movement, with writers such as Countee Cullen,
Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, and Jean Toomer among its major figures.
The writers of the New Negro Movement, the
periods more common nomenclature for the
608
Renaissance, were consciously representing black

people in new ways. They sought to counter
received, racist, and stereotypical images of African Americans and to forge, through art, new
versions of black identity. Howard philosophy
professor and Harlem Renaissance proponent
Alain Locke produced what comes closest to being
a manifesto for the movement, a 1925 essay
entitled The New Negro that appeared in the
Survey Graphic, a progressive journal of social
analysis. Locke sounded the death knell for the
Old Negro, a stock figure that had long become
more of a myth than a man. Locke argued for a
new psychology among younger black Americans, who possessed, he said, renewed selfrespect and self-dependence. Locke associated
the New Negro with creative expression in the
belief that cultural recognition would lead to
improved social and political conditions for
black people.
Well before the 1920s, several key texts helped
set the stage for the New Negro movement.
W. E. B. Du Boiss 1899 urban study, The
Philadelphia Negro, along with his landmark
1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, had helped
establish the legitimacy of academic study of
African American culture and experience. In
1912, Fisk literature professor, diplomat, and
writer James Weldon Johnson anonymously
published his novel, The Autobiography of an
Ex-Colored Man; it was reissued in 1927, at the
peak of the Renaissance, this time with the
authors identity revealed. The novels unnamed
narrator, a mulatto man who can pass for
white, is a gifted, classically trained pianist.
Upon learning late in his childhood of his racial
identity, he decides to embrace his blackness. He
becomes a successful ragtime piano player and
embarks on a project to blend European classical
with African American folk musical forms. But
after witnessing the lynching of a black man in
Georgia, the narrator abruptly abandons his
project, deciding instead to pass as white for the
rest of his life. He becomes a successful businessman and marries a white woman. At the end of
the novel, he concludes that he has sold [his]
birthright for a mess of pottage. The novels
intertwining of racial identity, cultural production, and commerce and its representation of
the terroristic power of lynching anticipated
many aesthetic and political preoccupations of
the Harlem Renaissance. Likewise, anti-lynching

writings of the 1910s, especially the journalism of
Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the plays of Angelina
Weld Grimke, offered a strong precedent for the
movements tenet of political activism through
writing.
A number of historical developments also
helped make the Harlem Renaissance possible.
In the late nineteenth century, New York became
an economic and cultural magnet for hundreds
of thousands of African American migrants and
many Caribbean immigrants. Between 1890 and
1920, the Great Migration brought 1.2 million
African Americans from the South to Northern
and Western US cities, with at least 300,000
migrating in a single decade, 191020. They
sought escape from the Souths hardships, from
recession to lynching; and they had high hopes
for their opportunities in cities such as Chicago,
Detroit, Los Angeles, and, above all, New York.
There, thanks in part to entrepreneur Phillip A.
Payton and his Afro-American Realty Company,
Harlem and its strong housing stock once home
to European, especially Dutch, immigrants
emerged as a destination for black people of all
sorts. Nearly all the major Harlem Renaissance
figures lived, or at least spent a great deal of time,
in Harlem during the 1920s; and the periods
most influential race journals, including the
NAACPs Crisis, the Urban Leagues Opportunity,
and A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owens
leftist Messenger, all had offices in Harlem. Marcus
Garveys United Negro Improvement Association
and its journal Negro World were located there as
well. As James Weldon Johnson put it in Black
Manhattan, his 1930 history of the neighborhood,
Harlem in the 1920s was the intellectual and
artistic capital of the Negro World.
Jean Toomers 1923 book Cane, among the
most innovative and lauded texts of the Renaissance, is very much about the Great Migration,
its costs as well as its benefits. In three sections
consisting of brief poems and prose fiction, Cane
traces the lives of its largely African American
characters. The first section takes place in a romanticized yet also dangerous and violent rural
South; the second section considers the potentially stultifying conditions of a postmigration urban
North; and the third follows an African American
male protagonist, Kabnis, an intellectual Northerner often read as a Toomer-like character, who
returns South and finds life there compelling yet

also difficult to navigate and comprehend. Ultimately, the book sounds a mournful note about
the passing of rural Southern black culture while
it reinforces the idea that the center of gravity
for black identity and community had shifted to
Northern US cities.
No work of fiction reflects that shift in all its
complexity more vividly than Home to Harlem, a
1928 novel by Claude McKay and the first bestselling book by a black American. McKay himself
was part of the migration to New York. In 1912,
he arrived in the United States from his native
Jamaica and about two years later made his way
to Harlem, where he emerged as one of the New
Negro movements foremost writers. Home to
Harlem portrays not only the Great Migration but
also other major historical contexts and causes of
the Harlem Renaissance, including the end of
World War I and the enactment of Prohibition.
At the beginning of the novel, we meet the first
of its two protagonists, the working-class American Jake, an Army soldier gone AWOL from his
tour of duty in Europe to return home to
Harlem. The novel thus begins with what many
historians of the movement consider one of its
principal psychological causes: the 1919 return to
the US of black veterans, who, having experienced
a quite different racial reality abroad, readily
evinced the sort of new psychology Locke had
in mind regarding race relations and black identity. Harlem photographer James VanDerZees
well-known 1919 photo of the all-black 369th
Regiment parading on New Yorks Fifth Avenue
likewise represents this return home, though
in a more uncomplicatedly proud fashion than
the version we see in Home to Harlem. Unlike
VanDerZees positive, sometimes even airbrushed, photographs, Home to Harlem represented a more inclusive, if less optimistic, picture.
The novels second protagonist, Ray, is the
primary vehicle for this alternative picture. A
disaffected intellectual from Haiti, Ray also lives,
though not as contentedly as Jake, in Harlem.
He is frustrated by its close quarters, where black
people arrive in such great numbers only partly by
choice, given the larger context of a Jim Crow city
and nation. Ray longs to escape from Harlem and
his girlfriend Agatha. Home to Harlem thus shows
the tensions as well as the vitality brought about
by Harlems mixture of African Americans and
609
West Indians, men and women, light-skinned

people and dark-skinned people, gay people
and straight people. It shows the street life, the
jazz, and the speakeasies of Prohibition-era
Harlem, along with the more highbrow lifestyle
of its literati. Prostitutes and nightclub singers,
veterans and longshoremen, jazz musicians and
numbers runners, writers and Pullman porters
all inhabit its pages.
Just as in McKays novel, everyone in the 1920s,
it seemed, wanted to go uptown. In fact, Prohibition and jazz must be considered causes of the
Renaissance simply because they brought so many
diverse, enlivening presences to Harlem. The
performances of Count Basie, Louis Armstrong,
Bessie Smith, Eubie Blake, Bert Williams,
Florence Mills, and many others although not
strictly speaking part of the more literary and
middle-class Harlem Renaissance lent the era
vitality and drew people to Harlem; so, too, did
the liquor that was available uptown. And it was
not only black people partaking of Harlem nightlife. So many whites went to Harlem for adventure, jazz, and booze that they were regularly
satirized in Harlem Renaissance writings, as in
Rudolph Fishers essay The Caucasian Storms
Harlem and Wallace Thurmans satiric 1932
novel about the movement, Infants of the Spring.
Despite the often humorous tone of such satire,
white presence within Harlem and the Harlem
Renaissance was troubling to the writers and
artists of the movement. Racially exclusive nightclubs even in Harlem, where black people could
play in the band but not be part of the audience,
were an obvious source of injustice and outrage.
The existence of white patrons of black art, with
Carl Van Vechten the most visible among them,
was perhaps less public but no less problematic.
Hughes and Hurston at one point even shared a
patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who used her
considerable wealth to support primitive arts
and artists. Hughes ultimately split with Mason
in 1930, and then with Hurston in 1931, in part
over the issue of patronage.
Like any major cultural movement, the Harlem
Renaissance had its own internal sources of tension,
with white patronage just one among them. A
perhaps more fundamental controversy emerged
from the fact that not all Harlem Renaissance
figures appreciated portraits of Harlem, like
McKays, that represented mixtures not only of
610
races but also of colors, classes, sexes, and

sexualities. In a review of Home to Harlem in
Crisis, Du Bois declared that, after reading it, he
felt distinctly like taking a bath. He preferred
the novels of Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928) and
Passing (1929), with their tasteful, light-skinned,
and well-dressed heroines inhabiting Harlem
parlors. Du Bois apparently overlooked the
social commentary in Larsens writings, in which
repressed middle-class protagonists chafed
against the class, gender, sexual, race, and color
strictures of their day and social stratum every
bit as much as did McKays Ray.
The question of how to represent the New
Negro was regularly, and hotly, debated. Du Bois
asked that question explicitly in a February 1926
Crisis questionnaire, part of a symposium
titled The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be
Portrayed? Disagreement immediately erupted
along generational lines. Du Bois, Locke, and
Johnson argued for portraying positive images
of black people, meaning standard-Englishspeaking, college-educated members of the African American middle class. Younger writers like
McKay, Hurston, and Hughes argued for portraying the common folk and their ways of living
and speaking. In a 1926 Nation essay, The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain, Hughes
responded by lambasting the Nordicized Negro
intelligentsia and holding up the low-down
folks, the so-called common element, as the only
viable sources for authentic Negro art. In his own
work, Hughes said, he sought to grasp and hold
some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz, which
he termed the child of the common people.
Taking their cue from Hughes, many scholars of
the Harlem Renaissance consider Hughess jazz
poetry to be its quintessential literary expression,
but Larsens acidly satiric parlor novels should be
considered equally so.
The generational struggle over how to represent the Negro in art found definitive expression
in Fire!! a one-time-only 1926 publication of a
literary journal originally intended to be a quarterly devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, as
the subtitle put it. A shortage of funds ultimately
did in Fire!! whose contributors included Wallace Thurman, promoter and editor of the journal; Hughes; Gwendolyn Bennett; Richard Bruce
(Nugent); Hurston; John Davis; and Aaron
Douglas. But even the single issue managed to
achieve one thing its contributors wanted

namely, to put the older generation on notice
that they would not be held to its standards of
propriety. Hurstons short story, Sweat, focuses on domestic violence and working-class,
vernacular-speaking characters. The title character in Thurmans short story, Cordelia the
Crude, becomes a prostitute. Richard Bruces
brief experimental prose piece, Smoke, Lilies
and Jade, is clearly homoerotic. Despite the
discomfort one might call it denial of the
older Harlem Renaissance figures, there can
be no question that sexuality, especially gay and
lesbian sexualities and, more broadly, queer
sensibilities, helped shape much of the literature,
the music, and indeed the overall atmosphere of
the Renaissance. Many of the major writers and
performers of the period were gay, lesbian, or
bisexual including writers Locke, Countee
Cullen, Harold Jackman, Nugent, and Thurman;
blues singers Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey; and
the popular cross-dressing nightclub performer
Gladys Bentley.
Analysis of the role that sexuality played in
the Harlem Renaissance is among a number of
recent scholarly trends. Scholars have also started
to highlight locations other than Harlem as
significant sites of modern black cultural production. A focus on the movements visual art is
yet another recent development; critics are now
seeing just how central VanDerZees photographs, Oscar Micheauxs films, and Aaron
Douglass illustrations among many other visual artworks were to the project of representing
a New Negro. Of growing interest, too, is the
relationship between the Harlem Renaissance and
other especially interracial, queer, transnational, and diasporic modernisms and identities.
Scholars are also beginning to challenge the rhetoric of failure long associated with the movement.
In his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston
Hughes spoke sardonically of When the Negro
Was in Vogue, declaring that ordinary Negroes
hadnt heard of the Harlem Renaissance. And if
they had, it hadnt raised their wages any (228).
Scholars ever since, including Nathan Huggins
and David Levering Lewis, have echoed Hughess
assessment that the movement failed because it
did not result in palpable gains for African American people. Lockes manifesto had certainly set
up the movement to be viewed in just this way.
But if we look not for immediate political effects

but to the movements artistic output, even simply to a list of its fiction, it is hard to view the
Harlem Renaissance as having been anything
but a success.
The Harlem Renaissance may or may not have
failed, but it certainly ended. When it ended is,
likewise, subject to debate. Some scholars say it
lasted until 1940, in part because several important novels by Harlem Renaissance figures
appeared in the 1930s, including Thurmans
roman-a-clef, Infants of the Spring (1932);
Rudolph Fishers detective novel, The Conjure
Man Dies (1932); and Hurstons Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937). An equally likely end date
would be in the early 1930s, since the Great
Depression and the repeal of Prohibition
meant hard times for Harlems speakeasies and
also for its writers, who were dependent upon
patron dollars and on the financial well-being of
publishing houses and little magazines. Moreover, even the post-1930 novels may in some
ways lie outside the central concerns of the
Harlem Renaissance. Hurstons is set in the rural
South, Fishers is as much a Depression novel as
it is a Harlem one, and Thurmans reads rather
like an epitaph for the movement. At the end of
Infants, a Thurman-like character covers his
bathroom floor with handwritten pages from a
novel he had been writing. He then climbs into
the bathtub and slits his wrists; blood and water
overflow, soaking the pages and rendering them
illegible. Only the dedication to Huysmanss
Des Esseintes and Oscar Wilde can still be
read. Thurman himself died two years later, in
1934, of tuberculosis complicated by alcoholism;
Fisher died the same year. Such narratives, both
fictional and biographical, seem to confirm that
the Harlem Renaissance was a tragic failure based
upon a crumbling foundation, to quote from the
last page of Infants. And yet, Thurmans novels,
along with so many other extraordinary writings
from the New Negro movement, do live on, continuing to shape our understanding and appreciation of the rich cultural record of the Harlem
Renaissance.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity
and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
611

Baker, H. (1987). Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Blair, S. (2007). Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers
and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1926). The Negro in Art: How Shall
He Be Portrayed? A Symposium. Crisis, 31 (4),
21920.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1928). Two Novels. Crisis, 35, 202, 211.
Edwards, B. H. (2003). The Practice of Diaspora:
Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black
Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
English, D. (1999). Selecting the Harlem Renaissance.
Critical Inquiry, 25 (4), 80721.
Fisher, R. (1927). The Caucasian Storms Harlem
American Mercury, 11 (44), 39398.
Fisher, R. (1992). The Conjure Man Dies [1932].
Garber, E. (1989). A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian
and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem. In M.
Duberman, M. Vicinus, & G. Chauncey, Jr. (eds.),
Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian
Past. New York: New American Library, pp. 31831.
Gates, H. L., Jr. (1997). Harlem on Our Minds. Critical
Inquiry, 24 (1), 112.
Huggins, N. (1971). Harlem Renaissance. New York:
Hughes, L. (1926). The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain. The Nation, pp. 69294 (June 23).
Hughes, L. (1940). The Big Sea. New York: Knopf.
Hurston, Z. N. (2006). Their Eyes Were Watching God
[1937]. New York: HarperCollins.
Hutchinson, G. (1995). The Harlem Renaissance in
Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Johnson, J. W. (1927). The Autobiography of an
Ex-Coloured Man. New York: Knopf.
Johnson, J. W. (1930). Black Manhattan. New York:
Knopf.
Larsen, N. (1986). Quicksand and Passing [1928, 1929].
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
New York: Penguin.
Locke, A. (ed.) (1992). The New Negro [1925].
New York: Atheneum.
McKay, C. (1928). Home to Harlem. New York: Harper.
Thurman, W. (ed.) (1926). Fire!! Devoted to Younger
Negro Artists, 1(1).
Thurman, W. (1992). Infants of the Spring [1932].
Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Toomer, Jean. (1923). Cane. New York: Boni and
Liveright.
612
HARRISON, JIM
Harrison, Jim
NANCY BUNGE
Jim Harrison believes that the artist should fully

explore his or her consciousness; while attempting to meet this standard, Harrison has produced
10 poetry collections, nine novels, five novella
trilogies, a memoir, a childrens book, and many
essays on a variety of subjects, especially food,
hunting, fishing, and literature.
Born James Thomas Harrison in Grayling,
Michigan on December 11, 1937 to Winfield
Sprague and Norma Olivia (Wahlgren) Harrison,
he grew up in Reed City, Michigan. Spending
his youth in the country gave Harrison a connection with nature and a penchant for hunting
and fishing which persistently comfort him and
many of his characters. The adolescent Harrison
read so widely that when he was 18, his favorite
authors included only two Americans, William
Faulkner and Henry Miller, along with Dylan
Thomas, Rimbaud, James Joyce, and Dostoyevsky.
Harrisons reading grew even more exotic when
he studied comparative literature at Michigan
State University, where Harrison would reflect
on esoteric texts while working at the universitys
farms. This combination of sophistication and
earthiness persists throughout Harrisons work
and helps explain how he repeatedly achieves a
blending of elegance and simplicity that pleases
both critics and readers.
Harrison points out that, like many fiction
writers, he began as a poet. In his case, all those
years concentrating on language help explain why
even though reviewers sometimes criticize themes
they identify in Harrisons work, they persistently
exclaim over the lucidity, power, and grace of his
writing. His first books of fiction, Wolf (1971), A
Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), Legends of
the Fall (1978), and Warlock (1981), focused on
men whom some critics found violent; as a result,
Harrison found himself accused of male chauvinism. Harrison rejects any characterizations of
his books as macho and suggests that the charge
comes from a failure to understand huntings
role in the Midwest.
On the other hand, Harrison grew tired of
writing about males who reminded him of himself. So, he found it rewarding to lose himself in
someone unlike himself while producing Sundog
(1984). The novels structure reflects Harrisons

attempt to connect with a different kind of character. The narrator interviews Robert Corvus
Strang, the protagonist, whom Harrison characterizes as a quintessential man of action. Strang,
who has built dams in South America and Africa,
has settled in northern Michigan after severely
injuring himself in a fall. Listening intently to
Strangs life story allows the narrator (and Harrison) to participate in his worldly life and share his
exotic travels. Harrison appropriately uses his
writing cabin in northern Michigan as the setting
for Strangs narration.
In his next book, Harrison made an even more
extensive imaginative journey. He became absorbed by Dalva, a female character who came
to him in a series of dreams and whose name
became the title of the novel Dalva (1988).
Harrison says that seeing the world through her
eyes had a deep impact on him, altering his
writing methods and confirming his sense that
writers are androgynous. He also gave Dalva the
quality he considers essential to living a full life:
curiosity, a trait Harrison also shares. That he
learned so much from resting in Dalvas perspective helps explain why the title novellas of
Harrisons next two collections, The Woman Lit
by Fireflies (1990) and Julip (1994), also focused
on women.
Dalva especially fascinated Harrison, so he
went on to tell her family history in The Road
Home (1998a), but rather than simply losing
himself in her point of view, he further expanded
his imagination by writing the book not only
from Dalvas perspective, but also from the points
of view of her family members, ranging from her
grandfather John Northridge to her son, Nelse.
This forced Harrison not only to deal imaginatively with both genders, but also to understand
and portray the impact of past generations on
their descendants.
Harrison apparently enjoyed this challenge,
for he decided to take an even more extensive
imaginative odyssey in writing his next two
books. In True North (2004) and Returning to
Earth (2007), Harrison presents the saga of
another family from Michigans Upper Peninsula, assuming one characters perspective after
another, this time entering into the points of
view of characters who are both male and female
and native and white and even entering into the
HAWKES, JOHN
musings of someone facing death in Returning

to Earth.
While Harrisons novels have broadened to
accommodate an expanding range of characters
and sensibilities, his poetry has deepened,
allowing it to render natures transcendent dimensions with increasing power. This radiant
view of the natural world surfaces in all his
work, but particularly in Harrisons later novels. As a result, in Returning to Earth, he
achieves a perfect synthesis of realism and myth.
The pleasure Harrison takes in extending his
awareness has led him to produce fiction that
steadily grows in depth, breadth, complexity,
and beauty.
SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Joyce,
James (BIF); Miller, Henry (AF);

Demott, R. (ed.) (2002). Conversations With Jim
Harrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Harrison, J. (1971). Wolf. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Harrison, J. (1973). A Good Day to Die. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Harrison, J. (1976). Farmer. New York: Viking.
Harrison, J. (1978). Legends of the Fall. New York:
Delacorte.
Harrison, J. (1981). Warlock. New York: Delacorte.
Harrison, J. (1984). Sundog. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Harrison, J. (1988). Dalva. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Harrison, J. (1990). The Woman Lit by Fireflies. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Harrison, J. (1994). Julip. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Harrison, J. (1998a). The Road Home. New York:
Atlantic Monthly.
Harrison, J. (1998b). The Shape of the Journey.
Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon.
Harrison, J. (2000). The Beast God Forgot to Invent.
New York: Atlantic Monthly.
Harrison, J. (2004). True North. New York: Grove.
Harrison, J. (2005). The Summer He Didnt Die.
New York: Atlantic Monthly.
Harrison, J. (2007). Returning to Earth. New York:
Grove.
Reilly, E. C. (1996). Jim Harrison. New York: Twayne.
Smith, P. A. (2002). The True Bones of My Life:
Essays on the Fiction of Jim Harrison. East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press.
613
Hawkes, John
PATRICK ODONNELL
A writer of remarkable stylistic gifts who offers

alternately comic and nightmarish portrayals
of psychic life, John Hawkes famously said in
an interview, I began to write fiction on the
assumption that the true enemies of the novel
were plot, character, setting and theme (Enck
141). In the same interview, he noted that
his literary ancestry runs from Quevado, the
Spanish picaresque writer, and Thomas Nashe,
at the beginnings of the English novel, down
through Lautreamont, Celine, Nathanael West,
Flannery OConnor, James Purdy, Joseph
Heller (Enck 143). During his lifetime, Hawkes
published 14 novels, several novellas and short
stories, and a collection of plays. Born in 1925,
Hawkes spent his childhood in Connecticut,
Alaska, and New York; after graduating from
high school, he served for a year as an American
Field Service ambulance driver in Germany and
Italy in the final months of World War II.
Following the war, he married Sophie Goode
Tazewell and entered Harvard University, where
he studied creative writing with Albert Guerard.
Hawkes taught creative writing at Harvard and
Brown (where he spent the bulk of his career),
with visiting stints at Stanford, MIT, and the
City College of CUNY. The winner of Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller
fellowships, he died in Providence, Rhode Island
in 1998.
Hawkess first novel, The Cannibal, clearly
based on Hawkess wartime experiences, is a
torturous narrative of fascism and violence
set in the American zone of postwar Germany.
The Beetle Leg (1951) followed, a mock western
that features the mystery of a body buried in a
dam (Hawkes worked at the Fort Peck Irrigation Dam in Montana in 1947). After the
publication of two novellas in 1954 The Owl
and The Goose on the Grave it was several
years before Hawkes published one of his signature novels, The Lime Twig (1961), a surreal,
noir-like mystery set amidst the English horseracing scene. What many consider to be
Hawkess finest novel, Second Skin (1964),
about the adventures of a protagonist named
Skipper who is both deeply narcissistic and
614
HAWKES, JOHN
self-sacrificial, was nominated for a National

Book Award; the novel portrays the complex
paternal relationship Skipper has with his
daughter, Cassandra, one in a series of Hawkess
depictions of the intensive kinship between parent and child. Following the publication of a
collection of stories and novellas in Lunar Landscapes (1969), Hawkes published The Blood Oranges (1971), the first of several novels set in the
Mediterranean, about two married couples
whose erotic relationship leads to isolation and
suicide. Hawkess fascination with the relation
between death and eroticism intensifies as his
writing develops: Death, Sleep and the Traveler
(1974) is a dream journey of a man involved in
two sexual triangles and murder as he searches
for the roots of his own identity; Travesty (1976)
records the final hours of a man who is driving
toward a stone wall, and self-extinction, at a
deadly speed; and The Passion Artist (1979)
features yet another male protagonist who is
obsessed with the threat of female sexuality and
his own failed attempts to control women. The
protagonist becomes female in Virginie: Her Two
Lives (1982), the parallel, mock-pornographic
stories of the maturation of an 11-year-old girl
living in the eighteenth century as a servant and
companion to a Sadean aristocrat, and in the
twentieth century as the sister of a pimp to the
aristocracy.
Hawkes attempted something of a more traditional narrative in Adventures in the Alaskan
Skin Trade (1985), in which a daughter comes to
terms with the frontier legacy of her larger-thanlife father, whose escapes and mysterious death
in the Yukon are legendary. In Whistlejacket
(1988), Hawkes takes up once more his lifelong
fascination with horses in a dream-narrative of
a cursed family estate and its mysteries as unraveled by a fashion photographer and huntsman. In Sweet William (1993), the narrator is a
horse one who tells the story of his tumultuous
life as he approaches his final days. Hawkess last
two novels The Frog (1996) and An Irish Eye
(1998) are two coming-of-age fables that underscore Hawkess long fascination with the
relation between childhood, innocence, and
corruption.
While Hawkess intense narratives make strong
demands upon the reader, the reward is inevitably
a complex, often unsettling new vision of the

human capacity for passion and violence, sacrifice
and catharsis.
SEE ALSO: Heller, Joseph (AF); OConnor,

Flannery (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Purdy, James (AF); West, Nathanael (AF)

Enck, J. (1964). John Hawkes: An Interview. Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6, 14155.
Ferrari, R. (1996). Innocence, Power, and the Novels
of John Hawkes. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Greiner, D. (1978). Comic Terror: The Novels of
John Hawkes. Memphis: Memphis State
University Press.
Hawkes, J. (1949). The Cannibal. New York:
New Directions.
Hawkes, J. (1951). The Beetle Leg. New York:
New Directions.
Hawkes, J. (1961). The Lime Twig. New York:
New Directions.
Hawkes, J. (1964). Second Skin. New York:
New Directions.
Hawkes, J. (1969). Lunar Landscapes: Stories and Short
Novels 19481963. New York: New Directions.
Hawkes, J. (1971). The Blood Oranges. New York:
New Directions.
Hawkes, J. (1974). Death, Sleep & the Traveler.
Hawkes, J. (1976). Travesty. New York:
New Directions.
Hawkes, J. (1979). The Passion Artist. New York:
Harper and Row.
Hawkes, J. (1982). Virginie: Her Two Lives. New York:
Harper and Row.
Hawkes, J. (1985). Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade.
Hawkes, J. (1988). Whistlejacket. New York: Collier.
Hawkes, J. (1993). Sweet William: A Memoir of Old
Horse. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Hawkes, J. (1996). The Frog. New York: Viking.
Hawkes, J. (1998). An Irish Eye. New York: Penguin.
Kuehl, J. (1975). John Hawkes and the Craft of Conflict.
Marx, L. (1997). Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes
and the Shapes of Apocalypse. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press.
ODonnell, P. (1982). John Hawkes. New York:
Twayne.
HELLER, JOSEPH
Heller, Joseph
DAVID BUEHRER
Joseph Heller was one of post-World War IIs

most popular and critically acclaimed writers,
whose first and best-known novel, Catch-22
(1961), became a counterculture classic. His career spanned some 40 years and included seven
novels, three dramas, two memoirs, and a posthumously published collection of short fiction.
He is best known for his black humor and scathing satire to critique those bureaucratic forces of
modern society determined to defeat the individual and undermine humanistic values.
Heller was born to Russian Jewish immigrant
parents in Brooklyn, New York on May 1, 1923;
attended public schools; and in 1942 enlisted
in the US Armys 12th Air Force Division. His
experiences as a wing bombardier flying combat
missions over Italy and France greatly affected
Heller and inspired many of the characters he
fictionalizes in Catch-22. After the war, he received a BA and MA in English at New York
and Columbia universities. Following short
stints working in academia and the advertising
industry, Heller began writing full-time after
the commercial success of Catch-22, occasionally
teaching creative writing at various universities.
In 1981, he was stricken with GuillainBarre
syndrome, a debilitating neurological disorder
that left him nearly paralyzed, and chronicles,
with his usual acerbic wit, his recovery in No
Laughing Matter (1986, with Speed Vogel). He
died of a heart attack in New York on December
12, 1999.
In Catch-22, Heller presents his first postmodern antihero, John Yossarian, a bombardier
stationed in Italy during World War II who fights
to survive and withstand a military establishment
hell-bent on precipitating his demise. The main
theme of Hellers first novel (and many subsequent ones) is death and his protagonists
determination to cheat it and revolt against the
irrational conformity of contemporary society.
Through comic dislocations and gallows humor,
parodic manipulations of language, and a labyrinthine plot structure, Heller presents a moral
satire on an increasingly deterministic and systematized state and the individuals often absurd
efforts to confront or escape it. The novel was
615
also forward-looking, as many soldiers during the

Vietnam War identified with Yossarians plight.
Heller exploited his success by publishing three
dramatic versions of the book, finally returning to
fiction with Something Happened (1974). Here, he
employs a first-person narrator, Bob Slocum, a
middle-aged company man, to show the dehumanizing weight of the business world and the
emotional bankruptcy of bourgeois American
experience. Slocums dull, spiritless monotone
suggests a psychological and moral paralysis in
an entropic contemporary America. Missing the
vaudevillian antics of Catch-22, Something Happened warns against the loss of identity or assimilation of the self by the deadening homogenization of a corporate environment.
With 1979s Good as Gold, Heller for the first
time explores Jewish themes and motifs. Its protagonist, Bruce Gold, a disgruntled New York
college professor who harbors political aspirations, tries to come to terms with his Jewish
heritage and family life (a subject common to
the novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth) and
at the same time join a farcical government
bureaucracy in Washington, DC that is exclusively WASPish. The novel shifts from realism to
parody to depict Gold and the ironic, doublebind situations in which he is caught. During the
1980s, Heller published God Knows (1984), which
treats the biblical figure of King David in mockcomic fashion, and Picture This (1988), which
considers the artist Rembrandt and his paintings.
Both novels foreground the unreliability of history and the absurdities of its written record,
with Heller meditating satirically on religion,
aesthetics, money, war, and politics.
In Closing Time (1994), dubbed a sequel to
Catch-22, Heller reprises Yossarian and some
other peripheral characters from that earlier
novel as old men possessing little of the vitriol
or slapstick humor displayed previously. Yossarian and his friends, winding down their days
against the backdrop of a New York City in
decay, evidence a resigned disgust toward their
lives, and Heller expresses anguish for his characters in their battles with modernity and pessimism about their ability to overcome the apocalyptic forces out to destroy them. His second
autobiography, Now and Then: From Coney
Island to Here (1998), examines his coming of
616
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST
age in Brooklyn, and his posthumous last novel,

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000), a selfreflexive metafiction, concerns an aging writer,
Eugene Pota, trying to generate material for a
final book before time and mortality catch up
with him.
Joseph Heller was a major voice in post-1950
American fiction, and Catch-22 alone (which
has been translated into more than a dozen
languages) assures him a place in the canon of
twentieth-century letters. Consistent in many
of his works, however, is the theme of the individual in conflict with monolithic systems
and institutions and ones quest to make sense
out of the chaos and absurdity of contemporary
existence.
SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF);
The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF); Roth, Philip (AF)

Craig, D. (1997). Tilting at Mortality: Narrative
Strategies in Joseph Hellers Fiction. Detroit: Wayne
Heller, J. (1961). Catch-22. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Heller, J. (1968). We Bombed in New Haven. New York:
Knopf.
Heller, J. (1971). Catch-22: A Dramatization. New York:
Samuel French.
Heller, J. (1973). Clevingers Trial. New York:
Samuel French.
Heller, J. (1974). Something Happened. New York:
Knopf.
Heller, J. (1979). Good as Gold. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Heller, J. (1984). God Knows. New York: Knopf.
Heller, J. (with Vogel, S.) (1986). No Laughing Matter.
New York: Putnams.
Heller, J. (1989). Picture This. New York: Putnams.
Heller, J. (1994). Closing Time. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Heller, J. (1998). Now and Then: From Coney Island to
Here. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Heller, J. (2000). Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man.
Heller, J. (2003). Catch as Catch Can: The Collected
Stories and Other Writings (ed. M. J. Bruccoli, &
P. Bucker). New York: Simon and Schuster.
Merrill, R. (1987). Joseph Heller. Boston: Twayne.
Nagel, J. (ed.) (1984). Critical Essays on Joseph Heller.

Boston: G. K. Hall.
Pinkster, S. (1991). Understanding Joseph Heller.
Potts, S. W. (1982). From Here to Absurdity: The Moral
Battlefields of Joseph Heller. San Bernardino, CA:
Borgo.
Seed, D. (1989). The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against
the Grain. New York: St. Martins.
Sorkin, A.J. (ed.) (1993). Conversations with Joseph
Heller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hemingway, Ernest
THOMAS STRYCHACZ
No writer of the twentieth century can match

Ernest Hemingways charisma. War hero, war
reporter, big-game hunter, bullfighting aficionado, celebrity expatriate, bestselling author, winner
of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for
30 years, Papa Hemingway found ways to place
a series of iconic roles and images before the
American public. But few writers can match
Hemingways impressive range of literary accomplishments either. The Nobel Prize committee,
in its remarks, celebrated him for the influence
that he has exerted on contemporary style. The
committee was correct. He was a key figure in
the development of American literary modernism, creator of a terse, minimalist style virtually
synonymous with his name. He fathered a
distinctively American school of hard-boiled
fiction, whose practitioners, from Dashiell Hammett to Elmore Leonard, feature tough prose
and tight-lipped men. Perhaps most remarkably,
half a century after his death Hemingways posthumously published writing has provoked new
appraisals of what had long seemed the obvious
interpretation of his work: that it was mostly
engaged with men and their tough, lonely pursuit
of manhood.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21,
1899 and committed suicide on July 2, 1961 after
a long period of depression. Growing up in Oak
Park, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago,
Hemingway came to deride his mothers conformity and religious narrowness and ultimately
though he inherited his fathers love of hunting
and fishing to scorn his father for bowing to
his mothers authority. After a short stint as a
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST
reporter for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway,

eager to see action in World War I, undertook to
drive ambulances on the Italian front. There,
in July 1918, he was seriously injured by an
exploding shell.
That wounding, according to many scholars,
was the seminal event of his life. Physically
wounded and mentally traumatized male characters haunt his fiction, from Jake Barnes in The
Sun Also Rises (1926), suffering from some serious
though unspecified wound to his genitals, to a
shell-shocked Nick Adams in A Way Youll
Never Be, to a plethora of gored bullfighters.
For Hemingway, it seems, the existential condition of men in the early twentieth century is to be
wounded. Scholars generally agree on two corollaries. First, those male characters who rise bravely
to the challenge of that wounding by exhibiting
what Hemingway called grace under pressure
define true manhood. Second, displaying grace
under pressure typically means observing a rigorous code of conduct, which allows one to impose
a ritualistic control over chaos and pain, and
which stands in lieu of a fading belief in a divinely
ordained cosmos. Pedro Romero in The Sun Also
Rises might be said to exemplify that code when he
performs magisterially in the ring, bringing under
the control of his perfect maneuvers the bull and
his own pain (for he has been beaten). Philip
Young (1952) importantly extended the idea of
the code to Hemingways early writing style,
arguing that its famous economy dramatized in
linguistic terms the control men sought to exercise over themselves.
But the first two great works of Hemingways
career, In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises,
cannot be explained only in terms of his wounding. By 1922 Hemingway was living and working
in Paris, a hotbed of literary and artistic modernist
practices. There he was inspired by novelist F.
Scott Fitzgerald and the modernist poet Ezra
Pound, whose call to express emotion and meaning in poetry by way of compressed, concrete
images found a counterpart in Hemingways famous description of his style, set forth in Death in
the Afternoon, to put down what really happened
in action. There he met James Joyce and admired
his paradigmatic modernist novel, Ulysses (1922);
and there he met the avant-garde writer Gertrude
Stein, whose linguistic experiments were a
particular influence on Hemingways early style.
617
Through her he was introduced to the work

of post-impressionist painters such as Matisse,
Picasso, and Cezanne, whose techniques of fragmentation and juxtaposition resonate throughout
In Our Time a work about which Hemingway
claimed that he was trying to do the country like
Cezanne. The posthumous A Moveable Feast
(1964) gives a moving, often scurrilous, sometimes hilarious, but always fascinating account of
those Paris years.
Both In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises
portray a postwar world of angst, anomie, disillusion, casual violence, and ruptured relationships amid a pervading sense that all traditional
structures of value spiritual, social, and ethical
are being swept away or shifting in unpredictable
ways. In Our Time, a collection of short stories
thematically related to even shorter interspersed
vignettes, concerns conflict in a variety of ways:
cultural and racial tensions between European
Americans and Native Americans in the early
stories, for example, are interwoven with
laconically delineated flashes of horror from
World War I battlefields. Another source of
conflict emerges in stories such as The End
of Something, Cat in the Rain, and Out of
Season, which anatomize gender relations between men and women in terms of power plays.
The postwar stories in particular depict (to employ a term Hemingway popularized when he
used it as the epigraph to Sun) a lost generation
of men and women who wander, irresolute
and broken, searching for spiritual or emotional
sustenance. In fragile response, a few moments of
courage and harmony stand out: Villalta, in
chapter 10, comports himself valiantly and well
in his duel with the bull; and in Big Two-Hearted
River, the famous final story of the collection,
Nick Adams undertakes a pilgrimage from trauma (the story begins in a burned-over land) to
potential healing and redemption as he slowly
immerses himself in the restorative powers of
nature. Here (as in Jake Barness trip to the Irati
River in Sun), a sense of mythic patterning asserts
itself: the story elaborates a heros journey with
the goal of setting himself and elemental forces
in equilibrium.
Like other famous modernist works such as
T. S. Eliots The Waste Land (1922) and Virginia
Woolfs To the Lighthouse (1927), In Our Time
develops aesthetically in concert with a wide-
618
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST
spread sense in the early twentieth century that

traditional frameworks of Western society were
fast eroding. In Our Time reads a little like a
truncated novel a novel in search of its traditional coherence, perhaps insofar as many of the
stories follow in roughly chronological order the
early years of Nick Adams (a character to whom
Hemingway returns in subsequent short stories,
notably The Killers). Stylistically, the predominant tone of cool restraint sometimes veers toward febrile repetition, as in Soldiers Home
and Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, but always implies the
imminence of disruption. In stories such as On
the Quai at Smyrna (first published in the 1930
edition) and Out of Season, and in many of the
vignettes, laconic understatement barely holds
together scenes of terror and frightening
disorientation.
In The Sun Also Rises, as in In Our Time,
Hemingway situates his characters in a terrain of
conflict. Jakes war wound takes its toll on the
intense and (because it cannot be consummated)
intensely frustrating relationship between him
and Brett Ashley. That frustration spills over into
Jakes jealous rivalry with Robert Cohn and makes
its way via a series of displacements and compensations not only into bouts of heavy drinking but
also into Jakes admiration for Pedro Romero, the
up-and-coming bullfighter whose prowess in the
ring, self-control, and respect for bullfighting
traditions, and perhaps his ability to bed Brett
Ashley, stand for all that Jake feels he has lost. Jake,
like all of the centerless wanderers in this expatriate wasteland, has a fragile purchase on any source
of hope. Isnt it pretty to think so?, the famous
final words of the novel as Jake replies to Bretts
fantasy of what might have been between them,
strikes a mordant, and common, tone of disillusioned irony.
Loss is also the keynote of A Farewell to Arms
(1929), the novel that made Hemingway wealthy
and famous. Based on Hemingways actual love
affair with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky during
his convalescence from his war injury, the novel
intertwines two sorts of farewells: Frederic
Henrys desertion from the Italian army after the
disastrous retreat at Caporetto, and his loss of the
arms of his beloved Catherine Barkley after her
death in childbirth the event that concludes
the novel and that governs the elegiac tone
of Henrys retrospective narration. Catherine
Barkley has often focused discontent with

Hemingways female characters. Judith Fetterley
(1978), for example, criticizes the pliancy of a
character who seems to give herself over entirely
to Henry, and who is in a sense punished for being
female by dying in childbirth. From this perspective, Hemingways works are not merely about
men and mens experience but also insidiously
misogynist they register an animus against
women that also appears, for example, in the
representation of Brett Ashley as a femme fatale.
Other scholars, however, have argued that Hemingways female characters are more complex than
these accusations make them appear (Kert 1999;
Broer & Holland 2002).
Many scholars consider that Hemingways
work from the early 1930s on suffers an aesthetic
decline, relieved by For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), as the
cumulative effect of his alcoholism and his devotion to his Papa Hemingway persona began to
take its toll on his writing. Intellectuals of the
1930s, predisposed in the wake of the Great
Depression to favor works written from a socially
committed perspective, were certainly contemptuous of Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingways account of his safari in Africa, starring
himself, and of Death in the Afternoon (1932), his
long, arcane, treatise on bullfighting in Spain
and were only marginally swayed by the fragmentary To Have and Have Not (1937), with its final
lament for the perils of being a man cut off
from community. From a more charitable perspective, one can see Hemingway developing in
new ways the ideas that had already occupied
him for a decade. Death shifts Hemingways style
from the laconic to the labyrinthine. The book
is a self-reflexive meditation on style: the art of
bullfighting doubles for the art of writing. And
both, arguably, represent the art of styling
oneself as a man, as if manhood were a performance to be maintained rather than an essence
to be acquired. Hemingways self-promotion in
Green Hills might then be read as a reflection on
the stratagems men devise to construct a sense
of manhood.
This period also witnessed the publication of
three more collections of short stories a form
that many scholars believe to have encouraged his
best work. Men Without Women (1927) was followed by Winner Take Nothing (1933), and a few
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST
years later The Fifth Column and the First FortyNine Stories (1938) included all his short stories
from previous collections plus two of his most
famous: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. These
latter two stories feature some of Hemingways
lifelong concerns. Snows, one of several Hemingway stories portraying artists and writers
David Bourne in The Garden of Eden (1986),
and Thomas Hudson in Islands in the Stream
(1970) are two others recounts the thoughts of
a dying writer lamenting the fact that he has sold
out his talent. Short Happy Life, a tense, provocative look at gender politics, charts Francis
Macombers rise from cowardice to brief selfconfident manhood, whereupon he is killed by
a bullet from the gun of his wife Margot. Yet the
easy assumption, which many readers have made,
that the story sets up a battle of the sexes terminated by Margot when her husband appears ready
to assert his newfound authority, is hardly sustained by the story, which leaves open the question of Margots guilt.
Hemingways sensitivity toward gender issues
has been the focus of much attention in the last
20 years, particularly after the publication of The
Garden of Eden, a truncated version of a sprawling
manuscript Hemingway had worked on for years,
whose reprise of a lost generation landscape of
psychically disintegrating wanderers features a
remarkable interest in switching gender and sexual roles. One consequence has been to send
scholars back to the work Hemingway published
in his lifetime to attack the supposition that he
was mostly concerned with men attaining manhood, and show instead that Hemingway was
compelled by gender trouble (Kennedy 1991)
and fascinated by the transformative possibilities
of gender roles, polymorphous sexual experiences, lesbianism, and homosexuality (Comley
& Scholes 1994), or by the self-dramatizations
men undertake (Strychacz 2003). Others have
explored his career in terms of a fluctuating
relationship between masculine and feminine
elements of his psyche (Spilka 1990) or investigated the importance of fetishes, such as his
fascination with cutting and coloring hair, to his
constructions of identity (Eby 1998).
These ideas occur even in what appears the
unlikely venue of Hemingways epic novel of the
Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls,
619
which places Robert Jordan as an American sent

to aid a Loyalist (Republican) guerilla group in
their effort to blow up a strategic bridge. The
novel gives Hemingway his most thorough opportunity to explore the psyches of men at war at
a pivotal historical moment the imminent
victory of the fascists in Spain foreshadowing the
rise of fascism elsewhere in Europe. But it also
allows him to create one of his more complex and
evocative female characters in the figure of Pilar,
who supplants her husbands leadership of the
guerillas and plays a tough counterpoint to
Maria, whose rape before the novel opens represents in human terms what is at stake in this
conflict, and whose experience of love with Jordan offers partial redemption. Hemingways
account of the war itself turns out to be surprisingly complex. The blowing-up of the bridge
appears to be strategically unimportant. And, in
one of the more memorable set-piece sequences
of the novel, Pilars description of the grisly
retribution meted out to fascists in a hilltop
village at the hands of Republicans led here by
her husband provides an unsettling glimpse
into the horrors of total war. Even the ending, in
which Jordan prepares to hold off the pursuing
fascist forces long enough to allow the guerrilla
band (including Maria) to escape, has an ironic
resonance: Jordans act of lonely heroism does
underscore the value of self-sacrifice. But it is a
choice determined in the first place by the fact
that he has incurred an injury serious enough to
prevent his escape.
Over a decade later, many critics greeted the
novella The Old Man and the Sea as a sign of
Hemingways literary resurrection, and it was in
large measure responsible for his winning the
Nobel Prize in 1954. Certainly this tale of a
Cuban fisherman in his battle to capture the
biggest marlin he or anyone else has ever heard
of seems in many ways a miniature gloss on ideas
long held to be the quintessence of Hemingways
aesthetic and philosophy. The tale pits Santiago,
a man off alone, against gigantic natural forces
the sea, the marlin, sharks that he seeks to
overcome by strength and enduring courage. He
is guided by a simple code of ethics that has him
respecting the great adversary he must kill. His
failure his failure, that is, to return the marlin
intact after sharks attack accentuates the grandeur
of his accomplishment. Since the marlin no longer
620
HERBST, JOSEPHINE
possesses economic worth, its value has to be reckoned instead in mythic terms: as an epic battle
between human and nature, between a mans frail
body and his indomitable will, in which Santiago,
that most humble of fishermen, takes his place
among David, Hercules, Beowulf, Captain Ahab,
and many more in an ancient tradition of giantslayers.
In some respects, this trim novella plays an odd
role in Hemingways career. Its laconic understatement and winner-take-nothing attitude
return us to his early work, but the mythic resonances of the story make Santiago a more
complete and confident hero than traumatized
characters such as Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, and
Frederic Henry. Yet the flood of posthumous
work in the next 40 years Islands, Garden, and
True at First Light (1999), among others showed
that Hemingways attention never shifted from
representing a cultural landscape not only of
traumatic disorientation, but also of the myriad
new possibilities for human expression it
liberated.
SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); Fitzgerald, F.
Scott (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Joyce,
James (BIF); Modernist Fiction (AF); The Novel
and War (AF); Stein, Gertrude (AF)

Baker, C. (1952). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist.
Broer, L., & Holland, G. (2002). Hemingway and
Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Comley, J., & Scholes, R. (1994). Hemingways Genders:
Rereading the Hemingway Text. New Haven:
Eby, C. (1999). Hemingways Fetishism: Psychoanalysis
and the Mirror of Manhood. Albany: SUNY Press.
Fetterley, J. (1978). The Resisting Reader: A Feminist
Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington:
Hemingway, E. (1925). In Our Time. New York:
Boni and Liveright.
Hemingway, E. (1926). The Sun Also Rises. New York:
Scribners.
Hemingway, E. (1927). Men Without Women.
Hemingway, E. (1929). A Farewell to Arms. New York:

Scribners.
Hemingway, E. (1932). Death in the Afternoon.
Hemingway, E. (1933). Winner Take Nothing.
Hemingway, E. (1935). Green Hills of Africa. New York:
Scribners.
Hemingway, E. (1937). To Have and Have Not.
Hemingway, E. (1938). The Fifth Column
and the First Forty-Nine Stories. New York:
Scribners.
Hemingway, E. (1940). For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Hemingway, E. (1952). The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway, E. (1964). A Moveable Feast. New York:
Scribners.
Hemingway, E. (1986). The Garden of Eden. New York:
Scribners.
Hemingway, E. (1999). True at First Light. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Kennedy, J. G. (1991). Hemingways Gender Trouble.
American Literature, 63(2), 187207.
Kert, B. (1999). The Hemingway Women. New York:
Norton.
Raeburn, J. (1984). Fame Became of Him: Hemingway
as Public Writer. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Rovit, E., & Brenner, G. (1986). Ernest Hemingway.
Boston: Twayne.
Spilka, M. (1990). Hemingways Quarrel with
Androgyny. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Strychacz, T. (2003). Hemingways Theaters of
Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press.
Young, P. (1952). Ernest Hemingway: A
Reconsideration. New York: Rinehart.
Herbst, Josephine
JULIA EHRHARDT
Josephine Herbst (18921969) was a novelist,

journalist, and memoirist best known for the
radical fiction she composed during the 1930s.
Her literary reputation declined in subsequent
decades, but the resurgence of academic interest
in the literature of the American Left along with
the rise of feminist literary criticism have revitalized interest in her work.
Herbst resisted categorization as a proletarian
novelist the default classification assigned to
HERBST, JOSEPHINE
writers in her circle because she found the term

too limiting as a description of her fiction. As
opposed to most male radical novelists who focused exclusively on how capitalism exploited
working-class men, Herbsts writings emphasized
how sexist social ideologies together with the
injustices of capitalism oppressed women and
adversely affected relationships between the sexes.
Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Herbst aspired to be
a writer from girlhood, but her familys precarious financial circumstances delayed her efforts
to embark on a literary career. She attended
Morningside College, the University of Iowa, and
the University of Washington before graduating
from the University of California, Berkeley in
1918. In 1919, she moved to New York City,
where she joined a thriving group of literary
radicals including Genevieve Taggard, Mike Gold,
and Floyd Dell. She published several stories
under the pseudonym Carlotta Greet, but her
career was curtailed after she embarked on an
affair with the married playwright Maxwell
Anderson and became pregnant. She had an
abortion at Andersons insistence and then
plunged into a deep depression; her grief was
compounded when her sister Helen died from
an illegal abortion. Unable to write in America,
Herbst traveled to Europe in 1922, and during a
three-year sojourn memorialized her sisters
death in her unpublished first novel, Following
the Circle. This manuscript reflects Herbsts
practice of basing her fiction on tragic events that
had befallen her family, using their personal
experiences to illumine larger social problems.
While in Paris in 1924, Herbst met the writer
John Herrmann. The couple returned to America
in 1925 and married in 1926. In 1929, Herbst
published two novels: Nothing Is Sacred and
Money for Love. In 1930, while in Russia attending
a conference on radical literature, Herbst experienced an artistic epiphany that would inspire her
most acclaimed literary undertaking: a trilogy of
novels that documented the misfortunes of a
fictional American family doomed by the vagaries
of capitalism. Recognizing that her own familys
history served as a microcosm of the Marxist
theory of class, Herbsts Pity Is Not Enough
(1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope
of Gold (1939) depict the multigenerational struggles of the fictional TrexlerWendel clan to enter
the middle class. Though the family valiantly
621
attempts to get ahead through both legitimate

labor and illegal schemes, the historical cataclysms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries thwart them. The older generations
blame themselves for their failure to achieve
prosperity, but the two youngest daughters,
Victoria and Rosamond Wendel, slowly come to
realize that the familys welfare depends largely on
forces beyond individual control. Both sisters
become radicalized, and after the pregnant Rosamond dies in a car accident, Herbsts fictional
alter ego Victoria becomes a freelance journalist
determined to publicize the struggles of people
fighting for a better world.
Herbst based her trilogy on her maternal family
history, frequently quoting from her ancestors
letters and diaries. Like John Dos Passoss U.S.A.
trilogy, Herbsts novels incorporate newspaper
articles and third-person commentary on contemporary wars, strikes, and grassroots political
movements. In addition to narrating the events
in the chapters from a variety of perspectives,
Herbst (like John Steinbeck in The Grapes of
Wrath [1939]) uses interchapters to provide a
panoramic backdrop for her characters, demonstrating how the struggles of Midwestern farmers,
Cuban sugarcane workers, and Detroit labor
organizers were all interrelated. An equally important symbolic element in the trilogy is the large
number of female characters who get sick, die
young, or are left to do domestic work while their
male partners join social movements; Victoria
herself endures stillbirth and divorce as she pursues her writing career. By emphasizing the unrealized potential of her female characters, Hurst
critiques the sexism that precluded womens full
participation in revolutionary politics.
In addition to her trilogy, in the 1930s Herbst
reported on a variety of topics including farm
strikes in the United States, the Cuban general
strike, the Spanish Civil War, and German resistance to the Nazi regime. She was divorced from
Herrmann in 1935.
In the 1940s, Herbst wrote two novels, Satans
Sergeants (1941) and Somewhere the Tempest Fell
(1947), but neither received the attention her
trilogy had garnered. In 1954 she composed
Hunter of Doves, a novella about American
novelist Nathanael West, as well as New Green
World, a biography of American naturalists
William and John Bartram. In the 1960s, Herbst
622
HIGHSMITH, PATRICIA
wrote her memoirs. Published posthumously in

1991, they are regarded as some of the finest
assessments of the 1930s literary Left. Herbst died
of cancer in 1969.
SEE ALSO: Dos Passos, John (AF); Politics and
the Novel (BIF); Steinbeck, John (AF); West,
Nathanael (AF)
Bevilacqua, W.F. (1985). Josephine Herbst. Boston:
Twayne.
Browder, L. (1998). Rousing the Nation. Amherst:
Ehrhardt, J. (2004). Writers of Conviction. Columbia:
Hapke, L. (1995). Daughters of the Great Depression.
Herbst, J. (1929a). Money for Love. New York:
Coward-McCann.
Herbst, J. (1929b). Nothing Is Sacred. New York:
Coward-McCann.
Herbst, J. (1933). Pity Is Not Enough. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Herbst, J. (1934). The Executioner Waits. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Herbst, J. (1939). Rope of Gold. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Herbst, J. (1941). Satans Sergeants. New York:
Scribners.
Herbst, J. (1947). Somewhere the Tempest Fell.
Herbst, J. (1954a). Hunter of Doves. Botteghe Oscure,
3, 31044.
Herbst, J. (1954b). New Green World. New York:
Hastings House.
Herbst, J. (1991). The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and
Other Memoirs. New York: Harper.
Langer, E. (1994). Josephine Herbst. Boston:
Rabinowitz, P. (1991). Labor and Desire. Chapel
Shulman, R. (2000). The Power of Political
Art. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Highsmith, Patricia
JUSTUS NIELAND
A poet of disquiet and obsessive desire, Patricia

Highsmith (192195) specialized in psychological
thrillers staged in an amoral, irrational, Cold War

universe. Her best-known literary creation is Tom
Ripley, the cheery, charismatic psychopath and
consummate performance artist who debuted in
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), the first in a series
of five Ripley novels (the Ripleiad) that spanned
Highsmiths career. Highsmiths literary output
was prodigious: 22 novels, seven short story collections, and a meditation on her generic breadand-butter, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
(1966). Her first published novel, Strangers on a
Train (1950), was quickly adapted in Alfred
Hitchcocks famous 1952 film, and Highsmiths
cold and fascinating fictional world has spawned
a host of cinematic adaptations by prestigious
European auteurs like Claude Chabrol, Rene
Clement, and Wim Wenders. Recently, Highsmith has been rediscovered not just as a quintessential noir novelist but also as a shrewd analyst
of perverse desire and its Cold War production,
and an unsparing explorer of the fluidity of
modern identity at mid-century.
Born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth,
Texas, Highsmith took the name of her stepfather,
Stanley Highsmith, who, like her mother, Mary
Coates, was a commercial artist. Raised largely
by her grandmother, Highsmith moved often
between Texas and New York City during her
childhood, eventually enrolling in Barnard College
in 1938. At Barnard, Highsmith studied English
literature, Greek, and Latin; published short fiction in the Barnard Quarterly; discovered her
lesbianism; and became increasingly convinced
of the centrality of abnormal or deviant
psychology to the modern condition. Graduating
in 1942, Highsmith made her living for the next
six years grinding out copy for comic books. She
sold her first story, Heroine, to Harpers Bazaar
in 1945, and three years later, with the help of her
friend Truman Capote, she was accepted into the
artists colony Yaddo, where she wrote Strangers
on a Train.
Highsmiths first three, pre-Ripley novels are
among her best. Strangers inaugurates Highsmiths preoccupation with the power of an
obsessive, destructive bond between two people
ostensibly dissimilar, but actually strange doubles
in their darker psychic recesses. Successful architect Guy Haines finds himself sharing a train
car with Charles Anthony Bruno, a spoiled
young psychopath. From this utterly contingent
HIGHSMITH, PATRICIA
encounter, Guy finds himself embroiled in

Brunos plan to exchange murders, a plan that
binds him fatally to Bruno, who at once disgusts
him and stands for his cast-off self, what he
thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved
(1950, 180). Highsmiths landmark lesbian
novel, The Price of Salt (1952), published under
the pseudonym Claire Morgan, concerns the
romance between Therese Belivet, an aspiring
stage designer, and the lovely, unhappily married
suburban housewife Carol Aird. A trenchant
parable of homosexual repression and paranoia
in McCarthyite America, The Price of Salt refuses
to punish homosexual desire, and offers, in its
final reunion of Therese and Carol, an affirmative
love story, unusual both for the period and within
Highsmiths own career. With The Blunderer
(1954), Highsmith returns to her interest in the
deathly reality of fantasy. Unhappily married
Walter Stackhouse finds his darkest dreams realized when his neurotic wife Clara kills herself, but
in a fashion reminiscent of the death of Helen
Kimmel, recently murdered by her own husband,
Melchior. Eventually, Walters perverse curiosity
about Melchiors violence, a displaced version of
his own deadly capacity, leads the police investigators back to Melchior, who eventually kills
his blundering double, Walter.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) is Highsmiths
greatest meditation on the lure of fantasy, and its
power to fashion realities and selves better aligned
with the powerful vagaries of human desire. The
novel concerns Tom Ripley, a loner, orphan, and
petty New York criminal who, in Highsmiths
explicit homage to Henry Jamess The Ambassadors, is sent by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to Mongibello, Italy to bring home his wastrel
son Dickie, who spends his days soaking up the
Mediterranean sun and dabbling in bad surrealist
paintings. Tom befriends Dickie, and becomes
attracted not so much to Dickie himself as to the
idea of being Dickie. Perversely, Tom realizes this
sympathetic identification by killing Dickie and
then assuming his personal effects and his general
bearing of privilege and confidence. The personal
is only an effect in Highsmith, and Tom proves a
better Dickie than the original. Tom, then, is the
books real artist, and his medium is the malleable
substance of human personality itself.
The next two novels in the series, Ripley Under
Ground (1970) and Ripleys Game (1974), expand
623
the first novels meditations on authenticity and

morality by embroiling Tom now a gourmand
and art collector ensconced in a lovely villa outside of Paris in a series of scams involving forged
paintings by a dead modern master named Derwatt. The series final two entries, The Boy Who
Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water
(1991), are the weaker of the lot: the former makes
the homosexual subtext of much of the earlier
novels explicit in the new role of lover and protector that Tom plays for a guilt-ridden 16-yearold boy; and in the latter, Tom is tormented
by David Pritchard, who threatens to dredge
up Dickie Greenleafs murder. Pritchard thus
embodies everything that uncannily haunts
Toms future-oriented, improvisational path
the weight of the past, the stubborn materiality
of the body, and the vulgarity of the real.
Highsmiths achievement extends beyond her
early work and the Ripley novels. Also fine are
This Sweet Sickness (1960), the story of an engineer who, dumped by his girlfriend, re-creates
an alternate domestic life with her in fantasy,
supplemented by the prop of an actual suburban
home; Those Who Walk Away (1967), a crime
novel whose only murders are imaginary; and
The Tremor of Forgery (1969), an investigation
of cultural and moral relativism set in Tunis
during the ArabIsraeli Six Day War of 1967,
and focused through the dawning anxiety of an
American writer who kills an Arab with his
typewriter.
In Europe, where Highsmith lived most of her
adult life, the author was lionized early on as
an American existentialist, one whose picture of
the modern psyche and detached, ironic style
were indebted to the writers she most admired
Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Camus,
and Gide. While her critical reputation is soaring today in the US, and secured by handsome
Library of America and Norton editions, during
her lifetime Highsmiths fiction never sold well
in the United States. Her work received mixed
critical reviews and, especially in the 1950s and
1960s, was critiqued for its remorseless, unsentimental view of humanity. This optic is especially
evident in her superb late short fiction collection The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murder
(1975a), which assumes the point of view of
animals an elephant, a truffle-hunting pig, and
a Venetian rat who revolt against an abusive
624
HIMES, CHESTER
and exploitative human world. For her part,

Highsmith had little truck with demands that her
fictions be more human or more just: I find the
public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares if justice is
ever done or not (Wilson 223).
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Noir
Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)

Cassuto, L. (2008). Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The
Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York:
Harrison, R. (1997). Patricia Highsmith. New York:
Twayne.
Highsmith, P. (1950). Strangers on a Train. New York:
Harper.
Highsmith, P. (as Morgan, C.) (1952). The Price of Salt.
Tallahassee, FL: Naiad.
Highsmith, P. (1954). The Blunderer. New York:
Coward-McCann.
Highsmith, P. (1955). The Talented Mr. Ripley.
New York: Coward-McCann.
Highsmith, P. (1960). This Sweet Sickness. New York:
Harper and Brothers.
Highsmith, P. (1966). Plotting and Writing Suspense
Fiction. Boston: The Writer Inc.
Highsmith, P. (1967). Those Who Walk Away. London:
Heinemann.
Highsmith, P. (1969). The Tremor of Forgery. London:
Heinemann.
Highsmith, P. (1970). Ripley Under Ground. New York:
Doubleday.
Highsmith, P. (1974). Ripleys Game. New York: Knopf.
Highsmith, P. (1975a). The Animal-Lovers Book of
Beastly Murder. London: Heinemann.
Highsmith, P. (1975b). Little Tales of Misogyny. Zurich:
Diogenes Verlag.
Highsmith, P. (1980). The Boy Who Followed Ripley.
London: Heinemann.
Highsmith, P. (1991). Ripley Under Water. New York:
Knopf.
Schenkar, J. (2009). The Talented Mrs. Highsmith: The
Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith.
Seltzer, M. (2007). True Crime: Observations on Violence
and Modernity. London: Routledge.
Wilson, A. (2003). Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia
Highsmith. New York: Bloomsbury.
Zizek, S. (2003). Not a Desire to Have Him, but to Be
Like Him. London Review of Books (Aug. 21).
Himes, Chester
CHRISTOPHER T. RACZKOWSKI
Chester Bomar Himess extraordinary life and

writing resist categorization. Born in Jefferson
City, Missouri in 1909 to a black bourgeois family
one generation removed from slavery, Himes
attended the Ohio State University in 1926 with
the intention of studying medicine. Instead, he
received his first education in institutionalized
racism from the universitys Jim Crow student
facilities and was expelled two semesters later.
Within a year, Himes had reinvented himself as
a minor figure in Clevelands black underworld
and was arrested for armed robbery in 1928. As
prisoner 59623 at the Ohio State Penitentiary,
Himes began his unlikely literary career.
His first stories, mainly about crime and prison
life, appeared in 1931 in the black periodical
Abbots Monthly. By 1934, he began landing pieces
in the more lucrative Esquire. In To What Red
Hell and Crazy in the Stir (both 1934) later
revised as episodes in his prison novel Yesterday
Will Make You Cry (1998 [1952]) Himess
commitment to an aesthetics of absurdity
emerges. His acute visual attention to the grotesque and his thematic interest in the violence
and irrationality of modern America would become central features of his subsequent writing.
Following his release in 1936, Himes cast about
for employment, worked for the Federal Writers
Project, got involved with industrial unionism,
and published fiction and editorials in Crisis,
Opportunity, and Old Left literary magazines like
Crossroads. Living and writing at the intersections
of the Harlem Renaissance and the Popular
Front Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and
Carl Van Vechten were critical early influences
and supporters Himes became increasingly
concerned with radical social and political
change. Himess first novel, If He Hollers Let Him
Go (1945), weaves together the violent racial and
sexual fantasies of his protagonists dream life
with realist accounts of his work as a black leaderman in the racially polarized shipyards of wartime
Los Angeles. Here and in Lonely Crusade (1947),
Himes revised the proletarian novel by joining
documentary elements of social realism with
modernist narrative experiments in perspective
and the representation of extreme psychological
HIMES, CHESTER
states. Together, the novels provide important

critiques of Popular Front racial politics and
contribute to a largely untold cultural history
of Californias integrated war industries.
Despairing of American political and literary
culture in the 1950s, Himes permanently departed
for Europe and joined Richard Wright and a
growing community of expatriate black artists
and intellectuals in Paris. With no means of
supporting himself, Himes welcomed French surrealist Marcel Duhamels suggestion that he contribute a hard-boiled detective novel for his Serie
Noire label. The first novel, For Love of Imabelle
(1958), won Himes the Grand Prix de Litterateur
Policiere and made him an instant celebrity in
France Himes would eventually complete nine
novels for Duhamel, collectively known as the
Harlem Domestic Cycle. In the early installments
of the cycle The Crazy Kill (1959a), The Big Gold
Dream (1960b), and All Shot Up (1960a)
Himess pair of black, antiheroic police detectives,
Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, stride through
Harlem like capricious gods, outsized Harlem folk
heroes who sow havoc and reap awe and ambiguous justice from white and black populations
alike. As Rudolph Fisher did before him, Himes
rewired a genre implicated in the racist policing of
black bodies by disrupting its overly rationalist
vision, and insisting upon its blindness; forensic
evidence yields no solutions here to crimes that
spread out across a social order. In the final
installments of the cycle, the growing structural
and thematic marginalization of his detectives
reflects the intensification of race conflict in
1960s America. In Blind Man With a Pistol
(1969), which ends elliptically with Harlems
violent uprising against the citys white police
and demolition crews, Coffin Ed and Digger are
often absent from the narrative. When present,
they appear as anachronistic ghosts to a Harlem
mobilized by Black Power and Civil Rights movements. Their former structural centrality as folk
heroes to Himess Harlem is replaced by multiple,
splintered points of view and textual fragments
that seem to elicit black Harlem as the collective
subject and object of its own potentially apocalyptic story in the making.
With his health declining in the 1970s, Himes
completed his second volume of autobiography,
My Life of Absurdity (1976), but little else. Himes
ranked the Harlem Cycle as his most important
625
literary achievement and critics have tended to

agree, viewing them as major landmarks in black
crime fiction. Largely neglected in America during his lifetime, Himes has gained much attention since his death in 1984. His strange, profoundly violent, genre-imploding novels have
animated a generation of scholars trained in
poststructuralist and neo-Marxist cultural theory. Meanwhile, his aesthetic influence remains
palpable everywhere from Ishmael Reed and
Clarence Major to Walter Mosley and Quentin
Tarantino.
Noir Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular
Front Fiction (AF)

Breu, C. (2005). Hardboiled Masculinities.
Eburne, J. P. (2005). The Transatlantic Mysteries of
Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism and the Serie Noire.
PMLA, 120(3), 80621.
Himes, C. (1934a). Crazy in the Stir. Esquire (Aug.).
Himes, C. (1934b). To What Red Hell. Esquire (Oct.).
Himes, C. (1945). If He Hollers Let Him Go. New York:
Doubleday.
Himes, C. (1947). Lonely Crusade. New York: Knopf.
Himes, C. (1956). The Primitive. New York: New
American Library.
Himes, C. (1957). For Love of Imabelle. Greenwich, CT:
Fawcett.
Himes, C. (1959a). The Crazy Kill. New York: Avon.
Himes, C. (1959b). The Real Cool Killers. New York:
Avon.
Himes, C. (1960a). All Shot Up. New York: Avon.
Himes, C. (1960b). The Big Gold Dream. New York:
Avon.
Himes, C. (1965). Cotton Comes to Harlem. New York:
Putnams.
Himes, C. (1966). The Heats On. New York: Putnams.
Himes, C. (1970). Blind Man With a Pistol.
New York: Dell.
Himes, C. (1972). The Quality of Hurt. New York:
Doubleday.
Himes, C. (1976). My Life of Absurdity. New York:
Doubleday.
Himes, C. (1998). Yesterday Will Make You Cry
[originally published as Cast the First Stone, 1952].
New York: Norton.
626
HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION
Margolies, E., & Fabre, M. (1997). The Several Lives

of Chester Himes. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Nieland, J. (2000). Enough to Make a Body Riot:
Pansies and Protestors in Himess Harlem.
Arizona Quarterly, 56(1), 105133.
Soitos, S. (1996). The Blues Detective. Amherst:
Historiographic
Metafiction
MICHAEL BUTTER
The term historiographic metafiction was

coined by Linda Hutcheon in her essay
Beginning to Theorize the Postmodern in
1987 and then further developed in her seminal
study A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) to describe those well-known and popular novels
which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet
paradoxically also lay claim to historical events
and personages. According to Hutcheon, novels
such as E. L. Doctorows Ragtime (1975) or
William Kennedys Legs (1975) display a theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as
human constructs (historiographic metafiction)
[that] is made the grounds for [a] rethinking and
reworking of the forms and contents of the past
(1988 5). Historiographic metafiction thus constitutes a specific form of metafiction, which
Patricia Waugh, in an equally influential study,
has defined as fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its
status as an artifact in order to pose questions
about the relationship between fiction and reality (1984 2). However, historiographic metafiction adds a further dimension to such reflections:
texts that can be subsumed under the heading not
only explore the workings of literature and lay
bare its ontological status as fiction. They additionally engage and unveil the parallels between
writing literature and historiography the practice of writing history suggesting that both are
acts of construction that do not reflect or naively
represent reality or the past, but (re)invent and
shape them from necessarily subjective and ideologically laden perspectives.
In order to project this notion, historiographic
metafiction makes use of a broad variety of the-
matic and formal means. Plots usually revolve

around characters openly concerned with making
sense of the past, figures such as historians, detectives, or archivists who study documents, data,
and testimonies to arrive at an understanding of
what has happened. As a consequence, the action
of most historiographic metafictions takes place
on two different levels; the texts are almost always
characterized by a dual time frame. They are set in
a fictional present where one or more characters
often first-person narrators who address specific
narratees undertake explorations of the past
and frequently reflect on their activities and the
epistemological problems they face. Simultaneously, however, the novels are set in a fictional
past where the events took place that these (amateur or professional) historians are interested in.
Sometimes the version of the past presented in
the novel is quite obviously a (re)construction by
one or several of the investigators in the fictional
present, sometimes novels incorporate various
conflicting versions about what has happened
that stem from one or more of these investigator
figures, and sometimes the story of the investigator
figure simply exists alongside the historical narrative with both being related by a more or less
covert narrator. Invariably, however, such a juxtaposition of past and present problematizes
the very possibility of historical knowledge
(Hutcheon 1988, 106). Accordingly, historiographic metafiction implies that the past remains ultimately inaccessible, that historical
narration is necessarily an act of the imagination,
and that historiography, therefore, is not a neutral
account of what happened but rather a biased
story determined by the needs and convictions of
those who tell it.
In Don DeLillos Libra (1988), for example, a
novel about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, scenes dedicated to
Oswalds personal development and his involvement with an unfolding conspiracy to kill the
president alternate with scenes describing how
Nicolas Branch, a retired CIA analyst, attempts
to write the secret history of the assassination
(1988, 15). Twenty-five years after Kennedys
death, however, and after 15 years of work, Branch
has not yet written anything, as he is completely
overwhelmed by the quantity of documents and
possible evidence available to him: He is in too
deep to be selective (59). His inability to structure
the material and produce even a single line

severely undermines the historical narration that
the other parts of the novel deliver, marking its
account of what allegedly happened as clearly
fictional and suggesting that all efforts to discover
order in [history] can only produce fictions of
coherence (Ickstadt 1994, 310). Branch fails in
his work because he is unwilling to make the
selections necessary to fabricate such a fiction; he
is unable to stop assembling data (DeLillo 1988,
59). Although his office is already a book-filled
room (14), he continues to collect and study
[b]aptismal records, report cards, postcards,
divorce petitions, canceled checks, daily timesheets, tax returns, property lists, postoperative
x-rays, and other similar items (181).
His obsessive collecting, though, not only reveals his failure to structure and organize his
material. It also hints at another dimension of
writing history that all historiographic metafiction invariably highlights: We cannot know the
past except through its texts: its documents, its
evidence, even its eye-witness accounts are texts.
Even the institutions of the past, its social structures and practices, could be seen, in one sense, as
social text (Hutcheon 1988 16). Historiographic
metafiction lays bare this inevitable textuality of
history through its own excessive intertextuality.
In Libra, for instance, Don DeLillo quotes extensively from Oswalds diary and the 26 volumes of
testimonies and depositions that the Warren
Commission published along with its official
report. Other novels shift the focus considerably
from factual to fictional intertexts to reveal that
the distinction between fact and fiction (or, for
that matter, historiography and literature) is not
an ontological one but is determined by habit and
convention a fact also often discussed at length
by the novels narrators.
Through a broad variety of devices such as
interventions by narrator figures or the disturbance of a coherent image of the past by the
interpolation of scenes dedicated to those exploring the past, then, historiographic metafiction
destroys the illusionism that more realist historical novels seek to achieve. However, in order to
deconstruct the idea that fiction can adequately
represent or even mirror reality, the novels first
need to build up such illusions themselves. Next
to metafictional devices that lay bare their own
fictionality, they therefore also deploy the strate-
627
gies of mimetic realism and oftentimes offer large

passages of rather traditional narration. This explains why Hutcheon can refer to the novels she
has in mind as popular and well-known. Unlike
modernist texts, which only found a rather
small readership, many novels that can be called
historiographic metafiction and this goes in
particular for British texts such as Graham Swifts
Waterland (1983) or Julian Barness Flauberts
Parrot (1984) have indeed been bestsellers. Their
combination of historical narration and metahistoriographic and metafictional commentary
obviously appealed to a broad audience.
As is apparent from the examples drawn on
so far, historiographic metafiction is a predominantly postmodern phenomenon. As a form of
metafiction, it was a welcome venue for artists
struggling at least during the 1960s and 1970s with
what John Barth has famously called the usedupness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain
possibilities after high modernism (1976, 29).
More importantly, though, historiographic
metafiction has thrived under the cultural and
epistemological conditions of postmodernity
that are characterized by a radical questioning of
the very possibility of identity, secure knowledge,
and any kind of representation. In the field of
history, the epistemological skepticism of the
past decades has led various theorists to arrive
at the same conclusions that historiographic
metafiction reaches by fictional means. Thus,
scholars like Hayden White (1973, 1978) and
Dominick LaCapra (1985) have also pointed out
that historians do not simply describe the past
but also create stories about it. Furthermore,
White, LaCapra, and others have emphasized the
crucial role that ideology and the narrative
templates available to the historian play in this
process. Moreover, similar to theorists arguing
from a more explicitly poststructuralist position
than White and LaCapra do, historiographic
metafiction has also challenged the humanist
notion of the homogeneous subject and worked
to question and complicate essentialist and fixed
notions of identity.
Just like metafiction in general, however, historiographic metafiction is not an exclusively
postmodern phenomenon but has a longer history. As, among others, Julika Griem (1994) and
Kurt M
uller (1994) have shown, Henry Adamss
The Education of Henry Adams (published
628
posthumously in 1918) in many ways anticipates

the larger number of postmodernist texts by
dramatizing both a continuous search for conceptual order and a consciousness that this search
will finally be frustrated (M
uller 1994, 40) and
revealing the process of making sense in historical
discourse to be temporary and unstable
(Griem 1994, 108). And both John Dos Passoss
trilogy U.S.A. (19306) and William Faulkners
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) can be seen as continuing this project, as they combine an element of
metafictional self-reflection [with] an awareness
of the problematic nature of historiographic reconstruction (M
uller 1994, 41). Yet, as M
uller
also stresses, the historical novel remained a more
or less marginal genre within the movement of
modernism (42). It was only with the advent of
postmodernism in the 1960s that the issues that
concerned Adams, Dos Passos, and Faulkner
moved to the center of artistic attention.
In fact, for Linda Hutcheon, historiographic
metafiction is the postmodernist way of writing as
such. Since she sees postmodernist art as continuing modernist self-reflexivity and introspection,
but paradoxically re-engaging history at the same
time, she has repeatedly argued that historiographic metafiction is what would characterize postmodernism in fiction (1988, ix). This
claim, however, seems exaggerated, especially
from todays position, as such a wholesale classification would neglect the aesthetic and stylistic
differences between various forms of postmodernist fiction that have developed over the last
50 years. Neither do all postmodernist novels turn
back to history, nor do all novels that do so
combine this return with metahistorical reflections. It is therefore advisable to regard historiographic metafiction, as Ansgar N
unning (1995)
has proposed in his comprehensive study of latetwentieth-century fiction with a historical bent,
as one subgenre of the postmodernist historical
novel, a subgenre that coexists with various
other forms of postmodernist historical and
non-historical fiction. The term historiographic
metafiction thus designates a group of texts that
Elisabeth Wesseling refers to as self-reflexive
historical fiction (1991, 83).
What comes into focus when the concept is
narrowed down in this fashion is that, in the
United States, historiographic metafiction has
been particularly prominent among proponents

of what Andreas Huyssen (1984) has labeled
affirmative postmodernism (16), that is, among
white male writers of the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s like John Barth, Robert Coover, or E. L.
Doctorow. Barths The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a
novel that reinvents the history of colonial
America in order to expose the blanks and distortions in traditional accounts; Coovers The
Public Burning (1977), which, narrated by
Richard Nixon, capitalizes on the metaphor of
the witch-hunt to cast the trial and execution of
the Rosenbergs during the early 1950s as another
instance of a collective paranoia that can be traced
back to the Puritans; and Doctorows The Book
of Daniel (1971), which re-engages the same
historical case, albeit through the eyes of the
Rosenbergs fictitious son, all wholeheartedly
embrace the notion of a playful, chaotic, and
destabilizing aesthetics in their novels.
These texts thus differ markedly from those by
female and ethnic writers who Hans Bertens
(2002) sees as promoting a postmodernism of
difference (11). Ishmael Reeds Mumbo Jumbo
(1972); Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman
Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
(1976); Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987); Leslie
Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead (1991); and
Gerald Vizenors The Heirs of Columbus (1991),
for example, also perform a postmodernist turn
back to history, but they do so in different fashion
and for dissimilar ends. Although they challenge
established narratives just as historiographic
metafiction does, the agenda of these texts is more
explicitly political and revisionist. Rather than
being interested in negotiating the limits and
pitfalls of historiography, they rewrite history
from a Native American, African American, or
Asian American vantage point in order to do
justice to minorities whose experiences had been
silenced by dominant discourses in the past.
Accordingly, just as revisionist approaches to
historiography have demanded and provided attention to those ethnicities, genders, and classes
that are marginalized or even excluded in traditional accounts, such revisionist historical novels,
as N
unning (1995) labels them, tell the stories of
the suppressed and give them a voice, for example,
by relating events from their point of view or even
employing them as narrators.
The concept of historiographic metafiction also

does not adequately describe the complex workings of recent novels such as Mark Danielewskis
House of Leaves (2000) or Jonathan Safran Foers
Everything Is Illuminated (2002), for which Katrin
Amian (2008) has recently suggested the term
post-postmodern in order to acknowledge their
attempt to push beyond the all-too-familiar
schemes of postmodern textual critique (159).
Similar to Beloved insofar as it also negotiates issues
related to traumatic memory, Foers novel, for
instance, pays tribute to the fact that the insights
of affirmative postmodernist historiographic
metafiction have become rather commonplace in
the twenty-first century. Everything Is Illuminated,
for instance, is therefore no longer interested in
destabilizing historical accounts and unveiling
them as subjective constructions. Taking this notion for granted, the novel instead explores ways
of establishing and stabilizing an intersubjective
version of the history of the small Ukrainian shtetl
Trachimbrod after all an attempt Amian calls
the novels will to believe anyway (191).
In an essay entitled Postmodern Afterthoughts, Linda Hutcheon (2002) has acknowledged that the fiction of today differs considerably
from the texts she labeled historiographic metafiction during the 1980s. In this piece, Hutcheon
treats postmodernism as a thing of the past and
defines it as a twentieth-century phenomenon
(2002, 5). Yet, regardless of the question whether
or not literary historians of the future will follow
Hutcheon in this periodization, contemporary
novels such as Everything Is Illuminated can only
be understood as responses to historiographic
metafiction. They may explore new ways of
writing, but in doing so they remain intimately
indebted to the insights of earlier postmodernist
fiction. As a consequence, the concept of historiographic metafiction remains an indispensable
and powerful tool in any attempt to describe and
analyze postmodernist fiction. It is best understood, however, as referring to a postmodernist
subgenre of the historical novel that had its heyday
during the 1970s and 1980s and that continues to
influence novels of the early twenty-first century.
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Politics and the
Novel (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
629

Adams, H. (1918). The Education of Henry Adams.
Amian, K. (2008) Rethinking Postmodernism(s): Charles
S. Peirce and the Pragmatist Negotiations of Thomas
Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Barnes, J. (1984). Flauberts Parrot. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Barth, J. (1960). The Sot-Weed Factor. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Barth, J. (1967). The Literature of Exhaustion.
Atlantic Monthly, 8, 2934.
Coover, R. (1977). The Public Burning. New York:
Viking.
Danielewski, M. (2000). House of Leaves. New York:
Pantheon.
DeLillo, D. (1988). Libra. New York: Viking.
Doctorow, E. L. (1971). The Book of Daniel. New York:
Random House.
Doctorow, E. L. (1975). Ragtime. New York: Random
House.
Dos Passos, J. (1946). U.S.A. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Engler, B., & M
uller, K. (eds.) (1994). Historiographic
Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian
Literature. Paderborn: Sch
oningh.
Faulkner, W. (1936). Absalom, Absalom! New York:
Random House.
Foer, J. S. (2002). Everything Is Illuminated. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Griem, J. (1994). A Lesson for Henry Adams: The
Failure of Teaching History to Clios American
Daughters. In B. Engler & K. M
uller (eds.),
Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American
and Canadian Literature. Paderborn: Sch
oningh,
pp. 10326.
Hutcheon, L. (1987). Beginning to Theorize
Postmodernism. Textual Practice, 1, 1031.
Hutcheon, L. (2002). Postmodern Afterthoughts.
Wascana Review, 37(1), 512.
Huyssen, A. (1984). Mapping the Postmodern.
New German Critique, 33, 552.
Ickstadt, H. (1994). Loose Ends and Patterns
of Coincidence in Don DeLillos Libra. In B. Engler
& K. M
uller (eds.), Historiographic
oningh, pp. 299312.
Kennedy, W. (1975). Legs. New York: CowardMcCann.
Kingston, M. H. (1976). The Woman Warrior: Memoirs
of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Knopf.
630
HOWARD, MAUREEN
LaCapra, D. (1985). History and Criticism. Ithaca:

Methuen.
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Knopf.
M
uller, K. (1994). The Development Towards
Historiographic Metafiction in the American Novel.
In B. Engler & K. M
uller (eds.), Historiographic
oningh pp. 3551.
N
unning, A. (1995). Von historischer Fiktion zu
historiographischer Metafiktion [From Historical
Fiction to Historiographic Metafiction], 2 vols.
Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.
Reed, I. (1972). Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Silko, L. M. (1991). Almanac of the Dead. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Swift, G. (1983). Waterland. London: Heinemann.
Vizenor, G. (1991). The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover,
NH: University Press of New England.
Waugh, P. (1984). Metafiction: The Theory and
Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen.
Wesseling, E. (1991). Writing History as a Prophet:
Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
White, H. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in
Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Howard, Maureen
DAVID W. MADDEN
Maureen Howard is an elegant stylist and incisive

social critic. Each of her novels intricately explores
post-World War II American life and represents
a new fictional departure in terms of technique.
Her works abound in various, competing voices
with multiple first-person narrators, including
the author herself, presenting and representing
the narrative.
Maureen Kearns Howard was born June 28,
1930 in Bridgeport, Connecticut to William L.
and Loretta (Burns) Kearns, and she graduated
from Smith College in 1952. She has been married
three times and has a daughter, Loretta Howard.
In addition to being a novelist and critic, she is
a professor of writing at Columbia University in
New York.
Howards major fictional concern is with the

family, not simply the domestic particularities
or the chains of heredity but also the thick webs
of devotion, obligation, and passion. The relationships between parents and children are
fraught with deep love and equally deep dissatisfaction and friction. Not a Word About Nightingales (1961) deals with a family in which the
husband rejects his loved ones for a life in Italy;
the daughter, sent to retrieve him, becomes distracted with a new life; while the wife, suddenly
freed of familial obligations, begins to enjoy her
independence.
Bridgeport Bus (1966) focuses on the place of
the Irish in America, a theme that reoccurs in
most of Howards other novels. Her Irish are
lace-curtain figures, yearning for respectability
but forever unsure of their place and alternately
proud of and embarrassed by their heritage.
Thirty-five-year-old Mary Agnes Keely escapes
the stifling confines of her mother and Bridgeport, Connecticut for a life in New York with a
troubled room-mate, eccentric friends, and an
unwanted pregnancy. The quest for freedom is
frustrated by a return home and the likelihood
that Agnes will become her mother. Before My
Time (1975) explores the unlikely friendship of a
relatively content professional woman who takes
a troubled teen into her home and finds herself
sharing confidences about her life with the young
man. In spite of their attempts to either reject or
ignore their pasts, personal histories are seen as
the warp and woof of identity despite generational
differences.
Grace Abounding (1982) centers on a young
widow and her teenage daughter, each of whom
longs for escape and pageantry in her life. Eventually both mother and daughter reinvent their
lives, marry, and have successful careers, but
beneath the seemingly happy ending are more
sorrow and unexpected tragedies. The novel
marks Howards growing experiments with temporal shifts and narrative dislocations, which
continue in Expensive Habits (1986) with a series
of flashbacks that underscore the episodic character of an ailing womans life. Her loves are
catalogued against the major social and political
events of the postwar era as the protagonist seeks
to control the meaning of her existence.
Natural History (1992) is Howards most
audacious, experimental fiction. Focusing on
HUGHES, LANGSTON
another family, the Brays, the novel actually presents Howards home of Bridgeport as the true
protagonist. The citys most illustrious citizen, P.
T. Barnum, acts as a powerful metaphor for a
culture constructed on tawdry appearances. With
its double-column narrative and collage techniques, the novel is as self-consciously metafictional
as any of its era. Beneath the puzzlingly fragmented structure is another family drama, drawn
along the lines of Howards own, which she
detailed unsparingly in her autobiography, Facts
of Life (1978). In Natural History, memory and
history become so entangled that truth remains
elusive, as a daughter struggles to discover her
fathers complicity in a crime.
With A Lovers Almanac (1998), Howard inaugurated a planned tetralogy based on the seasons of
the year. This work opens in winter, with the dawn
of the new millennium, and follows two sets of
lovers. The younger ones fret and fight, and separate and unite, while the elders, one of whom is the
grandfather of the younger male lover, reunite in
old age after years apart. Constructed as sections of
an almanac, the novel follows the stars in charting
lives. Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring (2001)
presents three novellas, in one of which the younger lovers reappear, a child in tow, still struggling
with their relationship. In another James Audubon, another of Howards studies in celebrity, is
revealed to be less than honorable. The Silver
Screen (2004) concentrates on a former silent
screen starlet who rejected celebrity for domesticity, yet for all her seeming fulfillment creative urges
are left unsatisfied. Again a son and daughter must
struggle with personal and familial legacies.
In addition to various fellowships, among them a
Guggenheim, Howard received a National Book
Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1980 and
American Book Award nomination for autobiography/biography in 1981 for Facts of Life, and PEN/
FaulknerAwardnominationsforGraceAbounding,
Expensive Habits, and Natural History. She has
also been honored with a National Endowment
for the Arts grant (1988) and a Literary Lion Award,
New York Public Library (1993), and is a recipient
of an Academy Award in Literature from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Fiction (AF)
631

Ahearn, K. (1984). Pursuing the Self: Maureen
Howards Facts of Life and Before My Time. Critique,
25(4), 1719.
Howard, M. (1961). Not a Word About Nightingales.
New York: Atheneum.
Howard, M. (1966). Bridgeport Bus. New York:
Harcourt.
Howard, M. (1975). Before My Time. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Howard, M. (1978). Facts of Life. Boston: Little, Brown.
Howard, M. (1982). Grace Abounding. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Howard, M. (1986). Expensive Habits. New York:
Summit.
Howard, M. (1992). Natural History. New York:
Norton.
Howard, M. (1998). A Lovers Almanac. New York:
Viking.
Howard, M. (2001). Big As Life: Three Tales for Spring.
New York: Viking.
Howard, M. (2004). The Silver Screen. New York:
Viking.
OBrien, G. (1993). Assimilation Blues: Maureen
Howards Facts of Life. MELUS, 18(1), 95102.
Scott, J. (1998). Maureen Howard. BOMB,
63, 749.
Ward, C. (1991). Wake Homes: Four Modern Novels
of the Irish-American Family. Eire-Ireland, 26(2),
7891.
Hughes, Langston
MATTHEW HOFER
A populist and extraordinarily popular African

American author, Langston Hughes was born in
Joplin, Missouri in 1902 and died in New York
City in 1967. His very first published poem, The
Negro Speaks of Rivers, printed in the leading
black journal The Crisis in 1921, helped to position him as a pivotal figure of the New Negro
Renaissance of the later 1920s. Fueled by the
prevalence of racial and class inequities in the
US, Hughess revolutionary tendencies intensified during the Depression, resulting in his persecution as a fellow traveler of the Communist
Party by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. However, despite any apparent
inconsistencies in his beliefs or values, Hughes
was a lifelong supporter of the ideals of American
632
HUGHES, LANGSTON
democracy, even when those ideals were being

shamefully neglected in practical terms. Throughout his prolific and sometimes controversial career, his contributions to American literature
in addition to the poems that justly made him
famous extend to novels, short stories, biographies, translations, plays, and even musical scores,
including a libretto. His texts commonly examine
relations between privileged and disenfranchised
people in twentieth-century America, emphasizing what it means to be human in difficult if not
exceptional circumstances.
Following two major books of blues poems
that elicited hotly mixed reviews from the
African American establishment for their realistic
attention to low material and use of racial
dialect, Hughes turned his attention to prose for
the first time. Fiction held special appeal for the
writer whenever poetry became, for personal or
political reasons, temporarily untenable. His first
novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), is a simple,
realistic tale of three generations of a black family
from Stanton, Kansas. The rural Midwestern
setting is remarkable for its break with the
then-dominant traditions of the urban ghetto and
Southern plantation novels. Near the MasonDixon Line, the family matriarch, a former slave
who is known as Aunt Hager Williams, advocates for interracial harmony and dedicates her
life to uplift via the education of her Hughes-like
grandson, Sandy Rodgers. The middle generation, composed of Hagers three daughters, represents broadly the three possibilities Hughes
recognizes for racial accommodation in modern
America (slavish emulation, uncomplaining acceptance, and proud independence). This novel is
driven by the ambitions and interactions of its
characters rather than a strict plot, and is underwritten by attention to descriptive adjectives, jazz
rhythms, and local dialect.
Not Without Laughter is a social document as
well as an aesthetic one, and the same is true of
Hughess later fiction. The ambivalence between
propaganda and literature may even help explain why the best of Hughess prose is not
just compelling but also enduring. Moreover,
the stylistic strengths of the 14 stories collected
as The Ways of White Folk (1934) amplify and
extend those of his novel: verisimilitude, lyricism, and an earnest examination of love and
hatred from the Deep South to the Midwest, and
from Harlem to Paris. Even so, there is a shift in

tone in these variously arch, cynical, and radical
stories from that of the hopeful novel: there is
more bitterness here, and less laughter, however
qualified. Yet the finest of them, Cora Unashamed and Home, are haunting expressions of conflicted attachment. This tonal shift
is again reversed in Hughess second and final
novel, Tambourines to Glory (1958), a comparatively slight and episodic satire on the abuse of
religion in the vein of Sinclair Lewiss Elmer
Gantry (1927).
In 1943 Hughes began to publish the franchise
known as the Simple stories in the weekly
Chicago Defender, which had a circulation of
200,000 predominantly black readers, and more
occasionally in Phylon and the New Republic.
Selections from these casually sensationalistic
narratives, which record the uninhibited, often
extremist, typically one-sided fictional dialogues
between Harlems voluble Jesse B. Semple (thus
Simple) and a Hughes-like straight man, were
later reshaped and published as a series of books
(Simple Speaks His Mind [1950], Simple Takes a
Wife [1953], Simple Stakes a Claim [1957], and
Simples Uncle Sam [1965]). Perhaps closest in
form and motivation to Finley Peter Dunnes
Mr. Dooley monologues from the close of the
nineteenth century, Hughess serialized Simple
stories which do risk redundancy when read in
succession are a rare and fine example of a black
author writing expressly for a black audience.
However, the caustic wisdom and humorous
insight of the Simple stories succeed best as
literature when the educated narrator deigns to
challenge Simples opinions and to engage him in
real conversation. In general, this assortment of
protest narratives, satires of self-correction, and
genre pieces gives the impression of accurate
eavesdropping but Simple generally has something to say thats worth hearing, or overhearing.
Ultimately, a reliance on accurate conversation
is what distinguishes the poets fiction in virtually
every instance, as his prose from the 1930s to the
1960s consistently depends upon dialogue among
a range of black voices to achieve its authenticity
and energy.
Harlem Renaissance (AF); Modernist
Fiction (AF)
HURSTON, ZORA NEALE

Dace, T. (ed.) (1997). Langston Hughes: The
Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Harper, D. S. (1995). Not So Simple: The Simple
Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press.
Hughes, L. (1930). Not Without Laughter. New York:
Knopf.
Hughes, L. (1934). The Ways of White Folks. New York:
Knopf.
Hughes, L. (1950). Simple Speaks His Mind. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Hughes, L. (1953). Simple Takes a Wife. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Hughes, L. (1957). Simple Stakes a Claim. New York:
Rinehart.
Hughes, L. (1958). Tambourines to Glory. New York:
John Day.
Hughes, L. (1963). Something in Common and Other
Stories. New York: Hill and Wang.
Hughes, L. (1965). Simples Uncle Sam. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Ostram, H. A. (1993). Langston Hughes: A Study of the
Rampersad, A. (19868). The Life of Langston Hughes,
2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tidwell, J. E., & Ragar, C. R. (eds.) (2007). Montage of
a Dream: The Life and Art of Langston Hughes.
Tracy, S. C. (ed.) (2004). A Historical Guide to Langston
Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale

DAPHNE LAMOTHE
Folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston was

born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891, but she
claimed to be born 10 years earlier in Eatonville,
Florida, the first incorporated black community
in America. In fact, her family moved to Eatonville when she was a toddler. Her upbringing there
would play a formative role in Hurstons fiction
because she sought to capture its vital culture in
her writing.
Hurston remembered her childhood as idyllic
until her mother died in 1904. Lucy Ann Hurston
encouraged her children to jump at de sun, and
follow their dreams. After her mothers death,
however, her father remarried to a woman with
633
whom Hurston experienced years of tension and

conflict. She finally left home to join a traveling
theater troupe, and then surfaced in 1917 at
Morgan Academy in Baltimore, where she finished high school at the age of 26. From there, she
went to Howard University in Washington, DC,
where she studied until 1924. While at Howard,
she published John Redding Goes to Sea, which
drew on her memories of Eatonville. She also
attended Georgia Douglass Johnsons literary salon off campus, and had two poems published in
the Universal Negro Improvement Associations
newspaper, Negro World. After Opportunity
published her story, Drenched in Light, in
1924, she was inspired to move to New York.
When Hurston arrived in New York City in
1925, she had won second prize in an Opportunity fiction contest, but otherwise, she had little
money, and few connections to the citys cultural
and artistic scene. Eventually, she became acquainted with Harlem Renaissance notables such
as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Carl
Van Vechten; and enrolled at Barnard College,
where she studied anthropology with Franz
Boas. Over time, she gained credentials as a folklorist and anthropologist, while also becoming
a vital member of Harlems social and literary
scene.
One of the participants in the Renaissance who
did not come from a privileged background,
Hurston worked at menial jobs and also became
adept at finding patrons to fund her writing
and fieldwork. The compromises that patronage
imposed on her made her subject to accusations
of pandering to their demands for stereotypical
depictions of Negro life. Charlotte Osgood Mason
is perhaps the best-known benefactor to associate
herself with Hurston.
Franz Boas, who pioneered the discipline of
anthropology in the United States, would prove to
be another highly influential person in Hurstons
career. Boas headed the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University at the time that
Hurston was enrolled at Barnard, its sister institution. She took classes in anthropology and
phrenology with Boas, who encouraged her work
as a folklorist. Papa Franz, as she called Boas,
wrote a laudatory introduction to Hurstons first
publication of folklore, Mules and Men (1935).
In it, he praised Hurston for her ability to provide
an insiders view into the lives of a population,
634
HURSTON, ZORA NEALE
the Southern rural Negro, thought to be inscrutable to outsiders.

With Boass guidance and Masons financing,
Hurston went back to Eatonville in 1927 to collect
Southern songs, folktales, sermons, work songs,
blues, hoodoo, and games. This was followed by a
second trip in 1934, funded by a Guggenheim
Fellowship. Intent on documenting the contributions of Southern blacks to American society,
Hurston looked to Eatonville and other black
communities in the American South as the source
of much of the folklore that she collected.
Such communities were the inspiration for most,
if not all, of her short stories and novels. For her
fieldwork, she worked her way through turpentine and lumber camps in Florida and Alabama,
and studied and practiced under a hoodoo doctor
in Louisiana.
Hurston aimed to represent black cultures for
a popular audience, so she did not limit herself to
writing solely for scholarly publications. In addition to staging concerts, such as The Great Day,
that showcased the songs and lore she collected
during her folklore-collecting trips in Florida, she
also included in her ethnographies contextual
details about social dynamics among her informants, and between herself and her informants,
that were designed to capture the interest of the
non-academic reader. In a letter dated August 20,
1934 in which she asked Franz Boas to write the
introduction to Mules and Men, Hurston wrote,
So I hope that the unscientific matter that must be
there for the sake of the average reader will not
keep you from writing the introduction. It so
happens that the conversations and incidents are
true. But of course I never would have set them
down for scientists to read. I know that the learned
societies are interested in the story in many ways
that would never interest the average mind. He
needs no stimulations. But the man in the street is
different (cited in Hemingway 1634). Mules and
Men is full of details of Floridian black life, providing a complex analysis of the social dynamics
within each of those communities while also preserving a rich trove of oral culture.
Hurstons second ethnography, Tell My Horse
(1938), was less successful than its predecessor.
Based on fieldwork that she conducted in Haiti,
Jamaica, and Martinique while on a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1936, it included political and social
commentaries on Jamaican and Haitian societies
that are marred by her biased tone. The texts

weaknesses are only partially alleviated by her
more respectful and complex treatment of Jamaican Obeah and Haitian Vodou as organized religions with sophisticated social networks and
worldviews. Despite its unevenness, throughout
the narrative Hurston implies a relationship between the anthropological project and imperialist
ideology that, combined with its detailed representation of Haitian religious ritual and culture,
continues to make the book an object of critical
interest.
Hurston represented the folklore she collected
not only in ethnographies but also in novels.
Her first, Jonahs Gourd Vine (1934), gave a
glimpse of the creative genius that would come
into full bloom when she published Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937). Jonahs Gourd Vine,
loosely based on her parents lives, tells the tale of
John Pearson, a gifted orator and minister, who
eventually brings on his own downfall because he
cannot resist temptations of the flesh. Johns
ability to connect with and speak directly to
his congregation in their own language endows
him with power in the pulpit. The novel reaches
its pinnacle at the point that John delivers a
sermon that Hurston first recorded during her
fieldwork. Hurston implicitly contrasts Johns
social stature with his wife Lucys comparative
lack of status and power. Lucys moral and
intellectual superiority to John do little to help
her challenge his abuse of patriarchal authority
within their home.
Hurston shifts the focus more fully to female
voice and empowerment in her next novel, Their
Eyes Were Watching God, which follows the development of its protagonist, Janie Crawford.
Hurston wrote Their Eyes in a seven-week burst
of inspiration while in Haiti conducting fieldwork, and the novels symbolism shows evidence
of its Caribbean origins. A Bildungsroman, the
novel depicts Janies struggle for self-definition as
she matures into womanhood. Janie must reject
racist and sexist definitions of herself in order to
fulfill her multifaceted quest for romantic and
self-love. In a novel rich with the stories and
poetry of Southern life, Janies quest for autonomy and voice becomes increasingly attainable
the more she immerses herself in her Southern
culture. At the same time, Janies physical attributes bear a striking resemblance to the Haitian
HURSTON, ZORA NEALE
goddess of love, Ezili. The characters journey

deeper south into the muck of the Everglades,
and, symbolically, into the Caribbean, functions
as a metaphor for the kind of cultural immersion
that Hurston celebrated as an essential journey for
African Americans. At a time when most of her
Harlem Renaissance peers focused on African
Americans turn to modernity in the urban North,
Hurston went against the grain, moving Janie
deeper south and at the same time recognizing
that these cultures allowed her to explore the same
questions of race and class divisions and social
change that concerned her urban and Northernoriented peers. Hurstons use of folk culture is not
only nostalgic but also the vehicle for comprehending history and social change.
Reviews in the mainstream press of Their Eyes
Were Watching God were positive, but African
American critics were more critical, especially for
what they perceived as the novels lack of political
commentary. Both Alain Locke and Richard
Wright wrote reviews of the novel that panned
it for catering to white societys taste for minstrelsy. Lockes critique was rooted in the Harlem
Renaissances understanding that literature
should work to improve dominant societys perception of African Americans through the construction of positive images of urbane and
sophisticated black folk. Hurstons use of dialect
and humor rubbed against the grain of this
philosophy. Moreover, her focus on womens
lives and communal dynamics was also at odds
with the more militant protest literature of the
1930s, dominated by Richard Wright. In contrast
to the characteristically overt challenges to
white supremacy and racism that characterized
that period, Hurston represented black womens
struggle for self-realization within patriarchal
communities, communal rituals of love and
humor, and the coded ways that black folks
signified on historical struggles in a racist society
through their folktales, songs, and humor. In
Hurstons fiction, resistance against racism and
sexism takes place in mundane interactions and in
the authors insistence on the humanity of her
characters.
After the success of Their Eyes, Hurston published two other novels, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948),
and a memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). The
635
later novels never matched the lyrical mastery and

narrative consistency of Hurstons earlier works.
In Moses Hurston attempted to retell the Moses
myth by bringing together biblical, African oral,
and African American slave traditions, yet she
failed to realize her ambitions. Seraph was even
less readable, with its melodramatic presentation
of whites in Florida who, perplexingly, spoke in
a black vernacular. Hurston published prolifically throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but as time
passed the quality of her work diminished. Her
last book was published just as she was falsely
accused of molesting a 10-year-old boy. The
accusation and ensuing press attention devastated
Hurston, who never fully recovered from the
blow even after she produced documents proving
that she was out of the country at the time of the
alleged incident.
Even as Hurston fell out of the spotlight, she
continued to write and publish. In 1954 she
covered the murder trial of Ruby McCollum for
the Pittsburgh Courier, and she also worked as a
freelance writer for newspapers and magazines.
Her political views grew increasingly reactionary,
and she argued against integration on the premise
that it was based on the assumption of African
Americans inferiority. The last years of her life
were marked by financial difficulties and illness.
Hurston worked in a library, as a substitute
teacher, and even as a maid in Fort Pierce, Florida.
She died in the Fort Lucie County Welfare Home
in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave, a
far cry from the public acclaim she enjoyed in the
1920s and 1930s.
Hurstons many contributions to American
folklore and literature might have been lost forever if not for the publication of Alice Walkers
tribute to her in a 1975 essay. In it, Walker,
pretending to be Hurstons niece and retracing
her steps through Florida, commemorates
Hurstons importance as a literary ancestor for
contemporary black women writers. Her tribute
to Hurstons legacy lifted the author from years
of obscurity and commenced a flood of scholarship on Hurstons influence as a folklorist and
author. Hurston is now firmly entrenched within
the canons of African American, womens, and
mainstream American literatures, and her writing
is fittingly celebrated for its lyricism, humor, and
drama.
636
HURSTON, ZORA NEALE

Gender and the Novel (AF); The Harlem
Renaissance (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); The
Southern Novel (AF); Walker, Alice (AF);

Hemenway, R. (1980). Zora Neale Hurston:
A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Hurston, Z. N. (1934). Jonahs Gourd Vine.
Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Hurston, Z. N. (1935). Mules and Men. Philadelphia:
Lippincott.
Hurston, Z. N. (1937). Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston, Z. N. (1938). Tell My Horse. Philadelphia:

Lippincott.
Hurston, Z. N. (1939). Moses, Man of the Mountain.
Hurston, Z. N. (1942). Dust Tracks on a Road.
Hurston, Z. N. (1948). Seraph on the Suwanee.
Kaplan, C. (2002). Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.
New York: Anchor.
Lamothe, D. (2008). Inventing the New Negro:
Narrative, Culture, Ethnography. Philadelphia:
Walker, A. (1983). In Search of Our Mothers
Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York:
Harcourt.
Wall, C. (1996). Women of the Harlem Renaissance.
I
Irving, John
KATHARINE NICHOLSON INGS
If a novel incorporates into its plot a trained bear

or two, cleverly named characters, single mothers,
prep school culture, and wrestling, chances are it
is written by John Irving. Often compared to
Charles Dickens for his storytelling skills, Irving
writes darkly comic coming-of-age novels set in
New England in which boys and men search for
meaning in a dysfunctional society.
Born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. on March 2, 1942,
Irving grew up as a self-described faculty brat at
the elite prep school Phillips Exeter. There he
learned to wrestle, a sport he continued throughout his college education at Pittsburgh, at the
Iowa Writers Workshop (where he studied with
Kurt Vonnegut), and during his teaching career at
Windham, Iowa and Mount Holyoke.
Irving published three moderately received
novels Setting Free the Bears (1968), The
Water-Method Man (1972), and The 158-Pound
Marriage (1974) before becoming an internationally bestselling author with The World According to Garp (1978). This book engages Irvings
dominant theme: a boy trying to find his personal
and sexual identity while surrounded by strong,
sometimes threatening women. Readers responded to Garps outrageously imaginative turns
of plot, and critics lauded its use of metanarrative:
Irving interweaves lengthy excerpts from Garps
own novel, The World According to Bensenhauser,
with Garps personal story. Indeed, Garp is a
meditation on the writerly voice Garps girlfriend will not marry him until he publishes, his
mother composes a feminist memoir which is
taken up by a feminist society protesting violence

against women, and Garps novel not only competes with his mothers book, which easily outsells
his, but also is denounced by feminists for its
sexual violence.
Following this success, Irving cemented his
place as an author of multilayered, carnivalesque,
popular fiction, with The Hotel New Hampshire
(1981) and The Cider House Rules (1985). In these
works, he grapples with psychological issues ranging from a Freudian treatment of incest (Freud
turns up as a postmodern Viennese hotelier who
also owns a bear) to the ethics of being an
abortionist in an orphanage. A Prayer for Owen
Meany (1989), his most religiously and visually
challenging work, presents a diminutive title
character, an instrument of God destined for
heroism, who speaks in FULL CAPS throughout.
A Son of the Circus (1995) and The Fourth Hand
(2001) represent a geographical departure for
Irving, for both have connections to India. Circus,
Irvings most complicated and ambitious work,
depicts an American physician and screenwriter
of Indian descent who returns to that country in
search of identity, but finds an imagined reality to
be more generous. The Fourth Hands relationship to India is more tangential: a self-assured
American television reporter in India has his hand
bitten off by a tiger live on TV. Following Irvings
consistently wry yet grim humor, the reporter
receives a hand transplant from a dead man whose
widow wants visiting rights with the appendage.
Here Irving creates a character rare for him: a
ladies man who, after being taken advantage of
sexually by the widow, desperately longs to become a father to the child he sires with her.

638
IRVING, JOHN
Indeed, Irving explores mens sexual awakening

and reckoning throughout his novels. In A Widow
for One Year (1998), an Exeter schoolboy takes a
summer job as a famous authors assistant only to
lose his virginity to the authors wife, and in
Irvings most recent book, Until I Find You
(2005), numerous older girls and women prey on
a boy at boarding school. The female predator
resonates particularly aggressively in this latter
novel, and in a New York Times interview (June
28, 2005), Irving revealed it was autobiographical.
He further disclosed that the theme of the absent
father, which also permeates his work, came from
his personal history as well, and in Until I Find You,
the hero finally locates his father, just as Irving was
newly spending time with his biological father.
In addition to his 11 novels, Irving has published three other works: My Movie Business
(1999), which discusses his bringing The Cider
House Rules to film; a childrens book, A Sound
Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (2004),
which was part of the novel A Widow for One Year;
and a collection of fiction and non-fiction, Trying
to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), which includes a
memoir, six short stories, and three essays two
on Charles Dickens and one on Gunter Grass.
Irving has received numerous awards: he was
both a finalist for the American Book Award
(1985) and winner of the National Book Foundation Award (1986) for Garp; he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters (1992);
and in 2000 he won an Academy Award for the
best adapted screenplay for Cider House. He
entered the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in
Stillwater, Oklahoma in 2001. Irving has three
sons, and he and his wife, the literary agent Janet
Turnbull, divide their time between Toronto
and Vermont.
SEE ALSO: Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Vonnegut, Kurt (AF)

Bloom, H.(ed.) (2001). John Irving: Modern Critical
Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
Davis, T. F. & Womack, K. (eds.) (2004). The
Critical Response to John Irving. Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Epstein, J. (1982). Why Is John Irving So Popular?
Commentary, 73(6), 5963.
Irving, J. (1968). Setting Free the Bears. New York:
Random House.
Irving, J. (1972). The Water-Method Man. New York:
Random House.
Irving, J. (1974). The 158-Pound Marriage. New York:
Random House.
Irving, J. (1978). The World According to Garp.
Irving, J. (1981). The Hotel New Hampshire. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Irving, J. (1985). The Cider House Rules. New York:
Morrow.
Irving, J. (1989). A Prayer for Owen Meany. New York:
Morrow.
Irving, J. (1995). A Son of the Circus. New York:
Random House.
Irving, J. (1996). Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
[includes The Imaginary Girlfriend]. New York:
Arcade.
Irving, J. (1998). A Widow for One Year. New York:
Random House.
Irving, J. (1999). My Movie Business: A Memoir.
Irving, J. (2001). The Fourth Hand. New York: Random
House.
Irving, J. (2004). A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to
Make a Sound. New York: Doubleday.
Irving, J. (2005). Until I Find You. New York: Random
House.
Reilly, E. C. (1991). Understanding John Irving.
Rickyard, J. (1977). Wrestling With the Text:
The World According to John Irving. Meanjin, 56,
71422.
Shostak, D. (1994). The Family Romances of John
Irving. Essays in Literature, 21(1), 12945.
J
James, Henry
KEVIN OHI
American by birth, educated in the US and

Europe, a British citizen at his death, and immersed in not only the American but also the
English and European worlds of arts and letters,
Henry James is a curiously unassimilable presence
in the various traditions American, Victorian,
novelistic, critical, aestheticist, modernist, and
queer to which he both does and does not belong.
His early masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
initiates a career that culminates in the three great
novels of the turn of the century: The Ambassadors
(1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The
Golden Bowl (1909). One of the greatest novelists
in English, he is, like Johnson, Dryden, and Coleridge, the rare writer who is perhaps equally
important for his critical writings: essays such as
The Art of Fiction and The Future of the
Novel; a vast range of critical writings on French,
English, American, and other writers; and, most
importantly, the prefaces to The New York Edition
form an influential body of literary criticism. He is
also one of the masters of the short story and
novella (he wrote nearly 100 short stories), and his
late (quasi-)autobiographical texts A Small Boy
and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother
(1914), and The Middle Years (1917) (left unfinished at his death, and named after one of his own
short stories) are among the most important
instances of the genre in English. In their stylistic
and formal complexity, as in some of their central
concerns, they look forward to Proust, whose
Recherche offers one of the few analogous literary
experiences. James was also a prolific letter writer,
and only a fraction of his more than 10,000

extant letters have been published (though publication is underway). Living most of his life as
an expatriate, a late tour of America produced
the extraordinary American Scene (1907), an unclassifiable work of cultural criticism that offers
one of the most fascinating accounts of turn-ofthe-century American culture, manners, and
architecture.
Born April 15, 1843, the second-oldest child
(his older brother was the philosopher William
James) of an extraordinary family intimate with
many of the most important writers and artists of
the day, James received his highly unorthodox
education in a range of schools in America and
Europe, and briefly attended Harvard Law
School. Influenced by, perhaps most notably,
Hawthorne, George Eliot, Turgenev, and Balzac,
his first published novel was Watch and Ward
(1871) (subsequently disavowed); his first great
commercial success came with Daisy Miller
(1878). Between 1871 and 1911, when appeared
The Outcry, his last finished novel (The Sense of the
Past and The Ivory Tower were published posthumously as fragments in 1917), James published
20 novels whose evolution marks crucial shifts,
not just for his career but also for the form of the
European novel.
His contribution has traditionally been understood as a refinement of realism, extending the
depiction of reality to the increasingly exhaustive,
increasingly refined exploration of psychology.
Perhaps more satisfying as an account of the
early fictions departure from its precursors, even
there it does not do justice to the strangeness of
the writing. One thinks of the famous passages in

640
JAMES, HENRY
The Portrait of a Lady that seem to offer characterization by describing houses: Isabel Archers
house in Albany, a disorientingly double structure
whose curiously equivocal commerce with its
outside with two entrances, only one functional,
and with an elaborate passageway connecting
the two halves represents Isabels double, ambivalent thirst for life; Gardencourt, Ralph
Touchetts house, whose furniture, erupting onto
the lawn, seems to connote an outside so thoroughly domesticated that it is in fact an inside, a
privacy that extends to the garden that surrounds
it; and the Italian home of Gilbert Osmond, a
house facing backward described as a mask whose
orientation and blankness render the personality
of the duplicitous man Isabel makes the disastrous decision to marry. In each case, at stake
seems to be less characterization than a disorienting externalization of character. Psychology and
motivation are crucial concerns in the early texts,
and Isabel Archer, for example, is one of the great
characters in the English novel. In the late fiction,
character is so thoroughly submitted to the surface of the writing that it is often a question
whether one is dealing with characters or psychologies at all. As recent critics most notably, Leo
Bersani and Sharon Cameron have shown,
Jamess innovation is perhaps best understood in
anti-psychological terms. In the late writing, consciousness, Cameron notes, is located between
rather than within people. Jamess famous figure of the house of fiction (in his preface to The
Portrait of a Lady), whatever its other claims for
the shaping powers of art, points to ways that
consciousness in James is subordinated to a deindividualized, depsychologized perspective. Likewise, it is evident as early as his 1884 essay The
Art of Fiction that, if James casts his novelistic
project in the language of realist fiction, his is a
realism that is not to be understood in terms of
mimetic representation.
These anti-mimetic, anti-psychological strands
are best seen in Jamess style, which, far more than
any thematic preoccupation, is where the true
interest of Jamess writing lies. Increasingly, in
the course of his career, his language comes to take
the place of theme and plot. Indeed, it is the style
the dauntingly recondite syntax, the complications
on the level of the sentence that proliferate as plots
and characters recede that makes Jamess writing
unmistakable among others in the English and
American traditions (if also the object of countless

parodies). The anti-mimetic effect of Jamess
writing does not simply lie in the difficulty of
deciphering what is happening; it also lies in the
fact that what happens is simply the syntax itself.
Concomitant to that recursive turn, late Jamesian
fiction habitually suspends certainty not just about
what takes place, but also about the diegetic reality
of described events and speech. As Leo Bersani
suggests (1976), the hypothetical status of novelistic events consigns them to the virtual space of
the fictional; all that can truly be said to take
place in the fiction is the fiction itself. Likewise,
attention to the famously complex characters of
the late fiction reveals (as David Kurnick points
out) the rather startling fact that they all talk alike,
and like a Jamesian narrator. James is famous for
the unprecedented psychological depth of his
characters less because they are differentiated as
voices or psyches than because those characters
come into contact with the style and its seemingly
infinitely elastic powers of differentiation. That
perceived psychological depth is in effect, then,
an anti-psychological practice that everywhere
subordinates psychology, individuality, and consciousness to style.
The late style comes into its own in what has
been called the major phase, and the transition
is especially evident in 1897 and 1898, when James
published The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What
Maisie Knew (1897), and The Turn of the Screw
(1898). (These texts follow a series of important
stories from the 1880s and 1890s including The
Aspern Papers (1888), The Figure in the Carpet
(1896), The Lesson of the Master (1897), and
The Death of a Lion (1894) about literary life,
literary discipleship, and the vagaries of interpretation.) There are a number of probable descriptions of the transition; perhaps most evident is
the increasing syntactical complexity of the style.
A brief consideration of What Maisie Knews
relation to the Bildungsroman can bring into view
some of the innovations of late Jamesian style.
An experiment in point of view, the novel,
famously, limits its depictions to what Maisie
perceives without limiting them to what she can
understand. That difference between perceptions and conceptions or terms allows the novel,
in the progressive shifts in that ratio, to be one of
the great representations of mental development.
At the same time, the novel is governed by an
JAMES, HENRY
entirely other logic: what develops is not a consciousness but a system of exchange, one that is at
once the result of the contentious divorce proceedings that, opening the novel, give birth to the
sordid arrangements that shift Maisie among a
series of more or less culpable adults in more or
less recondite relations, and the linguistic system
that is the novel itself. The implication of the
novel in the parents treatment of Maisie is one
effect; the incompatibility of the narrative of
development with the development it depicts is
another. Likewise, The Spoils of Poynton is governed by two competing systems that are both
fully articulated without being hierarchically ordered or mutually governed by any other unifying
principle: a perfectly compelling account of psychological motivations of desire and a fully developed, though largely unrelated, aesthetic logic
of the novels eponymous spoils one that
looks, as it were, parapsychological to the extent
that one takes at face value Jamess claim that the
furniture is the main character of the novel, and
what is most accorded consciousness and volition. One then notes these larger structures of
Spoils and Maisie enact a typical rhetorical figure
in Jamess late writing: syllepsis or double governance. The late fiction is everywhere marked by
unresolved yokings of figural and literal registers
such that the depicted events of the novels
become indistinguishable from the movements
of the language that ostensibly render it; the
competing systems of these texts enact a crossing
typical of a sentence in late James. It would
misrepresent the complexity of that writing, however, to say that such rhetorical patterns enact
or represent larger thematic or aesthetic structures. Indeed, part of the difficulty of the late
fiction especially The Ambassadors, The Wings of
the Dove, and The Golden Bowl is the way their
various complexities of theme, plot, character,
and moral seem to be generated by the syntax of
their sentences. Each of these novels has its own
highly individualized syntax; a detailed reading of
the sentences of these texts could be shown to
produce an account of their respective innovations to the form of the novel.
Criticism of James has often returned to a few
major themes: the confrontation between Europe
and America, for example, or the depredations of
innocence by experience. As thematic renderings
of Jamess texts, such accounts are accurate; there
641
is a certain uniformity of theme across the entire

corpus. But, insofar as they are thematic, they
miss what is most interesting about James.
Of the celebrated themes, the confrontation of
innocence and experience is perhaps the most
promising, but not because of any moralized
account of the fiction it might produce. Striking
in the texts about childhood and initiation is the
tendency for any moralized account to disappear
into the unfathomable nature of initiation itself.
Jamess autobiographies present analogous initiations, where the ostensible object of inquiry
becomes only more elusive in the account of
development that is meant to explain it. (Perhaps
like any great autobiography of a writer, they
throw in question teleologies of aesthetic development.) One can read such concerns as
themes only to the extent that one presupposes
that there are psychologies in the texts to undergo them. To dwell on such complications is
not to say that the texts are removed from the
world. Not the least consequential of the effects of
the depsychologizing of consciousness in relation
to the theme of innocence, for example, is a
radical intervention in a sexual ideology the
ideology, precisely, of a childhood sexual innocence that, articulated in the Victorian period, has
been roiled to a fever pitch of eroticism today.
Jamess career-long interest in children ought to
be read in relation to the innovations of his style.
After the publication of the late novels, James
turned his attention to the revision of his works
for The New York Edition, the monumental reissue, between 1906 and 1910, of selected novels
and tales. Each volume was accompanied by a
photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn and a
preface by James. These prefaces, later collected
by R. P. Blackmur as The Art of the Novel (1934),
are oblique, playful, and often opaque among
the most important works of criticism of the
novel. Often framed as accounts of the genesis
of the texts they preface, they present an aesthetic
system whose unity is to be found perhaps less in
any overarching theoretical articulations (where,
indeed, James can be bafflingly, if fascinatingly,
contradictory) than in the movements of these
contradictions, and in the particular opacities and
shifting intensities of his style. (Notably, the best
recent reading of these texts by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick traces the movements of various
groups of invested terms and syllables.) In the
642
JAMES, HENRY
years before his death, James completed a series of

texts The American Scene, the first two volumes
of the autobiography, and a series of essays that
contemplate the war, the literary life, and the
reach of literary language that are now considered by many to form a fourth period after the socalled major phase. James became a British citizen
in 1915 and died on February 28, 1916.
From early encounters (memorably detailed in
the autobiography) with figures such as Ralph
Waldo Emerson, William Thackeray, and (somewhat later) George Eliot and Henry Lewes to
his important friendships with, among many
others, Edmund Gosse, William Dean Howells,
Robert Louis Stevenson, Constance Fenimore
Woolson, and Edith Wharton, Jamess life intersects the lives of some of the most important
literary figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Somewhat strangely, this most
prolific and most fully realized of literary lives
has often been read as an instance of a thwarted
existence for earlier critics because he never
married, and for later ones because of a sense that
his same-sex desires were left unfulfilled. Assertions by his later biographers that he did have
sex with particular men have been controversial;
recent scholarship, however, and the publication
of several collections of his letters to young
men, have made those same-sex desires, and a
richly articulated relation to them, a matter,
simply, of public record. Following the groundbreaking work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, sexuality and particularly same-sex desire are now
ineffaceable aspects of any serious criticism of his
life and work. Perhaps the most salutary effects of
this shift has been the ways that by liberating
criticism from the need to prove the relevance of
homosexuality, it has also decentered sexually
oriented criticism, allowing it to perceive intensities of desire and sociality not governed by the
monolithic opposition between hetero- and
homosexuality, and that by freeing critics from
homophobic assumptions about the writers life,
it has allowed criticism to turn away from a
biography that, however fascinating in its own
terms, can, as the presumed reference for the texts
exploration of sexuality, only obscure the more
important sexual resonances of Jamess style.
Influential biographies of James have been written
by Leon Edel, Sheldon Novick, Fred Kaplan, and
(of the entire James family) R. W. B. Lewis.
Jamess texts pose certain editorial dilemmas

because they were often published in serial form,
in (sometimes conflicting, sometimes even multiple) English and American book versions, and,
in the case of many of the major novels and tales,
in the fully revised versions of The New York
Edition. The differences among these texts are
often considerable, and modern editors have to
decide, on inevitably partial theoretical grounds,
which to follow.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer
Modernism (AF); Wharton, Edith (AF)
Bersani, L. (2008). The It in the I. In L. Bersani & A.
Philips, Intimacies. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 130.
Bersani, L. (1976). The Jamesian Lie. In A Future for
Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston:
Little, Brown, pp. 12855.
Cameron, S. (1989). Thinking in Henry James. Chicago:
Edel, L. (195372). Henry James, 5 vols. Philadelphia:
Lippincott.
Holland, L. (1972). The Expense of Vision: Essays on the
Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
James, H. (1875). Roderick Hudson. Boston: Osgood.
James, H. (1879). Hawthorne. London: Macmillan.
James, H. (1881). The Portrait of a Lady. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
James, H. (1886a). The Bostonians. London: Macmillan.
James, H. (1886b). The Princess Casamassima.
James, H. (1890). The Tragic Muse. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
James, H. (1897a). The Spoils of Poynton. London:
Heinemann.
James, H. (1897b). What Maisie Knew. Chicago:
Herbert Stone.
James, H. (1899). The Awkward Age. London:
Heinemann.
James, H. (1902). The Wings of the Dove. New York:
Scribners.
James, H. (1903a). The Ambassadors. New York:
Harper.
James, H. (1904). The Golden Bowl. New York:
Scribners.
James, H. (1907). The American Scene. London:
Chapman and Hall.
James, H. (1913). A Small Boy and Others. New York:
Scribners.
JOHNSON, CHARLES
James, H. (1914). Notes of a Son and Brother. New York:

Scribners.
James, H. (1934). The Art of the Novel (intro. R. P.
Blackmur). New York: Scribners.
James, H. (1999). Complete Short Fiction vols. 15.
New York: Library of America.
Kaplan, F. (1992). Henry James: The Imagination of
Genius. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Kurnick, D. (2005). Horrible Impossible: Henry
Jamess Awkward Stage. Henry James Review, 26,
10929.
Lewis, R. W. B. (1991). The Jameses: A Family Narrative.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
McWhirter, D. (ed.) (1995). Henry Jamess New York
Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Novick, S. (2007). Henry James: The Mature Master.
Ohi, K. (2004). Narrating the Childs Queerness in
What Maisie Knew. In S. Bruhm & N. Hurley (eds.),
Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
pp. 81106.
Ohi, K. (in press). Henry James and the Queerness of
Style. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). The Beast in the Closet: James
and the Writing of Homosexual Panic. In
Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of
California Press, pp. 182212.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Shame, Theatricality, and Queer
Performativity: Henry Jamess The Art of the Novel. In
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 3565.
Teahan, S. (1995). The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James.
Walker, P. A. (ed.) (1999). Henry James on Culture:
Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social
Scene. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Walker, P. A., & Zacharias, G. W. (eds.) (2006). The
Complete Letters of Henry James. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press.
Yeazell, R. B. (1976). Language and Knowledge in the
Late Novels of Henry James. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Johnson, Charles
GARY STORHOFF
Charles Johnson is one of the most innovative,

profound, and challenging writers in contemporary America. The author of four novels and three
volumes of short stories, Johnson combines
Western and Eastern philosophy and religion,
revises African American and canonical American
643
literary texts, and fuses magic realism with American history a creation he calls a philosophical
black fiction.
Johnson was born on April 23, 1948 in Evanston, Illinois and graduated from Southern
Illinois University. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University, State University of New York, and became the S. Wilson
and Grace M. Pollack Distinguished Professor of
Creative Writing at the University of Washington.
Besides numerous awards and fellowships, he
received the MacArthur Fellowship (the Genius
Grant) in 1998.
Faith and the Good Thing (1974) demonstrates
Johnsons brilliantly eclectic style and his exceptional philosophical range. Johnson merges the
naturalist style of Richard Wright with the magic
realism of Jorge Borges in a philosophical investigation of the contemporary African American
experience. The eponymous protagonist, Faith
Cross, searches throughout her life for the Good
Thing, only to discover it in a Buddhist relinquishing of the self in favor of an embeddedness in
an infinitely interconnected universe the Buddhist concept of Emptiness. Buddhist themes also
proliferate in his collection of short stories, The
Sorcerers Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations
(1986), yet Johnson also deftly integrates Western
philosophy in these comic stories.
In the Foreword, Johnson refers to his second
novel, Oxherding Tale (1982), as his platform
novel, an allusion to the Sixth Patriarch of Zen
Buddhism, Hui Neng. Johnson imaginatively revises the traditional slave narrative in the story of
Andrew Hawkinss escape not only from slavery,
but also from his own Westernized conception of
an integrated and permanent Self. As with Faith
Cross, Andrew discovers the nature of his spiritual
connection to the cosmos. The nexus of slavery
and personal identity, then, is brilliantly exploded. Besides using these Buddhist themes as organizing principles, Johnson also interrogates the
Western philosophies of Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, and Karl Marx.
In his 1990 National Book Award winner
Middle Passage, Johnson again revises African
American literary traditions by focusing on the
Middle Passage, the shipment of slaves from their
capture in Africa to their enslavement in America.
The novels plot centers on an onboard slave
revolt by the Allmuseri, Johnsons imagined
644
JOHNSON, DENIS
African tribe. Before their capture, the Allmuseri

represented an uninterrupted sense of Being,
but when they revolt against the slavers, they
understandably adopt many of their captors
brutal tactics even as the whites slowly begin
to absorb Allmuseris pristine cultural values. In
this way, Johnson dramatizes his theme that the
self is not permanent and even racial identity is an
illusion. Rutherford Calhoun, like Johnsons earlier protagonists, struggles to achieve a fixed sense
of identity, only to discover the illusory nature of
the self. Calhouns personal quest is played out
against the backdrop of Americas own struggle to
define itself. To what extent, Johnson asks, should
America find its identity in its shameful record of
enslaving Africans?
Perhaps Johnsons most deeply moving novel is
Dreamer (1998) about Martin Luther King, Jr.s
civil rights campaign in Chicago, Illinois. The
novels protagonist, Matthew Bishop, is anxious
for Kings safety in the racially charged city, and so
enlists the help of Chaym Smith (an ex-con and a
practicing Buddhist) to act as Kings double in
some public appearances. Although Chaym never
does stand in for King, he becomes slowly transformed morally by being exposed to Kings understanding of the worlds interdependence.
Matthew resembles Johnsons other protagonists because like them, he is a troubled person in
search of an identity, having no father and having
recently lost his mother. Yet in the novel he is also
a foil for King, who is also deeply disturbed about
the apparent failure of his quest for a beloved
community. Johnson does not depict King as a
heroic cultural icon; instead, he is profoundly
tormented on many levels physically uncomfortable in Chicago and missing his family and
spiritually adrift because his Chicago campaign
seems futile. Chicago represents, in Johnsons
novel, Kings Gethsemane moment. In contrast,
Chaym, beset with envy and desire, tries desperately to reform in Kings shadow. Each of these
characters takes refuge in Johnsons syncretistic
merging of Judeo-Christian and Buddhist values.
Johnson returns to the short story form in
Soulcatcher (2000), which consists of stories written to accompany the PBS series Africans in America. Dr. Kings Refrigerator and Other Bedtime
Stories (2005) was partly written for Humanities
Washington, where Seattle writers composed stories on the theme of bedtime reading. He also
wrote Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and

Writing (2002), a collection of philosophical essays. Consistent with his revolutionary approach,
Johnson recently called for a revision of the black
literary tradition in The American Scholar.
Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Wright,
Richard (AF)
Conner, M. C., & Nash, W. R. (eds.) (2007). Charles
Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher. Jackson:
Johnson, C. (1974). Faith and the Good Thing.
New York: Viking.
Johnson, C. (1982). Oxherding Tale. Bloomington:
Johnson, C. (1986). The Sorcerers Apprentice: Tales and
Conjurations. New York: Penguin.
Johnson, C. (1988). Being and Race: Black Writing Since
1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Johnson, C. (1990). Middle Passage. New York:
Atheneum.
Johnson, C. (1998). Dreamer: A Novel. New York:
Scribners.
Johnson, C. (2000). King: The Photobiography of Martin
Luther King, Jr. (photos by B. Adelman). New York:
Viking.
Johnson, C. (2001). Soulcatcher and Other Stories.
New York: Harcourt.
Johnson, C. (2003). Turning the Wheel: Essays on
Buddhism and Writing. New York: Scribners.
Johnson, C. (2005). Dr. Kings Refrigerator and Other
Bedtime Stories. New York: Scribners.
Johnson, C. (2008). The End of the Black American
Narrative. American Scholar, 77(3), 3242.
Little, J. (1997). Charles Johnsons Spiritual Imagination.
McWilliams, J. (ed.) (2005). Passing the Three Gates:
Interviews with Charles Johnson. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Nash, W. R. (2003). Charles Johnsons Fiction. Urbana:
Storhoff, G. (2004). Understanding Charles Johnson.
Johnson, Denis
SCOTT J. JUENGEL
Alternately blessed and burdened by the sobriquet

of a writers writer, Denis Johnson is a
JOHNSON, DENIS
contemporary novelist, poet, and playwright of

astonishing imaginative range and nearly Kierkegaardian vision. While his early stories of addicts
and drifters, and con men and raconteurs, garnered Johnson a cultish following among those
looking for the heir to Burroughs and Bukowski,
his work has also subtly explored the spoils and
savagery of the American empire. With Tree of
Smoke, which won the 2007 National Book
Award, the worlds of the confidence game and
military intelligence were shown to overlap in the
tragedy of the Vietnam War.
The son of a State Department official with the
US Information Agency, Johnson was born in
Munich in 1949 and raised in Tokyo, Manila, and
the northern Virginia suburbs. He entered the
renowned Writers Workshop at the University of
Iowa, and under the tutelage of Raymond Carver
published his first book of poems and nurtured
his descent into alcoholism, eventually bottoming
out in heroin addiction and homelessness. Many
of these latter experiences are distilled in Jesus Son
(1992), a slim collection of stories that established
Johnsons reputation as a contemporary minimalist of the highest order: purportedly assembled to stave off debt to the IRS and the cost of a
second divorce, the 11 interwoven stories follow a
genial addict known only as Fuckhead through
an America recognizable by its bus depots, emergency rooms, drunk tanks, and taverns. In addition to his critically admired fiction, poetry, and
playwriting, Johnson has made an ancillary career
out of taking journalistic sorties to write about the
civil wars in Liberia and Somalia, US occupation
in Iraq and Afghanistan, right-wing militias in
Montana, and the domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph holed up in the caves of North Carolina.
When he is not venturing after stories of rogue
faith and violence, Johnson lives a relatively
reclusive life in northern Idaho with his third
wife, Cindy.
Johnsons novelistic career generally moves
between long, increasingly baroque plots such
as Angels (1983); Already Dead: A California
Gothic (1998); and Tree of Smoke (2007) and
a series of shorter experiments in genre. For
example, Fiskadoro (1985) is postapocalyptic science fiction; The Stars at Noon (1986), a cynical
Americans abroad exercise set in Nicaragua; The
Name of the World (2000), a moody take on the
campus novel; and the recent Nobody Move
645
(2009), a talky, pulpy noir originally serialized in

Playboy. Despite such stylistic variety, the publication of Tree of Smoke demonstrated how
Johnsons oeuvre draws often from an unusually
integrated fictional universe, as many characters
from his previous novels reappear, woven into the
sprawling plot of Johnsons Vietnam tour de
force. So where his first novel, Angels, ends grimly
with its protagonist, Bill Houston, in the gas
chamber, Tree of Smoke returns to Houstons
nightmarish tour of duty alongside his brother,
granting the reader access to what was psychologically and narratively repressed in the earlier
novel. Similarly, one of Tree of Smokes Vietnamese characters, Nguyen Minh, appears in Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991) and may be the
Captain Minh whose helicopter crash into the
China Sea becomes the persistent and searing
memory of the 100-year-old Grandma Wright in
Fiskadoro.
Given Johnsons persistent excavation of faith
and doubt in the context of secular America, it is
not surprising that the nightmare of Vietnam
would prove to be the historical center of his
moral universe. Johnsons is often a world of
purgatorial drifters, men and women who know
they are guilty but have yet to meet their fates.
The unnamed and nihilistic narrator of The Stars
at Noon travels to Managua to learn the exact
dimensions of Hell and finds herself involved in
black markets, industrial espionage, and prostitution. As their titles intimate, Resuscitation of a
Hanged Man and Already Dead have failed suicides as central characters, while other novels
involve men pursued by hit men (Already Dead
and Nobody Move), widowers so numb with
sudden grief that they have become ghostly
themselves (The Name of the World and Tree of
Smoke), and myriad variations on the living
dead. But life suspended does not preclude the
desire for grace, and Johnson the recovering
addict has more than once dedicated a novel
To H.P., that Higher Power that promises
meaning at the far side of doubt. Johnsons
fictions typically end gesturing toward some
future salvation, even if, as Bill Houstons lawyer
muses at the end of Angels, that was just a story,
something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence
inside a man to wear him away, or to be
consumed itself. The fate of this consuming
646
JONES, EDWARD P.
violence structures Tree of Smoke, which turns

the Vietnam War into a tangle of alibis and
intelligences, all competing to impose certainty,
quite literally at any cost. Where Jesus Son
offered luminous and incantatory tales of
Americas lost and yet unfound, who collectively
cope with what its narrator calls that helpless,
destined feeling, Tree of Smoke demonstrates
how such a feeling can become the stuff of
national export and the dangerous principle of
godforsaken history.
SEE ALSO: Carver, Raymond (AF); Naturalist
Fiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF);

Champion, J. (2000). Denis Johnsons Strange Light. In
S. VanZanten Gallagher & M. D. Wallhout (eds.),
Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere.
Connors, P. (2008). Denis Johnsons Higher Power.
Virginia Quarterly Review, 84(1), 2517.
Johnson, D. (1982). The Incognito Lounge, and Other
Poems. New York: Random House.
Johnson, D. (1983). Angels. New York: Knopf.
Johnson, D. (1985). Fiskadoro. New York: Knopf.
Johnson, D. (1986). The Stars at Noon. New York:
Knopf.
Johnson, D. (1987). The Veil. New York: Knopf.
Johnson, D. (1991). Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.
Johnson, D. (1992). Jesus Son: Stories. New York:
Johnson, D. (1995). The Throne of the Third Heaven of
the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems
Collected and New. New York: Harper Perennial.
Johnson, D. (1998). Already Dead: A California Gothic.
New York: Harper Perennial.
Johnson, D. (2000). The Name of the World: A Novel.
New York: Methuen.
Johnson, D. (2001). Seek: Reports from the Edges of
America and Beyond. New York: HarperCollins.
Johnson, D. (2002). Shoppers: Two Plays. New York:
Harper Perennial.
Johnson, D. (2007). Tree of Smoke. New York:
Picador.
Johnson, D. (2009). Nobody Move: A Novel. New York:
Parrish, T. L. (2001). Denis Johnsons Jesus Son: To
Kingdom Come. Critique: Studies in Contemporary
Fiction, 43(1), 1729.
Reitenbach, G. (1991). Foreign Exchange in Denis

Johnsons The Stars at Noon. Arizona Quarterly,
47(4), 2747.
Jones, Edward P.
JAMES ROBERT SAUNDERS
Edward P. Jones creates fiction that focuses on the

circumstances of the most underprivileged in
society, particularly poor blacks in the Washington, DC area, a group to which he belonged for a
significant period of his own life. His two short
story collections Lost in the City (2003b) and All
Aunt Hagars Children (2006) fit into this vein,
recapitulating the lives of inner-city DC blacks.
His one novel, The Known World (2003a), does
not venture far from that city, set as it is in the
fictional Manchester County, Virginia, where the
underprivileged this time are black slaves, especially intriguing because their owners also are
black. Wherever he might have traveled in his
life, the author always returns to this general
venue, providing, when his work is taken as a
whole, a penetrating look at this geographical and
emotional landscape.
The author was born in Washington, DC on
October 5, 1950 and understands this city so well
in large part due to having moved so much from
one place to another while his mother struggled to
raise him and her two other children on a restaurant dishwashers salary. All of Joness books are
dedicated to that mother. If I write more, he
declares, I will dedicate them to her as well. It is a
small, small thing to do for ones creator (2005,
142). The short stories themselves are laced with
her presence, particularly ones such as The First
Day from Lost and Spanish in the Morning
from Hagars. In both of those stories, readers
witness the arbitrariness of education as family
elders are embattled with the dilemma of what
quality of school an offspring will be able to
attend.
There is a certain irony involved in all that
because Joness mother, who died when he was
24 years old, was illiterate. She had desperately
sought to enroll her son in Catholic school but
was unable to afford it. So, from the first grade
through the twelfth, Jones attended DC public
schools and, as if through an act of divine intervention, won a scholarship, in the late 1960s, to
JONES, GAYL
attend the College of the Holy Cross, and then, in

the late 1970s, he won a fellowship to do graduate
work at the University of Virginia.
In talking about the Virginia educational experience, Jones has said, I tended to get more out of
the literature courses. One in particular was The
Bible and Literature, where for the first time I read
the entire Bible (2000, 96). That Virginia experience, combined with his own upbringing, has
evolved into a great deal of religious ambiguity in
the authors fiction. It is, for example, curious that
Jones would, in His Mothers House, give a
murderous drug dealer the name Santiago Moses.
In Known, a slave named Moses is ready and
willing to send his wife and son away so that he
can have a chance to marry the new head of the
plantation, whose husband has recently died.
Lord, Moses, his helpless wife moans, why
you throwin us away like this? (2003a, 296). It
is almost as if, in order to understand it all, one has
to be as wise as Laverne Shepherds grandmothers
in The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River,
women who had come to know the Devil so well
that he, in all his guises, called them always by
their childhood nicknames (2006, 272).
These and the other black people who inhabit
Joness fiction might be said to be all Aunt
Hagars children, evolving from their tragic origins in search of a better world. They came from
Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi,
Tennessee, and other Southern states, traveling to
places like DC, their journey being part and parcel
of the black migration that began just after the
Civil War and lasted, with great fervor, well into
the 1960s. What Jones chronicles in his fiction is a
certain loss that occurred in that century-long
migration process. Critics J. Gerald Kennedy and
Robert Beuka contend that the black denizens of
Joness capital seem as estranged from each other
as they are from the nation and its narrative (16).
In other words, for many black Americans, DC
did not turn out to be anything near the Promised
Land espoused in either the stories that they had
heard back home or the idealistic credos that they
had recited in their schoolroom devotions.
As imperiled as the black community might in
some respects be, Jones does not indicate that,
without a doubt, all is lost. In one story from Lost,
The Store, the author has a mother-like storeowner adopt the community, giving credit to
those who need it, and finally transferring own-
647
ership over to a young man who will more than

likely continue her altruism. Another story,
Common Law from Hagars, has residents in
a neighborhood join together to run off the
abusive boyfriend of Georgia Evans. The community literally chases him until he got to 4th Street
and turned the corner and the children and the
grown-ups stopped following him but continued
to shout Boos and each one rained down upon
him (2006, 235).
Jones has won accolades such as the PEN/
Hemingway Award as well as grants from the
Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment
for the Arts for Lost. Subsequently, he has won the
Pulitzer Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award,
the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a
MacArthur Fellowship, all for Known.
and Fiction (AF)
Jackson, L. P. (2000). An Interview with Edward P.
Jones. African American Review, 34(1), 95103.
Jones, E. P. (2003a). The Known World. New York:
Amistad.
Jones, E. P. (2003b). Lost in the City. New York:
Amistad.
Jones, E. P. (2005). In the Name of the Mother. Essence,
36(8), 140, 142.
Jones, E. P. (2006). All Aunt Hagars Children.
New York: Amistad.
Kennedy, J. G., & Beuka, R. (2001). Imperiled
Communities in Edward P. Joness Lost in the City
and Dagoberto Gilbs The Magic of Blood. Yearbook of
English Studies, 31, 1023.
Packer, Z. Z. (2001). Z. Z. Packer Talks With Edward P.
Jones. In V. Vida (ed.), The Believer Book of Writers
Talking to Writers. San Francisco: Believer,
pp. 13357.
Saunders, J. R. (2007). A World of Irony in the Fiction
of Edward P. Jones. Hollins Critic, 44(3), 110.
Jones, Gayl
DEBORAH M. MIX
Gayl Jones has written in a variety of genres, but

she is best known for her novels, most notably her
first, Corrigedora (1975). Joness work insists on
the significance of the past in both its painful
648
JONES, GAYL
and celebratory manifestations to the present,

especially for black women. Textual experimentation, particularly the use of the conventions of
African American oral narrative and music, is
central to Joness aesthetic. Her work also reflects
her interest in both North and South American
history; in a 1982 interview, she discussed her
interest in Brazilian history, which informs several of her works, asserting that the Brazilian
experience (purely literary and imaginative since
Ive never been there) helped to give perspective
on the American one (Rowell 41).
Jones was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1949,
and grew up surrounded by women who were
writers. She attended Connecticut College and
Brown University, where she earned graduate
degrees and found guidance in poet Michael
Harper, who was instrumental in getting Corrigedora published. After a short but impressive
period teaching at Wellesley College and the
University of Michigan, Jones and her husband
immigrated to Germany for a few years during
the 1980s. They returned to Lexington in 1988; an
altercation between her husband and the police
led to his suicide and her temporary institutionalization in 1998. Since the late 1990s, Jones has
lived and continued to write in Lexington.
With Corrigedora, Jones established herself as an
important literary talent and won glowing reviews.
The novels protagonist, Ursa Corrigedora, is a
blues singer who seeks to pass on her familys
history particularly its matrilineal history of
slavery and abuse at the hands of a cruel nineteenth-century Brazilian plantation owner named
Corrigedora through song. In doing so, Ursa, like
Jones herself, weaves together oral and written
narrative techniques to plumb the complicated
legacies of this history. Jones returns repeatedly to
the subjects of slavery and race relations in the
Americas throughout her literary career.
Her next novel, Evas Man (1976), was the
subject of some controversy, with reviewers raising
concern that its protagonist, who is institutionalized after murdering and then castrating her
abuser, fed into stereotypes of vindictive black
women. However, others have asserted that the
novel interrogates those stereotypes to plumb the
vexed intersections of black female sexuality and
agency. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s,
Jones continued to publish prolifically: a collection
of short stories, White Rat (1977); another novel
published only in Germany, Die Volgelfaengerin

(The Birdwatcher, 1985); and three volumes of
poetry, Songs for Anninho (1981), The HermitWoman (1983), and Xarque and Other Poems
(1985), all appeared within a span of eight years.
Clabough (2006) and other critics have noted
Joness use of the grotesque in her work, arguing
that its aesthetic allows Jones to dramatize the
competing forces of oppression and liberation. In
general, however, the works between Corrigedora
and her late-1990s novelshave received littlecritical
attention, and her poetry has received almost none.
In 1991, Jones published a book-length work of
criticism, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in
African American Literature, in which she considers the work of a variety of African American
authors from Paul Dunbar and Langston Hughes
to Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, considering
the ways both spoken and musical orality inflect
their work. These authors, she argues, must balance between the demand to reflect traditional
forms and the drive to invent new ways of responding to the contemporary, a balancing act
that is likewise part of Joness aesthetic.
Joness most recent novels, The Healing (1998)
and Mosquito (1999), received positive notices,
but their publication and the fact that The
Healing was a finalist for the National Book
Award was little remarked due to the tragic
events in Joness personal life. Taken together,
these books suggest an optimistic turn in Joness
work. The Healing is the story of an itinerant faith
healer, Harlan Jane Eagleton, whose first patient is
herself: when you discover you can heal yourself,
that you simply put your hand to a wound and it
heals, you soon discover that you can heal others
(281). Her story is bound throughout the novel to
the Brazilian myth of Jaboti, the trickster turtlewoman. Mosquitos titular protagonist is a truck
driver who, among other things, transports illegal
immigrants from Mexico into the US. Building on
Joness other work, Mosquito articulates a hemispheric, internationalist vision of America, one
that values ethnically diverse feminist perspectives. In doing so, Jones delivers on the vision she
offered in 1982 and offers a crucial example of
what she describes in a 1994 essay written in the
voice of an African American novel: I am a multicultural, Afro-centric Afro-eccentric novel. I am
as ancient as storytelling itself and as human as
storytelling (510).
JONES, GAYL
SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender

and the Novel (AF); Morrison, Toni (AF);
Walker, Alice (AF)

Callaloo. (1982). Gayl Jones, Poet and Fictionist:
A Special Section. Callaloo, 16, 32111.
Clabough, C. (2006). Speaking the Grotesque: The
Short Fiction of Gayl Jones. Southern Literary
Journal, 38(2), 7496.
Coser, S. (1995). Bridging the Americas: The Literature of
Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Jones, G. (1975). Corrigedora. New York: Random
House.
Jones, G. (1976). Evas Man. New York: Random
House.
Jones, G. (1977). White Rat: Short Stories. New York:
Random House.
649
Jones, G. (1981). Song for Anninho. Detroit: Lotus.

Jones, G. (1983). The Hermit-Woman: Poems. Detroit:
Lotus.
Jones, G. (1985). Xarque and Other Poems. Detroit:
Lotus.
Jones, G. (1991). Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in
African American Literature. Cambridge, MA:
Jones, G. (1994). From the Quest for Wholeness:
Re-Imagining the African-American Novel: An
Essay on Third-World Aesthetics. Callaloo, 17,
50718.
Jones, G. (1998). The Healing. Boston: Beacon.
Jones, G. (1999). Mosquito. Boston: Beacon.
Mills, F. (ed.) (2006). After the Pain: Critical Essays on
Gayl Jones. New York: Peter Lang.
Robinson, S. (1991). Engendering the Subject:
Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary
Womens Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press.
Rowell, C. H. (1982). An Interview with Gayl Jones.
Callaloo, 16, 3253.
K
Kennedy, William
MICHAEL PATRICK GILLESPIE
William Kennedy was born in Albany, New York

in 1928. He grew up in a predominately Irish
Catholic neighborhood, attended Sienna College,
and worked briefly as a sportswriter for the Post
Star in Glen Falls, New York. He was drafted into
the Army in 1950, where he worked as a journalist
in Europe, and after his discharge became
a reporter for the Times-Union newspaper in
Albany. In 1956 he relocated to Puerto Rico and
became managing editor of the San Juan Star in
1959. There he met Saul Bellow, who encouraged
his literary aspirations, and Dana Sosa, whom he
married and with whom he had three children.
In 1961 Kennedy left journalism to devote
himself to writing fiction. In 1963 he wrote
a series of newspaper profiles of Albany neighborhoods later collected in his non-fiction O Albany!
(1983b). This collection and the companion
volume, Riding the Yellow Trolley Car (1993),
provide an excellent background of the Albany
milieu, particularly between World Wars I and II,
for any reader seeking a detailed sense of the
world from which Kennedys fiction emerges.
Kennedys first novel, The Ink Truck (1969), draws
on his own experiences as a journalist and offers
a unsparing view of a contemporary newspaper
strike in an unnamed city resembling Albany.
The central concern of Kennedys fiction, comprising a century-long chronicle of the intertwining features of political, criminal, and commercial
life in Albany, emerged six years later. In 1975,
he published Legs, a fictionalized account set
primarily in Albany of the life and death of the

Prohibition gangster Jack Legs Diamond. Its
gritty exposition and unsentimental humanity set
the tone for all his subsequent works. Kennedy
followed that with a novel about a Depression-era
gambler, Billy Phelans Greatest Game, which
appeared in 1978. The tawdriness of Billys life
would seem unremarkable were it not for
Kennedys unflinching ability to understand and
convey the complex code of honor that governed
the lives of Billy and all with whom he associated.
In 1983, Kennedy published his most acclaimed
work, Ironweed, the account of Billys father
Francis, a one-time major league baseball player
who abandoned his family and became a hobo
after the tragic death of his infant son. The novel
takes up issues of damnation and redemption
without straining for resolution or submitting to
sentimentality. Its profound sense of human dignity and human weakness makes it a powerful
account of the underside of urban life. Four years
later a film version of Ironweed, authored by
Kennedy, appeared, and three years earlier, he
wrote the script for The Cotton Club with Francis
Ford Coppola. These three novels mark the beginning of what has been called the Albany
cycle, and for over 30 years Kennedy has used
his native city, much the way James Joyce used
Dublin, as the fertile source of narrative engagement with fundamental human concerns.
Kennedys next Albany novel, Quinns Book
(1988), expands the scope outlined in the first
three books, moving backward to the pre- and
post-Civil War era and providing the biographical
background of the Phelans and other families so

KEROUAC, JACK
prominent in the novels set in the twentieth

century. Very Old Bones, published in 1992, brings
the chronicle of the Phelan family into the 1950s
and examines the lives of the generation after
Francis in their middle age. The Flaming Corsage
(1996a) offers a detailed account of the events
spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and provides
readers with a clear sense of the near fatalistic
forces set in motion then that continued to influence Kennedys central figures over the first half of
the twentieth century.
Two works the play Grand View, first produced in 1996, and his novel Roscoe (2002)
cover World War II politics in Albany. They
neatly complement one another and give readers
a sense of the totems and taboos of the rich
social environment that informed Kennedys
world. Although these works focus on politicians
living in a seemingly different world from the
working-class figures who populate most of his
fiction, their behavior and attitudes present a
clear delineation of the forces and beliefs that
shape the lives of all of the citizens of Kennedys
Albany.
In 1983 Kennedy received a Pulitzer Prize and
a National Book Critics Circle Award for
Ironweed. In the same year, he was awarded
a MacArthur Fellowship, and part of that money
went to create the New York State Writers Institute. Kennedy is the executive director of the
Institute and continues to live and write in Albany
with his wife, Dana.
SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); The City in
Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF)
Giamo, B. F. (1997). The Homeless of Ironweed:
Blossoms on the Crag. Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press.
Gillespie, M. P. (2001). Reading William Kennedy.
Kennedy, W. (1969). The Ink Truck. New York: Dial.
Kennedy, W. (1975). Legs. New York: CowardMcCann.
Kennedy, W. (1978). Billy Phelans Greatest Game.
New York: Viking.
Kennedy, W. (1983a). Ironweed. New York: Viking.
Kennedy, W. (1983b). O Albany! Improbable City of
Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular
651
Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated

Scoundrels. New York: Viking.
Kennedy, W. (1987). Ironweed. Los Angeles: Tri-Star.
Kennedy, W. (1988). Quinns Book. New York:
Viking.
Kennedy, W. (1992). Very Old Bones. New York: Viking.
Kennedy, W. (1993). Riding the Yellow Trolley Car.
New York: Viking.
Kennedy, W. (1996a). The Flaming Corsage. New York:
Viking.
Kennedy, W. (1996b). Grand View. Premiered at
Capital Repertory Theatre, Albany, NY.
Kennedy, W. (2002). Roscoe. New York: Viking.
Kennedy, W. (with Coppola, F. F.) (1986). The Cotton
Club. New York: St. Martins.
Lynch, V. V. (1999). Portraits of Artists: Warriors in the
Novels of William Kennedy. Bethesda, MD:
International Scholars.
Marowski, D. G., & Matur, R. (1989). William Kennedy.
Contemporary Literary Criticism 53, 189201.
Michener, C. (1998). From Then Into Now: William
Kennedys Albany Novels. Scranton, PA: University of
Scranton Press.
Reilly, E. C. (1991). William Kennedy. Boston: Twayne.
Seshachari, N. C. (ed.) (1997). Conversations With
William Kennedy. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Van Dover, J. K. (1991). Understanding William
Kennedy. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press.
Kerouac, Jack
MATT THEADO
Jack Kerouac was a leading figure among the

Beat Generation writers of the 1950s. Over 30 of
Kerouacs works are in print, and he remains one
of the most popular American novelists of the
twentieth century. His 1957 novel, On the Road,
inspired numerous young people to spurn
conventional middle-class lives and instead to
embark on impulsive adventures and spiritual
quests. As a result, Kerouac is sometimes called
the daddy of the hippies and the father of the
counterculture. He did not relish these titles and
wished to be known instead as an innovative
writer, yet many of his fans are as interested in
his life as in his work; he is the subject of no fewer
than 15 biographies. Kerouac saw religious significance in many of the wandering folks he met
on the road: hobos, petty criminals, drug addicts,
and also, as he wrote in On the Road, the mad
652
KEROUAC, JACK
ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,

mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the
same time, the ones who never yawn or say
a commonplace thing (1957, 8). Kerouac is
associated today in the popular culture with
such people, and with adventurous travel via
such nonconventional means as train-hopping
and hitchhiking.
Jean Louis Kerouac was born on March 12,
1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third and
last child of Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, both
of French Canadian descent. Kerouac grew up
speaking French in the tenement-house neighborhoods of the working-class mill town. A fine
high school athlete, Kerouac excelled in track,
baseball, and football. Columbia University
offered Kerouac a football scholarship upon
graduation from high school in 1939, so he
traveled to New York, one of the cities with which
he would be most associated, and where he would
meet other figures who comprised the Beat Generation, including another Columbia student,
Allen Ginsberg, as well as William Burroughs,
Neal Cassady, and Gregory Corso. Their artistically formative years were characterized by drugs,
personal tragedy, World War II, travel, and, for
Ginsberg and Kerouac at least, an all-encompassing devotion to writing. Kerouac himself would
label his generation as Beat, a term he picked up
from a Times Square hustler and yarn-spinner,
who used the word to mean beaten, as in a bad
deal, or just plain down and out. Kerouac saw
religious significance in the term, merging its
meanings with the Beatitudes of his Catholic
upbringing.
In his first novel, The Town and the City (1950),
Kerouac applied the lyricism of Thomas Wolfe to
the frenetic atmosphere of wartime New York
City. As in Wolfes novel Look Homeward, Angel,
Kerouacs story initially concerns a large familys
home town, modeled on Lowell, and the familys
various escapades. However, as the title implies,
the story moves from the home town to the
modern city, and the tone shifts to match
the neurotic complexity of the environment. The
novel ends with the garrulous, hardworking
fathers death, paralleling the circumstances in
Kerouacs family, and with one of the brothers
heading out on the road. In Kerouacs vision,
girded by his reading of Oswald Spenglers The
Decline of the West, the good-natured simplicity of
the town has given way to the modern urban

world of malevolence and complexity.
In the ensuing years, Kerouac wrote constantly,
although he had no luck finding publishers. There
are several reasons for his difficulty. First of all, he
changed his approach to writing after his first
novel. The Town and the City is a conventional
novel, featuring well-drawn characters, established settings, and a prose manner that, while
highly lyrical, was also structured along the principles of typical novelistic technique. His next
novel, On the Road, represents his break from
Wolfes influence and a discovery of his own
material and style. Working from notes taken
during years of traveling, he wrote the novel
quickly, in 21 days in April 1951, and the rush
of typing allowed him to find his voice in a jazzy,
conversational monologue that vacillates between
joy and despair. Instead of creating fictional characters and contrived scenes, Kerouac chose his
material directly from events in his life, employing
first-person narration that slipped from external
descriptions to internal monologues. After this
breakthrough, Kerouac composed novels that
were even more innovative that he referred to as
true-story novels written in his new style, which
he called spontaneous prose. These new works
baffled publishers, who thought the novels were
sketchy, plotless, and artless. When asked to revise
them into conventional form, Kerouac refused,
earning a reputation as being difficult to work
with. Instead of exhibiting a willingness to craft
his work to suit the publishers, Kerouac instead
put forth a steadfast confidence in his works as he
had written them.
Finally, thanks to various literary advisors and
editors, Viking Press published On the Road,
the most accessible of Kerouacs new work. The
book created a sensation in the press and became
a bestseller, establishing Kerouac as an important
though controversial writer and also as a celebrity.
The books success opened the doors for his other,
more stylistically innovative works. None of them
matched the financial success of On the Road,
though. His most famous book centers on a basic
plot: two buddies hit the road in search of girls,
good times, and the joy of escape on Americas
highways in the post-World War II era. Along
the way, the first-person narrator, identified
closely with Kerouac, discovers the downside of
purposeless travel, the despondency of endless
KEROUAC, JACK
kick-seeking. His finest insights come when he is

at his most bleak, when the money is gone and
the friends are elsewhere. Ultimately, the novel
subjugates the cold austerity of the road to the
warm sweetness of home, but most readers prize
the exploits along the way and see the attainment
of temporary joy as worth the hardships of the
road.
The Subterraneans (1958b) is an example of his
fully developed spontaneous prose style. Written
in three days in 1953, the novel relates a recently
concluded affair with a young black woman in
New York City. This book conveys far fewer
pleasant emotional moments than does On the
Road. The spontaneous prose style conveys the
narrators doubts, weaknesses, and second
thoughts. Instead of exuberance, his drinking
frequently brings on only boorishness. In short,
the style and themes are so different from those of
On the Road and The Town and the City that one
might assume three different writers had produced them. However, these books represent
Kerouacs stylistic development as a writer from
the late 1940s into the early 1950s.
The publication of other spontaneous prose
books followed rapidly: Doctor Sax (1959a),
Kerouacs recounting of adolescence and the
1934 Lowell flood; Maggie Cassidy (1959b),
Kerouacs description of a high school love affair;
and Tristessa (1960), his treatment of his relationship with a Mexican junkie. In employing spontaneous prose, Kerouac wrote quickly, digging
into his memories and feelings as he crafted long,
flowing sentences that are typically separated by
dashes rather than periods. He relates ideas from
other times in his life, even if these thoughts
would not be permissible in traditional narratives.
For example, Kerouac sometimes writes of the
moment of composition itself, mentioning what
music he listens to as he types, thus imbuing the
work with freshness and a tight connection between the act of composition and the experience
of reading. Kerouac claimed that his technique
had many sources, including the stories his mother told when he was young, the letter-writing style
of Neal Cassady, and the extemporaneous musical
explorations of jazz musicians. His method also
parallels the process of psychoanalysis, a popular
practice at the time for exploring ones submerged
memories and feelings. Kerouac determined early
in the 1950s that his various books would
653
ultimately comprise one great work, dubbed The

Duluoz Legend after his fictive alter ego.
Tristessa also features Kerouacs interest in
Buddhism, which is developed as well in Visions
of Gerard (1963), Kerouacs account of the last
days of his older brother, Gerard, who died at
age 9. Although the story is set in Lowells
Catholic schools, Kerouac fills the story with his
perspective on Buddhist doctrines. Some critics
believe the Buddhist influences belie the working-class, Catholic roots of the story, but Kerouac maintained that he was seeing afresh the
tragic events of his childhood. His awareness of
Buddhism resulted from his self-teaching, and
he contended with his friends, some of whom
were Buddhists, over the proper approaches
and interpretations of Buddhism. Undoubtedly
Kerouac helped to popularize the awareness of
Buddhism in America, particularly with The
Dharma Bums (1958a). This book was not a
spontaneous prose work; Kerouac wrote it in a
style similar to that of On the Road to satisfy
Viking editors, who were eager to repeat their
success on the bestseller lists. Like On the Road,
The Dharma Bums is essentially a buddy story,
only instead of hitting the road, the young
men hit the trail to some of the west coasts
highest mountain peaks. Kerouac inspired a
spiritually based back-to-nature movement, one
that Kerouac himself referred to as a rucksack
revolution. The book includes a portrayal of the
legendary Six Gallery Poetry Reading during
which Ginsberg first read his long poem Howl
in public. This event heralded the San Francisco
poetry renaissance.
Some of Kerouacs most mature writing
appears in Desolation Angels (1965), a book he
worked on over several years at different times.
Originally conceived as two distinct books, Desolation Angels covers the summer of 1956, when
Kerouac worked as a fire lookout high in the
Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington,
and then his return to his Beat Generation friends
in San Francisco. The mountaintop sections feature interior monologues and fine nature writing
as well as haiku poems interspersed through the
prose. The sections that describe his return to
civilization are chronological narratives that portray the day-to-day goings-on among the writers
and poets and painters of San Francisco in the
mid- to late 1950s.
654
KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG
Kerouac continued to flesh out the Duluoz

Legend with Big Sur (1963), Satori in Paris
(1966), and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). These books
indicate the kind of confessional, loose narratives
that Kerouac might have continued to produce
had he lived. He died on October 21, 1969 at the
age of 47, of complications arising from alcoholism. His finest prose masterpiece was published
after his death in 1972; Visions of Cody is Kerouacs
spontaneous prose retelling of the events of On the
Road. Less well-known than its precursor, it is a
bold and courageous achievement, the pinnacle of
Kerouacs abilities as a writer. Despite his originality in prose, he probably remains best-known as
an American cultural icon of hitchhiking and
carefree traveling, rather than as an important
prose innovator, as he had dreamed.
SEE ALSO: Burroughs, William (AF); Modernist
Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF); Wolfe,
Thomas (AF)
Charters, A. (1973). Kerouac: A Biography. New York:
St. Martins.
Hunt, T. (1981). Kerouacs Crooked Road: Development
of a Fiction. Hamden, CT: Archon.
Kerouac, J. (1950). The Town and the City. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Kerouac, J. (1958a). The Dharma Bums. New York:
Viking.
Kerouac, J. (1958b). The Subterraneans. New York:
Grove.
Kerouac, J. (1959a). Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three.
New York: Grove.
Kerouac, J. (1959b). Maggie Cassidy. New York: Avon.
Kerouac, J. (1960). Tristessa. New York: Avon.
Kerouac, J. (1962). Big Sur. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Cudahy.
Kerouac, J. (1963). Visions of Gerard. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Cudahy.
Kerouac, J. (1965). Desolation Angels. New York:
Coward-McCann.
Kerouac, J. (1966). Satori in Paris. New York: Grove.
Kerouac, J. (1968). Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous
Education. New York: Coward-McCann.
Kerouac, J. (1971). Pic. New York: Grove.
Kerouac, J. (1972). Visions of Cody. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Kerouac, J. (1995a). Selected Letters, 19401956
(ed. A. Charters). New York: Viking.
Kerouac, J. (1995b). Selected Letters, 19571969

(ed. A. Charters). New York: Viking.
Leland, J. (2007). Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons
of On the Road. New York: Viking.
Nicosia, G. (1983). Memory Babe: A Critical Biography
of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove.
Theado, M. (2000). Understanding Jack Kerouac.
Weinreich, R. (1987). Kerouacs Spontaneous Poetics:
A Study of the Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Kingston, Maxine Hong

DEBORAH M. MIX
Best-known for her first work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976),
Maxine Hong Kingston has published seven
books in 30 years. In her memoirs as well as in
her other works, Kingston enacts a politics of
righting wrongs particularly those produced by
racism and sexism by writing them: The
swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. . . What
we have in common are the words at our backs.
The idioms for revenge are report a crime and
report to five families. The reporting is the
vengeance not the beheading, not the gutting,
but the words (1976, 62). Her unique genrecrossing aesthetic, blending memoir, myth, and
fictional narrative, has made her both a celebrated
author and a figure of some controversy.
Born in Stockton, California in 1940, she is the
eldest of six children of Chinese immigrant
parents and grew up speaking a Cantonese dialect at home and working in a family-run laundry. She attended the University of California,
Berkeley, earning both a BA and a teaching
certificate, and at Berkeley she met and married
Earll Kingston, with whom she has one son. The
family moved to Hawaii, and Kingston has lived
and worked there and in California in subsequent years.
The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976 to glowing reviews and quickly became a staple of college
curricula; it won the National Book Critics
Circle Award in 1976 and was named one of
the top 10 non-fiction works of the decade by
Time magazine. It is, as its title suggests, a memoir, one that conceives of its subject as part of a
KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG
community of women the books five chapters

depict Maxine wrestling with the presences and
absences of a variety of women, including her
mother, two aunts, and the Chinese folk hero Fa
Mu Lan. Her second book, China Men, published
in 1980, was conceived as a companion to The
Woman Warrior, and in it Kingston concentrates
on elucidating the stories of her male relatives as
they intersect with her own and with the broader
landscape of American history. These books
weave together memory, history, and invention,
recreating the talk stories that Kingston recalls
from her own childhood. They have become the
subject of some controversy in part due to Kingstons enormous popularity. Some critics most
famously Frank Chin have charged that her
impressionistic and idiosyncratic representations
of Chinese culture and history are irresponsible
and even damaging. However, Kingston has
repeatedly asserted that she is trying to represent
her own experiences, not provide a primer on
Chinese or Chinese American culture.
The protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey: His
Fake Book (1989) represents another thematic
thread in Kingstons works: the trickster. Wittman Ah Sing, the central character, is a beatnik
playwright living in Berkeley, who must, like
Kingston, grapple with the forces of racism and
sexism; the novel concludes with his grand production weaving together a panoply of Western
European and Asian cultural figures and texts.
The novels title alludes to the Chinese trickster
figure of the monkey, thus continuing Kingstons
interest in bringing together the realist and the
mythic in her work.
Her most significant recent work is The Fifth
Book of Peace (2003), part fiction, part memoir,
part history, and of a piece with the work for
which she is best known. In the early 1990s,
Kingston began work on a sequel to Tripmaster
Monkey titled The Fourth Book of Peace, but the
manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1991. In its
place, Kingston offers this hybrid work, which
includes the elements she intended for the lost
Fourth Book of Peace along with the story of the
fires that destroyed her home and the manuscript,
her experiences in writing workshops she ran for
Vietnam veterans and their families (their work is
collected in Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace
[2006], which Kingston edited), and the death
of Kingstons mother, a figure who looms large in
655
The Woman Warrior. It ends with a call for

a literature of peace: Children, everybody, heres
what to do during war: In a time of destruction,
create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One
peaceful moment (2003 402).
Kingstons other recent work, including 11
personal essays in Hawaii One Summer (1987),
the three Harvard lectures collected in To Be the
Poet (2002), and the collected work of Vietnam
veterans and their families with whom Kingston
has worked in various workshops since the early
1990s, has received almost no critical attention. It
is, in the end, The Woman Warrior, and to a lesser
extent China Men and Tripmaster Monkey, that
continue to define her legacy as a writer.
Fiction (AF)

Cheung, K. K. (1990). Articulate Silences: Hisaye
Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa.
Chin, F. (1984). The Most Popular Book in China.
Quilt, 4, 610.
Chu, P. P. (2000). Assimilating Asians: Gendered
Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Grice, H. (2006). Maxine Hong Kingston. Manchester:
Kingston, M. H. (1976). The Woman Warrior:
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York:
Knopf.
Kingston, M. H. (1980). China Men. New York: Knopf.
Kingston, M. H. (1987). Hawaii One Summer. San
Francisco: Meadow.
Kingston, M. H. (1988). Conversations With Maxine
Hong Kingston (ed. P. Skenazy & T. Martin). Jackson:
Kingston, M. H. (1989). Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake
Book. New York: Knopf.
Kingston, M. H. (2002). To Be the Poet. Cambridge,
Kingston, M. H. (2003). The Fifth Book of Peace.
New York: Knopf.
Kingston, M. H. (ed.) (2006). Veterans of War, Veterans
of Peace. Kihei, HI: Koa.
Lim, S. G.-L. (ed.) (1991). Approaches to Teaching
Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior.
New York: MLA.
656
KOSINSKI, JERZY
Skandera-Trombley, L. E. (ed.) (1998). Critical Essays

on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G. K. Hall.
Smith, J. R. (1997). Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols
in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Wong, S.-L. C. (1993). Reading Asian American
Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton:
Kosinski, Jerzy
LUDMIA GRUSZEWSKA BLAIM
For Polish-born novelist Jerzy Kosinski, the

thin line separating fact from fiction was never
significant. Born of Jewish parents in 1933,
Kosinski survived World War II, sheltered by
Polish peasants. In 1957, he arrived in the United
States, where he published two well-received
monographs on communist Russia and his first
novel, The Painted Bird (1965), deemed a masterpiece of Holocaust literature. Encouraged by
initial success, Kosinski became a recognized
writer whose works, praised for evocative representations of totalitarianism, collective mind,
and victimization, were listed beside those of
Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, Richard
Brautigan, and Ken Kesey. His glittering career
of an eccentric but important writer-thinker
in the existentialist mode of Sartre and
Camus (Sloan 1996) was ruined in 1982, when
two reporters from the Village Voice insinuated
that his account of himself and his Holocaust
experience was based on fiction rather than
fact. In the wake of further publications portraying him as an impostor, plagiarist, and pathological liar, Kosinskis literary status rapidly
deteriorated.
The aura of scandal, intensified by Kosinskis
suicide in 1991, partly obscures the innovative
and experimental aspects of his nine novels. Already The Painted Bird, a modern Bildungsroman
focused on a nameless Holocaust child wandering
through a wartime and postwar world of Eastern
European brutes, situates Kosinski among the
literati violating taboo subjects. The novel
abounds with scenes of inordinate violence and
perversion. Its episodic, tripartite composition,
framed by the deathrebirth motif, reflects the
stages of the protagonists deformed socialization
and maturation. The Painted Bird, translated into
all major languages, won the French Prix du

Meilleur Livre E tranger in 1966.
Steps (1968), composed according to nouveau
roman conventions, is a collection of provocative
dialogues and vignettes in which unidentified
narrative voices depict a carnivalized trap-world.
Probing various layers of the narrators memory,
Kosinski presents gruesome shots from different temporal, geographical, and socio-political
realities. The novel won the National Book Award
in 1969.
In the parable-like novelette about a retarded
gardener who becomes the US president,
Kosinski juxtaposes and simultaneously deconstructs the borderline between two ontologically different realities, empiric and cinematic.
Being There (1970), intertwining the dream
and Hollywood screenplay conventions, exposes
the naivety of contemporary society that tends
to invest simulacra with life. For the film adaptation of Being There, Kosinski won two Academy
Awards for Best Screenplay (1979, 1980).
The two versions of The Devil Tree (1973, 1981)
fill the stage of theatrum mundi with actors
rehearsing for spectacles that either glorify or
compromise the American dream. Considering
the plurality of masks and the incongruity of parts
played by most characters, the novel may be read
as a writers notebook whose owner purposefully
meanders between mutually exclusive story lines
and ideologies.
Cockpit (1975), in which conventions of the
confessional and the spy novel coalesce, introduces
a vindictive Homo ludens who plays perverse games
with his victims, including a woman addressee
doomed to listen to his appalling confessions. As
the confessions of the former spy and Eastern
European emigre frequently allude to Kosinskis
biography and lifestyle, the fictional reality becomes
a game in itself, inviting the reader to quest for truth
among obscure hints dropped by the author.
Though still manipulative and vengeful, the
protagonist of Blind Date (1977), Kosinskis alter
ego with an Oedipal past, may easily be reinterpreted as a naive sentimental hero who believes in
justice and the essential goodness of Man. By
imposing an incongruous sentimental dimension
onto the mimetic representation of horrendous
reality, Kosinski exposes the mechanism of
controlling the readers emotional response to
bare facts.
KOSINSKI, JERZY
The structure of Passion Play (1979) relies on

a broadly conceived romance formula. Playing on
chivalric, quixotic, sports, popular, pornographic,
and Christian romance conventions, Kosinski prepares a stage for his Janus-faced alter ego. Equipped
with Kosinskis survival and narrative strategies,
the protagonist, an aging polo player and writer,
rides through life assuming the incompatible
roles of a knight-errant, a sexual sadist, or a Messiah
in a postmodernist passion play.
The intertextual and autobiographical trends
in Kosinskis fiction come to the fore in Pinball
(1982), a noir detective novel enriched by the
Kunstlerroman and apology conventions. The
intricate plot of Pinball, involving four musicians
and a drama student, contests the allegations
of plagiarism made against Kosinski. The novel
reveals the complexities of a contemporary artists
life by exposing the destructive influence of the
mass media and art criticism.
The Hermit of 69th Street (1988, 1991) is
a postmodernist, self-reflective text in statu nascendi playing on the conventions of the thriller,
Kunstlerroman, novel of ideas, writers notebook,
apologia, proofs of the novel, and suicide note.
This longest and most complex of Kosinskis nine
works, planned as his magnum opus, has never
gained popularity and met with little critical
attention.
SEE ALSO: The Novel and War (AF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Television
and Fiction (AF)
Gruszewska-Blaim, L. (2005). Gra w SS. Poetyka
(nie)powiesci Jerzego Kosinskiego [The SS Game:
657
The Poetics of Jerzy Kosinskis (Non)novels]. Lublin,

Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii
Curie-Skodowskiej.
Hicks, J. (1981). In the Singers Temple: Prose Fictions
of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and
Kosinski. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Karl, F. R. (1983). American Fictions 19401980.
New York: Harper.
Kosinski, J. (Novak, J.) (1960). The Future Is Ours,
Comrade. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Kosinski, J. (Novak, J.) (1962). No Third Path. Garden
Kosinski, J. (1965). The Painted Bird. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Kosinski, J. (1968). Steps. New York: Random House.
Kosinski, J. (1971). Being There. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Kosinski, J. (1973). The Devil Tree. New York: Harcourt
Brace. (Revised and expanded 1971.)
Kosinski, J. (1975). Cockpit. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Kosinski, J. (1977). Blind Date. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Kosinski, J. (1979). Passion Play. New York: St Martins.
Kosinski, J. (1982). Pinball. New York: Bantam.
Kosinski, J. (1988). The Hermit of the 69th Street.
New York: Seaver.
Kosinski, J. (1992). Passing By: Selected Essays,
19621991. New York: Random House.
Lupack, B. T. (1988). Plays of Passion, Games of Chance.
Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall.
Lupack, B. T. (ed.) (1998). Critical Essays on Jerzy
Kosinski. New York: G. K. Hall.
Sloan, J. P. (1996). Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography.
Stokes, G., & Fremont-Smith, E. (1982). Jerzy
Kosinskis Tainted Words. Village Voice, 1, 413
(June 22).
Teicholz, T. (ed.) (1993). Conversations With Jerzy
Kosinski. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
L
Larsen, Nella
MARTYN BONE
In the late 1920s, Nella Larsen emerged as one

of the leading literary figures of the Harlem
Renaissance. Larsens novels Quicksand (1928)
and Passing (1929) are formally sophisticated and
psychologically subtle analyses of US racial ideology that also explore issues of class, gender, and
sexuality. As the Renaissance waned in the early
1930s, Larsen withdrew from the literary scene
and never published another novel. Her slim body
of work largely disappeared from American literary history until the 1970s and 1980s, when it was
rediscovered by black feminist critics who claimed
Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston as literary foremothers for a new wave of African American
women writers.
Nella Larsen or Nellie Walker, as she was
named on her birth certificate was born in
Chicago in April 1891 to immigrant parents:
Mary Hansen, a dressmaker from Denmark, and
Peter Walker, a black man from the Danish West
Indies. Larsens biographer George Hutchinson
(2006) notes that, as Danish-speaking immigrants, Nellies parents may not have fully understood the power of the taboo against miscegenation in the United States. When Walker died
during Nellies infancy, Hansen married a fellow
Danish immigrant called Peter Larsen. However,
Nellies presence in the Larsen household was a
hindrance to the familys chances of assimilating
into mainstream society, and in 1907 she was sent
to the all-black Fisk Normal School in Nashville.
These traumatic events would inform the semi-
autobiographical Quicksand, in which the biracial

protagonist, Helga Crane, is rejected by her white
stepfamily and sent to a school for Negroes in
the South the start of Helgas lifelong and
peripatetic struggle with US racial classifications.
Throughout her literary career, Larsen repeatedly stated that from about the age of 16, she spent
three or four years living in Denmark. Though
earlier biographers cast doubt on these claims,
Hutchinson (2006) has provided conclusive evidence that Larsen visited Denmark at least twice in
her childhood: in 1898 and again in 1909, shortly
after she was expelled from Fisk. The likelihood
that Larsen lived in Denmark for some time
between 1908 and 1912 helps explain the remarkable veracity of Quicksands portrait of Copenhagen after Helga Crane escapes US racial ideology
by visiting her mothers family in Denmark.
In 1912, Larsen began training as a nurse in
New York. In 1915, she had a fraught spell as head
nurse at Booker T. Washingtons Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This experience too informed
Quicksand, which opens with a biting portrait of
Helgas experiences of teaching at Naxos, a
thinly disguised fictional double of Tuskegee.
In 1920, Larsen published her first pieces of
writing in the NAACPs Brownies Book: both
Three Scandinavian Games and Danish Fun
drew on her Danish cultural heritage. As the
Harlem Renaissance gathered steam, Larsen began to play a minor role through her new job as
a librarian at Harlems 135th Street branch.
In 1925, Larsen became friends with Carl Van
Vechten, the celebrated white writer who in 1926
published the hugely controversial Nigger Heaven

LEE, CHANG-RAE
(one of that novels central characters, Mary Love,

is a librarian at Harlems 135th Street branch).
Van Vechten helped Larsen place Quicksand
with Alfred Knopf, who published the novel in
March 1928. Though some reviewers worried that
Helga Crane was an unsuitable representation of
black womanhood, others expressed a moral
preference for Quicksand over Home to Harlem
(1928), Claude McKays recent and sensational
novel about lower-class black life. W. E. B. Du
Bois declared that Quicksand was the best African
American novel since the heyday of Charles
Chesnutt.
Larsens second novel, Passing, opens with a
surprise reunion between Irene Redfield and
Clare Kendry, two old friends who are passing
as white: Irene only occasionally, Clare more
completely as the wife of a white (and racist)
businessman. Yet neither woman is identified as
black until some way into the second chapter
of Passing. This daring deferral of revelation
challenges readers to consider the role of racial
classifications in American society. Throughout
Passing, Larsen mediates the readers perception
of events through the unreliable perspective of
Irene Redfield. Irenes view of and relationship
with Clare become increasingly unstable, eventually leading to a dramatic but ambiguous denouement in which Clare dies probably by Irenes
hand. If Passing examines the anxieties and absurdities of racial identity, it also explores class
tension and sexuality. Irene is a member of
Harlems burgeoning black middle class, and is
primly offended by Clares transformation from
the daughter of a poor mixed-race janitor to the
flamboyant and flirtatious wife of a wealthy white
man. However, as Deborah McDowell (1986) has
observed, there is also a barely repressed sexual
attraction between Irene and Clare.
In early 1930, Larsens flourishing reputation
was damaged when she was accused of plagiarizing the British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith in a short
story called Sanctuary. Though some scholars
have argued that the plagiarism scandal destroyed
Larsens confidence and career, she continued to
work on a third novel, and in March 1930 won a
Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Europe.
More damaging was Larsens 1933 divorce from
physicist Elmer Imes (Elmer had been having an
affair with a white woman). By 1937, Larsen had
cut off contact with literary friends like Van
659
Vechten; she never published again. In 1944,

Larsen returned to nursing, working in two
New York hospitals until she retired in 1963. She
died in her apartment in March 1964.
Since the 1970s, Quicksand and Passing have
reached a much wider audience than in Larsens
lifetime. Larsen is now widely regarded as not
only the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but also an important figure in American
modernism, and a pioneer analyst of biracial
identity across what Du Bois termed the color
line.
SEE ALSO: Du Bois, W. E. B. (AF); Ethnicity
Hurston, Zora Neale (AF); McKay, Claude
(AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction
(AF); Van Vechten, Carl (AF)
Larsen, N. (1928). Quicksand. New York: Knopf.
Larsen, N. (1929). Passing. New York: Knopf.
Larsen, N. (2001). The Complete Fiction of Nella
Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories
(ed. C. Larson). New York: Anchor.
Hutchinson, G. (2006). In Search of Nella Larsen: A
Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap.
McDowell, D. (1986). Introduction. In N. Larsen,
Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, pp. xxiiixxx.
Lee, Chang-rae
MARK C. JERNG
Chang-rae Lee has emerged as one of the most

important voices in contemporary ethnic American literatures. His three critically acclaimed
novels are marked by his distinctive voice; his
subtle use of language, tone, and lyricism; and his
emotionally embattled narrator-protagonists. Often mixing and casting anew the conventions of
immigrant fiction, detective stories, and the suburban novel through the lens of language, Lees
fiction highlights the varied and often conflicting
uses of language in the process of telling ones
story. From this engagement with how we tell
stories, Lee perceptively attends to the difficulties
of belonging and assimilation; the formations
660
LEE, CHANG-RAE
of community, family, nation, and race; and the

intersection of private choices and collective histories. Lee picks up his characters lives in
the midst of settling down after a tragic death, a
traumatic memory, or even a deceptively comfortable existence.
Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1965, Lee immigrated to the United States in 1968 with his
parents and sister. First living in New Yorks
Upper West Side, and then in Westchester County, Lee uses the urban and suburban settings as
crucial locales for his fiction. Bursting onto the
literary scene with Native Speaker in 1995, Lee was
quickly hailed as the first major Korean American
novelist. After appointments at the University of
Oregon and Hunter College, Lee is now professor
and director of the creative writing program
at Princeton University. Lee has won several
awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award
for Native Speaker, the Anisfield-Wolf Prize for
A Gesture Life, and a Guggenheim Fellowship,
among others.
Native Speaker (1995) introduces the careful,
highly wrought, lyrical narrative voice that has
become one of Chang-rae Lees authorial signatures. Set in New York City, it focuses on Henry
Park, a second-generation Korean American who
struggles with personal tragedy (the deaths of his
son and father and estrangement from his wife)
and is a spy who has infiltrated the political
organization of a local Korean American politician. Juxtaposing the private and the public,
Lee examines how the difficulties of assimilation
and political representation are simultaneously a
passage through language. Often addressing the
reader, Parks narrative voice (often compared to
the narrator of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man) is an
experiment of sorts in forming, resisting, and
augmenting the possibilities of identification
with the reader and an American and immigrant
community.
Lees second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), augments this interest in language and telling a story
of how language is used to omit and displace as
much as to tell. Again juxtaposing and blurring
the boundaries of the public and the private, Lee
focuses on Doc Hata, an elderly man ensconced in
a suburban life whose attempts to belong are
interrupted by his memories as a medic during
the Japanese occupation of Korea. Hatas language echoes these thematics in the erasures,
disavowals, and silences in his speech, a voice that

is extremely careful and self-censoring. Taking up
the historical and ethical dilemmas of comfort
women in Korea (the use of Korean women as
prostitutes for the Japanese army) in a language
of repression and erasure, Lee engages the problems of assimilation from a unique angle and
mode.
Aloft, Lees most recent novel (published in
2004), can be similarly characterized in terms of
voice, this time the blustery, even overconfident
voice of someone too comfortable in his milieu,
a semi-retired white man named Jerry Battle
born and raised in the suburbs of Long Island.
Like the two previous novels, this novel contains
a litany of personal tragedies: the suicide of
Battles Korean wife, his sons bankruptcy, and
his daughters pregnancy and battle with cancer,
all of which highlight a changing landscape
of multiculturalism and the exigencies of economic reproduction. Lee again brilliantly explores conventions in this case, the novel of
suburbia most famously utilized by Updike and
Cheever in order to think about the fissures
of family and locale. In this novel, he continues
his obsessions with language, first-person narration, and the relationship between identity and
context.
As opposed to contextualizing his own work
within the questions of ethnic identity per se, Lee
prefers to use the language of context, belonging,
and projection: how characters struggle with
who we are in a place, and how they reckon
with the modalities of belonging. His writing
more largely is characterized by this sensitivity
to language, voice, and mode that has made Lee
a powerful writer of the affective lives of both
individuals and collective groups.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ellison,
Ralph (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF)

Carroll, H. (2005). Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading
Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-Rae Lees A
Gesture Life. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 51(3),
592616.
Chen, T. (2002). Impersonation and Other
Disappearing Acts in Native Speaker by Chang-rae
Lee. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 48(3), 63767.
LE GUIN, URSULA K.
Cheng, A. (2005). Passing, Natural Selection, and

Loves Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-rae Lee
to Jacques Lacan. American Literary History, 17(3),
55374.
Corley, L. (2004). Just Another Ethnic Pol: Literary
Citizenship in Chang Rae-Lees Native Speaker.
Studies in the Literary Imagination, 37(1), 6181.
Chuh, K. (2003). Discomforting Knowledge: Or,
Korean Comfort Women and Asian Americanist
Critical Practice. Journal of Asian American Studies,
6(1), 523.
Jerng, M. (2006). Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee:
Adoption Life Stories and Chang-rae Lees A Gesture
Life. MELUS, 31(2), 4167.
Kim, D. (2003). Do I, Too, Sing America? Vernacular
Representations and Chang-rae Lees Native Speaker.
Journal of Asian American Studies, 6(3), 23160.
Lee, C.-R. (1995). Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead.
Lee, C.-R. (1999). A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead.
Lee, C.-R. (2001). Aloft. New York: Riverhead.
Lee, J. K (2002). Where the Talented Tenth Meets the
Model Minority: The Price of Privilege in Widemans
Philadelphia Fire and Lees Native Speaker. Novel: A
Forum on Fiction, 35(23), 23157.
Quan, K. (2004). Interview With Chang-rae Lee. Asia
Pacific Arts. At www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?
parentid11432, accessed July 2, 2008.
Song, M. H. (2001). A Diasporic Future? Native Speaker
and Historical Trauma. Lit: Literature Interpretation
Theory, 12(1), 7998.
Le Guin, Ursula K.
WARREN G. ROCHELLE
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most critically

acclaimed and influential writers of the twentieth
century. Her prolific career includes utopian and
feminist science fiction, fantasy, poetry, criticism,
and mainstream fiction. She has produced 23
novels, 10 short story collections, 11 volumes of
poetry, four translations, four works of criticism,
12 childrens books, one screenplay, and three
prose chapbooks, and has edited or coedited four
anthologies.
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in Berkeley,
California on October 21, 1929; earned a BA
at Radcliffe College and an MA at Columbia
University; and has lived in Portland, Oregon
since 1958. Emerging as a writer of speculative
fiction in the early 1960s, her first major successes
came in 1968, A Wizard of Earthsea, and in 1969,
The Left Hand of Darkness. Wizard established her
661
as a serious writer of fantasy who used traditional

mythic themes and motifs, while also calling them
into question. Left Hand is a groundbreaking
novel in its treatment of gender as a social construct. Wizard introduces her primary fantasy
universe, Earthsea; Left Hand, her science fiction
universe, Hain. In the early 1970s, she continued
her exploration of both fictional locales and
added a third, the US west coast, with her 1971
novel, Lathe of Heaven, which examines the nature of reality.
With the publication of The Dispossessed
(1974), set in her Hainish universe, Le Guin
continued her investigation of gender, feminism,
and social commentary on power, freedom, the
environment, and individual responsibility. In
this utopian novel she juxtaposes two contrasting
societies seen from the perspective of a physicist
doing his lifes work and renewing his societys
experiment in anarchism. Eye of the Heron (1978),
which uses the same structure of contrasting
societies, is again a polemic on human freedom.
Always Coming Home (1985), a return to the
utopian questions of The Dispossessed, marks
Le Guins maturity as a feminist. The novel, an
experiment in narrative structure, is a fictional
ethnography, exploring a future culture, loosely
based on that of Native Americans. Le Guin uses a
familiar protagonist: the outsider observer, again
drawing on the influences of her anthropologist
father and her mother, a writer who was involved
with her husbands work. Le Guins use of societal
conflict allows for social commentary while
paying attention to the quotidian of human life,
love, family, marriage, and the struggle to be
human in the face of overwhelming opposition.
In her poetry Le Guin considers the same issues
and questions, with much the same evolving
answers, as she becomes more political and polemical and feminist and global, and yet local,
with her examination of family and of the mysterious and spiritual. These ideas and connections
between speculative fiction and myth, thoughts
on language and gender, feminism and power, are
further explored in her three essay collections.
Le Guins interest in Taoism is exemplified in
her translation of Lao-Tzus Tao Te Ching (1997).
Taoist notions of duality and unity and the balance are prominent in her fantasy fiction. Her
fiction of the 1990s and early 2000s, with works set
in both the fantasy world of Earthsea and the
662
LETHEM, JONATHAN
science fictional universe of Hain, including

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (story collection,
1994), Four Ways to Forgiveness (four interconnected novellas, 1994), The Telling (2001), and
The Other Wind (2001), considers familiar themes
and demonstrates her continued growth and
evolution. The subject motifs are familiar, as is
the overarching concern for the protection and
nurturing of human freedom and the need to
create a truly human community.
Le Guin is not exclusively a writer of speculative
fiction, as her 1996 short story collection,
Unlocking the Air, attests, featuring both mainstream and magic realism. Changing Planes
(2003), another collection, contains both magic
realism and fantasy, sharpened by her sense of
satire, social commentary, and whimsy. Her
young adult fantasy series, the Western Shore
trilogy Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers
(2007) deals with coming of age and the abuse
and use of power and family, found and given,
and love and the magical. Lavinia (2008) is
both historical fiction and fantasy, and in true
feminist fashion, voice is given to the voiceless.
Lavinia, whose hand is won by Aeneas in The
Aeneid, tells her story. A master work of style and
grace from a mature stylist, the rich language
makes visible a distant world both magical and
real.
Among her many awards, Le Guin has received
the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for gender in speculative fiction (1994, 1996, 1997); the World
Fantasy Award (1988); the Nebula and Hugo
Awards, which are among science fiction and
fantasys highest honors (1969, 19735, 1988,
1990, 1995); and the National Book Award for
Childrens Books (1972).
Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and

Bittner, J. (1984). Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula
K. Le Guin. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
Bloom, H. (ed.) (1987). Ursula K. Le Guins The Left
Hand of Darkness. New York: Chelsea House.
Cadden, M. (2005). Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond
Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults. New York:
Routledge.
Cummins, E. (1990). Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin.

Le Guin, U. (1968). A Wizard of Earthsea.
New York: Bantam.
Le Guin, U. (1969). The Left Hand of Darkness.
New York: Walker.
Le Guin, U. (1971). The Lathe of Heaven. New York:
Scribners.
Le Guin, U. (1974). The Dispossessed. New York:
Harper and Row.
Le Guin, U. (1978). The Eye of the Heron. New York:
Harper and Row.
Le Guin, U. (1990). Tehanu. New York: Bantam.
Le Guin, U. (1994). A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.
New York: HarperPrism.
Le Guin, U. (1995). Four Ways to Forgiveness. New York:
HarperPrism.
Le Guin, U. (1996). Unlocking the Air and Other Stories.
Le Guin, U. (2002a). The Other Wind. New York:
Harcourt.
Le Guin, U. (2002b). The Telling. New York: Harcourt.
Le Guin, U. (2003). Changing Planes. New York:
Harcourt.
Le Guin, U. (2004). Gifts. New York: Harcourt.
Le Guin, U. (2006). Voices. New York: Harcourt.
Le Guin, U. (2007). Powers. New York: Harcourt.
Rochelle, W G. (2001). Communities of the Heart:
The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula
K. Le Guin. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Selinger, B. (1988). Le Guin and Identity in
Contemporary Fiction. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press.
Lethem, Jonathan
PATRICK ODONNELL
The author of an eclectic array of novels that test

the boundaries of genre, Jonathan Lethem combines realism, fantasy, and linguistic play in narratives that range from the story of a crime
investigated by a protagonist who suffers from
Tourette syndrome to a boy raised in tough
circumstances whose dreams of being a superhero
survive into adulthood. His native Brooklyn is
the setting for many of Lethems novels, and
motherless children are often the protagonists in
adventures that alternate between noir and naivety, replete with references to popular culture
and urban legend.
Jonathan Lethem was born in 1964 in Brooklyn, the son of a contemporary painter. Lethems
LETHEM, JONATHAN
mother died of cancer when he was 13, a personal

loss that is the source for his fictional interest in
motherless children. Following in his fathers
footsteps as an artist, he entered the High School
of Music and Art in Manhattan, and then entered
Bennington College in Vermont, but dropped
out after two years in order to hitchhike across
America and pursue his new vocation as a writer.
Taking on a series of temporary and odd jobs for
the next several years while living in California,
Lethem began to write and published his first
novel, Gun With Occasional Music, in 1994. This
was followed by Amnesia Moon (1995), As She
Climbed Across the Table (1997), and Girl in
Landscape (1998), the latter written following his
return to Brooklyn. While these early novels
cast in the genres of science fiction or postapocalyptic road novel brought some success,
Lethem became one of the most visible young
writers in America with the publication of Motherless Brooklyn in 1999, followed by The Fortress
of Solitude in 2003, both bestselling novels; a
seventh novel, You Dont Love Me Yet, appeared
in 2007. Lethem has published several collections
of short fiction; The Disappointment Artist
(2005), a collection of essays; Omega the Unknown (2007), a graphic novel based on the
famous Marvel superhero; and a number of
miscellaneous pieces, including a 2006 Rolling
Stone interview with Bob Dylan. In 2005, Lethem
was one of the recipients of the prestigious
MacArthur Fellowship.
Characterizing Lethems fiction is difficult because, to some degree like Thomas Pynchon, he
works in so many styles and has such a finely
tuned ear for the myriad rhythms of popular
speech that he often seems to be channeling
contemporary culture directly through the medium of prose. His most important novel to date,
Motherless Brooklyn, is the story of a Brooklyn
street kid, Lionel Essrog, who is taken under the
wing of a godfather-like figure, Frank Minna, a
small-time gangster who owns a detective agency
and a limousine service. Lionel grows up, becomes one of Minnas men under Franks tutelage, and investigates the murderous attack on
his mentor in the novels main plot, but the
substance of Motherless Brooklyn is the depiction
of Lionels interiority, expressed through the erratic discourse that results from his disability,
Tourette syndrome. The disability turns out to
663
be the special power that one finds in many of

Lethems novels a gift that is also a curse which
lends insight and sensitivity, but which causes
one to be different, alienated. Certainly this is the
case as well in Fortress of Solitude, in which a
young white boy raised in a black neighborhood
of Brooklyn and abandoned by his mother as a
teenager negotiates a violent, alien environment
while acquiring a special power (the ability to fly,
conferred by a magic ring). While seemingly
gimmicky, this device allows Lethem to explore
Dylan Ebduss growth into adulthood, his career
as a rock journalist, and his return to the scenes
of childhood solitude with a decision to make
about how he will use a power that has signified
the limitations of his existence thus far. The rock
music world is also at the center of You Dont Love
Me Yet, which portrays the romantic adventures
of a twenty-something woman who is a member
of a struggling rock band with a day job as a
phone-complaint line respondent. Several turns
of event lead to the bands sudden success and a
series of comic consequences in which success
turns into pratfall. Though not the most substantive of his novels, You Dont Love Me Yet joins
Lethems previous work in portraying the reach of
ambition and the treacheries of growing up absurd in contemporary America.
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas
(AF)

Godbey, M. (2008). Gentrification, Authenticity and
White Middle-Class Identity in Jonathan Lethems
The Fortress of Solitude. Arizona Quarterly, 64(1),
13151.
Lethem, J. (1994). Gun, With Occasional Music.
New York: TOR.
Lethem, J. (1995). Amnesia Moon. New York: TOR.
Lethem, J. (1996). The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of
the Eye. New York: TOR.
Lethem, J. (1997). As She Climbed Across the Table.
Lethem, J. (1998). Girl in Landscape. New York:
Doubleday.
Lethem, J. (1999). Motherless Brooklyn. New York:
Doubleday.
Lethem, J. (2003). The Fortress of Solitude. New York:
Doubleday.
664
LEWIS, SINCLAIR
Lethem, J. (2004). Men and Cartoons. New York:

Doubleday.
Lethem, J. (2005). The Disappointment Artist and
Other Essays. New York: Doubleday.
Lethem, J. (2007). You Dont Love Me. New York:
Doubleday.
Lethem, J. (2008). Omega the Unknown
(illus. F. Dalrymple). New York: Marvel.
Lethem, J. (ed.) (2000). The Vintage Book of Amnesia.
New York: Vintage.
Schiff, J. A. (2006). A Conversation With Jonathan
Lethem. Missouri Review, 29(1), 11634.
Schleifer, R. (2001). The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome:
Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry. New Literary
History, 32(3), 56384.
Lewis, Sinclair
JAMES M. HUTCHISSON
In many ways, Sinclair Lewis (18851951) was the

prophet of his generation. In an amazingly productive 10-year period, the 1920s, Lewis produced
five classic novels that satirized American society
and questioned entrenched American values. He
systematically worked his way through the pantheon of American myths, from the piety of the
small town to the sanctity of the church, smashing
shibboleths left and right and permanently lodging an element of cynicism and doubt in the
American imagination. Although Lewiss star began to fall as literary experimentation started to
replace old-fashioned narrative, the topics that he
tackled with his blend of realism and satire still
resonate today. Indeed, he gave the words Main
Street and Babbitt the titles of his two most
important novels special meanings which they
still possess.
He was born Harry Sinclair Lewis in the frontier outpost of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, where his
father was a country physician. Lewis got on well
with his stepmother (his birth mother had died
when he was quite young), but his dreamymindedness and lack of ambition rankled his
father, who was something of a conformist. After
a lackluster education, Lewis was still bright enough to get into Yale, but he dropped out after
one year in order to travel and see the world. For a
time, he hooked up with Upton Sinclair and his
socialist commune in New Jersey, Helicon Hall;
later still, he drifted to Carmel, California, where
a group of writers had clustered around Jack

London and other bohemian artists. Lewis eventually returned to Yale and graduated, but he
never shook his deep-seated wanderlust. For the
rest of his life, he never stayed in one place very
long but lived to write and experience the world
in all its many aspects.
Lewis spent his apprenticeship as a journalist
and a publicity agent for New York publishers.
By day he cranked out copy, and by night tried
his hand at fiction writing. (One early novel, The
Trail of the Hawk, he famously wrote standing at
the kitchen sink in a cottage on Long Island.)
During the 1910s, Lewis produced several novels
Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), The Job (1917b), and Free
Air (1919) that took up social issues of the day,
foremost among them the new woman and her
evolving role in a male-oriented culture.
These would turn out to be dry runs for his
most famous book, Main Street, published to
huge critical and popular acclaim in 1920. The
novel crystallized in Lewiss mind when he returned to Sauk Centre for a visit with his wife, a
sophisticated woman with upper-crust tastes who
reacted peevishly to the narrow-mindedness and
hypocrisy she observed in the so-called wholesome Middle American village in which Lewis had
grown up. She (and Lewiss stepmother, whose
attitudes she shared) in part became the model for
Carol Kennicott, the idealistic young woman who
moves from the city to the country and is stifled by
small-town life. In Main Street Lewis permanently
altered Americans perceptions; the book became
a byword for iconoclasm and the questioning of
long-held social attitudes, especially about the
American Midwest.
Main Street was a media sensation. Lewiss
savvy publisher, Alfred Harcourt, shrewdly assessed the market for such a book and ordered a
huge first printing, which sold out almost immediately. Main Street became the number-one-selling novel for the entire period from 1920 to 1925.
Small towns across the country, including Sauk
Centre, wondered aloud whether they were the
real Gopher Prairie, the fictional village that
Lewis mocked in the novel.
From there, it was a straight shot upward to
literary stardom that Lewis sustained for several
years to come. Having taken on the small town in
Main Street, Lewis next satirized the elastic ethics
of the businessman in Babbitt (1922), the portrait
LEWIS, SINCLAIR
of a small-time real estate salesman who worships

gizmos and gadgetry but whose inner life is
soulless and hollow. In Babbitt, Lewis also proceeded up from the village to describe the medium-sized city, charting out a kind of anatomy of
the American landscape. With Babbitt, Lewis also
inaugurated what would become his tried-andtrue compositional method. He would visit locales on which he planned to base his setting,
interview people who did the kind of work his
characters would do, and generally immerse himself in the environment of the novel. Like Emile
Zola on his scouting expeditions through the
streets of Paris, Lewis was a tireless and meticulous researcher one reason his books rang so true
to life with contemporary readers.
Lewiss next target was the medical industry.
Less satirical than his previous novels, Arrowsmith
(1925) follows the career of an idealistic young
physician who is seduced by the profits of commercial pharmaceutical companies and is torn
between wanting to be a servant to the public
good and devoting himself to pure research in the
laboratory. Arrowsmiths conflicts are Herculean,
and his ultimate actions painfully heroic, as he
ends up losing his wife to a public health epidemic
on a Caribbean island but inventing a vaccine that
helps to save everyone else. Like Babbitt, Arrowsmith also struck a chord with American readers
who, like the characters in the book, were witness
to the passing of the art of old-fashioned medicine
and its replacement with a quasi-scientific technocracy that increasingly viewed humans not as
people but as chemical machines another iteration of Lewiss brand of Zolaesque naturalism.
Perhaps because he had toned down the harshness of his satire-laden rhetoric in Arrowsmith,
in his next novel Lewis went all out, following
the advice of his friend and literary confidant,
H. L. Mencken, who had been urging him for
years to take on what he thought was the most
conspicuous type of American fraud ever the
evangelist. In the heyday of Billy Sunday and other
tent-revival preachers, Lewis created the unforgettable Elmer Gantry: an audacious, unrepentant
womanizer and drunkard who nonetheless is
fantastically successful at bilking his followers of
their money and, eventually, their self-esteem.
Perpetrating one nefarious scheme after another
throughout the book, the fictional Gantry became
an almost endless target for religious leaders,
665
editorial writers, and newspaper columnists, who

heaped abuse on Lewis for mocking Christianity.
Lewis later defended what he had written, saying
that it was nothing more than what he had seen on
his trips to places like Kansas City and other cities
in the Bible Belt, but that did not stop him from
being vilified.
Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction for Arrowsmith. True to form, Lewis used
the occasion to criticize the whole enterprise
of literary prizes and other false symbols of
prestige. He refused to accept the honor. He
did, however, in 1930 accept the Nobel Prize in
Literature, becoming the first American ever to
win the award. Lewis rounded out his remarkable
decade with Dodsworth (1929), like Arrowsmith a
more introspective novel in which satire is tempered with sympathy for his protagonist. Sam
Dodsworth is a purer and more intelligent version
of Babbitt, an industrialist who has spent his life
making money but in late middle age realizes that
he has ignored the higher ideals of education and
travel. In the novel, Lewis places his character in
the familiar paradigm of the American in Europe,
coming to terms with his wins and losses, assessing his life against the backdrop of art and
literature, history and philosophy. He succeeds
where Babbitt fails. Dodsworth does something to
heal his soul before its too late.
Lewiss sphere of influence and his skills as a
writer began, perhaps justifiably, to wane after
becoming Americas first Nobel laureate. The
exhaustive research and writing he undertook
during the 1920s definitely had tired him, and
he could not always sustain the level of impact he
had had during the boom years, when America
had seemed unthinkingly obsessed with progress.
Lewis still took on controversial subjects and he
was still both the target and the subject of the
media everywhere he went, but his later books
were not as finely wrought as novels like Babbitt
and Elmer Gantry. In Ann Vickers (1933), Lewis
explored penal reform and addressed the daring
subject matter of lesbianism. In It Cant Happen
Here (1935), perhaps his most prescient analysis
of the American character, he penned a dystopian
farce in which fascism took the reins of the federal
government (an all-too-real possibility in the era
of Hitler and Mussolini). And in Kingsblood Royal
(1947), Lewis wrote a fascinating example of the
black passing novel, accurately predicting the
666
THE LITTLE MAGAZINES
political struggles of the near future: African

Americans demands for civil rights and equal
treatment under the law.
However, Lewis was no modernist. He paid
little heed to developments in rhetoric and style;
he eschewed stream-of-consciousness and experimentation with narrative in general. He still
wrote novels about things hotels, universities,
and the generation gap and so held less and less
appeal to audiences being taught new ways of
thinking and seeing by the avant garde techniques
of Hemingway, Stein, Dos Passos, and E. E.
Cummings.
He was, however, the conscience of a whole
generation of Americans and one of the most
acute analysts of the American character ever to
put pen to paper. Babbittry and small-town life
are known for what they are today because of the
works of Sinclair Lewis.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist
Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Utopian

Di Renzo, A. (1997). Introduction. In A. Di Renzo (ed.),
If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of
Sinclair Lewis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Eby, C. V. (1993). Babbitt as Veblenian Critique of
Manliness. American Studies, 34(2), 523.
Hutchisson, J. M. (1996). The Rise of Sinclair Lewis,
19201930. University Park: Penn State
University Press.
Hutchisson, J. M. (ed.) (1997). Sinclair Lewis: New
Essays in Criticism. Troy, NY: Whitston.
Lewis, S. (1917a). The Innocents. New York: Harper.
Lewis, S. (1917b). The Job. New York: Harper.
Lewis, S. (1919). Free Air. New York: Harcourt.
Lewis, S. (1920). Main Street. New York: Harcourt.
Lewis, S. (1922). Babbitt. New York: Harcourt.
Lewis, S. (1925). Arrowsmith. New York: Harcourt.
Lewis, S. (1926). Mantrap. New York: Harcourt.
Lewis, S. (1927). Elmer Gantry. New York: Harcourt.
Lewis, S. (1928). The Man Who Knew Coolidge.
New York: Harcourt.
Lewis, S. (1929). Dodsworth. New York: Harcourt.
Lewis, S. (1933). Ann Vickers. New York: Doubleday.
Lewis, S. (1934). Work of Art. New York: Doubleday.
Lewis, S. (1935). It Cant Happen Here. New York:
Doubleday.
Lewis, S. (1945). Cass Timberlane. New York:

Random House.
Lewis, S. (1947). Kingsblood Royal. New York:
Random House.
Lewis, S. (1949). The God-Seeker. New York:
Random House.
Lewis, S. (1951). World So Wide. New York:
Random House.
Lewis, S. (1952). From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters
of Sinclair Lewis, 19191930 (ed. H. Smith).
Lewis, S. (1953). The Man From Main Street: A
Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and
Other Writings 19041950 (ed. H. E. Maule &
M. H. Cane, asst. P. A. Friedman). New York:
Random House.
Lewis, S. (2000). Minnesota Diary, 194246
(ed. G. Killough). Moscow: University of
Idaho Press.
Lewis, S. (2005). Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis
on Class in America (ed. S. E. Parry). New York:
Signet Classics.
Lingeman, R. (2002). Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main
Street. New York: Random House.
Love, G. A. (1973). New Pioneering on Prairies:
Nature, Progress, and the Individual in the
Novels of Sinclair Lewis. American Quarterly, 25,
55877.
Martin, E. A. (1984). The Mimic as Artist: Sinclair
Lewis. In E. A. Martin, H. L. Mencken and the
Debunkers. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
pp. 11538.
Parry, S. E. (1989). The Changing Faces of Sinclair
Lewis Wives. Studies in American Fiction, 17(1),
6579.
Parry, S. E. (1992). Gopher Prairie, Zenith, and the
Grand Republic: Nice Places to Visit, but Would
Even Sinclair Lewis Want to Live There? Midwestern
Miscellany, 20, 1527.
Schorer, M. (1961). Sinclair Lewis: An American Life.
The Little Magazines

ADAM MCKIBLE
Modernist fiction developed in tandem with the

rise and proliferation of little magazines. These
periodicals, which tended to have small circulations, short lifespans, and limited funds, encouraged both established and emerging authors to
challenge the traditional forms, themes, and expectations of the short story and the novel;
indeed, many significant works of fiction were

originally published and/or serialized in little
magazines. According to Hoffman et al.s standard history, The Little Magazine: A History and
Bibliography, these journals stood defiantly in
the front ranks of the battle for a mature literature, ultimately publishing about 80 percent of
what is now canonical modernism (1). Hoffmans
martial metaphor for the conjoined development
of modernism and little magazines a metaphor
used throughout The Little Magazine underscores the often antagonistic relationship between
little magazines and their mainstream counterparts, each of which established their identity in
contradistinction to the other. The experimentalism and radicalism of the fiction of little magazines, therefore, can be better understood in
comparison with contemporaneous commercial
fiction.
Examples of proto-modernist little magazines
can be found in America as early as the 1890s, but
scholarly consensus points toward the early 1910s
as the moment of critical mass for the development of experimental periodicals in the US. Although little magazines and their contributors
were more likely to work from multiple perspectives and engage in often surprising acts of crossfertilization, a provisional schematic of major
tendencies has some usefulness. According to
Hoffman et al., the renaissance of the littles in
the US began with the 1911 launch of the Masses
(191117) in New York and the 1912 publication
of Poetry (1912) in Chicago. W. E. B. Du Boiss
magazine, The Crisis (1910) a vital periodical at
the heart of the Harlem Renaissance should be
added to the roster of modernisms originating
little magazines. Beginning with these early entrants (there were others, of course, such as the
Little Review [191429] and Others [191519]),
little-magazine culture spread rapidly and widely.
Hoffman delineates six major trends in little
magazines: magazines dedicated primarily to poetry, such as The Fugitive (19225) and Palms
(193240); leftist magazines such as Liberator
(191824), the Messenger (191728), and Partisan Review (19342003); regional magazines such
as the Midland (191533); experimental magazines such as the Double Dealer (19216) and
The Dial (19209); critical magazines such
as Hound and Horn (192734); and eclectic
magazines such as Smart Set (191224) and The
667
Seven Arts (191617). Examples of modernist

fiction can be found across this spectrum of
magazines in a variety and depth that cannot be
adequately developed here (Hoffman 710). Little
magazines continued to flourish in America
well after the initial emergence of modernism
(Anderson and Kinzie), and their spirit can still
be found in contemporary zines and e-zines.
Although there was certainly a spectrum of
responses to little magazine fiction published in
the early decades of the twentieth century, much
of the mainstream press viewed this fiction with
skepticism, often characterizing little magazines
and their contents as an extension or even excrescence of the free-ranging conversations that characterized many of the modernists themselves.
In 1917, when Margaret Anderson launched one
of modernisms most important little magazines,
the Little Review, her intention was to fill it up
with the best conversation the world has to offer
(1970, 35). While recent critics have recognized
the extraordinary achievements of modernism as
a public discourse (Morrisson 6) promulgated
through conversational communities (Stansell
83), Andersons mainstream contemporaries
were far more skeptical, writing off modernism
as mere talky talky (Wilson 45) or Big Talk
(Saturday Evening Post 26).
A story from George Horace Lorimers Saturday Evening Post, which dominated magazine
publishing during the rise of modernism in
America, exemplifies the mainstream medias
derision of the people and fiction associated
with modernist little magazines. In Nina Wilcox
Putnams Seeings Believing (Jan. 3, 1920),
the narrator and protagonist, Nellie Kelly,
works for a popular magazine called the Record
Breaker (an obvious pseudonym for the Post,
which was constantly breaking circulation records at this time), but she spends her off-hours
with a motley assortment of bohemians affiliated with a little magazine called the Arm of
Labor. Nellies modernist friends loudly denounce her work for the mainstream press, but
they also secretly harbor a desire to publish in
her magazine. At the beginning of the story,
Nellie is torn between modernisms faddish
talk, flamboyant personalities, and experimental aesthetics and the conventional behaviors,
expectations, and measures of success shared by
middle America:
668
Of course I realize . . . that a subscription list

of three or four hundred intellectuals such as
the Arm has is worth infinitely more to the
country at large. But I confess I am sometimes
puzzled why we that is, the Record Breaker,
has so many more readers. Its queer, dont you
think? (15)
As the story continues, Nellie finds herself
weeding out unsolicited submissions to her magazine, and she comes across a manuscript from
the Arm of Labors editor, the erstwhile revolutionary and truth-teller, Fritz West:
It was called Loves Labor Rewarded, and I cast
aside all other matters to read it at once,
because of course I expected something fearless and strong and radical.
Frankly, I did not expect it would be the sort
of thing we could publish, and it wasnt. But
not for the reasons I had anticipated. We could
not publish it because I must tell the Truth,
painful as it is and was because it was not
good enough. It was well, mawkish! A love
story of the supposedly popular type, but
badly done a mere attempt at potboiling,
I suppose. (149)
As it turns out, Fritzs mawkish stab at popular
fiction was his twentieth submission to the Record
Breaker, and Nellie discovers that all of her little
magazine friends regularly submit perfectly
awful stuff (149) to the larger periodical, all of
which gets rejected.
The exposure of Greenwich Village modernists
as amateurish frauds and poseurs is a typical turn
of events for the fiction of the Saturday Evening
Post. With mechanical predictability, Nellies
bohemian friends are revealed as shallow people,
rotten parents, hopelessly bad artists, and terrible
writers; she ultimately musters the good sense to
accept the marriage proposal of her editor, Dick
Kellogg, who himself typifies the ideal of American masculinity promoted by both the advertisements and the editorial content of the Post: he
smells of English soap, tobacco and toothpaste
and is nice to look at in a well-washed, collar
advertisement sort of way (149). Marriage for
Nellie will mean a move from Greenwich Village
to a home in the suburbs, where she will also
presumably give up her career. But shes fine with
all of that as long as we dont have to eat in a
Soviet house (157). Thus, Seeings Believing

concludes by demonstrating that there is no place
like home, no system like capitalism, no gender
structure like patriarchy, and no real art or writing
outside of the popular, commercial fiction written
by the level-headed, common-sense authors published by respectable periodicals such as the Post.
Lorimers tenure as editor of the Saturday
Evening Post from 1899 to 1937 coincided with
the development of modernism and modernist
fiction, and his magazine did publish a number
of writers now identified as modernists, including
William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy
Parker. By and large, however, Lorimer insisted on
stories that would appeal to the wholesome tastes
of [the] average American, and as modernism
continued to develop, fiction in the Post remained
safe, it was conventional, and it shunned absolutely situations, characters, or ideas that undermined nineteenth-century American values and
sensibilities (Cohn, 28, 189).
Contributors to little magazines understood
their own fiction as resisting the values and
sensibilities of commercial periodicals such as
the Saturday Evening Post. In his autobiography,
An American Testament, Joseph Freeman, a regular contributor to small-circulation publications, wryly compares the commercial writer,
the Success who earned large incomes in
the employ of popular magazines and succeeded by glutting the market with adulterated
goods which corrupted the public taste to the
Failure or True Artist whose handmade
output . . . was superior to the machine-made
output of the Saturday Evening Post until that
day when the handicraftsman of letters himself
entered the process of mass production as . . . a
popular magazine writer (2678). Freeman and
Putnam writing from divergent political and
aesthetic sensibilities make similar points
about the relationship between little magazines
and the commercial press. On the one hand,
contributors to the littles often conceived of their
lives and work as resistant to mainstream media
(while just as often harboring a desire to break
into those arenas); on the other hand, the commercial press cast a scornful but ever-curious eye
on the fascinating personalities and experimental products of little magazine culture. Periodicals such as the Saturday Evening Post loved
to hate the Bolshevictorians (Lowe, 18) and
Naughty Boys (Wilson, 3) associated with little

magazines.
Little magazines did not merely attract the
scorn of other periodicals; they sometimes incurred governmental wrath. A. Philip Randolph
and Chandler Owens Harlem Renaissance magazine, the Messenger, was scrutinized by the US
Department of Justice and confiscated by the Post
Office (McKible 41); The Masses was brought to
trial twice for violations of the World War I-era
Espionage Act (Eastman); Broom was effectively
shut down by the Post Office censor, which found
the magazine in violation of Section 480 of the
Postal Laws which prohibited the mailing of
contraceptives and obscene matter (Munson
187); and, perhaps most famously, the Little
Review was successfully prosecuted and fined
twice (not to mention destroyed), first for publishing Wyndham Lewiss Cantlemans SpringMate, and then for printing the Nausicaa
episode of James Joyces Ulysses, which the magazine had been running serially (Anderson 1970).
Despite the efforts of hostile institutions and a
scornful press, little magazines burgeoned in the
early decades of the twentieth century. And because they published writers according to the
tastes and interests of their editors rather than
the dictates of the market, little magazines took
chances on unknown authors who experimented
with both form and content. Certainly, this experimentalism resulted in the publication of a
great deal of immediately forgettable material,
but because little magazines were more interested
in aesthetic innovation than profits, they also
published most of what would now be considered
canonical modernism.
Jean Toomers engagement with little magazines exemplifies the development of fiction in
these outlets, and his career also demonstrates a
shared project of social and aesthetic experimentation across a wide variety of little magazines.
As Darwin T. Turners critical edition of Cane
makes clear, many of the stories (in addition to
the poetry and drama) that were ultimately collected in Toomers groundbreaking book were
originally published in a number of little magazines. Karintha, Seventh Street, and sections
of Kabnis were first published in the dadaist
magazine Broom in 1923. Becky and Carma
ran in the Liberator in September and October
1922, when that magazine was moving away from
669
an amorphous bohemian radicalism and toward a

notably stronger affiliation with orthodox political communism. Toomer first published the story
Fern in the Little Review, also in late 1922 long
after that magazine had abandoned its earlier
bohemian anarchism, embraced aesthetic avant
gardism, and was in the process of relocating from
New York to Europe. the Little Review printed
Fern in an issue that also contains contributions
by Man Ray, Kenneth Burke, Gertrude Stein,
Francis Picabia, and Guillaume Apollinaire.
Esther first ran in early 1923 in Modern Review,
an avant garde periodical published in Winchester,
Massachusetts. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin little
magazine Prairie, which was largely devoted to
Midwestern, regionalist literature, published
Blood-Burning Moon in 1923. And the Double
Dealer, A National Magazine of the South that
attempted to vitalize regional Southern literature (Hoffman 11), published Calling Jesus
under its original title, Nora, in September
1922. Hoffman et al. suggest that Toomers first
publication was in the Double Dealer, which would
mark Toomer primarily as an aesthetic modernist.
But the politically radical Liberator ran Carma in
the same month and placed the story between
Mike Golds essay, The Jesus-Thinkers, which
proclaims Lenin more beautiful than Jesus and
resoundingly condemns churches and a swarm of
lying parasite minister dogs (11), and Ralph
Chaplins sonnet, A Sioux Dies in Prison.
George Bornsteins claim that a texts meaning
can shift dramatically in different contexts
(what he calls the texts bibliographic codes)
is borne out here. In Cane, Carma can be read
as a note in Toomers swan song (Turner in
Toomer xxii) for the vanishing black folk life of
the South. In the Liberator, however, Carma
reads primarily as exemplifying some of the
consequences of racial oppression and an inadequate class consciousness. Toomers ability to
place his fiction in a variety of little magazines
representing a fairly broad spectrum of aesthetic
and political affiliations thus underscores the
assertion made (explicitly or implicitly) by little
magazines that they were engaged in a shared
project of cultural and aesthetic revitalization
and revolution.
While Toomers publication in a variety of little
magazines demonstrates how an individual author could find a home for his or her fiction in a
670
number of periodicals, the publication of Fire!! A

Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists shows
us how the fiction of little magazines represents
a conscious break with the acceptable literature
of the commercial press. Embodying the ephemerality and financial insecurity of little magazines,
Fire!! was published only once; its editorial
board which included Wallace Thurman,
Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Richard
Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron
Douglass could not procure the funds or
support for subsequent issues; and most copies
of the magazine were lost, ironically, in a fire. The
magazine also demonstrates its affiliation and
interconnections with the little magazine community as a whole by running advertisements
for the politically radical New Masses and the
National Urban Leagues Opportunity, a periodical that published many luminaries of the Harlem
Renaissance. According to David Levering Lewis,
the contents of Fire!! shocked and outraged
the established black intelligentsia of Harlem:
Benjamin Brawley was disgusted, W. E. B. Du
Bois felt offended and personally hurt, and even
Paul Robeson gave the contributing editors
the cold shoulder when he came across them in
public (194).
Thurman, the primary force behind Fire!!, had
every intention of shocking his readers, and he
also succeeded in printing some groundbreaking
fiction. In addition to Hurstons now widely
anthologized story, Sweat, which ends with
the calculated death of a brutally abusive husband, the magazine also includes Bennetts
Wedding Day, which portrays an interracial
relationship; Thurmans Cordelia the Crude, a
story about a short-sighted intellectual and a
child prostitute; and Richard Bruce Nugents
stream-of-consciousness, typographically daring Smoke, Lilies and Jade. Nugents contribution to the magazine is arguably the first
explicit treatment of homosexual desire in
African American fiction, and much to the
consternation of older writers such as Du Bois
it concludes with a montage of pederasty and
androgyny (Lewis 197). Nugents story, in other
words, ends on a very different note than the
ideologically and aesthetically safe fiction of
magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post,
and Fire!! in all its brief glory exemplifies how
little magazines challenged the expectations of
the mainstream press by providing a venue for

experimental fiction, and in the process published most of what is now considered canonical
modernist literature.
After World War II an intellectual era that
produced a particular, even peculiar, canonical
formation (i.e., modernism as autonomous, difficult, putatively apolitical, and largely authored by
white men) modernist fiction was fetishized as a
collection of lone masterworks free from the impurities of mass production and mass culture. The
study of little magazines reveals the inadequacy of
this form of canonization. Indeed, little magazines
demonstrate repeatedly that modernist fiction developed through a deep and thorough engagement
with the mainstream press, and like their commercial counterparts, these magazines were almost
always a heteroglossia of genres, images, and advertisements. Indeed, twentieth-century American
fiction was an essential element of the extraordinary
conversation little magazines had amongst themselves and with the culture as a whole.
SEE ALSO: The Herlem Renaissance (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF)
Anderson, E., & Kinzie, M. (1978). The Little Magazine
in America: A Modern Documentary History.
Yonkers, NY: Pushcart.
Anderson, M. (1970). My Thirty Years War, the
Autobiography: Beginnings and Battles to 1930.
New York: Horizon.
Ardis, A. (2002). Modernism and Cultural Conflict,
Bornstein, G. (2001). Material Modernism: The
Politics of the Page. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Churchill, S., & McKible, A. (eds.) (2007). Little
Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches.
Hampshire: Ashgate.
Cohn, M. (1989). Creating America: George Horace
Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
Dettmar, K. J. H., & Watt, S. (1996). Marketing
Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and
Rereading. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Eastman, M. (1969). Love and Revolution: My Journey
Through an Epoch. New York: Random House.
Freeman, J. (1936). An American Testament: A
Narrative of Rebels and Romantics. New York:
LONDON, JACK
Gold, M. (1922). The Jesus-Thinkers. Liberator,

pp. 1012 (Sept.).
Hoffman, F. J., Allen, C., & Ulrich, C. F. (1946).
The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography.
Hutchinson, G. (1995). The Harlem Renaissance in
Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Latham, S., & Scholes, R. (2006). The Rise of Periodical
Studies. PMLA, 121(1), 51731.
Lowe, C. (1919). Alice Through the Working Class.
Saturday Evening Post, pp. 18ff. (May 3).
Marek, J. (1995). Women Editing Modernism: Little
Magazines and Literary History. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky.
McKible, A. (2002). The Space and Place of Modernism:
The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New
York. New York: Routledge.
Morrisson, M. (2001). The Public Face of Modernism:
Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception,
19051920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Munson, G. B. (1985). The Awakening Twenties: A
Memoir-History of a Literary Period. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press.
Nelson, C. (1989). Repression and Recovery: Modern
American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory,
19101945. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Putnam, N. W. (1920). Seeings Believing. Saturday
Evening Post, pp. 14ff. (Jan. 3).
Saturday Evening Post. (1919). Joyriding and
Jaywalking. Saturday Evening Post, pp. 267
(Nov. 29).
Stansell, C. (2000). American Moderns: Bohemian
New York and the Creation of a New Century.
Toomer, J. (1988). Cane: An Authoritative Text,
Backgrounds, Criticisms (ed. D. T. Turner).
New York: Norton.
Watson, S. (1991). Strange Bedfellows: The
First American Avant-Garde. New York:
Abbeville.
Wilson, H. L. (1919). Naughty Boys! Saturday
Evening Post, pp. 3ff. (May 3).
London, Jack
DONALD E. PEASE
Jack London took up a career in writing at a time

when innovative printing technologies made
magazines quite inexpensive to publish. Perhaps
best known for the trilogy of Wolf books The
671
Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and

The Sea Wolf (1904) London was also one of
the first Americans to make a lucrative career
exclusively from writing. Along with his contemporaries in the newly emergent literary genres of
realism and naturalism, William Dean Howells,
Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt,
Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, London freely
borrowed from the discourses which described
the industrial technologies of Taylorization and
scientific engineering, as well as from cultural
anthropology and the faits divers of the daily
newspaper to endow his literary constructions
with the formal authority of literal reality. The
shift from romanticism to realism and naturalism
was part of a more pervasive social transformation in which innovative industrialization processes had accelerated the profitability of the
commercial system.
London was born out of wedlock in San
Francisco, California on January 12, 1876. His
mother, Flora Wellman, was a piano teacher and
spiritualist. His father, Professor W. H. Chaney,
was an astrologer, con artist, and philanderer who
abandoned Flora shortly before Jack, who would
never lay eyes on him, was born. After she gave
birth, Flora turned the baby over to ex-slave
Virginia Prentiss. When Jack was eight months
old, Flora married John London, a widower and
Civil War veteran with a carpenters income and
two daughters of his own.
At 15, London took up the first of a series
of legendary careers when he bought the sloop
Razzle-Dazzle and became known as the Prince
of the Oyster Pirates for raiding the oyster beds
in the bay off Oakland. Two years later he
shipped aboard the Sophia Sutherland. In 1893,
he joined Kellys Army, the western regiment of
Coxeys March on Washington, to protest the
economic depression, then deserted in Hannibal,
Missouri on May 25, 1894 to tramp across the
country. That adventure ended with his arrest for
vagrancy in Niagara, New York and a 30-day
sentence in Erie County Penitentiary. Those
experiences became the real-life basis for the
reminiscences published 13 years later in The
Road (1907).
Following his 20th birthday, London left
Oakland High School without a diploma to
start cramming for the University of California
entrance examination. At the University of
672
LONDON, JACK
California, Berkeley, London joined the Socialist

Labor Party and discovered his passionate interest
in Marxian socialism. He dropped out of
Berkeley, after only one semester, to begin his
formal career as a writer.
In the 23 years in between the publication of his
first story in 1893 and his death from uremic
poisoning at the age of 40 on November 22, 1916,
London produced nearly 200 short stories, 20
novels, and three full-length plays along with
several volumes of lectures and correspondence.
Londons more than 400 pieces of non-fiction
certainly bear significant witness to his prodigious
compulsion to have his say about almost any topic
(from animal rights to anthropology, environmentalism, greed, Marxian socialism, Nietzschean
supermen, political corruption, primitivism, racial opression, prizefighting, social reform, social
Darwinism, war, and xenophobia) likely to incite
impassioned debate. Characteristically, London
did not formulate a systematic understanding of
any of these topics, but approached each as if to
stake a claim on the passionate energies these
topics aroused.
Londons essays are best understood as efforts
at consuming these subjects with an appetite
that his rational processes could not possibly
have satisfied. Three of these topics Marxian
socialism, Nietzsches doctrine of the superman,
and Social Darwinism in the contradictory
response they consistently evoked, supplied
London with a tendentious intellectual orientation. Londons relationship to socialism is indicative of the ways in which he rendered his
ambivalence productive. London joined the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896. He ran unsuccessfully as the socialist nominee for mayor of
Oakland in 1901 and 1905, crossed the country
lecturing on socialism in 1906, and published
two collections of essays on the topic. But in his
essay How I Became a Socialist (1910), London
provided a Darwinian explanation for his attraction to Marxian socialism, describing these views
as having evolved from his identification with
persons at the bottom of the social order. In
other essays, London explained his attraction to
socialism as a way of gratifying his Nietzschean
desire to become the superman at the head
of a socialist movement. These vacillations in
Londons writerly commitments led some of
his contemporaries to poke fun at Londons
identification with the working class as a pose

designed to sell books.
When he traveled to the Klondike in 1897,
London was in search of subject matter that
would focus his restless literary imagination.
Before the Klondike expedition, London imposed
immense demands on creative talents lacking an
appropriate subject. By the time he returned to
California in 1898, he had discovered his subject
matter as well as the figure that would become
his totem animal and literary trademark the
Klondike wolf.
Throughout the stories collected in The Son
of the Wolf (1900), the first volume of the
Northland saga, London proposed the Alaskan
timberwolf as the representative in nature of
contradictions he found socially pervasive. Like
Jack London, the Klondike wolf found the
Nietzschean loner and the socialist pack animal
equivalently attractive social personae. The featured story of the volume contained an account
of the elevation of the wolf into the white prospectors totem animal. In the Northland tales
written thereafter, Wolf became known as the
tutelary presence under whose aegis the entire
white population conducted heterogeneous
transactions ranging from fur trading to interracial marriage with the indigenous tribes.
London correlated biological with literary paternity when he married his former mathematics
tutor, Bessie Maddern, on April 7, 1900, the same
day that Houghton Mifflin published The Son of
the Wolf. Over the next three years he became
in rapid succession the father of two daughters,
Joan and Bess London; the author of seven additional books; and the lover of Anna Strunsky.
Strunsky was a brilliant young social philosopher
of Russian Jewish heritage whom London had met
at socialist Austin Lewiss lecture at Stanford
in December 1899, and with whom he later
collaborated on a book-length dialogue about
love, published anonymously as the Kempton
Wace Letters in 1903.
In that same marathon year, London initiated
another love affair, this time with Charmian
Kittredge, the woman London believed was endowed with all the virtues of his mate-woman.
To mark this turning point in his public life,
London published two books, The People of the
Abyss (1903), a sociological study of the impossible living conditions in Londons East End, and
LONDON, JACK
The Call of the Wild, a novel about a dog adapting

to the Klondike wilderness.
The first tales of the Northland Saga were
concerned with white prospectors whose struggles to learn the natives ways led to the reciprocal
commercial and social exchanges epitomized in
interracial marriage. The Call of the Wild replaced
these earlier tales of miscegenation with a mixedbreed dog named Buck whose spectacular regression in the Yukon wilderness elevated him into
Londons literary trademark. As Londons
new means of taking verbal possession of the
Klondike, Buck erased offending erotic relations
from memory and offered in their place the
sentimental education of a noble creature who
always remained loyal to his white masters.
The totemic system London introduced in
Bucks narrative was symptomatic of the racism
that would eventuate in the notorious diatribes
that London would later direct against what he
called the yellow peril and that required that he
place race loyalty above his obligations to international socialism. By 1903, US imperialist ideology had mutated homegrown anti-foreignism
into a comparable strain of racism. The extensive
relay that Buck traced through the Northland
wilds linked Judge Millers Santa Clara estate with
John Thorntons camps, and thereby expanded
the circle of his masters symbolic property to
include the entire Klondike region.
The eagerness that the mongrel Buck displayed in
The Call of the Wild to sacrifice his life in executing
John Thorntons will in Klondike Territory would
be acted out on a much larger scale in the US
imperial adventures whose dates more or less coincided with Jack Londons personal chronology and
whose trajectory Hawaii, Panama, Cuba, and the
Pacific Rim Londons later tales would retrace.
Whereas The Call of the Wild had recorded Bucks
regressive adaptation to the wilderness, White Fang
reversed direction and described Wolf s transformation from a natural force into a surrogate national agent. White Fangs progression from Klondike nature to US culture reenacted the nations
imperial design as its plotline.
The reversibility of the two plots mirrored a
larger reversal in ideological accounts of imperialism wherein the acquisitive drives of an imperial
adventurer were redescribed as defensive reactions directed against what these adventurers
described as the senseless aggression of native
673
populations. By finding it thoroughly acted out

in companion dog stories, London effectively
reinscribed the entire circuit of US imperial appropriation its aggressive policies of colonial
annexation followed by the blandishments of
acculturation upon the white silence of the
Klondike. After delinking White Fang from
the network of associations he shared with the
Northwest tribal communities, London realigned
his interests with the more inclusive project of
US imperialism in the South Pacific, in which
such later writings as The Cruise of the Snark
(1911), South Sea Tales (1911), and the Son of
the Sun (1912) would play a significant role.
Unlike contemporaries, like William Dean
Howells, who tried to free their characters from
romantic dependencies, Jack London submitted
his protagonists to the complex of confinements
and determinations posed by market and biological forces as well as by the mechanisms of the
disciplinary society. While American realists continued to correlate their protagonists with the
bourgeois subject of aesthetic ideology, in the
quasi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909),
London subordinated the aesthetic sphere to the
laws of the market, and he described that spheres
appeals to a transcendental standpoint and its
enforcement of a universal standard of taste as
having turned the aesthetic against the social
markers of the lower classes.
In preparation for writing The People of the
Abyss, a sociological study of living conditions in
East London, London reenacted Bucks regressive
evolution. In August 1902, he disguised himself as a
derelict and then disappeared for six weeks into
what were then believed to be the worst slums in the
Western hemisphere. With the publication of The
Sea Wolf in 1904, London created a narrative that
demonstrated uncanny intuition into the change of
his reading publics needs. In The Sea Wolf and
People of the Abyss, London relocated Wolf, the
totem animal from his literary imagination, in
environments the slums of East London, the
open sea that, while different from the Klondike,
nevertheless recalled its demands on the survival
instinct. Wolf Larsen, the protagonist of The Sea
Wolf, combined Bucks and White Fangs courage
with the ruthless will to power that constituted the
only political order that he acknowledged.
Following his marriage to Charmian Kittredge
on November 19, 1905, London reversed the habit
674
LONDON, JACK
of construing his life as raw material for his

writing, and turned his most popular literary
formula combining the themes of survival and
sentimental romance into the basis for their
relationship. After they set sail in 1907 for a
seven-year around-the-world cruise in Snark, the
schooner London had built for $35,000, the theme
of survival predominated. During extensive travel
throughout the South Seas and Polynesia from
Hawaii to the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, New
Hebrides, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands Jack
and Charmian contracted multiple tropical diseases and returned after only two years to
Londons California estate.
Londons adaptation of his craft to a quasi-Taylorizedmodeofproductionmadehimquitewealthy,
but it also inclined him to create formulaic plots and
stereotypical characters. Because he purchased plots
and novels from other writers and used incidents
from newspaper clippings as writing material,
Londons Taylorization of his writing labors rendered him vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism.
After 1910, his literary works were dismissed by his
critics as potboilers that he wrote to cover the
operating costs of Wolf Ranch, the most valuable
piece of real estate in Sonoma, California.
But Londons work has recently played an
important role in the revaluation of literary naturalism. Mark Seltzer has explained the recent
spectacular shift in literary attention away from
American romanticism to the logics of naturalism
as reflective of a more encompassing cultural
transition that has supplanted the interpretive
attention to the contradictions of market society
with analyses of what Michel Foucault called
disciplinary society. The negative counterpart of
American romanticism, Jack Londons naturalism, has became newly fascinating because his
writings were saturated with the disciplinary
powers from which the American romance aspired to emancipate itself.
SEE ALSO: Naturalist Fiction (AF); Norris,
Frank (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
Auerbach, J. (1996). Male Call: Becoming Jack London.
Labor, E. (1974). Jack London. New York: Twayne.
London, J. (1900). Son of the Wolf. London: Isbister.

London, J. (1902a). Children of the Frost. Chicago:
Donohue.
London, J. (1902b). A Daughter of the Snows.
London, J. (1903a). The Call of the Wild. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1903b). The People of the Abyss. London:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1904). The Sea-Wolf. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1905). The Game. New York: Macmillan.
London, J. (1906a). Tales of the Fish Patrol. New York:
Heinemann.
London, J. (1906b). White Fang. New York: Macmillan.
London, J. (1907a). Before Adam. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1907b). The Road. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1908). The Iron Heel. New York: Macmillan.
London, J. (1909). Martin Eden. New York: Macmillan.
London, J. (1910a). Burning Daylight. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1910b). Lost Face. New York: Macmillan.
London, J. (1910c). Revolution, and Other Essays.
London, J. (1911a). Adventure. New York: Macmillan.
London, J. (1911b). The Cruise of the Snark. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1911c). South Sea Tales. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1912a). The Scarlet Plague. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1912b). Smoke Bellew. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1912c). A Son of the Sun. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1913a). The Abysmal Brute. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1913b). John Barleycorn. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1913c). The Valley of the Moon. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1914). The Mutiny of the Elsinore.
London, J. (1915). The Star Rover. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1916a). The Little Lady of the Big House.
London, J. (1916b). The Turtles of Tasman. New York:
Macmillan.
London, J. (1917a). Jerry of the Islands. New York:
Grosset and Dunlap.
London, J. (1917b). Michael, Brother of Jerry. New York:
Macmillan.
LONDON, JACK
London, J. (1920). Hearts of Three. New York:

Macmillan.
London, J., & Strunsky, A. (1903). The KemptonWace
Letters. New York: Macmillan.
Lundquist, J. (1987). Jack London: Adventures, Ideas,
and Fiction. New York: Ungar.
675
Pease, D. E. (1998). Martin Eden and the Limits of

Aesthetic Experience. Boundary 2, 17(1), 13960.
Seltzer, M. (1992). Bodies and Machines. New York:
Routledge.
Sinclair, A. (1977). Jack: A Biography of Jack London.
New York: Harper and Row.
M
Mailer, Norman
SHEREE L. MEYER
Norman Mailer was one of the most protean

writers of the latter half of the twentieth century.
In both his fiction and non-fiction, regardless of
its setting or time period, Mailer mapped the
conflicts and concerns of contemporary history.
Indeed, from his first published novel, The Naked
and the Dead (1948), to his final novel, The Castle
in the Forest (2007), Mailer probes societys and
his characters spiritual, psychological, and physical wounds.
Norman Kingsley Mailer was born to Fanny
(Schneider) Mailer and her husband, Isaac
Barnett Barney Mailer, on January 31, 1923.
His sister, Barbara, was born in April 1927, and
both the immediate and extended family, including Normans cousin Cy, remained unstinting
in pursuit of Normans excellence; for his part,
Mailer remained tightly connected to his family.
At age 16 Mailer, who had spent much of his
adolescence building model airplanes, attended
Harvard to study engineering, but soon found
himself attracted to writing, a desire actively
supported by his family. Early on in writing, as
in life, Mailer discovered one of his many alter
egos in the Irish protagonist of James Farrells
Studs Lonigan novels. And, indeed, his early college writing, such as the never-published No
Percentage (1941), was imitative of Farrell, along
with Hemingway and Faulkner.
Not only did Mailer dive headlong into writing,
but he also actively sought the experiences that
would give truth and voice to his words. Indeed,
throughout most of his career, it was often difficult to separate the narrative of his life from the
narratives he wrote. In particular, his marital
history, which he comments upon in Armies of
the Night (1968a), was fraught with drama. Mailer
married his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, a
Boston University student he met when he was
a junior at Harvard, shortly before he was drafted
in 1944. On November 19, 1960, after a raucous
party that concluded with a fight and beating in
the street, Mailer quarreled with his second wife,
Adele Morales, then stabbed her in the abdomen
and back. Mailer was sent to Bellevue, although he
maintained all along that he was sane, and when
Adele recovered from her wounds, she refused to
press charges. While there was an attempt at
reconciliation, the couple separated in March
1961. He then married Lady Jeanne Campbell in
early 1962. Despite his relative optimism in
Armies, published four years after he wed next
wife Beverly Bentley, they separated, and Mailers
mistress, Carol Stevens, moved into the family
home. It was not, however, until 1980 when Norris
Church was the central woman in Mailers life, that
Mailer quickly married and divorced Carol Stevens to legitimize their daughter Maggie, and then
married Norris, whom he considered his soulmate
and with whom he shared a birthday. Despite the
volatility of his married life, Mailer remained a
central figure in his childrens lives, all nine of
them Susan, Danielle, Betsy Ann, Kate, Michael
Burks, Stephen, Maggie, Matthew, and John Buffalo Mailer with the last of whom Norman
collaborated on The Big Empty (2006), a father/
son series of interviews on issues of the time.

MAILER, NORMAN
Not only did his domestic situations provide

a symbiotic relationship to his writing, reinforcing his sense of the violence that lurks just below
the surface of love, but also other life experiences
often crossed the boundaries between his fiction
and non-fiction. Beginning with the first-hand
military experience in World War II that provided
the cynicism and material for The Naked and
the Dead, Mailer engaged fully in politics,
Hollywood, boxing, and other arenas in which
he shaped himself and his fiction and non-fiction.
Mailer consistently made history by challenging
societys complacency and too-easily embraced
ideologies, arguing in The White Negro (1957)
that murder is not altogether cowardly; battling
the feminists of the 1970s in Prisoners of Sex;
naively supporting Jack Henry Abbotts release
from prison, helping him publish In the Belly of
the Beast (1981), and testifying for Abbott at his
trial in 1982 after he was arrested for fatally
stabbing a busboy; and inviting Ronald Reagans
Secretary of State George Schulz to the PEN
International Congress in 1985. He examined
politics from the inside and out: expressing the
desire to believe in JFK in Superman Comes to
the Supermarket (1960), running for mayor of
New York as a Left Conservative in 1969, and
covering the Democrat and Republican Conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968b). If
the world of American politics provided grist for
the Mailer mill, the world of Hollywood gave him
the opportunity to examine the American
Character in its many evolving forms particularly in his novel, and later the play, The Deer Park
(1955), and in his two books on Marilyn Monroe,
Marilyn: A Biography (1973) and Of Women and
Their Elegance (1980). Then, too, there is the
world of boxing and its character as it is reflected
in The Fight (1975) as well as Mailers own
pugilistic efforts. Indeed, throughout his career,
it was evident that Mailer, as he admitted in
Advertisements for Myself (1959), crafted himself
as self-consciously as he crafted his characters.
One of the difficulties in evaluating Mailers
impact on literature is that critical reception has
often confused, in both positive and negative
ways, the man with the work and has often been
radically inconsistent. With the possible exceptions of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead,
which was universally heralded as the best war
novel of its time, and The Executioners Song
677
(1979), seen as an antithesis to Truman Capotes

In Cold Blood (1966), almost every other publication was greeted by equal responses divided
between love and hate. From the beginning of
his career, Mailer also encountered difficulties
with censorship nearly a fifth of the profanity
in Naked had to be removed even after his cousin
recommended that he use the word fug instead
of the more offensive f word yet remained
dedicated to making his readers uncomfortable.
Ever the iconoclast, Mailer made it clear that
his job as a writer was to shake his readers to the
core and to challenge the too-easily held beliefs
of society.
From the beginning, Mailer crafted characters
both fictional and historical who stood in the
midst of existential conflicts. He defined those
existential crises as moments when one must
choose a direction without knowing the outcome.
Indeed, for Mailer heroism is the deliberate act
of choice in the face of the unknown, of bravery,
however foolhardy, in the face of fear. So, most of
Mailers novels begin by situating his characters
at the edge of the unknown and unknowable. The
soldiers at the beginning of The Naked and the
Dead know that they will face battle the next day
and that they may, of course, face death. The
works central metaphor is literally played out
in the card game with which the book opens. The
narrator follows the internal and external dialogues as Wilson, Croft, and Gallagher contemplate both their choices to fold, hold, or raise the
stakes and the unknown outcome of the next days
battle. The protagonist of The Deer Park, Sergius
OShaughnessy, who does not consider himself
a gambler, does make the fateful choice to enter
a poker game, and it is that act that brings him to
the Desert DOr retreat with $14,000. While most
of these existential moments are acted out in the
face of death, either as the potential outcome of
an action or as the generative conditions under
which one acts, Mailers version of death in
Ancient Evenings (1983) implies that even the
afterworld demands choice, for Menenhetet II,
a deceased young nobleman who guides the reader through an ancient Egyptian necropolis, must
decide which route to take through the Land of
the Dead. Will the newly deceased Egyptian
trust his corrupt great-grandfathers ghost, as
repulsive in death as he had been in life, and
allow Menenhetet I to guide the younger ghost in
678
MAILER, NORMAN
his journey? Furthermore, humans act without

absolute guidelines of right and wrong.
For Mailer and his characters, there can be no
certainty because the outcome of the battle between God and the Devil has not yet been determined. God is not all-powerful and does not
know his destiny but continues to engage in the
war between good and evil. Evil itself is an
unknown, a mystery, because it is part of this
ongoing war. So, God and the Devil are part of an
irresolvable dialectic. When Mailer imagines God
and the Devil, both sides have armies, adjutants,
aides, little demons, angels; both have their
department of dirty tricks (1975). In Armies
of the Night, Mailer acknowledges that both
armies are equally admirable and disgraceful;
in Harlots Ghost (1991), he directly explores the
department of dirty tricks, the CIA, without
bringing the plot to full closure, ending as it does
To Be Continued. In The Gospel According to the
Son (1997), Mailer ambitiously imagines Christs
own uncertain role in the Manichaean battle
between his father and Satan. Last, but not least,
The Castle in the Forest explicitly sets up the
Miltonic structure of the war as demons and
angels, without knowing the future, direct Hitler
and history. The problem of evil, however, is too
complex to trace as a simple causal pattern. Part of
the lesson Mailer learned in writing about Gary
Gilmore in The Executioners Song, which he then
applied to writing about Hitler in The Castle in the
Forest, is that there is no simple answer to Why?
While at one point in his career, Mailer thought
that the novelist might be able to explain what the
psychologist could not, his experience with Gary
Gilmore revealed the impossibility of such a task.
So, despite the enormous amount of factual
information and multiple points of view he marshals in The Executioners Song or the bibliography, theology, or psychology he cites in Castle,
Mailer came to believe that the best the novelist
can do is to push the ideas as far as possible and
provide the highly detailed materials in which the
conflicts play themselves out.
Ever anxious about their masculinity, Mailers
protagonists violently struggle to define their
manhood in relation both to other men, particularly father figures, and to women. In bed, as in
war or the boxing ring, these men are constantly
caught up in webs of power and authority. The
Naked and the Dead pits Cummings against
Hearn; Barbary Shore (1951) joins violence

and sexuality as Mikey Lovett is embroiled in an
Oedipal triangle with his landlady, Guinevere,
and her husband, McLeod, who is murdered. In
An American Dream (1965), which was published
first in serial form in Esquire, Stephen Richards
Rojack murders the wife whose power threatens
to unman him, and much to the dismay of certain
critics, he gets away with it, not unlike the way in
which Mailer got away with stabbing Adele. Later
in 1984, Mailer published Tough Guys Dont
Dance in which Tim Madden wonders if he is
sufficiently the tough guy his father expects him
to be, even as he is unsure whether or not he has
committed murder. Part of Mailers fascination
with violent characters, particularly Gary Gilmore,
is the way in which the barely controlled violence
of a sexual relationship can explode in otherwise
unmotivated ways. Finally, The Castle in the
Forest focuses as much on the fathers powerful
sexuality as on the way Hitlers personality is
forged in the heightened crucible of sex and
violence.
Just as Mailers own highly volatile romantic
relationships and pugilistic impulses informed his
novels and non-fiction, so did his sometimes
paradoxically ambivalent politics. Many have
argued that one of the weaknesses of Barbary
Shore is its overtly political allegory, yet in neither
Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) nor Armies of
the Night (1968a) two novels more explicitly
engaged in the political question of their day
does Mailer take a position on that central question. The main character in Why Are We in
Vietnam?, simply called D.J., is set at the edge of
his existential moment, preparing for his departure for Vietnam. Mailer, however, is much more
interested in the less-than-harmonious chorus
of voices responding to the political choices;
D.J. provides narrative access to multiple voices,
just as Armies takes its readers to the steps of the
Pentagon so that they can eavesdrop on the full
panoply of American voices. Similarly, while The
Executioners Song places the reader in the midst of
the cacophony of voices both those calling for
Gilmores execution and those against it is
genuinely democratic in its interrogation of
the various political and personal motivations of
those engaged in the debate.
Dialectics and doubling are not simply the
content of Mailers work but the form as well.
MAILER, NORMAN
The Executioners Song is divided between

Western Voices and Eastern Voices, while
Harlots Ghost, which is about double agents,
falls between the Alpha and Omega. These
divisions mark stylistic, as well as perspectival,
differences. In the middle 1950s, somewhat
frustrated by the reception to Barbary Shore and
beginning to doubt the conventional form of the
novel, Mailer began to explore what came to be
known as New Journalism and at one point
owned a 30 percent share of the Village Voice.
The subtitle of The Armies of the Night: History as
a Novel, the Novel as History announces the
generic oppositions that the book will then call
into question, hence challenging literary classifications and categories as well. In fact, the confusion of how to classify Mailers work is evident in
the two Pulitzer Prizes he won: The Armies of the
Night won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, while
The Executioners Song won the Pulitzer for
fiction. Occupying the space between the facts
of history and the imaginary reconstructions of
the novel, Mailers books seek to redefine the
Great American novel. Just as America is itself
too complex to classify, so the forms in which
Mailer writes of America avoid neatness and
simplicity. In Tough Guys Dont Dance, Harlots
Ghost, and The Deer Park, Mailer pushes the
generic boundaries of the detective novel, the spy
novel, and the Hollywood novel past their limits.
Mailers efforts to capture the expansiveness of
America, its many voices, and its chaotic democracy also set up a tension between the sheer length
of his novels (typically over 1,000 pages) and his
prose style. While he is certainly capable of
Faulknerian sentences that continue at length,
many of his sentences are powerfully succinct,
almost terse, and they are sometimes delivered at
the most intense moments with a flatness of affect
that paradoxically intensifies the experience.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prizes for The Armies
of the Night and The Executioners Song, Norman
Mailer received the National Book Award for
non-fiction for both Miami and the Siege of
Chicago and The Armies of the Night. The Executioners Song also received a National Book Critics
Circle Award nomination, an American Book
Award nomination, and a Notable Book citation
from the American Library Association. Mailer
was also the recipient of the EmersonThoreau
Medal for lifetime achievement from the
679
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989

and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Despite failing health and eyesight,
during interviews following the publication of The
Castle in the Forest, Mailer expressed his plan for a
new novel that would pick up from the digression
on Czar Nicholas II in Castle and further explore
yet another one of the twentieth centurys enigmatic figures, Rasputin. Normal Mailer died at the
age of 84 on November 10, 2007.
SEE ALSO: Farrell, James T. (AF); Faulkner,
William (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF);
Historiographic Metafiction (AF); The Novel
and War (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Wolfe,
Thomas (AF)

Adams, L. (1988). Existential Aesthetics: An Interview
With Norman Mailer. In M. J. Lennon (ed.),
Conversations With Norman Mailer. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, pp. 20727.
Bloom, H. (ed.) (1986). Norman Mailer. New York:
Chelsea House.
Braudy, L. B. (ed.) (1972). Norman Mailer: A Collection
of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Ehrlich, R. (1978). Norman Mailer: The Radical as
Hipster. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow.
Gordon, A. (1980). An American Dreamer: A
Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer.
Press.
Leigh, N. (1990). Radical Fictions and the Novels of
Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martins.
Lennon, J. M. (ed.) (1986). Critical Essays on Norman
Mailer. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Lennon, J. M. (ed.) (1988). Conversations With Norman
Mailer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Lucid, F. R. (ed.) (1971). Norman Mailer: The Man and
His Work. Boston: Little, Brown.
Mailer, N. (1948). The Naked and the Dead. New York.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Mailer, N. (1951). Barbary Shore. New York:
Rinehart.
Mailer, N. (1955). The Deer Park. New York:
Putnams.
Mailer, N. (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York:
Putnams.
Mailer, N. (1965). An American Dream. New York: Dial.
Mailer, N. (1967). Why Are We in Vietnam? New York:
Putnams.
680
MAJOR, CLARENCE
Mailer, N. (1968a). The Armies of the Night. New York:

Mailer, N. (1968b). Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
Mailer, N. (1969). Of a Fire on the Moon. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Mailer, N. (1971). The Prisoner of Sex. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Mailer, N. (1975). Existential Aesthetics. Partisan
Review, 42, 197207.
Mailer, N. (1979). The Executioners Song. New York:
Little, Brown.
Mailer, N. (1983). Ancient Evenings. New York: Little,
Brown.
Mailer, N. (1984). Tough Guys Dont Dance. New York:
Random House.
Mailer, N. (1991). Harlots Ghost. New York: Random
House.
Mailer, N. (1995). Oswalds Tale: An American Mystery.
Mailer, N. (1997). The Gospel According to the Son.
Mailer, N. (2007). The Castle in the Forest. New York:
Random House.
Mailer, N., & Mailer, J. B. (2006). The Big Empty:
Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality,
Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America. New
York: Nation.
Merrill, R. (1992). Norman Mailer Revisited. New York:
Twayne.
Poirier, R. (1972). Norman Mailer. New York: Viking.
Radford, J. (1975). Norman Mailer: A Critical Study.
New York: Barnes and Noble.
Major, Clarence
NANCY BUNGE
Trusting his artistic inclinations has led Clarence

Major not only to write in multiple genres but also
to paint. He has published nine novels; one
collection of short fiction; 11 volumes of poetry;
a memoir; two essay collections, one of them
about African American literature; two dictionaries of African American slang; two anthologies
of African American poetry; and one anthology of
African American fiction. He has also produced
hundreds of paintings.
He was born on December 31, 1936 in Atlanta,
Georgia to Clarence and Inez (Huff) Major. When
his parents separated, his mother moved to
Chicago, taking her children with her. There,
Major saw an exhibition of Van Goghs paintings
which began a lifelong fascination with and

admiration of another painter who wrote well.
He took art lessons from Gus Nall and studied at
the Art Institute on a fellowship, but also discovered French symbolist poetry. After joining the
army, he admired many authors he found in the
base library, including Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Herman Melville. When discharged in
1957, Major published, exhibited paintings, and
created a literary community for himself by editing Coercion Review.
In 1967, he moved to New York and taught
creative writing between trips to Europe and the
Caribbean. He moved on to tenure stream
positions at the universities of Washington and
Colorado, and in 1989 joined the faculty at the
University of California, Davis, from which he
retired. During these years, the publications persisted and his travels grew more extensive.
Majors fiction is experimental from the start.
All-Night Visitors (1969) deals with sexuality in
a way that shocked some audiences (in part
because Majors editor insisted that he cut the
book to half its original length with the sexual
passages left intact; in 1998, the original version
was published). Major wrote NO (1973), his next
novel, on a long roll of paper, a compositional
method he shared with Jack Kerouac, but in
content and technique it extended the experiments of his first novel. NO, like All-Night
Visitors, presents a chaotic account focused on
sexuality and identity. Major considers the structures of his first two novels traditional compared
to those of the three that followed: Reflex and Bone
Structure (1975), Emergency Exit (1979), and My
Amputations (1986), which also focus on the
search for identity; their unruly plot movement
conveys a sense of the protagonists fragmentation. Free of conventional narrative sequence,
these sometimes delightfully playful works reflect
Majors habit of sitting down to compose with
only a vague sense of direction so that he can enjoy
and learn from the process. Major stresses his
belief that imagination inevitably shapes ones
reality by emphasizing the artificial nature of the
worlds he renders in these novels: no one would
confuse the verbal tennis match in Emergency Exit
with a real one. Major also integrates a visual
perspective into these works: Emergency Exit
includes paintings, and his desire to produce
a work composed of large blocks of prose inspired
MALAMUD, BERNARD
My Amputations. Fiction Collective, a press supported by innovative fiction writers, published

these three books, certifying their postmodern
credentials.
Come by Here (2002), Majors memoir of his
mother, suggests that he learned about imaginations power to transcend limits at a young age.
His mother sometimes passed as white in order to
secure well-paying jobs; this persuaded her that
racial distinctions are arbitrary. Major believes
that racism has prevented African American
artists from receiving the attention they deserve
and has responded by putting together anthologies, dictionaries, and an essay collection celebrating African American writing and speech, but like
his mother, he considers race an arbitrary social
construct.
He also believes men can imagine their way
into womens experiences, as he does in his novel
Such Was the Season (1987). Because the book
followed a chronological order, some critics felt
he was producing a realistic work, but Major
considers it at least as experimental as his other
work, for an older African American woman
provides the novel with a voice that sometimes
ascends into poetry. In Painted Turtle: Woman
With Guitar (1988), Major dreams his way into
Zuni culture and transcends the split between
poetry and prose. A musician supplies the voice
of Majors subsequent novel, Dirty Bird Blues
(1996), allowing the reader to see the world from
the perspective of someone who thinks, feels,
and sees with song. One Flesh (2003), Majors
most recent novel, presents the world through
the eyes of an African American painter with
acute physical senses who constantly responds to
the world visually. Although these later novels
lack the structural dislocation of Majors earlier
work, he has never stopped experimenting,
but has continued to enrich and extend his
imagination.
Bell, B. (ed.) (1994). Clarence Major Issue. African
American Review, 28, 1140.
Bell, B. (ed.) (2001). Clarence Major and His Art. Chapel
681
Bunge, N. (ed.) (2002). Conversations With Clarence

Major. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hogue, W. L. (2002). Postmodernism, Traditional
Cultural Forms, and the African American Narrative:
Majors Reflex Morrisons Jazz and Reeds Mumbo
Jumbo. Novel, 35(23), 16992.
Major, C. (1973). NO. New York: Emerson Hall.
Major, C. (1975). Reflex and Bone Structure. New York:
Fiction Collective.
Major, C. (1979). Emergency Exit. New York: Fiction
Collective.
Major, C. (1986). My Amputations. New York: Fiction
Collective.
Major, C. (1987). Such Was the Season. San Francisco:
Mercury House.
Major, C. (1988). Painted Turtle: Women With Guitar.
Major, C. (1990). Fun and Games: Short Fictions.
Duluth, MN: Holy Cow!
Major, C. (1994). Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of AfricanAmerican Slang. New York: Viking.
Major, C. (1996). Dirty Bird Blues. San Francisco:
Mercury House.
Major, C. (1998a). All-Night Visitors [unexpurgated
version; ed. version pub. 1969]. Boston:
Major, C. (1998b). Configurations: New and Selected
Poems, 19581998. Port Townsend, WA: Copper
Canyon.
Major, C. (2001). Necessary Distance: Essays and
Criticism. Minneapolis: Coffee House.
Major, C. (2002). Come by Here: My Mothers Life.
New York: Wiley.
Major, C. (2003). One Flesh. New York: Kensington.
Weixlmann, J. (1991). African American Deconstruction of the Novel in the Work of Ishmael Reed
and Clarence Major. MELUS, 17(4), 5779.
Malamud, Bernard
VICTORIA AARONS
Bernard Malamud is a central post-World War II

American writer whose novels and short stories
capture the texture of life for the Jewish immigrant, the increasing socio-economic pressures of a developing urban milieu, and the
ambiguous and precarious conditions faced by
a rising middle class in America. Malamuds
expertly crafted fiction is widely applauded for
its animated dialogue and vivid, extraordinary
characterizations.
682
MALAMUD, BERNARD
When Bernard Malamuds paradigmatic Jewish protagonist, Mendel, in the short story Idiots
First, utters his plaintive cry in the face of the
relentlessly uncompromising figure of death,
Dont you understand what it means human,
he gives voice to the fundamental thematic
concerns in all of his work: the compassionate
embrace of suffering and the possibilities for
redemption (1963, 14). What it means to be
human, in Malamuds oeuvre, is the unshakable
recognition of shared suffering and the redemptive obligation to extend compassion to others.
Malamuds work asserts for an ethic of rachmones,
Yiddish for compassion and mercy, a concept as
central to Jewish thought as is the covenantal
Hebraic Law, whose very structures Malamud
reinvents in his fiction in fallible yet indomitable
human terms.
In a defining moment in The Assistant (1957),
a novel of despair and transcendence, one character asks another, What do the Jews believe in?
The deceptively rote response the Torah . . . a
Jew must believe in the Law opens itself up to
the essential principle of Malamuds work, the
intersection of Judaism and basic human morality
in the context of twentieth-century America. This
central human concern is articulated with clear
conviction by Malamuds usually hesitant protagonist, who, in the face of this deceptively simple
creed, expresses Malamuds unwavering belief
in the possibilities for a defining morality and
humanity: to do what is right, to be honest, to be
good . . . to other people.. . . This is what a Jew
believes (1957, 150). This simple creed, the belief
in the expression of basic human decency, as
scholar Daniel Walden suggests, is what is meant
by menschlichkeit and is at the heart of all of
Malamuds fiction (Walden, 169). It is, in Malamuds work, the central motivating feature of
both plot and character. For Malamud, being
human and humane are inseparably and intricately linked, and demanding their consanguinity
becomes, in his fiction, a stay against self-deception and despair, the inescapable condition of
human loneliness (1983, p. xiii). Malamud
demands of his characters that they admit their
human worth by acknowledging their place in
history and their responsibility to others.
Literature, Malamud contends, values man by
describing him (1983, p. xiii). As such, plot in
Malamuds fiction gives way to the ethical making
of character. His recognizably Jewish characters,

often speaking in the rhythmic cadences of Yiddish-infused English, remind the reader of what it
means to be human in a precariously unstable,
fallible, and unforgiving world.
Born April 26, 1914 in Brooklyn, New York to
Max (Mendel) Malamud (b. 1885) and Bertha
(Brucha) Fidelman (b. 1888), Malamud drew
heavily upon his immigrant parentage in creating
his settings and characters. His Russian-born
father immigrated to the United States in the
early years of the twentieth century, ran a small
grocery in Brooklyn, and was the prototype for
Morris Bober, the poor, floundering grocer in
The Assistant. Malamuds mother, the daughter
of a shochet (ritual slaughterer) and granddaughter of a rabbi, suffered from schizophrenia and
died in a mental hospital in 1929. In the early
years of his writing, Malamud admits to
thinking about my fathers immigrant life
how he earned his meager living and what he
paid for it, and about my mothers, diminished
by fear and suffering as perhaps matter for my
fiction. . . . I had them in mind as I invented the
characters who became their fictional counterparts. . . . I thought of [my father] as I began
The Assistant and felt I would often be writing
about Jews, in celebration and expiation (1983,
pp. viiiix). Malamuds fiction bears the imprint
of his familys economic struggle and the mark
of their mental anguish his mothers suicide
attempt when Malamud was a boy, her subsequent hospitalizations, and the condition of
his brother, Eugene (b. 1917), who, afflicted
similarly by schizophrenia, was hospitalized for
much of his adult life and died in 1973 at the age
of 55. Much of Malamuds fiction, especially his
early novels and short stories, such as The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), Cost of Living
(1950), The Mourners (1955), and Take Pity
(1957), bear the tenor of a life that admits
suffering and tragedy. Although the American
Jewish writer Philip Roth has described Malamud as a man of stern morality, such moral
certitude becomes the source of ironically
charged comic realism, a understated humor
measured by pathos and through which characters attempt to negotiate both their vulnerability
and strength (Roth, 1).
Bernard Malamud received his BA from City
College in New York in 1936 and his MA from
MALAMUD, BERNARD
Columbia University in 1942. In the early years of

his career, he taught high school while writing
short stories as well as an early attempt at a novel
that was rejected and ultimately destroyed by
Malamud. In 1945 Malamud married Ann de
Chiara, with whom he had two children, Paul
Malamud in 1947 and Janna Malamud in 1952.
His first novel, The Natural (1952), was published
during his first university appointment at Oregon
State College in Corvallis, where he taught from
1949 to1961, followed by a position at Bennington College in Vermont. During his prolific literary career, Malamud published numerous short
stories and eight novels, and was working on a
novel, The People (1989), at the time of his death
in 1986.
The Natural, a story about a rookie baseball
player, Roy Hobbs, whose charmed life is upended by his misguided judgment and ill fate,
establishes Malamuds moral project and draws
heavily upon elements of the fantastical, a narrative conceit that became a staple in Malamuds
writing. Against the backdrop of a mythic quest
for the holy grail, Roy Hobbs emerges from
obscurity with a magical bat, and is toppled by
a mysterious woman and a silver bullet. Against
this mythic backdrop, The Natural particularizes
the conditions of triumph and suffering, moral
ambiguity and certainty, and realism and fantasy.
Malamuds fiction is typically shaped by
enigmatic and mysterious figures who create
moments of opportunity for characters: the disincarnated black Jewish angel who appears to the
beleaguered Job-like character, Manischevitz, in
the short story Angel Levine; the embodiment
of death who would stand in the way of Isaacs
salvation in Idiots First; the diminishing figure
of Salzman, the marriage broker, whose mysterious comings and goings haunt the rabbinical
student in The Magic Barrel; the nagging presence of Schwartz, the scraggly Jewbird who,
speaking Yiddish and davening with passion, flies
through the kitchen window of an anti-Semite in
The Jewbird; the cryptic Rabbi Lifschitz in The
Silver Crown, a faith healer, who promises to
restore health through the creation of an inexplicably potent silver crown; the Charonesque
coxswain of The Lady of the Lake, who ferries
the anxiously dissembling Henry Levin to his
inevitable fate; the curious Abramowitz, quizzically a man in a horse or a horse that talks like
683
a man, in Talking Horse (1983 329); and the

fablesque world of the novel Gods Grace (1982),
with its chimpanzee upon whom the gift of speech
has been bestowed. Such fantastic elements, invested with the triumph of human imperfections
and depth of compassion, become believable in
the creative spin of Malamuds imagination and
emerge from an honest assessment of both the
extraordinary weaknesses and redemptive possibilities that make of his characters what it means
human (1963, 14).
Although best-known as a Jewish writer who
re-creates the immigrant experience in America,
a writer who brings to life the rich vocalization
of Yiddish, and for whom Jewish suffering is
a metonymy for universal human suffering,
Malamud was also a consummate stylist who was
known to write multiple drafts of his work and to
have revised his manuscripts extensively. His
fiction covers a vast expanse of historical, social,
political, cultural, and individualized moments
and events. While the novels The Natural, The
Assistant, and Dubins Lives primarily focus on
individual characters who attempt to reinvent
themselves, The Fixer (1966) is based on the
1913 blood libel case of a Russian Jew accused
of the ritual murder of a Christian child. The
Fixer, which received both the National Book
Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was later
adapted to film, suggests Malamuds preoccupation with anti-Semitism and persecution. Stories
such as The German Refugee (1963) and Man
in the Drawer (1968, which received the
O. Henry Prize) focus on the tragic consequences
of oppression and the absence of autonomous
self-expression. Malamuds fiction freezes in time,
defining political and social events in American
culture. The 1971 novel The Tenants (adapted to
film in 2006) exposes the complexities of black/
white relations through the lens of two phobic
writers, and The Letter (1972) and My Son the
Murderer (1968) address the consequences of
war and depression as a backdrop for personal
despair and fear.
The recipient of many prestigious awards and
honors, including the Rosenthal Award from the
National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Book Award, a Ford Foundation Grant, the
Pulitzer Prize, the O. Henry Prize, the Jewish
Heritage Award, and the Premio Mondello Prize
in Italy, to name a few, Malamud was elected to
684
MARKSON, DAVID
the American Institute of Arts and Letters and the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Critical
reception of Malamuds work has consistently
praised the depth of his vision, the range of
narrative voice, and the brilliance of his prose.
Cynthia Ozick stated that he brought into being
a new American idiom of his own idiosyncratic
invention . . . who had introduced the idea of
blessing a virtue as insight, virtue as crucible
into the literature of a generation mainly sunk
in aestheticism or nihilism or solipsism (26).
Considered one of the three most influential
post-World War II American Jewish writers,
along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Bernard
Malamud remains a major voice in American
literature.
Jewish Fiction (BIF); Ozick, Cynthia (AF);
Roth, Philip (AF)

Aarons, V. (1996). Believe Me, There Are Jews
Everywhere Accidental Connections in the
Most Unlikely Places: A Reading of Bernard
Malamud. In V. Aarons, A Measure of
Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American
Jewish Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
pp. 92122.
Aarons, V. (2002). The Unfettering of the Law:
Rescripting the Word in Bernard Malamuds Fiction.
Modern Jewish Studies, 117.
Aarons, V. (2005). Biblical Revisions and Interruptions:
Bernard Malamuds Renaming of Law and Covenant.
In V. Aarons, What Happened to Abraham?
Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, pp. 3463.
Avery, E. (ed.) (2001). The Magic Worlds of Bernard
Malamud. New York: SUNY Press, pp. 3463.
Cheuse, A., & Delbanco, N. (eds.) (1996). Talking
Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Davis, P. (2007). Bernard Malamud: A Writers Life.
Lasher, L. M. (ed.) (1991). Conversations With Bernard
Malamud. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Malamud, B. (1952). The Natural. New York: Harcourt,
Brace.
Malamud, B. (1957). The Assistant. New York: Farrar
Straus.
Malamud, B. (1958). The Magic Barrel. New York:
Farrar Straus.
Malamud, B. (1961). A New Life. New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux.
Malamud, B. (1963). Idiots First. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Malamud, B. (1966). The Fixer. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Malamud, B. (1969). Pictures of Fidelman: An
Exhibition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Malamud, B. (1971). The Tenants. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Malamud, B. (1973). Rembrandts Hat. New York:
Malamud, B. (1979). Dubins Lives. New York: Farrar
Straus.
Malamud, B. (1982). Gods Grace. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Malamud, B. (1983). The Stories of Bernard Malamud.
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux.
Malamud, B. (1989a). The Complete Stories (ed. R.
Giroux). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Malamud, B. (1989b). The People and Uncollected
Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ozick, C. (2001). Remembrances: Bernard Malamud.
In The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud (ed.
E. Avery). New York: SUNY Press, pp. 257.
Roth, P. (2001). Pictures of Malamud. In P. Roth, Shop
Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 12030.
Smith, J. M. (2006). My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of
Bernard Malamud. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Walden, D. (2001). Bernard Malamud and His
Universal Menschen. In The Magic Worlds of Bernard
Malamud (ed. E. Avery). New York: SUNY Press,
pp. 16773.
Markson, David
JOSEPH P. TABBI
Author of The Last Novel (2007), David Markson

(born in Albany, New York in 1927) might better
be thought of as the last modernist author. Even
the justifiable claim to have created with this book
his own personal genre reinforces the modernist compulsion to make it new with each and
every project. At the same time, Markson in this
self-declared last book makes a point of including, among the literary and art-historical citations
that comprise his late works, a list of plagiarisms,
repetitions, direct quotations, and reported
misquotations. The new appears in a context
of rewritings, bowdlerization, anticipation, and
recycling throughout the literary canon.
MARKSON, DAVID
Marksons life work is partly a preservation and

poetic arrangement not of world knowledge but
of the sum total of what one individual might
know and remember over a dedicated literary
lifetime. At the same time, putting these remembered bits on the page is a way of disburdening the
self of The baggage in ones head, as the heroine
of Wittgensteins Mistress (1985) puts it. Before
Markson had reduced his persona to the barest
identifier, the Novelist of the last four books,
in Wittgensteins Mistress he had conceived
a remarkable female character to convey the
(living) novelists accumulated life knowledge.
Kate in Wittgensteins Mistress imagines herself
to be, literally, the last person on earth who
wanders the world driving abandoned cars until
the gas runs out, who camps out in the great
museums using picture frames and other
artifacts for firewood. At one point late in the
novel, Marksons narrator imagines herself to be
the curator of the world, as if she alone
literally, alone held possession of all knowledge.
Wittgensteins Mistress (1985) is surely the
height of Marksons achievement; it was anticipated by an already accomplished body of work
a series of detective novels set in Greenwich
Village in the 1960s. Even in these popular
productions, Markson squirrels away literary
apercus, not least the detective Fannins discovery, in a suspects typewriter, of a Columbia
University essay draft naming The Recognitions
by William Gaddis the greatest American novel
since Moby Dick. Those attributions mattered,
then and Marksons may be the first such
appreciation of Gaddis in print. A debut literary
novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee (2008 [1965]),
was made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra, but
rather than pursue either the screen or genre
writing, Markson remained true to his literary
vision, his Columbia University education in
world literature, and his important early friendships with Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Lowry, and
Dylan Thomas.
Going Down, a novel of expatriate life in
Mexico, was a journeymans attempt to write in
the mode of Lowry (who had been the subject of
Marksons Columbia University masters thesis,
published in 1978 as Malcolm Lowrys Volcano).
Dostoevsky is another presence in Going Down,
yet the drama and evolving subjectivity of the
literary precursors can only be echoed by
685
Marksons postwar literary generation. Already

with Lowry, the modernist stance was beginning
to lapse into self-consciousness and selfabsorption. To avoid such, Markson took this
aesthetic into hitherto unexplored comic and
erotic modes in Springers Progress (1977).
Ultimately, though, the explorations into psychology and subjectivity, typical of Dostoevsky
and Lowry, would become the pure subjectivity
of Wittgensteins Mistress and then, eventually,
no subjectivity at all insofar as its absence can
be imagined.
Typical of modernist self-awareness, the late
works aesthetic is stated in the work: Nonlinear.
Discontinuous. Collage-like. An Assemblage.
This line from The Last Novel appears, with slight
variations, in the previous three books by Markson, Vanishing Point (2004), This Is Not A Novel
(2001), and Readers Block (1996). The removal of
elements familiar from other genres, especially
those associated with print fiction, places Markson, surprisingly, among the forebearers of
electronic literature where precisely those
narrative, plot, and character elements have been
lost. The attribution would shock Markson,
who composed each of his books from note
cards transferred to a typing machine in the
words of one youthful admirer, who had probably
never heard the word typewriter (Markson
2005).
Each Markson novel thats not one, though
written in the same unvarying mode, features
dramatic, and dramatically different, insights and
endings. The narrator of Readers Block consigns
the previous musings to the wastebasket the
final word, set on a line of its own at the end of
Readers Block. The Vanishing Point author
figure, lucid throughout, glimpses the start
of Alzheimers in that books final pages. The
author figure in The Last Novel, returning to
an earlier citation from Jan van Eyck, offers
an apologia for the minimal turn in his art: Als
ick kan.
Which Novelist finds himself several times
repeating, even while not even sure in what
language is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up
by van Eycks use of it. Thats it, I can do no
more? All I have left? I can go no further? Als ick
kan?
686
MARSHALL, PAULE
In life, Markson showed no sign of Alzheimers.

His living memory in fact, his friendship over
half a century with most major writers of his era,
and his gifts as a raconteur remained a rich
resource for visitors who were frequently, and
courteously, received in his Greenwich Village
apartment. The modernist aesthetic, since T. S.
Eliot, refuses the personal: the individual talent
must not get in the way of the art. Markson
remained true to the aesthetic, and the tradition.
David Markson died on June 4, 2010, at the age
of 82.
SEE ALSO: Gaddis, William (AF); Lowry,
Malcolm (BIF); Modernist Fiction (AF);

Dempsey, P. (2005). Novelist of Shreds and Patches:
The Fiction of David Markson. Hollins Critic, 42(4),
113.
Green, D. (2003). Postmodern American Fiction.
Antioch Review, 61(4), 72941.
Markson, D. (1970). Going Down. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
Markson, D. (1977). Springers Progress. New York:
Markson, D. (1978). Malcolm Lowrys Volcano: Myth,
Symbol, Meaning. New York: Times Books.
Markson, D. (1988). Wittgensteins Mistress. Normal,
IL: Dalkey Archives.
Markson, D. (1993). Collected Poems. Normal, IL:
Dalkey Archives.
Markson, D. (1996). Readers Block. Normal, IL: Dalkey
Archives.
Markson, D. (2001). This Is Not A Novel. Washington,
DC: Counterpoint.
Markson, D. (2004). Vanishing Point. Washington, DC:
Shoemaker and Hoard.
Markson, D. (2005). An Interview With David
Markson. Bookslut. At www.bookslut.com/features/
2005_07_005963.php, accessed Jan. 12, 2010.
Markson, D. (2006). Epigraph for a Tramp [1959].
Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard.
Markson, D. (2006). Epigraph for a Dead Beat [1961].
Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard.
Markson, D. (2007). The Last Novel. Washington, DC:
Shoemaker and Hoard.
Markson, D. (2008). The Ballad of Dingus McGee
[1965]. Berkeley: Counterpoint.
Tabbi, J. (1990a). David Markson: An Introduction.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, 10(2), 91103.
Tabbi, J. (1990b). An Interview With David

Markson. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 10(2),
10417.
Tabbi, J. (1997). Solitary Inventions: David Markson
at the End of the Line. Modern Fiction Studies, 43,
74572.
Marshall, Paule
HELLEN LEE-KELLER
Paule Marshall is one of the most important US

writers addressing the legacy of the African
diaspora in the Americas in the second half of
the twentieth century. Spanning nearly 50 years,
beginning with the short story The Valley Between (1954), Marshalls works consistently
focus on the daily lives of working-class and
middle-class minority women, the difficulties
facing West Indian immigrants to the United
States, and the legacy of the slave trade in the
Americas. In addition to five novels, Marshall
has published several collections of novellas
and short stories, a memoir, and many speeches
and lectures. Her short stories are regularly
included in literary anthologies.
Born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn,
New York on April 9, 1929 to Barbadian immigrants Samuel and Ada Burke, Marshall grew up
in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929
and then during the Great Depression. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1953 and pursued
graduate studies at Hunter College. She married
Kenneth Marshall in 1950, and they had one son
before divorcing in 1963.
Marshalls major contribution to American
letters is that she brings to light the specificities
of national, linguistic, and cultural origins of
and differences among African Americans in
the United States. By focusing on West Indian
immigrants, she stresses the limitations of conceiving of African diaspora in the Americas as
a monolithic phenomenon. Her attention to the
particularities of West Indians as a subgroup of
African Americans requires readers to recognize
intraracial as well as interracial conflicts.
It was only accidentally that, as an adolescent,
she stumbled upon the poetry of Paul Laurence
Dunbar in the Macon Street branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, an event which inspired her to
MARSHALL, PAULE
become a writer. Her first job was as a writer for

Our World, a magazine aimed at a black reading
audience. Due to the lack of exposure to black
writings and literature as a youth, her main
influences on writing her first novel were the
Bildungsromanen of Thomas Mann. It was only
later, through self-education, that she drew upon
black writers, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and
Ralph Ellison.
An important element of Marshalls fiction is
her ability to imagine and dramatize the hardships facing African Caribbean immigrants to the
United States. Marshalls attention to dialogue,
character development, and storytelling brings
alive unique perspectives from a variety of social,
racial, national, and gendered positions. While
Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), a coming-of-age
story of a young African American woman
growing up among a community of Barbadian
immigrants in Brooklyn, offered a semiautobiographical perspective, Marshalls other works
clearly illustrate her agility in crafting multiple
points of view. For example, while her first short
story describes the growing frustration and eventual freedom of a middle-class white woman,
her most recent novel, The Fisher King (2000), is
a tersely written novel about intergenerational
family conflict that takes place in New York
and Paris as told from the perspective of an
8-year-old boy. In her epic The Chosen Place,
The Timeless People (1969), Marshall delivers a
sharp criticism of the economic and political
postcolonial strife in the Caribbean nations and
of US cultural and economic interference impeding the autonomy of the island nations.
Marshalls other novels are Praisesong for the
Widow (1983a), a saga of a middle-class African
American widow who takes a Caribbean cruise
vacation only to find herself coming into cultural
and spiritual awareness in Grenada; and Daughters (1991), a story about a young immigrant
woman from the fictional island of Triunion,
who must come to terms with the women in her
extended family. Among her short stories,
Reena, Merle, To Da-Duh: In Memoriam,
and Some Get Wasted are the most widely
anthologized.
Marshall has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, a Ford Foundation
Grant in 1963, a National Endowment for the
Arts Grant in 1967, and a MacArthur Founda-
687
tion Award in 1992. She won the Rosenthal

Foundation Award for the American Academy
of Arts and Letters in 1962 for Soul Clap Hands
and Sing, the Before Columbus Foundation
American Book Award in 1984 for Praisesong
for the Widow, and the John Dos Passos Prize for
Literature in 1989 for Brown Girl, Brownstones
and Praisesong for the Widow. In 1994, she
was named a Literary Lion by the New York
Public Library. Marshall has taught at Virginia
Commonwealth University; the University of
California, Berkeley; the Iowa Writers Workshop; and Yale University. She currently teaches
creative writing at New York University and
holds the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of
Literature and Culture.
SEE ALSO: Ellison, Ralph (AF); Ethnicity and
Fiction (AF); Postcolonial Fiction of the
West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF);
West Indian Fiction (WF)

Coser, S. (1994). Bridging the Americas: The Literature of
Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
DeLamotte, E. C. (1998). Places of Silence, Journeys of
Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Denniston, D. (1995). The Fiction of Paule Marshall.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Gikandi, S. (1992). Writing in Limbo: Modernism and
Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Hathaway, H. (1999). Caribbean Wave: Relocating
Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington:
Marshall, P. (1959). Brown Girl, Brownstones.
Marshall, P. (1961). Soul Clap Hands and Sing. New
York: Atheneum.
Marshall, P. (1969). The Chosen Place, the Timeless
People. New York: Vintage.
Marshall, P. (1983a). Praisesong for the Widow.
New York: Penguin.
Marshall, P. (1983b). Reena and Other Stories. Old
Westbury, NY: Feminist Press.
Marshall, P. (1985). Merle: A Novella and Other Stories.
London: Virago.
Marshall, P. (1991). Daughters. New York: Plume.
688
MASO, CAROLE
Marshall, P. (2000). The Fisher King. New York:

Scribners.
Marshall, P. (2001). From Poets in the Kitchen.
Callaloo, 24(2), 62733.
Marshall, P. (2008). Triangular Road: A Memoir.
New York: Basic Civitas.
Pettis, J. (19912). A MELUS Interview: Paule
Marshall. MELUS, 17(4), 11729.
Pettis, J. (1995). Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshalls
Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Maso, Carole
ROBIN SILBERGLEID
Carole Maso is widely known as a feminist experimental writer and postmodernist, though her
relationship to the publishing industry has been
fraught. Her work foregrounds issues of personal
and cultural loss and trauma, particularly the
Holocaust and the AIDS pandemic. The author
of six works of fiction and three works of nonfiction, as well as numerous pieces of short fiction
and criticism, Maso is a writers writer who takes
language itself as a major subject matter. Born
March 9, 1956 in Paterson, New Jersey, Maso
attended Vassar College and held a series of odd
jobs before publishing Ghost Dance in 1986.
Much of her work is metafictional, incorporating self-reflexive discussion of the possibilities of
writing about loss and desire and questioning the
usefulness of traditional narrative forms. Masos
novels are highly intertextual, whether through
subtle allusion or blatant parody, and most of
her characters are artists, writers, or professors.
Characterizing herself as a lyric artist who works
in prose, Masos fiction fits within the tradition
of the lyrical novel or the modernist notion of
spatial form. While her work is known for its
formal experimentation, each novel takes a different strategy in its critique of narrative and
exploration of lyricism.
Anti-narrative and lyricism in Masos books
are connected thematically to loss and grief, on
the one hand, and female sexuality and desire
on the other. Although she is not a writer of
strict historiographic metafiction, her books are
nonetheless historically grounded. The personal
tragedies of her protagonists are tied to the major
traumas of the twentieth century. Ghost Dance
(1986), a book in five parts, is organized around
central image patterns, as protagonist Vanessa

comes to terms with the unexpected death of her
mother in the explosion of a Ford Pinto; it takes its
title from Native American mourning rituals.
Similarly, The Art Lover (1990) is a multileveled
narrative of loss, centered around novelist Caroline, whose work-in-progress forms part of the
fiction, and who searches for a way to work
through both her friends AIDS diagnosis and
the recent death of her father. The novel radically
breaks from the fiction to incorporate elements of
autobiography, as Maso devotes the penultimate
section to the AIDS-related death of her friend,
artist Gary Falk. Its serious interrogation of the
efficacy of art in a time of grief sets up The
American Woman in the Chinese Hat (1994),
which features a writer visiting France and grieving the break-up of her romantic relationship.
American Woman is Masos barest narrative,
mirroring Catherines breakdown and loss of faith
in words.
AVA (1993) is the most radical of Masos
novels, virtually devoid of plot; instead, like
Virginia Woolfs The Waves, it is composed as
a series of short fragments of Ava Kleins memory
on the last day of her life: snippets of poems she
recalls, favorite quotations, images of her husbands and lovers. Haunted by the deaths of Avas
family members in Treblinka, the book offers an
example of post-Holocaust narrative and situates
itself consciously against the writing of Anne
Frank, Claude Lanzmann, and Paul Celan. Masos
most intertextual book, AVA features a substantial sources section, inviting her readers to
gather the books Ava has read. In direct opposition to the open, reader-centered form of AVA,
Defiance (1998) offers a fierce parody of narrative
convention; its heroine, Bernadette OBrien, is a
professor on death row for murdering two of
her students. Forced to write from her cell, she
likewise describes plot-driven narrative as a vise
or prison.
Not surprisingly, given her characters continued interrogation of the possibilities of narrative
fiction, Masos three most recent book-length
works have been pieces of non-fiction that bridge
creative and critical writing. In Break Every Rule
(2000a), Maso collects pieces that explain her
development as a writer and reflect on the state
of twentieth-century literary production. The
Room Lit by Roses (2000b) tells the story of Masos
MATHEWS, HARRY
pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. Yet

rather than a straightforward journalistic account, the book considers questions of narrative
form and the fragmented quality of diaries themselves, exploring reproduction as metaphor for
narrative, and narrative as metaphor for reproduction. Her book on Mexican painter Frida
Kahlo, Beauty Is Convulsive (2002), brings together
poetry, diary, and criticism as an homage to Kahlo
and consideration of feminist/female artistic production. Influenced by feminist writers and thinkers including Virginia Woolf, Helene Cixous,
Julia Kristeva, and Nathalie Sarraute, Maso defines
one of her major projects as locating a space for
female experience in writing.
The winner of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for
fiction, Maso is currently professor of literary arts
at Brown University. She continues to work on the
triptych The Bay of Angels, of which AVA is a part.
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Woolf, Virginia
(BIF)
Cooley, N. (1995). Carole Maso: An Interview.
American Poetry Review, 24(2), 325.
Harris, V. F. (ed.) (1997). Special Issue on Carole Maso.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17(3), 104215.
Maso, C. (1986). Ghost Dance. San Francisco: North
Point.
Maso, C. (1990). The Art Lover. San Francisco: North
Point.
Maso, C. (1993). AVA. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive.
Maso, C. (1994). The American Woman in the Chinese
Hat. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive.
Maso, C. (1996). Aureole. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco.
Maso, C. (1998). Defiance. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Maso, C. (2000a). Break Every Rule: Essays on Language,
Longing and Moments of Desire. Washington, DC:
Counterpoint.
Maso, C. (2000b). The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of
Pregnancy and Birth. Washington, DC:
Counterpoint.
Maso, C. (2002). Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of
Frida Kahlo. Washington, DC: Counterpoint.
Quinn, R. G. (2001). We Were Working on an Erotic
Song Cycle: Reading Carole Masos AVA as the
Poetics of Female Italian-American Cultural and
Sexual Identity. MELUS, 26(1), 91113.
Silbergleid, R. (1999). We Perished, Each Alone: Loss
and Lyricism in Woolf, Maso, and Young. In
689
J. McVicker & L. Davis (eds.), Virginia Woolf and

Communities: Selected Papers From the Eighth Annual
Conference on Virginia Woolf. St. Louis, MO: Pace
Silbergleid, R. (2007). Treblinka, a Rather Musical
Word: Carole Masos Post-Holocaust Narrative.
Stirling, G. (1998a). Exhausting Heteronarrative: The
American Woman in the Chinese Hat. Modern Fiction
Studies, 44(4), 93558.
Stirling, G. (1998b). Mourning and Metafiction: Carole
Masos The Art Lover. Contemporary Literature,
39(4), 586613.
Worthington, M. (2000). Posthumous Posturing: The
Subversive Power of Death in Contemporary
Womens Fiction. Studies in the Novel, 32(2),
24363.
Mathews, Harry
DAVID W. MADDEN
Harry Mathews is a remarkably versatile writer in

a range of genres novels, short stories, poetry,
essays, translations, and memoir. He has written
complex, challenging metafictions, and though he
rejects the label, his works have been in the
vanguard of American postmodernism.
Harry Mathews was born February 14, 1930 in
New York City and attended exclusive schools,
including Princeton, which he left his sophomore
year to join the Navy. He received his BA from
Harvard University in 1952 and immigrated to
Europe, spending most of his time in Paris, where
he joined a number of avant garde writers and
became the only American admitted to the French
literary society, Oulipo.
His first novel, The Conversions (1962), begins
with an air of mystery as an unnamed narrator is
invited to a wealthy scions mansion and challenged to interpret the engravings on an ancient
adze, which he wins after a bizarre contest. A day
or so later, the scion dies and bequeaths all his
estate to the holder of the adze who must solve
three riddles. The bulk of the novel is taken up by
the narrators complicated search for answers and
ultimate frustration that the entire enterprise may
have been a ruse. More important is the novels
construction, which relies on metafictional forays
through letters, documents, paintings, films, and
stories within stories.
690
MATHEWS, HARRY
Tlooth (1966) also involves quests and journeys

and likewise centers on an ambiguous narrator,
who the reader assumes is male but is eventually
revealed to be a woman who is incarcerated in
a Russian prison and plots the assassination of
Evelyn Roak, a surgeon who has mistakenly amputated some of the violinistnarrators fingers.
After international travels and numerous fictional
digressions, the narrator catches up with Roak,
discovers she has a fatal disease, and allows fate to
take its course.
Where the first two novels experimented with
the detective and picaresque genres, The Sinking
of the Odradek Stadium (1975) is an epistolary
exchange between a pair of lovers, Zachary
McCaltex and Twang, his Asian wife. Once again
a byzantine plot revolves around discovery of
a hidden treasure that takes the protagonists
around the world and leads to what appears to
be the dissolution of their relationship. As in his
other novels, this work concludes elliptically. The
emphasis in all three novels on puzzles and games
is reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokovs elaborate
verbal stratagems, and the incorporation of actual
and invented history parallels the experiments of
Thomas Pynchon.
Cigarettes (1988a) revolves around another
puzzle as a group of characters move in and out
of the life of a woman named Elizabeth, the
subject of a destroyed portrait that exists only
as a copy. The novel shuttles back and forth
between the pre- and postwar years of the wellheeled and unscrupulous in New York. While
narrators in the first three novels occupy the
center of narrative attention, neither Cigarettes
narrator, Lewis Lewison, nor any other character
can be described as the center or protagonist, thus
Mathews challenges a central tenet of most fictions. The novel further extends his use of stories
within stories and narrative fragments to decenter the reader and force more active narrative
engagement.
The Journalist (1994) once more revolves
around the writings of a subjective narrator, this
time a middle-aged man who keeps a journal in
which he ponders questions large and small and
gradually becomes so immersed in what he hopes
is a comprehensive account that he loses touch
with any world outside of words. Mathews
foregrounds, perhaps more overtly than in any
other novel, metafictional concerns as his protag-
onist obsesses over art, its materials, and its

creation. My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973
(2005) is a fictionalized memoir of what became
a fairly widespread suspicion that Mathews
himself was a CIA agent. S: Semaines du Suzanne
(1997 [1991]), originally published in French, is
a novella of which Mathews is one of seven
contributors that further underscores the writers
devotion to fragmented fiction and the gamesmanship of narrative composition.
Mathews has been something of a cult favorite
to a devoted cadre of readers and been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts
grant for fiction writing (1982) and a National
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
Prize for Fiction (1991). He has taught at Bennington and Hamilton Colleges and Columbia
University.
Nabokov, Vladimir (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF)

James, A. (2008). The Maltese and the Mustard
Fields: Oulipian Translation. SubStance, 37(1),
13447.
Leamon, W. (1993). Harry Mathews. New York:
Twayne.
Mathews, H. (1962). The Conversions. New York:
Random House.
Mathews, H. (1966). Tlooth. New York: Paris Review/
Doubleday.
Mathews, H. (1974). The Planisphere. Providence, RI:
Burning Deck.
Mathews, H. (1975). The Sinking of the Odradek
Stadium. New York: Harper.
Mathews, H. (1980). Country Cooking and Other Stories.
Providence, RI: Burning Deck.
Mathews, H. (1987). Armenian Papers. Princeton:
Mathews, H. (1988a). Cigarettes. New York:
Mathews, H. (1988b). The Orchard. Flint, MI:
Bamberger.
Mathews, H. (1988c). Singular Pleasures. New York:
Grenfell.
Mathews, H. (1988d). Twenty Lines a Day. Normal, IL:
Dalkey Archive.
Mathews, H. (1991a). The American Experience.
London: Atlas.
MAUPIN, ARMISTEAD
Mathews, H. (1991b). Immeasurable Distances. Venice,

CA: Lapis.
Mathews, H. (1994). The Journalist. Boston: David
Godine.
Mathews, H. (1997). S: Semaines du Suzane [1991].
Cambridge, MA: Lumen.
Mathews, H. (1999). The Way Home: Collected Longer
Prose. London: Atlas.
Mathews, H. (2002). The Human Country: New and
Collected Stories. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.
Mathews, H. (2005). My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of
1973. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.
OBrien, J. (ed.) (1987). Harry Mathews. Review of
Stonehill, B. (1982). On Harry Mathews. Chicago
Review, 33(2), 10711.
Maupin, Armistead
SAMUEL GAUSTAD
Armistead Maupin, an openly gay writer, focuses

on realistic portrayals of marginal characters,
including gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals,
African Americans, and dwarves. He creates
unique non-biological family structures and also
attacks hypocrisy by dealing with non-mainstream individuals, deftly intertwining their
stories within a larger societal framework.
Additionally, Maupin includes references to
contemporary settings, current political events,
and popular fashions, so that fictional time feels
like real time. Because of this, his works
function as a subtle catalogue of political and
popular culture.
Born in Washington, DC on May 13, 1944,
Maupin, the eldest of three children, was raised
in Raleigh, North Carolina. He attended the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
graduating in 1966. Following service in the US
Navy, Maupin worked as a journalist for a brief
time in South Carolina before relocating to San
Francisco as an agency writer for the Associated
Press. Maupins acclaimed Tales of the City series
was born in San Francisco in 1974, where he lived
with his partner and manager, Terry Anderson,
for many years, and is currently married to
Christopher Turner.
Inspired by the serialized fiction of Charles
Dickens, Maupins first five volumes of the series
(Tales of the City (1978), More Tales of the City
(1980), Further Tales of the City (1982), Babycakes
691
(1984), and Significant Others (1987)) were

initially published in the San Francisco Chronicle
followed by the San Francisco Examiner. Subsequently, each volume was published as a novel,
beginning in 1978. Sure of You, the final volume of
the opus, was published as an independent novel
in 1989. Set predominantly in San Francisco and
functioning as a social history of the city, Tales
contains several characters who run throughout
the series: Michael Tolliver, Anna Madrigal, Mary
Ann Singleton, Brian Hawkins, and Mona Ramsey. Each is representative of a different faction:
gay, transsexual, female and male heterosexual,
and bisexual. Headed by landlady and matriarch
Mrs. Madrigal, these characters form the nonbiological nuclear family of 28 Barbary Lane, the
setting for much of the action of the first three
volumes. Anna Madrigal functions as the voice of
experience and wisdom throughout the series.
Maupin uses Michael as his raissoneur, creating
a gay Everyman to voice a gay perspective. Of
particular importance was Maupins inclusion of
the AIDS epidemic, beginning with Babycakes; he
was one of the first fiction writers to address the
topic openly. In treating the subject, however,
Maupin never sentimentalizes or allows his characters to become maudlin. Maupins attack on
Hollywood hypocrisy (forcing gays to stay closeted) is introduced in Babycakes, when Michael
becomes intimately involved with a closeted film
star, referred to only as ____. This plot turn was
based on Maupins involvement with the late
Rock Hudson.
In Maybe the Moon (1992), Maupin again offered a poignant combination of pathos and wit.
His protagonist is a Jewish dwarf, Cadence Cady
Roth (based on Tamara De Treaux, who appeared
in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial), who struggles as an
actress in Hollywood. Once more, Maupin focuses
on various marginalized characters, and a strong
surrogate family is created. He uses three gay
characters, Jeff, Callum, and Leonard, as foils for
one another, contrasting gays means of dealing
with the heterosexual mainstream. Maupin
again highlights Hollywoods double standards
in dealing with those outside the norm. Callum,
as a young film star, remains closeted, while Cadys
journal, when turned into a film, is completely
altered because of Hollywoods assumption of
mainstream audiences lack of comfort in
dealing with dwarves. The result is an account of
692
MCCARTHY, CORMAC
Cadys life in which she becomes a non-essential

character.
In 2000, Maupin published the semiautobiographical and darker The Night Listener, whose
central character, loosely based on Maupin, is
Gabriel Noone, a National Public Radio star.
Gabriel is gay, a resident of San Francisco,
and estranged from his partner of 10 years, Jess
Carmody. He is befriended by Pete Lomax, a
sexually abused 13-year-old who has been
adopted by Donna Lomax, a blind doctor. The
contact between Gabriel, Donna, and Pete is
initially via telephone but, because Pete and
Donna are shrouded in such mystery, Gabriel
journeys to Wisconsin in an attempt to meet Pete
in person, which never happens. Pete and Donna
vanish. Once again, Maupin deals with idiosyncratic marginal characters, family constructs, and,
to a lesser extent, Hollywoods refusal to deal with
homosexuality honestly.
The long-awaited Michael Tolliver Lives (2007)
is a coda to the Tales series. The title, which refers
to the characters HIV-positive diagnosis in the
fifth volume of Tales, underscores Maupins
positive outlook in addressing AIDS, offering a
protagonist who, surviving for nearly two decades, is happy, healthy, and responsibly sexually
active. In this most recent work, Maupin once
more addresses marginal characters and hypocrisy, although now the religious hypocrisy of the
South. Other original Tales characters return,
including the sixtyish Brian, the physically
fragile but mentally sharp Mrs. Madrigal, and
Mary Ann.
Worthy of note are the filmed versions of the
first three volumes of the Tales of the City series,
produced as a miniseries by PBS and Showtime,
and The Night Listener, adapted as a feature film
in 2006 with the screenplay by Maupin and
Terry Anderson.
SEE ALSO: Queer Modernism (AF)

Crawford, S. (1998). No Time to Be Idle: The Serial
Novel and Popular Imagination. World and I, 13(11),
32331.
Gale, P. (1999). Armistead Maupin. Bath: Absolute
Press.
Gillespie, E. (1990). Armistead Maupin at Tales End.

San Francisco Review of Books, 14(4), 1820.
Hunt, S. (1992). An Interview With Armistead Maupin.
Christopher Street, 14(192) 812.
Maupin, A. (1978). Tales of the City. New York:
HarperCollins.
Maupin, A. (1980). More Tales of the City. New York:
HarperCollins.
Maupin, A. (1982). Further Tales of the City. New York:
HarperCollins.
Maupin, A. (1984). Babycakes. New York:
HarperCollins.
Maupin, A. (1987). Significant Others. New York:
HarperCollins.
Maupin, A. (1989). Sure of You. New York:
HarperCollins.
Maupin, A. (1992). Maybe the Moon. New York:
HarperCollins.
Maupin, A. (1995). Foreword. In D. Deitcher (ed.),
The Question of Equality: Gay and Lesbian Gay
Politics in America Since Stonewall. New York:
Scribners.
Maupin, A. (2000). The Night Listener. New York:
HarperCollins.
Maupin, A. (2007). Michael Tolliver Lives. New York:
HarperCollins.
Warhol, R. (1999). Making Gay and Lesbian into
Household Words: How Serial Form Works in
Armistead Maupins Tales of the City. Contemporary
McCarthy, Cormac
JAKE MATTOX
Cormac McCarthy is one of the most critically

acclaimed and popularly successful writers in
modern US fiction over the past 40 years. Most
often set within the geographic South and West, his
novels usually feature violent plots conveyed
through dense prose and intertwined with philosophical and metaphysical investigations. His
body of work spans numerous forms and genres,
including 10 novels, two plays, and one screenplay,
and his works have been adapted to the stage and
screen, including No Country for Old Men (2005),
which won the Academy Award for Best Film
in 2007.
Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr. was born in
Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933, and
he and his family moved to Tennessee in 1937.
He enrolled at the University of Tennessee in
MCCARTHY, CORMAC
Knoxville from 1951 to 1952 and again after

serving for four years in the US Air Force. He
did not graduate, but during his time there he
published two stories in The Phoenix, the student
literary magazine. He won the Ingram-Merrill
Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960 and
published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in
1965. He has been married three times and has
two children; he is known for guarding his privacy
and avoiding public appearances.
His work is often noted for its debts to and
intertextual connections with canonical US
authors such as William Faulkner and Herman
Melville, as well as writers and philosophers from
the European tradition. McCarthys novels often
feature the literal and metaphorical peregrinations of uprooted and alienated young men
through an intensely violent and seemingly meaningless world, and they engage with many fundamental issues of Western thought: epistemology,
ontology, religion, human agency, the nature of
evil, storytelling, and language. Stylistically, much
of McCarthys fiction features difficult vocabulary, regional and local dialects and idiolects, and
episodic story lines rather than fluid narrative. His
novels usually leave readers without explicit
explanations as to why characters act as they do,
or how various plot elements relate to one another
in time and space. McCarthys characters often
seem to lack the ability or desire to reflect upon
their own situations, and they struggle to make
meaning in a world in which violence is apparently the ultimate arbiter and only constant in
human affairs. While McCarthys narratives usually refuse to reveal much about the interior
consciousnesses of characters, the dense poetics
of landscape and place of the exterior world
often provide a surrogate avenue for knowledge
about them.
Many critics have viewed McCarthys career as
dividing into two distinct phases: a Southern or
Appalachian phase associated with his residence
in Tennessee and other parts of the South, and a
focus on Western or border narratives, linked
to McCarthys move to Texas in the late 1970s.
McCarthys first four novels are set in povertyridden Appalachian locales in and around
Tennessee and engage with classic Southern literary themes identified with writers such as
Flannery OConnor and William Faulkner such
as violence, redemption, the relationship between
693
the Southern past and present, Christian thematics, and an often dark humor. Clear connections to Faulkner are an authenticating regional
dialect, an often abstruse syntax, and a pareddown, minimalist punctuation format.
McCarthys early novels are narratively complex works with shifting points of view and
opaquely linked story lines; they present dislocated, alienated characters in a world often
framed by violence and transgressive sexualities.
The Orchard Keeper (1965) follows John Wesley
Rattner, a young man whose mentor is a bootlegger and whose murdered fathers unidentified
body lies in a pit watched over by an old recluse
in the East Tennessee mountains. Outer Dark
(1968) describes the separate but overlapping
wanderings of Culla and Rinthy, incestuous siblings in search of their infant, who Culla had left
in the wilderness of rural Tennessee to die. The
novel engages with questions of the nature of
evil, guilt, and the lack of clear moral structures
in the world. Child of God (1973), a fragmented
novel that begins with a series of multiple,
short accounts told by unnamed community
narrators, continues these themes by telling
of Lester Ballard, a young man who loses his
family farm and slips into insanity, murder, and
necrophilia.
Suttree (1979), the most dense and ambitious of
the first four novels, follows Cornelius Suttree, the
self-alienated son of a well-to-do family, who has
left his wife and child to live a life of squalor and
day-to-day survival in the slums of Knoxville in
the early 1950s. Suttree resides on a houseboat
and subsists by selling the carp and catfish he
occasionally catches in the filthy river. His austere
poverty and chosen social network of marginalized slum dwellers suggest a rejection of the
confident middle-class narrative stressing industry and order. The novel densely packs in episode
after extreme episode of drunken binges, violence,
sickness, and other reminders of an intense corporeality amidst deep existential despair. Thematically, it deals with the apparent absence of
God in the world and the almost unbearable sense
of isolation in human existence, even as it suggests
the fundamental responsibilities that humans
have toward one another.
By the time Suttree was published, McCarthy
had relocated to the Southwest, and his fiction
likewise shifted in geographic scope. His fifth
694
MCCARTHY, CORMAC
novel, Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in

the West (1985), follows a character known only as
the kid, who runs away from his Tennessee
home at age 14 and winds up in the border region
just after the USMexican War (18468). The kid
joins a vicious gang contracted by the Mexican
government to kill as many Apache Indians as
possible and bring their scalps in for reward.
Drawing heavily on historical sources, the
novel is often praised as McCarthys finest work,
even while it is seen by many as unreadably
violent, disturbing, and nihilistic. Like much of
McCarthys work, it also lacks any developed
or interesting female characters. It features one
of McCarthys most striking creations: a sevenfoot hairless albino known as the judge, an
impossibly ubiquitous and seemingly immortal
giant of a man unmatched in physical and intellectual prowess, whose violent sexuality and sheer
enjoyment of his genocidal project are framed as
integral to the US conquest of the West. Through
the actions of the gang, the novel interrogates,
and often challenges, fundamental mythologies
depicting the expansion of the nation as a relatively benign process of settling putatively uninhabited territories.
In the 1990s, McCarthy achieved popular success with his bestselling Border Trilogy: All the
Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and
Cities of the Plain (1998). Pretty Horses, which was
made into a film in 2000, establishes a break in
style in its more accessible attention to some of the
elements of the Western or cowboy romance:
a young innocent seeking adventure, traversing
beautiful if unforgiving landscape, fighting
against threats, avenging injustices, and engaging
in a forbidden love affair. The novel can also be
seen as a pastoral Bildungsroman, as its protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a young Texas horseman
who rides to Mexico in 1949 seeking a way of life
that is disappearing in the US Southwest. While
the text contains many clear links to McCarthys
previous works, its language is less complex
and challenging even as it broadens to reflect the
cultural history of its geography by including
some dialogue in Spanish.
The Crossing tells a closely related tale that takes
place several years prior to Pretty Horses; its three
main sections follow the three border crossings of
Billy Parham, its 16-year-old protagonist. The
novel is marked heavily with dense philosophical
investigations, and many of these are related to the

epistemological issues surrounding narration and
storytelling; in his travels, Billy hears (as many
McCarthy protagonists do) a variety of parables
and stories from incidental characters such as
a gypsy, a shaman, and a blind Mexican revolutionary. Cities of the Plain unites the first two
novels of the trilogy. John Grady Cole and Billy
Parham are both working for a ranch outside of El
Paso approximately three years after the end of
Pretty Horses. On a visit across the border, John
Grady falls in love with a prostitute named
Magdalena, and the narrative follows his attempts
to free her. If Pretty Horses began the trilogy
drawing upon more conventional and accessible
plot and narration, by the end of Cities the
themes of existential despair and violence so
prevalent in McCarthys previous works again
are foregrounded.
Continuing his focus on the border region,
McCarthy published his ninth novel, the bestselling No Country for Old Men, in 2005. The
work draws from both the crime fiction and
Western genres and tells of Llewellyn Moss, a
Vietnam veteran who finds more than $2 million
at the scene of a drug deal gone awry and must
flee a killer hired to track him down. The work
also features italicized monologues from the
local sheriff, as he struggles with the possibility
that the assumptions upholding the Western
way of life associated with his familys history
of law enforcement may no longer be valid or
effective.
McCarthy released The Road in 2006, a postapocalyptic tale of a man and his son walking
hundreds of miles through a ruined landscape
following an unspecified disaster; a film adaptation appeared in 2009. Focusing in part on the
fathers devoted protection of the child, the story
thus complicates the theme of paternal abandonment prevalent in much of McCarthys fiction. In
2006, McCarthy also published The Sunset Limited, a novel in dramatic form, which was staged
in Chicago and New York; his first drama was
The Stonemason (1994). Also appearing in between the novels of the Border Trilogy was The
Gardeners Son (1996), a screenplay broadcast on
PBS in 1977.
McCarthy has received much critical recognition for his work. The Orchard Keeper won
the William Faulkner Foundation Award for
MCCARTHY, MARY
the best first novel by an American, and

McCarthy received a MacArthur Fellowship in
1981. More recently, he received the National
Book Award for fiction and the National Book
Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses
in 1992, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for
The Road in 2007.
SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Faulkner,
William (AF); OConnor, Flannery (AF);
The Road Novel (AF); The Southern Novel
(AF)
Arnold, E. T., & Luce, D. C. (eds.) (1999). Perspectives
on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Bell, V. M. (1988). The Achievement of Cormac
McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Cant, J. (2008). Cormac McCarthy and the
Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York:
Routledge.
Cormac McCarthy Society. (2008). Cormac McCarthy:
A Biography. At www.cormacmccarthy.com/
Biography.htm, accessed June 3, 2008.
Guillemin, G. (2004). The Pastoral Vision of Cormac
McCarthy. College Station: Texas A&M University
Press.
Hall, W., & Wallach, R. (eds.) (2002a). Sacred Violence,
vol. 1: Cormac McCarthys Appalachian Works, 2nd
edn. El Paso: Texas Western Press.
Hall, W., & Wallach, R. (eds.) (2002b). Sacred Violence,
vol. 2: Cormac McCarthys Western Novels, 2nd ed.
El Paso: Texas Western Press.
Holloway, D. (2002). The Late Modernism of Cormac
McCarthy. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Jarrett, R. L. (1997). Cormac McCarthy. New York:
Twayne.
Lilley, J. D. (ed.) (2002). Cormac McCarthy: New
Directions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Luce, D. C. (2007). Cormac McCarthy: A Bibliography.
At www.cormacmccarthy.com/Resources.htm,
McCarthy, C. (1965). The Orchard Keeper. New York:
Random House.
McCarthy, C. (1968). Outer Dark. New York: Random
House.
McCarthy, C. (1973). Child of God. New York: Random
House.
McCarthy, C. (1979). Suttree. New York: Random
House.
695
McCarthy, C. (1985). Blood Meridian: or, The

Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random
House.
McCarthy, C. (1992). All the Pretty Horses. New York:
Knopf.
McCarthy, C. (1994a). The Crossing. New York: Knopf.
McCarthy, C. (1994b). The Stonemason. Hopewell, NJ:
Ecco.
McCarthy, C. (1996). The Gardeners Son. Hopewell,
NJ: Ecco.
McCarthy, C. (1998). Cities of the Plain. New York:
Knopf.
McCarthy, C. (2005). No Country for Old Men. New
York: Knopf.
McCarthy, C. (2006a). The Road. New York: Knopf.
McCarthy, C. (2006b). The Sunset Limited. New York:
Vintage.
Wallach, R. (ed.) (2000). Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical
Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Manchester:
McCarthy, Mary
BRENDA MURPHY
During her lifetime, Mary McCarthy was known

first as a public intellectual, the First Lady of
American Letters (Newsweek 1963), and second
as a novelist. Since her death in 1989, McCarthys
critical reputation has largely been based on her
memoirs, particularly Memories of a Catholic
Girlhood (1957), as well as her novel The Group
(1963a) and several much-anthologized stories.
Mary Therese McCarthy was born on June 21,
1912 in Seattle, Washington. The circumstances
of her difficult childhood, recounted in Memories
of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), Cast a Cold Eye
(1950), and How I Grew (1987), include the
deaths of both of her beloved and doting parents
in the influenza epidemic of 1918 and the placing
of Mary and her three brothers into the foster care
of a relative and her abusive husband in Minneapolis, who provided no emotional warmth and
only the barest of physical necessities to the
children. This was her Irish Catholic girlhood.
When she was 11, Mary was rescued by her AngloProtestant maternal grandfather and taken to live
with him and her Jewish grandmother in Seattle.
She completed her education at Vassar.
McCarthy wrote about Vassar, and its importance in shaping her intellectually, in her memoirs
696
MCCARTHY, MARY
and essays. Most significantly, McCarthys

bestselling novel, The Group, is based on her
experiences and those of some classmates in the
Vassar class of 1933. The novel covers eight years,
from 1933 to 1941, and its detailed, satiric portrait
of this group of privileged female college graduates chronicles what she saw as the failure of the
progressive ideology of the New Deal to change
the lives of these idealistic but spoiled and naive
young liberals in any fundamental way.
Several other novels helped to establish
McCarthys reputation as a brilliant stylist, known
for her wit and comedic talents as well as her
incisive social commentary. The Company She
Keeps (1942), originally published as six short
stories which share a protagonist, broke new
ground with its episodic but carefully crafted
structure and the unflinching honesty with which
it treated the social, romantic, and sexual relationships in the young New York intellectual milieu in
which McCarthy moved. In The Oasis (1949), she
satirized the utopian socialism of her Partisan
Review colleagues, and in The Groves of Academe
(1952), she produced both a memorable academic
novel and a satiric exposure of the cynical
manipulation of McCarthyism by both Left and
Right. A Charmed Life (1955) took aim at the
self-involved and irresponsible lives of artists
and intellectuals who believe they are exempt
from the morality that applies to those who are
less talented than they. Her later novels, Birds of
America (1971) and Cannibals and Missionaries
(1979), examine the psychology of the younger
generation dominated by the Vietnam War and
of terrorists who hijacked airplanes during
the 1970s.
While McCarthys sharp critical mind is evident in her fiction, it emerged most tellingly in her
literary and cultural criticism and her political
writing. A five-part series in The Nation when she
was 23, Our Critics, Right or Wrong (McCarthy
& Marshall 1935), established her credentials as
what Life magazine was to call the Lady With
a Switchblade (Life 1964). At the Partisan Review, she was given the seemingly innocuous
assignment of theater reviewer, but her acute and
acerbic theatre chronicles soon became a major
draw for the magazine. Major collections of her
wide-ranging cultural criticism include On the
Contrary (1961), Mary McCarthys Theatre
Chronicles, 193762 (1963b), and The Writing on
the Wall (1970). Always a passionate political

writer, McCarthy became intensely interested in
the US involvement in Vietnam in the early 1960s,
and traveled there twice to observe the situation
first-hand. The result was her books Vietnam
(1967), Hanoi (1968), and Medina (1972). During
the Watergate scandals, she wrote The Mask of
State: Watergate Portraits (1974).
Mary McCarthy, who lived in many houses in
her lifetime, never really found a home until she
and her fourth husband, James West, settled into
a life that moved between their apartment in Paris
and their house in Castine, Maine. McCarthy
loved travel, and throughout her life was never
stationary for long. Her peripatetic life fed her
fiction as well as her vivid travel writing, most
notably in Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones
of Florence (1959).
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Gender
and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);

Abrams, S. F. (2004). Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics,
and the Post-War Intellectual. New York: Peter Lang.
Brightman, C. (1992). Writing Dangerously: Mary
McCarthy and Her World. New York: Clarkson
Potter.
Brightman, C. (ed.) (1995). Between Friends: The
Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary
McCarthy 19491975. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Gelderman, C. (1988). Mary McCarthy: A Life.
New York: St Martins.
Gelderman, C. W. (1991). Conversations With Mary
McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
McCarthy, M. (1942). The Company She Keeps.
McCarthy, M. (1949). The Oasis. New York: Random
House.
McCarthy, M. (1950). Cast a Cold Eye. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1952). The Groves of Academe.
McCarthy, M. (1955). A Charmed Life. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1956). Venice Observed: Comments on
Venetian Civilization. New York: Reynal.
McCarthy, M. (1957). Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.
McCarthy, M. (1959). The Stones of Florence. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
MCCULLERS, CARSON
McCarthy, M. (1961). On the Contrary. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.
McCarthy, M. (1963a). The Group. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1963b). Mary McCarthys Theatre
Chronicles 19371962. New York: Farrar, Straus.
McCarthy, M. (1967). Vietnam. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1968). Hanoi. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1970). The Writing on the Wall and
Other Literary Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1971). Birds of America. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1972). Medina. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1974). The Mask of State: Watergate
Portraits. New York: Harcourt Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1979). Cannibals and Missionaries.
McCarthy, M. (1987). How I Grew. San Diego: Harcourt
Brace.
McCarthy, M. (1992). Intellectual Memoirs: New York
19361938. New York: Harcourt Brace.
McCarthy, M., & Marshall, M. (1935). Our Critics,
Right or Wrong. Nation 141(3674), 654.
Murphy, B. (ed.) (2004). Mary McCarthy [special
issue]. Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 15(1).
McCullers, Carson
SARAH GLEESON-WHITE
Carson McCullers has been described as one of the

United States greatest living writers (Williams
(1986 [1950])) and as a minor writer (Fiedler
142). Although her reputation today lies somewhere between these two poles, she remains one of
the most significant writers of the Southern Renaissance. McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith
in Columbus, Georgia on February 19, 1917 to
Lamar and Marguerite Smith. In 1930, Lula
dropped her first name to become Carson, to
better reflect what she believed was her proper
boyish identity. Two years later, she developed
rheumatic fever; left undiagnosed, it led to the
many cerebral strokes she suffered throughout
her life, eventually paralyzing one side of her
body, and causing her death in Nyack, New York
on September 29, 1967. McCullerss imaginative
engagement with untenable gender positions,
queer sexualities, and physical freakishness in
697
her writings was thus rehearsed in her own life.

Similarly, her support of the Civil Rights Movement enabled a white writer, for the first time in
Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with
as much ease and justice as those of her own race
(Wright 195). McCullerss elegant prose and her
conviction that [n]ature is not abnormal, only
lifelessness is abnormal (1971, 282) have ensured
that her writing resonates with such force and
freshness today.
In 1934, McCullers left Georgia to study
creative writing at Columbia University and
New York University. On a visit home, she met
Reeves McCullers, an army corporal. They married in 1937 and moved to New York in 1940.
Leaving Reeves that same year, she joined the
legendary Brooklyn Heights household that
included W. H. Auden and Gypsy Rose Lee.
She divorced Reeves in 1941, and they remarried
in 1945. Reeves, a frustrated writer and, like
McCullers, an alcoholic, committed suicide in
November 1953. McCullers returned to Nyack
with her mother and sister, where she had been
living on and off since 1944, and where she would
spend the rest of her life.
Wunderkind, her first publication, foreshadowed the pared-back style, small Southern
towns, tomboy protagonists, and themes adolescence, belonging and lonesomeness, creativity,
displaced sexuality, and gender instability that
would define all her writings. The Heart Is a Lonely
Hunter (1940), McCullerss first novel, was published to critical acclaim, and is arguably her
greatest achievement, its stylistic and thematic
sophistication belying her 22 years. While Heart
portrays a yearning for connection by a tomboy,
a deaf-mute, and other townsfolk, it also engages
with class and racial unease, and the changing
place of women, in the 1930s. Scholars have, until
recently, overlooked the novels committed
aspect, a characteristic of all her writings.
Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) is set on
a Southern army base in peacetime and narrates
the homoerotic and voyeuristic yearnings of
a captain for a young private. Reflections was
arguably the first Southern novel to discuss
homosexuality openly. The Member of the Wedding (1946) concerns a young tomboys desire to
join her brother and his fiancees we of me.
McCullers adapted it to the stage, and it won
a 1950 New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
698
MCELROY, JOSEPH
Another play, The Square Root of Wonderful

(1958), failed to achieve Members warm reception. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951a) imagines
another we of me, between an Amazonian
woman, a hunchback, and an ex-convict. Edward
Albee adapted Ballad to the stage in 1963.
McCullerss last novel, Clock Without Hands
(1961), which deals openly and urgently with
segregation and homosexuality, divided the
critics: some were critical of its seeming lack of
formal coherence, while others embraced it for its
incisive social and political commentary.
Between the publication of Clock and her death
in 1967, McCullers became increasingly ill;
although her great productive period was over,
she published several short stories and a book of
childrens verse, Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as
a Pig (1964), and started writing her memoirs.
After her death, her sister published The
Mortgaged Heart (1971), a collection of short
stories, poems, articles, and essays. The collection
is central to the McCullers canon for its inclusion
of those essays in which she reflects on the writing
and creative process, as well as her outline of
Heart.
Almost all of the novels, and some stories, have
been adapted to the screen. McCullers received
two Guggenheim Fellowships (1942 and 1946)
and the 1966 Henry Bellamann Award for her
outstanding contribution to literature.
McCullers, C. (1951a). The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: The

Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
McCullers, C. (1951b). The Member of the Wedding: A
Play. New York: New Directions.
McCullers, C. (1958). The Square Root of Wonderful: A
Play. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
McCullers, C. (1961). Clock Without Hands. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
McCullers, C. (1964). Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a
Pig. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
McCullers, C. (1971). The Mortgaged Heart (ed. M. G.
Smith). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
McCullers, C. (1987). Collected Stories. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
McCullers, C. (1999). Illuminations and Night Glare:
The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers
(ed. C. Dews). Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Savigneau, J. (2001). Carson McCullers: A Life (trans.
J. E. Howard). London: Womens Press.
Westling, L. (1985). Sacred Groves and Ravaged
Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson
McCullers and Flannery OConnor. Athens:
Whitt, J. (ed.) (2007). Reflections in a Critical Eye: Essays
on Carson McCullers. Lanham, MD: University Press
of America.
Williams, T. (1986). This Book [1950]. In H. Bloom
(ed.), Carson McCullers. New York: Chelsea House.
Wright, R. (1940). Inner Landscape. New Republic,
p. 195 (Aug. 5).

Queer Modernism (AF); The Southern
Novel (AF)
McElroy, Joseph

Carr, V. S. (1985). The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of
Carson McCullers. New York: Carrol and Graf.
Clark, B. L., & Friedman, M. (eds.) (1996). Critical
Essays on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall.
Fiedler, L. (1967). Love and Death in the American
Novel. London: Jonathan Cape.
Gleeson-White, S. (2003). Strange Bodies: Gender and
Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers.
McCullers, C. (1940). The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
McCullers, C. (1941). Reflections in a Golden Eye.
McCullers, C. (1946). The Member of the Wedding.
JOSEPH DEWEY
The construction of identity centers the narratives of Joseph McElroy. The novels themselves
are cutting edge they confront first-time
readers with their rich excess, layerings of
associational symbols, improvisational feel, and
unapologetic scale; these are novels so imposing
that they create their own kind of reading
dynamic (much like those of others of his
generation, most notably Thomas Pynchon,
William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo). Reading
McElroy requires diligence, an intellectual
curiosity about a range of disciplines (including
economics, mathematics, linguistics, biology,
cybernetics, and history), a fascination with the
sheer volume of data offered by the material
world, and, supremely, a love of word play.
MCELROY, JOSEPH
Yet for all their arch inventiveness, thematically

the novels are remarkably traditional: sensitive
isolates construct the self through the exertion of
memory and intellect via intricate interior monologues that ultimately confirm a global human
community of such isolated bits. That humanist
faith in the design of complexity distinguishes
McElroy from the apocalyptic pessimism and
caustic satires of those other experimental novelists of his generation.
McElroy, born August 21, 1930, grew up on the
boisterous streets of Depression-era Brooklyn
Heights. His father, who died when McElroy was
15, was trained in chemistry and urged his precocious son not to limit his intellectual growth to his
evident love of novels but to pursue the sciences
with equal curiosity. McElroy completed his BA
in 1951 from Williams College, his masters the
following year at Columbia (his thesis centered on
women in Kafka), and (after a two-year stint in
the Coast Guard) his PhD in 1961, also
from Columbia University. A career academic,
McElroy taught literature for more than 30 years
(196495) at New Yorks Queens College, all the
while quietly writing groundbreaking experimental narratives. For instance, in A Smugglers Bible
(1966), McElroys first novel, a man aboard a
transatlantic ship works futilely to bring together
eight autobiographical chapters, each told from a
different perspective of those neighbors, teachers, and family who had touched his life.
Over the next decade, McElroy published
a kind of trilogy Hinds Kidnap: A Pastoral on
Familiar Airs (1969), Ancient History: A Paraphrase (1971), and Lookout Cartridge (1974) in
which characters who struggle to solve mysteries
ultimately must confront the dilemma of identity.
In Hinds Kidnap, a man attempts to find a boy
kidnapped years earlier, an obsession that leads
the man himself into a dramatic loss of his own
psyche (a kind of metaphoric kidnapping) that
leaves only the uneasy reward of his awareness
expanded into ambiguity. Ancient History, using
the metaphors of anthropology to anatomize the
complexity of friendship, the viability of memory,
and the construction of responsibility (a man,
unable to comprehend a friends suicide, types the
suicide note his friend should have left). In Lookout Cartridge, a documentary filmmaker tries to
account for why one of his experimental films has
been destroyed, and his expansive narrative of its
699
creation leads the eccentric visionary into

a transcontinental pilgrimage that becomes in turn
an exploration of his own relationships. McElroy
deploys a variety of system metaphors among
them, the body, electricity, and computers to
suggest how the appetitive nature of data acquisition can recover intricate patterns without defining any ultimate answers.
In Plus (1977), McElroy, using an audacious
science fiction premise, pares the process of selfidentity into the elemental. A young engineer,
exposed to radiation, agrees to act as guinea pig
in an elaborate experiment: his brain will be
excised from his dying body and launched into
space, kept alive in a nutrient solution. The
excised brain, awakening to its own improbable
existence, controls the narrative perspective: we
share its grasping momentum toward defining
its own identity, relearning its memories, and
reinvestigating the logic of language until it must
concede to its decaying orbit and incinerates
during re-entry but McElroy hints that the
apparent catastrophe promises further awakening beyond the check of science or the reach of
the senses.
Women and Men (1987), McElroys landmark
achievement, catapults the struggle to construct
identity into a transcendental webbing: McElroy
tracks the parallel lives of a journalist and a
feminist activist who happen to share an apartment building in contemporary Manhattan. The
two never actually meet; rather McElroy charts
their histories and in doing so recovers intricate
associations scenes, voices, images, and characters that, across more than a thousand pages,
crystallize into fractal patterns that argue the
essential connectedness of the human project.
McElroy followed that massive narrative with
two far more accessible offerings (one a Bildungsroman, the other a love story) that nevertheless
confirm the same breathtaking vision. In The
Letter Left to Me (1988), a 15-year-old wrestles
with the implications of a letter left to him by his
dead father, a conventional wisdom-epistle that
advises the boy to appreciate every moment. But
as others read the letter it is copied and disseminated initially to the boys family but ultimately
to his entire college freshman class McElroy
elaborates that private communication into an
accidental conspiracy of readers who draw a
range of conclusions about the letter, leaving
700
MCKAY, CLAUDE
the man-child both apart and a part, suspended

between adolescence and adulthood. In 2003s
Actress in the House, the lives of a Manhattan
lawyer and an aspiring actress half his age briefly
collide (a one-week affair ignited by the lawyers
visceral reaction to the actress taking a hard slap
during a performance). The narrative discloses
how these two lives, each bent on exorcising
the pain in their pasts, come nevertheless to defy
the centripetal pull of the self and move outward into a dynamic that resonates with global
energies.
McElroys fictions ultimately dismiss the integrity of the self as the hobgoblin of small minds
widen that perspective, they argue, and discover an integrity to facticity. That embracing
sensibility permits the dreary world of the immediate to ascend into the transcendent, an
un-ironic (even giddy) celebration of order that
gives McElroys novels, despite their intricate
execution and their evident gravitas, a defiant
optimism.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); DeLillo,
Don (AF); Gaddis, William (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF)

Hantke, S. (1994). Conspiracy and Paranoia in
Contemporary American Fiction: The Works
of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy. New York:
Peter Lang.
Karl, F. (1983). American Fictions 19401980: A
Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation. New
York: Harper and Row, pp. 37083.
LeClair, T. (1983). An Interview With Joseph McElroy.
In T. LeClair, with L. McCaffrey, (eds.), Anything
Can Happen: Interviews With Contemporary
American Novelists. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, pp. 23551.
LeClair, T. (1989). The Art of Excess: Mastery in
Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, pp. 13174.
McElroy, J. (1966). A Smugglers Bible. New York:
Harcourt.
McElroy, J. (1969). Hinds Kidnap: A Pastoral on
Familiar Airs. New York: Harper and Row.
McElroy, J. (1971). Ancient History: A Paraphrase. New
York: Knopf.
McElroy, J. (1974). Lookout Cartridge. New York:
Knopf.
McElroy, J. (1977). Plus. New York: Knopf.

McElroy, J. (1987). Women and Men. New York:
Knopf.
McElroy, J. (1988). The Letter Left to Me. New York:
Knopf.
McElroy, J. (2004). Actress in the House. New York:
Knopf.
Porush, D. (1985). The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction.
New York: Methuen.
Review of Contemporary Fiction. (1990). Joseph
McElroy [special issue]. 10(1).
Tanner, T. (1976). Toward an Ultimate Topography:
The Work of Joseph McElroy. TriQuarterly, 36,
21452.
McKay, Claude
LEAH READE ROSENBERG
A poet, novelist, journalist, and political radical,

Claude Festus McKay made profound contributions to the formation of the Caribbean, Harlem
Renaissance, modernist, Negritude, and queer
literary traditions. He belongs to the tradition of
black Atlantic public intellectuals, such as C. L. R.
James, who brought a Marxist critique to the
politics of race and art and challenged dominant
conceptions of modernity by placing the black
proletariat and peasantry at its center.
McKay was born on September 15, 1889 to
prosperous farmers in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica
and received an intellectually open education. In
1912, he immigrated to the United States, and
with his famous sonnet If we must die (1919)
established himself as the leading black poet in the
United States, a position reinforced with Harlem
Shadows (1922), a founding text of the Harlem
Renaissance. He soon gained a reputation as
a prominent political radical, and in 1919 traveled
to London, where he published a volume of
poetry, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems
(1920). After returning to the States, he traveled to
Moscow in 1922 for the Fourth Congress of the
Third International, but because of his association
with communism, was barred re-entry into the
United States, and Britain banned him from its
colonial territories. Between 1923 and 1934 he
lived in France and Morocco and traveled to other
countries, and wrote three novels and a collection
of short stories published in New York as part of
the Harlem Renaissance.
MCKAY, CLAUDE
In 1934, McKay was able to return to the

United States, where he suffered financial and
health problems, converted to Catholicism, and
died May 22, 1948. During this period he wrote
two memoirs, A Long Way From Home (1937) and
My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979a); Harlem: Negro
Metropolis (1940), an analysis of the history,
culture, and politics of Harlem; and a large body
of poetry, most notably the cycle manuscript,
a collection of 54 poems.
McKays first two books of poetry, Songs of
Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), are
written in Jamaica Creole and heroic couplets.
They reflect both Jamaican peasant culture and
his training in British romanticism and German
philosophy. Featuring peasant speakers, McKays
dialect verse portrayed the hardship of peasant
labor and the satisfaction Jamaicans took in their
work. McKay also celebrated contemporary and
historical militancy; for instance, his prize-winning poem, George William Gordon to the
Oppressed Natives, commemorated the 1865
Morant Bay peasant rebellion. Published in the
local press and presented at literary and debating
clubs, these poems participated in an emergent
cultural nationalism in Jamaica and provoked
debate about the legitimacy of dialect as
a literary language.
In a significant break from his dialect verse,
McKay established himself as the leading black
poet in the United States with the sonnet and
other poetic forms. McKay published in the journals such as the Liberator and African American
publications such as Alain Lockes The New Negro
anthology (1926). Despite their formal conservatism, McKays poems are powerful portrayals of
black humanity which condemn lynching, working-class exploitation, and colonialism. If we
must die, for instance, decries the violence
against returning African American servicemen
and union workers in the summer of 1919.
Harlem Dancer and Harlem Shadows portray
African American prostitutes as complex,
alienated human beings, oppressed by poverty
and shame.
McKay wrote three influential novels: Home to
Harlem (1928), regarded as the first bestselling
novel by an African American author; Banjo: A
Story Without a Plot (1929), which inspired Aime
Cesaire and Leopold Senghor in establishing
the Negritude movement; and Banana Bottom
701
(1933), a foundational Caribbean novel. In these

works, McKay returns to the vernacular in diction
and in subject. Centered on the relationship
between a Haitian poet and working-class
Harlemites, Home to Harlem presents Harlem
as an international, proletarian, and polymorphously sexual Negro metropolis whose soul
and power lie in its jazz, brothels, cabarets, and
laboring classes. Home to Harlem was strongly
criticized by both W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus
Garvey for pandering to white prurience by
focusing on the underworld.
Banjo is the story of a homosocial and
homoerotic international community of black
vagabonds in post-World War I Marseilles; it
develops the vision of black politics and
aesthetics presented in Home to Harlem by
addressing the linked development of European
and US imperialism and by articulating a theory
of black subaltern culture as a unique form of
resistance against the oppressive forces of
modernity. In contrast, Banana Bottom (1933)
returns to the rural Jamaica of McKays youth
and is the story of a black woman who marries
a peasant and settles in rural Jamaica. All three
novels, however, critique European colonialism,
US imperialism, capitalism, and bourgeois
propriety and center on the role of the artist
and of art.
McKay was honored with the Musgrave Silver
Medal from the Institute of Jamaica (1912), the
Harmon Gold Award for literature (1929), and
the Order of Jamaica (1977). His oeuvre illuminates the profoundly international and political
nature of literary movements in the first half of the
twentieth century.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); The Harlem
Renaissance (AF); James, C. L. R. (WF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF);
Cooper, W. (1987). Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in
the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
Hathaway, H. (1999). Caribbean Waves. Bloomington:
Holcomb, G. E. (2007). Claude McKay, Code Name
Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem
Renaissance. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
702
MILLER, HENRY
James, W. (2001). A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude

McKays Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion.
Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle.
Locke, A. (1925). The New Negro: An Interpretation.
New York: Boni.
McKay, C. (1940). Harlem: Negro Metropolis. New
York: E. P. Dutton.
McKay, C. (1961). Banana Bottom [1933]. San Diego:
Harcourt, Brace.
McKay, C. (1970). Banjo [1929]. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
McKay, C. (1970). A Long Way From Home [1937].
McKay, C. (1973). The Passion of Claude McKay:
Selected Poetry and Prose, 19121948 (ed. W.
Cooper). New York: Schocken.
McKay, C. (1979). My Green Hills of Jamaica (ed. M.
Morris). Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann.
McKay, C. (1979). The Negroes in America (trans. R. J.
Winter) Port Washington, NY: Kennikat.
McKay, C. (1987). Home to Harlem [1928]. Boston:
McKay, C. (1990). Harlem Glory. Chicago: Kerr.
McKay, C. (2004). Complete Poems (ed. W. Maxwell).
Miller, Henry
JAMES M. DECKER
Henry Miller, infamous for his use of unvarnished

sexuality and seamy portraits of city life, combined a variety of modes ranging from surrealism and romanticism to the jeremiad and the
burlesque as he investigated his life. His major
works banned for three decades, Miller wrote
prolifically, and versions of his experiences both
verifiable and fantastic lie at the core of his
narratives. While his sexual imagery often
distracts his readers, Millers importance far
surpasses his numerous obscenity trials and
extends to both his avant garde narrative style
and his rejection of the strangulating values of
capitalism.
Born on December 26, 1891, Henry Valentine
Miller experienced an ambivalent childhood in
which he disdained his mothers bourgeois pretensions yet benefited from his status, particularly
in relation to the struggling immigrants who
encroached daily on his neighborhood. In Black
Spring (1936) and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy
Sexus (1949), Plexus (1952b), and Nexus (1959)
Miller, via his eponymous narrator, describes

feelings of dislocation and anxiety over the
hypocrisy of desires suppressed in pursuit of
the almighty dollar. Chastised for giving away
some of his many possessions to poor children,
the young Miller was laying the mental groundwork to associate sympathetically with an underground intellectual tradition that challenged the
all-American values of the work ethic and orthodox Christianity.
At a young age, Miller began reading the subversive philosophies of Nietzsche, Max Stirner,
and Emma Goldman, whom he met in California,
readily lapping up her challenges to capitalist
conformity. In The Books in My Life (1952a), he
also acknowledges Dostoevsky, Theodore Dreiser,
Elie Faure, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, and
Lao Tzu, among others, as influences. Miller
typically admired intellectual rebels who bristled
at orthodoxy, literary mentors who eschewed
linear narratives, and a personal spiritualism that
readers have frequently misread.
After a brief 1913 stint as a cowboy, Miller
initially lived a conventional lifestyle, marrying
the first of his five wives, Beatrice Wickens, to
avoid the draft during World War I. His job as
personnel director for a branch of Western Union
changed his life and is immortalized in Tropic of
Capricorn (1939b) as the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. He found in the telegraph
company a microcosm of the arbitrariness of
American capitalism, and alternatively loathing
and relishing his power, Miller jotted down stories
about some of the most compelling messengers,
whom he often compared to angels. While
Clipped Wings was a self-proclaimed failure
that pathetically echoed Dreisers voice, it did
reinvigorate his desire to write, a passion that
June Mansfield Smith soon to become his
mistress and then his second wife would ignite.
June (Julia Edith Smerth) offered the ostensible
subject for several of Millers most famous narratives: Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Plexus, and
Nexus. She would also filter through Tropic of
Cancer (1934). Through the decades, Miller
would represent June (alternatively as Mara
and Mona) as a Janus-faced figure: part
muse, part tormentor. Although she believed in
Millers ability and encouraged him to quit
his high-paying job, he believed her income
came from a type of genteel prostitution. Later,
MILLER, HENRY
June would, according to Miller, have a lesbian

relationship with Jean Kronski, a mutual friend,
and ultimately the emotional turbulence she provided would fuel Millers writing for decades,
most notably in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy.
Paris, where Miller would eventually visit in
1928 and live from 1930 to 1939, served as another
major inspiration. Arriving alone with 10 dollars,
Miller initially found Paris a dispiriting place.
However, he eventually met kindred spirits who
shared his criticisms of capitalism and his love for
art. Often dueling with him in conversation and
via letter (Miller would write letters prolifically),
new friends such as Michael Fraenkel, Walter
Lowenfels, Conrad Moricand, David Edgar,
Lawrence Durrell, and Anas Nin encouraged and
inspired Miller. Miller characterized Paris far
differently than the expatriates of the 1920s and
reveled in squalor, and during this period he
dropped the stilted style of his first novel, Moloch
(1992 [1927]), and adopted a first-person voice
that exploded off the page.
While some versions of his second novel, Crazy
Cock (1991 [c. 192830]), contain flashes of this
voice, it is in Tropic of Cancer where it appears
consistently. Bombastic and tender, crude and
erudite, the style ranges widely in an attempt to
capture the honest contradictions of Millers life.
He distorts his experiences greatly, however, making use of caricature in attempting to depict the
emotional core of his experiences. While many
early critics marked Miller as a realistic writer or,
paradoxically, a purely surrealist one, the current
critical consensus is that Miller adopts a mixed
mode, one that mingles earthy depictions of
sex and grime with ecstatic reveries. In addition,
this autobiographical romance (Millers term)
also contains miniature essays and set pieces on
such subjects as Matisse and time. Miller later
remarked that his readers generally preferred
either the sex (such as the apostrophe to Tanias
vagina or the sexual misadventures of Van
Norden) or his spirituality, but he felt that both
aspects were of a piece, much as Walt Whitman
had adopted the Hindu perspective that ugliness
and beauty flow from the same source and thus
are inseparable.
Drawing from a variety of heterodox traditions,
such as theosophy and Gnosticism, Miller
discards organized religion in favor of a personalized spirituality. Miller, especially later in life,
703
often talked about giving up writing, which

represented a struggle, and merely living life to
the fullest. Such self-liberation is a constant theme
in all his books. Miller did not see Henry Miller
as a man to be emulated; rather, he saw him as
a figure who had not yet attained enlightenment
and who pursued indiscriminate sex and sordid
diversions as a way of avoiding himself. Only after
his rosy crucifixion, the despair of Junes abandonment and initial time in Paris, could he cast
off his pain-causing desires and pursue the art
that would lead to rebirth. By interrogating the
past, Miller can free himself for China, his term
for a nirvana-like realm.
Casual readers might wonder at this goal, since
Henry Miller seems hardly peaceful, a whirl of
activity who explodes at the injustices he encounters. Tropic of Capricorn, in particular, targets
capitalism and its ideological superstructures
(church, school, democracy, etc.) for its wrath.
From Fraenkel, among others, Miller acquired the
idea that the materialist impulse driving capitalism squelched individuality, and that despite
rhetoric that prized the exceptional, capitalist
mechanisms destroy identity and demand conformity. The messengers in the book have nearly
all been broken by their quest for the American
dream, a goal Miller likens to a narcotic for
the soul. As in Buddhism, things cloud the
mind and cause pain. External forms become
more important than internal character, and
only a Spengler-like destruction can forebode
a new order.
Sensing this, the narrator seeks to transgress in
any way that he can, and sexuality becomes a way
of subverting the underpinnings of capitalism,
particularly the middle-class family and monogamy. In large swaths of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of
Capricorn, and Sexus, the narrator and his friends
pursue one sexual relationship after another,
activity that has prompted many feminist critics
to label Miller a misogynist. However, other
scholars, including some leading feminists, note
that none of Millers characters (other than the
central voice) are particularly well rounded and
that most men are mocked. Miller portrays sex
not as a sacred activity or as a goal unto itself, but
as an enjoyable part of life. Grove Press published
the banned works in 1961, and a 1964 Supreme
Court decision put an end to the many obscenity
trials that ensued.
704
MILLER, HENRY
While Millers use of sexuality has cemented his

reputation as a realist, much of his writing
consists of fantasy and dreams. He read Freud,
Jung, Rank, and others, and he knew and studied
many of the European leaders of surrealism and
Dada. His lover, Nin, was also instrumental in
focusing his attention on dreams and the unconscious. As with the Romantics, Miller infused his
writing with both nightmarish and dreamlike
passages. Black Spring, for instance, has entire
sections based on both Lewis Carroll-like nonsense and Poe-like horrors. Millers realism,
therefore, extends well beyond the mimesis of
the nineteenth-century realists and naturalists,
and into the other reality of the imagination
and unconscious. His work regularly juxtaposes
a depiction of real events with purely fantastic
images. At times Miller will extend dreams
over many pages, while at others shifting more
rapidly.
Quick transitions between modes comprise a
hallmark of Millers narrative style. He often
jumps chronologically and thematically, interrupting the narrative at crucial points. In some
cases he begins an anecdote only to rupture the
narrative with a catalogue, a dream, a memory,
or a delirious, poetically charged discourse on
a single word. Sometimes, his departures extend
dozens of pages before picking up the anecdote
again. Miller called this technique spiral form,
which allows him the freedom to abandon plot in
order to pursue emotionally significant digressions. Earlier critics assumed this style to be
formless and sloppy, but recent trends (informed
by poststructuralism and other theories) have
linked it to an alinear tradition of Rabelais, Petronius, and Whitman. Millers contribution to
the genre in many ways resembles the talking
cure championed by the psychoanalysts of his
day whereby digression ultimately yields emotional truth.
While critics and biographers frequently read
Millers narratives as transparent renderings of his
experience, perceptive readers have noticed that
the writer regularly distorted the external facts of
his life. Seeking internal truths rather than factual
accuracy, Miller often insists on a subjective
reality. As such, he is not above changing, deleting, or adding facts to better conform to his
self-mythology. Millers emotional honesty and
powerful style influenced a variety of writers,
including Lawrence Durrell, Norman Mailer, Jack

Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, and Erica Jong. His
later work the Book of Friends trilogy employs
a more sedate, nostalgic voice. Miller died on
June 7, 1980.
Dreiser, Theodore (AF); Durrell, Lawrence (BIF);
Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction
(AF)

Blinder, C. (2000). A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and
Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller, Rochester, NY:
Camden House.
Dearborn, M. V. (1991). The Happiest Man Alive: A
Biography of Henry Miller. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Decker, J. M. (2005). Henry Miller and Narrative Form:
Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity. New York:
Routledge.
Ferguson, R. (1991). Henry Miller: A Life. New York:
Norton.
Flaxman, A. M. (2000). New Anatomies: Tracing
Emotions in Henry Millers Writings. New York: Bern
Porter.
Gordon, W. A. (1967). The Mind and Art of Henry
Miller. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Hassan, I. (1967). The Literature of Silence. New York:
Knopf.
Jahshan, P. (2001). Henry Miller and the Surrealist
Discourse of Excess: A Post-Structuralist Reading.
Jong, E. (1993). The Devil at Large. New York: Turtle
Bay.
Martin, J. (1978). Always Merry and Bright: The Life of
Henry Miller. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra.
Miller, H. (1934). Tropic of Cancer. Paris: Obelisk.
Miller, H. (1936). Black Spring. Paris: Obelisk.
Miller, H. (1939a). The Cosmological Eye. Norfolk, CT:
New Directions.
Miller, H. (1939b). Tropic of Capricorn. Paris:
Obelisk.
Miller, H. (1941a). The Colossus of Maroussi. San
Francisco: Colt.
Miller, H. (1941b). The Wisdom of the Heart. Norfolk,
CT: New Directions.
Miller, H. (1941c). The World of Sex. New York: J. H. N.
[Ben Abramson].
Miller, H. (1945). The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. New
York: New Directions.
Miller, H. (1949). Sexus. Paris: Obelisk.
MILLHAUSER, STEVEN
Miller, H. (1952a). The Books in My Life. New York:

New Directions.
Miller, H. (1952b). Plexus. Paris: Corrêa.
Miller, H. (1957). Big Sur and the Oranges of
Hieronymous Bosch. New York: New Directions.
Miller, H. (1959). Nexus. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel.
Miller, H. (1991). Crazy Cock [c. 192830]. New York:
Grove Weidenfeld.
Miller, H. (1992). Moloch; or, This Gentile World [1927].
New York: Grove.
Orend, K. (2005). The Brotherhood of Fools and
Simpletons: Gods and Devils in Henry Millers Utopia.
Paris: Alyscamps.
Parkin, J. (1990). Henry Miller, the Modern Rabelais.
Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen.
Shifreen, L. J., & Jackson, R. (1993). Henry Miller: A
Bibliography of Primary Sources. Ann Arbor: Roger
Jackson.
Millhauser, Steven
CATHERINE KASPER
Steven Millhauser has been called one of the most

original writers to emerge from the 1970s. His
novels, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an
American Writer, 19431954, by Jeffrey Cartwright
(1972), and Martin Dressler: The Tale of an
American Dreamer (1996), are his most lauded
books to date. He is also the author of seven
collections of short stories and novellas, and
several uncollected stories and articles. One of
his short stories was adapted for The Illusionist
(2006), a major motion picture.
Steven (Lewis) Millhauser was born on August
3, 1943 in New York City. He received his BA
from Columbia in 1965, and he attended Brown
University. His first major success was his highly
acclaimed first novel, Edwin Mullhouse (1972). In
this mock biography of the Great American
Writer, the brief life (Mullhouse dies at age
11) of Edwin Abraham Mullhouse, author of a
brilliant but misunderstood novel titled Cartoons,
is told by his lifelong friend, Jeffrey Cartwright.
This novel establishes the stylistic concerns that
preoccupy much of Millhausers future work:
postmodernist irony, experimental use of point
of view, and metafictional or self-commenting
textual narration. His analysis of the borders
between fiction and reality, and art and illusion,
are critically acclaimed. In capturing those border
705
or liminal spaces, Millhausers fiction is classified

with that of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino,
and Gabriel Garca Marquez. His stories are
praised for their originality and their precise details and descriptions that create inventive and
often surreal worlds. From 1972 to 1996, he
published The Portrait of a Romantic (1977), In
The Penny Arcade (1985), From the Realm of
Morpheus (1986), The Barnum Museum (1990),
and Little Kingdoms (1993). In these he demonstrated his mastery of the experimental short
story, novella, and novel forms, and his ongoing
interest in techniques of historiographic metafiction, often utilizing American historical settings
and characters in his fictionalized tales.
He is lauded for his ability to depict American
life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He
is celebrated, in particular, for his portrait of life in
New York in a pre-technological America. His
recreation of the evocations of childhood imagination and of the architecture of American east
coast towns are unparalleled, as in his most
celebrated novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of An
American Dreamer (1996), set in Coney Island,
New York at the turn of the nineteenth century.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel unfolds in
highly specific descriptive details that fully recreate Dresslers real and fantastical world in what
is a quintessential story of American ambition
and hubris.
Following its success, Millhauser concentrated
on the novella and short story forms. The Knife
Thrower and Other Stories (1998), Enchanted
Night (1999), and The King in the Tree (2003)
received less attention, as Millhauser continued to
explore similar concerns manipulating myths,
fairy tales, and fables. In 2006, The Illusionist was
released, a major motion picture based on Millhausers short story Eisenheim the Illusionist.
First published in the collection The Barnum
Museum, this story was included in the Best
American Short Story anthology of 1990. In
2008, his collection Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen
Stories was given high praise.
While best-known for his award-winning
novels, Edwin Mullhouse and Martin Dressler,
Millhausers notoriety has increased since his
connection with the film The Illusionist. His
fiction has been translated into Chinese, Japanese,
French, German, Spanish, and other languages.
He has received numerous awards, including
706
MINIMALIST/MAXIMALIST FICTION
a Pulitzer Prize, an O. Henry Prize, a Lannan

Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Award
in Literature from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters. He continues to write and
publish.
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Utopian and
Millhauser, S. (2003). The King in the Tree: Three

Novellas. New York: Knopf.
Millhauser, S. (2008). Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen
Stories. New York: Knopf.
Saltzman, A. M. (2001). A Wilderness of Size: Steven
Millhausers Martin Dressler. Contemporary
Literature, 42, 589616.
Sheridan, D. (2003). The End of the World: Closure in
the Fantasies of Borges, Calvino, and Millhauser. In
F. Iftekharrudin, J. Boyden, & M. Rohrberger (eds.),
Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story. Westport,
CT: Praeger, pp. 924.

Barrineau, N. W. (1999). Theodore Dreiser and Martin
Dressler: Tales of American Dreamers. Dreiser
Studies, 30, 3545.
Fowler, D. (1996). Steven Millhauser, Miniaturist.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 37,
13948.
Hebel, U. J. (2004). Performing the Spectacle of
Technology at the Beginning of the American
Century: Steven Millhausers Martin Dressler. The
Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in
Contemporary American Fiction, 28, 192211.
Herrero-Olaizola, A. (2002). Writing Lives, Writing
Lies: The Pursuit of Apocryphal Biographies. Mosaic:
A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature,
35, 7389.
Kasper, C. (2002). Steven Millhausers American
Gothic. Denver Quarterly, 36, 8893.
Kinzie, M. (1991). Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka:
On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser. Salmagundi, 92,
11544.
Max, D. T. (2008). The Illusionist: Review of Dangerous
Laughter. New York Times, pp. 13 (Feb. 24).
Millhauser, S. (1972). Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and
Death of an American Writer, 19431954, by Jeffrey
Cartwright. New York: Knopf.
Millhauser, S. (1977). Portrait of a Romantic. New York:
Knopf.
Millhauser, S. (1985). In the Penny Arcade. New York:
Knopf.
Millhauser, S. (1986). From the Realm of Morpheus.
New York: Morrow.
Millhauser, S. (1990). The Barnum Museum. New York:
Poseidon.
Millhauser, S. (1993). Little Kingdoms. New York:
Poseidon.
Millhauser, S. (1996). Martin Dressler: The Tale of an
American Dreamer. New York: Crown.
Millhauser, S. (1998). The Knife Thrower and Other
Stories. New York: Crown.
Millhauser, S. (1999). Enchanted Night: A Novella.
New York: Crown.
Minimalist/Maximalist
Fiction
ROBERT REBEIN
The terms minimalist fiction and maximalist

fiction began to be used by writers and critics in
the late twentieth century to describe opposing
impulses or trends within postmodern American
fiction. Minimalist fiction, or minimalism,
denotes short works of fiction that combine
a terse style and deliberate economy of means
with ordinary, even mundane subject matter.
The short stories of Raymond Carver, Ann
Beattie, Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, Frederick
Barthelme, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff,
Jayne Anne Phillips, and Richard Ford, among
others, have been associated with this style. The
term maximalist fiction, or maximalism, meanwhile, denotes fictional works, particularly novels,
that are unusually long and complex, are digressive in style, and make use of a wide array of
literary devices and techniques. Among the novelists associated with this style are David Foster
Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers,
Rick Moody, William T. Vollmann, and, from
a slightly older generation, Thomas Pynchon,
Don DeLillo, and Paul West. In their separate
ways, both minimalism and maximalism have
been explained as responses to the declining
relevance of literary fiction in a cultural landscape
dominated by newer media such as television,
video games, and the Internet.
The heyday of minimalist fiction was the
decade of the 1980s. Not coincidentally, this was
also the era of the so-called renaissance of the
American short story, which saw an outpouring of
new work in the genre, as well as a period of rapid

growth for MFA programs in creative writing,
seen by some as little more than assembly lines
for minimalist stories. Within a few years of each
other, several influential story collections were
published, among them Carvers What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love (1981), Bobbie
Ann Masons Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), Ann
Beatties The Burning House (1982), Frederick
Barthelmes Moon Deluxe (1983), Amy Hempels
Reasons to Live (1985), Richard Fords Rock
Springs (1987), and Mary Robisons Believe Them
(1988). Although the work of these writers varied
greatly, it also shared certain fundamental characteristics that led some critics to classify it as
belonging to a single school of writing.
The prototypical minimalist story takes place
in a small domestic space, often a nondescript
kitchen or living room, and features a small cast
of characters going about their everyday lives
amid a profusion of brand names and pop
culture references. Whether told in first or third
person, the story typically employs a dispassionate narrative voice and is written in a flat, declarative, unadorned style devoid of metaphor,
summary exposition, flashbacks in time, or
extended representation of consciousness. Dialogue and scene predominate, often to the exclusion of what we normally consider action or
plot, and the storys ending is often muted or
open. Representative themes include loneliness, alienation, and loss of the ability to connect
with others or to find meaning in a fragmented,
atomized world.
The opening of Bobbie Ann Masons story
Shiloh strikes the typical minimalist pose: Leroy
Moffitts wife, Norma Jean, is working on her
pectorals. She lifts three-pound dumbbells to
warm up, then progresses to a twenty-pound barbell. Standing with her legs apart, she reminds
Leroy of Wonder Woman (1982, 97). The use of
present tense is a common feature of minimalist
fiction, as is the focus on working-class characters
(Leroy is a truck driver, Norma Jean a drugstore
clerk) and the reference to popular culture
(Wonder Woman) that closes the paragraph. As
the story progresses, we are introduced to one more
character of note (Norma Jeans mother, Mabel)
and a host of pop culture references (Popsicles,
Donahue, Star Trek, Dr. Strangelove, Diet Pepsi,
and Lincoln Logs, to name just a few). Aside from a
707
trip to the Civil War battleground at Shiloh, all of

the storys important scenes take place inside the
Moffitt home, where Leroy is recuperating from a
truck accident and simultaneously coming to
terms with the extent to which he and Norma Jean
have grown apart in the years since their only child
died in infancy. At Shiloh, Leroy realizes dimly that
the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of
history, have escaped him (114).
The title story from Carvers collection What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love covers
similar ground, albeit in a darker and more
suggestive way. Two married couples, Mel and
Terri and Nick and Laura, sit around a kitchen
table in Albuquerque, New Mexico drinking gin
and talking about the meaning of love in a contemporary world characterized by mobility, rapid
change, and divorce. In the course of their conversation, Mel, a cardiologist, tells a story about
an elderly couple he treats in the ER after the
camper they are riding in is hit on the interstate by
a drunk teenager who dies in the accident. The
couple, meanwhile, is badly injured, the husband
so much he cannot, in Mels words, turn his
goddamn head and see his goddamn wife, a state
of affairs that leaves him very depressed. According to Mel, who suffers from a different kind of
depression, this is just the sort of story that ought
to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we
know what we talk about when we talk about
love. As Mel recounts the story, a feeling of sadness
mixed with confusion descends upon the characters. They polish off the bottle of gin, then lapse
into a collective silence as the story closes.
Both Shiloh and What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love highlight the spare,
subtle ways in which minimalist fiction portrays
contemporary America as a place marked by
fragmentation and malaise. However, it was not
these traits so much as their multiplication across
stories and authors that by the mid-1980s led to
a harsh critique of minimalist fiction and its
aesthetic underpinnings. Mounted by a diverse
group of writers including Madison Smartt Bell,
Sven Birkerts, Carol Iannone, John Barth, Paul
West, and others, this critique lambasted minimalist fiction for its apparent lack of ambition, its
focus on surface details and pop culture references, its unmediated reflection of fragmentation
and unease, and its seeming loss of faith in
literatures traditional claim to speak a higher
708
and more subtle language than that offered up by

the culture at large.
This critique was widened a decade later when
it was revealed that many of Carvers most famous
stories, including all of those from his breakout
1981 collection What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love, had undergone systematic amputation at the hands of an aggressive, charismatic
editor, Gordon Lish, who apparently exerted
a similar influence on the careers of several other
minimalist authors, most notably Mary Robison
and Amy Hempel (who dedicated her collection
Reasons to Live to him). In the case of What We
Talk About When We Talk About Love, Lish cut
Carvers original draft by more than a third and
added several key passages all in pursuit of
a quintessentially minimalist style once thought
to have originated with Carver himself. Coming as
they did after Carvers death in 1988, these revelations only strengthened the arguments of minimalist fictions more virulent detractors, casting
the entire movement in a vaguely fraudulent light.
However, even as these revelations were emerging, scholars of the short story were already
beginning to see past the controversy surrounding
Carvers work to glimpse the ways in which
minimalism and the American short story more
generally share roots in the aesthetic theories of
Poe and Chekhov and the later examples provided
by Joyce, Hemingway, and Beckett. According to
these scholars, the renaissance of American short
fiction in the 1980s was just that a rebirth or
rediscovery of principles (brevity, the single effect,
the so-called iceberg theory of strategic omission,
etc.) that have been part of the short story form
almost since its inception.
Like minimalism, maximalism is a term that
has been employed by critics far more often than it
has been embraced by writers, who tend to view it
as reductive and misleading. Be that as it may, the
type of fiction maximalism denotes is immediately recognizable and can be defined by reference
to a small number of agreed upon characteristics
such as length, complexity, and the tendency to
foreground ideas and information at the expense
of characters. Although it could be argued that
maximalist fiction has been around since
Melvilles Moby-Dick (1851), if not before, or that
certain novels from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
like William Gaddiss The Recognitions (1955) or
Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow (1973)
exemplify the style, maximalism as it has come

to be defined more recently refers to a group of
sprawling, post-minimalist works that includes
Paul Wests The Place in Flowers Where Pollen
Rests (1988), David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest
(1996), Pynchons Mason and Dixon (1997),
Don DeLillos Underworld (1997), Dave Eggers
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000),
William T. Vollmanns The Royal Family (2000)
and Europe Central (2004), Jonathan Franzens
The Corrections (2001), and Jonathan Safran Foers
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), all of
which employ a dense, digressive style in an attempt to capture or comment on the protean
complexity of contemporary American reality.
Where these works differ from the literary
postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s (to which
they owe an obvious debt) is in their generally
unproblematic relationship with realism. For the
most part, maximalist novelists of the 1990s and
beyond eschew irony and metafictional commentary on the limits of mimesis; rather than mocking
realist assumptions about the power of language
to fully or accurately represent the world, these
writers take these assumptions to their logical
extreme. As the critic James Wood has observed,
in books like Infinite Jest, Mason and Dixon, and
Underworld, the conventions of realism are not
being undermined or abolished; rather, they are
being exhausted and overworked. Tom LeClair
makes a similar point, arguing that writers like
Wallace, Powers, and Vollmann have embarked
on a strategy of transforming the synecdochic
scale of realism, purposely overloading it in
order to illustrate the extent to which contemporary society has itself been overloaded with technology and information. In doing so, these writers
are reacting not only to the perceived lack of
ambition in so much minimalist fiction of the
1980s, but also to what they see as the lack of
engagement in so many metafictional works of the
1960s and 1970s.
David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest (1996) is
perhaps the perfect example of a 1990s-era maximalist novel. Including its Notes and Errata
section, the book is 1,079 pages long (and was
longer before Wallaces editors at Little, Brown
cut nearly 500 pages from the original manuscript). Descriptive detail crowds every page, and
digressions shade into further digressions, which
themselves refer the reader to lengthy, tightly
spaced footnotes at the back of the book. Three

intertwined character groupings structure the
novel, but it would be inaccurate to call these
groupings plots or subplots, because for the most
part they do not dovetail or come together in
a satisfying conclusion. Parts of the book, like
those set in a Massachusetts drug rehabilitation
center, possess an almost documentary feel that is
no doubt the result of Wallaces voluminous
research, while others, like those tracking the
machinations of a group of Quebecois separatists,
exude a deliberately zany, off-kilter vibe. Layered
over this, and contributing its own set of effects, is
the fact that the novel is set in an improbable
near-future in which the United States, Canada,
and Mexico have merged to form the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N.
(pun intended).
Throughout the book, Wallace adopts a strategy of relentless and lengthy digression. For example, no sooner are we introduced to Don Gately,
a recovering addict and one of the books main
characters, than we are told all about Dons live-in
staff job at Ennet House, which involves shopping
for a daily communal supper (further details
about which appear in a footnote at the back of
the book). This leads to a lengthy digression about
the kind of car Don drives on errands to buy food
for these suppers (a 1964 Ford Aventura, said to
be an antique variant of the Ford Mustang),
which leads to a further digression about the cars
two different alarm systems, which leads to an
even longer digression about how Don came
to lose his drivers license more or less
permanently while using drugs and alcohol years
before. Like Infinite Jest as a whole, the passage is
an odd mix of fact (1964 Mustangs are real
enough), fiction (Aventuras are not), vital information (Dons status as a recovering addict), and
throwaway detail of an almost obsessive kind (the
footnote and the lengthy description of the car).
No detail is too small to be amplified or appended,
for according to the logic ruling this world, trivia
is itself a kind of truth.
Yet for all the pyrotechnics on display here,
Wallace leans far more in the direction of an
earnest representation of the world than an ironic
one. The author himself has confirmed this in
interviews and essays on the topic, insisting
repeatedly that his purpose in writing Infinite Jest
was nothing more or less than to represent the
709
texture of the world as he has experienced it. If

the book is full of advertisements and pop culture
references and conspiracy theories that become
ever more complex, thats because the postmodern world is that way, too.
A similar point could be made about other
maximalist novels like DeLillos Underworld
(1997), Vollmanns The Royal Family (2000) and
Europe Central (2004), Franzens The Corrections
(2001), and Foers Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close (2005). While these books often display
literary postmodernisms extensive bag of
tricks, they do so for the most part without the
self-reflexive irony one typically associates with
postmodernism. Why? In his essay on television
and contemporary fiction, Wallace argues that the
pervasive irony that once stood as postmodern
fictions answer to the blandness of television
has itself been appropriated by television and
by the culture as a whole leaving fiction writers
with few options other than to buck the trend.
Vollmann, the most prolific and in some ways the
most accomplished of the maximalists, has gone
even further, explicitly calling for a literature that
transcends both the insularity of minimalism
and the gamesmanship of 1960s-era literary postmodernism in order to seek answers to important
human problems like poverty, violence, and
addiction.
Whatever the reason for this shift away from
metafiction, it remains ironic that todays Maximalist authors continue to produce long and
difficult works in an age they themselves define
by reference to a decline in literacy and growing
competition from television, movies, and the
Internet. Charles McGrath notes this irony in his
review of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,
suggesting that for all their bells and whistles
and clever textual devices, maximalist novels
like Foers are deeply worried about the ways in
which our lives and the printed page fail to match
up. According to McGrath, the length and complexity of maximalist novels are not so much the
result of their authors audacity as it is of their
anxiety their worry that when it comes to
competing for the time and attention of todays
readers, even too much may not be enough.
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Television and
Fiction (AF)
710
MODERN FICTION IN HOLLYWOOD

Aldridge, A. W. (1992). Talents and Technicians:
Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction.
Barth, J. (1986). A Few Words About Minimalism.
New York Times Book Review, pp. 12, 25 (Dec. 28).
Barthelme, F. (1983). Moon Deluxe: Stories. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Beattie, A. (1982). The Burning House. New York:
Random House.
Bell, M. S. (1986). Less Is Less: The Dwindling of the
American Short Story. Harpers, pp. 6469 (April).
Birkerts, S. (1986). The School of Lish. New Republic,
pp. 2833 (Oct. 13).
Carver, R. (1977). Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Carver, R. (1981). What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love. New York: Knopf.
DeLillo, D. (1997). Underworld. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Eggers, D. (2000). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Foer, J. S. (2005). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Ford, R. (1987). Rock Springs. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
Franzen, J. (2001). The Corrections. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Hallett, C. W. (1999). Minimalism and the Short Story:
Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison.
Hempel, A. (1985). Reasons to Live. New York: Knopf.
Iannone, C. (1987) The Fiction We Deserve.
Commentary, 83(6), 602.
LeClair, T. (1996). The Prodigious Fiction of Richard
Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster
Wallace. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,
38(1), 1237.
Mason, B. A. (1982). Shiloh and Other Stories.
McCaffery, L. (ed.) (1993). Younger Writers Issue:
William Vollmann; Susan Daitch; David Foster
Wallace. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13(2),
767, 127236.
McGrath, C. (2005). The Souped-Up, Knock-Out,
Total Fiction Experience. New York Times. At www
.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/weekinreview/17mcgrath
.html, accessed Jan. 7, 2010.
Miller, L. (1996). David Foster Wallace: The Salon
Interview. Salon (9), March 922. At www.salon
.com/09/features/wallace1.html, accessed Jan. 7, 2010.
Phillips, J. A. (1979). Black Tickets. New York:
Delacorte.
Pynchon, T. (1997). Mason and Dixon. New York:
Henry Holt.
Robison, M. (1988). Believe Them. New York: Knopf.

Vollmann, W. T. (2000). The Royal Family. New York:
Viking.
Vollmann, W. T. (2004). American Writing Today:
Diagnosis of a Disease. In L. McCaffery &
M. Hemmingson (eds.), Expelled From Eden: A
William T. Vollmann Reader. New York: Thunder
Mouth, pp. 32932.
Vollmann, W. T. (2005). Europe Central. New York:
Viking.
Wallace, D. F. (1993). E. Unibus Pluram: Television
and U. S. Fiction. Review of Contemporary Fiction,
13(2), 15194.
Wallace, D. F. (1996). Infinite Jest. Boston: Little,
Brown.
West, P. (1987). In Defense of Purple Prose. In Sheer
Fiction. New Paltz, NY: McPherson, pp. 4656.
West, P. (1988). The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests.
Wolff, T. (1981). In the Garden of the North American
Martyrs. New York: Ecco.
Wood, J. (2004). Hysterical Realism. In The
Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 17894.
Modern Fiction
in Hollywood
TOM CERASULO
The modern American novel and the Hollywood

feature film have historically made for a rocky
marriage. Both, at their core, are narrative forms
that depict events and characters causally linked to
those events, but their respective methods of
delivering that narrative to the audience are often
colored by different sets of economic, cultural,
industrial, and artistic concerns. While the
American movie industry has always been attracted to pre-sold properties commodities with
a familiar set of story elements and a built-in
potential customer base the process of adapting
modern novels to the screen has often posed
technical challenges, raised questions of faithfulness to the source material, and stirred up
concerns about mass cultures threat to elite culture. In general, the realist novel and genre fiction,
modes which place a premium on plot and physical description and encourage audience identification, have been better matches for Hollywood
than have modernist texts that chart inner states
and seek to intellectually challenge the audience.
Where modernist art is rarefied, preoccupied

with subjectivity, and prone to abstraction, commercial film is democratic, public, and concrete.
Where modernism foregrounds style, Hollywood
aims for an invisible style. For these reasons, art
cinema, especially that of the French New Wave,
has often found a more comfortable fit between
modernist novelistic experimentation and cinematic form than have mainstream American
movies. Critics such as Andre Bazin, David Bordwell, Andras Kovacs, and David Trotter have
convincingly argued for the modern novels
aesthetic centrality in the formation of postwar
auteurist filmmaking from Orson Welles to
Jean-Luc Godard, Luchino Visconti and Kenneth
Anger in the US and Europe. With its psychological complexity, loose narrative structures,
emphasis on individual experience, and embrace
of ambiguity, the art cinema has often reflected
the influence of modernist fiction. Recent scholarly work has problematized the supposedly oppositional dynamic between popular culture and
high culture, especially the distinction between
artistic and commercial agendas. Yet for much of
the twentieth century, modernism was seen as
mass cultures purposeful other. Modernisms
aesthetic ideologies and its claims to cultural
superiority still hold sway over many film adaptation discussions today.
Critics often argue that some great Hollywood
films, The Good Earth (1937) and Gone With the
Wind (1939) most notably, have been made from
mediocre modern novels, while also arguing that
modernist literary masterpieces seldom make for
good motion pictures. This belief may have as
much to do with reception as it does with aesthetics. Every adaptation is also an interpretation.
This can lead to the sacralization of the original
stable text, and the resulting misstep of judging
an adaptations worth in terms of its faithfulness
to its source. This fetishization of fidelity, especially in cases where the revered source text places
a modernist premium on autonomy and purity, is
the basis of the charge that a movie has somehow
dumbed down the book, a stance which pits the
lowbrow motion picture in a rigged match-up
against the highbrow novel by focusing on what
is missing from the film rather than what is
actually on the screen. These sorts of analyses
often fixate on narrative, characters, and dialogue,
ignoring matters of visual style shot selection,
711
mise-en-scene, and editing. Some film critics,

especially those in the auteurist camp, would even
argue that a movie that has its origins in a book, in
words, can never be a true, stand-alone cinematic
masterpiece. The director John Ford, for instance,
who left it to others to call him a singular genius,
nonetheless claimed in an interview with George
Bluestone (1957) that he had never bothered to
read John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
before filming it.
Hollywoods process of translating the language of prose fiction into the visual and aural
medium of cinema necessitates medium-specific
changes, and financial and sociological factors
play a part as well. Compression and scope are
vital to adaptations, beginning with the screenplay. Most novels simply contain too many characters and scenes to fit into a feature-length
movie; therefore, filmmakers must decide what
can be left out while still retaining the essence of
the original. Adapting a work of literature often
necessitates cutting everything that does not drive
the story forward. An early attempt to translate
the modern novel to the screen, Erich Von
Stroheims Greed (1924), a literal adaptation of
Frank Norriss McTeague (1899), famously ran
10 hours long in its first cut. Early film shared with
literary naturalism a fascination with the sights
and rhythms of modern urban life, and Von
Stroheim sought to faithfully match Norriss level
of accumulated and cataloged details, but Irving
Thalberg, the head of production at MGM,
ordered the studio editors to pare down the movie
to two hours, rendering it financially viable but
also incomprehensible. In the end, 30 minutes of
footage were restored before the films release.
Today, while Greed is critically regarded as a silent
classic, the 10-hour version is still mourned by
cinema scholars as a lost masterpiece.
During the silent era, when films status as
a mere mechanical recording often disqualified
it as art for many critics and theorists, adaptations
of novels allowed the emerging medium of cinema to borrow the artistic stature and cultural
capital of the established medium of prose fiction.
With the standardization of sound in the late
1920s and Hollywoods continuing pursuit of
a middle-class audience, the American film
industry developed an even greater hunger for
adaptations of modern novels and plays, especially for their dialogue. Authors like Edna Ferber,
712
Eugene ONeill, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott

Fitzgerald were happy to sell the subsidiary rights
to their work, and equally happy to disown what
Hollywood had done with it.
But a few modern authors were more protective of their literary output. Willa Cather, angry
with the adaptation of her novel A Lost Lady
(1923), vowed never again to license her work
to the movies as long as she lived, and she
specified in her will that her executors not do
so after her death either. More litigiously, in 1931
Theodore Dreiser, upset by the film that had
been made from his novel An American Tragedy
(1925), sued Paramount Pictures. The studio,
Dreiser believed, had bastardized his work. A
psychological study of a mans decline had been
turned into a trite morality tale to placate the
Hays Office censors, and Dreiser unsuccessfully
tried to block the pictures release. In a move
that reveals how Hollywood imagined its audience to differ from the literary public, Paramount argued that the majority of the ticket
holders would be more interested in justice
prevailing than in Clyde Griffithss complex
characterization.
However, a second adaptation of An American
Tragedy, A Place in the Sun (1951), manages to
depict both what happens to Clyde here
renamed George Eastman as well as why it
happens. On the page, Dreisers plodding prose
style, which always seems to be striving for the
right word but missing it, has the perhaps unintended effect of mirroring Clydes own class
aspirations. The graceful camerawork of A Place
in the Sun finds a visual correlative for this
yearning by depicting the beauty the character is
drawn to and the frustrations standing in his way.
The causes and effects of his murderous actions,
and their social and psychological ramifications,
are all in evidence, and thus the tragedy of An
American Tragedy emerges. Conversely, the 1935
film adaptation of Booth Tarkingtons Alice
Adams (1921), a novel which explores similarly
painful issues facing lovers of different social
classes, inserts a romantic, uplifting ending in
place of Tarkingtons unsparing critique of upward mobility. In Depression-era film comedies
like this, love frequently conquers economics,
demonstrating that Hollywoods adaptations
of modern fiction were at once formal and
ideological.
Modern authors who came to Hollywood on

screenwriting contracts quickly found that
Hollywood screenplays accepted by producers
favored liberal humanism and stable narrative
worlds, tenets much modernist fiction finds suspect. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and
Nathanael West all wrote for the movies, at times
successfully, but their novels have not translated
well into film. Twentieth Century Foxs 1959
adaptation of Faulkners The Sound and the Fury
(1929) scraps the psychological complexity of
Quentin Compsons first-person narration and
finds no visual correlative for his impaired brother Benjys linguistic inner world. Paramounts
1949 adaptation of Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby
(1925), starring Alan Ladd in the title role, introduces Gatsby too soon and spoils the build-up
and mystery. Paramounts 1974 color version,
directed by Jack Clayton, fails to find a narrative
answer for Fitzgeralds celebrated use of Nick
Carraways point of view. It also suffers from
miscasting in the key roles, a cold stiffness in its
cinematography, and a script which remains too
faithful to the books dialogue, lines which sound
awkward when spoken aloud.
While Hollywood has struggled to adapt the
content and form of many modernist novels,
some modern novelists have successfully borrowed from Hollywood film. Although Gustave
Flaubert was already using the cinematic technique of crosscutting in the county fair scene of
Madame Bovary, where three levels of action
unfold simultaneously, early silent films exploration of temporal, spatial, and causal effects had
a great influence on fiction writers of the 1920s
and 1930s. Ernest Hemingways fixed, objective
viewpoint in a short story like The Killers owes
something to the cinema, as do Faulkners experiments in narrative disjunctions. John Dos
Passoss 1930s U.S.A. trilogy and its newsreel
sections utilize montage and crosscutting to capture the rapid, modern rhythm of socio-economic
forces at work, as the narrative point-of-view
bounces among perspectives and makes stops
along the way to examine the found objects and
fragments of Americas media-saturated print
and visual culture. Inspired by such literary
experiments, contemporary literary critics like
Susan McCabe and David Trotter have carefully
explored the invention of cinematic modernism within the prose and poetry of the period.
Several modern writers, such as West, Fitzgerald,

John OHara, and Budd Schulberg, used their
experience as screenwriters as material for their
fiction. Fitzgeralds study of the American film
industry had informed his novels The Beautiful
and Damned (1922) and Tender Is the Night (1934);
Hollywood played an even bigger role in his Pat
Hobby story cycle of the late 1930s and early 1940s
and the unfinished manuscript posthumously
published as The Last Tycoon (1941). Fitzgerald
also made several unsuccessful attempts to sell
original scripts and adaptations of his own novels.
Like many modern authors who wrote for the
movies, Fitzgerald had contempt for Hollywoods
business practices, but he was also fascinated by its
creative possibilities and its capacity to reach larger
audiences than any book ever could.
Hollywood novels like Fitzgeralds The Last
Tycoon, Wests The Day of the Locust (1939), and
Schulbergs What Makes Sammy Run? (1941)
have often been read as poison pen letters to Los
Angeles. But more often than not these books do
not come to bury Hollywood; rather, they attempt
to understand its inner workings and cultural
power. While The Day of the Locust centers on
the audience that consumes films, What Makes
Sammy Run? and The Last Tycoon concentrate on
those who make films. Fitzgeralds book focuses
on a noble movie producer, Monroe Stahr;
Schulbergs book concerns a philistine, Sammy
Glick. These novels provide insider accounts
of Hollywood. Along the way, their examinations
of issues like film spectatorship, cinematic grammar, studio hierarchies, and movie authorship
also make them prototypical examples of
American film theory.
Successful Hollywood novels have not always
made for successful films, however. During the
studio era of the first half of the twentieth century,
the movie moguls lived in fear that their empires
would be taken away from them by Wall Street,
or the US government, or the forces of antiSemitism. This is one reason that self-reflexive
movies about movies that portrayed Hollywood in anything other than a soft, flattering
light were thought by the studios to be selfdestructive. Even today, What Makes Sammy
Run? has never made it to the big screen, despite
periodic rumblings in Hollywood that one
director or another hopes to resuscitate the project. The Day of the Locusts scenes of attempted
713
rape, miscegenation, and child violence would

have been virtually unfilmable under the production code of Hollywoods golden age. John
Schlesingers 1975 version, made after the studio
system had dissolved, captures the novels episodic, cinematic style, but the pieces never fit
together, a criticism also frequently leveled at the
source book. The result is a mixed bag. There is no
rooting interest in The Day of the Locust. The Ivy
League-educated set decorator Tod Hackett, the
closest thing the film and novel have to a main
character, leaves the action for a long period of
time and makes for an unsympathetic hero or
even antihero. The films coda, where Faye
Greener, the teenage actress who teases and toys
with Tod throughout the story, suddenly and
romantically goes looking for him only to find
him gone, betrays the spirit of the novel. At
times the film cant decide if it wants to approximate Wests brand of surrealism or strive for a
grittier, more documentary realism. However,
the climactic crowd scene, where Hollywoods
cheated work themselves into a murderous
frenzy, strikes all the right notes of terror and
absurdity. On the other hand, the overall tone of
Elia Kazans 1976 film version of Fitzgeralds The
Last Tycoon falls flat. Fitzgeralds novel portrays
the romance, vigor, and excitement of studio life,
but the adaptation suffers from listless pacing,
an aging cast far too old for the roles they play,
and a boy-loses-girl story that overwhelms
Fitzgeralds deeper theme of American wonder
and disillusionment.
Like the Hollywood novel of the 1930s and
1940s, the modern crime novel, exemplified by
practitioners like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and James M. Cain,
exhibits a preoccupation with the cityscapes of
modernity. Writing in the immediate postwar
context in which French film critics reinvented
American hard-boiled crime thrillers and melodramas as film noir, Claude-Edmonde Magny,
for example, argued for the American crime
novels centrality to the development of the film
aesthetic of interwar fiction. The genre meshed
well with Hollywood cinema, providing an
especially graceful partner for the expressionistic
films noir of the 1940s and 1950s. These novels
shared literary modernisms pessimism and hints
of misogyny, but owing to their crisp dialogue,
exciting plots, and streaks of morality and order
714
amid a tapestry of sin and chaos, they made for

more comfortable stylistic and ideological
matches for the American screen. Yet compromises were still necessary.
For example, Cains novel Double Indemnity
(1936) was listed that year by film censor Joseph
Breen as a property unfit for family audiences and
a poor candidate for adaptation. The book
provided a step-by-step account of how to pull
off a murder, glorified adultery, and allowed the
criminals to die in a suicide pact rather than be
punished by the forces of law. But a few years later,
in 1944, director Billy Wilder asked Raymond
Chandler to take a stab at adapting it. Chandler
substituted his own brand of stylized, wise-guy
banter for Cains laconic exchanges. He punched
up the dialogue but toned down the books earthy
sexuality and amorality, a move almost negated
by Barbara Stanwycks erotic performance as
a merciless femme fatale. Chandler also structured the majority of the film as the narrative
flashback of a doomed man, enhancing the
fatalistic mood of the story as the events unfold.
According to James Naremore (1998), the filmmakers scripted and shot a gas chamber execution
scene, so that at least one of the murderers would
be brought to justice, but the sequence was,
ironically, judged by the Breen office as too
gruesome. The punishment was now too severe
for the audience to handle.
Despite a critical history that occasionally
casts them as bitter foes locked into a zero-sum
fight for cultural supremacy, Hollywood cinema
and the modern American novel are each better
for having encountered the other. The movie
industry has thrived by making products
inspired by literary sources and has returned the
favor by opening up new creative possibilities for
novelists.
SEE ALSO: The Film Industry and Fiction (BIF);
Noir Fiction (AF); Television and Fiction (AF)
Bazin, A. (1971). What Is Cinema? vol. 2. Berkeley:
Bluestone, G. (1957). Novels into Film. Berkeley:
Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (1993). Film Art: An
Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Boyum, J. G. (1985). Double Exposure: Fiction into Film.

New York: Mentor.
Cohen, K. (1979). Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of
Exchange. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Corrigan, T. (2000). Film and Literature: An
Introduction and Reader. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Eyman, S. (1997). The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and
the Talkie Revolution, 19261930. Baltimore: Johns
Fine, R. (1993). West of Eden: Writers in Hollywood
19281940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press.
Kovacs, A. (2008). Screening Modernism: European Art
Cinema 19501980. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Levine, L. (1988). Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of
Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA:
Magny, C. E. (1972). The Age of the American Novel: The
Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars (trans.
E. Hochman). New York: Ungar.
Mayne, J. (1988). Private Novels, Public Films. Athens:
McCabe, S. (2005). Cinematic Modernism: Modernist
Poetry and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon.
Murray, E. (1972). The Cinematic Imagination: Writers
and the Motion Pictures. New York: Ungar.
Naremore, J. (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir in Its
Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Orr, J. (1993). Cinema and Modernity. Cambridge:
Polity.
Palmer, R. B. (ed.) (2007). Twentieth-Century American
Fiction on Screen. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Peary, G., & Shatzkin, R. (eds.) (1978). The Modern
American Novel and the Movies. New York: Ungar.
Spiegel, A. (1976). Fiction and the Camera Eye:
Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern
Novel. Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia.
Stam, R., & Rengo, A. (eds.) (2005). Literature and Film:
A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Trotter, D. (2007) Cinema and Modernism. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Wilson, G. M. (1986). Narration in Light: Studies in
Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Wilt, D. (1991). Hardboiled in Hollywood: Five Black
Mask Writers and the Movies. Bowling Green, OH:
Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
MODERNIST FICTION
Modernist Fiction
JUAN A. SUAREZ
Initially, modernist fiction named the experimental narrative of the interwar period, most
eminently associated with Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and William
Faulkner, and, secondarily, with Sherwood
Anderson, John Dos Passos, and Willa Cather.
Their masterpieces belonged to the jazz age,
even though Stein started publishing before,
Faulkners best work appeared during the 1930s,
and some of these writers remained active until the
early 1960s. Early approaches to this work were
formal, influenced by the New Criticism, and
when historically minded scholars like Alfred
Kazin or Lionel Trilling discussed this literature,
they tended to invoke a mixture of biographical
and national motifs, such as individual alienation
before a mercantilist society indifferent to aesthetic value or the disillusionment of a generation
marked by World War I.
Such a compact, but narrow, view of the field
has been thoroughly modified in recent times.
Critics and historians now have a longer and
wider view of modernism a view that includes
the committed writing of the 1930s; stretches past
mid-century to the novels of Beat authors Jack
Kerouac or William Burroughs; and engages
peripheral modernities, transnational cultural
traffic, and postcoloniality. Additionally, while
modernism was once regarded as an exclusively
aesthetic phenomenon, it is now customarily
connected with a plurality of social forces and
identities gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and
class and placed in conversation with the
modern media and the culture industry.
These contexts should have been hard to
ignore. The early twentieth century was an inaugural moment in anti-colonial and anti-racist
militancy, with the creation of the (short-lived)
League against Imperialism, the rise of independentist movements in the Caribbean, and the
emergence of the New Negro in the United
States. Women achieved the vote in 1920 with
the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and
the popularity of Freuds ideas, along with the
opportunities for association and visibility
afforded by urban life, brought sexual minorities
into the public eye. These developments had
begun to stir in the nineteenth century but
715
erupted into view in the first decades of the

twentieth century, when the public started to be
divided along lines other than the familiar ones of
class or national origin. As a result, public life after
1900 appeared more variegated than ever before,
and this diversity was heightened in some ways,
induced by the media, disseminators of new
expressive idioms and political agencies. If the
social map gained complexity, so did the textures
and rhythms of quotidian experience. Telephones
and cars promoted speed and (dis)connectedness,
and the electronic media cinema, photography,
the gramophone, and the radio made images
and sounds portable, detachable, and manipulable. These inventions made daily experience
layered and intricate, shrank time and space,
modified habits of perception and thought, and,
consequently, radically changed the styles of reading and writing.
The revolution in modernist studies has largely
consisted in showing the mutually enabling connections between these worldly developments and
what was once deemed an elitist, mandarin
aesthetic that held itself aloof from modernity.
Influenced by cultural studies, Frankfurt School
analysis, and feminist and queer critiques, critics
and historians began, from the mid-1980s
onward, to bring the social and material life of
modernity to bear on its literature. As they did
so, they were implementing, in the realm of
criticism, the cultural logic of modernism itself
a logic that consisted in expanding the range of
mimesis by importing into literature and art
cultural material previously untouched by aesthetics. Part of this material was the intricacies of
sexuality, memory, and perception, now rendered
with unprecedented candor; another substantial
part of what modernism brought into artistic
utterance were the languages and perspectives of
marginal subjects who were gradually becoming
more visible at the beginning of the century:
women, blacks, sexual dissidents, and colonial
subjects. This kind of inclusiveness had a direct
effect on form but, at its root, it obeyed a political
impulse: making the aesthetic sphere more representative of the actual complexity of the social
body and more responsive to its dynamism.
Feminism was the first critical approach to
pick up the political frequency of modernism,
prolonging in this way the polemical impulse of
Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones Own and
716
MODERNIST FICTION
responding as well to the fact that the campaign

for a new art and the claims of feminism were
tightly intertwined in the early twentieth century.
Authors like Gilbert and Gubar (1986), Blau du
Plessis (1985), and DeKoven (1991), to name a
few, uncovered a feminist tradition in which
writing was not simply an aesthetic practice but
contained a political wager as well. For many
women writers, experimental fiction offered a
way to map their embattled location in the social
fabric, to oppose oppressive gender arrangements, and to imagine new ones. Theorizing
womens particular modernism went hand in
hand with the revision of the historical archive
and the retrieval of understudied figures. Perhaps
the most prominent rediscoveries have been Djuna Barnes and Harlem Renaissance novelists Zora
Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Redmond
Fausset (Wall 1995). Part of the archival work has
been directed beyond the page, toward uncovering the activities of editors and cultural brokers
who played a crucial role in the dissemination of
modernism the cases of Margaret Anderson and
jane heap (her spelling), the editors of the Little
Review, and Sylvia Beach, owner of the Parisbased bookstore Shakespeare and Co. and occasional editor (most famously, of Joyces Ulysses)
(Benstock 1986; Scott 1990; Scott 1995).
Coming up after feminism, queer studies further helped to expand the picture of modernism.
Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, among the
most generative figures of queer discourse, went
beyond the gender binarism of earlier feminist
analysis to explore sexual heterodoxy and the
contingencies of gender influentially conceived
by Butler as a performative surface effect rather
than as the expression of a biological essence.
Sedgwicks and Butlers contributions exceed the
field of modernist studies, but they also intervened in it: Sedgwick (1989) analyzed Willa Cathers novella Pauls Case, and Butler (1993)
analyzed Nella Larsens Passing. Additionally,
cultural historians like Chauncey (1994) have
furthered the queering of modernism by documenting the existence of vibrant lesbian and gay
communities in metropolitan centers since the
turn of the twentieth century, and suggesting the
continuity between subcultural street life and
queer textuality. Subsequent contributions have
unfolded in two interrelated directions: the recovery of a queer streak in experimental writing
(Boone 1997) and the revision of canonical figures from queer perspectives (Haralson 2003).
Exemplary of the queer revision of the canon are
studies that have brought Willa Cather to a new
prominence (Anders 1999; Lindeman 1999;
Love 2007). A recent line of queer inquiry has
studied the collusion of sexual insubordination
with other marks of difference, such as social
maladjustment and marginality (Trask 2003) or
African American identity (Somerville 2000).
A recent offshoot of both feminism and queer
critiques, masculinity studies has subjected the
traditionally unmarked gender to historical and
theoretical scrutiny, and has shown that maleness
is contingent and subject to historical variables
rather than an unquestionable bedrock of identity. Modernist fiction offers a significant case study
in this regard. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos,
and, especially, Hemingway reflected the fluctuations and anxieties brought about by the loss of
male privilege at a time of growing female autonomy. Yet recent contributions have shown that
male modernists were not always blind defenders
of masculine prerogative. Moddelmog (1999) and
Strychacz (2003) have shown that Hemingway,
eminent exemplar of macho posturing, was
a shrewd critic of the rituals of maleness
and anticipated some brands of late-twentiethcentury anti-essentialist gender analysis.
The gendering and queering of modernism
must be placed alongside its racialization its
consideration against the racist backlash of the
1910s and 1920s, the emergence of black (trans)
nationalism, and the redrawing of American
racial geography caused by the Great Migration.
The main site for this approach has been the art
and literature of the Harlem Renaissance studied under a separate entry in this volume but
race also figures prominently in the work of
white writers, not only as a topical element but
also as a style of discourse and a source of expressiveness. As a topic, race has been examined most
frequently in relation to William Faulkner, whose
writing encodes a freighted history of ethnic
relations in America (Sundquist 1983) and
explores race as an effect of linguistic, social, and
cultural convention (Wittenberg 1995). By connecting race to broader linguistic and expressive
repertoires, critics like North (1994) have shown
that modernism drew extensively on racially
marked accents and dialects. While white
MODERNIST FICTION
modernists (from Stein to Eliot and Pound)

gravitated toward racial speech, a symptom of
vernacular vitality which they often impersonated
with flair, black modernists like Claude McKay
and Jean Toomer detached themselves from a
dialect tradition that they found constricting; their
living between two equally restrictive languages
the high literary standard and ethnically stereotyped speech prompted a sense of linguistic
dispossession that is deeply imprinted in their
work and slightly erratic careers. Other writers
Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph
Ellison are some examples used their linguistic
in-betweenness to forge extraordinary styles that
combined the best possibilities of both idioms.
For many white modernists, the encounter
with racial others did not lead to imitation or
racial masquerade. The fiction of Fitzgerald, Dos
Passos, and Hemingway unfolds in a predominantly white world occasionally crossed by ethnic
or racialized subjects. Encounters with otherness
often bring about anxieties about diminishing
white hegemony along with evasions and attempts at containment. At times, their works
depict the racial other as an indigestible residue
that is discarded in the form of a corpse or
consigned to voiceless marginality.
Recent modernist criticism has also studied the
formative effect of the media on early-twentiethcentury fiction. The main modernist fiction
writers were born in the same decade as the
cinema; they belonged to the first generation to
grow up surrounded by electronically disseminated images and sounds. Many of them worked in
journalism, advertising, or radio; saw their works
adapted for the screen; and were occasionally
employed by the studios during Hollywoods
golden era. This confluence of modernism and
the popular media has traditionally been characterized in adversarial terms. In Clement Greenbergs or Theodor Adornos classic formulations,
modernism was a hostile reaction against the
simplicity of popular texts and the degraded
rationality of mass culture. Numerous studies of
modernist writers encounters with Hollywood
have reduced this convergence to the betrayal of
complex art by crass commercialism.
More recently, however, drawing on both archival evidence and textual interpretation, critics
have begun to envision more symbiotic relationships between experimental writing and popular
717
forms. According to Dewberry (1996), Hemingway borrowed much more from journalism
than his proverbial laconism; he learned to sacrifice absolute objectivity and to stylize anecdotal
detail in the production of mood or tonal effect.
Lutes (2006) has shown that journalism was a
writing school for female modernists, such as
Cather or Barnes, and a vehicle for gender and
racial concerns, as Ida B. Wellss and Nellie Blys
newspaper writings attest. Margolies (2002) has
proposed that, contrary to received opinion, Hollywood was salutary to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, at
the end of his life, regained his footing as a writer
there and nearly completed what might have become his masterpiece, The Love of the Last Tycoon.
Matthews (1995) has shown that, in adapting his
own work for the screen, Faulkner managed to
subvert the conventions of filmic storytelling.
Blair (2007) has studied the reciprocal borrowing
between post-Harlem Renaissance black modernists and contemporaneous photographers. And
Denning (1997) has shown that political modernism spread not only through traditional literary
channels but also through fashion writing, pulp
fiction, song lyrics, topical journalism, cabaret
skits, musical reviews, and even cartoons.
Reversing the angle high borrowing
from, or projecting itself through, low culture
Rabinowitz (2002), Hansen (1999), and Naremore (1998) have fruitfully complicated what
was considered low culture; they demonstrated
that popular narrative formats were permeated
by modernist themes and techniques, and were
therefore forms of vernacular modernism. Hence,
any discussion of modernism that does not take
into account its broad dissemination in a diversity
of media threatens to remain sorely limited.
Most of these approaches take an external
perspective on the modernismmedia convergence; they explore the traffic of strategies,
motifs, and iconography between what are essentially fully formed entities. By contrast, recent
contributions by North (2005), Suarez (2007),
and Trotter (2008) look at this encounter as
taking place between evolving media in mutual
interaction. Following the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Bela Balasz, as well
as those of contemporaries Friedrich Kittler
and Fredric Jameson, these critics propose that
modernist writing was shaped by for Trotter,
it unfolded in parallel with the automatic
718
MODERNIST FICTION
receptivity of photography, film, and soundrecording technologies; these qualities were more
apparent in these medias moment of emergence,
before their possibilities were streamlined and
their oddness tamed. These new technologies
mixed signal and noise, captured previously unrecorded perceptions, and delivered an unconscious pulsing in the heart of the everyday. This
perceptual unconscious punctuates modernist
textuality by means of compulsive repetitions,
gaps, or unaccountable moments, which these
critics find in an ample swath of texts little
magazines such as Contact or View, narratives by
Dos Passos or Fitzgerald, photography, experimental cinema, and commercial films by Griffith
or Chaplin. These disruptions signal unresolved
collective trauma (North), flag uncontainable
contingency (Trotter), or harbor inchoate yet
politically transformative energies that, at times,
have only been activated in retrospect, as neglected antecedents to contemporary struggles
(Suarez).
As most of this writing pays attention largely
to film and photography despite occasional
incursions into the sound media more work is
needed on the aural ecology of modernity and its
effect on textuality. T. S. Eliots claim that
contemporary novels obtain what reality they
have from an accurate rendering of the noises
that human beings currently make in their daily
simple needs of communication could be taken as
a premise for further analysis. Modernism, however, is also traversed by non-human noises that
exceeded communicative needs, and Paulson (1988), Gitelman (1999), and Campbell (2006)
offer productive suggestions in this regard. Noise
may be made to resonate productively with many
of the social, cultural, and political investments
that have shaped modernist studies in recent
decades, and may prompt us to relearn the modern
in ways that we have not yet plumbed. Equally
fruitful may prove recent reflections on eccentric
affect, which Nieland (2008) finds intrinsic to
modernity, or on modernist material culture
(Brown 1999, 2003). What seems clear is that new
fields of interest and new concerns will keep
reactivating a textual corpus that, nearly a century
after its first emergence, still seems inexhaustible
because of its cultural density and aesthetic sophistication, and because it remains a crucial
antecedent to much that is still vital in our time.

Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel
(AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF)
Anders, J. (2001). Willa Cathers Sexual Aesthetics and
the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. Lincoln:
Benstock, S. (1986). Women of the Left Bank: Paris,
19001940. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Blair, S. (2007). Harlem Crossroads: Harlem Writers and
the Photograph in the 20th Century. Princeton:
Blau du Plessis, R. (1985) Writing Beyond the Ending.
Boone, J. (1997). Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the
Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.
Campbell, T. C. (2006). Wireless Writing in the Age of
Marconi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York: Gender, Urban
Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World. New
York: Basic Books.
DeKoven, M. (1991). Rich and Strange: Gender, History,
Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Denning, M. (1997). The Cultural Front: The Laboring
of American Culture in the Twentieth Century.
New York: Verso.
Dewberry, E. (1996). Hemingways Journalism and
the Realistic Dilemma. In S. Donaldson (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1635.
Gilbert, S., & Gubar, S. (eds.) (1986). Female
Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic. New York:
Gordon and Breach.
Hansen, M. (1999). The Mass Production of the Senses:
Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.
Modernism/modernity, 6(2), 5977.
Haralson, E. L. (2003). Henry James and Queer
Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lindeman, M. (1999). Willa Cather: Queering America.
Love, H. (2007). Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics
of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lutes, J. M. (2006). Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists
in American Culture and Fiction, 18801930. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Margolies, A. (2002). Fitzgerald and Hollywood. In
Prigozy, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to F.
MOMADAY, N. SCOTT
Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, pp. 189208.
Matthews, J. (1995). Faulkner and the Culture Industry.
In P. M., Weinstein (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to William Faulkner. Cambridge: Cambridge
Moddelmog, D. (1999). Reading Desire: In Pursuit of
Ernest Hemingway. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Naremore, J. (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir and Its
Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nieland, J. (2008). Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of
Public Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
North, M. (1994). The Dialect of Modernism: Race,
Language, and Twentieth Century Literature.
North, M. (2005). Camera Work: Photography and the
Twentieth-Century Word. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Paulson, W. (1988). The Noise of Culture. Ithaca, NY:
Rabinowitz, P. (2002). Black & White & Noir: Americas
Pulp Modernism. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Scott, B. K. (ed.) (1990). Gender of Modernism: A Critical
Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Scott, B. K. (1995). Refiguring Modernism, vol. 1:
Women of 1928. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1989). Across Genders, Across
Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others. South Atlantic
Quarterly, 88(1), 5372.
Somerville, S. (2000). Queering the Color Line: Race and
the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture.
Strychacz, T. (2003). Hemingways Theaters of
Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Suarez, J. A. (2007). Pop Modernism: Noise and the
Reinvention of the Everyday. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Sundquist, E. (1983). Faulkner: The House Divided.
Trotter, D. (2007). Cinema and Modernism. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Wall, C. (1995). Women of the Harlem Renaissance.
Wittenberg, J. B. (1995). Race in Light in August:
Wordsymbols and Obverse Reflections. In P. M.,
Weinstein (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
William Faulkner. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 14667.
719
Momaday, N. Scott
CHRISTOPHER DOUGLAS
N. Scott Momaday is one of the most important

Native American writers to emerge since the
1960s. His novels, autobiographical writings, and
poetry reflect his Kiowa heritage and the geography of the Southwest. Frequently using mixedgenre writing, his work emphasizes the creative
power of language, the communal acts of storytelling, and the ongoing search for identity.
Navarre Scott Momaday was born in Lawton,
Oklahoma on February 27, 1934 to a Kiowa father
and a mixed white/Cherokee mother. He grew up
on Navajo, Apache, and Jemez Pueblo reservations, where his mother and father had teaching
jobs for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He attended
the University of New Mexico, briefly enrolled in
the University of Virginia Law School, and went
on to earn a PhD in English at Stanford University, supervised by Yvor Winters, focusing on the
poetry of nineteenth-century American poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman.
Following the completion of his PhD in 1963,
Momaday began exploring his Kiowa heritage,
viewing the sacred Tai-me medicine bundle of the
Kiowa with his father Al and paternal grandmother Aho, and later visiting Ahos grave on
Rainy Mountain in Oklahoma. His creative efforts in the decade began with this search for
origins: of both the Kiowas historical migration
from Yellowstone to the Plains and the cultural
and racial heritage of his ancestors. The fruit of
this labor in the late 1960s was some of Momadays
most important work, his The Way to Rainy
Mountain (1969), illustrated by his father and
composed of mixed anthropological, autobiographical, and oral tradition voices. These stories
he collected personally from members of the
Kiowa community, as they were translated by his
father since Momaday does not speak Kiowa.
Characterized by a search for ethnic identity, the
creative power of language and naming, and the
spiritual importance of landscape, The Way to
Rainy Mountain set the terms for Momadays
thematic interests.
He had been writing during this same period
what is arguably still the most famous Native
American novel, House Made of Dawn (1968),
about a Jemez Pueblo veteran of World War II
720
MOMADAY, N. SCOTT
who returns to the Jemez community but remains

disconnected from the geography and culture of
his people. Revealing the influence of modernism;
Faulkner; Navajo, Kiowa, and Jemez oral traditions and legends; and anthropology, the novel
portrayed Abels failed confrontation with a
Jemez witch and final late reconciliation with his
dying grandfather and Jemez communal traditions. House Made of Dawn was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The novel has been understood to have begun an outpouring of creative
energy among Native American writers like Leslie
Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor,
who, together with Momaday, comprise what
some critics have seen as a Native American
Renaissance. The Way to Rainy Mountain and
House Made of Dawn can be thought of as some of
the earliest multicultural literature signaled by an
anti-assimilationist ethic and a search for cultural
origins. This claiming of Native identities is
often developed in Momadays work through his
oeuvre-wide trope of memory in the blood.
While teaching at Berkeley and Stanford, Momaday published two important books of poems,
Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974) and The
Gourd Dancer (1976a), and began to work as an
artist as well as a writer. His 1976 memoir The
Names was more clearly and formally an autobiographical work than The Way to Rainy Mountain, though it too begins with an excavation of
family history and Kiowa oral tradition. With
more emphasis on childhood reminiscences
and genealogical ties, it nonetheless carries on
Momadays search for personal and tribal identities, a search that is the context for his evolving
poetry, storytelling, and drawings.
His second novel, The Ancient Child (1989),
takes shape around the Kiowa legend of Tsoaitalee (Rock Tree Boy) for whom the infant
Momaday was named. An autobiographical
novel, it is about a contemporary artist seeking
his Indian identity. His old and new poetry was
collected in In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and
Poems (1992), where it was joined by his painting
and drawing in a collection of ancestral voices and
personal memories. Like Ancient Child, In the
Bears House (1999) was a mixture of Momadays
prose, poems, and paintings, concentrated thematically around the image of the bear, a spiritually significant animal for the Kiowa. Momadays
most recent published work extends the range of
genres in which he works: Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in
Two Windows (2007) collects two plays and a
screenplay.
SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Modernist
Fiction (AF); Ortiz, Simon J. (AF); Silko, Leslie
Marmon (AF); Vizenor, Gerald (AF); Welch,
James (AF)

Allen, C. (1999). Blood (and) Memory. American
Literature, 71(1) 93116.
Douglas, C. (2009). A Genealogy of Literary
Multiculturalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Momaday, N. S. (1967). The Journey of Tai-me. Santa
Barbara: University of California Press.
Momaday, N. S. (1968). House Made of Dawn. New
York: Harper and Row.
Momaday, N. S. (1969). The Way to Rainy Mountain
(illus. A. Momaday). Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press.
Momaday, N. S. (1973). Colorado: Summer/Fall/
Winter/Spring (illus. and photo. D. Muench).
Chicago: Rand McNally.
Momaday, N. S. (1974). The Angle of Geese and Other
Poems. Boston: Godine.
Momaday, N. S. (1976a). The Gourd Dancer. New York:
Harper.
Momaday, N. S. (1976b). The Names: A Memoir.
New York: Harper.
Momaday, N. S. (1989). The Ancient Child. New York:
Doubleday.
Momaday, N. S. (1992). In the Presence of the Sun:
Stories and Poems, 19611991. New York: St.
Martins.
Momaday, N. S. (1997). Man Made of Words: Essays,
Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martins.
Momaday, N. S. (1999). In the Bears House. New York:
St. Martins.
Momaday, N. S. (2007). Three Plays: The Indolent Boys,
Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Scarberry-Garca, S. (1990). Landmarks of Healing: A
Study of House Made of Dawn. Albuquerque:
Schubnell, M. (1985). N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural
and Literary Background. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Schubnell, M., & Momaday, N. S. (1997). Conversations
with N. Scott Momaday. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
MOORE, LORRIE
Velie, A. R. (1982). Four American Indian Literary

Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie
Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman:
Woodward, C. L. (1989). Ancestral Voice: Conversations
with N. Scott Momaday. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Moore, Lorrie
PATRICK ODONNELL
With just three collections of short stories and

three novels to her credit, Lorrie Moore has
established herself as one of the premiere American writers of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Born in 1957 in the Adirondack
town of Glenn Falls, New York, she attended
St. Lawrences University as an English major,
winning her first writing award from Seventeen
magazine while an undergraduate. Following
graduation, she worked in New York for two
years as a paralegal, then entered Cornell Universitys MFA program, where she studied with
Alison Lurie. She began publishing stories while at
Cornell; the first gathering of her work, Self-Help
(1985), was published to strong acclaim, and
initiated a slow but steady succession of meticulously crafted stories and novels remarkable for
their subtle rendering of voices and interiorities.
Moore is currently the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of
WisconsinMadison, where she has spent her
teaching career; she has won the O. Henry Award
for her story, People Like That Are the Only
People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,
and the Rea Award for the Short Story, and has
been elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Moores stories tend to focus on the complexities and ironies of interpersonal relationships and
everyday domestic life. Self-Help offers a series of
lightly parodic takes on the self-help manual with
stories such as How to Talk to Your Mother
(Notes) and How to Become a Writer the
former revealing the combined fragility, humor,
and terror of motherdaughter relations; the
latter surreptitiously taking issue with all of those
writing manuals that offer easy advice and shortcuts to becoming a successful commercial author
721
in phrases that suggest wanting to become a writer

is a lot like having polio. Moore followed SelfHelp with her first novel, Anagrams (1986), about
a thirty-something poetry teacher whose isolation
and self-absorption cover over a rich interior life
full of fantasy and sardonic observation of the
human condition; as she scribbles anagrams
(words or sentences made by rearranging the
letters of another word or sentence) on napkins
and scraps of paper, she attempts to connect the
disparities and absurdities of the life she quietly
observes around her. This quirky, experimental
novel achieved mixed success on its appearance.
This was not the case with Like Life (1990) and
Birds of America (1998), two short story collections that made Moore, for many, the most
significant American short story writer to appear
on the scene since Raymond Carver or Grace
Paley. Like Life contains one of Moores most
widely anthologized stories, Youre Ugly, Too,
told from the perspective of a lonely college
professor whose visit to her sister in Manhattan
allows her to display her barbed wit on the topics
of men and heterosexual relationships. In Birds of
America, there appears the award-winning
People Like That Are the Only People Here,
a wrenching story told from the perspective of
a mother whose baby is diagnosed with cancer
and undergoing surgery; the story is made up of
notes the mother has made to herself describing
conversations with her husband and the doctors
as she awaits the outcome of the surgery and
attempts to emotionally navigate the crisis. Across
the two collections, Moore develops diverse
scenarios in which the collision of opposite
intentions and mindsets leads to pathos and
absurdity: a quiet, repressed librarian having
coffee with a brash social activist in Community
Life (in 1998); a self-alienated man scrutinizing
his sleeping wife in Places to Look for Your
Mind (in 1990); and young upwardly mobile
professionals revealing the vacuity of their lives
at a New Years Eve party in Beautiful Grade
(in 1998).
In Moores second novel, the oddly titled Who
Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), a woman in an
unsatisfactory marriage on a trip with her
husband to France reflects on her painful adolescence, and particularly on a summer spent working at a storyland amusement park where she
formed a fast friendship with a girl who shares
722
MORRIS, WRIGHT
her maturational miseries and flights into a world

of fractured myths and fantasy. The grating relation between fantasy and reality is a constant of
Moores fiction, and no more so here, where the
narrator describes the complicated arrangements
she must make for her friend to have an abortion
at the same time as she constructs visions of
a future that have been thoroughly deflated by
the exigencies of real life in the novels present
tense. To some degree, Moores most recent
novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), is, like her
second novel, a coming-of-age story, but is narrated under the shadow of 9/11 as the narrator
looks back on her childhood on a farm in the
Midwest and her undergraduate days as a student
at a small liberal arts college. The novel develops
a somewhat unlikely plot in which the narrator
becomes involved as a nanny with a family who is
other than they appear to be; however, the real
impact of A Gate at the Stairs, like Moores stories,
resides not in its plot but in its language as it
depicts the inner life of an agile, naive mind
encountering the complexities of reality and the
subjectivities of others whose intentions are at
cross-purposes with her own.
SEE ALSO: Carver, Raymond (AF); Gender
and the Novel (AF); Paley, Grace (AF),

Fagan, M. (2006). Choirs and Split Voices: Female
Identity Construction in Lorrie Moores Who
Will Run the Frog Hospital? College Literature, 33,
5269.
Gaffney, E. (2001). Lorrie Moore: The Art of Fiction
167. Paris Review, 43, 5784.
Kelly, A. (2009). Understanding Lorrie Moore.
Moore, L. (1985). Self-Help. New York: Knopf.
Moore, L. (1986). Anagrams. New York: Knopf.
Moore, L. (1990). Like Life. New York: Knopf.
Moore, L. (1994). Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? New
York: Knopf.
Moore, L. (1998). Birds of America. New York: Knopf.
Moore, L. (2008). Collected Stories. New York: Faber
and Faber.
Moore, L. (2009). A Gate at the Stairs. New York: Knopf.
Phelan, J. (1994). Self-Help for Narratee and Narrative
Audience: How I and You? Read How.
Style, 28(3), 35065.
Raiffa, J. R. (2006). Lorrie Moore. In B. H. Belfant & L.

Graver (eds.), The Columbia Companion to the
Twentieth Century American Short Story. New York:
Columbia University Press, p. 386.
Morris, Wright
LAURA BARRETT
The publication of two novels, My Uncle Dudley

(1942) and The Man Who Was There (1945), and
two photo-texts, The Inhabitants (1972a
[1946]) and The Home Place (1968 [1948]),
inaugurated Wright Morriss dual career as
a photographer and writer. The hybridity of the
photo-text illustrated his simultaneous interest
in and talent for photography and writing as well
as his temporal and stylistic position on the cusp
of modernism and postmodernism. A postmodern sense of exhaustion, exacerbated by an inability to represent and, therefore, respond to the real
thing, permeates Morriss fiction. [O]ur only
inexhaustible resource at the moment, argues
Morris, is the cliche (1978 [1957], 12). In
response to his sharp criticism of nostalgic and
derivative fiction, Morris experimented with narrative form and style, often creating a hallucinatory atmosphere in which reality commingles
with absurdity, and pseudo-objective narration
is juxtaposed with subjective stream of consciousness. Morriss expansive career includes 19 novels,
three memoirs, four collections of essays, dozens
of short stories, and multiple photo-texts and
photography books.
Born in Central City, Nebraska on January 6,
1910 to a father motivated by wanderlust and
a mother who died six days after his birth,
Morris lived a somewhat itinerant early life,
spending a few summers on a farm belonging
to his Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara during his
fathers absence. In 1940, he embarked on a
photographic tour of the US, taking pictures
that would later appear alongside text in The
Inhabitants, a work that represents the residents
of the Great Plains through brief first-person
commentaries coupled with narratives in dialect. The images, like so much of his fiction,
investigate the influence of environment, and his
photographs of Nebraska often convey overwhelming isolation.
MORRIS, WRIGHT
The 1940s also saw the beginning of Morriss

career as a novelist struggling with themes of
authenticity and originality. The Man Who Was
There chronicles the loss of the real in an age of
increasing mediation and reproduction, and The
Works of Love (1972b [1952]) offers a character
constructed by advertisements and films who
requires the artificiality of theater and hotel
lobbies, spaces which are both in . . . and out
of this world (172) to feel alive. That sense of
being on the threshold between worlds is
a recurring theme in Morriss fiction. Nostalgia
rules our hearts while a rhetoric of progress
rules our words (1978 [1957], 25). Characters
in his novels find themselves looking backward,
often in imitation of famous writers, actors,
and sports figures. So salient are the footprints
of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Greta Garbo, and Charles
Lindbergh in The Huge Season (1975 [1954]),
a finalist for the National Book Award, that
characters cannot fashion original lives for
themselves. Authenticity is further hampered by
the ubiquity of advertising in twentieth-century
America.
Morriss interest in optics continues in his
National Book Award-winning novel, The Field
of Vision (1974 [1956]), which explores the confrontation between what one sees and what is
there. Five characters, witnessing the same bullfight in Mexico, see entirely different events, and
while a photograph of the episode provides
a certain objective representation, it fails to present the truth: The camera did not lie. A pity, since
the lie mirrored the truth. The camera would
report what no pair of eyes present had seen
(154). Many of the characters from Field of Vision
reappear in Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), a novel
which chronicles the birthday celebration of
a patriarch, an event overshadowed by the murder
spree of a young man. A finalist for the National
Book Award, the novel, which is told from the
point of view of 10 characters, continues Morriss
preoccupations with perspective, memory, and
representation.
The relationship of the Midwest of the midtwentieth century to its romanticized past is
also explored in what is perhaps Morriss most
acclaimed novel and another National Book
Award winner, Plains Song: For Female Voices
(1991 [1980]). Here, he describes three generations of Midwestern women living in Nebraska
723
since the late nineteenth century. In its sparseness

and clarity, the novel resembles his photographs:
portraits of people strong, independent, and
somewhat unpredictable women emerge largely
through tone and setting.
In addition to various honors, including two
National Book Awards and multiple Guggenheim
Fellowships, Morris received one of the inaugural
Whiting Writers Awards in 1985, a Creative
Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts (1986), the Commonwealth
Award from the Modern Language Association
(1982), the Mark Twain Award (1982), and the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize/Robert Kirsch
Award for Lifetime Achievement (1981). Marking
the end of a prodigious career that also included
12 years as an English professor at San Francisco
State College (196375), Wright Morris died in
April 1998.
Fiction (AF)

Barrett, L. (1998). The True Witness of a False Event:
Photography and Wright Morriss Fiction of the
1950s. Western American Literature, 3(1), 54057.
Bird, R. K. (1985). Wright Morris: Memory and
Imagination. New York: Peter Lang.
Booth, W. C. (1962). The Shaping of Prophecy: Craft
and Idea in the Novels of Wright Morris. American
Scholar, 31, 60826.
Crump, G. B. (1978). The Novels of Wright Morris:
A Critical Interpretation. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Madden, D. (1964). Wright Morris. New York: Twayne.
Morris, W. (1942). My Uncle Dudley. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Morris, W. (1945). The Man Who Was There.
Morris, W. (1960). Ceremony in Lone Tree. New York:
Atheneum.
Morris, W. (1968). The Home Place [1948] (illus.
W. Morris). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Morris, W. (1972a). The Inhabitants [1946], 2nd edn.
New York: Da Capo.
Morris, W. (1972b). The Works of Love [1952]. Lincoln:
Morris, W. (1974). The Field of Vision [1956]. Lincoln:
724
MORRISON, TONI
Morris, W. (1975). The Huge Season: A Novel [1954].

Morris, W. (1977). Love Among the Cannibals [1957].
Morris, W. (1978). The Territory Ahead [1957]. Lincoln:
Morris, W. (1981). Wills Boy: A Memoir. New York:
Harper.
Morris, W. (1988). Collected Short Stories, 19481986
[1986]. New York: Godine.
Morris, W. (1991). Plains Song: For Female Voices
[1980]. New York: Godine.
Trachtenberg, A. (1962). The Craft of Vision. Critique,
4(3), 4155.
Wydeven, J. J. (1998). Wright Morris Revisited. New
York: Twayne.
Morrison, Toni
CEDRIC GAEL BRYANT
Is it possible to get some place where the love is

generous? Toni Morrison inquires in Things
We Find in Language (Taylor-Guthrie 171).
This passionate question is present from the
beginning of Morrisons literary career and thematically informs the fiction and non-fiction she
has produced over 40 years of playing in the
dark, the title of her 1992 collection of essays
meditating on race and the American literary
imagination. After completing her third novel,
Song of Solomon (1977), Morrison expressed the
multilayered ways that love and survival form the
woof and warp of her writing in this way: I think
that I still write about the same thing, which is
how people relate to one another and miss it or
hang on to it . . . or are tenacious about love.
About love and how to survive not to make
a living but how to survive whole where we are all
of us, in some measure, victims of something
(Taylor-Guthrie 30).
Born Chole Anthony Wofford on February 18,
1931 in Loraine, Ohio, by the age of 12, Toni,
the affectionate form of her masculine middle
name, had already begun practicing the craft that
would help shape American literature in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.
Morrisons fiction, from The Bluest Eye (1970)
to A Mercy (2008), is a dramatic conjugation of
loves protean potential to reveal what moves at
the margins (Morrison 1994, 28) for characters
who often are trapped between communal stric-
tures or familial allegiances and an irrepressible

will to express the self creatively, if unconventionally. This urge to create or claim the body-as-self,
and the contrary desire to claim the others body for
oneself, all happen in the name of love and desire.
Either love or desire can become a monstrous
perversion of itself and compel, for example, a
neglected black girl to covet the blue eyes and white
skin that in the American iconography of race
signify happiness (The Bluest Eye), or convince a
desperate mother to help her heroin-addicted son
act like a man by burning him to death (Sula), or
persuade a fugitive slave mother to put her children in a safe place by killing (murdering?) them
rather than surrender them to the unspeakable,
peculiar institution of slavery (Beloved).
From 1965 until 1983, when Toni Morrison
resigned her post as senior book editor at Random
House, finding practicable ways to do intimate
things in place as she negotiated single-parenting
two sons, writing, and teaching was an imperative, as Morrison has said, comparable to
nothing (Denard, 2008a). After 18 years as senior
editor and the publication of three very successful
novels (Song of Solomon won the National Book
Critics Circle Award in 1978), Morrison was
named Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany.
She was named to the Robert Goheen Chair at
Princeton in 1989, a position she held until her
retirement in 2006. The recipient of prestigious
national and international awards in the arts
and humanities, Morrison received the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1993 and the French Commandeur de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres. Toni
Morrisons metaphor, intimate things in place,
signifies the multidimensional shape of the
writers life and the diversity of the writers work;
however, this trope is also inextricably concerned
with the power language has, paradoxically, to
recuperate and erase history and to make and
unmake the self.
Without memory, or the ability to conjure or
catalyze it, the communities and individuals in
such complex novels as Love, Song of Solomon,
Beloved, and Paradise stand little chance of challenging evil or truly understanding themselves.
Ourself behind ourself, concealed / Should
startle most / Assassin hid in our Apartment /
Be Horrors least, poet Emily Dickinson announces. It is precisely this proposition about
MORRISON, TONI
human nature that produces the unspeakable

acts that Morrisons fiction insists must be spoken
(1990, 203): the theft of a slave mothers milk by
white boys with mossy teeth, or a red ribbon
knotted around a curl of wet wavy wooly hair
stuck to the side of a flat-bottom boat (1987, 181);
or, the demonizing of gendered difference and
xenophobia that compel black men to kill
convent women they shoot the white girl
first. With the rest they can take their time in
order to purge themselves of an evil that is, in fact,
concealed in themselves (1997b, 3).
The corpus of Toni Morrisons work is a play
on the body in several significant ways, beginning with the synthesis of African, ancient Greek
and Roman, and Latin American cultural traditions that inform Morrisons narrative practice.
Early in her career, this global body of literary
influences included the work of magic-realist
writers, especially Gabriel Garca Marquezs
fiction and Jorge Luis Borgess poetry. The nine
novels, short story (Recitatif), collection of
essays and lectures on race in American literary
criticism (1992b), and two edited books Morrison
has thus far produced constitute an ongoing
dialogue with romance and gothic traditions
traceable to American roots in the nineteenth
century, particularly the work of Hawthorne,
Melville, and Poe. Moreover, much recent scholarship has explored Morrisons ties to an expanding number of canonical American and European
authors, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce,
and William Faulkner. Woolf and Faulkner have
been tempting pairings with Morrison, partly
because both were the subjects of Morrisons
1955 masters thesis (The Treatment of the
Alienated in Virginia Woolf and William
Faulkner) from Cornell University.
With the exception of The Bluest Eye (1970)
and Sula (1973), Morrison has published a novel
every four or five years; the longest gestation
period between major publications occurred in
the 1980s between the release of Tar Baby in 1981
and the arrival of Morrisons most successful
novel to date, Beloved, in 1987. This was an
extremely fertile period for experimentation,
research, and discovery that resulted in
Morrisons only published short story, Recitatif
(1983), and an unpublished play, Dreaming
Emmett, about the murder of Emmett Till and
its significance to social reality and the American
725
imagination. Most notably, during this time Morrison researched the material that would become
the basis for Beloved in her investigation of the
American slave narrative tradition, specifically
Samuel J. Mays historical account of Margaret
Garner, a slave woman in Cincinnati, Ohio who in
January 1856 was tried, convicted, and sentenced
to death for the murder of her children who she
claimed, in her defense, were hers and not her
masters property. Narrated from multiple, interdependent points of view, which demonstrate
the constitutive nature of consciousness and the
universal particular of human experience,
Beloved, thematically, is a dramatic conjugation
of love, memory, and possession of the body.
Against the hegemonic authority of slavery to
commodify the black body to possess, repossess,
dispossess, dismember, and remember it
a fugitive slave mother named Sethe struggles
for the power, if not the legal right, to love your
heart. For this is the prize.
As Michael Awkward suggests, within the tradition of African American writing, black women
writers have created a textual system defined
aesthetically by inspiriting influences (8), and
the black female body is their central subject
matter. This doubling as producers and subjects
is richly manifest in the concerns Toni Morrison
shares with sister writers, including Gayl Jones,
poet Lucille Clifton, Margaret Walker, Octavia E.
Butler, Alice Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams.
In diversely inspiriting genres, as poets, novelists,
and science fiction writers, the reconstruction of
slavery through the literary imagination is the
shared subject that has informed, at one time or
another, their narrative strategies and themes.
In protean texts such as Morrisons Beloved,
Williamss Dessa Rose, Butlers Kindred, and
Walkers Jubilee, the scarred, mutilated black
body becomes a semiotic sign of a pernicious
ideology that commodifies and subjugates black
bodies on the basis of gendered and racial otherness. The scars speak the unspeakable and make
plain the physical and emotional brutality that
within this literary tradition always threatens to
make marginalized people perpetual victims but,
remarkably, often catalyzes their self-empowerment and transcendence.
When love fails to find its generous, lifeaffirming balance, as in the novel Jazz (1992a),
it can take the grotesque form of the beloved dead
726
MORRISON, TONI
body. Joe Traces all-consuming love for Dorcas,

the beautiful girl he kills, leaves so little affection
for his wife, Violet, that she, driven by her own
unmanageable need to be loved, slashes the dead
girls face during the open-casket viewing. What
should be a respectful, public ritual of mourning
is transformed into grotesque parody by what the
narrator calls those deep down, spooky loves
(3) that cause one thrown-away lover to kill his
beloved and the jealous wife to desecrate the dead
girls body and memory. Jazz and these events
take place during the 1920s during the heyday of
the Harlem Renaissance and the jazz age. This is
the second novel of a triology that begins with
Beloved, which takes place between the 1850s and
the end of Reconstruction; and Paradise, which
chronicles the 1930s through the late Civil Rights
period. By contrast, the narrative events of A
Mercy (2008) take place in the 1690s, the earliest
historical time of Morrisons novels.
Visible and invisible scarring, the struggle for
self-empowerment, and transcendence have been
central subjects in Toni Morrisons fiction from
the beginning. The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrisons
first novel, develops the tragic story of Pecola
Breedlove, a young, unloved black girl doubly
brutalized by a systemic racial ideology that privileges whiteness and denigrates blackness, and by
her father, Cholly, who in a perverted and sad
effort to express affection rapes her. Anathematized and abandoned by both her family and the
larger black community, Pecola is befriended only
by the novels two adolescent narrators, Claudia
and Frieda MacTeer. Told retrospectively from
the vantage point of adulthood looking back to
a moment of crisis that shapes all three characters,
the narrators sense of loss and regret is palpable.
However, there are lessons learned about the
paradoxically corrupting and saving grace of
community, the fragility of identity, and the
power of ideology. And there is an ironic victory
for Pecola herself, who ultimately finds an escape
from self-loathing and incest in madness, where
she can possess perfectly the blue eyes and white
skin she covets and retreat from a brutally indifferent world.
The Bluest Eye and Morrisons second novel,
Sula (1973), chart the development of adolescent
black girls transitioning to mature womanhood in
the first half of the twentieth century, between the
Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement.

In Sula, Morrison broadens her concern with
the damaging internalization of assumptions of
immutable inferiority originating in an outsider
gaze (1973, 210) to include the complex relation
between radical individualism and communalism, and explores the inextricably intertwined
nature of good and evil. Questions about love,
its generous possibilities and its corrosive kinds of
narcissism, are also central in Sula and throughout Morrisons novels.
The narrative time frame in Sula moves from
1919 to 1965, the year that Nel Greene finally
comes to terms with a remembrance of things
past, which includes revelations about the permanence and fragility of the relationship with her
childhood best friend, Sula Peace, and the meaning
of life and death in a world that includes the
collapse of a tunnel filled with people and the
misplaced feelings of loneliness for the husband,
Jude, who abandoned her. Two sides of the same
personality, divided between self and other, Nel
and Sula move through girlhood to womanhood
under the glaring gaze of the Bottom, an
all-black community whose moral standards, customs, and consensus about evil problematically
both protect and pervert, and nurture and punish,
deviance or compliance, accordingly, with its strictures. (Morrison would again explore the subject
of social control in an all-black community in her
seventh novel, Paradise.) Because Sula is marked
by difference symbolized by a Rorschach-like
birthmark that, like Hester Prynnes scarlet letter
A in Nathaniel Hawthornes novel, morphs into
what the viewer projects onto it: a serpent, a rose, or
a tadpole her black female body becomes
a semiotic sign and her eccentricities are viewed
as evidence of the evil from which the community
believes it must protect itself. Such evil, the
collective voice of the community announces,
must be avoided . . . and precautions must naturally be taken to protect themselves from it (89).
Sula violates the communitys most cherished
values by putting her grandmother, Eva, in
a facility for convalescents, rather than caring for
her at home; committing adultery with Nels
husband, Jude; watching her own mother burn to
death because she was interested; and allegedly
fornicating with white men, a cardinal sin that
irretrievably anathematizes her. Marginalized by
MORRISON, TONI
his own species of difference, only crazy

Shadrack and ultimately Nel herself seem to understand what Sula says on her deathbed: maybe
it was me who was good (146). Because Sulas
deviance has exposed the communitys moral
contradictions and, concomitantly, engendered
an ironically orderly response to the disorder that
she represents, the community may come to
love her, as she predicts. Thematically, the
community, through the forms of ideological
and social control it wields, will always need the
kind of check on its potential abuses of power that
radical individualism provokes.
Song of Solomon (1977) marks a narrative
shift from a female- to male-centered point of
view that, however, remains concerned with the
emergent self struggling at the conjunction of
familial and political responsibility, history and
loss, and the possibility of recovery through the
primacy of language. This thematic trajectory in
Toni Morrisons first three novels is also the
narrative foundation for her fiction generally.
However, her eighth novel, Love (2003), links up
with the corpus through the resilient question
Morrison has posed in diverse ways over time
about struggling to reach the place where the
love is generous.
The narrative shape of Love resembles the way
crystal forms, Morrison says in an interview:
you have a small piece and then it expands to
another. And another layer comes on in a different shape. . . . And when you get finished its
different facets, different light looking at one
simple thing, which is, of course, love (Denard
2008a, 216). The different facets of conflict and
theme in this novel center on Bill Cosey, owner of
Coseys Hotel and Resort, whose charm, wealth,
and aloofness attract the women Heed (his
second wife), May (his daughter), L (hotel chef),
Junior (mysterious stranger), Christine (his
granddaughter), and Vida (faithful employee)
who collectively and diversely reflect the novels
title. With the possible exception of L, these
women have failed, or never learned, to love
themselves first and, consequently, like moths
drawn dangerously and irresistibly to an open
flame, seek this lack or absence in the protean
presence of Bill Cosey. The prismatic effect refracted by Coseys light exposes the internecine
kinds of rivalries between friends, husbands and
727
wives, strangers, and daughters and stepmothers

and the volcanic emotions jealousy, insecurity,
deceit, hate, and distrust that can destroy families and whole communities. What trumps both
narcissism and the kind of altruism that deifies the
other, the novel implies, is self-authentication,
which makes generous expressions of mutual love
and friendship possible. This is what Heed and
Christine, whose lives have been shaped most by
Coseys life and perverted most by his death,
ultimately realize sitting on the floor, in each
others arms, in Coseys empty hotel. In the dust
and exhausted aftermath of their best effort to
physically hurt one another, Heed and Christine
rediscover what is true about their relationship:
Pretty. So so pretty. / Love. I really do (194).
The parable Toni Morrison relates in her Nobel
Prize Lecture, about an old, blind woman who is
asked by young visitors to say whether a bird
one of them is holding is alive or dead, expresses
essential truths about paradigms of power, the
systematic looting of language, and our collective responsibility to prevent them. The old, blind
woman, who is also wise, believes that when
language dies out of carelessness, disuse, indifference, and absence of esteem, or [is] killed by
fiat, not only she herself but all users and makers
are accountable for its demise (1994, 1415).
This responsibility for language, Morrison notes
in the William E. Massey Sr. lectures that form
the essays in Playing in the Dark, touches all
aspects of life, the speakable and unspeakable,
and extends to both white and black, male and
female American writers for whom there is no
escape from racially inflected language (1992b,
13). Throughout Morrisons remarkable fiction
and non-fiction, what she says about language
and writers generally, like the parable about the
bird and the old woman, is there to be seen and
felt, so long as there are listeners and players in
the darkness: the work writers do to unhobble
the imagination from the demands of . . . language is complicated, interesting, and definitive
(1992b, 13).
Faulkner, William (AF); Gender and the Novel
(AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF);
728
MORRISON, TONI

Awkward, M. (1989). Inspiriting Influences: Tradition,
Revision, and Afro-American Womens Novels.
Bryant, C. G. (2005). The Soul Has Bandaged
Moments: Reading the African American Gothic
Tradition in Wrights Big Boy Leaves Home,
Morrisons Beloved, and Gomezs Gilda. African
American Review, 39, 54153.
Conner, M. C. (2000). The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison:
Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi.
Denard, C. C. (ed.) (2008a). Toni Morrison:
Conversations. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Denard, C. C. (ed.) (2008b). Toni Morrison: What
Moves at the Margin. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Mayberry, S. N. (2008). Cant I Love What I Criticize:
The Masculine and Morrison. Athens: University of
Georgia Press.
Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
Morrison, T. (1973). Sula. New York: Knopf.
Morrison, T. (1977). Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf.
Morrison, T. (1981). Tar Baby. New York: Knopf.
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Knopf.
Morrison, T. (1990). Unspeakable Things Unspoken:
The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.
In H. Bloom, (ed.), Toni Morrison. New York:
Chelsea House.
Morrison, T. (1992a). Jazz. New York: Knopf.

Morrison, T. (1992b). Playing in the Dark. Cambridge,
Morrison, T. (ed.) (1992c). Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power. New York: Pantheon.
Morrison, T. (1994). The Nobel Lecture in Literature,
1993. New York: Knopf.
Morrison, T. (1997b). Paradise. New York: Knopf.
Morrison, T. (2003). Love. New York: Knopf.
Morrison, T. (2004). Remember: The Journey
to School Integration. New York: Houghton
Mifflin.
Morrison, T. (2008). A Mercy. New York: Knopf.
Morrison, T., & Claudia Brodsky Lacour (eds.)(1997a).
Birth of a Nationhood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in
the O. J. Simpson Case. New York: Pantheon.
Page, P. (1995). Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and
Fragmentation in Toni Morrisons Novels. Jackson:
Peterson, N. J. (ed.) (1997). Toni Morrison: Critical and
Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Taylor-Guthrie, D. (ed.) (1994). Conversations With
Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Toni Morrison: Uncensored. (1990). [Video interview].
Films for the Humanities and Sciences. Jackson:
Wall, C.A. (2005). Worrying the Line: Black Women
Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill:
N
Nabokov, Vladimir
LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE
Vladimir Nabokov is one of the most brilliant,

original, and complex writers of the twentieth
century. Though best known for his novels, he is
the author of works in a variety of genres, ranging
from verse to memoir, biography to translation.
No writer of the last half century has had so broad
or so decisive an influence on American as well
as non-American fiction, from his student
Thomas Pynchon to his early advocate John
Updike, from Martin Amis to W. G. Sebald,
Aleksandar Hemon to Jhumpa Lahiri, Don
DeLillo to Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith to
Michael Chabon.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born
into a family of great wealth and influence in St.
Petersburg on April 22, 1899. He was the eldest of
five children and the son of a renowned jurist and
liberal politician. The family, a member of the
untitled nobility, spent their summers on family
estates in the Russian countryside, and the rest of
the year in St. Petersburg a rhythm recounted in
his Speak, Memory (1966). Also related therein is
that Nabokovs exceptionally happy childhood
was also a trilingual one. Alongside his native
Russian, the rules of fashionable society demanded a thorough knowledge of French. He
first learned the language in which he would
become most famous from his English governess.
Inheriting an independent fortune from an
uncle at the age of 17, Nabokov used a small
part of his briefly held riches to publish a collection of his Russian verse. With the rise to power
of the Bolsheviks in 1917 his family fled St.

Petersburg for the Crimea, remaining there for
18 months before leaving Russia in 1919, never to
return.
Nabokov and his brother Sergei were sent to
study at Cambridge University, while his parents
(stripped of their considerable wealth) and younger siblings settled in Berlin, then the center
of Russian emigre society. At Trinity College
Nabokov studied Russian and French literature.
In 1922 his father was murdered by Russian
monarchists in Berlin (he was not the target of
the attack but was killed while trying to hinder the
assassins). The following year Nabokov met his
future wife, Vera, whom he married in 1925. Their
only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934. In response
to the mounting danger posed by the National
Socialist government, made particularly acute by
the fact that Vera was Jewish, the couple and their
young son left Berlin for Paris in 1937. Under
renewed pressure from the Nazis, they sailed from
Paris for New York in 1940.
During the years between the end of his university studies and his fleeing Europe, Nabokov
wrote eight novels in Russian, culminating in his
masterful The Gift (1938). Alongside these he
wrote a large body of verse and short fiction
(including two novellas). Despite the critical success with which both his poetry and fiction were
met, the exigencies of the emigre market made it
impossible for him to earn a living from writing.
To supplement his income, he composed chess
problems and crossword puzzles for newspapers,
as well as gave lessons in French, English, Russian,
tennis, and boxing.

730
NABOKOV, VLADIMIR
By the late 1930s it became clear to Nabokov

that if he was to have any hope of supporting his
family through literature, he would need to remake himself as either a French or an English
writer. His first forays into the French literary
world were successful, but the political situation
there soon led him to set his sights on the Anglophone world. While he had actually learned to
read English before Russian (much to his parents
surprise), and attended an English university, his
first creative writing in English what was to
become The Real Life of Sebastian Knight dates
from 1938, when Nabokov was 39 years old. It is
for this reason all the more remarkable that the
literary language he developed in that and
later works is neither simplified nor stiff. As
his readers soon remarked, it abounds in both
stylistic refinement and colloquial flavor (an important early critic of his work, Alfred Appel, Jr.,
notably dubbed it colloquial baroque). At many
points it displays a foreigners heightened sensitivity to the neglected resources of a language.
The striking felicity of much of his writing is
inflected by echoes of other languages and is
strongly marked by what George Steiner called
its extraterritoriality.
Upon arriving in New York in 1940, Nabokov
found himself in the same narrow financial straits
he had known in Europe. He took a curatorial job
in the entomology department of New Yorks
Museum of Natural History, which was later
supplanted by a similar post at Harvards Museum of Comparative Zoology. Alongside this
scientific work, Nabokov taught Russian and
comparative literature at Wellesley College, stealing time for creative writing where he could.
During these years he found a publisher for his
first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight (1941), and wrote and published his second one, Bend Sinister (1947). Nabokov at last
found a full-time teaching post at Cornell University in 1948, where he remained until the
proceeds from Lolita (1955) would allow him to
retire permanently from teaching 10 years later.
After completing another novel, Pnin (1957), and
writing a screenplay for Stanley Kubricks film
version of Lolita, Nabokov left America for
Switzerland in 1960, where he spent the last
17 years of his life in peaceful seclusion, and
during which he wrote and published Pale Fire
(1962); Ada, or Ardor (1969); Transparent Things
(1972); and Look at the Harlequins! (1974). Despite his injunction against posthumous publication, since his death Lectures on Literature (1980),
Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures
on Don Quixote (1983) have appeared. At the time
of his death, Nabokov was at work on a novel
entitled The Original of Laura (2009). He had
instructed that it was to be burnt in the event he
died before being able to complete it. After long
years of uncertainty, and an intense flurry of
media attention, his son and literary executor,
Dmitri, agreed to its publication.
Just as Nabokovs exceptional talent did not
limit itself to a single language, it did not limit
itself to a single genre. While indeed best-known
for his novels, he also wrote verse, short fiction, a
richly evocative memoir, a biography, two stage
plays, a screenplay, scientific papers treating the
taxonomy and behavior of butterflies and moths,
and one of the most extensively annotated translations of a poem ever produced. And yet this
translation of Pushkins Eugene Onegin (1975)
for which Nabokov thought he would be, along
with Lolita, best remembered only represented a
modest part of the total translating he did during
his life. In addition to early translations such as
one from English to Russian of Alice in Wonderland and later ones from Russian to English such
as that of the twelfth-century epic The Song of
Igors Campaign, Nabokov either himself translated, or had a significant hand in the translations
of, all his earlier Russian works, as well as translated Lolita into Russian.
Nabokovs energetic movement between genres is also clearly reflected within his preferred
genre, the novel. Ever impatient with generic
constraints, each of Nabokovs English novels
presents some significant formal or thematic innovation. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight begins
as a fictionalized literary biography and ends as a
riddle of authority and identification. The dystopian Bend Sinister oscillates between the political
and the private, between a reflection on totalitarianism and one on suffering and loss, and closes
with the curious intervention of a figure Nabokov
described as an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me. Pnin is a touching, tender, and
often melancholy story of emigration and academia which, however, does not fail to raise many of
the same questions of authority as had Nabokovs
first English novel. As its subtitle indicates, Ada,
NABOKOV, VLADIMIR
or Ardor is a family chronicle but one where

familial resemblances, history, and even the
passage of time are subject to highly specialized
rules of engagement. Fittingly enough, Nabokovs
final completed novel, Look at the Harlequins!, at
once reflects and mocks the genre of the literary
autobiography.
The most striking instance of Nabokovs formal
innovation is offered, however, by Pale Fire. The
novel takes the form of a 999-line poem written by
a (fictional) poet accompanied by the preface and
annotations of a (fictional) critic who, as becomes
ever more apparent to the reader, is either a
monomaniacal monarch in exile or a madman
or both. Still other possibilities, however, are
gradually suggested, as certain details of plot and
presentation seem to indicate that both poem and
commentary were written by the poet himself,
while others imply that both were written by the
commentator. In an important early review, Mary
McCarthy described the novel as a Jack-in-theBox, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess
problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch
reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself
novel (21). Still other elements in the dizzyingly
complex construction point to yet another author
within the world of the novel (a local professor).
Further conjectures have been made, though these
might suffice to give a sense of the playful complexity of the novels intricate structure (for an
overview of the varying possibilities, as well as the
impassioned advocacy of a single one of them, see
Boyd 1999).
Nabokov is, however, best known for his tale of
ardent love, aching loss, and cruel mistreatment,
Lolita. The novel combines elements of the case
history, the confession, the lyric, and the detective
novel. Its most unsettling formal characteristic,
however, is also its most unsettling moral one, as
Lolita is told in the first-person voice of a criminal
graced with unsettling eloquence. Humbert is
remarkable not only for his wit, imagination,
and powers of observation, but also for how little
he corresponds to stereotypical images of pedophiles. Lolita has become one of the most famous
books of its century, and yet its nature has remained resolutely enigmatic with readers divided
as to whether it is a sterile exercise of linguistic
virtuosity or a deeply human account of love and
loss, whether it is an incitement to vice or an
encouragement to virtue, whether it is art for
731
nothing but its own sake or a work of rare

moral force.
While present in all Nabokovs fiction, this
innovative element is not limited to it. Nabokov
was fiercely independent in all his activities, from
the conventional genre of the biography to the
freer one of the novel. Much to his publishers
chagrin, in writing his biography of Nikolai Gogol
he refused to either offer summaries of Gogols
works or proceed chronologically in the telling of
his life. Equally remarkable is that this same
principle was followed in Nabokovs own memoir
published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence, translated into Russian in 1954, and published in
expanded and altered form as Speak, Memory:
An Autobiography Revisited in 1966. In all its
incarnations, this memoir follows thematic
rather than chronological strands and accords far
greater importance to seemingly minor details
and chance recollections than to what are customarily viewed as formative experiences and
watershed events.
Nabokovs view of art can be most succinctly
described as art for arts sake. He categorically
dismissed the importance or interest in both his
works and those of others of social, political, or
moral questions and displayed a particularly
strong antipathy toward writers and critics whom
he saw using literature to advocate social or political views. In the introduction to Bend Sinister he
stated, I am not sincere, I am not provocative, I
am not satirical. I am neither a didacticist nor an
allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs,
primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient,
symptoms of thaw in Soviet Russia, the Future of
Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent (xii). Of Dickenss Bleak House, he claimed
that the sociological side . . . is neither interesting
nor important (1980, 68); and of Madame Bovary,
he remarked, [T]he subject may be crude and
repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated
and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the
only thing that really matters in books (1980,
138). When he addressed the question of audience, it was most often to dismiss it as not worth
discussing, and was fond of quoting Pushkins
dictum, I write for pleasure and publish for
money (1973, 273). This is not to say, however,
that he was indifferent to his audience, and, in
private communications, he reacted with pride
and pleasure to the reactions of attentive readers.
732
NABOKOV, VLADIMIR
What Nabokov most demanded from readers

was attention to detail. Both in life and in art, he
stressed the need to study even and especially the
subtlest details the finest shades of color and
most delicate nuances of meaning. This resulted
in a virulent dislike for generalizations, most
clearly visible in his repeated attacks on
Freud. Freud was not alone, however, in receiving
such harsh treatment. In 1973 Nabokov published
a collection of interviews, essays, and chess
problems entitled Strong Opinions (1973) in
which the vehemence of his literary opinions is
on prominent display. Both there and elsewhere,
his reverence for Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka,
Dickens, Proust, and Bely found its complement
in the contempt in which he held a number of
celebrated authors from Marx to Dostoevsky, and
from Balzac to Thomas Mann. Amongst notable
American writers whom Nabokov deemed
mediocrities are T. S. Eliot, Henry James,
Faulkner, and Saul Bellow.
In virtually all of Nabokovs work, early and late,
themes of madness, cruelty, and suffering recur
frequently. In some cases, they are presented in
relatively conventional fashion, albeit with unconventional insight, as in such early works as Laughter
in the Dark (1938) and The Defense (1930). In Lolita
and Ada, or Ardor, they are filtered through the
more or less villainous eyes of the perpetrators. In
still other instances, a remarkable figure enters the
world of the fiction that of the works creator
as at the end of Bend Sinister and the story
Cloud, Castle, Lake. Unsurprisingly, the relation of creator to creation and the role of cruelty
in that creation have comprised a topic of perennial curiosity and unease amongst readers
and critics, as has been the theme of emissaries
from the beyond.
Given the complexity of Nabokovs works, it
should come as no surprise that the question as to
what extent his readers are meant to unravel them
has also been a recurrent one, as has been the
related one of whether singular definitive answers
to the riddles posed in works such as The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight or Pale Fire are to be had.
Arguments for the ultimate impossibility of certainty and determinacy in such matters are to be
found expressed with particular clarity in Wood
(1994). A spirited defense of determinacy in
interpretation brought to bear on the most
densely and deceptively patterned of Nabokovs

works, Pale Fire is given by Boyd (1999).
In conclusion, for the reader experiencing surprise at finding Nabokov listed as an American
author, a few details bear noting. As concerns his
own view of the matter, Nabokov exclaimed, I
am as American as April in Arizona (1973, 98).
More precisely, he noted elsewhere, I am an
American writer, born in Russia and educated in
England where I studied French literature, before
spending fifteen years in Germany (1973, 26).
When asked where in the library classification his
works should be placed, his widow remarked that
they belonged under American Literature as his
best works were written in that language.
SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF);
McCarthy, Mary (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);

Alexandrov, V. (1991). Nabokovs Otherworld.
Alexandrov, V. (ed.) (1995). The Garland
Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York:
Garland.
Boyd, B. (1990). Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years.
Boyd, B. (1991). Vladimir Nabokov: The American
Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boyd, B. (1999). Nabokovs Pale Fire: The Magic of
Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Connolly, J. (ed.) (2005). The Cambridge Companion to
Vladimir Nabokov. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
de la Durantaye, L. (2007). Style Is Matter: The Moral
Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Johnson, D. B. (1985). Worlds in Regression: Some
Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis.
Nabokov, V. (1938). Laughter in the Dark. New York:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Nabokov, V. (1941). The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
Nabokov, V. (1947). Bend Sinister. New York: Holt.
Nabokov, V. (1955). Lolita. Paris: Olympia Press.
Nabokov, V. (1957). Pnin. New York: Doubleday.
Nabokov, V. (1959). Invitation to a Beheading [trans. of
Priglashenie na kazn, 1938] (trans. D. Nabokov with
V. Nabokov). New York: Putnams.
NATURALIST FICTION
Nabokov, V. (1961). Nikolai Gogol [1944], corr. ed.

Nabokov, V. (1962). Pale Fire. New York: Putnams.
Nabokov, V. (1963). The Gift [trans. of Dar, 193738]
(trans. M. Scammell with V. Nabokov). New York:
Putnams.
Nabokov, V. (1964). The Defense [Zashchita Luzhina,
1930] (trans. M. Scammell with V. Nabokov).
New York: Putnams.
Nabokov, V. (1965). The Eye [Sogliadatai, 1938]
(trans. D. Nabokov with V. Nabokov). New York:
Phaedra.
Nabokov, V. (1966). Speak, Memory: An Autobiography
Revisited. New York: Putnams.
Nabokov, V. (1968). King, Queen, Knave [Korol, dama,
valet, 1928] (trans. D. Nabokov with V. Nabokov).
Nabokov, V. (1969). Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
Nabokov, V. (1970). Mary [Mashenka, 1926]
(trans. M. Glenny with V. Nabokov). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Nabokov, V. (1971). Glory [Sovremennye Zapiski]
(trans. D. Nabokov with V. Nabokov). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Nabokov, V. (1972). Transparent Things. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Nabokov, V. (1973). Strong Opinions. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Nabokov, V. (1974). Look at the Harlequins! New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Nabokov, V. (1975). Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by
Aleksandr Pushkin [1964] (trans. and comm. V.
Nabokov), rev. ed., 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Nabokov, V. (1980). Lectures on Literature (ed.
F. Bowers). New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Nabokov, V. (1981). Lectures on Russian
Literature (ed. F. Bowers). New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Nabokov, V. (1991). The Annotated Lolita [1970]
(ed., pref., intro., and notes, A. Appel, Jr.). New York:
Vintage.
Nabokov, V. (1996). Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.
New York: Knopf.
Page, N. (ed.) (1982). Nabokov: The Critical Heritage.
London: Routledge.
Pifer, E. (1980). Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge,
Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, Solidarity.
Steiner, G. (1970). Extraterritorial. TriQuarterly, 17,
11927.
Wood, M. (1994). The Magicians Doubts: Nabokov and
the Risks of Fiction. London: Chatto and Windus.
733
Naturalist Fiction
JOHN DUDLEY
Famously dismissed by Malcolm Cowley and

other critics as little more than pessimistic
determinism, American literary naturalism
might more fully be described as an attempt to
incorporate the revolutionary scientific ideas of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into
an American literary tradition already heavily
invested in questions of free will and individualism. At its center, naturalist fiction is concerned
with understanding the limits placed upon an
individual by forces beyond his or her control.
While generally viewed as the culmination of the
realist turn in American art and literature that
began after the US Civil War, the naturalist
movement, with its incorporation of scientific
discourse, its exploration of individual consciousness, its experimentation with form and technique, and its attention to issues of racial and
gendered difference, should also be seen as
laying the groundwork for questions of subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics so crucial to modernism and postmodernism. Always engaged
with contemporaneous social, political, and
intellectual issues, naturalism as a fictional
mode continued to evolve in response to, and
along with, the myriad cultural changes of the
twentieth century.
In his 1880 treatise The Experimental Novel,

Emile
Zola appropriated the language and techniques of medical science in describing the role of
the novelist as an objective observer of the ways in
which human lives are shaped by a combination
of heredity, environment, and chance. Throughout his Rougon-Macquart series of 20 novels,
published between 1870 and 1893, Zola demonstrates the application of his theory, offering a sort
of natural history of two families that encompasses the major political and social events of
Frances Second Republic (185170) and incorporates such subjects as alcoholism, prostitution,
labor unrest, and the effects of urbanization.
Zolas revolutionary approach to literature coincided with the growing impact of Marxist and
Darwinian ideas, as well as the rise of the social
sciences, all of which contributed to the emergence of American literary naturalism in the
1890s.
734
NATURALIST FICTION
The naturalist fiction produced by American

writers has defied easy generalizations or definitions. Critics have largely regarded naturalism as a
deterministic descendant of the realist movement,
as defined and practiced by Mark Twain, William
Dean Howells, and Henry James. Unlike their
realist predecessors, who shared considerable personal and professional ties and who articulated a
consistent, if varied, aesthetic program, the first
generation of naturalists could hardly be said
to form a coherent school. With the notable
exception of Frank Norris, who made clear his
debt to Zola, few American writers used the term
naturalism to describe their work, and the most
celebrated naturalists, including Norris, Stephen
Crane, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Theodore
Dreiser, crossed paths only intermittently during
their careers. Indeed, any reader must acknowledge the formal and philosophical diversity
among these writers, as well as the profound
impact of their work on subsequent American
fiction. The various strands of naturalist technique
that developed over the subsequent century can be
largely traced to the dominant characteristics of
these authors works: sensational depictions of
poverty, degeneration, and urban life (Norris,
London, and Crane); overt reference to biological
and environmental determinism (Norris, London,
and Dreiser); painstaking documentary detail
(Dreiser); a detached, acerbic irony (Crane and
Wharton), and, to a varying degree in each of these
writers, an explicit critique of the excesses and
hypocrisies of American culture during the
Progressive era.
In the wake of police reporter Jacob Riiss
sensational and influential analysis of Manhattans poor in How the Other Half Lives
(1890), fellow journalist Stephen Crane produced
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and published
it himself under a pseudonym. The novels frank
descriptions of inner-city tenement life and
sympathetic, yet unsentimental, portrayal of a
prostitute found few readers, despite an established middle-class fascination with reformist
slum narratives. Indeed, it was as an alternative
to the overtly sentimental tradition of popular
fiction that the naturalists staked out their territory. For these writers, naturalism, as a literary
mode informed by science, journalism, and the
Progressive-era emphasis on professionalism,
provided a distinctly masculine authorial role
that addressed the anxieties surrounding what

historian Ann Douglas has referred to as the
feminization of American culture. At the same
time, this gendered stance masked the genres
affinities with the popular romance, the reform
tract, and the sentimental novel. These formal
tensions mirror the unsettled thematic structure
of naturalist fiction. Impressionistic and darkly
ironic, Cranes portrait of Maggie, the doomed
Bowery girl who blossomed in a mud puddle,
effectively introduces the archetypal conflicts
within naturalist fiction between, on one hand,
the inchoate aspirations of its characters for aesthetic beauty and spiritual fulfillment, and, on the
other, the profound inability of these characters to
fully comprehend, let alone escape, the conditions
in which they find themselves trapped. Likewise,
the novel reflects the unresolved tensions between
nature and culture that epitomize naturalist narratives. Crane leaves open the degree to which
Maggies fate stems from a genetic predisposition
to moral weakness, the corrupting influences of
her abusive mother and a deceitful suitor, or the
larger environmental degradation of the urban
underworld that she inhabits. Subsequent paradigmatic examples of naturalism, such as Cranes The
Red Badge of Courage (1895), Norriss McTeague
(1899), Dreisers Sister Carrie (1900), and
Whartons The House of Mirth (1905), offer complex, and even contradictory, explorations of what
constitutes inherent human nature and its interaction with the environmental forces at work in
determining an individuals fate.
In a century increasingly committed to the
power of cultural construction, naturalist fiction
consistently provided an avenue for social critique, and its endlessly adaptable form reflected
shifting ideas in evolutionary science and philosophy. For instance, Jack Londons novels and
stories incorporate at times, uneasily the
authors commitment to socialism, a utopian
belief in progress, Nietzsches radical individualism, and the eras poisonous attitudes toward
racial inequality. In The Call of the Wild (1903),
London employs the conventions of a boys adventure story to construct a parable in which a
dog is transformed, through his immersion into
the brutal world of the Yukon Gold Rush, from a
spoiled house pet to the dominant primordial
beast lurking within his genetic coding. The
capacity of environmental forces to reveal an
NATURALIST FICTION
individuals true nature also serves as the focus of

Londons The Sea-Wolf (1904), in which an ineffectual poet, shipwrecked and rescued by the cruel
captain of a sealing vessel, undergoes a dramatic
metamorphosis, surviving the nightmarish torments of the ship to discover a courage and
strength that conform with the expectations of
a masculinity most prominently defined by Theodore Roosevelts notion of the strenuous life.
London also presents, in such works as The People
of the Abyss (1903) and The Iron Heel (1908), a
more direct, polemical critique of economic and
social inequality, and this trend in naturalist
fiction is well represented in the early twentieth
century by the so-called muckrakers, including
David Graham Phillips, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln
Steffens, and Upton Sinclair. Sinclairs fictional
depiction of immigrant workers in Chicago meatpacking plants, The Jungle (1906), exposed both
exploitive labor conditions and the shocking
hygienic standards of the food industry, and is
credited with fomenting popular support for the
creation of the US Food and Drug Administration
shortly after its publication.
Despite the prevailing Progressive-era faith in
biological differences of race and gender, as well
as the overtly racialist and masculinist ideology
apparent in writers such as London and Norris,
naturalist fiction depicting the particular struggles of women and people of color not only
emerged in response to the larger trend, but also
helped to shape the form and content of naturalism. Charlotte Perkins Gilmans utopian novel
Herland (1915), for instance, applies a distinctly
Larmarckian view of acquired heritability to undermine the more rigid definitions of gender
associated with Darwinian evolution. Texts as
diverse as Pauline Hopkinss Contending Forces
(1900), Zitkala-Sas The Soft-Hearted Sioux
(1901), Paul Laurence Dunbars The Sport of the
Gods (1902), and Sui Sin Fars Mrs. Spring
Fragrance (1912) illustrate naturalist fictions
flexibility, as well as its power to explore intersecting ideas about biological and cultural difference. In his first novel, The Quest of the Silver
Fleece (1911), W. E. B. Du Bois not only appropriates the form of the agrarian reform novel, as
defined by Norriss The Octopus (1901) and Zolas
earlier Germinal (1885), but also employs this
form to elucidate his economic analysis of the
Jim Crow South. The novel traces the fates of Bles,
735
an educated, aspiring member of Du Boiss

talented tenth and Zora, an outcast child of
the swamp, as they struggle between self-interest
and a higher duty to improve conditions in the
cotton belt of the Deep South. While The Octopus
concludes with Presley, the exiled poet, reaching a
bittersweet epiphany reflecting the evolutionary
positivism of Norriss Berkeley professor, Joseph
LeConte, The Quest of the Silver Fleece unites Zora
and Bles in a partnership that reinforces the
racial unification called for in Du Boiss landmark
The Souls of Black Folk.
If the naturalist movement of the early twentieth century demonstrated the ability to synthesize
and critique diverse philosophical and scientific
ideas, as well as the potential for direct intervention in contemporary social problems, subsequent trends in naturalism both reinforce these
characteristics and establish naturalism as a persistent and powerful strain across American fiction, perhaps better understood as a shifting set
of formal and thematic patterns than as a discrete
literary genre, in traditional critical terms. Although critics would generally interpret the modernist experimentation of the 1920s in the context
of metaphysical and aesthetic terms quite alien to
the materialist emphasis of naturalism, the naturalists concern with the power of physical and
environmental forces upon individual consciousness certainly informs the work of such canonical
modernists as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway,
and William Faulkner.
Among subsequent literary movements, the
rise of social protest and proletarian fiction in
the 1930s remains the best-known adaptation of
naturalistic form and technique in the twentieth
century. Novels by John Dos Passos, James
T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, and Michael Gold
reinvigorate the formal innovations of the
earlier generation of naturalists within the leftist
political atmosphere which arose out of the Great
Depression. Dos Passoss U.S.A. trilogy (19306)
and Farrells Studs Lonigan trilogy (19325)
match Zolas Rougon-Macquart series in scale
and ambition, and Steinbecks most naturalistic
novels, including In Dubious Battle (1936) and
The Grapes of Wrath (1939), combine the
muckrakers spirit of outrage and dissent with
a modernists suspicion of totalizing philosophies. Golds Jews Without Money (1930) revisits
the Lower East Side of Manhattan, sketched in
736
NATURALIST FICTION
vivid, if impressionistic, fashion in Cranes

Maggie, through a fictionalized memoir of an
immigrant childhood. Drawing upon its readers
familiarity with the urban milieu of slum fiction,
Golds novel explicitly links the injustices and
indignities of tenement life with the oppressive
and exploitive excesses of capitalism. Unlike
such racialized caricatures as Norriss Zerkow in
McTeague, here the familiar anti-Semitic motif of
the grotesque, rapacious Jew, ill-equipped for the
challenges of modernity, is rewritten as a fuller
portrait of distinct individuals, shaped not by
genetic destiny but by the stifling prison of the
urban ghetto.
As Golds emphasis on environmental forces
exemplifies, the twentieth century witnessed the
so-called eclipse of Darwinism in its most sweeping and deterministic forms, as well as a concurrent emphasis on cultural, rather than biological,
forces. Likewise, while early naturalist texts were
infused with biological determinism, naturalism
as a form not only accommodated shifting ideas
about the fixity of human nature, but also in
fact facilitated and encouraged such changes,
a pattern seen clearly in the work of African
Americans and others with a vested interest in
questioning, if not demolishing, widespread
attitudes about racial and ethnic difference.
Within the African American tradition, novels
such as Nella Larsens Quicksand (1928), Richard
Wrights Native Son (1940), Ann Petrys The
Street (1946), and Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man
(1952) deploy familiar naturalistic motifs to
explore issues of free will and determinism. The
naturalists desire to confront the harshest of
circumstances resonates powerfully with what
Ellison defines, in his homage to Richard Wright,
as a crucial element of the blues: an impulse
to keep the painful details and episodes of a
brutal experience alive in ones aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain (78). While these
works chart an increasing belief in the power of
social construction, this attitude is problematized by the persistence of violence, sensationalism, and gendered differences within these texts.
In their ambiguous confrontation with essentialism, their incorporation of vernacular forms, and
their refusal to find easy or comforting resolutions, such texts help to redefine the scope and
urgency of literary naturalism in the later twentieth century.
Gloria Naylors The Women of Brewster Place

(1982) offers a paradigmatic example of both
the contours of contemporary naturalism and the
ways in which African American writers have
reshaped the tradition. In this novel in seven
stories, Naylor explicitly links the interwoven
fates of several female residents of a dead-end
street with the economic and sociological forces
that dramatically changed the post-World War II
urban landscape and the African American community in the United States. Like an ebony
phoenix (5), each womans narrative reflects the
crushing challenges facing African Americans in
general and black women in particular, as well as
the power and resilience needed to achieve
even modest victories over circumstance. After
Lorraine, an openly lesbian resident shunned by
her neighbors, is brutally raped by teenage thugs
and left for dead, she rises from her stupor and, in
her confusion, smashes the skull of an alcoholic
old man. Naylor makes clear that the patriarchal
violence that directly and indirectly curtails the
lives of the women of Brewster Place lurks like a
virus, waiting to destroy the community from the
inside out. Unflinching in its portrayal of sexual
violence, homophobia, alcohol and drug addiction, and the humiliating consequences of
poverty, Naylors novel highlights the continued
relevance of the naturalist mode as a vehicle for
social critique.
At the conclusion of a century in which
culture, in all its manifestations, had assumed
an ever larger role in explaining human behavior, naturalist fiction has facilitated a return to
the question of human nature, albeit a return
tempered by a postmodern skepticism about
objective truth and constructed within an intellectual climate informed by new ideas in chaos
and systems theory, genetics, and evolutionary
science. The prolific Joyce Carol Oates, for
instance, in a series of dense and ambitious
novels that includes them (1969), Bellefleur
(1980), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), and The
Falls (2004), among many others, weaves together social and family history, often explicitly
situating her fictional narratives alongside factual accounts of topical issues, from the 1967
Detroit riots to the Love Canal environmental
disaster of the late 1970s. While not precisely
updated versions of the little soldier of fortune
Carrie Meeber in Dreisers Sister Carrie, Oatess
NATURALIST FICTION
protagonists often prove ill-equipped, by temperament and background, to contend with the
formidable forces aligned against them. Likewise, Denis Johnson, in such works as Angels
(1983) and Jesus Son (1992), both redefines and
reinvigorates the naturalist tradition. Johnsons
fiction offers a bleak, drug-fueled portrait of
post-industrial America, fusing a stark, poetic
minimalism with flashes of the surreal and
fantastic in documenting the mixture of pervasive despair and desperate idealism that has
always informed literary naturalism. Near the
conclusion of Angels, Bill Houston enters the gas
chamber to be executed for his role in a botched
robbery, and A truth filled up the chamber:
there was nothing left for him now. The door
had shut on his life. It said DEATH IS THE
MOTHER OF BEAUTY (206). As he draws his
last breath, Houston achieves a partial epiphany
consistent with the tensions always central to
naturalist fiction: something between acceptance and transcendence, a realization of both
the limited autonomy of the individual and the
ongoing struggle against this fact.
Modernist Fiction (AF); Noir Fiction (AF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF)

Campbell, D. M. (1997). Resisting Regionalism: Gender
and Naturalism in American Fiction, 18851915.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
Civello, P. (1994). American Literary Naturalism and Its
Twentieth-Century Transformations: Frank Norris,
Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo. Athens: University
of Georgia Press.
Cowley, M. (1947). Not Men: A Natural History
of American Naturalism. Kenyon Review, 9(3),
41435.
Crane, S. (1893). Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. New York:
Appleton.
Den Tandt, C. (1998). The Urban Sublime in American
Literary Naturalism. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Dos Passos, J. (1938). U.S.A. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Dreiser, T. (1900). Sister Carrie. New York:
Doubleday.
737
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1911). The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

Chicago: McClurg.
Dunbar, P. L. (1902). The Sport of the Gods. New York:
Dodd, Mead.
Ellison, R. (1964). Richard Wrights Blues. In Shadow
and Act. New York: Random House, pp. 7794.
Farrell, J. T. (1935). Studs Lonigan. New York:
Vanguard.
Fleissner, J. L. (2004). Women, Compulsion, Modernity:
The Moment of American Naturalism. Chicago:
Giles, J. R. (1995). The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in
America: Encounters With the Fat Man. Columbia:
Gold, M. (1930). Jews Without Money. New York:
Liveright.
Hopkins, P. (1900). Contending Forces. Boston: Colored
Cooperative.
Howard, J. (1985). Form and History in American
Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Johnson, D. (1983). Angels. New York: Knopf.
William K. (1983). Ironweed. New York: Viking.
Link, E. C. (2004). The Vast and Terrible Drama:
American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth
Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
London, J. (1903). The Call of the Wild. New York:
Macmillan.
Mailer, N. (1948). The Naked and the Dead. New York:
Rinehart.
Michaels, W. B. (1987). The Gold Standard and the Logic
of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the
Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mitchell, L. C. (1989). Determined Fictions: American
Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Naylor, G. (1982). The Women of Brewster Place. New
York: Viking.
Norris, F. (1899). McTeague. New York: Doubleday.
Oates, J. C. (1969). them. New York: Vanguard.
Papke, M. E. (ed.) (2003). Twisted From the Ordinary:
Essays on American Literary Naturalism. Knoxville:
Petry, A. (1946). The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Pizer, D. (1993). Twentieth-Century American Literary
Naturalism: An Interpretation. Carbondale: Southern
Viking.
Walcutt, C. C. (1956). American Literary Naturalism:
A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Wharton, E. (1905). The House of Mirth. New York:
Macmillan.
Wright, R. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper.
738
NAYLOR, GLORIA
Naylor, Gloria
MARGARET EARLEY WHITT
When Alice Walker published The Color Purple

(1982), the literary spotlight focused on a writer
and novel that won the Pulitzer Prize. That same
year Gloria Naylor emerged more quietly with
The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and captured
the American Book Award for the Best First
Novel. With the addition of her next three novels,
Naylor found herself a part of a long African
American literary tradition. Her discovery of that
tradition came when she read Toni Morrisons
The Bluest Eye. To date, she has published five
novels and one memoir, edited a collection of
short stories, and written a variety of pieces for
popular magazines, newspapers, and scholarly
journals. One of her novels has been produced
as a television drama, and another novel was
staged as a play.
Naylor was born in New York City on January
25, 1950, the oldest of three daughters of former
Mississippi sharecroppers, Roosevelt and Alberta
McAlpin Naylor, who chose to leave the pre-Civil
Rights South for greater educational opportunities for their children. Naylor graduated from
high school the spring that Martin Luther King, Jr.
was assassinated in 1968, and found her response
to this event influenced by her mothers conversion to the Jehovahs Witnesses. From 1968 to
1975, she served as a missionary in New York,
North Carolina, and Florida, and returned to
New York to pursue a nursing career, but found
herself drawn toward the literary life. She earned
her BA in English from Brooklyn College (1981)
and her MA in Afro-American studies from Yale
in 1983.
Naylors first four novels form the foundation
of her career: Women of Brewster Place is a collection of seven stories held together by a neighborhood, a last-chance gathering place for women
down on their luck. Among these characters,
though, is one woman who has chosen this housing project, not out of necessity, but because she
wants to practice her organizing skills. She hails
from wealthy Linden Hills, the neighborhood of
Naylors second novel of that title. The impression of Linden Hills presented in Brewster Place is
contradicted in this novel as Naylor retells the
story of Dantes Inferno. Although Linden Hills is
home to the affluent, those who have financially
excelled in America, it is not the desirable place of

her first novel, but rather a modern hell.
A character accorded only minor mention in
Linden Hills (1985) becomes the subject of
Naylors third novel, Mama Day (1988). From
the passing reference to her in the second novel,
Mama Day would not seem to be a figure of
intriguing possibility. However, Miranda (Mama) Day reigns supreme on Willow Springs, an
Edenic island not located on any map. Reminiscent of Shakespeares Prospero and his daughter
Miranda, those magical powers Mama Day possesses are not like any in a world of recognizable
reality. Her niece, Ophelia (Cocoa), marries a
New York orphan named George, who arrives in
Willow Springs and gives his life for Ophelia.
George has been damaged by the discovery of his
mothers body that was found off a pier in Harlem
near a dilapidated restaurant called Baileys Cafe
and the knowledge that she may have been a
prostitute. This cafe becomes the setting for
Naylors fourth novel, Baileys Cafe (1992), also
performed as a play, which is told in the language
and history of jazz and various biblical stories,
where, once again, Naylor develops a series of
stories about seven people whose lives coalesce
at the Cafe, a place that evokes magic realism,
existing nearly anywhere and for anyone who
needs it. Here the reader also discovers what
George did not that his mother was definitely
not a whore.
For her fifth novel, Naylor returns to Brewster
Place with The Men of Brewster Place (1998) and
delves deeply into the characters of the men in
each womans life. Naylor transforms these husbands, fathers, and sons into characters that reshape the readers understanding of figures who
had been in the shadows of the first novel. When
Naylor writes of women, she depicts a community
of caring and mutual support that lives and
flourishes in the spoken word; however, when
the subject is men, she emphasizes their isolation
from one another, living in silence as a means of
survival. A particularly violent incident in the
barber shop where the men gather evokes the
graphic nature of William Faulkners Light in
August. As The Women of Brewster Place begins
at dawn and ends at dusk, The Men of Brewster
Place opens at dusk and ends at dawn, a choice
that suggests an optimistic possibility for the
future.
NOIR FICTION
In 1996, advertised as a fictional memoir,

Naylor tells her story about government surveillance and mind control during the year 1996. The
story begins with a series of strange incidents
that happen on an island off the coast of South
Carolina and continues once she returns to
Brooklyn, and throughout she describes her
subject in the third person as Gloria Naylor.
As editor of Children of the Night (1997), Naylors
task was to update Langston Hughess 1969 classic
collection, The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers:
An Anthology From 1899 to the Present.
Naylor has been a visiting professor at a wide
range of universities internationally and is the
recipient of numerous prestigious grants, fellowships, and awards.
Faulkner, William (AF); Hughes, Langston (AF);
Morrison, Toni (AF); Walker, Alice (AF)

Fowler, V. C. (1996). Gloria Naylor: In Search of
Sanctuary. New York: Twayne.
Levy, H. F. (1992). Lead on With Light: Gloria
Naylor. In Fiction of the Home Place. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, pp. 196222.
Montgomery, M. L. (ed.) (2004). Conversations with
Gloria Naylor. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Naylor, G. (1982). The Women of Brewster Place.
New York: Viking.
Naylor, G. (1985). Linden Hills. New York: Ticknor
and Fields.
Naylor, G. (1988). Mama Day. New York: Ticknor
and Fields.
Naylor, G. (1992). Baileys Cafe. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Naylor, G. (ed.) (1997). Children of the Night: The Best
Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present.
Naylor, G. (1998). The Men of Brewster Place. New York:
Hyperion.
Naylor, G. (2005). 1996. Chicago: Third World Press.
Stave, S. (2001). Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique,
Magic and Myth. Newark: University of Delaware
Press.
Whitt, M. E. (1999). Understanding Gloria Naylor.
Wilson, C. E. (2001). Gloria Naylor: A Critical
739
Noir Fiction
JONATHAN P. EBURNE
Noir fiction is a hybrid genre. The coinage of the

term film noir to describe US crime films popular
in France after the end of World War II gave
generic coherence to an otherwise disparate body
of American film and fiction. Noir fiction, like
noir film, emerged as a label useful for describing
works that exploit the conventions of mystery
fiction, especially with regard to the genres presumptions about social order: that crime can be
punished, that justice can be restored, or that
there is even such a thing as a social order.
Noir fiction, often considered a subset of the
hard-boiled detective writing popularized in pulp
fiction magazines during the Prohibition era, has
in fact a genealogy of its own. Though tied inextricably to writers who began their careers working
for the pulps such as Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, and David
Goodis noir fiction also describes writing beyond
detective fiction. From the 1950s through the
twenty-first century, the term noir has been
used to describe modes of so-called genre fiction
that either borrow from the formal innovations of
hard-boiled writing (such as action-heavy prose,
the deployment of street slang and police jargon,
and episodic plotting) or share the pessimistic
worldview attributed to film noir and noir fiction
alike. Thus the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, as
well as the westerns of Cormac McCarthy, the
graphic novels of Alan Moore and Frank
Miller, and the experimental prose of William
S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, might also be
described as noir.
The blackness denoted by the French word
noir bears several meanings. First, the roman noir
(black novel) is the French term for gothic
fiction, suggesting a genealogical link between
twentieth-century crime fiction and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction by authors
such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and
Matthew Lewis. But noir also bears the French
connotations of darkness used to describe periods
of historical trauma or portent. Such associations
seemed apt for characterizing US detective fiction
and film of the interwar and postwar years, which
register the political conflicts of the period: from
conditions of economic crisis and racial unrest to
changing popular ideas about national security,
740
NOIR FICTION
international involvement, and domestic values.

It was this latter sense of noir that informed the
Serie Noire, the influential detective fiction series
at the Gallimard publishing house in Paris that
popularized American (and British) hard-boiled
crime writing in France. According to Marcel
Duhamel, who founded the Serie Noire in 1946,
noir writing offers a reflection of society that
reflects its excesses; it only gives a certain image,
but its an image of society all the same (Geslen &
Rieben 125). In its French incarnation, noir fiction was notable for its ability to represent the
phenomenon of lawlessness with a structural and
stylistic cohesiveness unavailable to other literary
modes, such as social realism or naturalism.
In the United States, the postwar equivalent to
the French Serie Noire could be found among the
numerous popular fiction imprints such as Avon,
Ace, Gold Medal, Lion, and Signet, which capitalized on the popularity of crime fiction writing.
Featuring writers such as Woolrich, Goodis, Ross
McDonald, Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson,
Charles Williams, and Mickey Spillane, these
inexpensive paperbacks served the function
that pulp magazines and dime novels had served
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries: they featured original stories made
recognizable by their rapid and often serial commercial production. Though marketed as commodities whose lurid covers seemed virtually
interchangeable, the novels could be distinguished by their deviations from or playful
manipulations of the sensationalistic formulae
of the emerging commercial form. Both Hughess
In a Lonely Place (1947) and Thompsons The
Killer Inside Me (1952) are narrated from the
point of view of a murderer, a notion made
famous by Agatha Christie in The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd (1926) and rendered commonplace by Edmund Wilson in his 1944 essay Who
Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Hughess
novel, however, follows the thought process of
a serial killer as he stalks his prey; Thompsons
novel enshrines the killer as its first-person
narrator.
As in the French context of the Serie Noire, this
postwar writing might be characterized by its use
of literary formalism to evoke the social dissolution at work in historical reality. In the words of
the novelist Barry Gifford, whose Black Lizard
Press (19805) returned key postwar-era novels
to circulation and did much to consolidate noir

fiction as a viable generic form, such books were
psychologically provocative, uniquely on-theedge and more often than not over the edge
(Gifford 137). Noir fiction is noteworthy, in other
words, for its ability at once to register cultural
anxiety (to be on edge) as well as to deviate
from accepted notions of formal or thematic
judgment (to be over the edge). Recent critics
of film noir have characterized this figuration of
anxiety and paranoia largely in psychoanalytic
terms (Oliver & Trigno 2002; Copjec 1993);
scholars of detective fiction have tended instead
to stress the genres attention to changing social,
commercial, and political relations (see McCann
2000; Cassuto 2009; Smith 2000). For all its
sensationalism and heavy-handed stylistics, postwar noir writing was driven by deep sociological
concerns; yet the genre rarely distinguished itself
as overtly progressive or avant garde in its politics.
In fact, the stylized social milieux of the novels
often seem to emphasize deeply conservative
fears: the threat of sexual, political, and racial
disorder, as well as the infectious nature of criminal violence.
Writers such as Mickey Spillane and Patricia
Highsmith exemplify this tendency. Spillanes I,
The Jury (1947) is a study in vigilante justice, with
Spillanes detective, Mike Hammer, avenging
himself whether in gesture or in action on
women, homosexuals, and criminals; the novel
concludes with Hammer finding his own lover
guilty of murder and, in spite of her efforts to
seduce him, executing her. In Highsmiths Strangers on a Train (1950), the novels protagonist is
drawn into a murder plot by a man he meets
aboard a train. Reflecting on his motives for the
crime he has committed, he remarks that good
and evil live side by side in the human heart, and
not merely in differing proportions in one man
and the next. Crime, in Highsmiths fiction, is
not restricted to criminals; it is a capacity within
even the most innocent of people. For Spillane,
this capacity toward evil demanded a nearly paranoid vigilance in order to stave off the seductions
of the wicked and the obscene.
Other Cold War-era noir writers were more
measured in their explorations of the moral
landscape of the postwar United States. Ross
MacDonald, for instance, mourns rather than
exploits the effects of warfare on postwar
NOIR FICTION
Americans; in The Moving Target (1949),

MacDonalds detective Lew Archer realizes that
the people he trusts have been invisibly yet unmistakably corrupted. Yet he regards these former
friends with sympathy, to the point of trusting a
murderer to turn himself in. David Goodis similarly depicts corruption as an inevitable rather than
evil force; in novels such as Down There (1956; now
Shoot the Piano Player) and Black Friday (1954), his
protagonists struggle vainly to extricate themselves
from irrevocably violent pasts, only to find themselves mired in a tragic fate. For Chester Himes,
who began writing detective fiction in France in
1957, this violence characterizes the basic conditions of American racial consciousness; his darkly
comic crime novels, set in a baroque and largely
nocturnal Harlem, represent the moral landscape
of the US as a fundamental absurdity. Indeed, the
continued popularity of noir fiction into the
twenty-first century can be attributed to its capacity
for summoning the historical violence that lingers
within American social life not only on the terrain
of crime and punishment, but also within the
broader sphere of racial and ethnic relations, class
and labor conflicts, and sex and gender politics.
In spite of such pessimistic meditations on fate,
the postwar concentrations of noir fiction in the
US and France helped to unify a literary history
that was by no means singular. The notion that a
mode of crime fiction could be defined in terms of
its blackness proposes a direct lineage between
hard-boiled fiction of the 1920s and 1930s
signaled by the predominance of Black Mask
magazine and, say, the fiction of Cornell
Woolrich, which explicitly takes up the theme of
blackness in its titles: The Bride Wore Black (1940),
The Black Curtain (1941), Black Alibi (1942),
The Black Angel (1943), and The Black Path of
Fear (1944). Yet in establishing such lineages,
this concentration leaves it unclear as to whether
the various invocations of noir represent a set
of generic conventions, a set of commercial
expectations, a coherent conceptual noir universe, or simply an additive collection of tropes
and motifs. The question of whether noir fiction
obeys specific laws whether generic, logical,
psychological, or historical has occupied critics
zek 1992 and
since the inception of the form (see Zi
Copjec 1993; Naremore 1998 and Deleuze 2004).
The development of the hard-boiled school
of fiction writing in the mid-1920s was instru-
741
mental in constituting the body of work later

known as noir fiction. Hard-boiled writing was
largely the product of periodicals like Black Mask,
founded in 1920 as a moneymaker for the highbrow Smart Set. In the early 1920s, the magazine
began publishing stories by Dashiell Hammett,
Carroll John Daly, and Erle Stanley Gardner,
who wrote detective stories characterized by
sequential action and violence, rather than by
the deductive conventions of classic detective
fiction. When Joseph T. Shaw took over as the
magazines editor in 1926, he galvanized its identification with this realist style of pulp fiction,
introducing writers such as Horace McCoy and
Raymond Chandler to the literary marketplace;
he also encouraged writers like Hammett to
use Black Mask as the platform for developing
longer, novel-length stories. Hammett was the
magazines first break-out author, bursting onto
the national literary scene with the publication of
Red Harvest by Knopf in 1929.
In spite of Shaws claims of realism, hardboiled detective writing was convincing less for
its verisimilitude than for its sensitivity to affect.
As Chandler famously described this writing in
1950, Most of the plots were rather ordinary and
most of the characters rather primitive types of
people. What distinguishes the genre is instead
the smell of fear which these stories managed to
generate. Their characters lived in a world gone
wrong, a world in which, long before the atom
bomb, civilization had created the machinery for
its own destruction, and was learning to use it
with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying
out his first machine gun (Chandler 1016).
Chandlers assessment of hard-boiled fiction suggests that the writings appeal lay as much in its
deployment of metaphor as in its sociological
insights: Chandler highlights this fictions attention not only to the moronic delight of a
gangster, but also to the synaesthetic experience
of the smell of fear.
In breaking away from classic detective fiction,
hard-boiled writing self-consciously adapted the
experiments in vernacular writing undertaken by
literary modernists such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Ring
Lardner, Jr. In directing this vernacular focus
toward crime and detection, however, hard-boiled
writers became known for their own mode of
literary expression that was, Chandler admitted,
742
NOIR FICTION
easy to abuse. In spite of this tendency toward

pastiche, the relations between hard-boiled fiction and the modernist literary milieu were no
less reciprocal. Beginning in the 1920s, the
popularity of pulp fiction magazines like Black
Mask and Detective Story, as well as the changes
taking place in the fiction of mainstream writers
such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, W. R. Burnett,
and William Faulkner, demonstrated the genres
growing interest. Critics likened Faulkners
Sanctuary (1931) to potboilers of the hardboiled school, a comparison that may have been
disparaging but was no less accurate, given that
Faulkner had befriended Hammett that same
year; Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay for The
Maltese Falcon (1941), which was adapted from
Hammetts 1930 novel and is considered to be
the first significant film noir.
The extent to which noir fiction emerged in
literary milieux beyond the pulps remains to
be fully explored; in dialogue with hard-boiled
writing were leftist writers of the 1930s such as
Nathanael West, Kenneth Fearing, Richard
Wright, and Chester Himes. Indeed, one of the
appeals of the hard-boiled school was its affective
distance from the naturalism of older leftist writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair.
Noir fiction may have been predominantly conservative in its Cold War incarnations, but it was
no less available to the Left.
The origins of noir fiction are not restricted
to the 1920s; magazines like Black Mask were
themselves descended from the dime novels and
popular periodicals of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, from Police Gazette to
the serial fictions of the Street and Smith publishing house. The rise in popularity of sensationalist
fiction dates from the antebellum era, inspired
by the English translation of Eugene Sues The
Mysteries of Paris in 1843. Itself sparked by the
international appeal of James Fenimore Coopers
adventure novels, the enormous popularity of Sues
work quickly elicited imitations most notably
G. M. Reynoldss The Mysteries of London (1844)
and George Lippards The Quaker City (1844). The
detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe, often cited as
the first true incarnations of the genre, likewise date
from this period.
Whereas in France Sues writing ushered in the
heroic age of literary naturalism, the city-
mystery genres place in American literary history is more diffuse, conditioned by its marketability (see Denning 1987). The genre became a
popular and profitable format in the United
States: over 50 such novels appeared between 1844
and 1850, concentrating on larger cities like
New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, but covering smaller, working-class towns as well. These
serial novels were episodic in construction, weaving innumerable characters into plots as intricate
as the cities themselves. Recalling the British
gothic fiction of Walpole and Radcliffe, the
city-mysteries genre multiplied the ghostly
mansions of its precursors, imagining cities replete with haunts. At stake in such representations
of the city was the ability to give physical form to
urban anxieties: the dangers of seduction, gambling, and prostitution the novels catalogued, or
the antebellum rise in racial and political unrest
they channeled affectively.
By the late nineteenth century, the classic
amateur detective had arrived to render legible
this sprawling metropolis. Noir fiction, by contrast, returns mystery writing to its nineteenthcentury unease, loosening the detectives conceptual dominion over public space and subjecting
protagonists and readers alike to its dangers. The
work of Cornell Woolrich most self-consciously
pursues its ties to the vernacular gothic; set in
nineteenth-century New Orleans, Waltz Into
Darkness (1947) takes up the themes of seduction
and corruption around which city mystery plots
turned. Other hard-boiled writing, too, gestures
toward nineteenth-century sensation fiction:
Hammetts Red Harvest, for instance, is modeled
on Allan Pinkertons strike-breaking stories from
the 1870s. Walter Mosleys Devil in a Blue Dress,
though set in post-World War II Los Angeles,
describes a descent into the political underworld
and a secret miscegenation plot reminiscent of
earlier novels by William Wells Brown, Mark
Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Nella Larsen. Such
intersections suggest that the category of noir
fiction be broadened to include writing beyond
the genealogy of detective fiction. The fiction of
Flannery OConnor, Erskine Caldwell, Carson
McCullers, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner,
and Katherine Anne Porter, for instance, features
unsentimental depictions of social crisis that
resonate as much with the vernacular gothic of
NORRIS, FRANK
the nineteenth century as with the hard-boiled

writing of the twentieth century.
In Southern gothic writing and neo-noir crime
writing alike, the question of noir fictions
relationship to blackness continues to charge
this hybrid genre. Beginning with his first Easy
Rawlins mystery, Mosleys fiction inhabits postwar-era Los Angeles as a site for exploring race
relations in the US. The work of James Ellroy
likewise examines racial tension and racism in its
depiction of 1950s law enforcement, albeit with a
more cynical eye. In addition to the fiction of
numerous other writers working within the detective genre Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, Sarah
Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell
noir fiction continues to offer a conceptual and
stylistic platform for exploring discontinuities
within US cultural life.
Detective/Crime Fiction (WF); Modern
Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Modernist
Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF)
743
Lippard, G. (1995). The Quaker City: or, The Monks

of Monk-Hall. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press.
McCann, S. (2000). Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled
Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal
Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
McDonald, R. (1998). The Moving Target. New York:
Vintage.
Mosley, W. (1990). Devil in a Blue Dress. New York:
Norton.
Naremore, J. (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir in
Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Oliver, K., & Trigo, B. (2002). Noir Anxiety.
Smith, E. A. (2000). Hard-Boiled: Working-Class
Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Spillane, M. (2001). The Mike Hammer Collection, vol. 1
New York: North American Library.
Thompson, J. (1991). The Killer Inside Me. New York:
Vintage.
Wilson, E. (2007). Literary Essays and Reviews of the
1930s and 40s. New York: Library of America.
Woolrich, C. (1998). The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus.
New York: Penguin.
zek, S. (1992). Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in
Zi
Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.

Cassuto, L. (2009). Hard-Boiled Sentimentality.
Chandler, R. (1995). Later Novels and Other Writings.
New York: Library of America.
Copjec, J. (ed.) (1993). Shades of Noir: A Reader.
London: Verso.
Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert Island and Other Texts,
19531974 (trans. M. Taormina). Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Denning, M. (1987). Mechanic Accents: Dime
Novels and Working-Class America. London:
Verso.
Faulkner, W. (1993). Sanctuary. New York: Vintage.
Geslin, L., & Rieben, G. (1972). Interview du Mois:
Marcel Duhamel. Mystere-Magazine, pp. 1257
(July).
Gifford, B. (2003). The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile
Room: A Barry Gifford Reader. New York: Seven
Stories.
Goodis, D. (1990). Shoot the Piano Player. New York:
Vintage.
Hammett, D. (1989). Red Harvest. New York: Vintage.
Highsmith, P. (2001). Strangers on a Train. New York:
Norton.
Hughes, D. (2003). In a Lonely Place. New York:
Feminist Press.
Norris, Frank
CAREY MICKALITES
Alongside Stephen Crane, Jack London, and

Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris is one of the most
important figures in American literary naturalism. Rather neglected today, Norris published six
major novels (an important early novel, Vandover
and the Brute, was published posthumously in
1914), and regularly contributed short stories and
impressionistic journalism to such publications
as The Wave, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The
Occident. A collection of his critical writing, The
Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary
Essays, was published by Doubleday in 1903,
shortly after his tragic early death in 1902.
Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. was born in 1870
in Chicago, and at the age of 15 his family moved
to San Francisco. He studied art briefly at the
California School of Design and then at the
Academie Julian in Paris before attending
the University of California, Berkeley and studying for an additional year at Harvard. As a
744
NORRIS, FRANK
correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, he

witnessed the Jameson Raid in Johannesburg,
South Africa. His writing career began in earnest
while at Berkeley and Harvard, where he wrote
naturalist sketches and the kernels of what became
McTeague (1899) and Vandover and the Brute.

Like the work of Emile
Zola, Norriss fiction is
consistently marked by a bold naturalist treatment of human sexuality and attention to the
socio-economically downtrodden. In his critical
and fictional writing, Norris defined naturalism
as a dialectical synthesis of romanticism and
realism, balancing the sublime grandiosities of
romanticism with the sharp attention to regional
and quotidian detail distinctive of nineteenthcentury realism. Vandover and the Brute and
McTeague, both set in San Francisco, exemplify
Norriss striking attention to local detail, and their
characters and narratives are motivated by instinctive, animalistic, and often violent forces.
Vandover, harking back to Stevensons Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, shows its protagonists social devolution under his uncontrollable, animal-like
instinctive self, suggesting the strong Darwinian
influence in Norriss naturalism. McTeague explores a similar animal nature lurking in its
brutish miners son-turned-dentist, but like
Dreisers Sister Carrie (1900), McTeagues determinism is tempered by the force of chance an
unforeseen lottery winning sets the course of the
narrative events to follow, both comic and tragic.
Moreover, the novel establishes an important
socio-economic duality between hoarding and
wasteful expenditure, a contrast which serves
both as an expression of turn-of-the-twentiethcentury American economic life and as the vehicle
through which Norris develops a sadomasochistic
view of malefemale relationships, a theme that
recurs in much of his fiction.
Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), Blix (1899), and
A Mans Woman (1900) are each conventional
romances, yet they display Norriss influential
emphasis on life over high literary culture, a
cultural positioning he advocates in much of his
critical writing. Kiplings influence is evident in
Morans deployment of hybrid dialects and its
fast-paced sea adventures Norris transforms a
dandyish San Francisco society man into a hypermasculine shark hunter and pirate chaser. Yet,
despite its potboiler status, Moran demonstrates
Norriss developing capacity for narratives that
tightly interweave heredity and nature, and environmental forces and radical contingency, as well
as his influential rejection of posh society in favor
of attention to lives fearlessly lived on the fringes
of a merciless natural order. Blix, a sentimental
romance and the most morally conventional of
Norriss major work, pits feminine agency against
the male vice of gambling; in so doing, the novel
both reflects on progressive gender relations in
American culture and establishes gambling as a
powerful trope for the expansion of financial
speculation in the late-nineteenth-century US.
A Mans Woman extends Norriss fictional representation of womens agency within American
institutional life, even if the novel remains limited
by his masculine naturalist vision.
The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903), together with McTeague considered Norriss most
important works, are the first two of the planned
trilogy The Epic of the Wheat. The final novel, The
Wolf, was never completed. The trilogy was to
have traced the production of wheat in an increasingly global market, focusing on growing
in northern California, distribution and price
setting in Chicago, and consumption in Europe.
Interpersonal, instinctual, and regional forces
complicate and lend a dramatic microeconomic
dimension to these works macroeconomic scope.
The Octopus pits growers against railroad magnates in a fictional treatment of the history of
US railroad corporations, showing the inhumane
dictates of supply and demand and exposing a
monopoly capitalism driven by irrational greed.
The Pit, a bulls-and-bears drama, incisively
portrays an attempt to corner the wheat
market in Chicago, and poses an ethical critique
of capitalist disregard for laborers and consumers
alike.
Dreiser, Theodore (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF);

Ahnebrink, L. (1947). The Influence of Emile Zola on

Frank Norris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Borus, D. H. (1989). Writing Realism: Howells, James,
and Norris in the Mass Market. Chapel Hill:
THE NOVEL AND WAR
Brown, B. (2003). The Nature of Things. In A Sense

of Things: The Object Matter of American
Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
pp. 5180.
Campbell, D. M. (1997). Resisting Regionalism: Gender
and Naturalism in American Fiction, 18851915.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
Horwitz, H. (1982). To Find the Value of X:
The Pit as a Renunciation of Romance. In
E. Sundquist (ed.), American Realism: New Essays.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
pp. 21537.
Hussman, L. E. (1999). Harbingers of a Century:
The Novels of Frank Norris. New York: Peter Lang.
Link, E. C. (2004). The Vast and Terrible Drama:
American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth
Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
McElrath, J. R., Jr., & Crisler, J. (2006). Frank Norris:
A Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mitchell, L. C. (1989). Determined Fictions: American
Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Norris, F. (1928). The Complete Edition of Frank Norris,
10 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Pizer, D. (ed.) (1964). The Literary Criticism of Frank
Norris (ed. D. Pizer). Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Pizer, D. (ed.) (1995). The Cambridge Companion
to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to
London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zimmerman, D. (2006). Frank Norris and the
Mesmeric Sublime. In Panic! Markets, Crises,
and Crowds in American Fiction. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, pp. 12349.
The Novel and War

MARGOT NORRIS
The twentieth century saw two World Wars and

two other significant Asian conflicts with military
participation by the United States. Although none
of these wars took place on American soil, they
entrained millions of US soldiers in combat. Of
these conflicts, World War II, with its 78 million
casualties over a four-year period, was the most
traumatic. Although the necessity of military
conflict to halt German genocidal aggression
and brutal Japanese militarism remains relatively
uncontroversial, the extent and scope of human
and national destruction continue to stagger the
imagination. Literature, practiced to represent
745
individual trauma and tragedy, remains largely

unprepared to address killing and wounding in
such large numbers. Holocaust writers have
struggled with this difficulty for decades, a challenge that has become more and more acute as
recognition of the events scope and cruelty has
grown and solidified over time. But in spite of
the wars necessity, the excesses, corruptions, and
illogicality of militarism often led to cynical accounts that were conveyed through generic subversions and inventions by American novelists.
American novels of World War I, the Korean
War, and the Vietnam War will here bracket the
more extended discussion of American World
War II fiction, and will focus largely on novels
of combat written by author-veterans. Here,
especially, the dark, comic vision of many American war novels manifests an understanding that
words were inadequate to World War II unless
they were transformed into radically challenging
signs and gestures.
Because American military participation in
World War I spanned less than half of the conflicts duration, its literary depictions in both
poetry and fiction were generally overshadowed
by British and other European works. One of the
conflicts earliest American novels was John Dos
Passoss Three Soldiers (1921), whose bitter rendering of frustration with military regimentation
and exploitation made it a precursor to the dark
satirical World War II novels produced by American authors later in the century. H. L. Mencken
praised the realism of Three Soldiers for its refusal
to romanticize combat or to cloak it in patriotic
blather. Dos Passos, like Hemingway, served in
the ambulance corps, but the experience of a
veteran with extensive combat experience was
required to produce a work with the power of
Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western
Front: William Marchs Company K (1957
[1933]). March enlisted in 1917 and served with
distinction in the US Marines, suffering a gas
attack and head and shoulder wounds during
combat in France. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de
Guerre. Bouts of depression following the war
delayed his writing, but some of the 123 soldier
vignettes of Company K were first serialized in
New York Magazine Forum. The decision not to
privilege a single protagonist in favor of producing multiple perspectives gives Company K
746
THE NOVEL AND WAR
a unique collective focus. Like Three Soldiers,

Marchs work also refuses to exalt the varied and
often brutal experiences of soldiers on the ground
with patriotic justifications.
Arguably, the American World War I novel
most firmly embedded in the literary canon is
Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms (1929).
Hemingway too was wounded while working in
northern Italy with the ambulance service, albeit
after seeing little combat. His infatuation with a
nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky inspired the
plot of A Farewell to Arms, published the same
year as Remarques novel. The romance of Lieutenant Frederic Henry and his British nurse,
Catherine Barkley, avoids sentimentalizing the
war experience chiefly by virtue of Hemingways
simple, concrete, understated style of narration:
At the start of the winter came the permanent
rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it
was checked and in the end only seven thousand
died of it in the army (4). But the protagonists
narration offers a more slyly designed critique of
the brutality of war in its curious disavowal of
murder, as Henry refuses to acknowledge as an
atrocity his unwarranted shooting of a deserting
Italian sergeant in the back. I opened up my
holster, took the pistol, aimed at the one who had
talked the most, and fired. I missed and they both
started to run. I shot three times and dropped
one (204). In his anguished meditation on death
at the end of the novel, Henry hypocritically
complains of wars gratuitous killing of others
without acknowledging his own. That was what
you did. You died. You did not know what it was
about. . . They threw you in and told you the rules
and the first time they caught you off base they
killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like
Aymo (327). After witnessing Italian battle police
execute military personnel, Henry himself deserts
and reunites with Catherine, who dies in childbirth
at the end of the novel. In spite of these ironic
twists of plot and narration, A Farewell to Arms
unlike the work of Dos Passos and March is
difficult to construe as an anti-war novel. Hemingway reported on the Spanish Civil War for the
North American Newspaper Alliance, an experience that inspired his 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls
about American experience in the anti-fascist
International Brigades.
Three million American soldiers served in the
military in World War I; 15 million served in
World War II. But Studs Terkels epithet for the

Second World War as the good war notwithstanding, much of its fiction refuses to support
this sense. Film, in contrast, frequently glorified
combat, as Janis P. Stout explains: In the American popular imaginary, World War II has become
something like an action movie, a narrative of
violent excitement that entailed pain and destruction, yes, but also served as a proving ground for
masculinity and a demonstration of national
might (190). Indeed, Norman Mailer writes of
a soldier awaiting a Japanese attack in The Naked
and the Dead (1976[1948]): This was like a
movie, he thought (36). American Holocaust
novels such as William Styrons Sophies Choice
(1979) and, more controversially, Jerzi Kosinskys
The Painted Bird (1965) at least implicitly support
a good war reading of World War II, as does
Paul Wests account of the failed 1940 Hitler
assassination attempt in The Very Rich Hours of
Count von Stauffenberg (1980). But in spite of the
defeat of a genocidal regime and dictatorial aggression, few signature postwar American works
dwell on glorification. These include the James
Jones trilogy (From Here to Eternity [1951], The
Thin Red Line [1962], and Whistle [1978]), Herman Wouks The Caine Mutiny (1951), Norman
Mailers The Naked and the Dead (1948), and even
Irwin Shaws somewhat more celebratory The
Young Lions (1948). In the experimental novels
of Joseph Heller (Catch-22 [1961]), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five [1969]), and Thomas
Pynchon (Gravitys Rainbow [1973]), a satirical
edge sharpens a patent anti-war stance through
innovative play with genre and style.
Mailers The Naked and the Dead was written by
a 26-year-old veteran who had served in the
112th Cavalry Division of the US Army in the
Philippines from 1944 to 1946. Although Mailer
appears not to have seen much combat, the
experience of wartime army life allowed him to
realistically narrate the exploits of a platoon of
riflemen engaging with Japanese troops on a
Pacific island. Nobody could sleep, the novel
opens its first section, called Wave. All over the
ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going
to be dead (3). Mailers spare, realist style recalls
both Dos Passoss Three Soldiers as well as the
journalistic clarity of Hemingway. The novel uses
detail to produce verisimilitude, show characters
THE NOVEL AND WAR
uncomfortable with ethical choices, measure the

effect of class on character, and deploy vernacular
speech. When subjected to shelling a soldier
empties his bowels in his pants, and corpses are
covered with maggots. An officer reflects on the
class system in the military all the men he had
known in prep school were now ensigns or lieutenants. A class of men born to wealth, accustomed to obedience (76) and the men dispute
racism, anti-Semitism, labor unions, communism, and, of course, women. Mailers men speak
in a colorful and vulgar vernacular, even though
the novels publisher had him replace the classic
four-letter word with the substitute fug. The US
military action in the novel ends in a resounding
triumph with huge Japanese casualties. Yet the
victory is nonetheless hollow, having been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck
larded into a causal net of factors too large, too
vague, [for him] to comprehend (716).
Joseph Heller flew 60 B-25 missions as a
bombardier with the 12th Air Force in Italy
although he conceded that most of them were
milk runs. Catch-22 was published to mixed
reviews and sales, although it grew in popularity
with growing sentiment against the Vietnam War.
Its central conceit of the catch points to logical
contradictions built into military and other governmental systems that frustrate attempts to resolve impossible or intolerable situations. The
bombardier John Yossarian prays to survive his
required number of bombing missions only to
discover that the limit has increased each time he
reaches it. Hoping to escape his dilemma by
claiming insanity, he learns that his request to be
excused from flying bombing missions is judged
rational and therefore proof of sanity rather than
insanity. In his determination to survive rather
than sacrifice himself, Yossarian escapes classification as a cowardly anti-hero thanks to the
corruption of his superiors. Colonel Cathcart
risks the lives of his men in overly dangerous
missions to improve his chances of promotion,
and the mess officer Milo Minderbender has his
own squadron bombed as part of a lucrative deal
with the Germans. But soldiers die in Catch-22,
and the slowly revealed and horrific death of
Yossarians friend Snowden triggers his desire to
escape from his meaningless double-bind by deserting to Sweden. Heller eschews Mailers realism
in favor of experimental play resonant with the
747
conventions of the theater of the absurd: rough

comedy involving horrific situations; hopeless
characters caught in oppressive systems that, like
that of Sisyphus, force them to perform repetitive,
meaningless actions; and nonsensical dialogue
and conversations.
Kurt Vonneguts World War II experience was
far more traumatic than either Norman Mailers
or Joseph Hellers, and played a greater and more
direct role in the war novel that reflects it. Trained
as a mechanical engineer for his military service,
Vonnegut was serving as an infantry battalion
scout in the 106th Infantry Division when he was
captured by the Germans during the Battle of the
Bulge on December 14, 1944. Transported to the
city of Dresden as a prisoner of war, he worked in a
vitamin factory with other POWs during the day,
while housed in the underground meat locker of
a converted slaughterhouse that served as a
makeshift prison at night. That arrangement
saved his life when Dresden was firebombed by
Allied planes on the nights of February 13 and 14,
1945. The attack leveled one of the cultural jewels
of Europe, and Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners
were obliged to extract corpses from the rubble.
They were freed when the Russian army arrived in
Dresden and Vonnegut returned to the United
States in May 1945. Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969, a time when anti-Vietnam War
protests were escalating. In a self-reflexive maneuver, this background became part of the
novels title page, which announces Slaughterhouse-Five or The Childrens Crusade as having
been written by a fourth generation GermanAmerican who witnessed the firebombing of
Dresden and lived to tell the tale albeit in a
telegraphic schizophrenic manner. The metatextual gesture continues and intensifies in the
first chapter, where the author using details
from the Vonnegut biography describes both
the difficulties and the process of writing his
Dresden book. In this way, Slaughterhouse-Five
becomes not only a novel about the Dresden
firebombing but also a novel about the impossibility of writing about the experience and, by
extension, of transforming any earth-shattering
trauma into literature and narrative. Realism is
inadequate for describing this level of horror, and
so Vonnegut, like Heller, uses humor, absurdity,
surrealism, and word play to signal wars excesses
of pain, violence, and irrationality.
748
THE NOVEL AND WAR
The novels alternate title, The Childrens

Crusade, refers to the legend of a disastrous
1213 mission by European children to travel to
Jerusalem to convert Muslims there to Christianity. Instead, many of the children supposedly died
in shipwrecks or were sold into slavery, with only
a few returning home. The legend functions as
an allegory of the idealism of adolescent soldiers
going off to fight, only to end up dead or as
prisoners of war, like Vonneguts protagonist,
Billy Pilgrim. The second chapter of the book
introduces the notion that Pilgrim, his allegorical
name a gloss on the Childrens Crusade, has
become unstuck in time (23) a phenomenon
that allows him to experience events in his life in
random order. He has walked through a door in
1955 and come out another one in 1944. This
spastic time dislocation allows the narrative
to comment on Billys experiences through
their juxtaposition in a way that illuminates
them philosophically as well as psychologically.
Although Billys capture, forced march, and Dresden incarceration and its aftermath (Dresden
was like the moon now, nothing but minerals,
178) are told in chronological order, the
strange parallels of loss, pain, death, destruction,
violence, cruelty, and irony in Billy Pilgrims
civilian and fantasy life function like objective
correlatives to stand in for horrors that cannot be
expressed.
Thomas Pynchon, born in 1937, was not a
World War II veteran. He did, however, serve in
the US Navy in the 1950s, and worked as a
technical writer for the Boeing Corporation between 1960 to 1962 a job that informed his
interest in the intersection of physics, technology,
industry, and the military that plays a considerable role in Gravitys Rainbow. An exemplary
postmodern text, Gravitys Rainbow is not exactly
a World War II novel, either; its status is complicated by its extreme and outrageous experiments
with narrative, prose style, and encyclopedic
knowledge subversions of form that make its
message with respect to the Second World War
difficult to determine. The books title refers to
the arc of the German V-2 rocket that bombed
London in late 1944 and in 1945, its trajectory
a lethal rather than a hopeful gloss on the shape
of the biblical rainbow marking the survival of
Noahs Ark and Gods covenant to refrain from
further annihilation of the earths creatures.
This tension between the annihilating aims of

twentieth-century military weapons technology
and the desire for the spiritual salvation and
redemption promised by religion shapes the narrative, structure, allusions, and symbols in the
work without clear resolution. The texts chronology, roughly marking the dark nine months
between December 18, 1944 and August 6,
1945, when the Americans dropped the first
atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, is linked to
the cycle of the Christian calendars natal advent,
death of God, resurrection, and transfiguration,
but without clarifying whether the parallels offer
promise or ironic spiritual betrayal. There are
multiple military enterprises and Pavlovian scientific projects in progress in England, where the
novel opens, as well as espionage and counterespionage operations designed to monitor them.
Characters with problematic identities abound,
and plot elements are diffused in the uncertainties, grotesqueries, and exaggerations of a paranoid imagination. A rocket numbered 00000 is
being developed even as the function of a rockets
rising, trajectory, and explosion appears to signify
sexual arousal and orgasm as much as military
power. This symbolism also marks the peculiarity
of the works protagonist, US Army Lieutenant
Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual excitation appears
to predict rocket attacks. The novel ends as it
began with a German rocket launched and hurtling either into a movie theater whose film has
broken and projector bulb burned out or toward
the books readers themselves.
Although the Korean War inspired a number
of works that achieved wide public attention
through their film and television adaptations,
their impact on American literature was less
notable than either the World War II or Vietnam
texts that earned critical recognition and important literary awards. Following hard on World
War II, the Korean War may have distinguished
itself too little in technology or military challenges
to inspire the kind of stylistic or narratological
innovations that would have given them a distinctive voice and profile. James Micheners The
Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953) was one of the earliest
Korean War novels, based in his experiences as a
correspondent stationed on two airplane carriers
in 1952. The prose of James Salters novel The
Hunters (1956), describing the experiences of US
Air Force fighter pilots in the Korean conflict,
THE NOVEL AND WAR
recalls the style of Ernest Hemingway. Richard

Condons The Manchurian Candidate (1959),
about the manipulation of a soldier brainwashed
by the North Koreans, functions less as a Korean
War novel than as a Cold War spy thriller. Finally,
Richard Hookers MASH: A Novel About Three
Army Doctors (1968) brought to the day-to-day
experiences of the surgeons and staff in a Mobile
Army Surgical Hospital in Korea some of the
absurdist and satirical spirit of Joseph Hellers
Catch-22 as noted by Ring Lardner Jr., who
wrote the screenplay for the novels 1970 film
adaptation.
Tim OBrien emerged as one of the best-known
American fiction writers about the Vietnam War
in the 1970s, after being drafted and serving in
Vietnam between 1968 and 1970. A year prior to
OBriens appearance there, his division had participated in the notorious My Lai massacre
of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers.
Although his collection of interlinked stories
titled The Things They Carried (1990) is probably
his best-known Vietnam work, the novel Going
After Cacciato (1978) won the National Book
Award for Fiction and established his reputation.
Based on numerous personal combat experiences,
Going After Cacciato foregrounds the absurdity of
military logic, recalling the satiric agenda of such
writers as Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, but
inflecting its comic edge with mystery, ambiguity,
and poignancy. The pursuit of the happy soldier
Cacciato, whose name means hunted in Italian,
and who has gone AWOL and taken off on foot to
walk from Vietnam to Paris, immerses the novels
narrator, Paul Berlin, and his squad in a curious
surrealistic dream world resonant of magic realism. OBriens novel, which was published a year
before Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppolas
award-winning Vietnam film, shares its quest
motif, first introduced in Coppolas literary
source, Joseph Conrads The Heart of Darkness
(1902). At the same time, Cacciatos desertion
harks back to Frederic Henrys desertion in
Hemingways A Farewell to Arms. In each work
the journey to pursue a fugitive becomes a journey
of self-implication and self-discovery, into a darkness whose political revelation is that in pursuing
war, as in pursuing colonialism, innocence both
personal and national is destroyed. Cacciatos
Paris destination reminds us that Vietnam, along
749
with parts of Laos and Cambodia, was part of

Frances late-nineteenth-century colonial empire,
and that the Vietnam War was preceded by the
French Indochina War of the postwar 1940s
and 1950s.
The traumatic memory of Vietnam is very
much alive today, charged with a renewed urgency in the post-9/11 context of the USs ongoing
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the US has
recently gambled on a major escalation of forces
in Afghanistan a conflict whose uncertain future
is routinely billed as Obamas Vietnam the
lessons of that earlier war, and of failed colonial
and neocolonial projects of the past century, seem
confusingly drawn, if not willfully unlearned. One
hopes that the American novels to emerge from
the USs present and future conflicts will rise to
the subversive example of the twentieth centurys
most irrational, most absurd, and thus most
honest fictions of war.
Fiction (AF); World War I in Fiction (BIF);

Dos Passos, J. (1921). Three Soldiers. New York:
Doran.
Heller, J. (1961). Catch-22. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Hemingway, E. (1929). A Farewell to Arms. New York:
Scribners.
Mailer, N. (1976). The Naked and the Dead [1948].
March, W. (1957). Company K [1933]. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Norris, M. (2000). Writing War in the Twentieth
Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
OBrien, T. (1978). Going After Cacciato. New York:
Delacorte.
OBrien, T. (1990). The Things They Carried. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Pynchon, T. (1973). Gravitys Rainbow. New York:
Viking.
Stout, J. P (2005). Coming out of War: Poetry, Grieving,
and the Culture of the Wars. Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press.
Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. New York:
Delacorte.
O
Oates, Joyce Carol
GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKES
Joyce Carol Oates is not only the most prolific of

contemporary literary writers but also extraordinarily diverse. For Oates, the composing of fiction
is an activity integral to human life and so
stretches across all genres. Including the sophisticated thrillers published under her (known) pseudonyms, Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, she
is the author of over 50 novels, as well as more
than 30 story collections, a dozen volumes of
essays, and several collections of poetry and plays.
She has also written for young adults and for
children, edited numerous anthologies, and been
closely involved with the Ontario Review, which
ran until the death of her husband, its founder and
editor Raymond Smith, in 2008. Oates produced
the bulk of this work while also pursuing a career
first at the University of Windsor, Ontario, and
since 1978 at Princeton. Her literary fiction depicts multiple cross-sections of American culture
from the Depression era of her birth into the
twenty-first century, with forays into nineteenthand early-twentieth-century culture.
Born in 1938 in Lockport in upstate New York
(called Eden County in some of her fiction) she
was educated at Syracuse University and at the
University of Wisconsin before abandoning a
PhD at Rice to become a writer. At Syracuse she
co-won the 1959 Mademoiselle Fiction Prize, followed in 1963 by her first story collection as well as
her first novel, With Shuddering Fall. From then
on, she would produce the equivalent of more
than a book a year for decades to come.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Oates wrote largely in

a realist mode but her 1970s fiction became ever
more ambitious, leading to her most experimental period in the early 1980s. After this she
returned to a postmodernist realism that constitutes her mature artistic voice. Her work
throughout her career reveals a core concern
with the inner mysteries of personality and
identity in interaction with the intricacies of
American society. This gives rise to her most
common themes, including ambition, power,
the fluidity of personae, and illicit or aberrant
love. Many of her protagonists strive to escape
their blue-collar upbringing and rise through
the social strata. They seek to break away from
overbearing individuals or hostile environments, and to take control of their lives. Often
this involves transcending intense relationships
and sometimes experiencing a complete change
of identity. But it can also involve the manipulation of others or the prostitution of the
protagonists original sense of self. Even when
apparently triumphant, these journeys usually
occur at some cost to all concerned.
With Shuddering Fall anticipates several of
Oatess later works in that it involves a claustrophobic relationship between a young girl and an
older man beyond whom the girl must move in
order to discover the wider world. In A Garden of
Earthly Delights (1967; revised and republished in
1983), the daughter of itinerant farm workers
seeks a better life through marriage to a wealthy
landowner. them (1969), which won the National
Book Award, is about a girl who marries her way
out of deprivation while her brother, who also

OATES, JOYCE CAROL
seeks to better himself, ends up participating in

the Detroit riots. In the course of the novel, the
girl challenges her supposed teacher, Oates, over
the relevance of classic literature to working-class
life. This is part of a dialogue with past writing
that characterizes Oatess career. Marriages
and Infidelities (1972) includes revisions of stories
by Chekhov, Kafka, Henry James, and Joyce.
A recent collection, Wild Nights! (2008b),
revisits the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain,
James, and Hemingway. Oatess dialogue with
other writers can also be found in many of
her essays, most notably in those of the young
writer marking her territory in New Heaven,
New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature
(1974) and the mature writer reflecting on
examples of the writing impulse in The Faith of
a Writer (2003).
Oatess pivotal early-1970s novel, Wonderland
(1971), is about the social rise and emotional
alienation of a neurosurgeon, and more generally
an exploration of consciousness. Not long after its
publication, Oates suffered a mental crisis that
produced a sense of the fallacy of the unified self.
Out of this came a series of books, including
Childwold (1976), in which she sought to rethink
the way in which fiction renders selfhood by way of
individual characters (see Daly 1996). Such works
challenge conventional expectations concerning
narrative identity. Narrators switch between firstand third-person, and it is often impossible to
ascertain precisely which voice the reader is witnessing, which viewpoint is being expressed, or the
actual status whether real or imagined within the context of the fictional world of the events
being described. Oates was also producing poetry
and plays during this period, as well as a body of
significant short fiction including her best-known
early story. Where Are You Going, Where Have
You Been? is about a teenage girl who accepts a
ride from a creepily enigmatic stranger. This much
anthologized story features in the most comprehensive collection of short fiction from across her
career, High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories
19662006 (2006). Oatess choice from her
first four volumes of poetry appears in Invisible
Woman: New and Selected Poems, 19701982
(1982). Her work in that and other genres is
usually seen as subsidiary to her novels and stories
but, like her Journal (2007), gives valuable insight
into the preoccupations of her major work.
751
The early 1980s saw the publication of panoramic explorations of nineteenth-century America, marked by a departure of style, approach, and
subject matter. Most extraordinary of these is
Bellefleur (1980), an exuberant, surreal history of
a dynasty of landowners. Despite its elements of
magic realism, it also connects with her earlier
writing in its sharp commentary on the energies,
inequalities, and injustices of capitalism. Another
such novel, Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), continues Oatess revisionist explorations of both
nineteenth-century patriarchy and literary conventions by offering a labyrinthine, postmodernist take on the detective genre. These books also
exemplify the gothic tendencies that are another
characteristic of Oatess output, evident periodically in novels and stories through the course of
her career.
Returning to depictions of her own twentiethcentury environment, Marya: A Life (1986) closely follows the trajectory of Oatess career from
humble, rural origins into the world of academe.
The themes of survival and ambition evident in
her early work are now seen from a position of
artistic maturity. The protagonist superficially
resembles Oates in her rise from poverty to succeed in a male-dominated environment, but
Maryas attitudes toward her past, her colleagues,
and herself exact a notable price in terms of her
relationships with other people. Thereafter follows a succession of important novels, including
two works of gritty realism set in upstate New
York exploring respectively the mind-set of the
1950s and the 1960s. You Must Remember This
(1987) concerns an incestuous affair between a
fading boxer and his niece against the backdrop of
McCarthyism. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is
My Heart (1990) details a doomed interracial love
between a high school basketball star and a white
girl in the emerging Civil Rights era. These two
are part of a series of Oates novels that meditate
on questions of class, race, gender, and power in
American culture. John Updikes influential review of the former (1987) along with Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.s of the latter in The Nation (republished
in Cologne-Brookes 2006) provide two incisive
statements about Oatess work as a whole. While
Norman Mailer and Philip Roth are among the
few American writers of Oatess generation whose
extensive output bears comparison with hers,
Gates notes her reference to Balzac as a role
752
OATES, JOYCE CAROL
model. But Oates has also cited Updike as the

closest among her contemporaries to a literary
soul-mate. Also worthy of note from this decade
are two works of non-fiction. On Boxing (1987),
an analysis of masculinity and the pugilistic impulse, can be read as a companion piece to You
Must Remember This. (Woman) Writer (1988)
contains Oatess most significant commentary on
her artistic vision and on some of her many
literary influences.
Through the 1990s and into the twenty-first
century, Oatess work continues to explore
American culture in its myriad manifestations.
A fresh development, however, is Oatess examination of the cult of celebrity, especially as
filtered through news stories involving either
established public figures or individuals whose
fame is solely the result of the medias frenzy for
tragedy. Novels that refer tangentially to specific
examples of American celebrity include Black
Water (1992), about the drowning of an intern
in a car driven by a man named only as The
Senator; Blonde (2000), about the rise and fall of
a Hollywood star who marries a playwright and
sings for a president; and My Sister, My Love: The
Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008a), a
meditation on the murder of a child beauty
pageant winner. Oatess interest in our relationship with perceived and actual truths about
ourselves and others remains central to several
of her later novels, including the elegiac ode to
family life, We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). In
Middle Age: A Romance (2001), a peer group
experiences the ongoing influence of a friend
after his untimely death. Their memories of
Adam Berendts Socratic dialogues challenge
them to continue to question their lives. As such,
he is one of Oatess many portraits of the
authors role as she sees it. For Oates, we are all
creatively involved in shaping our own and
others lives. Her subsequent novels of the twenty-first century contain, among other things,
further diverse meditations on this general,
human characteristic.
Although Oatess mature novels are invariably
realist, many of her stories remain avowedly experimental even as they anticipate, echo, and
further the preoccupations evident in her novels.
Her books of essays equally continue to supply
insight into her worldview and artistic vision while
also testifying to the eclectic breadth of her reading
and interests. An intellectual who wears her learning lightly, she is inclusive rather than exclusive.
She remains a popular author both under her own
name and as the writer of thrillers under pseudonyms, even as she is the object of academic study.

Bloom, H. (ed.) (1987). Joyce Carol Oates. New York:
Chelsea House.
Cologne-Brookes, G. (2005). Dark Eyes on America:
The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge:
Cologne-Brookes, G. (ed.) (2006). Joyce Carol
Oates [special issue]. Studies in the Novel, 38(4),
385574.
Daly, B. (1996). Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce
Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Johnson, G. (1998). Invisible Writer: A Biography of
Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton.
Johnson, G. (2006). Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations
19702006. Princeton: Ontario Review Press.
Oates, J. C. (1963). With Shuddering Fall. New York:
Vanguard.
Oates, J. C. (1967). A Garden of Earthly Delights.
New York: Vanguard.
Oates, J. C. (1969). them. New York: Vanguard.
Oates, J. C. (1971). Wonderland. New York: Vanguard.
Oates, J. C. (1974). New Heaven, New Earth: The
Visionary Experience in Literature. New York:
Vanguard.
Oates, J. C. (1976). Childwold. New York: Vanguard.
Oates, J. C. (1980). Bellefleur. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Oates, J. C. (1982). Invisible Woman: New and Selected
Poems, 19701982. Princeton: Ontario Review
Press.
Oates, J. C. (1984). Mysteries of Winterthurn. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Oates, J. C. (1986). Marya: A Life. New York: E. P.
Dutton.
Oates, J. C. (1987). You Must Remember This. New
York: E. P. Dutton.
Oates, J. C. (1990). Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is
My Heart. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Oates, J. C. (1992). Black Water. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Oates, J. C. (1996). We Were the Mulvaneys. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Oates, J. C. (2000). Blonde. New York: Ecco.
Oates, J. C. (2001). Middle Age: A Romance. New York:
Ecco.
O C O N N O R , F L A N N E R Y
Oates, J. C. (2003). The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art.

New York: Ecco.
Oates, J. C. (2006). High Lonesome: New and Selected
Stories 19662006. New York: Ecco.
Oates, J. C. (2007). The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates:
19731982. New York: Ecco.
Oates, J. C. (2008a). My Sister, My Love: The Intimate
Story of Skyler Rampike. New York: Ecco.
Oates, J. C. (2008b). Wild Nights! Stories About the Last
Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and
Hemingway. New York: Ecco:
Updike, J. (1987). What You Deserve Is What You Get.
New Yorker, pp. 11923 (Dec. 28).
OConnor, Flannery
DEBRA ROMANICK BALDWIN
One of the most important voices in American

fiction, Flannery OConnors art combines jarring
intensity, stylistic economy, sardonic humor, intellectual richness, and spiritual depth. Her importance is all the more striking in being based on
a relatively small number of fictional works:
OConnor completed but two novels and two
collections of short stories before lupus erythematosus cut short her life at the age of 39. Yet she
also wrote several essays and lectures, many dozens of reviews, and hundreds of letters, all of
whose relation to her fiction remains one of the
most interesting critical questions about her art.
Alternately categorized as a Southern writer and a
Catholic writer, her fictions aesthetic power and
indeterminacy defy easy categorization.
Born on March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia,
Mary Flannery OConnor grew up as an only child
in an observant Catholic family and attended
parochial school, her Catholicism remaining a
vital force throughout her life and art. After moves
to Atlanta and Milledgeville, Georgia, OConnor
attended Georgia State College for Women (now
Georgia College and State University), where she
contributed stories, poems, essays, and cartoons
for the college literary magazine. In 1945, she was
accepted for graduate study at the State University
of Iowa (now the University of Iowa), having been
awarded a journalism scholarship there. Within a
semester, she applied to the universitys now
prestigious Writers Workshop, and worked closely first with Paul Engle, and later with Andrew
Lytle. Other writers and critics she encountered in
753
the program included Robert Penn Warren, John

Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Austen Warren, and
Paul Horgan. She completed her MFA in creative
writing in the spring of 1947, her masters thesis a
collection of short stories entitled The Geranium
with a title story published the previous year in
Accent. At the same time, she won a Rinehart-Iowa
Fiction Award for the work she had completed
on her first novel. In 1948, she moved to Yaddo,
the artists colony in Saratoga Springs, where she
met Robert Lowell, Edward Maisel, Elizabeth
Fenwick, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Following
political upheaval at the colony, she moved to
New York and met her future editor, Robert
Giroux, and also Robert and Sally Fitzgerald a
couple devoutly Catholic and literary, whose habits
were more compatible with OConnors than were
those of Yaddo, and whose lifelong friendship
would extend into literary executorship following
her death. For almost two years, she rented the
Fitzgeralds garage apartment in Connecticut,
babysat their children, and shared with them during meals and conversation.
At Christmas time 1950, just before returning
home to Milledgeville, OConnor experienced
the first symptoms of what she would later
learn was lupus, the incurable autoimmune disease that had killed her father nine years before.
OConnor moved back to Milledgeville, to a farm
called Andalusia that had been bequeathed to her
mother and uncle. She continued working on
her novel Wise Blood. It was published in 1952,
after significant revisions suggested by the writer
Caroline Gordon, who became a close friend and
correspondent. Despite an improvement in
OConnors health which allowed her to move
back with the Fitzgeralds the same year, she soon
suffered a relapse of symptoms and returned
to Milledgeville, where she was told she had
lupus. For the 12 remaining years of her life,
OConnor remained at Andalusia, living quietly
and productively, settling into a disciplined routine of writing cared for by her mother, surrounded by the peacocks that she loved, and
occasionally traveling, despite her illness, to visit
friends or engage in literary activities. Her first
collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard
to Find and Other Stories, was published in 1955,
and she continued to write and publish short
stories while working on her second novel, The
Violent Bear It Away, which came out in 1960. She
754
continued to produce short stories, essays,

and reviews until her death on August 3, 1964.
A second collection of short stories, Everything
That Rises Must Converge, was issued posthumously in 1965.
OConnors works are consistent in style and
vision. Their distinctive style is bare and carefully
crafted, rejecting a strong authorial voice or commentary in favor of vivid depictions of characters
and actions by narrative voices who integrate
colloquial slang, biting irony, powerful similes,
and subtle shifts in tone. The stories are unsettling, an effect heightened by her use of the
grotesque, an aesthetic of distortion and disjunction that we often associate with medieval gargoyles. The grotesque in OConnors art takes the
form of characters who are maimed or freakish
(such as a man whose fetish is stealing womens
prostheses), similes whose simple disjunction
evokes physical discomfort (as in her eyes fixed
like two drills on Mrs. Turpin), and plots that
turn suddenly and intensely violent (as when a
comically depicted family outing ends in a mass
murder). Early critics used this grotesque element
to categorize OConnor as an example of
Southern Gothic literature, or of the school
of Southern degeneracy a phrase that she poked
fun at in her essay, The Grotesque in Southern
Fiction. OConnor herself defended these jarring
elements as a form of what Nathaniel Hawthorne
described as romance that is, fiction that
focuses on the unusual and the extreme, that
lean[s] away from typical social patterns, towards mystery and the unexpected (1969, 40).
While the grotesque is a means of jolting readers
out of their complacency, for OConnor, it also
contains an essential truth: It is when the freak
can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature (1969, 45). OConnors writings about her
own art reveal a consistent and complex religious
and philosophical vision, although critics remain
divided on the extent to which her clear and
almost dogmatic pronouncements adequately
explain her aesthetic achievement.
Yet there is no denying that the Christian
notions of sin, grace, and mystery permeate all
of her works. And each one of her stories, she says,
contains a moment of grace a moment in which
the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be
accepted or rejected, even though the reader may
not recognize this moment (1969, 118). She

offers some examples in A Good Man Is Hard
to Find, when the Grandmother recognizes
the Misfit as one of her own children; in The
Artificial Nigger, when an unexpected encounter
with a statue allows Mr. Head and his grandson to
reconcile; in The River, when a boy is driven to
find the Kingdom of Christ and drowns himself.
Each of these moments is morally, politically,
and humanly problematical and the cumulative
effect is not to proselytize, but to shock the reader
into contemplation. OConnor wrote, The artist
has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to
his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the
evangelists (1969, 171). Indeed, she described the
novelist most cryptically, as a sort of prophet who
descend[s] through the darkness of the familiar
world into a world where, like the blind man
cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were
trees, but walking (1969, 50).
OConnors theological taste was extensive and
eclectic, embracing classical ecclesiastical figures,
as well as modern theologians on the edge of
orthodoxy, several of whom she reviewed for the
Bulletin, the Catholic diocesan paper for which
she wrote dozens of reviews between 1956 and
1963. She spoke enthusiastically about Hans
K
ung, Karl Rahner, Jean Danielou, Francois
Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin, about whom she wrote to Fr. J. H.
McCowan that he died in 1955 and so far escaped
the Index, although a monition has been issued on
him. If they are good, they are dangerous (1979,
571). She wrote that she cut [her] aesthetic teeth
on Jacques Maritains Art and Scholasticism,
which taught her the Thomistic phrase she applied to her own activity: the habit of art (1979,
216). Of the Church Fathers, St. Thomas was
her foremost theological influence; OConnor
repeatedly called herself a Thomist albeit a
hillbilly Thomist (1979 81) and she admitted to
her friend, Betty Hester, that she read Thomass
Summa Theologica for about twenty minutes
every night before I go to bed (1979, 93). But
some critics argue that she owes an equal aesthetic
debt to St. Augustine, whose account of intellectual pride and command of jarring imagery
echo the themes and spirit of her own art (see
Giannone 12; Asals 229; Baldwin).
OConnors literary influences were varied
and extensive. In addition to admiring Nathaniel
Hawthorne, as mentioned above, she stated that

her foremost literary influence, the largest thing
that looms up, was Edgar Allan Poe (1979 99).
She also called herself a great admirer of
Conrad, whose artistic vision, combining fidelity
to concrete particularity with openness to mystery,
reflected her own convictions. She read the
Catholic novelists Francois Mauriac, Georges
Bernanos, Leon Bloy, Graham Greene, and Evelyn
Waugh. She also read and admired Henry James,
Gustave Flaubert, Honore de Balzac, Franz
Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton
Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol. Of the Southern
writers, she appreciated Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter
Taylor, and William Faulkner although she
wrote of the latter, Probably the reason I dont
read him is because he makes me feel that with my
one-cylinder syntax I should quit writing and raise
chickens altogether (1979, 292).
OConnors works won several awards during
her writers life, including a Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award for first novel (1947); a National
Institute of Arts and Letters grant (1957); an
honorary doctorate of letters from Saint Marys
College, Notre Dame (1962); and three first prize
O. Henry Awards (1956, 1962, 1964). Her work
also received two posthumous awards: her Complete Stories won the National Book Award in
1972, and her letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald
under the name The Habit of Being, received
a National Book Critics Circle Special Award
for 1979.
SEE ALSO: The Southern Novel (AF); Welty,
Eudora (AF)
Asals, F. (1982). Flannery OConnor: The Imagination of
Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Bacon, J. L. (1993). Flannery OConnor and Cold
War Culture. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Baldwin, D. R. (2006). Augustinian Physicality and the
Rhetoric of the Grotesque in the Art of Flannery
OConnor. In R. P. Kennedy, K. Paffenroth, &
J. Doody (eds.), Augustine and Literature.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 30126.
755
Brinkmeyer, R. (1989). The Art and Vision of

Flannery OConnor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press.
Cash, C. (2002). Flannery OConnor: A Life. Knoxville:
Coles, R. (1980). Flannery OConnors South. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
DiRenzo, A. (1993). American Gargoyles: Flannery
OConnor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale:
Giannone, R. (2000). Flannery OConnor: Hermit
Novelist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gordon, S. (2000). Flannery OConnor: The
Obedient Imagination. Athens: University of
Georgia Press.
Hendin, J. (1970). The World of Flannery OConnor.
Kirk, C. A. (2008). A Critical Companion to Flannery
OConnor. New York: Facts on File.
OConnor, F. (1952). Wise Blood. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
OConnor, F. (1955). A. Good Man Is Hard to Find.
New York: Harcourt, Brace.
OConnor, F. (1960). The Violent Bear It Away.
OConnor, F. (1965). Everything That Rises Must
Converge. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
OConnor, F. (1969). Mystery and Manners: Occasional
Prose (ed. S. Fitzgerald, & R. Fitzgerald). New York:
OConnor, F. (1979a). The Complete Stories. New York:
OConnor, F. (1979b). The Habit of Being: Letters of
Flannery OConnor (ed. and intro. S. Fitzgerald).
OConnor, F. (1983). The Presence of Grace and
Other Book Reviews (comp. L. J. Zuber, ed. and
intro. C. W. Martin). Athens: University of Georgia
Press.
OConnor, F. (1987). Conversations With Flannery
OConnor (ed. R. M. Magee). Literary Conversations.
Orvell, M. (1972). Invisible Parade: The Fiction of
Flannery OConnor. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Scott, R. N. (2002). Flannery OConnor: An Annotated
Reference Guide to Criticism. Milledgeville, GA:
Timberlane.
Shloss, C. (1989). Flannery OConnors Dark Comedies:
The Limits of Inference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
Stephens, M. (1973). The Question of Flannery
OConnor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press.
756
OLSEN, TILLIE
Olsen, Tillie
JUSTUS NIELAND
The life and work of Tillie Olsen speak to the

discontinuities of literary history, an enterprise
shaped, as Olsen experienced first-hand, by patriarchy and political repression, the crushing realities of poverty, and underclass voices silenced by
the lack of time or resources to write. Olsens
literary output was slight: Yonnondio: From
the Thirties, an unfinished novel published in
1974, but begun in 1933; Tell Me a Riddle
(1962), a short-story collection; Silences (1978),
a nonfictional meditation on the obstacles to
female authorship; and Mother to Daughter,
Daughter to Mother (1984), an edited collection
of exchanges between women writers and their
daughters. Yet Olsens unsentimental, morally
unsparing depictions of the dehumanizing effects
of class and gender oppression in America,
like her penetrating analysis of the exclusion
of women and the poor from literary careers,
exerted a powerful influence on second-wave
feminists and scholars of working-class and
Depression-era literatures in the US. Olsens contribution to the politicized literary culture of the
1930s has also proven crucial to the important
critical revaluation of period over the last decade.
Her deft use of modernist technique (influenced
by early reading of Stevens, Eliot, Yeats, Dos
Passos, and Joyce) in the service of radical,
feminist social critique challenges old-fashioned
distinctions between apolitical formalism and
committed realism.
The daughter of Samuel and Ida Lerner, socialist Jews and dissidents who left tsarist Russia
following the failed 1905 revolution, Tillie Lerner
was born on a farm outside Omaha, Nebraska in
1912, and raised by her politically active parents in
North Omaha, where the citys Jews and blacks
were concentrated. A strong student, Olsen nonetheless dropped out of high school to join
the Young Communist League, and shortly left
Omaha for Kansas City, where she worked in a
factory and participated in Communist Party
activities. Jailed for posting party leaflets at a
packing house, Olsen return to Omaha briefly,
participating in strikes and union drives before
moving to Faribault, Minnesota in 1933, where
she became pregnant with her first child and
began to draft Yonnondio. In 1934, she moved

to San Francisco, meeting and marrying Jack
Olsen, a printer and fellow Party activist. There,
she began reporting on labor battles and, in the
inaugural issue of Partisan Review, published
The Strike, an arresting, experimental piece of
proletarian reportage about the massive longshoreman strikes and their violent repression by
the police, and Thousand Dollar Vagrant, about
her ensuing arrest. Also in 1934, she published
poems about sweatshop exploitation in the garment industry and fascist massacres in Austria,
and, in Partisan Review, the first chapter of
Yonnondio. Like The Strike, Yonnondio deployed modernist collage and parataxis to document the hallucinatory incoherence of political
rhetoric and reality. Olsen earned a book contract
from Random House, but Yonnondio would never
be finished the demands of motherhood intervened. Olsen lived the rest of her life in San
Francisco, working a variety of jobs while raising
four daughters.
Yonnondio, the surviving portions of which
Olsen wrote between 1933 and 1936, is a striking
work of documentary surrealism. The story
follows the migrations of the working-class
Holbrook family, who move from the misery of
a Wyoming mining town, to a failed pastoral farm
life, to brutal, smelly poverty in a Midwestern
meatpacking city much like Olsens Omaha. But
Olsens Holbrooks are not Steinbecks Joads,
and her stunning technique everywhere refuses
sentimentality. Olsen opts instead to combine
modernist stream-of-consciousness narration
mostly focalized through the sensitive perspective
of the Holbrooks 10-year-old-daughter, Mazie
and grotesque, quasi-fantastic depictions of capitalist industry and laboring bodies. Yonnondios
vital modernism, what one recent critic has
dubbed sensational, provides a radical anatomy
of the psychic and bodily toll of economic injustice on the impoverished. Olsen is especially
sensitive to capitals systemic destruction or deformation of human dignity and creativity, showing how the abusive working conditions that
plague Jim, the Holbrooks uneducated patriarch,
infiltrate and warp the rhythms of domestic life:
in one haunting scene, he rapes his sick wife,
Anna, within earshot of a shocked, barely comprehending Mazie, whose confused perceptions
Olsen handles skillfully. Like the novels other
ORTIZ, SIMON J.
children, who use movies or the recycled detritus

of a local garbage dump to dream of better futures
that never arrive, Mazie is an unromanticized
victim of a system that exceeds her, but she also
possesses insurgent capacities for imagination,
sensation, and beauty. Olsens lyrical treatment
of Mazie sharpens the pathos of the book, but is
never condescending, tempered instead by overt,
Brechtian challenges to her readers temptation to
consume suffering at a distance in the tired form
of sentimental pity.
After her own youngest daughter enrolled in
school, Olsen revivified her writing career in
the 1950s, taking creative writing classes at San
Francisco State University. On the merits of two
stories she drafted there (I Stand Here Ironing
and Hey Sailor, What Ship?), she received
Wallace Stegner and Ford Foundation fellowships. The support led to the publication of her
widely anthologized short story collection, Tell
Me a Riddle. The collections titular story, about
the pressures of gender differences and poverty
on a four-decade-long marriage, and the memory
of a revolutionary past by a woman dying of
cancer, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film
in 1981. The collection typifies Olsens interest in
the demands and sacrifices of maternity, the
complexities and unsentimental truths of
motherdaughter relationships, and the often
unheard voices of Americas underclass and immigrant populations. The collections critical acclaim paved the way for the eventual publication
of Yonnondio, the unfinished drafts of which
Olsen discovered in 1972. Olsen chose to not
rewrite or fill the gaps, leaving literary critics with
an aptly fragmentary product of a gifted young
writer and activist who lived and wrote urgently,
but whose life of writing would suffer repeated
interruptions. It was the nature of these kinds of
literary silences or apparent failures of energy
both her own and those of writers like Jane
Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Rebecca Harding
Davis, whose Life in the Iron Mills first convinced
a 15-year-old Olsen that literature could come
from working-class lives that Olsen sought to
account for in Silences. Full-functioning creativity, Olsen explained, required wholly surrendered
and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work;
totality of self. Such were luxuries that women
like Olsen could rarely afford. Tillie Olsen died
in 2007.
757
SEE ALSO: Gender in the Novel (AF);

Modernist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel
(BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF);
Working-Class Fiction (BIF); WPA and Popular
Front Fiction (AF)
Coiner, C. (1995). Better Red: The Writing and
Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur.
Edmunds, S. (2008). Grotesque Relations: Modernist
Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State. Oxford:
Entin, J. (2007). Sensational Modernism: Experimental
Fiction and Photography in Thirties America. Chapel
Faulkner, M. (1993). Protest and Possibility in the
Writing of Tillie Olsen. Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia.
Olsen, T. (1934). The Strike. Partisan Review, 1, 5.
Olsen, T. (1962). Tell Me A Riddle: A Collection.
Olsen, T. (1974). Yonnondio: From the Thirties.
Olsen, T. (1978). Silences. New York: Dell.
Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America.
Rosenfelt, D. (1981). From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen
and the Radical Tradition. Feminist Studies, 7(3),
370406.
Ortiz, Simon J.
P. JANE HAFEN
Simon J. Ortiz, a member of the Acoma Pueblo,

comes from a legacy of indigenous people who
have lived in the same place since their sense of the
beginning of time. His genre-crossing writings
reflect the heritage of location, community,
and language. Ortiz was born in Albuquerque,
New Mexico in 1941. He was reared in the village
of McCartys, where his family spoke their native
Keres language. After working in a uranium mine
and a stint in the military, Ortiz attended school at
Ft. Lewis, Colorado and the University of New
Mexico. As a student at the MFA workshop at
the University of Iowa, Ortiz joined the rank of
university-trained American Indian writers like
N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), James Welch (Black-
758
ORTIZ, SIMON J.
feet), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo).

Although sometimes categorized as a writer of
the Native American Renaissance, Ortizs awardwinning writing reveals a timeless heritage that
ties back to place, language, and sovereignty.
An early essay (1981) asserts tribal sovereignty.
Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural
Authenticity in Nationalism delineates how individual tribes each have their own literatures. By
relying on the specific tribal stories of his Acoma
heritage, Ortiz establishes a pattern that will be
consistent throughout his work. He relates in
English and Keres, through poetry and narrative,
varied experiences of resistance and identity familiar to contemporary Indians throughout the
western hemisphere. These experiences, though
common, inevitably lead back to his particular
place, Acoma Pueblo. From this early essay to a
more recent work, Out There Somewhere (2002),
that is set in multiple locations, Ortiz consistently
returns to his center of inspiration.
Additionally, Ortizs writing acknowledges indigenous history by situating events in the context
of multiple generations, telling stories of his
ancestors and family. Even his publishing history
acknowledges that sense of context. After a period
of personal struggles, the early 1990s began a
resurgence of publications beginning with Woven
Stone (1992). An omnibus of previously published works, Ortiz introduces the volume with
reflective and interpretive essays. Ortiz also updates his work to expose the environmental racism that exists on native lands.
Aware of the need to properly educate children
about American Indians and culture contexts,
Ortiz has published two childrens books, The
People Shall Continue (1977b) and The Good
Rainbow Road (2004). He has generously collaborated with other scholars by editing anthologies,
writing forewords, working with younger Native
writers, and cooperating with literary critics.
Perhaps Ortizs best-known work is the powerful and widely anthologized From Sand Creek
(2000 [1981]). Recounting the 1864 massacre of
Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in Colorado,
Ortiz expands resistance and survival to all indigenous peoples while personalizing his own struggles. While this volume recounts indescribably
horrific deaths and mutilations, it also points to
reconciliation and hope:
This America
has been a burden
of steel and mad
death,
but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising
from Sand Creek.
Now an elder statesmen in the field of Native

letters, Ortiz continues to write, speak, and teach.
Modern technologies and the Internet have made
hearing his reading and singing of his own work
essential in learning the oral nature and the power
of his language. He has had teaching appointments at the University of New Mexico, Sinte
Gleska Tribal College, the University of Arizona,
the University of Toronto, Kenyon College, and,
as of this writing, Arizona State University.
Momaday, N. Scott (AF); Silko, Leslie (AF);
Welch, James (AF)

Brill de Ramirez, S. (ed.) (2004). Simon Ortiz [special
issue]. Studies in American Indian Literatures, ser. 2,
16(4).
Fast, R. R. (1999). Telling Stories. In The Heart as a
Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American
Indian Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, pp. 16382.
Kroeber, K. (ed.) (1984). Simon Ortiz [special issue].
Studies in American Indian Literature, 8(34).
Lucero, E. Z., & Brill de Ramirez, S. (eds.) (2009). Simon
J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance.
Ortiz, S. (1976). Going for the Rain. New York:
Harper and Row.
Ortiz, S. (1977a). A Good Journey. Tucson: University
of Arizona Press.
Ortiz, S. (1977b). The People Shall Continue (Fifth
World Tales). San Francisco: Childrens Book Press.
Ortiz, S. (1980). Fight Back: For the Sake of the People,
for the Sake of the Land (illus. M. Chino).
Ortiz, S. (1981). Towards a National Indian
Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism.
MELUS 8(2), 712.
OZICK, CYNTHIA
Ortiz, S. (1988). Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in

Native American Literature. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo
Community College Press.
Ortiz, S. (1992). Woven Stone. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
Ortiz, S. (1994). After and Before the Lightening. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press.
Ortiz, S. (1997). Speaking for the Generations: Native
Writers on Writing. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press.
Ortiz, S. (1999). Men on the Moon: Collected Short
Stories. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Ortiz, S. (2000). From Sand Creek: Rising in This
Heart Which Is Our America [1981]. Tucson:
Ortiz, S. (2002). Out There Somewhere. Tucson:
Ortiz, S. (2004). The Good Rainbow Road. Tucson:
Ortiz, S. (2005). Beyond the Reach of Time and Change:
Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart
Photograph Collection. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
Rader, D. (1997). Luci Tapahonso and Simon Ortiz:
Allegory, Symbol, Language, Poetry. Southwestern
American Literature, 22(2), 7592.
Smith, P. C. (2005). Simon Ortiz: Writing Home. In
J. Porter, & K. M. Roemer (eds.), The Cambridge
Companion to Native American Literature.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 22132.
Wiget, A. (1986). Simon Ortiz. Western Writers Series
11. Boise, ID: Boise State University Press.
Ozick, Cynthia
JOSEPH ALKANA
Cynthia Ozick is a major voice in contemporary

American literature whose short stories, novels,
and essays have consistently elicited high critical
regard. Her fiction is often considered challenging
for raising difficult intellectual matters that frequently are situated in the dynamics of her characters. Ozicks novels and shorter fiction recall
literary and cultural tradition in their attention to
moral issues, yet they are also at times stylistically
innovative. Her five novels, five volumes of shorter fiction, and five collections of essays have
generated many honors, such as a Guggenheim
Fellowship and the Strauss Living Award by the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Born in New York City on April 17, 1928 to
William and Celia Ozick, immigrant owners of a
small drugstore in the Bronx, Cynthia Ozicks
759
autobiographical essays A Drugstore in Winter

(in 1983a) and A Drugstore Eden (in 2000) tell
of her early immersion in literature as well as her
Jewish background. She attended New York University and Ohio State University, where in 1950
she wrote her MA thesis on Henry James. The
importance of James to her conception of literature has been evident throughout her career, yet,
despite the ways she has positioned her work
within the contexts of both Jewish and nonJewish cultures, Ozicks fiction and essays on
literature often call into question conventional
thinking, particularly with regard to ethnicity. In
the latter respect, Ozicks work resembles that of
such other important American Jewish writers as
Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth.
Ozicks best-known work, The Shawl (1989b), a
paired short story and novella (each of which won
the O. Henry Award for short stories the different
years they were first published), displays a willingness to experiment with unconventional narrative form. The Shawl conveys its protagonists
Holocaust experiences and then jumps ahead
several decades to her life in Miami Beach, depicted in the distinctly unsentimental and at times
darkly comic manner typical of Ozick. In The
Shawl one can discern the tension between mainstream literary culture and Jewish tradition, in its
intellectual, religious, and more broadly social
dimensions, that some critics regard as a crucial
element of Ozicks fiction.
This tension is evident from her first novel, Trust
(1966), a narrative of a young womans attempts to
uncover a past that includes different father figures
who have allegiances to Jewish and non-Jewish
values. Other important early works include
Usurpation (Other Peoples Stories) (in 1976)
and Envy; or, Yiddish in America (in 1971), both
of which offer serio-comic treatments of Jewish
writers and intellectuals. The problem of the Jewish
artist in the United States also became the focus of
two important essays, Toward a New Yiddish (in
1983a) and Bialiks Hint (in 1989a), both of
which assert the value of English in place of the
more traditional Yiddish to the Jewish writer.
The interplay between intellectual or artistic
interests and the emotional lives of her characters
regularly animates Ozicks fiction. For example,
The Cannibal Galaxy (1983b) tells of a Holocaustera refugee who establishes an American school
curriculum divided between traditional Jewish
760
OZICK, CYNTHIA
and secular education; his story pivots on challenges posed by a student and her mother, both
highly intelligent. Although such attention to
forceful women is frequent in Ozicks writings,
her treatment of feminist issues, like her treatment of ethnicity, is less programmatic than it is
devoted to exploring complexity. As she reflects in
Tradition and (or Versus) the Jewish Writer,
Writers are responsible only to the comely shape
of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination,
which sometimes leads to wild places via wild
routes (2003, 129).
Ozicks varied commitments are revealed in The
Puttermesser Papers (1997), which features the
imaginative and highly educated Ruth Puttermesser. In one section, Puttermesser unconsciously
draws from Jewish tradition to create a golem that
helps bring about a transient utopian flowering of
New York City. In Heir to the Glimmering World
(2004), Ozick again displays her knowledge of
Jewish intellectual traditions, this time when presenting the story of a refugee European Jewish
scholar and his family, and the effects they have on
the youthful narrator who anticipates her own
future as a writer. The importance of writers is
also dramatized in the title story of Dictation
(2008), in which Henry James appears as a character, as well as an earlier novel, The Messiah of
Stockholm (1987), which presents a protagonist
who believes his father was Bruno Schulz, a Jewish
writer and artist murdered by Nazis.
Ozick has published numerous essays that reveal penetrating analyses of both well-known and
more obscure writers, and she has taken daring
stances on a variety of issues. For example, in
Who Owns Anne Frank? (in 2000), Ozick suggests that this best-known piece of Holocaust
literature may, as it is popularly apprehended,
do more damage than good. Ozicks essays are
unflinching in their advocacy of a moral perspective, her own unapologetically grounded in her
artistic and moral allegiances.
SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); Ethnicity and

Fiction (AF); Malamud, Bernard (AF); James,
Henry (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Roth, Philip
(AF)

Bloom, H. (ed.) (1986). Modern Critical Views: Cynthia
Ozick. New York: Chelsea House.
Kauver, E. M. (1993). Cynthia Ozicks Fiction: Tradition
and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Lowin, J. (1988). Cynthia Ozick. Boston: Twayne.
Ozick, C. (1966). Trust. New York: New American
Library.
Ozick, C. (1971). The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories.
New York: Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1976). Bloodshed and Three Novellas.
New York: Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1982). Levitation: Five Fictions. New York:
Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1983a). Art and Ardor. New York: Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1983b). The Cannibal Galaxy. New York:
Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1987). The Messiah of Stockholm. New York:
Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1989a). Metaphor and Memory. New York:
Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1989b). The Shawl. New York: Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1996). Fame and Folly. New York:
Knopf.
Ozick, C. (1997). The Puttermesser Papers. New York:
Knopf.
Ozick, C. (2000). Quarrel and Quandary. New York:
Knopf.
Ozick, C. (2003). The Din in the Head: Essays. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Ozick, C. (2004). Heir to the Glimmering World. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Ozick, C. (2008). Dictation: A Quartet. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Strandberg, V. (1994). Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The
Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
P
Paley, Grace
PATRICK ODONNELL
Revered as one of the most important and widely

taught short story writers of the post-World War
II era, Grace Paley (19222007) published four
volumes of short stories in her lifetime, as well
as several volumes of poetry and non-fiction; a
fervent advocate for the causes of world peace
and nuclear disarmament, Paley was equally well
known as a political activist beginning with her
involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Paleys stories are meticulously crafted portraits
of the middle-class inhabitants of the Bronx,
Brooklyn, and Greenwich Village, often focusing
on the lives, trials, and conversations of women
concerned about families, relationships, and an
environment that poses various threats to human
well-being. The ironic tone, dialogism, and metafictional strategies to be found in many of Paleys
stories are captured in the title of her first collection of stories, The Little Disturbances of Man
(1959), as well as in the titles of the stories
themselves: In Time Which Made a Monkey of
Us All, a satire on adolescent inventiveness and
human evolution; or The Loudest Voice, about
a young girl with a loud voice who insists on
her Jewish identity. Along with Eudora Welty,
Flannery OConnor, John Updike, and Bernard
Malamud, Paley is considered as one of the leading architects of the contemporary short story.
Paley was born in the Bronx and lived in New
York City for much of her life; her parents were
Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, and many of her
stories reflect her Jewish heritage. Paley studied at
Hunter College, New York University, and the

New School for Social Research, but never completed a formal degree. She married and raised
two children before beginning her career as a
writer and teacher in the mid-1950s. Following
27 years of marriage, she divorced her first husband and subsequently married the writer and
landscape architect Robert Nichols. She taught at
Sarah Lawrence College for 23 years beginning in
1966, with briefer teaching appointments at the
City College of New York, Syracuse University,
and Columbia University. Following The Little
Disturbances of Man, a second short story collection, Enormous Changes of the Last Minute, was
published in 1974 after a false start at a novel.
A third volume, Later the Same Day, was published in 1985, and Paleys stories were gathered
in a collected volume in 1994, which was a finalist
for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.
In between the publication of her story collections, Paley published Leaning Forward (1985b), a
volume of poetry, and New and Collected Poems
(1992); Begin Again: Collected Poems was published in 2000, and Just as I Thought, a collection
of essays and reviews, was published in 1998.
Paleys political activism led to her participation
in a peace group that visited Hanoi in 1969,
during the height of the Vietnam War, seeking
the release of prisoners of war; she was also part
of a peace delegation to Moscow in 1974. She was
the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and
was elected to the National Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters in 1989. Fidelity, a gathering
of her late poems, was published posthumously
in 2008.

762
PARKER, DOROTHY
One of the characters who recurs in many of

Paleys stories is Faith Darwin; a writer herself,
Faith may stand as Paleys shadow or alter ego. In
one of the stories of Enormous Changes of the
Last Minute, A Conversation With My Father,
Faith has a conversation with her dying father
in which he asks her to tell him a story. Like all
of Paleys own stories, the story Faith tells is one
that both confronts and sublimates personal
experience: she tells her father the unlikely story
of a woman who becomes a user of heroin in
order to become closer to her son, who is a drug
addict. The story goes through several permutations as Faiths father expresses dissatisfaction
with various elements of the invention, while
Faith insists on leaving the narrative open to
further developments and interpretation. The
story combines realistic attention to a contemporary social issue with an interior reflection
on how stories are made and remade, all within
a conversation between a father and daughter
that reveals the complexity of parentchild relationships and how time one of Paleys persistent concerns makes monkeys of us all
when we confront fate and mortality. Indeed,
many of the stories in Enormous Changes of the
Last Minute and throughout Paleys opus portray the time of childhood as fraught with possibility and danger as, in life, irrevocable choices
are made that, in narrative, can be reflected
upon or even reversed.
Ultimately, Paley can be considered a realist
with a finely tuned ear for conversation and
speech, yet one who brings to bear upon her stories
of ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances a
postmodern sensibility for the paradoxical frailty
and power of narratives that contend with and
mediate reality. Her stories will continue to be
read both as chronicles of domestic life after midcentury, and as tales that illuminate what is at stake
in the relation between talk and invention.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Jewish
Fiction (BIF); Malamud, Bernard (AF);
OConnor, Flannery (AF); Social-Realist
Arcana, J. (1993). Grace Paleys Life Stories: A Literary
Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Isaacs, N. D. (1990). Grace Paley: A Study of the

Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne.
Paley, G. (1959). The Little Disturbances of Man.
Paley, G. (1974). Enormous Changes of the Last Minute:
Paley, G. (1985a). Later the Same Day. New York:
Paley, G. (1985b). Leaning Forward. Penobscot,
ME: Granite.
Paley, G. (1991). Long Walks and Intimate
Talks: Poems and Stories by Grace Paley.
New York: Feminist Press at the City University
of New York.
Paley, G. (1992). New and Collected Poems.
Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House.
Paley, G. (1994). The Collected Stories. New York:
Paley, G. (1997). Conversations With Grace Paley
(ed. G. Bach & B. H. Hall). Jackson: University
Paley, G. (1998). Just As I Thought. New York:
Paley, G. (2000). Begin Again: Collected Poems.
Taylor, J. (1990). Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark
Lives. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Parker, Dorothy
RHONDA S. PETTIT
Dorothy Parker wrote and published short fiction

from 1922 to 1958, and she was perhaps best
known as a humorous voice of the Roaring
Twenties. Parkers intimate examination of human motivation and behavior transcends the
early twentieth century. Formally, her stories
combine the linearity of traditional fiction with
modernist and even postmodernist prose techniques: irony, satire, stream-of-consciousness narration, imagistic concision, and minimal authorial
presence. Her characters tend to be alienated,
intellectually shallow, or dishonest individuals
who lack self-awareness and therefore wreak
havoc on their own or others lives. Her themes
include sexual dynamics; critiques of domesticity;
social, racial, and economic justice; and war.
Parkers themes were influenced by the early
death of her mother and her unhappy childhood,
while her penchant for abbreviated forms was
shaped by her work as a magazine writer. She
PARKER, DOROTHY
was born to J. Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild

on August 22, 1893 in West End, New Jersey
and raised in New York City. Parker attended
schools in Manhattan and Morristown, New
Jersey, but suggested that she was largely selftaught through her own reading. After her father
died in 1913, Parker wrote for Vogue. In 1917 she
moved to Vanity Fair, eventually becoming its
theater critic, and married Edwin Pond Parker II,
whose name she kept in spite of their divorce
and her two marriages to Alan Campbell (1933
and 1950).
During and following her first marriage, Parker
became associated with the Algonquin Round
Table, a group of writers and actors who met
daily for lunch at New Yorks Algonquin Hotel.
This association, and the fact that most of Parkers
work fiction, poetry, and criticism appeared in
popular magazines as opposed to smaller literary
journals, meant that Parker would be among the
twentieth centurys first literary celebrities. Her
satiric barbs, whether written or oral, were often
the quotations to know among New Yorks social
circles, and she would become a character in
numerous novels, plays, and films by or about
the era.
Before establishing herself as a fiction writer,
Parker was a well-known poet, and the concise
imagery found in her best poems can be found
in her fiction as well. Much of her fiction first
appeared in the New Yorker, and was later collected
in Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such
Pleasures (1933). Parker used three forms for
her fiction: monologues, dialogues, and narrated
stories. Her most acclaimed and frequently anthologized monologue is The Waltz, in which
the bulk of the story is conveyed through the
narrators stream-of-consciousness thoughts
about her imperfect dance partner whom she cant
refuse. Other monologues range in theme from
desperation and deceit to abortion, and are delivered through the voice of a female narrator. In a
departure from traditional fiction, Parker offers
interior portraits of her characters, leaving the
exterior portrait to the readers imagination.
Parker deploys both male and female voices in
her dialogues, but their minimal narration gives
one the sense of overhearing a private conversation rather than merely reading a story about one.
Their settings range from public spaces (restau-
763
rants, speakeasies, and parties) to more private

ones (train compartments, telephone booths, and
apartments). Stories such as New York to
Detroit, The Sexes, The Mantle of Whistler,
You Were Perfectly Fine, Arrangement in
Black and White, and A Young Woman in
Green Lace do more than chronicle humorous
miscommunication between the sexes; they also
reveal the subtext of the 1920s cultural narrative:
in an era of prohibition, alcohol is abundant; in an
era of free love, women confront the sexual
double standard; in an era of the tough modern
woman, naivety coupled with a longing for permanent attachment put women in jeopardy, or
make them viciously manipulative; in the era of
the Harlem Renaissance, racial bias and stereotypes simmer beneath the social veneer of white
culture.
In stories using third-person narration, Parker
tends to address broader issues or intersections of
issues: domesticitys limitations (Such a Pretty
Little Picture, Mr. Durant, and The Wonderful Old Gentleman); class, race, and gender
(Horsie, Clothe the Naked); ideals of feminine beauty and dissolution (Big Blonde); and
war (Soldiers of the Republic, Who Might Be
Interested, Song of the Shirt, and The Lovely
Leave). Big Blonde won the O. Henry Award in
1929 as the years best story, and offers an interesting counterpoint to Anita Looss comedic
novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926).
Parker also wrote plays and screenplays,
worked as a political activist, and served as a
book critic for Esquire before she died in 1967.
Her fiction was critically well received in the 1920s
and early 1930s, often compared favorably with
that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but by midcentury it was labeled sentimental, slight, merely
humorous, or dated. Nevertheless, her work never
went out of print, and feminist literary critics
of the late 1970s became the first among many to
re-evaluate her work as the concept of literary
modernism became more inclusive. Her monologues might be considered important generic
precursors of the recent development of shortshort fiction.
SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); The
Little Magazines (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
764
PERCY, WALKER

Calhoun, R. (1993). Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography.
Capron, M. (1958). Dorothy Parker. In M. Cowley
(ed.), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews.
New York: Viking, pp. 7287.
Gaines, J. R. (1977). Wits End: Days and Nights of
the Algonquin Round Table. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Kinney, A. F. (1998). Dorothy Parker, Revised.
New York: Twayne.
Meade, M. (1987). Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is
This? New York: Villard.
Melzer, S. (1997). The Rhetoric of Rage: Dorothy Parkers
Women. New York: Peter Lang.
Parker, D. (2002). Complete Stories (ed. C. Breese)
New York: Penguin.
Parker, D. (2003). Complete Poems. Sydney: Penguin.
Parker, D. (2006). The Portable Dorothy Parker
(ed. M. Meade). New York: Penguin.
Pettit, R. S. (ed.) (2005). The Critical Waltz: Essays
on the Work of Dorothy Parker. Cranbury, NJ:
Pettit, R. S. (2000). A Gendered Collision:
Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parkers
Poetry and Fiction. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press.
Silverstein, S. Y. (2001). Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems
of Dorothy Parker. New York: Scribners.
Toth, E. (19778). Dorothy Parker, Erica Jong, and New
Feminist Humor. Regionalism and the Female
Imagination, 3, 7085.
Treichler, P. (1980). Verbal Subversions in Dorothy
Parker: Trapped Like a Trap in a Trap. Language
and Style, 13, 4661.
Percy, Walker
DOUGLAS L. MITCHELL
Walker Percy was a novelist, physician, and semiotician from the American South. Born on
May 28, 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, he was
orphaned at an early age and adopted by a patrician uncle. Percy attended the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and later graduated from
Columbia Universitys medical school. A bout of
tuberculosis ended his medical internship.
His career derailed, Percy immersed himself in
the works of Sren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Concerned with the problems of self and
identity in the modern age, Percy also read Albert
Camus and Gabriel Marcel, who shaped in him an

existentialist vision neither despairing nor nihilistic, providing the ground for a reformulation of
meaning in a nihilist age and a path to recovery.
This philosophical search encouraged him to
write fictions that explore the predicament of
individual selfhood, searching (with varying degrees of success) for clues to meaning. The novelist could raise and provide dramatic answers to
questions inaccessible to science.
After abandoning a first novel, Percy published The Moviegoer (1961), a landmark of
post-World War II American fiction that won
him the National Book Award and a wide audience. The protagonist, Binx Bolling, epitomizes
the quintessential Percian predicament. Despite
his financial success, Bolling is regarded as a
failure by his aristocratically stoical aunt, and
he wrestles with a malaise that seeps into every
corner of life and provokes an undefined
search. He achieves some temporary success
through Kierkegaardian rotations and repetitions, aided by movie-going, but ultimately discovers meaning through intersubjectivity and
the unselfish love of another.
His second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966),
centers on the search of another lost protagonist,
Will Barrett, a scientist/technician who suffers
from abstraction and an inability to re-enter the
world. He follows his coed love, Kitty, and finds
clues to his search in Kittys embittered physician
brother, Vaught, and her sister, a nun ministering to deaf black children. Much of what Barrett
finds in Vaughts writings is a distorted form of
Percys own analysis of modern culture: the
dislocation of the self, the deadness of language,
and the twin distortions of angelism and bestialism that reflect the alienation of the self.
Once again, the counter to nihilist despair is
active love.
Barrett resurfaces in Percys most hopeful
novel, The Second Coming (1980), as a divorced,
successful lawyer living the good life, yet filled
with despair and haunted by the possibility that
his father intended to kill them both when he
committed suicide. When in search of a lost
golf ball (a metaphor for the answer to his dark
question), he discovers a girl escaped from a
mental institution and encounters her again after
testing Gods existence in a failed suicide attempt.
Her language, with its fantastic word play and odd
PETRY, ANN
honesty, allows the recovery of Barretts language

and intersubjectivity.
Percys two dystopian novels, Love in the Ruins
(1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), concern the resistance of an alienated psychologist,
Thomas More, to mass behavior modification.
In the former, More has created a lapsometer, a
device that measures and treats the alienation of
the self through stimulation of brain centers.
When the device falls into the hands of a banal
Dostoevskian devil, social chaos ensues in a manner that mirrors the turbulence of the 1960s and
early 1970s. In The Thanatos Syndrome, More
notes a strange shift in social behavior, and the
decline of various social pathologies, with increasing outbreaks of extreme tendencies. Bestialism
and angelism predominate once more, as people
mate like baboons and play chess like Kasparov.
Underneath the madcap surface of the satire is the
darker awareness not only that treatments of
alienation might be destructive, but also that the
suppression of meaningful selfhood might serve
the interests of those interested in collective
progress.
Percys darkest novel is Lancelot (1977), in
which a deranged Lancelot Lamar tells a priestfriend, Percival, what led him to murder his
wife. Lance is the last of the aristocratic Lamars,
a drunken wretch who marries a Northerner with
aristocratic pretensions. Lance, realizing his
daughter is not his own, searches for the truth
of his wifes infidelity. His is a quest for evil by one
who has despaired of God, and his compelling
narration is an extreme version of modern man:
split between his pornographic imaginings and
his sentimentalized version of a code of honor
and strict division between ladies and whores.
The themes of alienation and the failure of
signification are also treated in The Message in
a Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last
Self-Help Book (1983). All his works pose a single,
crucial question: what does the decay of language
have to do with the collapse of meaningful selfhood in the (post)modern age? His answer is
always that the human being is Homo viator, man
on the way, and to recover this truth is to restore
the sense of quest to human life. The clues to this
quest are to be found in irreducibly complex signs,
which bring with them the hope of a community
of shared meaning.
765

The Southern Novel (AF); Utopian and
Coles, R. (1978). Walker Percy: An American Search.
Desmond, J. F. (2004). Walker Percys Search for
Community. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
OGorman, F. (2004). Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery
OConnor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in
Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
Percy, W. (1961). The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf.
Percy, W. (1966). The Last Gentleman. New York:
Farrar Straus.
Percy, W. (1971). Love in the Ruins. New York:
Farrar Straus.
Percy, W. (1975). The Message in the Bottle. New York:
Farrar Straus.
Percy, W. (1977). Lancelot. New York: Farrar Straus.
Percy, W. (1980). The Second Coming. New York:
Farrar Straus.
Percy, W. (1983). Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help
Book. New York: Farrar Straus.
Percy, W. (1987). The Thanatos Syndrome. New York:
Farrar Straus.
Sykes, J. D. Jr. (2007). Flannery OConnor, Walker Percy,
and the Aesthetic of Revelation. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press.
Tolson, J. (1992). Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of
Walker Percy. Chapel Hill: University of
Petry, Ann
JENNIFER D. WILLIAMS
For her critically acclaimed The Street (1946), Ann

Petry became the first African American woman
to pen a bestselling novel. Having sold over 2
million copies to date, Petrys debut novel has also
defined somewhat narrowly a writing career that
spanned over 40 years and encompassed fiction,
short stories, literary criticism, and childrens
literature. Petry stated her desire to be remembered for all of her work. Doing so uncovers a
writer who strayed from genre conventions while
adhering to her conviction in literatures usefulness as a tool of social criticism.
766
PETRY, ANN
Born October 12, 1908 in the middle-class

town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Ann Lane
earned a PhG from the Connecticut College of
Pharmacy and managed her familys drugstore.
Her marriage to mystery writer George Petry took
her to New York, where she pursued a writing
career. While working for the Amsterdam News
and the Peoples Voice, Ann Petry, under the
pseudonym Arnold Petri, published her first short
story, Marie of the Cabin Club (1939), in the
Baltimore Afro-American. The storys affinities
with the typically male crime genre may account
for Petrys nom de plume. The potential gender
impropriety associated with crime fiction did not
deter Petry from attaching her name to the noirlike On Saturday, the Siren Sounds at Noon
(1943), her story published in the NAACPs The
Crisis that caught the attention of the publishing
world. An editor from Houghton Mifflin suggested Petry apply for their literary fellowship
award. That award helped support Petrys completion of The Street.
As naturalistic urban protest fiction, The
Street elicits immediate comparisons to Richard
Wrights Native Son (1940). Like her contemporary, Petry exposes the harsh consequences of
racial segregation and economic disparity on
black city dwellers. However, Petrys unforgettable
portrait of a black working-class single mother,
struggling to overcome racism, poverty, and sexual
violence, not only distinguishes her novel from
Wrights, but also shifts the terrain of black
womens literary discourse. Unlike the protagonists of most early-twentieth-century black
women writers, Petrys heroine is neither middle
class nor mulatta. Instead, the unflinching Lutie
Johnson forecasts the figures that would appear
during the black feminist renaissance of the 1970s
and persist through the latter part of the century,
figures that would ignite a critique of interlocking
structures of domination.
After The Streets success, Petry returned with
her husband to Old Saybrook, where they settled
and had one child. The small, predominately
white town inspired the backdrop of Petrys second novel, Country Place (1947), a so-called
raceless novel, centered on white characters and
not explicitly concerned with racial subject matter. The hindsight of postructuralism has been
instrumental in reframing raceless narratives
authored by African American writers as exam-
inations of the social construction of whiteness.

Narrated from the perspective of the sagacious
town pharmacist Doc Fraser, A Country Place is
a parody of white middle-class domesticity and
romantic love in post-World War II Americas
changing gender climate.
Petry sticks to a small-town Connecticut setting in her last novel, The Narrows (1953), but
populates the text with an array of black and white
characters living in segregated neighborhoods.
At the heart of the narrative is an interracial love
relationship that meets a predictably tragic end.
What is unexpected about the novel is its portrayal of female sexuality. Both the black workingclass former blues singer Mamie Powther and
the wealthy white Camilla (Camilo) Sheffield
Treadway carry on sexual relationships outside of
their marriages. Camilo further transgresses the
racial and social codes of her elite family by having
an illicit affair with a black man. Certainly, if one
were to identify a common theme throughout all
of Petrys disparate novels, it would be intimate
relationships and the pressures that class, gender,
and racial inequities exact on them.
With the publication of Miss Muriel and Other
Stories (1971), Petry re-established herself as a
craftsperson of short fiction. The 13 stories published throughout the long expanse of Petrys
career are set in New York and Connecticut
communities similar to the ones the author inhabited. The diverse characters in Miss Muriel
match those in her novels. Through their interactions, Petry examines broad-scale social
conflicts in intimate spaces like families, neighborhoods, and insular communities.
Petry also published a collection of short stories,
Legends of the Saints (1970), for young readers as
well as a childrens book, The Drugstore Cat (1949),
and two historical novels written for young adults,
Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground
Railroad (1955) and Tituba of Salem Village (1964).
Even in her books for young audiences, Petry
chose as her subjects bold and resistant women.
In addition to the Houghton Mifflin award,
Petry received the New York Times Outstanding
Book of the Year and the ALA Notable Childrens
Book Award for Harriet Tubman. The recipient
of a number of honorary doctorates and briefly
a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii,
Petry wrote and lectured until the latter part of her
life. She died April 28, 1997 near her home town.
PHILLIPS, JAYNE ANNE

Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the
Novel (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Wright,
Richard (AF)
Barrett, L. (1998). Blackness and Value: Seeing Double.
Ervin, H. A. (1993). Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography.
Boston: G. K. Hall.
Ervin, H. A. (2005). The Critical Response to Ann Petry.
Westport, CT: Praeger.
Ervin, H. A., & Holladay, H. (2004). Ann Petrys Short
Fiction: Critical Essays. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Lubin, A. (ed.) (2007). Revisiting the Blueprint: Ann
Petry and the Literary Left. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi.
Petry, A. (1946). The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Petry, A. (1947). Country Place. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Petry, A. (1949). The Drugstore Cat. Boston: Beacon.
Petry, A. (1950). The Novel as Social Criticism. In H. Hull
(ed.), The Writers Book. New York: Harper, pp. 329.
Petry, A. (1953). The Narrows. Boston: Beacon.
Petry, A. (1955). Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the
Underground Railroad. New York: Crowell.
Petry, A. (1964). Tituba of Salem Village. New York:
Crowell.
Petry, A. (1970). Legends of the Saints. New York:
HarperCollins.
Petry, A. (1971). Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Petry, E. (2005). Can Anything Beat White? A Black
Familys Letters. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Petry, E. (2008). At Home Inside: A Daughters Tribute to
Ann Petry. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Phillips, Jayne Anne

SARAH ROBERTSON
Jayne Anne Phillips has drawn international,

critical acclaim since her work first appeared in
print in the 1970s. In addition to two major
collections of short stories, three novels, critical
pieces, and reviews, her fiction regularly appears
in a wide range of literary magazines. Her contributions to Granta have partly accounted for the
classification of her work as new realist or dirty
realist, situating her alongside writers such as
Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason.
767
While in Phillipss early work, including Black

Tickets, her minimal, fragmented style and displaced characters reflect key characteristics of
both new and dirty realism, her interest in the
ideas of home and family has shaped her
fiction. For Phillips, we carry home around with
us in the way we perceive things, in the way we
look at things (Douglass 186). The haunting
quality of her writing, particularly in Machine
Dreams (1984) and Shelter (1994), arises out
of the pervasive pull of home that carries with it
the secrets and burdens of family life. Those
burdens are particularly felt by Phillipss female
characters, from Danner Hampson in Machine
Dreams and Fast Lanes (1987) to Kate Tateman in
MotherKind (2000). Phillipss belief that the generational inheritance of unresolved issues and
emotional dilemmas . . . becomes the tenor of
family life accounts for her continual return to
the past, and for her interest in the ways the past
manifests itself in the present (Homes 46). With
autobiographical strains running through her
work, the past to which Phillips returns is typically
one situated in twentieth-century Appalachia.
Phillipss own home place, Buckhannon, West
Virginia, where she was born in 1952, heavily
influences her fictional Southern communities.
Phillips spent her early years in this rapidly
modernizing small town, and after graduating
from West Virginia University she traveled
around the United States gaining in the varied
experiences that would influence the stories
in Black Tickets (1979). In her post-Black
Tickets fiction, Phillips repeatedly returns to her
Appalachian heritage, exploring as she does so
the modernization and the globalization of the
South, family and the nature of inheritance, class
and racial dynamics, and the impact and legacy
of war.
War plays a central role in much of Phillipss
work, most notably in Machine Dreams, which
spans World War II and Vietnam. Phillipss
most recent novel, Lark and Termite (2009),
sees her return to a dual preoccupation with
West Virginia and the Korean War, something
she first introduced in Shelter through the violent, traumatized figure of Carmody. Her concern with the impact of war both on veterans and
on their families back home allows Phillips to
address the wider impact of politics on everyday
life in America.
768
PIERCY, MARGE
At a stylistic level, Phillipss interest in language and the subtle connections between people and objects have defined her work, leading to
comparisons with her Southern predecessor
William Faulkner. Although Phillips resists being classified as a Southern writer, she acknowledges the influence of Faulkner and Poe on her
work. In addition, her interest in the subtleties
and secrets of family life echoes those found in
Katherine Anne Porters Miranda stories. The
transgenerational legacy of family secrets is central to Phillipss first two novels, where the
unspoken both permeates the characters lives
and shapes Phillipss narrative style. Discussing
her literary technique, Phillips claims that she is
much more interested in perception and in
dislocations of thought and the simultaneity of
time, than in event, getting from A to B (Homes
48). Subsequently, free-indirect discourse, with
the slippages of time and perspective it allows, is
a constant feature of Phillipss writing.
Phillips has channeled her preoccupation with
the nuances of language into teaching creative
writing, and she is currently professor of English
and director of the new MFA Program at
RutgersNewark, the State University of New
Jersey. Phillips has also received numerous accolades, including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First
Fiction from the American Academy and Institute
of Art and Letters for Black Tickets, and an Academy Award in Literature from the same institution for Shelter.
SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Porter,
Katherine Anne (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF);
The Southern Novel (AF)
Gainey, K. W. (1990). Jayne Anne Phillipss Machine

Dreams: Leo Marx, Technology, and Landscape.
Journal of American Studies Association of Texas,
21, 7584.
Glenday, M. K. (2005). The Secret Sharing: Myth
and Memory in the Writing of Jayne Anne Phillips.
In W. Blazek & M. K. Glenday (eds.), American
Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 6378.
Godden, R. (2002). No End to the Work? Jayne Anne
Phillips and the Exquisite Corpse of Southern Labor.
Journal of American Studies, 36(2), 24979.
Homes, A. M. (1994). Jayne Anne Phillips. BOMB,
49, 4651.
Jarvis, B. (1998). Postmodern Cartographies: The
Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American
Culture. London: Pluto.
Jarvis, B. (2001). How Dirty Is Jayne Anne Phillips?
Yearbook of English Studies, 31, 192204.
LeBrun, F. (1993). Womens Time? A Historical
Examination of the Reproduction of Mothering
in Machine Dreams. Overhere, 13(1), 95104.
Phillips, J. A. (1979). Black Tickets. New York:
Delacorte.
Phillips, J. A. (1984). Machine Dreams. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Phillips, J. A. (1987). Fast Lanes. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Phillips, J. A. (1994). Shelter. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Phillips, J. A. (2000). MotherKind. New York: Knopf.
Phillips, J. A. (2009). Lark and Termite. New York:
Knopf.
Price, J. (1993). Remembering Vietnam: Subjectivity
and Mourning in American New Realist Writing.
Journal of American Studies, 27(2), 17386.
Robertson, S. (2007). The Secret Country: Decoding
Jayne Anne Phillipss Cryptic Fiction. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Squier, S. M. (1991). Fetal Voices: Speaking for the
Margins Within. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature,
10(1), 1730.

Ahokas, P. (2007). Its Strange What You
Dont Forget: Towards a Postmodern White
Female Identity in Jayne Anne Phillipss Machine
Dreams. American Studies in Scandinavian, 39(1),
6283.
Bronfen, E. (1988). Between Nostalgia and
Disenchantment: The Concept of Home in Jayne
Anne Phillipss Novel Machine Dreams. AAA:
Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 13(1),
1728.
Douglass, T. E. (1994). Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips.
Appalachian Journal, 21(2), 18289.
Piercy, Marge
KERSTIN W. SHANDS
Marge Piercy, whose oeuvre includes novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and drama, is increasingly recognized as a prominent writer in the
United States. Born on March 31, 1936 in Detroit,
Michigan, Piercy comes from a working-class
background. Piercys poetic roots can be traced
back to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Allen Ginsberg had an impact on her writing in
PIERCY, MARGE
the 1950s, and in the 1960s Piercy was influenced

by black poets. Marge Piercys work is worth
exploring both for its challenging political perspectives and for its formal and structural aspects.
Sometimes compared to the work of Doris
Lessing, Piercys writings are often feminist, and
her poetry often deals with political issues (such as
the American occupation of Iraq). Jewish thought
is increasingly important in her work. Brimming
with a varied and subtly delineated gallery of
characters, Piercys work has been part of a rite
de passage for many readers in their personal and
spiritual development. Moving along Dionysian
rather than Apollonian lines, Marge Piercys work
is passionate, witty, and vitally alive.
Marge Piercys textual universe spans several
centuries and presents a wide range of themes
where issues of ethnicity, gender, and identity are
at the center. Piercys first novels describe the
problems of racism, urban renewal schemes, and
womens experiences in contemporary social and
economic contexts. Braided Lives (1982a), for
example, looks back on what it was like to grow
up in America during the 1950s. In Woman on the
Edge of Time (1976), Piercy presents a triptych of
American society, showing the present flanked by
utopian and dystopian scenarios. Based on extensive research and narrated from 10 points of view,
Piercys masterpiece, Gone to Soldiers (1987), is
a gripping account of World War II, depicting
the Jewish Resistance in France, the race riots in
Detroit, and the horrors of combat and concentration camps. The dehumanization of the war
and the barely survivable conditions on tankers
and in armed struggle are depicted, as well as the
dark memories of the ideology and methods of
Nazism in its unfathomable horror. He, She and It
interweaves a historical tale set in Prague in 1600
with a science fiction adventure set in America
in 2059. City of Darkness, City of Light (1996)
features the French Revolution; while Storm Tide
(1998) is a riveting emotional mystery story,
Three Women (1999) and The Third Child
(2003) delve into stories of love and politics, and
Sex Wars (2005), another critically acclaimed
historical novel, fictionalizes the lives of
Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Cornelius Vanderbilt.
In much of Piercys fiction, a Puritan ethic is
challenged along with the patriarchal values
Piercy sees as oppressive, divisive, and destructive,
769
while a maternal, healing, and nurturing principle

is celebrated through an intricate imagery of
birth, water, gardening, and quilting metaphors.
The ocean is omnipresent in Piercys work and is
often linked to a maternal principle that is seen as
life-enhancing and even life-saving. These principles are applied not only to relationships but
also to American culture and society as a whole.
Piercys poetry moves toward a balance of the
Apollonian and the Dionysian, often symbolized
by the cat imagery Piercy frequently employs.
Piercys predominantly realist, sometimes didactic and explicitly political narrative (in her early
fiction, in particular, she tends to be running
around in seven-league boots righting wrongs
before breakfast) is revitalized by a variety of
narrative forms such as the utopian, the selfreflexive, and the kaleidoscopically fragmented.
While the opposition between creative and destructive principles marks many of her novels,
Piercys oeuvre as a whole blends and orchestrates
a variety of different notes into a chord of empathy and connectedness.
SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF);
Atwood, M. (1982). Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge
of Time, Living in the Open [1976]. In M. Atwood,
Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto:
Anansi, pp. 2728.
Bartkowski, F. (1989). Marge Piercys Woman on the
Edge of Time. In F. Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 4180.
Marks, P. R. (1990). Re-Writing the Romance
Narrative: Gender and Class in the Novels of
Marge Piercy. PhD diss., University of Oregon,
Eugene.
Piercy, M. (1968). Breaking Camp. Middletown, CT:
Piercy, M. (1969a). Going Down Fast. New York:
Trident.
Piercy, M. (1969b). Hard Loving. Middletown, CT:
Piercy, M. (1973a). Small Changes. New York:
Doubleday.
Piercy, M. (1973b). To Be of Use (illus. L. Vernarelli)
Piercy, M. (1976). Woman on the Edge of Time.
New York: Knopf.
770
PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE
Piercy, M. (1978). The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing.

New York: Knopf.
Piercy, M. (1980). The Moon Is Always Female. New
York: Knopf.
Piercy, M. (1982a). Braided Lives. New York: Summit.
Piercy, M. (1982b). Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt.
Piercy, M. (1983). Stone, Paper, Knife. New York:
Knopf.
Piercy, M. (1985). My Mothers Body. New York:
Knopf.
Piercy, M. (1987). Gone to Soldiers. New York:
Summit.
Piercy, M. (1989). Summer People. New York: Summit.
Piercy, M. (1991). He, She and It. New York: Knopf.
Piercy, M. (1992). Mars and Her Children. New York:
Knopf.
Piercy, M. (2002). Sleeping With Cats. New York:
Morrow.
Piercy, M. (2003). The Third Child. New York:
HarperCollins/Morrow.
Piercy, M. (2005). Sex Wars. New York: HarperCollins/
Morrow.
Piercy, M. (2006). The Crooked Inheritance. New York:
Knopf.
Shands, K. W. (1994). The Repair of the World: The
Novels of Marge Piercy. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Thielmann, P. (1986). Marge Piercys Women: Visions
Captured and Subdued. Frankfurt: Fischer.
Walker, S., & Hamner, E. (eds.) (1991). Ways of
Knowing: Essays on Marge Piercy. Mobile, AL:
Negative Capability Press.
Porter, Katherine Anne

DARLENE HARBOUR UNRUE
Katherine Anne Porter earned distinction among

twentieth-century fiction writers with her lambent prose, classical structure, and penetrating
analyses of women and men confronting the
modern world. With her personal experience
lying at the core of each of her fictional pieces,
she consistently addressed the effects of betrayal,
alienation, and lovelessness on the human spirit
and the power of psychological forces within
human behavior. Her relatively small literary
yield during her lifetime 28 short stories and
short novels, one long novel, a collection of
miscellaneous non-fiction, and a body of uncollected pieces of non-fiction are exemplary in
the clarity of both language and vision.
Katherine Anne Porter was born in the frontier

community of Indian Creek, Texas on May 15,
1890, the fourth child of Harrison Boone Porter
(18571942) and (Mary) Alice Jones Porter
(18591892). Christened Callie Russell Porter,
she was known as Callie until she was an
adolescent. In 1892, after her mothers death, she
moved with her father, sisters, and brother to
Kyle, in Hays County, to live under the dominion
of her strong-willed, widowed grandmother,
Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter, whose Protestantism and Victorian manners she absorbed and
whose death in 1901 shattered what childhood
stability she had.
For the next five years, Callie lived a vagabond
life with her two sisters, brother, and father. She
attended several convent schools in Texas and
Louisiana and in 19045 spent a full academic
year at The Thomas School in San Antonio, her
only formal education. During this period she
unofficially changed her name to Katherine
Porter. Having become very beautiful and revealing a talent for drama and singing, she wanted
to become an actress. Instead of pursuing her
acting ambition, however, in 1906, at the age of
16, she married 19-year-old John Henry Koontz,
son of a prosperous Texas rancher. Although the
marriage lasted nine years, during which time
Porter converted to her husbands Roman
Catholicism, it was marked by Koontzs drunkenness, infidelities, and physical abuse of his wife.
Porter fled to Chicago in 1914 and worked for a
short while in the movies before returning to
Texas and divorcing Koontz in 1915, asking in
the decree that her name be formally changed
from Katherine Koontz to Katherine Porter.
She soon began calling herself Katherine Anne
Porter, signaling her identification with her paternal grandmother, whose strength and grace
she hoped to match.
The years between 1915 and 1920 were a particular struggle for Porter. After a second marriage
and quick divorce in 1915, she was diagnosed with
tuberculosis and during the next three years spent
long periods in Texas sanatoria. She married a
third time in the winter of 191617 and was soon
divorced, again. In the spring of 1918 she went to
Denver, Colorado, where the mountain air helped
strengthen her weak lungs and where she began a
journalistic apprenticeship at the Rocky Mountain
News. When she left for New York City in the
autumn of 1919, she was ready to become the

important writer she was convinced she could be.
In Greenwich Village, Porter supported herself
by writing publicity releases for movies and picking up freelance work while trying to find time
to devote to what she called her artist work.
Inspired by the freewheeling social and intellectual life in the village, Porter became friends with
political and literary radicals and Mexican expatriate writers who convinced her in 1920 to go to
Mexico, where, they told her, an exciting socialist
revolution was taking place. In the autumn of
1920, she traveled to Mexico and indeed ran
smack into the revolution, as she later described
her arrival. Between 1920 and 1923 she was in
Mexico three times, once at the invitation of the
new president of Mexico, Alvaro Obreg
on, who
asked her to organize an exhibit of Mexican
popular arts and crafts for transport to the United
States. After 1923 she did not return to Mexico
until the spring of 1930, when she began a
15-month sojourn.
During Porters first extended trip to Mexico in
19201, her creative imagination was released,
and her first original story, Mara Concepci
on,
was published in 1922. It was followed in 1923 by
The Martyr and in 1924 by Virgin Violeta, all
three stories inspired by events in the Mexican
Revolution and dealing broadly with the universal
theme of betrayal. In the mid-1920s, she began
to look into her Texas experience and soon produced such carefully crafted stories as He,
focusing on the plight of a poor farm family, and
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, an interior
monologue by an aged woman who confronts
death. Having mined her personal experiences in
such stories as Rope (1928), a monologue about
love and hate in marriage, and Theft (1929), an
analysis of personal responsibility for various
kinds of loss, in 1930 Porter published Flowering
Judas, another Mexico-inspired story, which
became the title story of her first collection,
published the same year and so lavishly praised
by critics that her high position among modernist
writers was fixed.
Living in Europe from September 1931 until
the autumn of 1937, and marrying Eugene Dove
Pressly in 1933, she continued to publish critically
acclaimed stories and to work on a long novel she
had conceived in the late 1920s and called Many
Redeemers. In the latter half of the 1930s, parts of
771
Many Redeemers spun off as the short novels

Old Mortality and Pale Horse, Pale Rider and
the short stories The Last Leaf, The Witness,
The Circus, The Grave, and The Old Order
(later retitled The Journey), all of which were
highly autobiographical and incorporated her
familys legends. In the 1930s she also published
the short novel Noon Wine (likened by critics
to Greek tragedy), the stories The Cracked
Looking-Glass (inspired by Joyces Dubliners
stories) and The Downward Path to Wisdom
(an illustration of the source of hate), and the
last of her so-called Mexican stories, Hacienda
and That Tree. She began to develop the remaining fragment of Many Redeemers into a
novel about the present day, that is, the interwar 1930s, when political currents constructed
barriers to human love and forgiveness.
Between 1940 and 1962, Porter expanded The
Present Day into a short novel called Promised
Land and then into a long novel titled first No
Safe Harbor and finally Ship of Fools by the time
it was published in 1962. For 22 years Porter had
supported herself with scattered publications (the
stories A Days Work, The Leaning Tower,
The Source, The Fig Tree, and Holiday;
excerpts from her long novel-in-progress; and
a variety of non-fiction pieces) and with brief
appearances as well as year-long appointments
at colleges and universities. After she divorced
Pressly in 1938 and married Albert Russel Erskine,
whom she divorced in 1942, she depended heavily
on the patronage of the artist colony Yaddo, in
Saratoga Springs, New York. She spent a year at
the Library of Congress as a fellow in Regional
American Literature and afterward worked in
Hollywood as a scriptwriter.
Ship of Fools, published April 1, 1962 to considerable fanfare and enthusiastic critical reception, soon became a bestseller. Although some
tepid and negative reviews appeared several
months after publication, the novel was generally
well received. Mark Schorer in the New York
Times rated it one of the best novels in the past
100 years and compared it with George Eliots
Middlemarch. Those who found fault with it
complained of Porters dark view of humanity
and its episodic structure. The critic Wayne Booth
questioned whether it was really a novel.
An analysis of the decade of the 1930s in the
Western hemisphere, Ship of Fools is structured as
772
a voyage on the symbolically named ship the Vera,

traveling from Vera Cruz, Mexico to Bremen,
Germany, whose passengers and crew comprise
the more than 900 characters who represent the
various social strata of human life. Because it is a
German ship, the captain, the officers, the ships
physician, and some of the most visible passengers
are German. Porter explores, in that context, the
seeds of Nazism, the many manifestations of love
and lovelessness, and the way that human beings
are isolated from one another. A satire in the spirit
of Swift and Erasmus, Ship of Fools illustrates the
relationship between historical tradition and its
modern manifestation.
It was not Ship of Fools but rather Porters
Collected Stories (1965) that brought her the
recognition of a Pulitzer Prize and a National
Book Award. Having already received numerous
awards and honorary degrees for the past 30 years,
Porter continued to be singled out for the excellence of her prose fiction and her contributions to
modern literature.
With the publication of Ship of Fools and its
adaptation into an award-winning movie with a
stellar cast, Porter earned a substantial amount of
money that should have set her up for the rest of
her life. However, she spent faster than she earned,
and only by the careful management of her
finances by agents, friends, and her nephew Paul
Porter did her money last through her lifetime.
After Ship of Fools, she wrote no new fiction. In
1976 a farcical story she had written in the 1920s
was published as The Spivvleton Mystery, and
in 1977 a memoir she had drafted decades earlier
about her participation in the protests against the
1927 executions of the anarchists Nicola Sacco
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was published as The
Never-Ending Wrong. At her death on September
19, 1980, she left unfinished her biography of
Cotton Mather and a long story (or short novel)
about events surrounding the martyrdom of Joan
of Arc. Her ashes were buried in a plot adjacent
to her mothers grave in the cemetery at Indian
Creek, Texas. On her tombstone is engraved
IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING.
SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); Joyce,
James (BIF); The Little Magazines (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF);

Austenfeld, T. C. (2001). American Women Writers and
the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford,
and Hellman. Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia.
Busby, M., & Heaberlin, D. (eds.) (2001). From Texas
to the World and Back: Essays on the Journeys of
Katherine Ann Porter. Fort Worth: Texas Christian
University Press.
DeMouy, J. K. (1983). Katherine Anne Porters Women:
The Eye of Her Fiction. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Givner, J. (1991). Katherine Anne Porter: A Life [1982]
Hendrick, G., & Hendrick, W. (1988). Katherine Anne
Porter. Boston: Twayne.
Liberman, M. M. (1971). Katherine Anne Porters
Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Machann, C., & Clark, W. B. (eds.) (1990). Katherine
Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship.
College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Porter, K. A. (1962). Ship of Fools. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Porter, K. A. (1965). The Collected Stories of Katherine
Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Porter, K. A. (1970). The Collected Essays and Occasional
Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. New York:
Seymour Lawrence.
Porter, K. A. (1977). The Never-Ending Wrong. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Porter, K. A. (1990). Letters of Katherine Anne Porter
(ed. I. Bayley). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Porter, K. A. (1991). This Strange, Old World and
Other Book Reviews (ed. D. H. Unrue). Athens:
Porter, K. A. (1993). Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine
Anne Porter (ed. R. M. Alvarez & T. F. Walsh) Austin:
Porter, K. A. (1996). Katherine Anne Porters Poetry
(ed. D. H. Unrue). Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Stout, J. (1995). Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of
the Times. Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia.
Titus, M. (2005). The Ambivalent Art of Katherine
Anne Porter. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Unrue, D. H. (1985). Truth and Vision in Katherine
Anne Porters Fiction. Athens: University of
Georgia Press.
Unrue, D. H. (1988). Understanding Katherine
Anne Porter. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Unrue, D. H. (ed.) (1997). Critical Essays on Katherine
Anne Porter. New York: G. K. Hall.
Unrue, D. H. (2005). Katherine Anne Porter: The Life

of an Artist. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Walsh, T. F. (1992). Katherine Anne Porter and
Mexico: The Illusion of Eden. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Postmodernist Fiction
ANDREW HOBEREK
First invoked in response to the mid-twentiethcentury waning of modernisms revolutionary

energies, postmodernism is among the most slippery and frequently debated terms in literary
history. At its most coherent, the term specifies
writing that inverts features associated with
the modernist literature of the early twentieth
century: where modernism promotes depth psychology, postmodernism offers deliberately flat
characterization; where modernism upholds
the boundary between high and low culture,
postmodernism blurs this boundary; where modernism emphasizes control and structure, postmodernism incorporates contingency and play;
where the modernist artist strives, in the words of
James Joyce, to be invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails (1999),
the postmodernist endlessly intrudes and comments upon the work in progress. Yet to the extent
that this account casts postmodernism as the
rebellious child of a stern father (with the masculine gender dynamic that this implies), it overstates the differences between modernism and
postmodernism and oversimplifies the internal
differences within each category. One of the major
debates about postmodernism concerns whether
it overturns or continues the modernist project.
And indeed this is not surprising given that
postmodernism arises in response to the midcentury institutionalization of modernism, seeking to overturn its predecessor in the interest
of reviving and extending modernisms own
revolt against the canons of proper literary taste
(Huyssen 1986). Both modernism and postmodernism, moreover, set themselves against the
majority of twentieth-century literature, which
remains committed to realism. In this respect we
can define postmodernism most simply as the
twentieth centurys second great flowering of
experimental, anti-realist fiction.
773
In practice, however, the term postmodernism oscillates between describing a distinct set
of aesthetic features and providing a catch-all term
for all literature published following World War II.
The terms earliest invocations, by figures like the
poet Charles Olson and the critic Irving Howe,
are more temporal than descriptive. In an essay
bemoaning the rise of so-called mass society and
the consequent erasure of the social distinctions
against which modernism had rebelled, for
instance, Howe (1969) characterized as postmodern a number of writers Bernard Malamud,
J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow upon whom we would
no longer confer this distinction. As Howe realized, however, writers of the 1940s and 1950s
strove, in largely unprogrammatic ways, to move
beyond modernisms stylistic prescriptions. Bellow, for instance, opened his first novel, Dangling
Man (1944), with an attack on the controlled (and
to Bellows mind, emotionally inhibited) prose of
Hemingway, while the Beats strove in both poetry
and prose for a loose, spontaneous-seeming style
opposed to the formalist prescriptions of modernism and its offshoot, the New Criticism. In 1967
the novelist John Barth (1984), while not using the
term postmodernism, called for a new experimental fiction that would replace the now outdated
models of Joyce and Franz Kafka. The term itself,
meanwhile, came into its own in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, when critics began employing it to
describe concrete differences between contemporary writing and that of the modernist masters
with Fiedler (1990) stressing postmodernisms
openness to popular forms such as pornography
and the western, for instance, and Hassan (1987)
offering a still-cited list of distinctions (hierarchy
vs. anarchy, art object vs. process, metaphysics vs.
irony, and so forth) between modernist and postmodernist fiction.
Even as subsequent critics further refined the
definition of postmodernist fiction (McHale 1987;
Hutcheon 1988), however, other observers offered more expansive definitions driven by the
recognition of another key feature of postmodernity: its tendency to blur the lines between discrete
areas of cultural endeavor. The 1970s boom in
writing about postmodernism was driven not
only by the steady appearance of challenging new
work by authors like Thomas Pynchon, William
Gaddis, and Robert Coover, but also by the new
transdisciplinary prestige of poststructuralist
774
philosophy, which shared a number of postmodernist fictions presuppositions about the nature
of language and reality (Hite 1991). If modernism
had been an international movement encompassing various art forms painting and sculpture,
music and poetry postmodernism seemed like
a totalizing logic linking everything, from avantgarde novels and deconstructionist philosophy to
architecture, advertising, television shows, and
politics. Many of the most compelling accounts
of postmodernity have been interdisciplinary,
from Lyotard (1979)s description of the decline
of so-called meta-narratives in technocratic society (first prepared as a report on higher education
for the Conseil des Universites du Quebec) to
Haraways (1991) scientifically informed discussion of the cyborg as the preeminent figure of
postmodernity. Jameson (1991) has offered arguably the most influential account of postmodernism with his assertion that critics in various
disciplines must look beyond merely stylistic
definitions to understand it as the totalizing
cultural logic of late capitalism. In recent years,
frequent announcements of postmodernisms
end have been joined by increasingly retrospective
analyses that blend close attention to literary form
with a sense of the broader historical frameworks
within which postmodernist fiction took shape:
the widespread sense of paranoia engendered by
the Cold War and the rise of large organizations
(Melley 1999; ODonnell 2000), the transformation of utopian thought in the 1960s (DeKoven
2000), and the rise of university-based creative
writing programs (McGurl 2005).
In a similar tentatively retrospective spirit, we
might divide the history of postmodernist fiction
into four overlapping phases: early efforts to move
beyond modernist form, the heroic age of postmodernist experimental fiction running through
the 1970s, the blending of postmodernism with
realism and other modes in the late 1970s and
1980s, and the ongoing resonances of postmodernism in contemporary fiction.
While Bellow and the Beats responded to the
advent of mass society with neo-Romantic efforts
to represent the plenitude of individual personality, other writers responded in ways that more
clearly anticipate postmodernism. Flannery
OConnor, for instance, consciously downplayed
characters motivations in an effort to gesture
toward a realm of mystery beyond the constraining
social logic whose proper genres were psychology

and sociology. Yet this effort to cultivate an aura
of individuality and theological significance by
means of what she failed to tell her readers led
the devoutly Catholic OConnor to produce precisely the sorts of flat characterization and banal,
massified settings that we associate with postmodern fiction. For this reason, the younger novelist
John Hawkes declared that OConnor was, like
Milton, unintentionally of the Devils party
(1962). If OConnor crafts her nihilistic landscapes
in implicit contrast with the fullness of meaning
available to believers, the more secular Hawkes
offers similar landscapes as a token of the exhaustion of meaning in human history. Thus in
Hawkess The Beetle Leg (1951), similarly deindividualized, motiveless characters move around a
western setting that has less in common with the
mythic American West than with the modernist
wastelands of T. S. Eliot and others. Yet unlike
Eliot or Joyce, Hawke offers no mythological order
beyond the contemporary, shores no fragments
against the ruins; indeed, in his novel the modernist evocation of the wasteland seems like just
another hollow story, expected and thus unable
to shock or move the reader. In this respect,
Hawkess fiction seems related to the contemporaneous fiction of authors working in popular
genres, like Philip K. Dick and Jim Thompson.
Both Dick and Thompson are aware of, and
frequently cite, Freudian and other deep psychological explanations of their characters behavior
indeed, the characters themselves cite these
explanations, which thus come to seem less like
descriptions of an external reality than like
scripts the characters mechanically follow. This
concern that people might not be free agents but
simply pawns in an unknown game a clear
legacy of Howes invocation of mass society
constitutes a major feature of postmodernist
fiction (Tanner 1971; Hite 1991; Heise 1997;
Osteen 2000).
By the mid-1960s, recognizably postmodern
fiction was appearing under the banner of the
so-called black humor. Bruce Jay Friedman, in
the introduction to his 1965 anthology Black
Humor which featured work by Barth, Joseph
Heller, and Pynchon, among others argued that
these authors embraced stereotypes and absurdity
in a simple effort to keep up with an era of media
sensationalism and government propaganda.
This understanding of postmodernism as a response to an increasingly surreal reality illuminates both the non-fiction experiments of the
New Journalism and the postmodernist novels
persistent attraction to such media spectacles as
Watergate and the Vietnam War. The postmodernist fascination with representation as reality
finds an apt symbol in the illogical, yet on some
level convincing, assertion that Hellers 1961
Catch-22 is somehow about the yet-to-occur
Vietnam War. Certainly Hellers book anticipates
not only the representation of war in books
ranging from Kurt Vonneguts 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five to Michael Herrs 1985 Dispatches and
the novels of Tim OBrien but also, on some level,
the prosecution of the Vietnam War itself.
This notion of postmodernism as a form of
higher realism belies its distinctly non-realist
methods, however, which are often accompanied
by a playfulness at odds with both high modernist
seriousness and the at times bleak worldview of
authors like OConnor and Hawkes. The narrator
of Barths 1967 story Lost in the Funhouse, for
instance, continually interrupts its narrative
about an adolescent boy on a World War II-era
trip to the Maryland shore with metafictional
commentary of the sort one might imagine the
story receiving in a creative writing class (such as
one Barth himself would then have been teaching
at SUNY Buffalo). But the story transcends mere
cleverness by making these comments resonate
with the pathos of the protagonist, who experiences his emerging vocation as a writer as a
paralyzing sense of detachment from other people
he presumes are more unselfconsciously able to
act rather than think. At the same time, the storys
playfulness about the writing program dicta it
interjects establishes a sense of the authors agency
as someone who manipulates, rather than simply
being manipulated by, such prescriptions. A similar playfulness inheres in Donald Barthelmes
fiction, which plays upon the fear that human
beings have been reduced to cartoonish stereotypes by inserting figures like Snow White and
Batman and Robin, to humorous effect, in banal,
quotidian situations. And novels like Pynchons
Gravitys Rainbow (1973) and Robert Coovers
The Public Burning (1977) combine moral and
aesthetic seriousness with frequently juvenile,
scatological humor, offering a carnivalesque
affirmation of human existence amidst the
775
deindividualizing imperatives of late-twentiethcentury life.

In one of the most coherent accounts of postmodernisms difference from its predecessor,
McHale (1987) argues that whereas modernisms
concerns are fundamentally epistemological (i.e.,
about the difficulty of knowing about a reality
whose ultimate existence nonetheless remains
unquestioned), those of postmodernism are ontological (i.e., about the nature of reality or realities as such). If modernisms favored popular
genre was the detective story, McHale argues,
then postmodernisms is science fiction, and
indeed another important predecessor of postmodernism is the alternative-reality stories of
writers like Dick and Joanna Russ. This fascination with alternative realities manifests itself in
Pynchons intimation, in Gravitys Rainbow, of a
counterforce of the preterite (a theological term
meaning the opposite of elect), who exist outside
the notice of the forces that govern society and
can thus model an alternative way of life. Likewise
Ishmael Reed suggests, in novels such as Mumbo
Jumbo (1971), that all of Western history has been
a conspiracy against an original heterotopia
whose legacy dimly resonates in polytheistic religions such as voodoo, the aesthetics of ragtime
and jazz, and the politics of Third World liberation. Just as important as the politics of Reeds
fiction is its form, which expresses its opposition
to abstract, monological thinking by violating
proper fictional norms (Mumbo Jumbos first
chapter appears before the title page, for instance)
and its liberal use of quotations from other texts
and photographic images.
As this account suggests, the worldview of
high postmodernism derived not only from fears
of a deindividualizing mass society but also,
more positively, from the hopeful energies unleashed by such phenomena as global decolonization and the transnational counterculture.
In the 1980s, following the denouement of the
Vietnam War and the rightward turn in American politics, postmodernist fiction becomes at
once more mainstream and more constrained.
While DeLillo is frequently cited as Pynchons
successor, for instance, his novels such as The
Names (1982), which takes place with the Iranian
Revolution as backdrop, and White Noise (1985),
which satirizes middle-American consumer culture, are marked not by the search for alternative
776
systems but by a paranoid suspicion of systems as

such. Indeed, these novels demonstrate a faith in
the world of concrete things that has less in
common with postmodernism than with the
minimalism of authors such as Joan Didion and
Raymond Carver.
Some authors did continue to write difficult
experimental fiction in the 1980s, often in explicit
alliance with post-1960s political movements.
Kathy Ackers novels, for instance, deconstruct
normative assumptions about sex and gender,
while Leslie Marmon Silkos Storyteller (1981)
and Theresa Hak Kyung Chas Dictee (1982)
employ collage-like structures similar to Reeds
Silko incorporating Native American oral traditions and Cha mimicking multilingual experience
through a combination of English, French, and
other languages. But DeLillos fiction exemplifies
what Steiner (1999) has identified as the main
trend of late 1970s and 1980s fiction, the blending
of postmodernist experimentalism with realism
and autobiography. DeLillo and Toni Morrison
incorporate postmodernist techniques into realist
novels, while Maxine Hong Kingstons nonfiction works The Woman Warrior (1976) and
China Men (1980) blend an autobiographical
impulse derived from popular feminism and
multiculturalism with formal experimentation
similar to that of New Journalists like Norman
Mailer and Hunter Thompson.
Similarly, postmodernist techniques that had
in some cases been drawn from popular science
fiction reappear in the new science-fictional
subgenre of cyberpunk, where they take on an
unexpectedly realist cast as diegetical markers of
an imagined virtual world anticipating the Internet. In a further twist, Acker would invoke
Gibsons seminal 1981 Neuromancer in her 1988
Empire of the Senseless (McHale 1992). And all of
the trends associated with what we might call late
postmodernism DeLillos blend of realism
and postmodernism, and his fascination with
contemporary technoculture; Morrisons and
Kingstons adaptations of magic realism; and
cyberpunks exploration of mass-mediated experience find expression in Karen Tei
Yamashitas 1997 Tropic of Orange, even as the
novel pushes beyond postmodernism into what
we might call the fiction of globalization
(Adams 2007).
In general, postmodernist fiction has since the

mid-1980s become just one part of a diverse
landscape of American fictional production. In
1996, the popular and critical success of David
Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest spurred many observers to remark that the era of the big, experimental postmodern novel was back. But if on one
level Wallaces novel seemed like a return to the
high-postmodernist heyday of works like Gravitys Rainbow, on another it was marked by a
sentimental approach to the posthuman world
of the mass-mediated, late-twentieth-century
US very different from the ironic stances of
Barthelme, Coover, and DeLillo (Giles 2007).
Wallace and other younger authors like Jonathan
Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, and
the members of the McSweeneys circle employ
postmodern techniques but evince an (at times
nostalgic) desire for emotional fullness absent
from much of the twentieth-century avant garde
tradition. In this respect, it is not surprising that
a number of these authors express admiration for
Vonnegut, the most traditionally humanist of the
postmodernists and a figure who has heretofore
remained for this reason as much as his proximity to popular science fiction on the margins
of the canon. As the history of canonization
demonstrates, however, writers practice retroactively shapes the traditions in which they participate. For this reason we can probably expect
future accounts of postmodernism in which Vonnegut will play a larger role than he heretofore has.
All of which is to say that the definitive history of
postmodernism will remain unwritten for some
time still.
Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction
(AF); Speculative Fiction (AF).
Adams, R. (2007). The Ends of America, the Ends
of Postmodernism. Twentieth-Century Literature
53(2) 24872.
Barth, J. (1984). The Literature of Exhaustion [1967].
In The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction.
New York: Putnams, pp. 6276.
DeKoven, M. (2004). Utopia Limited: The Sixties and
the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham, NC:
POWELL, DAWN
Fiedler, L. (1990). Cross the Border Close the Gap.

In A New Fiedler Reader [1970]. Amherst, MA:
Prometheus, pp. 27094.
Friedman, B. J. (ed.) (1965). Black Humor. New York:
Bantam.
Giles, P. (2007). Sentimental Posthumanism: David
Foster Wallace. Twentieth-Century Literature, 53(2),
32744.
Haraway, D. J. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge,
pp. 14981.
Hassan, I. (1987). POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical
Bibliography [1971]. In The Postmodern Turn: Essays
in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, pp. 2545.
Hawkes, J. (1962). Flannery OConnors Devil.
Sewanee Review, 70, 395407.
Heise, U. K. (1997). Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative,
and Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Hite, M. (1991). Postmodern Fiction. In E. Elliott (ed.),
The Columbia History of the American Novel.
New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 697725.
Howe, I. (1969). Mass Society and Post-Modern
Fiction [1959]. In M. Klein (ed.), The American
Novel Since World War II. New York: Fawcett,
pp. 12441.
History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism,
University Press.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or the Cultural
University Press.
Joyce, J. (1999). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man [1916]. New York: Penguin.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge (trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi).
McGurl, M. (2005). The Program Era: Pluralisms of
Postwar American Fiction. Critical Inquiry, 32(1),
10229.
Methuen.
McHale, B. (1992). Constructing Postmodernism.
Melley, T. (1999). Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture
of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
ODonnell, P. (2000). Latent Destinies: Cultural
Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
777
Olson, C. (1997). The Materials and Weights

of Herman Melville [1952]. In D. Allen &
B. Friedlander (eds.), Collected Prose.
Berkeley: University of California Press,
pp. 11319.
Osteen, M. (2000). American Magic and Dread: Don
DeLillos Dialogue With Culture. Philadelphia:
Steiner, W. (1999). Postmodern Fictions, 19701990.
In S. Berkovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of
American Literature, vol. 7: Prose Writings,
19401990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 425538.
Tanner, T. (1971). City of Words: American Fiction
19501970. New York: Harper and Row.
Powell, Dawn
TIM PAGE
Largely underappreciated during her lifetime,

Dawn Powell was a prolific American novelist,
playwright, short story writer, and diarist whose
life and works were discovered posthumously by
an erudite and passionate group of authors,
critics, and general readers in the 1980s and
1990s. Powell called herself a permanent visitor
to New York City, her adopted home for the last
47 years of her life. Throughout all, she retained a
certain practicality and common sense often associated with her native Midwest that permitted
her to see through the foibles of Manhattan high
life and low. Most of her novels are set in either
Ohio or New York: the earlier cycle best represented by Dance Night (1930) and Come Back to
Sorrento (1932) tends to be tender, poignant,
and bucolic, while the latter group of which
Turn, Magic Wheel (1936) and A Time to Be Born
(1942) are two superior examples is fast-paced,
satirical, and often scathingly funny.
She was born in Mt. Gilead, Ohio on November
28, 1896, the daughter of Roy King and Hattie
Sherman Powell. After Hattie Powell died from a
botched abortion in 1903, the father married a
conspicuously cruel woman who tormented her
young stepdaughters a series of events Powell
chronicled in her semiautobiographical novel
My Home Is Far Away (1944). Powell ran away
to live with an aunt, Orpha May Steinbrueck, in
Shelby, Ohio and was later accepted as a student
by Lake Erie College, where she graduated in 1918.
778
POWELL, DAWN
Powell moved immediately to New York,

where she married Joseph Gousha then a poet
and music critic, and later a successful advertising executive in 1920. Their only child, Joseph
Roebuck Gousha, Jr., was born the following
year, and suffered from marked and mysterious
mental and emotional difficulties from an early
age, now generally attributed to autism, a condition that was not discovered until he was in his
twenties.
Powell disowned and did her best to destroy all
copies she could find of her first published novel,
Whither (1925). For the rest of her life, she would
always claim that She Walks in Beauty (1928) was
her first book. The Brides House (1929) the story
of a woman divided between her loyalty to her
kind husband and her infatuation with a lover is
probably based on Powells clandestine affair with
the radical playwright and screenwriter John
Howard Lawson.
The value Powell placed on Dance Night, the
study of a gritty Ohio mill town, cannot be
overstated. But after it proved a popular and
critical failure, she set to work on Come Back to
Sorrento, with the specific idea of creating romantic fiction that might become a bestseller. Her
publisher renamed it The Tenth Moon, to Powells
disgust (it has since been reissued under the
original title), but this, too, found little favor.
She turned from Ohio to present-day New
York with Turn, Magic Wheel, a send-up of New
York literary life written in a breathless, exhilarated manner that won her a new audience. She
followed this with a series of hard, bright satires
The Happy Island (1938), Angels on Toast (1940),
A Time to Be Born (1942), The Locusts Have No
King (1948), The Wicked Pavilion (1954), and The
Golden Spur (1962). The Wicked Pavilion made it
to the bottom of the New York Times bestseller list,
the only one of her novels to get there, but it lasted
for only a single week. Nor were any of her plays
or attempts at screenwriting successful.
True gaiety, Powell wrote in 1939, is based
on a foundation of realism. Powells hearty,
stoical pessimism would be tested in her last years,
which were unusually difficult. After her husband
was forced into retirement in 1958, the family
finances collapsed and the couple was forced to
live in a series of seedy residence hotels. Joseph
Gousha died of cancer in 1962, and their son was
made a ward of New York state. Powell herself
died of intestinal cancer on November 14, 1965

during the week of the first great New York
blackout, a coincidence she might have appreciated. She donated her body to science and her
remains were buried on Hart Island, New Yorks
Potters Field, in 1970.
One of Samuel Johnsons acquaintances made
an effort to become a philosopher but gave it up
because, he said, cheerfulness was always breaking in. Powell, a merciless observer of the human
condition who never pretended she was any
nobler than the rest of her besotted, scattered,
doomed characters dear and valuable in spite of
themselves would have understood.
Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF)
Josephson, M. (1973). Dawn Powell: A Woman of
Esprit. Southern Review, 9(1), 1852.
Page, T. (1998). Dawn Powell: A Biography. New York:
Henry Holt.
Powell, D. (1925). Whither. Boston: Small, Maynard.
Powell, D. (1928). She Walks in Beauty. New York:
Brentanos.
Powell, D. (1929). The Brides House. New York:
Brentanos.
Powell, D. (1930). Dance Night. New York: Farrar
and Rinehart.
Powell, D. (1932). The Tenth Moon [originally pub. as
ComeBacktoSorrento].NewYork:FarrarandRinehart.
Powell, D. (1934). The Story of a Country Boy.
New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
Powell, D. (1936). Turn, Magic Wheel. New York:
Powell, D. (1938). The Happy Island. New York:
Powell, D. (1940). Angels on Toast. New York:
Scribners.
Powell, D. (1942). A Time to Be Born. New York:
Scribners.
Powell, D. (1944). My Home Is Far Away. New York:
Scribners.
Powell, D. (1948). The Locusts Have No King. New York:
Scribners.
Powell, D. (1954). The Wicked Pavilion. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Powell, D. (1956). A Mans Affair [revision of Angels
on Toast]. New York: Fawcett.
Powell, D. (1957). A Cage for Lovers. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
POWERS, RICHARD
Powell, D. (1962). The Golden Spur. New York: Viking.

Powell, D. (1995). The Diaries of Dawn Powell,
19311965 (ed. T. Page). Hanover, NH: Steerforth.
Powell, D. (1998). Sunday, Monday and Always [1952]
(ed. and rev. T. Page). Hanover, NH: Steerforth.
Powell, D. (1999). Four Plays (ed. T. Page & M. Sexton).
Hanover, NH: Steerforth.
Powell, D. (1999). Selected Letters of Dawn Powell,
19131965 (ed. T. Page). New York: Henry Holt.
Rice, M. S. (2000). Dawn Powell. Woodbridge, CT:
Twayne.
Vidal, G. (1987). Dawn Powell: The American Writer.
New York Review of Books (Nov. 5).
Powers, Richard
JOSEPH DEWEY
The novels of Richard Powers are dense speculative narratives that set the heartbreaking plotlines
of everyday life stories of obsessive love, dysfunctional families, illness, and death against a
wide-reaching sensibility that invests such ordinary moments with unsuspected (and compassionate) gravitas. To read the novels as a unit (and
each successive novel addresses questions raised
by the preceding one) is to recover the sheer
density of assumptions we routinely make about
the world.
Born June 18, 1957 in Evanston, Illinois,
Powers spent his teenage years in Thailand his
father, a middle school principal, administered
an international school in Bangkok. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Powers took
a degree in physics and rhetoric, finding either
discipline by itself unavailable to what he conceived as the aerial view of experience. He completed his masters in literature (from Illinois in
1979) but left academia, finding literary study
too narrow. A self-taught computer programmer
(indeed, Powers is an autodidact of heroic dimension), Powers supported himself by freelancing
computer work in Boston while he worked on
his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a
Dance (1985), an elegant meditation on World
War 1 based on an imaginative recreation of the
lives of three Westphalian farm boys in an August
Sander photograph Powers chanced to see in
a Boston museum. Encouraged by the reviews,
Powers accepted an appointment at Illinois and
there completed his second novel, Prisoners
779
Dilemma (1988). A much darker meditation on

the imagination and war, it juxtaposed the struggles of a close-knit Chicago family to accept the
imminent death of its brilliant and eccentric
father he had been exposed to radiation 20 years
earlier when he had witnessed the Trinity test site
blast with a fantastical account of a fictitious
Walt Disney propaganda film designed to help
win World War II.
Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989,
Powers, uneasy with his burgeoning celebrity,
moved to southern Holland to finish The Gold
Bug Variations (1991). Mining the metaphors
of contrapuntal music and genetics, it braided
two stories that anatomized the beauty and
mayhem of love: one, between a brilliant geneticist and a married colleague who in the late 1950s
work to crack the genetic code; the other, set a
generation later, between a research librarian
and a struggling artist. Returning to Urbana,
Powers published Operation Wandering Soul
(1993), a far more harrowing account of genetics: a promising surgeon-in-residence in the
pediatric ward in an East Los Angeles public
hospital suffers a nervous breakdown as he must
watch, helpless, while a beautiful, gifted Laotian
girl under his care succumbs to a virulent cancer.
In turn, the difficult process of reviving a shattered psyche centered Powerss next work, the
metafictional experiment Galatea 2.2 (1995).
The protagonist, a novelist named Richard
Powers, becomes involved in a cutting-edge
university research initiative designed to endow
a supercomputer program with the cognitive
skills to pass a masters-level oral exam. Introducing the computer program to the subtleties of
language (a la Pygmalion and his sculpture), the
character Powers reconnects with his own emotional life, using his long evenings teaching the
computer to come to terms with a lately shattered relationship.
Now holding an endowed chair as a writer-inresidence at Illinois, Powers, himself at midlife,
confronted the implications of mortality. Gain
(1998) juxtaposed the story of a single mother
coming to terms with her approaching death from
ovarian cancer with the long history of the chemical conglomerate whose environmental carelessness had most likely caused her cancer. Then,
in Plowing the Dark (2000), Powers twined
two narratives that tested the viability of the
780
PRICE, REYNOLDS
imagination in the face of mortality. In one story,

a burned-out New York artist helps create a
virtual reality program that makes art masterpieces come to life only to learn that the same
technology has been co-opted by the Defense
Department to develop guidance systems for
smart bombs; in the other story, an American
English teacher, taken hostage by Muslim terrorists in war-torn Beirut, spends three years blindfolded and shackled to a radiator, and discovers
the sustenance of the imagination.
But can the individual be separated from the
wider forces of history? In The Time of Our
Singing (2003), a sweeping family saga, a Jewish
physicist, driven from Hitlers Germany, marries
an African American singer from Philadelphia
shortly before the start of World War II. Their
three children, each gifted musically, struggle
heroically (and futilely) to live in a mid-century
American culture burdened by its history of
racial intolerance. Powers draws on the metaphors of both music and quantum physics as
countervisions of complex harmony. Although
controversial as Powers used first-person narration to project into the black experience, the
novel was shortlisted for the Pulitzer. In The Echo
Maker (2006), a National Book Award winner,
Powers in turn tests how memory creates history,
not vice versa. A car accident leaves a Chicago
slaughterhouse worker brain damaged a victim
of Capgras syndrome, a rare condition that
makes him suspect that his sister, his only living
relative, is an imposter. Desperate, the sister
contacts a celebrated New York neurologist intrigued by the brother as a potential case study.
Even as the brother recovers his memory, the
neurologist, on the downside of his career, undergoes an identity crisis of his own.
Like Don DeLillo, to whom he is often compared, Powers informs the novel of ideas with the
humanity of mimetic realism and the formal
experimentation of postmodernism. Each narrative architecture is a contrapuntal harmonic
that brings together two (and in some cases
three) narrative braids that would appear incommensurable but that ultimately create a
sophisticated dynamic. That structural signature, in turn, suggests Powerss wider vision,
one that challenges borders (much as his fiction
juxtaposes fiction and non-fiction as, amid the
execution of his plots, he offers poetic essay-like
set pieces on a range of subjects). In effect,

Powers argues, the wide sweep of the imagination and the hard scrutiny of the intelligence
the arts and the sciences, the heart and the head
must engage in a dialectic to even begin to
appreciate the sheer range of the human project.
SEE ALSO: DeLillo, Don (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF)
Berger, K. (2003). The Art of Fiction: Interview With
Richard Powers. Paris Review 164, 10938.
Burn, S. J., & Dempsey, P. (eds.) (2008). Intersections:
Essays on Richard Powers. Champaign, IL: Dalkey
Archive.
Dewey, J. (2002). Understanding Richard Powers.
LeClair, T. (1996). The Prodigious Fiction of
Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David
Foster Wallace. Critique, 38, 1237.
Neilson, J. (ed.) (1998). Richard Powers [special issue].
Review of Contemporary Fiction, 18(3).
Powers, R. (1985). Three Farmers on Their Way to a
Dance. New York: Beech Tree-Morrow.
Powers, R. (1988). Prisoners Dilemma. New York:
Beech Tree-Morrow.
Powers, R. (1991). The Gold Bug Variations. New York:
Morrow.
Powers, R. (1993). Operation Wandering Soul.
New York: Morrow.
Powers, R. (1995). Galatea 2.2 New York: Farrar.
Powers, R. (1998). Gain. New York: Farrar.
Powers, R. (2000). Plowing the Dark. New York: Farrar.
Powers, R. (2003). The Time of Our Singing. New York:
Farrar.
Powers, R. (2006). The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar.
Williams, J. (1999). The Last Generalist: An
Interview With Richard Powers. Cultural Logic, 2(2).
At http://clogic.eserver.org/2-2/williams.html,
accessed Jan. 15, 2010.
Price, Reynolds
VICTOR STRANDBERG
In 1963 Reynolds Price won the William Faulkner

Foundation Award for his first novel, A Long and
Happy Life, a book that has now sold over a
million copies. From that spectacular beginning,
he went on to compose three volumes of short
PRICE, REYNOLDS
stories, 13 novels, six plays, four volumes of

poetry, three collections of essays, three memoirs,
and enough religious writing to feature him on
the cover of Time (Dec. 6, 1999). In addition to
such versatility, Price has published countless
book reviews and interviews that disclose a vast
array of literary interests and relationships.
Born February 1, 1933 in Macon, North
Carolina, Edward Reynolds Price graduated
summa cum laude from Duke University in
1955, spent three years at Oxford University as
a Rhodes Scholar, and in 1958 became a writer-inresidence and teacher at Duke. A crucial turning
point in his life was the discovery, in May 1984, of
a malignant tumor on his spine. An operation and
radiation treatments slowed the progress of the
malignancy, but left him paraplegic and confined
to a wheelchair and in a state of colossal, incessant pain. The magnificent productivity of his
later decades has vindicated his heroic choice
to write and endure the pain.
A lifelong bachelor, Price has nonetheless taken
the dynamics of family life as a central feature of
his work, most notably in the two trilogies that
comprise his major achievement. The first, A
Singular Family: Rosacoke and Her Kin (1999),
began with A Long and Happy Life (1962), about
a rural girls relationship with the boy who impregnated her. A Generous Man (1966) portrayed
her brother Milos sexual initiation at age 15 as
a modern version of Miltons Fortunate Fall.
Decades later, Good Hearts (1988) portrayed
Rosacoke and her husband working through a
midlife crisis.
In 1975 Price launched the other trilogy,
A Great Circle, with his most ambitious novel,
The Surface of Earth, centering on fatherson
relationships through three generations of the
Mayfield family. Its youngest scion, Hutch Mayfield, reappears as the central character in The
Source of Light, bearing a considerable resemblance to his author. The Promise of Rest (1995)
ends the cycle with the death, by AIDS, of Hutchs
son, Wade, who extends the Mayfield genealogy
by fathering a son by the sister of his black male
lover, thereby bridging the gay/straight and
black/white rifts in the Great (Mayfield) Circle.
Within Prices other novels, James Schiff discerns two major themes, artists and outlaws. The
artist predominates in Love and Work (1968),
whose title poses a torturous artistic choice; in
781
the short story collection Permanent Errors

(1970), a title that prefigures a writers strained
or ruined relationships; in The Tongues of Angels
(1990), about a painter whose landscapes probe
the spiritual essence behind the worlds surface;
and in The Good Priests Son (2005), about an art
conservator who, after being nudged out of his
artists circle in New York by the 9/11 disaster,
returns to his North Carolina home to exorcise
a fathers malfeasance.
The outlaws, some of whom are also artists,
mainly perpetrate sexual transgressions, as in Kate
Vaiden (1986), when a teenage unwed mother
rebels against the traditional gender role by abandoning her son and enjoying a life of promiscuity
until she later seeks a reunion before her death.
In Blue Calhoun (1992), the first-person narrator
tries to expiate the harm he has caused his kinfolk
by an adulterous affair with a much younger
woman. Roxanna Slade (1998) adds a motif of
incest to the theme, and Noble Norfleet (2002)
involves a youths sexual initiation with his high
school teacher, prefiguring other love affairs,
including a homosexual tryst that leads to his
lovers suicide.
Considerable violence afflicts these minions
of Eros, whose family entanglements typically
involve murder, suicide, deaths in childbirth, and
by way of emotional violence deep ruptures
between parent and child. Eros in itself, however,
usually generates innocent fun, a joyous compensation for suffering that is perfectly compatible
with Prices Christian sensibility, yet a central
question in Prices work is the connection, whether benign or hostile, between erotic and family
love. Certainly Price sees marriage, an institution
which purports to delimit the boundaries of Eros,
as inadequate to that purpose, though it retains
central importance in the rearing of children.
Consequently, his fiction explores a wide range
of alternatives regarding both erotic love and the
idea of the family.
Largely because of Prices clear style and aversion to postmodern fashions, his fiction has failed
to attract much critical attention. For instance,
a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review
(June 29, 1975) dismissed The Surface of Earth as
a great lumbering archaic beast, ruinously out
of touch with the postmodernity of Thomas
Pynchon, John Barth, and Joseph Heller. Some
excellent criticism does exist, however, by way of
782
PROULX, ANNIE
book reviews, journal essays, and three outstanding books. These commentaries add strong support to Prices status as a major American author,
but for this highly accomplished writer, a major
work of criticism remains to be done.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); Southern Fiction (AF)
Price, R. (1962). A Long and Happy Life. New York:
Atheneum.
Price, R. (1966). A Generous Man. New York:
Atheneum.
Price, R. (1968). Love and Work. New York: Atheneum.
Price, R. (1970). Permanent Errors. New York:
Atheneum.
Price, R. (1975). The Surface of Earth. New York:
Atheneum.
Price, R. (1981). The Source of Light. New York:
Atheneum.
Price, R. (1986). Kate Vaiden. New York: Atheneum.
Price, R. (1988). Good Heart. New York: Atheneum.
Price, R. (1990). The Tongues of Angels. New York:
Atheneum.
Price, R. (1992). Blue Calhoun. New York: Atheneum.
Price, R. (1995). The Promise of Rest. New York:
Scribners.
Price, R. (1998). Roxanna Slade. New York: Scribners.
Price, R. (1999). A Singular Family: Rosacoke and
Her Kin. New York: Scribners.
Price, R. (2002). Noble Norfleet. New York: Scribners.
Price, R. (2005). The Good Priests Son. New York:
Scribners.
Rooke, C. (1983). Reynolds Price. Boston: Twayne.
Schiff, J. A. (1996). Understanding Reynolds Price.
Schiff, J. A. (ed.) (1998). Critical Essays on Reynolds
Price. New York: G. K. Hall.
Proulx, Annie
ALIKI VARVOGLI
Annie Proulx arrived late on the literary scene

but soon caught up with her contemporaries.
Since the publication of her first book of stories
in 1988, she has produced three further story
collections and four novels. Both popular and
critically acclaimed, she has been awarded numerous literary prizes: the PEN/Faulkner Award
for Fiction (1993) and both the National Book
Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1994).

Her work is often associated with regional writing, and most of her books are set away from
cities in rural areas underrepresented in American fiction. Proulx dislikes being categorized as a
woman writer, preferring her work to be read
and assessed for literary merit rather than for the
authors gender.
Proulx was born in Connecticut on August 22,
1935, the eldest of five daughters, though she
often wished for a brother she could join in
outdoor pursuits. Her adult life and writing style
are associated with qualities usually described as
masculine; her main characters are often men,
and she writes about farming, hunting, and generally living and working outdoors. After studying
history at the University of Vermont and Concordia University, she moved to a rural area on the
USCanada border and wrote journalism and
various how-to manuals. Her academic training
and her non-fiction writing gave her a taste for
meticulous research she employs in her fiction
writing. Her books open with long lists of acknowledgments, which reveal the breadth and
variety of her research. Although she is happy to
show the readers what sources she consulted, she
is reluctant to discuss other authors and does not
acknowledge any major influences, though she
has often been compared to Ernest Hemingway,
William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy.
Heart Songs (1988) comprises 11 stories set in
rural New England. As in all of her fiction, Proulx
does not romanticize her subjects or locations;
along with the humor and thoughtful, empathetic
descriptions of quiet, hidden lives, there is an
awareness of the hardship involved in rural living,
and her fiercest criticism is often directed at city
folk who come to consume the countryside
for their vacation. Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt
(2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008) are three
volumes of western stories she published since
moving to Wyoming in 1994; they have been
praised for their authenticity. Most involve families with dark secrets and violence lurking beneath
the surface. Despite her attention to verisimilitude, she also includes elements of the fantastic,
such as a talking tractor in Heart Songs, or the
Devil thinking of refurbishing Hell in Fine Just
the Way It Is. In the same volume, Tits-Up in a
Ditch attracted considerable attention and
shocked readers with its theme of the Iraq War,
PURDY, JAMES
but perhaps her most celebrated story is

Brokeback Mountain, which tells of a love affair
between two cowboys. It is a moving story that
shows Proulxs considerable gift of imaginative
empathy and showcases the literary treatment of
her chosen location.
The novels Postcards (1992), The Shipping News
(1993), Accordion Crimes (1996), and That Old Ace
in the Hole (2002) are set in rural areas and deal
with characters unlike the author herself. She has
acknowledged the influence of landscape on her
writing, and she is fascinated with language, collecting dictionaries of dialects and phrases. Postcards tells the story of Loyal Blood, who kills his
partner and leaves the family farm to travel across
America. As well as a story of family tragedy, the
book can be read as a portrait of postwar America.
The Shipping News, set in Newfoundland, is the
story of a bereaved father who rebuilds his life in a
small community after leaving New York. The
novel has been praised for its depiction of landscape and weather, but it is equally admirable for
its complex narrative structure, which involves
tortured personal and familial history, local history,
dialect and mores, and fragmented sentences that
mirror a pained consciousness.
Accordion Crimes combines the authors interest in both the genres of the story and the novel. It
is a collection of self-contained stories held together by the presence of an accordion, brought to
the US by a Sicilian and passing through the hands
of immigrants from different countries for whom
the instrument provides a link to their cultural
past as well as a means of survival and assimilation
in the New World. That Old Ace in the Hole tells of
the struggle between small farming communities
and big agricultural business. It is more humorous and light-hearted than the previous books,
but it still deals with serious issues such as family
relations, the exploitation of the land, and the
disappearance of some older ways of life.
SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Hemingway,
Ernest (AF); McCarthy, Cormac (AF);
Flavin, L. (1999). Quoyles Quest: Knots and Fragments
as Tools of Narration in The Shipping News. Critique:
Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 40(3),23947.
783
Oates, J. C. (2008). In Rough Country. New York Review

of Books, pp. 415 (Oct. 23).
Proulx, A. (1988). Heart Songs and Other Stories.
Proulx, A. (1992). Postcards. New York: Scribners.
Proulx, A. (1993). The Shipping News. New York:
Scribners.
Proulx, A. (1996). Accordion Crimes. New York:
Scribners.
Proulx, A. (1999). Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
Proulx, A. (2000). Big Skies, Empty Places. New Yorker,
p. 139 (Dec. 25).
Proulx, A. (2002). That Old Ace in the Hole. New York:
Scribners.
Proulx, A. (2004). Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2.
Proulx, A. (2008). Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming
Stories 3. New York: Scribners.
Rood, K. L. (2001). Understanding Annie Proulx.
Scanlon, J. (2008). Why Do We Still Want to Believe?
The Case of Annie Proulx. Journal of Narrative
Theory, 38(1),86110, 134.
Seiffert, R. (2002). Inarticulacy, Identity and Silence:
Annie Proulxs The Shipping News. Textual Practice,
16(3),51125.
Stewart, R. S. (1998). Tayloring the Self: Identity,
Articulation, and Community in Proulxs The
Shipping News. Studies in Canadian Literature
23(2) 4970.
Varvogli, A. (2002). Annie Proulxs The Shipping
News: A Readers Guide. New York: Continuum.
Purdy, James
JOSEPH T. SKERRETT JR.
James Purdy has been touted as a writers

writer that is, someone more respected and
admired by his peers than by the common reader
and the marketplace. His early stories were
praised by British writers like Dame Edith
Sitwell, to whom Purdy had sent a copy of a
privately printed volume in 1956, as well as
George Steiner, Angus Wilson, and John Cowper
Powys. His American admirers included Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Jerome Charyn,
Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, and, most recently,
Gore Vidal and Jonathan Lethem. He experienced
a brief period in the 1970s when his books made
it into inexpensive paperback editions fairly regularly, but as time passed these editions vanished
784
PURDY, JAMES
and were not followed by new editions of the early

texts or any paperback editions of many of his
later works. His plays of which there are over a
score have never been collected, and few are
published at all.
James Otis Purdy was born in Fremont, Ohio,
perhaps on July 17, 1923 but most likely earlier,
as he graduated from the University of Chicago in
1941. His parents divorced when Purdy was a
child, and he grew up in transit, moving frequently
between his parents separate households and his
grandmothers farm in northeastern Ohio. After
college, he served in the Army, then studied Spanish in Chicago and at the University of Puebla in
Mexico. He worked as a translator in Spain,
France, Cuba, and Mexico in the late 1940s.
Between 1949 and 1953, Purdy taught Spanish at
Lawrence College in Wisconsin before moving to
Brooklyn Heights in New York City, where lived
until his death.
After launching his career with that privately
printed collection of short fiction, Purdy published an expanded edition with New Directions
that included the novella 63: Dream Palace (1954).
He then landed a contract with a major New York
publisher for his first novel, Malcolm (1959). Since
then he has published 15 other novels, six collections of short stories, and five volumes of poetry.
Classifying Purdys prolific output has proven
a stumbling block for critics. His novels have
been set in locations across the United States,
and major character types, male and female,
include the very old, the very young, African
Americans, the very rich, the starving poor,
Native Americans, actors, composers, and, especially, writers of all sorts. His range of subjects is as
wide as the range of styles and genres available to
his imagination. Many proposed critical boxes
Midwestern realist, postmodern gothic fantasist,
gay romancer, and fabulist seemed increasingly
inadequate as the writing continued to unfold.
The earliest fictions (63: Dream Palace and
Malcolm) focused on the destruction of youthful
innocence and the betrayal of love, a theme to
which he frequently returned in quite different
later works. Malcolm is indeed both typical and
atypical of Purdys fiction. A picaresque exploration of a lost boy in search of his father who is
helped, exploited, bedded, and finally debauched
by patrons, the novel is surreal in some of
its juxtapositions of bizarre characters and com-
monplace situations, and thus unlike its more

realistic successors.
A set of novels including Jeremys Version
(1970), The House of the Solitary Maggot
(1974), Mourners Below (1981), and On Glorys
Course (1984) is concerned with Midwestern
settings and dark themes of small-town life, reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson. Another set,
including The Nephew (1960), In a Shallow Grave
(1975 arguably his masterpiece), and Gertrude of
Stony Island Avenue (1997), comprises versions of
romance, in which characters experience rebirth
of the heart from the experience of devastating
pain and loss. Garnet Montrose, the main character of In a Shallow Grave, is a hideously disfigured war veteran who returns to his Virginia
homestead to recover his health and an old,
conventional love affair. He learns to accept rejection and the mystery of love where he did not
expect it. Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967)
and Narrow Rooms (1978) focus on the destructive effect of resistance to homosexual desire.
Eustace Chisholm is a richly inventive work, at
the center of which is the terrifying tale of two
young men who cannot acknowledge their sexual
attraction. Eustace himself is one of Purdys most
frequently recurring tropes, the failed writer who
is unable to encompass the overwhelming nature
of human suffering.
The final grouping of novels (Cabot Wright
Begins (1964), I Am Elijah Thrush (1986), Garments the Living Wear (2001), and Out With the
Stars (1994)) might usefully be viewed as dark
satires, but nevertheless share with the others
and with his many superb short stories Purdys
themes of lost innocence, conflicted love and
violent passion, and the search for identity in a
not right world.
The respect for Purdys writing is reflected in
his receipt of literary awards. He has twice held
Guggenheim fellowships (1958, 1962), received
a Ford Fellowship for playwriting (1961), and in
1993 was awarded the Morton Dauwen Zabel
Award for fiction by the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters. Most recently,
Gore Vidal praised Purdy in a New York Times
article marking the twenty-first-century reissue of
a number of his works, one of which, Eustace
Chisholm and the Works, was cited by fellow
novelist Jonathan Franzen in awarding Purdy
the Mercantile Librarys Clifton Fadiman Medal
PYNCHON, THOMAS
for Excellence in Fiction in 2005. He died on

March 13, 2009.
SEE ALSO: Franzen, Jonathan (AF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism
(AF); Vidal, Gore (AF)
Adams, S. D. (1976). James Purdy. New York: Harper
and Row.
Baldanza, F. (1974). James Purdy on the Corruption of
Innocents. Contemporary Literature, 15(3), 31530.
Baldanza, F. (1975). Northern Gothic. Southern Review,
10, 56681.
Chupack, H. (1975). James Purdy. Boston: Twayne.
Purdy, J. (1956). 63: Dream Palace. New York: William
Frederick.
Purdy, J. (1959). Malcolm. New York: Farrar, Straus.
Purdy, J. (1960). The Nephew. New York: Farrar, Straus.
Purdy, J. (1964). Cabot Wright Begins. New York:
Farrar, Straus.
Purdy, J. (1967). Eustace Chisholm and the Works.
New York: Farrar, Straus.
Purdy, J. (1970). Jeremys Version. New York:
Doubleday.
Purdy, J. (1974). The House of the Solitary Maggot.
Purdy, J. (1975). In a Shallow Grave. New York:
Arbor House.
Purdy, J. (1978). Narrow Rooms. New York:
Arbor House.
Purdy, J. (1981). Mourners Below. New York: Viking.
Purdy, J. (1984). On Glorys Course. New York: Viking.
Purdy, J. (1988). The Candles of Your Eyes and Thirteen
Other Stories. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Purdy, J. (1997). Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue.
New York: Morrow.
Purdy, J. (2004). Moes Villa and Other Stories. New
Schwarzchild, B. (1968). The Not-Right House: Essays on
James Purdy. Columbia: University of Missouri
Press.
Skerrett, J. T. (1969). James Purdy and the Works:
Love and Tragedy in Five Novels. Twentieth Century
Pynchon, Thomas
LUC HERMAN and JOHN M. KRAFFT
On the strength of his first three novels, Thomas

Pynchon has become the epitome of American
postmodernism. While the label postmodernist
785
was not attached to him until the 1980s, it does

capture the features central to his work. A historical novelist even when his story is set in or near
the present, Pynchon renders the past with such
great ingenuity, humor, and self-awareness that,
along with E. L. Doctorow and Kurt Vonnegut,
he provides a main source for the concept of
what Linda Hutcheon has called historiographic
metafiction. Often working against conventional
characterization, plotting, and perspective, his
challenging yet entertaining novels address such
topics as capitalism, paranoia, technology, genocide, slavery, and terrorism without succumbing
to pedantry or simple caricature.
Pynchon, whose family roots in American history go back to the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, was born on May 8,
1937 in Glen Cove, New York and grew up in
nearby East Norwich. At 16, he entered Cornell
University as an engineering-physics major but
remained in that program for only one year. After
his second year at Cornell, he served for two years
in the US Navy, then returned to Cornell and
graduated with a degree in English in 1959. That
year also saw publication of his first two short
stories, The Small Rain and Mortality and
Mercy in Vienna. Low-Lands and Pynchons
best-known story, Entropy, appeared in 1960;
1961s Under the Rose won an O. Henry Award.
From 1960 to 1962, Pynchon worked as a
technical writer on the staff of the house organ
Bomarc Service News at the Boeing Airplane Co. in
Seattle while he completed the novel V. (1963),
which received the Faulkner Foundation Award
for best first novel of the year. The Secret
Integration, his last published short story and
the one Pynchon himself has said marked his
progression from apprentice to journeyman,
appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. His
second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), received a Rosenthal Foundation Award. Gravitys
Rainbow (1973), widely considered Pynchons
masterpiece, shared a National Book Award and
was nominated for but denied a Pulitzer Prize.
Awarded the Howells Medal in 1975 for the most
distinguished work of American fiction of the
previous five years, Pynchon politely refused it.
In 1988, however, he accepted a five-year,
$310,000 MacArthur Fellowship.
Pynchon also published odds and ends of nonfiction over the years, including at least one article
786
PYNCHON, THOMAS
on missile-handling safety (1960); essays on the

Watts riots (1966), Luddism (1984a), and sloth
(1993); a book review (1988); introductions to
books by Richard Farina (1983), Donald
Barthelme (1992), Jim Dodge (1997), and George
Orwell (2003); support notices; liner notes; and
more. In the interval between Gravitys Rainbow
and Vineland (1990), he collected his short stories
(except Mortality and Mercy in Vienna) into
Slow Learner (1984b), adding a reflective introduction. The novel Mason & Dixon appeared in
1997, and Against the Day in 2006. Inherent Vice
part homage to, part parody of, hard-boiled
detective fiction and film noir has just appeared
(2009).
Since Pynchon has always avoided personal
publicity, details of his private life are scarce.
Apparently he lived mostly in Mexico from late
1962 until 1964 or 1965, then mostly in various
places around California through the 1980s. Since
about 1989, he has lived in New York City with
his wife, Melanie Jackson, and their son.
V. combines a narrative about the amorous
endeavors of a group of mostly twenty-somethings in mid-1950s New York with an almost
chronological sequence of chapters set in various
locations in Europe and Africa between 1898 and
1943. The central characters of the New York plot
are the passive-aggressive Benny Profane and his
counterpart, Herbert Stencil, whose search for the
elusive V. mentioned in his spymaster fathers
journal leads him on the imaginative tour of the
past that results in the several Stencilized historical chapters. These appear to feature the title
character, whose probable death on Malta during
World War II is narrated in a long letter to Paola
Maijstral in New York. Stencil eventually goes to
Malta along with Paola and Profane, but his
search remains unresolved; and while the historical epilogue, set in Malta in 1919, provides many
clues to the connection between Stencils father
and V., it does not answer all the readers questions either. Pynchon endows Stencil with
a modernist craving for historical and encompassing explanations, but the characters frustration is nicely compensated if not for him, at least
for the reader by the creativity of his historical
imagination. The search for a woman at the
heart of the novel testifies to the importance for
Pynchon, early in his career, of the male attitude
toward the female other. However, the diverse
love interests in the New York chapters paint

such a varied picture of attitudes toward the
Feminine that the survival of the Western worship
of Woman as thematized in Stencils quest is by
no means given priority or offered as a solution to
what Pynchon may have seen as the sexual woes of
young Americans. Judging by the novels typescript and the correspondence between Pynchon
and his editor, V. benefited from a major prepublication overhaul, which involved dropping,
combining, reordering, and rewriting chapters.
Although he seriously addressed his editors advice
about the typescripts tendency toward protest,
its overlong party scenes, and its potentially confusing time shifts, Pynchon also proved himself a
masterly self-editor. Unlike V., which depicts an
African American saxophone player in terms of an
unresolved mixture of Beat-inspired cliches and
stereotypical liberal ideology, Pynchons subsequent short story, The Secret Integration,
featuring a group of white boys who imagine a
black boy as their friend, takes on the issue of race
by focusing on concrete examples of white racism.
Pynchons earlier Entropy and his second
novel, The Crying of Lot 49, are his most anthologized texts. They have in common the narrativization of science for which the author has
become famous, albeit at the cost of appearing
quite forbidding to many readers. In Entropy,
the tendentious contrast between a chaotic party
at Meatball Mulligans apartment and the
would-be hermetically sealed hothouse on the
floor above is somewhat clunkily enhanced by
the thematization of communication theory and
thermodynamics. In Lot 49, the connection between these two scientific models informs the
description of the heroines quest, but the fact
that the science is perhaps just over Oedipa Maass
head indicates a shift from sheer weightiness to
more complex speculation and even comedy in
Pynchons use of science. At the beginning of the
novel, Oedipa, a restless Californian housewife
married to a forlorn disc jockey, learns that she
has become the executrix of a wealthy ex-lovers
estate. She duly attempts to sort it all out, only
to get lost in a maze of historico-political information and conjecture. Part detective novel, part
romp, and part philosophical tale, Lot 49 puts its
reader in a position similar to Oedipas, since no
full, coherent explanation of the situation she
has found herself in, or imagined, ever emerges.
PYNCHON, THOMAS
History is a reservoir Oedipa readily taps in search

of understanding. From the Peter Pinguid Society
(named for a Confederate officer who sailed
around Cape Horn to open a second front in the
Civil War) to the rival postal system Tristero (set
up in the late sixteenth century near Brussels
by the rebellious cousin of a loyal adherent of
William of Orange), factual and counterfactual
history from a variety of sources provides Oedipa
and the reader with numerous occasions to bring
[her ex-lovers] estate into pulsing stelliferous
Meaning, (69) but to no avail. Laced with eccentric characters and delightful pastiche (including a
Jacobean revenge tragedy and a Hollywood movie
about World War I), Lot 49 explores information
surplus as a root cause of postmodern identity
and its characteristic inability to draw a clear line
between fact and fiction.
Judging by the cult status Gravitys Rainbow has
enjoyed since publication, as well as by the high
regard among scholars it soon began to win, its
intellectual and artistic excess (almost as daring as
James Joyces in Finnegans Wake) provides many
readers with the ultimate literary trip. Ostensibly
about the end of World War II, the novel
is organized around the tribulations of Tyrone
Slothrop, an American lieutenant stationed in
London. Since his erections during the V-2 Blitz
of 1944 seem to predict the sites of rocket strikes,
he is first subjected to study in England and then
sent to the French Riviera for experimentation.
Adopting a variety of identities, Slothrop escapes
to the Zone (Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war) to search for information and
wisdom, eluding pursuers and experiencing adventures that range from the comic (book) to the
truly harrowing. His itinerary includes the underground factory near Nordhausen (with the attached slave-labor camp Dora) where V-2s were
manufactured, and the rocket development and
testing facilities at Peenem
unde. As Slothrop
eventually dissipates as a character, the novel not
only follows the rise and fall of a Counterforce
dedicated in part to rescuing him, but also completes without necessarily resolving the narratives of other important characters. At the very
end, the novel suddenly jumps from a flashback to
the firing of a rocket on the L
uneburg Heath in
Germany in early 1945 to 1970s Los Angeles,
where another missile (the Bomb?) is falling on
a movie theater in which we readers sit.
787
Steeped in the minutiae of mathematics, statistics, chemistry, ballistics, psychology, music, film,
astrology, and the Kabbalah (to name only some
of its more evident topics), Gravitys Rainbow
encyclopedically investigates war as a high mass
of the corporate capitalism that has a stranglehold
on the individual and assumes a global role as
arbiter of life and death. A text therefore that
mirrors the concerns of 1960s counterculture, the
novel raises the possibility of subversion only to
leave that question in suspense. If its wild counterfactuality is perceived as a liberation from the
shackles They, the invisible rulers of this world,
also put on History by turning it into a simple
sequence of cause and effect in which Good and
Bad keep going head to head, the act of reading
may be invigorating in and by itself, especially if
the reader accepts Pynchons invitation and indulges in the making of connections among all the
elements on offer. If, on the other hand, such
creative paranoia appears to exemplify the repressive tolerance that is one of Their specialties, then Gravitys Rainbow risks exposure as a
hoax for letting its audience mistake intellectual
labor for an expression of freedom. However we
decide that question, the novel is so masterly in
construction, so rich and varied in detail, so
lyrical, touching, spectacular, and funny sometimes all at once (as in Slothrops toilet-bowl
journey or the story of Byron the Bulb) that
the readers pleasure is guaranteed.
Partly just because of the long wait for
Pynchons next novel, Vineland disappointed
many reviewers, who thought the author had lost
his edge. However, as a meditation on the 1960s
set in the ominous 1984, Vineland neatly complements Gravitys Rainbow and its countercultural
aspirations. As aging hippie Zoyd Wheeler struggles to raise his teenage daughter, Prairie, alone,
old ghosts from the past prompt Prairie to find
out why her mother, one-time radical filmmaker
Frenesi Gates, abandoned her. History in Vineland is related largely to the succession of generations in a family, but the time gap between the
novels Reaganite present and its apparent subject
decade allows Pynchon also to narrativize a national turn away from confrontation to placidity,
or from commitment to complacency if not
complicity. This shift may be understood as the
sign of an enduring victory by totalitarian forces,
now conspicuous in the character of federal
788
PYNCHON, THOMAS
prosecutor Brock Vond, but the novel also feelingly celebrates family ties. Problematic enough
to avoid sentimentality, the annual reunion of an
extended family at the end of the novel evokes the
original American community to which the
novels title alludes. A political and even feminist
novel, Vineland, with its undead Thanatoids and
its layers of sometimes ontologically uncertain
flashbacks, does not actually depart far from the
kind of historiographic metafiction in Pynchons
previous novels, but it may let down readers who
crave more of the fancy intellectual and literary
footwork displayed earlier in Pynchons career.
Mason & Dixon is narrated in 1786 by the
fictional Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, who knew the
British astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor
Jeremiah Dixon, and also has mysterious access to
the still extant field journal in which they recorded
the drawing of their famous line (17638) to settle
a border dispute in colonial America. A counterfactual journal of Masons is also at hand, which
allows Cherrycoke (who is occasionally addressed
and commented upon by another, invisible narrator) to add a variety of revelations about the
expedition. Peppered with anachronisms and animated by Cherrycokes unflagging imagination,
rhetorical bravado, and imitation eighteenthcentury English, the novel is a true historical
extravaganza that focuses on oppression and degeneration as ironic results of scientific progress
and the logic of capitalism as much as it deals with
the birth of the United States. At the root of this
representation of the Age of Reason and its effect
on the New World is a contrast between the
ruthless directionality of the MasonDixon line
and the curliness of the ampersand that connects
the two eponymous characters, suggesting the
intricacies of their friendship. Vinelands (extended)
family values reappear in Mason & Dixon in the
form of a sociability holding firm against the
demands of efficiency and order as these result in
exploitation, create slavery, and destroy a Native
American environment whose magic realism
Pynchon executes so beautifully it can be seen
as a literary form of resistance against the steamrolling forces of the Enlightenment. Thoroughly
researched and yet brisk in its fabulation, Mason &
Dixon is perhaps Pynchons most eloquent and
accessible testimony to the relevance of historical
fiction to the investigation of Americas past.
If Pynchon has a penchant for binary structures, it is certainly evident in Against the Day,
at once a prequel to Gravitys Rainbow and an
evocation of the authors entire oeuvre. From a
Negro in a pork-pie hat, echoing the short
story Low-Lands, to references to the Mason
Dixon, a host of earlier elements are incorporated
into a blockbuster narrative stretching from the
1893 Worlds Fair in Chicago to the years just after
World War I in Hollywood, with many stops all
around the globe and even a journey through it
in between. The major opposing forces in the novel
are corporate capitalism, embodied in the mogul
Scarsdale Vibe, and (taking historically appropriate center stage for the first time) anarchism,
represented by the Colorado miner Webb Traverse
and his family. Their extended confrontation provides the backdrop for a story about scientific
discovery, its economic appropriation, and its still
undiminished potential to bring magic into the
lives of characters who seem to owe their presence
in the story world to their affiliation with popular
genres such as the western, boys adventure fiction,
and Wellesian scientific romance that flourished
during the time of Pynchons plot. The modern
scientific theorization of a fourth dimension
motivates Pynchons adumbration of the multiverse, a literary topology developed by Michael
Moorcock and other science fiction and fantasy
writers to integrate precisely such genres as those
combined in Against the Day. Far from downplaying his wild sense of humor or the emphasis
on interpersonal support and affection central
to Vineland and Mason & Dixon, Pynchon here
frames both in a grandiose effort to conceive, in
almost Hegelian fashion, of historical change as it
would inexorably lead to World War I.
SEE ALSO: Doctorow, E. L. (AF);
Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); The Novel
and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Vonnegut, Kurt (AF)

Berube, M. (1992). Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers:
Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon.
PYNCHON, THOMAS
Clerc, C. (ed.) (1983). Approaches to Gravitys

Rainbow. Columbus: Ohio State University
Press.
Green, G., Greiner, D., & McCaffery, L. (eds.) (1994).
The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchons
Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive.
Herman, L., & Krafft, J. M. (2007). Fast Learner: The
Typescript of Pynchons V. at the Harry Ransom
Center in Austin. Texas Studies in Literature and
Language, 49(1),120.
Holton, R. (1988). In the Rathouse of History With
Thomas Pynchon: Rereading V. Textual Practice,
2(3), 32444.
Horvath, B., & Malin, I. (eds.) (2000). Pynchon and
Mason & Dixon. Newark: University of Delaware
Press.
Mead, C. (1989). Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of
Primary and Secondary Materials. Elmwood Park, IL:
Dalkey Archive.
ODonnell, P. (ed.) (1991). New Essays on
The Crying of Lot 49. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pynchon, T. (1959). Mortality and Mercy in Vienna.
Epoch, 9(4),195213.
Pynchon, T. (1960). Togetherness. Aerospace Safety,
16(12), 68.
Pynchon, T. (1963). V. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Pynchon, T. (1966a). The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia:
Lippincott.
Pynchon, T. (1966b). A Journey Into the Mind of Watts.
New York Times Magazine, 345, 78, 802, 84
(June 12).
Pynchon, T. (1973). Gravitys Rainbow. New York:
Viking.
789
Pynchon, T. (1983). Introduction. In R. Farina,

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. vxiv.
Pynchon, T. (1984a). Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?
New York Times Book Review, 1, 401 (Oct. 28).
Pynchon, T. (1984b). Slow Learner (intro. T. Pynchon).
Boston: Little, Brown. (Includes the stories The
Small Rain, Low-Lands, Entropy, Under the
Rose, and The Secret Integration.)
Pynchon, T. (1988). The Hearts Eternal Vow. Review
of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garca
Marquez. New York Times Book Review, 1, 47, 49
(Apr. 10).
Pynchon, T. (1990). Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown.
Pynchon, T. (1992). Introduction. In D. Barthelme, The
Teachings of Don B. (ed. K. Herzinger). New York:
Turtle Bay, pp. xvxxii.
Pynchon, T. (1993). Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.
New York Times Book Review, 3, 57 (June 6).
Pynchon, T. (1997). Introduction. In J. Dodge, Stone
Junction: An Alchemical Pot-Boiler. Edinburgh:
Rebel, pp. viixii.
Pynchon, T. (1997). Mason & Dixon. New York:
Henry Holt.
Pynchon, T. (2003). Foreword. In G. Orwell, Nineteen
Eighty-Four. New York: Plume, pp. viixxvi.
Pynchon, T. (2006). Against the Day. New York:
Penguin.
Pynchon, T. (2009). Inherent Vice. New York: Penguin.
Pynchon Notes. (1979).
Schaub, T. (ed.) (2008). Approaches to Teaching
Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works.
New York: Modern Language Association.
Weisenburger, S. (2006). A Gravitys Rainbow
Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchons
Novel, 2nd edn. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Q
Queer Modernism
PAUL MORRISON
Modernism has become sexy again. Only yesterday, it seems, we were eager to relegate the likes of
Eliot and Pound to the wrong side of a historical
divide, the better to establish our postmodernist
credentials. Today, however, the prefix is no
longer a condition of our intellectual and ideological well-being, and we are again laboring to
become Joyces contemporary. In a recent contribution to the Changing Profession forum in
PMLA, Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz
characterize this extraordinary transformation as
an expansion, one that has metamorphosed
even the object of study: where modernism
once was, modernisms now are. According to
Mao and Walkowitz, three broad areas of inquiry
or interest define the newly pluralized field:
(1) The Transnational Turn, (2) Media in an
Age of Mass Persuasion, and (3) Politics as
Itself. This seems broadly compelling, although
there is little here that is either new or unique to
the study of modernism. The old modernist studies, for instance, owe a great deal to the work of
Hugh Kenner, which includes some important
pages on the mechanic muse, and one might
cite the centrality of Marshall McLuhan, himself a
distinguished student of modernism, to any discussion of media in an age of mass persuasion.
I would be hard-pressed, moreover, to name any
field of literary or cultural studies that has not
taken a transnational turn of late. It may be,
of course, that the new modernist studies are
simply keeping faith with the deepest impulses of
high modernism itself: to make it new, in the

familiar paradox, is to recover what is very old.
Certainly expansion is an impulse intrinsic to
modernism, which is among the most imperial
and imperializing of literary movements. It remains an open question, for instance, if postcolonial literature has escaped the hold of the Euromodernism that it might logically be expected to
reject. The fidelity is not, however, absolute. What
is resoundingly absent from Mao and Walkowitzs
survey of the new modernist studies is what may
well define our modernity: the unprecedented
explanatory power attributed to sexuality in general and sexual deviance in particular. The word
sexuality appears only once in their article, the
words homosexual and queer not at all, and
the Works Cited is remarkable, at least in part,
for what it fails to cite: Scott Herrings Queering the
Underworld (2007); Heather Loves Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007);
and Michael Trasks Cruising Modernism (2003),
to name but three. Apparently modernism has
become sexy again by forgetting about sex.
It does so, Eve Sedgwick argues, at its own peril:
the presiding master term of the past century,
one that has the same, primary importance for
all modern Western identity and social organization (and not merely for homosexual identity
and culture), has been the chronic modern
crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, which
has affected our culture through its ineffaceable
marking particularly of the categories secrecy/
disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public,
masculine/feminine, majority/minority (11).
The list might be extended almost indefinitely,

QUEER MODERNISM
and Sedgwicks practical criticism Epistemology

of the Closet includes compelling readings of both
proto- and high modernists bears eloquent
testimony to the structuring force of the crisis in
modern sexual definition. But at a time when the
new modernist studies seem curiously unconcerned with the merely sexual, it is the central
premise of her book that bears emphasizing: an
understanding of virtually any aspect of Western
culture must be, not merely incomplete, but
damaged in its central substance to the degree
that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of
modern homo/heterosexual definition (1).
Foucault puts the matter simply: Sex, the
explanation for everything (78). This does not
mean, of course, that we are obliged to accept the
specific terms in which our culture advances a
hermeneutic of the sexual. Indeed, students of
modernism invested in the explanatory power of
sexuality can be divided, however provisionally,
between those who work within the dominant
psychosexual paradigm, if only to undermine it,
and those who seek to resist its explanatory power.
Joseph Boones magisterial Libidinal Currents:
Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (1998)
is an instance of the former. It is Freud who
codifies, if not invents, the overwhelming meaningfulness of the sexual for the modern world, and
Boone discerns in Freuds writing, particularly in
the early, brilliant postulation of the polymorphous perverse (13), the possibility of both a
poetics and politics of deviance. The official
trajectory of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality clearly privileges heteronormativity Freuds
highly labyrinthine text has been heralded as the
first modernist novel yet the official trajectory
never quite recovers from the polymorphous
perversity in which it originates. And so much
the better, Boone argues: a poetics of the
perverse teases out formations analogous to
the polymorphous perverse on the linguistic,
stylistic, and structural levels of the text; a
politics of the perverse, in turn, construes the
polymorphous as a viable model for adult sexuality, and not simply as a superseded stage in
normative psychosexual development (13). Modernism itself renders any direct translation of the
former into the latter problematic poetic radicalism and reactionary politics frequently made
for strange bedfellows but the much vaunted
break with tradition did seem to promise new
791
possibilities for sexual expression. Forms of human

experience hitherto marginalized or excluded
from representation gained a new prominence,
and homosexuality was positioned front and
center. The nineteenth-century novel is dominated by the marriage plot; it instructs women in
how to fall in love with the appropriate man. Its
twentieth-century counterpart, however, finds it
necessary to school woman in how to love men
tout court. Colleen Lamos speaks of deviant
modernism, but for Lukacs, the adjective is
strictly redundant: modernism is by definition
deviant, precisely in its elevation of perversity
and idiocy into types of the condition humaine
(32). Any number of individuals might be
blamed for (or credited with) this perverse state
of affairs: Baldwin, Barnes, Ginsberg, Crane,
Stein, and Whitman, to name only a few. One
thing, however, is certain: with the advent of
modernism, the love that dare not speak its name
can hardly hold its peace.
For Boone, sexuality is irretrievably (and gloriously) liminal, contingent, and ambiguous; it
always exceeds, both poetically and politically,
any narrative that would seek to contain it, any
structure that would seek to control it. Freud
himself construes homo- and heterosexuality in
non-binary terms, and in Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, he explicitly opposes any
attempt to separate homosexuals from the rest
of mankind as a group of a special character
(145n.1). For Foucault, however, such ambiguity
is a functional component of the normalizing
paradigm itself, and the modern crisis in homo/
heterosexual definition is really no crisis at all. On
the contrary. It is the very precariousness of
heterosexual identity, as Sedgwick argues in
Between Men, that allows for the effective regulation of the many by the specific oppression of the
few. Sexual ambiguity (is he or isnt he?) sustains,
rather than subverts, heteronormativity, which is
all the more coercive for its strategic instability.
Freud remains our cultures most distinguished
(if somewhat unwitting) theoretician of the liberatory potential of human sexuality, and the new
science of the soul found a particularly enthusiastic welcome, the predictions of its founding
father notwithstanding, in the New World. Even
in America, however, psychoanalysis is no longer
the only game in town, and Foucault remains
deeply suspicious of liberatory claims made in the
792
QUEER MODERNISM
name of the sexual. If anything can be said to

characterize the transformation in sexuality studies in the last few decades, it is the growing
influence of Foucault, particularly the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Freud is our great
theoretician of the homosexual. Foucault, as
David Halperin suggests, is the patron saint of
the queer.
Foucaults influence is not much in evidence in
Mao and Walkowitzs characterization of recent
transformations in the field of modernist studies.
I dont mean to shoot the messengers to survey
the state of modernist studies is not to assume
responsibility for it yet if Foucault were a more
central presence, the legitimacy of categories such
as Politics as Itself could not be so blithely
assumed. This is not to denigrate the growing
interest (which, again, is not unique to the new
modernist studies) in the conduct of politics in
relatively naked rather than veiled forms, in the
actions of governments, great men, and the like.
Indeed, the return to the concerns of an oldfangled historicism may well be a necessary supplement, as Mao and Walkowitz contend, to
broadly Foucauldian approaches to the subjects
fashioning by putatively apolitical institutions,
experts, and norms (745). But as no such approaches are ever discussed, Politics-as-Itself
seems very much like Politics-as-Usual. State
oppression remains a very real fact and force this
is, after all, the America of the PATRIOT Act but
to think power only with the king or president,
only in terms of its most obvious accoutrements
and manifestations, is to think power in the very
terms power itself would have us think. Modernism has long been associated with what E. M.
Forster terms the secret life, which each of us
lives privately, and to which (in his characters) the
novelist has access (113). And nothing, at least to
us, seems as deeply private, as completely prepolitical or apolitical, as our sexuality. A broadly
Foucauldian approach to the subjects fashioning
openly acknowledges the felt reality of this secret
life, even as it insists that what is experienced
as pure interiority, as the pre- or apolitical, is
itself an effect of power, an implantation or
inscription from without that is thereafter experienced as an originating impulse from within.
Modernism and homosexuality come into
being at roughly the same historical moment
(the term homo-sexuality made its English-
language debut in 1892; heterosexuality followed shortly thereafter), and the early decades of
the twentieth century witnessed the rise of various
Homosexual Rights Movements. To his credit,
Freud was committed to the repeal of paragraph
175 of the German penal code, the anti-sodomy
statue, and his opposition to separating off
homosexuals as a group of a special character
was clearly principled. Freud, however, no longer
exercises a monopoly hold over the field, and here
too we have experienced something of a historical
divide: Homosexual Rights Movements have,
for the most part, given way to queer activism. To
put the matter (much too) schematically: the
Freudian homosexual seeks at least some minimal
guarantee of basic civil liberties through recourse
to Politics as Itself or Politics-as-Usual,
which includes the right to representation.
Foucault, however, focuses on the putatively
apolitical construction of identity categories,
among which homosexuality occupies a privileged (for want of a better term) position. And
homosexual emancipation is to Freud (or neoFreudians in the tradition of Marcuse) as queer
activism is to Foucault. The former works within
the political sphere narrowly or conventionally
defined; the latter resists the normalizing imperatives that are broadly disseminated throughout a
variety of cultural practices and suppositions.
The turn to Foucault in sexuality studies does
not, then, displace the centrality that modernism
traditionally affords the secret life. It does,
however, transform our understanding of its politics. Certainly it is telling and the politics of
telling are very much at issue here that My
Secret Life is the title of a late-nineteenth-century
sexual memoir, a precursor of our modern
literature of the scandalous. Convention, if not
common sense, encourages us to celebrate its
anonymous author as a fugitive from a repressive Victorianism D. H. Lawrence in latenineteenth-century drag. Foucault, however,
argues otherwise. The nameless Englishman
is in fact thoroughly modern, and never more so
than when he mistakes the incitement to discourse, the broad cultural imperative to confess all, for the exercise of freedom (22). The
right to representation is conventionally held
to be a positive good, and modernism is routinely celebrated for its inclusion of the socially
marginal and the sexually deviant. But again,
QUEER MODERNISM
Foucault questions the conventional wisdom. A

disciplinary society requires precisely the unfettered access to the soul that modern literature
provides, and it has a particular investment in
ferreting out the pervert, actual or potential, lurking within. Mao and Walkowitz note that the new
modernist studies approach works by members
of marginalized social groups with fresh eyes
and ears (738). To which I would add, somewhat
unfairly: a disciplinary society has eyes and ears
in abundance, which are disproportionately
attuned to the sexually deviant. What are termed,
appropriately enough, the modern disciplines of
knowledge psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and
cultural anthropology, among others are only
too eager to position the perverse as the objects of a
coercive and normalizing knowledge.
Frantz Fanon is rather less pessimistic. Like Mao
and Walkowitz, he argues for an expansion of a
conventional field of inquiry in this case,
psychoanalysis the better to understand the
alienation of the socially marginal: Reacting
against the constitutionalist tendency of the late
nineteenth century, Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through
psychoanalysis. He substituted for a phylogenetic the ontogenetic perspective. It will be seen that
the black mans alienation is not an individual
question. Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands
sociogeny (11). Point well taken, although it
should also be noted that the alienation of gays
and lesbians is likewise irreducible to the individual factor. Any expansion of the field of
inquiry beyond the individual factor needs to
acknowledge, however, that the very category of
the individual is always already an ideological construct. Psychoanalysis is a sociogeny,
and all the more effectively so for its strategic
indifference to social factors not directly bound
to the Oedipal family. There is a sense, however,
in which all this is purely speculative. We have
not in fact expanded beyond the explanatory
power of the psychosexual, which, despite its
apparent marginalization within the new modernist studies, is still too much with us.
Consider, for instance, the transnational turn
noted by Mao and Walkowitz, the thoroughly
laudable attempt to assimilate the insights and
concerns of postcolonial theory. As it turns out,
however, there is a pervert around every turn;
even here, the explanatory power of (homo)sex-
793
uality holds sway. In Tennessee Williamss Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), for instance, a privileged white body Sebastian Venable, a paradigmatic homosexual aesthete travels to a mythical
Cabeza de Lobo in order to sample the local rough
trade. In effect, colonialism is gay sexual slumming on the down low. (Suddenly, Last Summer is
unique only in that what happens in Cabeza de
Lobo does not stay in Cabeza de Lobo.) And if
homosexuality fuels the colonial project, it is also
the disastrous repercussion of it. In Black Skin,
White Masks, Fanon claims that he cannot
establish the overt presence of homosexuality in
Martinique; only Europeanized Martinicans
become homosexuals, and then always
passive (180n.44). Had he traveled to Williams
non-existent Spanish town, he might have established that only Americanized Latinos become
homosexual, and then always cannibalistic. The
boys of Cabeza de Lobo are contingent perverts
in Freuds sense of the term; were it not for the
corrupting influence of the gay sexual tourist, they
would have continued in the happy, heterosexual
life that God and nature intended for them.
But such is only half the story: the sexual
deviance that America routinely exports to the
rest of the world is itself imported into America
from abroad. Thus Dr. La Forest Potter, the
author of the once popular Strange Loves: A Study
in Sexual Abnormalities (1933), claims that he
cannot establish the presence, overt or otherwise,
of homosexuality in anything indigenously American; sexual deviance is a foreign contamination, a
disastrous repercussion of Americas involvement
in the Great War. Cold War rhetoric tended to
figure homosexuality as a distinctly communist
threat, an alien invasion from without; communism, in turn, figured homosexuality as a fascist
and/or bourgeois aberration. Logic rebels, but
then logic has never been an obstacle to the
smooth workings of homophobia, which is
only too pleased to grant homosexuality virtually
unlimited explanatory power. (In fairness to
Williams, I should add that Suddenly, Last Summer
seems to me an exploration of this murderous
illogic rather than an instance of it.) There is a
sense, then, in which Sedgwicks caution might
seem unnecessary: modernism may have become
sexy again by forgetting about sex, but there is little
danger that any aspect of Western culture, including contact with its mythic or demonized
794
QUEER MODERNISM
Other, will not be structured by the homo/hetero

divide. Epistemology of the Closet calls, however,
for a critical analysis of the divide, not simply
ritualistic recourse to its explanatory power. This,
sadly, may have to await a new new modernist
studies.
Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction
(AF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction
(BIF)

Boone, J. A. (1998). Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and
the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Cole, M. (2003). The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of
Modern Homosexuality. New York: Routledge.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks (trans.
Charles Lam Markmann). New York: Grove.
Arnold.
Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, vol. 1
(trans. Robert Hurley). New York: Vintage.
Freud, S. (195374). Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (trans.
James Strachey). London: Hogarth.
Halperin, D. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay
Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hermann, A. C. (2000). Queering the Moderns: Poses/
Portraits/Performances. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Herring, S. (2007). Queering the Underworld:

Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and
Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kenner, H. (1988). The Mechanic Muse. New York:
Lamos, C. (1999). Deviant Modernism: Sexual and
Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel
Proust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levin, J. (1991). The Gay Novel in America. New York:
Garland.
Love, H. (2007). Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics
of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lukacs, G. (1964). Realism in Our Time: Literature and
the Class Struggle (trans. J. Mander & N. Mander).
Mao, D., & Walkowitz, R.L. (2008). The New
Modernist Studies. PMLA, 123(3), 73748.
Martin, R. K. (1979). The Homosexual Tradition in
American Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Potter, L. F. (1933). Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual
Abnormalities. New York: Dodsley.
Savran, D. (2003). A Queer Sort of Materialism:
Recontextualizing American Theater. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
University Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet.
Woods, G. (1987). Articulate Flesh: Male
Homoeroticism in Modern Poetry. New Haven:
R
Rand, Ayn
MIMI REISEL GLADSTEIN
Ayn Rand is a novelist and philosopher whose

works, though often dismissed by the mainstream
critical establishment, continue to sell well more
than a generation after her death. Rand wrote
romantic fiction that championed individualism,
freedom, and laissez-faire capitalism; her philosophy inspired adherents in the political and business worlds. Rands abilities as a creative writer are
all the more remarkable when one realizes that
English was not her native language. Rand was
born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia
on February 2, 1905. She graduated from the
University of Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg)
with a degree in history, and then attended the
State Institute for Cinematography in Leningrad
to learn screenwriting. Always an independent
thinker, Rand was fortunate to be able to leave
Soviet Russia to visit family in Chicago; she never
returned. Unlike some immigrants who retain a
nostalgia for their mother countries, Rand abhorred Russia and was a committed US patriot,
calling the United States the noblest country in
the history of men in her breakthrough novel,
The Fountainhead (1943, 715). Rand fought all
her life against the various collectivist forces that
worked to change the individualistic and capitalistic character of the country.
Rands professional success began with the
sale of a film script, Red Pawn, to Universal
Studios. Red Pawn is the story of a beautiful
woman who becomes the mistress of a prison
camp commandant to be near her jailed
husband. This plot pattern is replicated in

her first novel, We the Living (1936b), whose
heroine becomes the mistress of a communist
hero to save her non-communist lover.
Publication of The Fountainhead marked the
beginning of Rands transition from creative writer to leader of the intellectual movement known
as objectivism. The novels plot begins the day
the hero, Howard Roark, is expelled from architecture school and ends with his triumph over the
forces of conformity and the derivative in architecture as he completes his masterwork, the tallest
building in New York City. Readers have noted
some resemblances to Frank Lloyd Wright; indeed,
after the success of the novel, Wright designed
Rand and her husband a home that they never
built. Readers of The Fountainhead were drawn to
Rands strong theme of individualism, of the importance of integrity of both design and spirit. Rand
inveighs against parasitism and second-handers.
Among fans of The Fountainhead who met with
Rand to discuss her ideas as she prepared Atlas
Shrugged were those who helped her to spark
objectivism. Key among them were Nathaniel and
Barbara Branden, who founded an institute in
their name that taught Rands philosophy, first
locally and then nationwide. Perhaps the most
internationally famous member of the objectivist
group was later Federal Reserve chairman Alan
Greenspan, who credits Rand as a strong influence in his life. After Rands 1968 break with the
Brandens, Leonard Peikoff became Rands heir
and founded the Ayn Rand Institute.
Atlas Shrugged (1957) is Rands final presentation of her philosophy in fiction, and offers her

796
RECHY, JOHN
climactic vision of the ideal man. Originally titled

The Strike, the plot follows a strike of the worlds
capable and productive people, who refuse to
continue carrying everyone else on their
shoulders while they remain unappreciated and
often abused. Rand peoples her plot with characters from a great variety of professions, from
lobbyists to composers. Detractors have referred
to Atlas Shrugged as the Bible of objectivism.
Certainly, it is a comprehensive analysis of many
social ills and a guide to reform. Dagny Taggart
is the railroad-running protagonist whose romantic liaisons with Francisco DAnconia, heir
to a mining fortune, and Hank Rearden, inventor
of a revolutionary metal, precede her discovery of
John Galt, the strike leader and Rands ideal man.
Many individualist feminists see Dagny as a rarity
in American fiction, an assertive, independent,
and successful businesswoman.
Rand compiled her major philosophical
speeches from her fiction into For the New Intellectual (1961), her first non-fiction publication,
whose introduction presents an overview of
her interpretation of those forces that had historically undermined human happiness: Attila
and the witch doctor, or force and faith. During
the 1960s and 1970s, Rand continued to publish
non-fiction works, including her last published
work, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
(1979).
Ayn Rand died in 1982. Her legacy is an active
intellectual movement that attracts adherents
from a diverse range of interests and professions.
The Ayn Rand Institute, based in California,
and the Atlas Society (formerly the Objectivist
Center), based in Washington, DC, promote her
influence and ideas. Her theories are taught in
business ethics classes, as well as in philosophy,
literature, political science, and economics
courses. The Cato Institute, a Washington, DC
Libertarian think tank, is a key supporter of
Rands legacy.
Rand, A. (1938). Anthem. London: Cassell.

Rand, A. (1943). The Fountainhead. New York:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Rand, A. (1957). Atlas Shrugged. New York:
Random House.
Rand, A. (1961). For the New Intellectual. New York:
Random House.
Rand, A. (1964). The Virtue of Selfishness. New York:
Rand, A. (1966). Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
Rand, A. (1969). The Romantic Manifesto. New York:
World.
Rand, A. (1971). The New Left: The Anti-Industrial
Revolution. New York: New American Library.
Rand, A. (1979). Introduction to Objectivist
Epistemology. New York: New American Library.
Rand, A. (1982). Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Rand, A. (1999). Return of the Primitive: The AntiIndustrial Revolution, exp. edn. (intro. P. Schwartz,
New York: Meridian.
Branden, B. (1986). The Passion of Ayn Rand.
Branden, B. & Branden, N. (1962). Who Is Ayn Rand?
Branden, N. (1999). My Years With Ayn Rand.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Den Uyl, D., & Rasmussen, D. (eds.) (1984). The
Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand. Chicago:
Gladstein, M. R. (1999). The New Ayn Rand Companion,
rev. and updated ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Gladstein, M. R., & Sciabarra, C. M. (eds.) (1999).
Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand. University
Park: Penn State University Press.
Machan, T. (1999). Ayn Rand. New York: Peter Lang.
Merrill, R. E. (1991). The Ideas of Ayn Rand. La Salle, IL:
Open Court.
Sciabarra, C. M. (1995). Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.
University Park: Penn State University Press.
Younkins, E. W. (ed.) (2007). Ayn Rands Atlas
Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Politics and

the Novel (BIF)
Rechy, John

Rand, A. (1936a). Night of January 16th. New York:
Longman.
Rand, A. (1936b). We the Living. New York: Macmillan.
MICHAEL P. MORENO
A prolific writer from the gay and Chicano

communities, John Rechy has redefined the
American narrative of the late twentieth century
by crossing literary genres and challenging cultural perceptions. His many novels, which often
RECHY, JOHN
blur autobiography with fiction, possess a cinematic quality that reveals the underside of urban
spaces and the search for ones identity. Since the
late 1950s, Rechy has actively transformed and
articulated the way outsiders, particularly homosexuals, have been perceived throughout the
United States.
Born in El Paso, Texas on March 10, 1934 to
Scottish and Mexican American parents, John
Rechy rose to prominence with his first novel,
City of Night (1963), which explores the world of
young hustlers on urban streets, and its sequel,
Numbers (1967), which examines the role of
desire and sexuality for the gay male. Drawing
from his own experiences in the gay community,
Rechy addresses how identities are generated not
only by the people one encounters, but also
through the alienation of the city itself. The lonely
street corners and cold alleyways of the urban
landscape reflect the emptiness and desire in so
many of Rechys characters. This Days Dying
(1969) further underscores this tension by illustrating how the justice system criminalizes homosexuals and their behavior, while The Coming of
the Night (1999) celebrates the final vestiges of
sexual promiscuity on the eve of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. Most of Rechys writing
transpires in Los Angeles and emphasizes the
importance this region has in articulating gay
culture. With its fragmented neighborhoods,
weblike freeways, and body-conscious behavior,
Los Angeles is a unique space that constantly
challenges and changes identities, and where the
gay community is both at home and in exile from
mainstream America.
Rechys ability to recapture the many worlds
of the gay community extends into other genres
and themes as well. The Vampires (1971) and The
Fourth Angel (1972) are rich gothic narratives in
which Edgar Allan Poe-like images of beauty
and death are at the core of human depravity
and victimization. His writing has often been
called cinematic, employing film terminology and
images from scene to scene. This is evident in
works such as his non-fictional piece The Sexual
Outlaw: A Documentary (1977), which intertwines the homophobia of the legal system with
exploits in a sexual underground. Likewise,
Rushes (1979) and Bodies and Souls (1983) present
an eclectic cast of characters whose choreographed encounters throughout darker regions
797
of Los Angeles reveal erotic dimensions to the

cityscape.
Fascinated by the rituals of Hollywood epics
and the role of the fallen woman in Western
history, Rechy explores how the search for
redemption and empowerment is integral in redefining the postmodernist female in the late
twentieth century. In Marilyns Daughter (1988),
he resurrects the memory of Marilyn Monroe
through her fictional daughter who comes to
Hollywood to investigate if she is the progeny of
this tragic woman and Bobby Kennedy. The Miraculous Day of Amalia G
omez (1991) focuses on
a Mexican American divorcee whose desire to
witness an apparition of the Virgin Mary takes
her throughout the film-like spaces of Los
Angeles. Hidden from the high, surveilling walls
of the nearby Fox Studio and in the shadow of the
Hollywood Freeway, Amalia G
omezs noir-like
world possesses nothing of the glamour and
miraculousness resonate with the legacy of Tinsel
Town. Continuing with the theme of redemption, Our Lady of Babylon (1996) cross-examines
the many tragic women from history, including
Medea, Mary Magdalene, and La Malinche, and
rewrites their narratives into ones that animate
rather than erase the female identity.
His most recent works, which include The Life
and Adventures of Lyle Clemens (2003); Beneath
the Skin: The Collected Essays of John Rechy (2004);
and About My Life and the Kept Women: A Memoir
(2008), continue to demonstrate how the richness
of criss-crossing genres reveals not only the complexity of the American identity, but also his
ability to re-create literary conventions. By generating voices that shift from memoir, to film, to
fiction often within the same narrative Rechy
articulates a language that reflects the continual
flux and mobility in his characters lives and the
places they inhabit.
Among the many honors accorded John Rechy
over the years are the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, the Bill Whitehead Award
for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing
Triangle in 1999, and a National Endowment for
the Arts fellowship. He currently lives in Los
Angeles and teaches literature and film at the
University of Southern California.
and Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
798
REED, ISHMAEL

Bredbeck, G.W. (1993). John Rechy. In E. S.
Nelson (ed.) Contemporary Gay American Novelists.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 34051.
Canning, R. (2001). Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations
With Gay Novelists. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Casillo, C. (2002). Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of
John Rechy. Los Angeles: Advocate.
Christian, K. (1997). Show and Tell: Identity as
Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction. Albuquerque:
Giles, J. (1974). Religious Alienation and
Homosexual Consciousness in City of Night and
Go Tell It on the Mountain. College English, 36(3),
36980.
Rechy, J. (1963). City of Night. New York: Grove.
Rechy, J. (1967). Numbers. New York: Grove.
Rechy, J. (1969). This Days Death. New York: Grove.
Rechy, J. (1971). The Vampires. New York: Grove.
Rechy, J. (1972). The Fourth Angel. London: Allen.
Rechy, J. (1977). The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary.
New York: Grove.
Rechy, J. (1979). Rushes. New York: Grove.
Rechy, J. (1983). Bodies and Souls. New York:
Carroll and Graf.
Rechy, J. (1988). Marilyns Daughter. New York:
Carroll and Graf.
Rechy, J. (1991). The Miraculous Day of Amalia G
omez.
New York: Little, Brown.
Rechy, J. (1996). Our Lady of Babylon. New York: Arcade.
Rechy, J. (1999). The Coming of the Night. New York:
Grove Press.
Rechy, J. (2003). The Life and Adventures of Lyle
Clemens. New York: Grove.
Rechy, J. (2004). Beneath the Skin: The Collected Essays
of John Rechy. New York: Carroll and Graf.
Rechy, J. (2008). About My Life and the Kept Women:
A Memoir. New York: Grove.
Reed, Ishmael
ANDREW STROMBECK
An innovative, prolific, and always interesting

writer, Ishmael Reed is as famous for his fusions
of postmodern metafiction and African American
culture as for his clashes with African American
feminists over the question of a persecuted
African American male. He has been equally
influential, though, as a promoter of multicultural
literature of all stripes, lending support to younger writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and
Toni Cade Bambara.
Reed is associated with the Black Arts Movement, though his participation is far less singular
than that of leaders like Amiri Baraka, and Reed
has distanced himself from the movements more
agitprop strains in works like Yellow Back Radio
Broke-Down (1969). Raised in the Buffalo area,
Reed attended the University of Buffalo. His
penchant for controversy emerged early on; one
of Reeds first jobs was at a Buffalo radio station,
where an interview with Malcolm X resulted in his
shows cancellation. Reed moved to New Yorks
Lower East Side in the early 1960s, where he
became associated with the Umbra poetry workshop, a group which shaped the emergence of the
Black Arts Movement. The multicultural, community-based Umbra provides a blueprint for the
tireless work Reed has done on behalf of younger,
and especially minority, writers, through the Before Columbus Foundation and the Yardbird
publishing house.
While Reed published a stream of poetry
during the early 1960s, and has continued to
publish poetry since, The Freelance Pallbearers
(1967) marked Reeds emergence onto the national literary scene as a novelist with an original voice. Experimental, satiric, but rooted in
African American folk and literary cultures,
Reeds novels evidence equally the trickster
tradition of Yoruba religion, Nathaniel Wests
absurdism, Chester Himess hard-boiled detective fiction, and Ralph Ellisons modernism.
Mumbo Jumbo (1972) has been generally praised
as his best work, particularly by Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., who ended his Signifying Monkey
with a chapter which positions Mumbo Jumbo
as fulfilling four centuries of African American
literary production. Dense with allusions to
everything from the Harlem Renaissance to
Masonic ritual to Warren Hardings rumored
West Indian lineage, Mumbo Jumbo sets a vibrant
Third World culture against a hidebound Western culture; the latter emerges as all-powerful
but doomed to fail. His fiction addresses topics
from slave narratives (Flight to Canada (1976))
to the selfish public cultures of the Reagan years
(The Terrible Twos (1980)) to westerns (Yellow
Back Radio Broke-Down (1969)).
Critics link Reeds style with improvisational
jazz, but also with African religions and their
New World variants, particularly Voodoo,
which has played some role in almost all of
THE ROAD NOVEL
Reeds fiction. Mumbo Jumbo, in many ways, sets a

pattern that holds in Reeds work: a group of
outsiders struggles against a quasi-conspiratorial
force, with solving the mystery of this conspiracy
serving as the plot engine for Reeds novels.
Reed brilliantly draws on the paranoia and eclecticism of conspiracy lore to depict a world in which
Virginia is everywhere, as a fugitive slave in
Flight to Canada puts it, a world in which African
Americans, especially males, continually face persecution and death. In postmodern style, Reed
deploys anachronism, juxtaposition, allusion, and
caricature to capture a shifting post-1960s cultural
landscape.
In the mid-1980s, Reed clashed with African
American feminist Michelle Wallace over what
Wallace saw as the misogynistic content of Reeds
1986 novel Reckless Eyeballing, which positions
feminists as a conspiratorial force that stifles
African American male creativity. The episode,
focused on one of Reeds minor works, sometimes
promotes the impression that Reed is straightforwardly misogynist, a characterization that belies his works complicated category challenging
and ignores the complex historical relationship
between feminism and civil rights. Nevertheless,
in repeatedly decrying African American male
persecution, often with a personal bent, Reed has
provided much fodder for his critics.
If at times cantankerous, Reed is a unique
figure who emphasizes the multiplicity and hybridity of African American culture. Like his
predecessor Himes, and contemporaries Samuel
Delaney and Octavia Butler, Reed pushes the
boundaries for what is acceptable for African
American literature, situating African American
culture within a wide range of popular, consumer, and literary cultures. His work stands
as a key interface between the largely white
metafiction of Pynchon (who cites Reed in
Gravitys Rainbow), Barthes, and others and
post-1960s identity literature. Recent work
has begun to wrest Reed out of the metafiction/identity literature categories, demonstrating his novels relevance to postcolonial and
folklorist concerns, especially in terms of Reeds
use of Voodoo.
799

Davis, R.M. (1983). Scatting the Myths: Ishmael Reed.
Arizona Quarterly. 39(4), 40620.
Dick, B. & Singh, A. (eds.) (1995). Conversations
With Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Ebbesen, J. (2006). Postmodernism and Its Others: The
Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo.
Fox, R. E. (1987). Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black
Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka,
Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York:
Greenwood.
Gates, H. L. Jr. (1988). The Signifying Monkey. Oxford:
McGee, P. (1997). Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race.
Reed, I. (1967). The Freelance Pallbearers. New York:
Doubleday.
Reed, I. (1969). Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.
Reed, I. (1972). Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Atheneum.
Reed, I. (1974). The Last Days of Louisiana Red.
Reed, I. (1976). Flight to Canada. New York: Random
House.
Reed, I. (1978). Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. Garden
Reed, I. (1980). The Terrible Twos. New York:
St. Martins.
Reed, I. (1986). Reckless Eyeballing. New York:
St. Martins.
Reed, I. (1988). Writin Is Fightin: Thirty-Seven Years
of Boxing on Paper. New York: Atheneum.
Reed, I. (1989). The Terrible Threes. New York:
Atheneum.
Reed, I. (1993). Japanese by Spring. New York:
Atheneum.
Reed, I. (2008). Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media
Bullies and Other Reflections. Philadelphia: Da Capo.
The Road Novel

ANDREW S. GROSS
The road novel is the automotive version of the

journey narrative, borrowing elements from its
two major variants: the romance or noble quest
and the picaresque with its chance encounters
and roguish characters. American automobilists
recall pioneer figures like Leatherstocking and
Huck Finn who seek to escape civilization by
lighting out for the Territory; they also follow
800
THE ROAD NOVEL
in the footsteps of the peripatetic speaker in

Whitmans Song of the Open Road who finds
freedom, companionship, and insight on the
highway. Sinclair Lewiss Free Air (1919), the first
road novel, draws on these traditions in establishing the defining theme of the genre: the technologized escape from the constraints of civilization
to the freedom of the open road. This flight is also
the central paradox of the genre since drivers, in
their dependence on automotive technology,
bring with them the civilization they flee.
The road novel became a popular genre in the
1950s, when growing affluence made it possible for
the majority of Americans to own automobiles and
President Eisenhower backed the largest freewaybuilding project in history. The most famous
example is Jack Kerouacs On the Road (1957),
which adapts Hucks lighting out to the Beat
philosophy of dropping out. Kerouacs journey
inspired road trips by a number of literary dropouts, including Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Hunter
S. Thompson, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Robert Pirsig,
and William Least Heat-Moon, most of whom
recorded their experiences in non-fiction narratives or travelogues. Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita
(1955) and John Updikes Rabbit, Run (1960), both
structured around road trips, are the other major
statements of the immediate postwar period.
More recent examples tend to emphasize the
difficulties or dangers of travel in an overtechnologized society rather than the traditional theme
of escape. The dominant contemporary image is
not the open road but the traffic-clogged interstate system, for instance in Joan Didions Play It
as It Lays (1970) and Don DeLillos Cosmopolis
(2003). Stephen Kings Christine (1983) treats this
danger as the stuff of horror when an automobile
comes to life as an avenging demon. Cormac
McCarthys post-apocalyptic The Road (2006)
envisions pedestrian travel along the abandoned
highways of a civilization destroyed by its own
technology.
The earliest automobile narratives were factual
accounts of journeys doubling as advertisements.
Horatio Nelson Jacksons From Ocean to Ocean in
a Winton (1903), describing the first American
transcontinental automobile trip and mentioning
the manufacturers name in the title, is paradigmatic. Established writers also concentrated on
non-fiction narration, which the wondrous new
technology seemed to render fantastic enough.
The first sentence of Edith Whartons A MotorFlight Through France (1904) sums up the prevalent attitude: The motor-car has restored the
romance of travel (1). Henry James devotes
passages to automobile outings in The American
Scene (1907); Theodore Dreisers A Hoosier
Holiday (1916) documents the authors journey
to his birthplace; and Emily Post, who would later
become famous as a writer on etiquette, published
a widely read account of a transcontinental trip
in By Motor to the Golden Gate (1916). After
1913, when Ford invented the assembly line and
planning began for the first transcontinental
highway the famous Lincoln Highway the
number of automobile-related publications, advertisements, and popular songs multiplied. It
was in this mass production phase of Americas
love affair with the automobile that writers
turned to romance as a literary convention, and
the road novel was born.
Free Air is the fictionalized account of Lewiss
1916 honeymoon trip in a Model T. The novels
heroine is the eastern socialite Claire Boltwood,
who gains her independence as she motors west,
ultimately falling in love with a Midwestern
mechanic who teaches her how to operate her
automobile. The free air is advertised by gas
stations along the way; however, it is also the
substance Claire breathes on what Lewis calls
her voyage into democracy. The title thus combines commerce (civilization) and freedom in a
manner typical for the genre. It is significant that
Lewiss protagonist is a woman; cars helped many
wealthier women break out of traditional roles
by providing them with the means to escape the
constraints of the household.
The automobile, however, also poses a threat
to freedom one not immediately evident to
drivers excited by the journey. Claire discovers
she is on a voyage into democracy in Gopher
Prairie, the fictional town that would serve as the
setting of Lewiss next novel, Main Street (1920).
This is the first anti-road novel, and it demonstrates how automobiles become part of a new
consumer culture homogenizing American life
so that Main Street is the continuation of Main
Streets everywhere (n.p.). The tension between
the personal freedom promised by the new technology and its social and later ecological impact
would preoccupy all subsequent road and antiroad novels.
THE ROAD NOVEL
Automobiles begin to play a central role in the

fiction of the 1920s. In F. Scott Fitzgeralds The
Great Gatsby (1925), for instance, driving is an
index of personal morality, and a stretch of suburban roadway between the wealthy suburbs and
the city is the primary setting of violence and
betrayal. The wealthy Tom and Daisy Buchanan
are careless people, and the damage they inflict
through cars, ruining a poor auto mechanic and
running down his wife, is emblematic of the foul
dust floating in the wake of Gatsbys dream,
which is the American dream.
The novels of the Great Depression are less
concerned with the moral significance of driving
than with its economic impact. John Steinbecks
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a road novel with a
social conscience, depicting a group of Dust Bowl
farmers migrating in old jalopies to the promised
land of California. This land is fruitful but unwelcoming, dominated by agro-businesses interested only in exploiting cheap labor. The jalopies
that transport the farmers prove in a way to be
their undoing, as they are one species of the
technology (the other being Caterpillar tractors)
rendering rural forms of community obsolete.
However, mobility also promises a new form of
political mobilization, bringing together disparate
people in a common struggle for workers rights.
John Dos Passoss U.S.A. trilogy (1930, 1932,
1936) presents a more pessimistic view of life on
the road. The intersecting stories of the trilogy are
framed by the wanderings of Vag (for vagabond),
who remains an outcast beside the speeding
traffic of a society that has no place for him.
A form of vagrancy (bus travel) does provide a new
vision of solidarity in Nathan Aschs travelogue
The Road: In Search of America (1937). Asch also
worked as an editor for the WPA Guidebook to
America series, an unprecedented New Deal project putting hundreds of writers to work on guidebooks for every state in the nation. The American
Guides represent automobile tourism as a patriotic duty. Henry Millers Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), on the other hand, is a travelogue
with a bad conscience, pessimistic about American
culture, especially consumer culture, including the
automobile that Miller reluctantly drives.
Kerouacs On the Road displays striking similarities to Millers travelogue. The protagonist, Sal
Paradise, is a fictional version of the author, who
criss-crossed the country in the 1940s and 1950s,
801
often with or in pursuit of the famous vagabond

Neal Cassady, who would later drive a bus for Ken
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. (These journeys
are depicted in Tom Wolfes The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test [1968] and Keseys The Further Inquiry
[1990]). Cassady is the model for Kerouacs Dean
Moriarty, a compulsive vagabond and highly
skilled driver who nevertheless drives his cars
as he does his relationships to pieces. Sal recognizes the dangers of automobile travel and, in
contrast to Dean, is a poor driver himself, often
opting to hitchhike or take a bus. Safety is less the
issue here than the significance of travel in a highly
mobile society. The more Sal travels, the more he
loses sight of his destination, and his tone becomes melancholic as he laments the country that
seems to disappear under his wheels.
Early critics of the Beats focused on the ambiguity of their travels, arguing that the primary
difference between dropping out and tourism is
the price of the hotels and the quality of the cars.
If the Beats display the contradictions of all
subsequent countercultural movements an uncomfortable intimacy with the culture being criticized they also articulate what has become the
preeminent site and demographic of contemporary rebellion. Since the 1950s, revolutions have
moved from the picket lines to the open road, and
their protagonists are not the disenfranchised but
the young.
The road became such a powerful symbol of
youth and freedom that even novels concerned
with fitting in rather than dropping out turned to
it in the negative. John Barths The End of the Road
(1958) and Richard Yatess Revolutionary Road
(1961) represent conformity as the opposite of the
journey something ironically signaled in their
titles. John Updikes Rabbit, Run fuses the road
and anti-road novel; the main character, who in
sequels would become a car dealer, drives away
from the responsibilities of marriage and a job
only to recognize the futility of flight when he
hears the same songs on radio stations everywhere. Steinbecks Travels With Charley in Search
of America (1960) is a non-fiction elegy for the
authors lost youth and for the solidarity depicted
in The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck fears that the
freeway system, and all it represents, has sacrificed
the old, progressive America to the dictates of
efficiency and speed; the mobility that once promised social mobilization now leads to individua-
802
THE ROAD NOVEL
tion, which might mean independence for the

young but threatens the elderly with isolation.
Lolita presents the generational conflicts of the
road more lyrically and disturbingly than perhaps
any other novel. Humbert Humbert, the firstperson narrator, is a European immigrant obsessed with pre-pubescent girls and as dismissive
of American culture as he is impressed with the
landscape. He kidnaps the young Lolita and then
drives across the country, first in flight from
prying eyes and then, when she escapes with
another older man, in pursuit. Perversion and
tourism intertwine in a journey whose twin topoi
are the virgin territory of the fabled American
continent and the youth culture of American
consumerism. The novel establishes a parallel
between the landscape and Lolitas body, and
Humberts feverish geographical and sexual explorations inspire him to long lists of place names,
intertwined with medical and guidebook descriptions, that surprisingly transform banality and
perversion into beauty. The ultimate tone, however, is one of despair, as Humbert defiles Lolita
and the continent they have been traversing in his
lustful attempts to possess them.
Joyce Carol Oatess story Where Are You
Going, Where Have You Been? (1966) approaches the road from a Lolita-like perspective.
Dedicated to Bob Dylan, it depicts a girls kidnapping by a pair of young rebels who turn out to
be older men. Oates makes it clear that her
protagonist, Connie, is forcibly seduced by an
adult-driven youth culture, which (like Humbert)
tries to act young in order to exploit the young.
However, when Connie drives off with the threatening figures in their jalopy, she also discovers
possibilities in the vast sunlit reaches of the land
(31) opening before her.
More recent examples of the road narrative
tend to emphasize the dangers over the promise of
driving, although John Haskells American Purgatorio (2004) and Jon Krakauers Into the Wild
(1996; film 2007), the former a novel and the latter
a non-fiction book and subsequently a film, do
represent a nostalgic (if morbid) return to the
romance of dropping out. The film adaptation is
significant; in recent years the road genre has
become primarily visual; novels have given way
to TV shows such as Route 66 and Charles Kuralts
On the Road series for CBS News, and movies such
as Easy Rider, Cannonball Run, Smokey and the
Bandit, Convoy, Kalifornia, Thelma and Louise,

Lost Highway, and Smoke Signals.
Smoke Signals is based on the short story This
Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona
(1993) by Sherman Alexie, a SpokaneCoeur
dAlene Indian. However, comparatively few
road narratives have been written by Native
Americans or people of color, who more often
appear as sidekicks or local attractions in books
by white authors. This has to do with the differential economics and geographies of automobility. Cars are not available to everyone, not all
roads or destinations are accessible to all drivers,
and what constitutes a thruway for those with
access to transportation is a barrier for those
without. African Americans, for instance, could
not simply drive anywhere for much of the
previous century, as is evidenced by the special
travel guides (called Green Books) informing
black drivers where it was safe to stop for food,
gas, and lodging. The risks for black drivers are
depicted in E. L. Doctorows Ragtime (1975), a
novel describing how black jazz musician Coalhouse Walkers car is destroyed by racists. The
differential geographies of driving are also evident in African American travel narratives that
just miss being road books. Zora Neale Hurston,
whose autobiographical Dust Tracks on the Road
(1942) might suggest automobility, depicts the
author behind the wheel only when she is chauffeuring her wealthy white patron. Hurstons
novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is
also a journey narrative, but one in which selfdiscovery is linked to disappointment and technological regression; the heroine who sets out in
love and in a car returns from her travels on foot
and alone.
There is an analogous trajectory in the writings of Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man (1952) is a
picaresque novel, yet when the main character
sits behind the wheel, it is to chauffeur a white
patron of his college. By the end he goes underground at the same time that his white contemporaries, the Beats, were setting off on journeys. The short story Cadillac Flambe (1973),
projected to be a part of the second novel Ellison
never completed, depicts a jazz musician who is
shocked by a broadcast interview in which a US
senator calls the kind of Cadillac he has worked
hard to afford a coon cage. To protest the racist
epithet, which imprisons him in the vehicle
THE ROAD NOVEL
supposed to liberate him, he sets his car on fire

on the senators front lawn. It is such anti-road
narratives, told from the perspective of racial
difference or ecological disaster, that reveal those
invisible barriers in the landscape social, political, environmental repressed by the myth of
the open road. Although this myth is perhaps the
most popular element of the genre, it is also an
artifact of the road books early affiliation with
advertising.
SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
Noir Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF);

Acosta, O. Z. (1972). The Autobiography of a Brown
Buffalo. San Francisco: Straight Arrow.
Alexie, S. (1993). This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix,
Arizona. In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heaven. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Asch, N. (1937). The Road: In Search of America.
New York: Norton.
Barth, J. (1958). The End of the Road. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Bliss, C. S. (1972). Autos Across America: A Bibliography
of Transcontinental Automobile Travel: 19031940.
Los Angeles: Dawsons Bookshop.
DeLillo, D. (2003). Cosmopolis. New York: Scribners.
Dickstein, M. (1999). On and Off the Road: The
Outsider as Young Rebel. In S. Bercovitch (ed.),
The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 7.
Didion, J. (1970). Play It as It Lays. New York:
Doctorow, E. L. (1975). Ragtime. New York:
Random House.
Dos Passos, J. (1938). U.S.A. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Dreiser, T. (1916). A Hoosier Holiday. New York: Lane.
Ellison, R. (1952). Invisible Man. New York: Random
House.
Ellison, R. (1973). Cadillac Flambe. American Review,
16, 24969.
Scribners.
Flink, J. J. (1988). The Automobile Age. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Gross, A. S. (2006). The American Guide Series:
Patriotism as Brand-Name Identification. Arizona
Quarterly, 62(1), 85112.
803
Haskell, John. (2005). American Purgatorio. New York:

Hurston, Z. N. (1937). Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston, Z. N. (1942). Dust Tracks on the Road.
[Jackson, H. N.] (1903). From Ocean to Ocean in a
Winton. Cleveland: Winton Motor Carriage.
James, H. (1907). The American Scene. New York:
Harper.
Kesey, K. (1990). The Further Inquiry (photos by R.
Bevirt). New York: Viking.
King, S. (1983). Christine. New York: Viking.
Krakauer, J. (1996). Into the Wild. New York: Anchor.
Lackey, K. (1997). RoadFrames: The American
Highway Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Least Heat-Moon, W. (1982). Blue Highways: A Journey
into America. Boston: Little, Brown.
Lewis, S. (1919). Free Air. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Lewis, S. (1920). Main Street. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
McCarthy, C. (2006). The Road. New York: Knopf.
Miller, H. (1945). The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
Nabokov, V. (1955). Lolita. Paris: Olympia.
Oates, J. C. (1974). Where Are You Going, Where
Have You Been? In Where Are You Going, Where
Have You Been? Stories of Young America.
Greenwich, CT: Fawcett.
Pirsig, R. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. New York:
Bantam.
Post, E. (1916). By Motor to the Golden Gate. New York:
Appleton.
Primeau, R. (1996). Romance of the Road: The Literature
of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH:
Bowling Green State University Press.
Scharff, V. (1991). Taking the Wheel: Women and the
Coming of the Motor Age. New York: Macmillan.
Seiler, C. (2006). So That We as a Race Might Have
Something Authentic to Travel By: African
American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism.
American Quarterly, 58(4), 1091118.
Viking.
Steinbeck, J. (1962). Travels with Charley in Search of
America. New York: Viking.
Thompson, H. S. (1971). Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American
Dream. New York: Random House.
Updike, J. (1960). Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf.
Wharton, E. (1908). A Motor-Flight Through France.
804
ROBINSON, MARILYNNE
Wolfe, T. (1968). The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Yates, R. (1961). Revolutionary Road. Boston:
Atlantic/Little, Brown.
Robinson, Marilynne
LAURA E. TANNER
Born in Sandpoint, Idaho on November 26, 1943,

Marilynne Robinson received her BA in American
literature from Brown University in 1966 and
her PhD in English from the University of
Washington in 1977. In 1981, she published her
first novel, Housekeeping, which received the
PEN/Hemingway Award and the Richard and
Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. For
more than two decades after the publication of
her first novel, Robinson published primarily in
the essay form. In 1997, Robinson received the
Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1990,
she received the Lila Wallace Readers Digest
Writers Award. Her second novel, Gilead, was
published in 2004 to great acclaim; it received the
National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction
and in 2005 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In
2008, Robinson published Home, a companion
novel to Gilead. She currently teaches at the
University of Iowa Writers Workshop.
Regarded by many as one of Americas finest
contemporary writers, Marilynne Robinson has
produced a body of fiction that explores the
construction of subjectivity and the dynamics of
human relationship in the context of family,
religion, and loss. As they capture the motion of
individual consciousness, her novels also bring to
life the intensity of human connection, the threat
of isolation in the face of mortality, and the
textured immediacy of sensory experience. Structured by the rhythms of thought, Robinsons
works often achieve the lyrical beauty and intensity of poetry. Her ability to use words to capture
subtle shifts of emotion and to construct images
that render the thickness of quotidian experience
distinguishes her from even her most talented
peers. Robinsons depth of thought and breadth
of reading are apparent not only in her widely
acclaimed essay collections but also in works of
fiction that contain multiple allusions to history,
the Bible, philosophy, theology, and a tradition

of American literature that includes Dickinson,
Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau.
In lyrical prose, Robinsons first novel, Housekeeping (1980), represents the experience of Ruth
Stone, an adolescent protagonist who struggles to
define her own identity after her mother commits
suicide and she is left in the care of her aunt, a
solitary drifter named Sylvie. The novel traces the
efforts of Ruth and her sister to come to terms
with their aunts eccentric habits including
methods of housekeeping which involve moving
furniture onto the lawn and inviting the natural
world in and culminates in Ruths decision
to embrace the philosophy of transience Sylvie
embodies. After burning down their house, Sylvie
and Ruth escape from the town and the confines
(as well as the support) of middle-class domesticity. The novels striking portrayal of the landscape
of Fingerbone, Idaho, with the lake at its center
and images of reflection abounding in the water
and sky, renders the geography of Ruths world
with sensory immediacy. Robinsons imagistic
and sensuous narrative also traces the unspoken
shifts of Ruths consciousness as she struggles to
define herself in a world marked by the seeming
inevitability of loss. Driven largely by the rhythms
of language and the motion of thought, Housekeepings first-person narrative renders the haunting intensity of grief, the fearful isolation of
adolescence, and the immaterial intensity of longing with palpable immediacy.
Gilead explores the motion of consciousness in
the face of loss from a very different perspective.
Written in the form of letters from a dying father
to his young son, the novel inhabits the imagination of 76-year-old John Ames, a third-generation
Congregationalist minister living in the tiny town
of Gilead, Iowa. Blessed late in life with marriage
and unexpected fatherhood, Ames responds to
the imminence of his own death through the lens
of a powerful faith that celebrates rather than
dismisses the joys of immersion in the quotidian
worlds of nature, family, and community. Although the quiet power of Amess faith and the
depth of his emotional connection to his wife
and child contribute to the novels understated
beauty, Gilead also touches on the tensions of
religious belief and the complexities of relationships through its exploration of Amess rocky
relationship with his godson, Jack Boughton, and
ROTH, HENRY
through its reference to a family history which

extends from the Civil War era to the novels
1950s present. Robinson endows the setting of
Gilead with a textured presence that renders
nature a constant companion and situates the
reader in the contemplative space of Amess understated but intensely experienced life. A stunning meditation on the power and limits of
consciousness in the face of mortality, Gilead
explores the lived experience of history, religious
faith, and human connection through the perspective of a singular character inhabiting the
tenuous boundary between life and death.
Home functions as a companion piece to
Gilead. This parallel novel explores the domestic
world of the Boughtons: Amess friend, Robert
Boughton, who is also elderly and ill; Boughtons
daughter, Glory, who returns home to care for
him; and her brother Jack, whose history of
misbehavior, crime, and bad judgment was first
introduced in Gilead. Most of Home is set in the
elder Boughtons house and yard, where longstanding tensions between Jack and his father
erupt against the backdrop of unexamined memory, domestic habit, and unrealized expectation.
In this reworking of the prodigal son narrative,
Glory functions as both narrator and mediator.
Despite her unwavering commitment to protect
her fathers health and emotional stability, she
finds herself increasingly drawn into a connection
with her brother, who acknowledges his own
considerable failings with gentle resignation,
passivity, and subtle humor. By setting up the
inevitability of Jacks relapse into alcohol and
irresponsibility early on, the novel establishes a
rhythm of desire and loss that lulls the reader into
the expectation of Jacks failure. When the true
tragedies of the novel are finally unveiled, however, they involve not the painful, preordained
limits of Jacks character but the sudden, unwarranted possibilities for joy that the reader glimpses
only in the act of marking their disappearance.
SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF)

King, K. (1996). Resurfacings of the Deeps: Semiotic
Balance in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping.
Studies in the Novel, 28(4), 56580.
805
Ravits, M. (1989). Extending the American Range:

Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping. American
Robinson, M. (1980). Housekeeping. New York:
Robinson, M. (2004). Gilead. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Robinson, M. (2008). Home. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Schaub, T. (1994). An Interview with Marilynne
Robinson. Contemporary Literature, 35(2) 23151.
Tanner, L.E. (2007). Looking Back from the Grave:
Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence
in Marilynne Robinsons Gilead. Contemporary
Roth, Henry
STEVEN G. KELLMAN
Henry Roth was a pioneering figure in American

Jewish literature. Despite initial neglect, his first
novel, Call it Sleep (1934), was eventually recognized as a classic of immigrant fiction, a brilliant
adaptation of Joycean and Freudian techniques
to American urban experience, and a harbinger of
the flowering of American Jewish culture after
World War II. After a legendary hiatus of several
decades, Roth recovered his literary ambitions,
producing in the final decade of his long life a
massive cycle of autobiographical fiction. Two
volumes were carved out of it and published
before his death at the age of 89, two appeared
posthumously, and approximately 1,000 manuscript pages remained unpublished.
Roth was born in 1906 in Tysmenitz, a town in
Galicia, in what was then part of the AustroHungarian Empire and is now in Ukraine. When
he was 18 months old, he and his mother journeyed across the Atlantic to join his father, who
had already emigrated to New York City. The
family initially settled in the Brownsville section
of Brooklyn but in 1910 moved to the Lower East
Side, the densely populated immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan. In 1914, they moved to
Harlem, settling in a largely Irish and Italian area.
While attending City College, Roth became the
protege and lover of Eda Lou Walton, a poet and
instructor at New York University. While living
with Walton in her Greenwich Village apartment,
Roth wrote Call It Sleep. It was published in 1934,
806
ROTH, HENRY
during the depths of the Depression, and, despite

enthusiastic reviews, the novel attracted few readers. Roth eventually gave up on the New York
literary life, and, after marrying a musician named
Muriel Parker, moved to Maine, where he raised
ducks and geese. In 1964, Call It Sleep, in a new
paperback edition, suddenly became a commercial and critical success, propelling its author out
of obscurity and into the esteem enjoyed by
younger Jewish novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard
Malamud, and Philip Roth. He moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1968 and took up writing again. After several false starts and despite
rheumatoid arthritis so severe that lifting a pencil
was agony, Roth began tapping out on his computer a vast body of autobiographical fiction that
he called Mercy of a Rude Stream. He was intent
on baring painful truths that would earn him
the death that he longed for and that came on
October 13, 1995.
Beginning with a prologue recounting the
arrival of 2-year-old David Schearl and his
mother Genya at Ellis Island in 1907, Call It
Sleep focuses on young Davids troubling experiences during the years 191113, as a stranger in a
strange land. Not the least of his troubles is the
enmity of his father, Albert, a surly man who,
embittered by disappointment, is one of the
most memorable paternal monsters in modern
literature. A coming-of-age story about a hypersensitive Jewish boy who is forced to cope alone
with the mysteries of sex, religion, and love, the
novel consists of four sections, each of which is
defined by a different image: The Cellar, The
Picture, The Coal, and The Rail. Roth uses
stream-of-consciousness to intensify the sense of
an unformed mind trying to assimilate the varied
sensations that assault it. The family apartment
on the crowded Lower East Side is a haven for
David, as long as his father is not home and his
doting mother can lavish her affections on him.
Outside, the clamorous streets of New York
threaten the boy. He is frightened and confused
by sexual advances from a little girl named Annie
and, later, by the attempts of an older Christian
boy named Leo to use him to gain access to
Davids female cousins in order to play dirty
with them. At the end of a long, disorienting day
that concludes the novel, David, like the reader,
faces sensory overload and embraces temporary
oblivion, calling it sleep.
Roth denied having read Sigmund Freud, but

the powerful Oedipal bond between David and his
mother as well as the almost patricidal strife
between Albert and David suggest parallels if not
influences. Roth did acknowledge his debt to
James Joyce in his own portrait of the artist as
a young Jewish immigrant. A pattern of images of
radiance as well as of biblical allusions supports
the story of a little boy who manages to transcend
the shocks and horrors of everyday life into
mystical illumination. However, Call It Sleep is
also attentive to physical details of life among the
tenements of the Lower East Side, a tumult of
conflicting impressions that make it easy for little
David to become lost when he wanders just a few
blocks away from home and cannot make himself
understood to the kindly Irish cop who tries to
help him. The book is most memorable as a
cacophonous record of culture clash, one that
makes its English into a subtle instrument for
rendering the collision of languages. What, 30
years after its initial publication, was finally embraced as a neglected masterpiece was a novel that
is remarkable for its vivid rendition of a childseye view, its dramatic exposure of family tensions,
and its creation of rich linguistic textures.
In 1987, Roths friend and Italian translator
Mario Materassi gathered a Roth miscellany
short fiction, essays, and journal entries that he
published under the title Shifting Landscape.
However, Roth did not publish his second novel,
A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, until 1994.
The first volume of the tetralogy Mercy of a
Rude Stream, it begins in 1914, about a year
after the conclusion of Call It Sleep, when Roths
protagonist and alter ego now called Ira
Stigman is 8. It follows him into the early
1920s as he grows up, the butt of local antiSemites, in a cold-water flat in Harlem. The
work alternates between the experiences of its
young protagonist and the rambling commentary, set in different type, by a weary octogenarian Ira. The older Ira lives in Albuquerque and
addresses his computer directly, personifying it
and naming it Ecclesias.
A Diving Rock on the Hudson, the second
volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, was published
in 1995, eight months before its authors death.
It, too, alternates between the aged, ailing Ira
Stigman speaking to Ecclesias and episodes from
his youth more than 70 years earlier. The novel
ROTH, HENRY
begins in 1921, when Ira is just entering Stuyvesant High School, and it concludes in 1925, while
he is a student at City College, where he begins to
conceive a literary vocation after the campus
magazine publishes an essay he produces on
assignment.
Roth had attributed his long writers block 60
years between Call It Sleep and A Star Shines Over
Mt. Morris Park both to his flirtation with
communism, which demanded an artistic agenda
he was temperamentally unsuited for, and to
alienation from the Jewish community that he
only belatedly recognized as his true source of
inspiration. However, a startling development in
A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park suggests an
additional explanation for his prolonged silence.
Though Ira is an only child in the previous volume
of Mercy of a Rude Stream, a sister two years his
junior named Minnie suddenly and sensationally
appears in the second volume as Iras partner in
incest. So, too, is his younger cousin Stella. The
elder Ira broods over his paralyzing guilt and over
his compulsion to exorcise it in a culminating
literary confession. Like much of the rest of the
tetralogy, A Diving Rock in the Hudson, which
derives its title from a moment in which Ira,
caught stealing fountain pens, is tempted to
drown himself, is a document of self-loathing.
Its elderly narrator finds many reasons to despise
his awkward, erring younger self and welcomes
his own imminent demise.
In From Bondage, which was published posthumously in 1996 as the third volume of Mercy of
a Rude Stream, ailing, aging Ira reiterates his
wish to die and broods over the discontinuities
of his life. He attributes his belated recommitment to a literary calling to a renewed commitment to the Jewish community and the
embattled state of Israel. Throughout the novel,
he recounts his growing intimacy with Edith
Welles, the literature instructor and lover of
his friend Larry Gordon. And he torments himself by summoning up details of illicit trysts
with his cousin Stella.
The entanglement with Stella becomes even
more troublesome in Requiem for Harlem,
which was published in 1998. Writing about
his compulsive acts of incest intensifies the
laceration that Ira the anguished author inflicts
upon himself. Set in 1927, when Ira is a senior at
City College, the fourth and final volume of
807
Roths tetralogy concludes with an act of autoemancipation 21-year-old Iras decision to

depart the family apartment in Harlem and
make his way down to Greenwich Village, to
move in with Edith. He looks forward to fulfillment and redemption in a literary life. In the
final pages of Mercy of a Rude Stream, a fascinating document of life in the early twentieth
century written at the centurys close, Ira is
ready to write a novel very like Call It Sleep,
the book that initiated one of the most extraordinary careers in American literature.
and Fiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF)

Adams, S. J. (1989). The Noisiest Novel Ever Written:
The Soundscape of Henry Roths Call It Sleep.
Twentieth Century Literature. 35(1), 4364.
Altenbernd, L. (1989). An American Messiah: Myth in
Henry Roths Call It Sleep. Modern Fiction Studies,
35, 67387.
Diamant, N. (1986). Linguistic Universes in Henry
Roths Call It Sleep. Contemporary Literature, 27(3)
33655.
Folks, J. J. (1999). Henry Roths National and Personal
Narratives of Captivity. Papers on Language and
Literature, 35(3), 279300.
Gibbs, A. (2003). Conversation With Robert Weil,
March 2002, Henry Roths Mercy of a Rude
Stream. Studies in American Jewish Literature, 22,
15462.
Journal of the Short Story in English. (2005). Henry Roth
[special issue], 44.
Kellman, S. G. (2000). The Midwife of His Rebirth:
Henry Roth and Zion. Judaism, 49(3), 34251.
Kellman, S. G. (2008). Raising Muscovite Ducks and
Government Suspicions: Henry Roth and the FBI.
In C. Culleton & K. Leick (eds.), Modernism on File:
Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 19201950. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3952.
Kellman, S. G. (2005). Redemption: The Life of Henry
Roth. New York: Norton.
Lyons, B. (1976). Henry Roth: The Man and His Work.
New York: Cooper Square.
Materassi, M. (2007). On Henry Roth: An
Interview with Mario Materassi. Salmagundi,
15354, 6077.
Roth, H. (1934). Call It Sleep. New York: Robert
O. Ballou.
808
ROTH, PHILIP
Roth, H. (1979). Natures First Green. New York:

William Targ.
Roth, H. (1987). Shifting Landscape: A Composite
19251987 (ed. and intro. Mario Materassi).
Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.
Roth, H. (1994). A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park.
Roth, H. (1995). A Diving Rock on the Hudson.
Roth, H. (1996). From Bondage. New York: St. Martins.
Roth, H. (1998). Requiem for Harlem. New York:
St. Martins.
Roth, H. (20012a). Antica Fiamma. Princeton
University Library Chronicle, 63(12), 28291.
Roth, H. (20012b). Excerpt From Journal. Princeton
University Library Chronicle, 63(12), 292300.
Roth, H. (2006a). Freight. New Yorker, pp. 10013
(Sept. 25).
Roth, H. (2006b). God the Novelist. New Yorker,
pp. 725 (May 29).
Studies in American Jewish Literature. (1979). Henry
Roth [special issue], 5(1).
Todorova, K. (2006). Oy, a Good Men! Urban
Voices and Democracy in Henry Roths Call It Sleep.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 48(3),
25072.
Wirth-Nesher, H. (ed.) (1996). New Essays on Call It
Sleep. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Roth, Philip
DEREK PARKER ROYAL
Philip Roth is one of the most significant, recognized, and prolific novelists of the post-World
War II period. He is the author of over 29 books,
and his texts serve as both snapshots and critiques of contemporary culture from World War II
to post-9/11 America. It would be difficult, and
certainly foolhardy, to pigeonhole Roth in terms
of his style, politics, or narrative predilections. At
times he has been read as a social realist in the
mold of Henry James, at others a mischievous
metafictionalist reminiscent of John Barth. Often
he is associated with contemporaries such as John
Updike and Bernard Malamud, yet for many
readers he bears a stylistic kinship with the more
recent generation of Jewish American authors.
His novels have served as grist for many popular
book clubs, yet he stands as one of the most
unsettling, and even one of the most offensive,
novelists living today. He has been read as a

political radical, an anti-communist, a stand-up
(or sit-down) comedian, a misogynist, a liberal
apologist, a solipsist, a communitarian, a literary
pornographer, a Jewish godfather, and even an
anti-Semite. To call him chameleon-like would
not be an understatement. Yet his fiction is accessible to a general readership, earning him more
literary awards than almost any contemporary
American author.
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New
Jersey in 1933, the son of American-born parents
and the grandson of European Jews who were
part of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States. He grew up in the citys
lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and
was educated in Newark public schools. In works
as generically diverse as The Facts (1988) and The
Plot Against America (2004), Roth pulls from his
Weequahic experiences in ways that are both
evocative and confounding, problematizing distinctions between fact and fiction. He later
enrolled as a pre-law student at Newark College
at Rutgers, but eventually transferred to Bucknell
College, where he received his BA. He completed
his masters degree at the University of Chicago;
afterward he taught creative writing at both Iowa
and Princeton, and for many years he taught
comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in 1992.
Although publishing several apprentice-quality
stories throughout the mid-1950s, Roth first
gained critical notice with Goodbye, Columbus
and Five Short Stories (1959). Composed of previously published stories as well as new short
fiction and the title novella, this first book
brought quick critical attention to the young
writer and made an impact that would resonate
throughout his career. Goodbye, Columbus was
hailed by such critics as Irving Howe, Leslie
Fiedler, and Alfred Kazin; won the 1960 National
Book Award; and helped him to secure a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Roths ironic portrayal of middle-class Jews in
postwar America, caught between the anchors of
tradition and the temptations of assimilation,
earned him the ire of many readers, and several
influential rabbis denounced him as a self-hating
Jew. This became a critical tendency that would
mark the first years of Roths career. Careful
ROTH, PHILIP
readers of the texts, however, would notice a more

complicated or ambivalent relationship between
the author and his Jewish roots. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, Roth has pitted his protagonists
need for independence and self-discovery against
the demands of the (ethnic) community. They
rebel against what the narrator of The Human
Stain (2000) describes as the tyranny of the we
and its we-talk and everything that the we wants to
pile on your head (108). In terms of his readership, this tyranny played itself out from the very
beginning. Many believed that narratives such as
Defender of the Faith (1959) and the novella
Goodbye, Columbus presented Jews in a way that
would only fuel the longstanding prejudices
against and even hatred of Jews in the United
States. Roth spent the next couple of decades
writing against such assumptions, even using
this resistance as material for his 1979 novel, The
Ghost Writer, whose protagonist is accused of
airing his familys, and by association his ethnic
communitys dirty laundry.
Nonetheless, the two novels that followed
Goodbye, Columbus have much less of a Jewish
feel to them. Both Letting Go (1962) and When
She Was Good (1967) are exercises in a more
straightforward Jamesian realism Roth has said
that when writing his first novel, he had a copy
of Portrait of a Lady beside him, and indeed,
the nineteenth-century novel undergirds Roths
text and while stylistically similar to Goodbye,
Columbus, their manner stands apart from the
kind of humor that will largely define the first half
of his career. Partly for this reason, they are two of
the most underappreciated texts in Roth criticism
today. This is unfortunate, since both of these
novels were early testing grounds for Roths everevolving voice. Of particular note is When She
Was Good, the story of a young Midwestern
woman trapped by societal restrictions a la
Flauberts Madame Bovary and one of the only
narratives in which Roth focalizes through a
female perspective.
For many readers, Roth is best known for
the wildly popular and comedic tour de force
Portnoys Complaint. It was the New York Timess
bestseller for the entire year of 1969, an unheardof accolade for a literary novel, and it became
for many readers the defining text of the sexual
liberation movement. Perhaps even more significant, it also made a celebrity out of Roth, an
809
uncomfortable yet experientially rich predicament that he would later use as narrative grist in
such novels as Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The
Anatomy Lesson (1983), and Operation Shylock
(1993). Portnoys Complaint is the first-person
tirade of Alexander Portnoy, whose overprotective mother leaves him with guilt and insecurity
that can only be relieved through elaborate
masturbation and sex with forbidden Gentile
women, or shiksas. The entire novel is Portnoys
meandering and salacious spiel to his psychiatrist,
Dr. Spielvogel, and many have called it the literary
equivalent of a Jewish mother joke. But the novel
is much more than a vulgar comedy shtick, an
accusation leveled by Irving Howe, who had once
been one of Roths most prominent defenders.
It is a highly experimental work whose genesis can
be found in four separate projects that Roth had
begun and then abandoned throughout the 1960s:
a vaudevillian narrative entitled The Jewboy,
a dramatic work-in-progress first performed as
The Nice Jewish Boy, an outrageous monologue
centered around the genitalia and private anatomy of famous individuals, and a highly autobiographical work of fiction whose working title was
Portrait of the Artist. Through the synthesis of
these unlikely literary trajectories, Roth established the volatile style that would define his
writing for the next 40 years.
After the publication of Portnoys Complaint,
Roth began a series of experimental comic narratives that, although never living up to the promise
set by his bestselling novel, further pushed the
boundaries of literary outrageousness. Our Gang
(1971) is a Swiftian satire of the Nixon administration whose absurdities uncannily anticipate the
revelations of the Watergate trials. Another short
novel, The Breast (1972), is a Kafkaesque tale of
David Kepesh, Roths first professor of desire
who literally turns into a female breast. But
perhaps the most notable of Roths post-Portnoy
works is his 1973 baseball narrative, The Great
American Novel, a farcical mixture of Frank
Norriss novelistic quest and the great American
pastime. With its politically incorrect humor,
insouciant handling of literary icons, and attack
on every sacred American ideal, the novel gives
new meaning to the term extreme sports.
With My Life as a Man (1974), Roth began
focusing on what would become his most enduring, and arguably his best defining, theme: the
810
ROTH, PHILIP
responsibilities of the author and the intersection

of text and self. He would describe this in his first
book of non-fiction, Reading Myself and Others
(1975), as a preoccupation with the relationship
between the written and the unwritten world
(p. xi). My Life as a Man was Roths first overt
engagement with self-reflective fiction, and it is
perhaps the first work in which he could unequivocally be defined as a postmodern writer. It is
the story of Peter Tarnopol, a writer who creates
a fictional character named Nathan Zuckerman
(his first appearance in a Roth novel), and how his
narratives become the testing fields of subjectivity. Just over 10 years later, Roth expands upon
this theme in his postmodern tour de force,
The Counterlife (1986), an ambitious and meticulously crafted novel whose characters constantly
negotiate or rewrite their selves in ways that are
underscored by the novels very structure. Each of
the books five different sections is rewritten by
the sections that follow, so that the facts that are
presented in one chapter appear to be fabrications in another. In essence, the entire novel is an
exercise in narrative deconstruction.
What many scholars of post-1960 American
literature tend to overlook is the fact that Philip
Roth is in many ways a postmodern writer. While
his narratives may not overtly resemble the metafictional absurdities of a Donald Barthelme or
emphasize the cultural frivolousness found in
Thomas Pynchon, they nonetheless betray characteristics that are not dissimilar from the work
of these authors. If, at the risk of overgeneralizing, postmodern narrative can be defined as
problematizing both originality and authenticity,
emphasizing indeterminacy and contingency, representing experience as fragmented, subverting
distinctions between high and low culture,
and revealing subjectivity as a negotiated construct, then most of Roths works could be read
within this context.
Such is indeed the case with the series of
books that make up the Zuckerman Bound collection: the novels The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman
Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and the novella
epilogue, The Prague Orgy (1985). The opening
Kunstlerroman of the series, The Ghost Writer
(1979), stands as a telling example of the postmodern subject. In the novel, the first in which
Nathan Zuckerman serves as the central protagonist, the up-and-coming artist appropriates and
rewrites the fate of Anne Frank through the fantasized life of a young student, Amy Bellette. By reimaging Bellette as an older Anne Frank, one who
never died in the Holocaust but instead made her
way to America, Zuckerman attempts to narrate
or write himself directly into the literary (and
Jewish) community, and by so doing, legitimize
his art. In Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The
Anatomy Lesson (1983), Roth directly addresses,
via his narrative doppelganger Zuckerman, the
kinds of criticism leveled at him in being both
vulgar and disrespectful of his Jewish heritage.
In fact, there is a tendency among Roths critics
to read him primarily as a great chronicler of
contemporary, and assimilated, Jewish life in
America. Such prejudices are what Saul Bellow
had in mind when he sardonically observed that
he, Roth, and Bernard Malamud are often lumped
together as the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of
American literature, assuming that just because
each came from Jewish backgrounds (just as
the famous clothiers), they should be read in
light of their ethnicity. However, in 2002, upon
winning the National Book Foundations Lifetime Achievement Award, Philip Roth said in
his acceptance speech that he has always thought
of himself as an American writer: I have never
thought of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish or a Jewish American
writer, anymore than I imagine Theodor Dreiser
or Ernest Hemingway or John Cheever thought of
themselves as American Christian or Christian
American writers. His statements may appear
provocative, but this was not the only occasion
where Roth expressed uneasiness at being labeled
a Jewish writer. Throughout his career he has
performed a curious balancing act of inscribing
his Jewish roots while at the same time denying
the ethnic-specific signifiers that place him in the
contemporary American canon.
Beginning with The Facts: A Novelists Autobiography (1988), Roth published a tetralogy
of works that explored the interplay between
fiction and fact in ways that far surpassed
his earlier works. Through his protagonist in
these works, a character named Philip Roth, the
author questions any static understandings of
the autobiographical and fictional genres, and he
mischievously encourages the reader to become
caught up in this literary game of where one
ends and the other begins. The Facts, purportedly
ROTH, PHILIP
a work of non-fiction, is framed by letters to and

from Roths fictional double, Nathan Zuckerman, and the one text specifically billed as a work
of fiction, Deception: A Novel (1990), reads more
like a dramatic script than it does a novel. The
style and plot of Patrimony: A True Story (1991)
are novelistic in nature and it even contains
passages reminiscent of Roths earlier fiction
and Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), one
of Roths most ambitious works, is based on a
premise so outlandish that its autobiographic
pretense becomes part of the joke.
Sabbaths Theater (1995), considered by many
scholars to be Roths masterpiece, is a return to
the outrageous psychosexual (and tragicomic)
form that entertained and outraged so many in
Portnoys Complaint. Its hero, the lewd and
arthritic puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, is the very
embodiment of transgressive behavior, but one
through which his author clearly establishes an
American character. Indeed, national character
is the primary focus of his multiple-award-winning American Trilogy: American Pastoral (1997),
I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human
Stain. Each of these three novels reflects a key
moment in late-twentieth-century American experience in the 1960s, 1950s, and 1990s, respectively and each is chronicled by an older Nathan
Zuckerman, no longer the audacious young writer he once was. In this later trilogy, the aged and
reclusive author reveals through his narration a
series of memorable individuals who, in many
ways, represent the social, political, and psychological conflicts that define postwar America.
Roth followed his American Trilogy with still
another historically conscious novel, The Plot
Against America, his biggest seller since Portnoys
Complaint. The book is, among other things, a
work of speculative fiction, an alternate history
where Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election; an allegory of the George W. Bush
administration and post-9/11 America; and an
example of historiographic metafiction, a demonstration of the contingent and constructed
nature of both fictional and historic narratives.
More recently, Roth has been employing the
novella or short novel form with increasing regularity. Perhaps his most ambitious example of
this is The Dying Animal (2001a), a first-person
confessional on sex and aging, and the third in a
trilogy of novels focusing on the protagonist
811
David Kepesh The Breast and The Professor of

Desire (1977) being the other two. Roth further
explores the travails of aging in Everyman (2006)
and Exit Ghost (2007), the latter supposedly being
the final Zuckerman installment, and in terms of
plot and focalization, it functions as a thematic
bookend to The Ghost Writer. By bringing his
protagonist full circle, Roth underscores many of
the themes that have defined his narrative oeuvre
and in doing so paints a vivid and, at times,
frantic portrait of the artist as an old man.
Other late novellas, Indignation (2008) and The
Humbling (2009), similarly focus on the dark
crossroads of death and desire.
In addition to his fiction, Roth has also proven
to be an accomplished essayist. In collections
such as Reading Myself and Others and Shop Talk
(2001b), his focus is on the act of writing, both his
own and that of other authors. The lengthy interviews that make up Shop Talk are a testament to
Roths unwavering and ongoing admiration of
some of the most significant writers in the last half
of the twentieth century. Until 1989 he was the
general editor of the Penguin book series Writers
From the Other Europe, which he inaugurated in
1974. The series helped to introduce American
audiences to, among others, Milan Kundera,
Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Ivan Klima.
Unlike many prolific novelists, whose productive qualities may wane over time, Roth has
demonstrated a unique ability to not only sustain
his literary output, but also even surpass the
achievements of his previous writings. His latter
fiction is arguably his best work, as demonstrated
by the succession of awards he received in the
1990s. His many accolades and honors include a
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, two National Book
Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards,
three PEN/Faulkner Awards, the National Medal
of the Arts, the National Book Foundation Medal
for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime
achievement, and he was the very first recipient
of the PEN/Bellow Award for Achievement in
American Fiction. To call him one of the most
accomplished American writers in the past
50 years would be an understatement.
SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); Ethnicity and
Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF);
Humor and Satire (WF); Jewish Fiction (BIF);
812
RUSS, JOANNA
Malamud, Bernard (AF); Postmodernist Fiction

(AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
Halio, J. L., & Siegel B. (eds.) (2005). Turning up the
Flame: Philip Roths Later Novels. Newark: University
of Delaware Press.
Milbauer, A. Z., & Watson D. G. (eds.) (1988). Reading
Philip Roth. New York: St. Martins.
Parrish, T. (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion
to Philip Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rodgers, B. F., Jr. (1978). Philip Roth. Boston: Twayne.
Roth, P. (1959). Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short
Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (1962). Letting Go. New York: Random House.
Roth, P. (1967). When She Was Good. New York:
Random House.
Roth, P. (1969). Portnoys Complaint. New York:
Random House.
Roth, P. (1972). The Breast. New York: Holt,
Roth, P. (1973). The Great American Novel. New York:
Roth, P. (1974). My Life as a Man. New York: Holt,
Roth, P. (1975). Reading Myself and Others. New York:
Roth, P. (1977). The Professor of Desire. New York:
Roth, P. (1985). Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and
Epilogue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Roth, P. (1986). The Counterlife. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Roth, P. (1988). The Facts: A Novelists Autobiography.
Roth, P. (1990). Deception: A Novel. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Roth, P. (1991). Patrimony: A True Story. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Roth, P. (1993). Operation Shylock: A Confession.
Roth, P. (1995). Sabbaths Theater. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Roth, P. (1997). American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Roth, P. (1998). I Married a Communist. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2000). The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2001a). The Dying Animal. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2001b). Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues
and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2004). The Plot Against America. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2006). Everyman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2007). Exit Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2008). Indignation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2009). The Humbling. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Philip Roth Studies (2004). D. P. Royal, exec. ed.
Royal, D. P. (ed.) (2005). Philip Roth: New Perspectives
on an American Author. Westport, CT:
Greenwood-Praeger.
Safer, E. B. (2006). Mocking the Age: The Later Novels
of Philip Roth. Albany: SUNY Press.
Russ, Joanna
TATIANA TESLENKO
An internationally acclaimed author, Joanna

Russ takes up issues pioneered by feminist
theorists in the 1960s and explores them in
many genres, from mainstream fiction to fantasy and utopia, offering unique visions of the
future and unprecedented activist solutions.
Thematically, her fiction focuses on identity,
difference, gender roles, power, oppression, and
violence. She also writes profound criticism of
feminist theory and history.
Born in New York in 1937, Russ received her
BA in English from Cornell University and
her MFA from Yale University. She combined
writing with a teaching career that spanned
almost three decades, as professor of English
at Cornell University, SUNY at Binghamton,
the University of Colorado, and the University
of Washington. She currently lives in Tucson,
Arizona.
Her first story, Nor Custom Stale, was
published in 1959. It was followed by numerous
short stories and novels, including And Chaos
Died (1970), The Female Man (1975), and The
Two of Them (1978). Russ has won many
awards, including Nebula Awards (1972,
1983), the O. Henry Award (1977), and the
Hugo Award (1983).
Russ authored major critical works, such as
How to Suppress Womens Writing (1984); Magic
Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts:
Feminist Essays (1985); To Write Like a Woman:
Essays in Feminism, and Science Fiction (1995);
and What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class,
RUSS, JOANNA
and the Future of Feminism (1998). Her outspoken and witty criticism has started frequent controversies. From 1966 to 1979, she worked as an
occasional book reviewer for Fantasy and Science
Fiction, the Washington Post Book World, and the
Feminist Review of Books, and as an essayist for
Science-Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Ms.
In 1988 she won the Pilgrim Award for Lifetime
Achievement in the field of science fiction
scholarship.
In her essays, Russ explores patriarchal concepts
in mainstream fiction that cast men in significant roles and women in disempowered roles.
Her fiction challenges traditional gender roles
and explores identity issues. Russ defines feminist
utopia as explicit about economics and politics,
sexually permissive, demystifying about biology,
emphatic about the necessity for female bonding,
concerned with children . . . non-urban, classless,
communal, relatively peaceful while allowing
room for female rage and female self-defence, and
serious about the emotional and physical consequences of violence (1980, 15).
This definition applies to most of her work,
especially to her Nebula Award-winning story,
When It Changed (1972). Set on a future world,
Whileaway, in which all males have died of a
mysterious, sex-linked plague, it depicts a utopian
society created by women. This society has functioned smoothly for many years, successfully
educating the young, inculcating values, and producing the goods necessary for survival. The
conflict in the story arises with the arrival of men
on Whileaway.
Whileaway also appears in Russs novel The
Female Man (1975), which explores the potentialities of the same female self in different social
contexts. Russ describes the encounter of four
protagonists Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and
Jael who have a similar bodily image and
share the same genotype, but not the same
genealogy and history. Who am I? I know who
I am, but whats my brand name? This central
question keeps turning up in the novel. Joanna
lives here and now (in this case, the United
States of the 1960s), while Jeannine lives in a
New York where the Great Depression never
ended and World War II never happened.
Though their oppressive situations are different,
Jeannine and Joanna have a similar patriarchal
identification of a disempowered woman. All
813
that patriarchy taught them is how to despise

themselves. Joanna is the primary narrator,
shaping the text and pushing the conflict to
excess. She describes the worlds of the other Js
and monitors the way they respond to their
encounter. Janet, a utopian visitor from Whileaway, is associated with strength, intelligence,
and adaptability. The fourth J, the super-terrorist
and guerilla fighter Jael from the dystopian
Womanland, is obsessed with fierce independence, cunning, power, and anger.
Exploring the possibilities inherent in their
common genotype, Russ probes the way toward
uniting patriarchal contrarieties in her female
man, thus offering a solution for resolving
the conflict and eliminating the difference: to
resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own
person (1975, 138). Her separatist trajectories
to the assumption of the new identity include
the dystopia of Jaels Womanland and the lesbian
utopia of Whileaway. In Womanland, the gender
conflict has grown into a war which started
40 years ago and will be fought until the death
of the last man on the planet. In contrast to this
permanent war, on utopian Whileaway there are
no men, and power is used to promote the
uniqueness of each woman.
Russs work is socio-historically contingent
and implicated in the politics and polemics of
the second-wave feminist movement in the
United States. Through paradox, satire, and
humor, and by exposing their incongruity and
absurdity, Russ makes patriarchal values suspect,
eventually helping to change the dominant
socio-historical order.
SEE ALSO: Delaney, Samuel (AF); Gender and
the Novel (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and

Barr, M. S. (1992). Feminist Fabulation: Space/
Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press.
Bartowski, F. (1989). Feminist Utopias. Lincoln:
Cortiel, J. (1999). Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ,
Feminism, Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
814
RUSS, JOANNA
Delany, S. (1979). The Order of Chaos. Science Fiction

Studies, 19(6), pt. 3.
Lefanu, S. (1988). In the Chinks of the World Machine:
Feminism and Science Fiction. London: Womens
Press.
Mendlesohn, F. (ed.) (2009). On Joanna Russ.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Moylan, T. (1986). Demand the Impossible: Science
Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York:
Methuen.
Russ, J. (1968). Picnic on Paradise. New York: Ace.
Russ, J. (1970). And Chaos Died. New York: Ace.
Russ, J. (1975). The Female Man. New York: Bantam.
Russ, J. (1977). We Who Are About To. New York: Dell.
Russ, J. (1978). The Two of Them. New York: Putnams.
Russ, J. (1980). Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle
of the Sexes in SF. Science Fiction Studies, 7, 215.
Russ, J. (1983a). The Adventures of Alyx. New York:
Pocket.
Russ, J. (1983b). How to Suppress Womens Writing.

Russ, J. (1984). Extra(ordinary) People. New York:
St. Martins.
Russ, J. (1985). Magic Mammas, Trembling Sisters,
Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays. Trumansburg,
NY: Crossing.
Russ, J. (1987). The Hidden Side of the Moon. New York:
St. Martins.
Russ, J. (1995). To Write Like a Woman: Essays in
Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Russ, J. (1998). What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race,
Class, and the Future of Feminism. New York:
St Martins.
Russ, J. (2007). The Country You Have Never Seen:
Essays and Reviews. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
S
Salinger, J. D.
JONATHAN L. PRICE
J[erome] D[avid] Salinger is known for fiction

concerned primarily with children and adolescents who search for religious fulfillment and
moral rigor against a society obsessed with materialism, sentimentalism, and religious hypocrisy
or misunderstanding; simultaneously he is the
most mysterious figure in American fiction.
Author of one of the most famous American novels
of mid-century, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he
stopped publishing fiction abruptly in 1967 and
has remained largely aloof from public life.
Born on January 1, 1919 in New York City,
Salinger graduated from Valley Forge Academy
in Pennsylvania, then served in World War II.
After attending three colleges for short times,
he began publishing short stories in magazines.
He married Claire Douglas in 1955 and had
two children, but they divorced in 1967. He
married Colleen ONeill, and live in Cornish,
New Hampshire until his death on January 27,
2010.
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is the story of
Holden Caulfield, an adolescent boy of 17 explaining traumatic events of his life that occurred
around Christmas in the previous year. Such
a pallid description offers little sense of the novels
insight and power. In its colloquial style and
ironic critique of the adult world, it is often
compared to Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn.
Both writers use the narrators viewpoint and
colloquial malapropisms to direct irony against
the narrator as well as his social milieu. Unlike
Huck, Salingers Holden is offering his story in
a long conversation with the reader, an analogue

of a psychiatric session as well as a plea for help
and understanding. Holdens colloquial style,
filled with repetition and vulgarity, is a distinctive
feature of the novel. Further unlike Huck,
Holden is a product of a mid-twentieth-century
upper-middle-class urban environment, and his
madman stuff that happened to me around last
Christmas primarily occurs at a posh preparatory school in midtown Manhattan. Holden offers
a critique of phoniness of what he perceives as
the artificiality of the adult world with its hypocrisy, materialism, and concern with forms over
substance. He discerns the same phoniness
among his prep school peers, but the reader
notices it in Holden himself.
Like Huck, Holden wants to escape his school
and social environment for a pastoral utopia. A
lover of innocence, he wants to save children from
all the corruption of the modern world as well as
the confusion of adult sexuality this is part of his
dream of being, as he tells his younger sister
Phoebe, a catcher in the rye, a savior of young
children. In some ways Holden is a Christ figure,
wishing to transform a decadent world, but he is
also a confused adolescent in need of coherent
guidance. His catcher in the rye is based on
misunderstanding and, as Phoebe points out, is
radically impractical. But this is why the novel is
continually addressed to you, a modest hope
that some readers presumably adults will
sympathize and perhaps change their behavior.
Despite his constant criticism, in the end Holden
miss[es] everybody, implicitly desiring their
company as human beings. The novel thus offers
a message of forgiveness and love.

816
SCHUYLER, GEORGE S.
None of Salingers works have achieved the

prominence of Catcher, but each of the other
three has remained in print since publication.
Nine Stories (1953) collected some of the stories
he had published since 1948. These are superior
stories, skillfully crafted in terms of point of view,
and most play variously on the theme of innocence juxtaposed against modern decadence seen
in his earlier novel. The Laughing Man; For
Esme With Love and Squalor; and De Daumier-Smiths Blue Period are all first-person
narratives of trauma and transformation, seen
initially through the eyes of a child or adolescent;
however, the sophisticated narrator contemplates
the experience from the distance of maturity.
The superior perception of the central figures
and their sensitivity to pain threaten them, often
with self-destruction. But in many of the stories,
the protagonist is rescued from self-destructive
feelings by gestures of love, or recognition of
a common humanity, as in the final pages of
Catcher.
The remaining two books and the rest of Salingers creative life have been devoted to members
of the fictional Glass family. The central figure,
a savior-guru-suicide named Seymour Glass, first
appeared in Nine Stories. His name and the family
name itself offer various symbolic suggestions:
that they see further than others, but may shatter
like glass; that they see only reflections of themselves; that they hold a mirror up to readers. These
stories bear echoes of patterns first seen in
Catcher: Franny Glass in Franny (of Franny and
Zooey, 1961) is a troubled adolescent on the verge
of a breakdown. Her therapist her brother
Zooey, an actor is more sensitive and versatile
than any of Holdens multiple interlocutors.
His final insight is contained in a Zen-like
comment, dont you know who that Fat Lady
[the anonymous, unpleasant, but also valuable
human member of any audience] is? . . . Its
Christ Himself (1961, 200). Zooeys offering
suggests how Salingers fiction mixes West and
East, in its search for a spiritual alternative to
the multiple failings of a modern, materialist
world.
The second Glass novel (Raise High the Roof
Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,
1963) details Seymours comic non-wedding and
also offers a variety of commentaries and memories of Seymour himself. The final published
Glass story Hapworth 16, 1924, a letter

home from camp by Seymour, a precocious age
7 was rumored to be republished in book form
in the 1990s, but this never occurred.
SEE ALSO: Humor and Satire (BIF);
Alexander, P. (1999). Salinger: A Biography. Los
Angeles: Renaissance.
Bloom, H.(ed.) (1987). J. D. Salinger. New York:
Chelsea House.
French, W. (1988). J. D. Salinger Revisited. Boston:
Twayne.
Laser, M. & Fruman, N. (eds.) (1963). Studies in J. D.
Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The
Catcher in the Rye and Other Fiction. New York:
Odyssey.
Lundquist, J. (1979). J. D Salinger. New York: Ungar.
Salinger, J. D. (1951). The Catcher in the Rye. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Salinger, J. D. (1953). Nine Stories. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Salinger, J. D. (1961). Franny and Zooey. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Salinger, J. D. (1963). Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Salinger, J. D. (1965). Hapworth 16, 1924. New Yorker
(June 19).
Salzman, J. (ed.) (1991). New Essays on The Catcher in
the Rye. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Schuyler, George S.
ALEXANDER M. BAIN
George Samuel Schuyler, journalist and novelist,

was one of the most widely read African American
periodical writers of the 1920s and 1930s. He was
born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 25,
1895 (biographer Oscar Williams has noted
ambiguities in his birth records); was raised in
Syracuse; and lived most of his life in New York
City. He worked for, and contributed to, some of
the most prominent publications of the centurys
first half, including The Messenger, American
Mercury (under the patronage of H. L. Mencken),
and The Crisis. Between 1924 and 1966 he was
a staffer, editor, international correspondent, and
SCHUYLER, GEORGE S.
columnist at the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the

major African American weekly newspapers; his
many serialized stories appeared there, sometimes
under pseudonyms, between 1933 and 1939.
He also published two novels. Schuylers deep
ambivalence about racial identity as a basis for
making claims about political and social equality,
along with his embrace of conservatism after the
1930s, made him controversial throughout his
career and led to his eventual disavowal by the
Courier and the black press in general. His autobiography, Black and Conservative (1966), has influenced recent attempts to establish a tradition of
African American conservative thought. He died in
New York City on August 31, 1977, having spent
his final years writing commentary for such rightwing periodicals as the Manchester Union Leader.
Schuylers work is usually labeled satire, and is
sometimes placed within the Harlem Renaissance, not least because of his 1926 argument
with Langston Hughes over the value of a distinctly African American art. His fiction is perhaps best understood as a set of experiments in
using pulp genres (e.g., science fiction, the spy/
detective thriller, and melodrama) to explore race
relations, political and economic progress, and
American identity. In Schuylers first and bestknown novel, Black No More (1931), Dr. Junius
Crookman markets a chemical process for turning black people into Caucasians. The success
of Black No More, Inc. produces both the
virtual disappearance of the African American
population and Americas slide into paranoia
once all accepted markers of racial distinction
have vanished. Nominally the story of Max
Disher, a Harlemite who undergoes the treatment in order to win the affections of a racist
socialite, the novel surveys the consequences of
Crookmans invention for political parties, the
NAACP, white supremacists, and Harlem. The
novel contains enduring depictions of what
Schuyler regarded as the hypocrisy and hucksterism that accompanied much American thinking
about race: W. E. B. Du Bois, for example,
appears as Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard,
the crafty race leader terrified that the disappearance of black people means the end of his
speaking fees.
Schuyler based his second novel, Slaves Today
(1931), on the expose he wrote (for the New
York Evening Post) of the Liberian governments
817
practice of indenturing its indigenous inhabitants

into plantation labor in the Spanish colony of
Fernando Po. Slaves Today employs a relatively
flat style; while it centers on the story of two village
newlyweds who are separated by Liberias slave
trade he to endure plantation abuses, she to
become the evil district commissioners concubine much of the novel is devoted to reportorial
set pieces: a village wedding feast, the agonies of
a plantation hospital, and the streets of Liberias
capital during a rigged election. The book is
notable for the links it draws between corrupt
business practices in Africa, the broader panorama of Euro-American imperialism, and the
question of Africans roles in their own political
liberation.
Until the early 1990s, these novels and some
serial stories in the Courier were thought to
represent the entirety of Schuylers fictional
output. This view, and his increasingly strident
conservatism, long relegated him to minor status
in American literary history, and seemed to suggest that he had little to say about the international responses of black political discourse to
fascist aggression. Major reassessments of this
judgment followed the discovery and republication of his quartet of Courier serial stories
responding to the 19356 Italo-Ethiopian War.
(While these stories, published between November 1936 and January 1939, represent only
a fraction of Schuylers total serial-fiction output,
only they have been reprinted and thus made
generally available.) The Black Internationale
and Black Empire (republished together as
Black Empire) combine science fiction and
espionage thriller elements in the story of a technocratic liberation front, masterminded by
Dr. Henry Belsidus, that retakes Africa from its
imperialist controllers and establishes a vaguely
fascistic new civilization. The Ethiopian
Murder Mystery and Revolt in Ethiopia (republished together as Ethiopian Stories) respond
more explicitly to the Italo-Ethiopian crisis. In the
former, part detective story and part spy thriller,
a series of mysterious deaths in Harlem leads
a newspaperman to Ethiopian secret agents
attempting to guard the plans for a death ray
from traitors and Italian spies; the latter, an anticolonial adventure-romance, concerns a wealthy
African American who aids an Ethiopian princess
in her quest to recover a secret treasure that can
818
SCOTT, JOANNA
finance resistance to the Italians. These four

serials comprise a sustained inquiry into ideas
about racial solidarity, war, and transnational
loyalty which were urgently felt in the 1930s by
millions of readers in and beyond the United
States.
SEE ALSO: Du Bois, W. E. B. (AF);
Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Novel and
War (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF)
Ferguson, J. B. (2005). The Sage of Sugar Hill: George
S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. New Haven:
Leak, J. B. (ed.) (2001). Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected
Essays of George S. Schuyler. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press.
Schuyler, G. (1966). Black and Conservative. New
Rochelle, NY: Arlington.
Schuyler, G. (1991). Black Empire (ed. R. A. Hill &
R. K. Rasmussen). Boston: Northeastern
University Press.
Schuyler, G. (1989). Black No More [1931]. Boston:
Schuyler, G. (1994). Ethiopian Stories (ed. R. A. Hill).
Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Schuyler, G. (1969). Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia
[1931]. College Park, MD: McGrath.
Stephens, M. A. (2005). Black Empire: The Masculine
Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the
United States, 19141962. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Thompson, M. C. (2007). Black Fascisms: African
American Literature and Culture Between the Wars.
Williams, O. R. (2007). George S. Schuyler: Portrait of
a Black Conservative. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press.
Scott, Joanna
PATRICK ODONNELL
Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels and two

short story collections that explore in rich detail
the interiorities of characters who exist in complex natural and historical environments. A native
of Darien, Connecticut, Scott received a BA from
Hartford University and an MFA in creative
writing at Brown University, where she studied
with John Hawkes. She has taught at the University of Maryland and Princeton University, and is
currently the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of
English at the University of Rochester. She is the
recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships; her fourth novel, The Manikin (1996), was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Scotts first novel, Fading, My Parmacheene
Belle (1987), is a tale of mourning and recovery:
an aging fisherman whose wife has died flees into
the wilderness, only to encounter a teenage runaway who accompanies him on a psychologically
intensive journey across the American landscape.
The Closest Possible Union, following but a year
later, is ostensibly a historical fiction about the
journey of a slave ship (disguised as a whaling
vessel) as told through the eyes of the ships 14year-old captains apprentice. A complex pastiche
of tales, dreams, and visions, the novel portrays
the narrators maturation as he encounters the
eccentric, mobile identities that inhabit the ship
and contends with his growing awareness of the
horrors of slavery during a journey to the heart of
darkness. In Arrogance (1990), Scott portrays the
complex integration of imagination and desire in
the life of the Austrian expressionist painter Egon
Schiele (18901918). The novel takes place during
Schieles brief imprisonment in a small village jail
on charges of immoral conduct issuing from his
use of young girls as nude models, an incident
that offers the occasion for the interrelated stories
of Schieles career and relationships, and the
portrayal of fin-de-siecle Vienna as perceived
through the gaze of the eccentric modernist
painter.
The Manikin (1996) is, perhaps, Scotts most
accomplished work. Like previous novels, it is set
in specific historical circumstances, but of equal
importance to history is the location of a habitat
where characters interact, recollect, and project:
a forest, a ship, a room, and, in this instance,
a deteriorating upstate New York estate where the
widow of Henry Caxton reigns over an empty
mansion and an odd collection of servants. Caxton has made his fortune as a taxidermist who
has supplied natural history museums all over the
world with the products of his art, and the mansion, named The Manikin after the skeletal
model over which the taxidermist stretches
the skin of an animal, contains an extensive and
exotic array of stuffed animals and birds. The
SELBY, HUBERT, JR.
contrast between these mortal remains and the

lively, at times rebellious, voices of the servants
the true inhabitants of The Manikin forms the
primary tension in this evocative still life of
a novel that captures life in death, and death in
life.
The Manikin demonstrates Scotts dramatic
interest in natural processes, as does Tourmaline
(2002). Told from the perspective of a 50-year-old
man who has come to the island of Elba with his
father, a precious stone prospector, at the age of
5, the novel involves the mystery of a girls
disappearance, the natural and political history
of the famous island upon which Napoleon was
exiled, and the growing isolation of the members
of the narrators family in this paradise. Tourmaline was preceded by Make Believe (2000),
a novel in which adult morality and duplicity are
portrayed through the eyes of a 4-year-old
boy who has survived a car accident in which
his mother has died, and who is subjected to
a complex custody battle (his father having died
before he was born) in which greed and love
contend for dominance.
Scotts two most recent novels to date include
Liberation (2005) and Follow Me (2009). In the
former, Scott returns to the island of Elba and
the story of a woman, recollecting her youth from
the vantage point of 70: as a child of 10 during
World War II, she hid herself on the island in fear
for her life from French forces liberating the
island, and encountered a wounded Senegalese
soldier who becomes her first love. Here, as in all
of her novels, Scott explores stark contrasts between brutality and care, ugliness and beauty. In
Follow Me, a granddaughter reviews and discovers
the life of her extraordinary, nomadic grandmother, who has drifted between towns and
relationships for her entire adult life following
a traumatic episode as a teenager. In addition to
the novels, Scotts published short story collections include Various Antidotes (1994), 11 tales of
scientists, doctors and patients, and inhabitants
of the world of medicine that explore the relation
between science and the imagination; and Everybody Loves Somebody (2006), 10 narratives of
romantic and anti-romantic relationships taking
place across the twentieth century.
A novelist in the vein of William H. Gass and
John Hawkes for whom style and form are the
primary elements of fiction, across a succession of
819
works, Scott depicts the intense relation between

identity and place, mind and habitat; she has
established herself as one of the premier literary
novelists of the post-1980 era.
SEE ALSO: Gass, William H. (AF); Hawkes,
John (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
Boyers, R. (2002). Joanna Scott. In A Book of Common
Praise. Keene, NY: Ausable, pp. 2446.
Eiben, T. (2006). PW Talks with Joanna Scott.
Publishers Weekly, 253(41), 28.
Scott, J. (1987). Fading, My Parmacheene Belle. New
York: Ticknor and Fields.
Scott, J. (1988). The Closest Possible Union. New York:
Ticknor and Fields.
Scott, J. (1990). Arrogance. New York: Linden.
Scott, J. (1994). Various Antidotes. New York: Henry
Holt.
Scott, J. (1996). The Manikin. New York: Henry Holt.
Scott, J. (2000). Make Believe. New York: Little, Brown.
Scott, J. (2002). Tourmaline. New York: Little, Brown.
Scott, J. (2005). Liberation. New York: Little, Brown.
Scott, J. (2006). Everybody Loves Somebody. New York:
Little, Brown.
Scott, J. (2009). Follow Me. New York: Little, Brown.
Shechner, M. (1997). Until the Music Stops: Women
Novelists in a Post-Feminist Age. Salmagundi, 113,
22038.
Selby, Hubert, Jr.

JAMES R. GILES
Giving voice to urban rage and alienation,

Hubert Selby, Jr.s fiction satirizes conventional
assumptions about American culture, and even
about the inherent nature of human beings, in
extreme and often obscene language. Especially
in his first two novels, Selby demands that his
reader hear the rage of the urban dispossessed.
What results is a mixture of naturalism and
artistic primitivism unlike anything that preceded it in American literature. Selby writes
out of a deceptively complex aesthetic in which
a discourse of outrage masks an underlying
compassion. His fiction is committed to violating traditional taboos in language and subject matter.
820
SELBY, HUBERT, JR.
A child of the Great Depression, Selby was born

in Brooklyn, New York in 1928 and grew up near
8th Avenue. In 1944, at the age of 15, Selby
dropped out of Peter Stuyvesant High School
after one year. He then joined the merchant
marines and was sent to Europe, where, in
1947, he nearly died of tuberculosis. He spent
most of the next three and a half years confined to
hospitals undergoing surgeries that removed 10 of
his ribs. He has said that his prolonged and almost
fatal illness filled him with rage and bitterness
(OBrien 333).
This internal rage was initially translated into
a number of short stories that subsequently provided the basis for Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964).
Selbys brutally frank style and determination to
explore transgressive subject matter prompted
a trial for obscenity in Britain and the banning
of the novel in Italy. Last Exit is set in the
economically depressed Red Hook section of
Brooklyn in the 1940s. It is divided into five main
sections followed by a coda and focuses most
memorably on a vulnerable drag queen, a rapacious prostitute, and a factory worker ultimately
destroyed by his homosexuality. In one of the
most brutally realistic scenes in American literature, Tralala, the prostitute, is gang-raped and
murdered on a trash heap. The novels fragmented form allows Selby to evoke the cumulative
rage-filled voice of an exploited and culturally
alienated Brooklyn.
Seven years elapsed before Selbys next novel,
The Room (1971), which focuses on a nameless
man imprisoned, perhaps falsely, for robbery.
Withholding his protagonists name, Selby emphasizes the powerlessness and anonymity of his
plight. The situation of the imprisoned man is
reminiscent of that of familiar characters from
existentialist novels, for example Kafkas The
Trial, Camuss The Stranger, and Genets Our
Lady of the Flowers.
Selbys third novel, The Demon (1976), is more
conventional in narrative structure than his earlier novels, and perhaps less successful as a result.
Its protagonist, a business executive, surrenders to
destructive urges and ultimately descends into
a world of violent criminality. Echoing the existentialist overtones of The Room, The Demon
climaxes with the executives attempt to destroy
God in the form of a widely admired Catholic
priest. The narrator initially chooses to experi-
ment with petty crime but soon finds himself

powerless to control his dangerous anti-social
behavior.
Selby regained his narrative power with Requiem for a Dream (1978), which examines in grimly
realistic detail the destructive effects of addiction
on four central characters. Three of the characters
are young people involved in urban drug culture.
The fourth, Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow,
becomes addicted to diet pills and has to be
committed to a treatment facility where she is
mentally destroyed.
After Requiem for a Dream, Selby published
three other books of varying success. Song of
the Silent Snow (1986) is a much underrated
short story collection. Underlying Song of the
Silent Snow is a mood of quiet spiritual peace
previously unknown in Selbys work. This
mood is more overtly present in his 1998 novel
The Willow Tree, which, because of its artificially structured plot, is Selbys least satisfying
work. In contrast, Waiting Period (2002) recalls
The Demon in its evocation of the consciousness of an anonymous narrator who is transformed by frustration and rage into a serial
killer.
In 2004, Selby died in Los Angeles of chronic
pulmonary disease, leaving behind a relatively
small but significant body of work. His aesthetic
of rage, especially in Last Exit to Brooklyn, The
Room, and Requiem for a Dream, revolutionized
the American novel. The intense, unmediated
anger of his characters constituted a radical
departure from the mainstream of American
literature as manifested in Whitmans concept of
the divine common man, or Howellss affirmation of the American middle class, or the crafted
narrative distance in the fiction of Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Among that of other
contemporary urban novelists, the fiction of
Richard Price reveals Selbys influence.
The City in Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF);
Giles, J. R. (1995). The Game of Mum as Theme and
Narrative Technique in Hubert Selbys Last Exit to
Brooklyn. In The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in
SILKO, LESLIE MARMON
America. Columbia: University of South Carolina

Press, pp. 11938.
Giles, J. R. (1998). Hubert Selby Jr. Columbia:
Henden, J. (1978). Angries: S-M as Literary Style. In
Vulnerable People. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 5371.
Hurm, G. (1991). Hubert Selby, Jr. In Fragmented
Urban Images: The American City in Modern Fiction
From Stephen Crane to Thomas Pynchon. New York:
Peter Lang, pp. 27399.
Langenheim, B. (1998). Interview With Hubert Selby Jr.
Enclitic, 10, 1428.
OBrien, J. (1981). Interview With Hubert Selby Jr.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, 10, 11115.
Peavy, C. D. (1969a). Hubert Selby and the Tradition
of Moral Satire. Satire Newsletter, 6, 3539.
Peavy, C. D. (1969b). The Sin of Pride and Selbys
Last Exit to Brooklyn. Critique, 11, 3542.
Review of Contemporary Fiction. (1981). Hubert Selby,
Jr. [special issue]. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1.
Selby, H., Jr. (1964). Last Exit to Brooklyn. New York:
Grove.
Selby, H., Jr. (1971). The Room. New York: Grove.
Selby, H., Jr. (1976). The Demon. New York: Playboy.
Selby, H., Jr. (1978). Requiem for a Dream. New York:
Playboy.
Selby, H., Jr. (1986). Song of the Silent Snow. London:
Marion Boyars.
Selby, H., Jr. (1998). The Willow Tree. New York:
Marion Boyars.
Selby, H., Jr. (2002). Waiting Period. New York: Marion
Boyars.
Sorrentino, G. (1964). The Art of Hubert Selby. Kulcher,
13, 2743.
Vorda, A. (1992). Examining the Disease: An Interview
With Hubert Selby Jr. Literary Review, 35, 288302.
Wertime, R. (1974). Psychic Vengeance in Last Exit to
Brooklyn. Literature and Psychology, 24, 15388.
Wertime, R. (1978). Hubert Selby, Jr. In J. Helterman &
R. Layman (eds.), Dictionary of Literary Biography,
vol. 2: American Novelists Since World War II.
Detroit: Thompson Gale, pp. 4446.
Silko, Leslie Marmon

JOSHUA J. MASTERS
Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the most important

Native American writers to emerge since the
1960s, and her first novel, Ceremony (1977), now
a staple in college English classes, has received
more critical attention than any other Native
American novel. Silko was born on March 5,
821
1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico to Lee Marmon

Silko and May Virginia Leslie and raised among her
extended family in Laguna, the principal village of
the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. A gifted learner,
Silko entered the University of New Mexico at age
17. In 1969 she earned her BA, published her first
short story, and entered the universitys law school,
leaving in 1971. In 1973 she began working on
Ceremony, and, bolstered by an NEA fellowship
in 1974, became a full-time writer. During the
past four decades she has published poetry, short
fiction, non-fiction, autobiography, and novels,
the genre for which she is best known.
Understanding Silkos work begins with an
understanding of her mixed cultural heritage
and complex regional identity. Although she was
raised on a reservation, the mixed blood or half
breed Marmon families with white, Mexican,
Spanish, and Laguna ancestry always lived on
the outskirts of the community. Significantly,
Marmon families resided in homes situated along
the San Jose River just below the village, putting
us on the fringe of things. The image of the river,
and related motifs suggesting borders, boundaries, and thresholds, play a foundational role in
Silkos poetics, indicative of her status as both an
insider and outsider to her community and suggesting an identity on the borderlands between
such categories as nation, race, ethnicity, and
class.
Silkos early education further established her
liminal position her status betwixt and between categories of identity and geography. She
attended two very different grammar schools in
which the Lagunas Keresan language was discouraged or even forbidden, and in her home, her
maternal grandmother spoke primarily Keresan,
while the majority of her family preferred English.
This conflict between two language systems
becomes a predominant theme in her work.
Growing out of the linguistic tension between
English and Keresan is a larger conflict between
orally based and written forms of narrative,
a conflict Silko simultaneously announces and
resolves through her creation of a hybrid literary
voice, which recalls oral storytelling conventions
while still confined to the pages of a book. Like
William Faulkner, a writer Silko much admires,
she employs multiple narrators and narrative
perspectives in her work, while mixing and
juxtaposing different genres. The generically
822
SILKO, LESLIE MARMON
unclassifiable Storyteller (1981) epitomizes the

hybrid nature of Silkos work, consisting of
25 poems, eight short stories, 26 black-and-white
photographs (17 of which are by her father,
a professional photographer), along with a series
of autobiographical interludes that recall the
stories of her childhood.
These narrative blendings among an array of
voices, narrative forms, and generic conventions
challenge readers to understand how this complex
web-work to borrow another of Silkos favorite
images is foundational to both the structural
integrity and thematic trajectory of her work. For
instance, her epic Almanac of the Dead (1991)
begins with a six-page table of contents, which
immediately indicates the sprawling scope of
the novel. Readers then encounter a two-page
diagrammatic illustration, entitled FIVE HUNDRED YEAR MAP, and its dizzying array of
prophetic sentences, character names, places, and
pictorial images. Although the map is bifurcated
horizontally by the US/Mexican border, dotted
lines from all directions converge on Tucson, each
bearing markers like cocaine to finance arms,
and organized crime family goes west, suggesting a transnational and transhistorical network of
forces, with Tucson as the hub the center of the
spiderweb, and a primary indicator of the novels
spatial and temporal scope.
Silkos novels are clearly metafictional, much
like those of Toni Morrison. Both write about
storytelling itself and the power of narrative to
construct the world and destroy it. Ceremony, for
example, begins with a poem about ThoughtWoman, the spider, whose thoughts call the
world into being, and the novel is about a mentally and culturally ill protagonist, Tayo, struggling to create a ceremony that adapts past rituals
to modern circumstances. While one can link
Silkos work to a postmodern, self-referential
aesthetic, it remains grounded in issues of place,
region, history, and communal culture. Furthermore, her metafictional tendencies are deeply
rooted in the mythology and oral storytelling
traditions of the Laguna Pueblo. Silkos hybrid
postmodernism is, therefore, uniquely embedded
in tradition.
Silko has received numerous honors and prizes
throughout her career an NEA writing fellowship (1974), the Pushcart Poetry Prize (1977),
a MacArthur Fellowship (1981), and the New
Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Living

Cultural Treasure Award (1988). In 1994 she
received the third Worldcraft Circle of Native
Writers and Storytellers Lifetime Achievement
Award.
and Fiction (AF); Faulkner, William (AF);

Barnett, L., & Thorson, J. (eds.) (1999). Leslie Marmon
Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Albuquerque:
New Mexico University Press.
Chavkin, A. (ed.) (2002). Leslie Marmon Silkos
Ceremony: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Fitz, B. (2004). Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine
Woman. Norman: Oklahoma University Press.
Jarman, M. (2006). Exploring the World of the
Different in Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the
Dead. MELUS, 31, 14768.
Jaskoski, H. (1998). Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of the
Nelson, R. M. (2008). Leslie Marmon Silkos
Ceremony: The Recovery of Tradition. New York:
Peter Lang.
Perez Castillo, S. (1991). Postmodernism, Native
American Literature and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich
Controversy. Massachusetts Review 32, 28594.
Rand, N. (1999). Silko, Morrison, and Roth: Studies in
Survival. New York: Peter Lang.
Salyer, G. (1997). Leslie Marmon Silko. New York:
Twayne.
Silko, L. M. (1974). Laguna Woman: Poems by Leslie
Silko. Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review.
Silko, L. M. (1977). Ceremony. New York: Viking.
Silko, L. M. (1981). Storyteller. New York: Viking.
Silko, L. M. (1986). The Delicacy and Strength of
Lace: Letters: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko
and James Wright (ed. A. Wright). St. Paul, MN:
Graywolf.
Silko, L. M. (1991). Almanac of the Dead. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Silko, L. M. (1993). Sacred Water: Narratives and
Pictures. Tucson, AZ: Flood Plain.
Silko, L. M. (1996). Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the
Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New
York: Simon and Schuster.
Silko, L. M. (1999). Garden in the Dunes. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
SINCLAIR, UPTON
Sinclair, Upton
LAUREN COODLEY
Most Americans know Upton Sinclair simply as

the author of The Jungle (1906), the astonishing
novel that rocked the beginning of the twentieth
century with its expose of poisoned meat. But in
Oil! (1927), Sinclair also described the transformation of the California landscape following the
building of automobile highways. His play Singing Jailbirds (1924b) drew attention to the plight
of striking longshoremen in San Pedro, California. The Worlds End (1949) series gained him
admirers from Britain to Japan to Germany, who
found in it their first taste of what one called
story history. With this series, Sinclair completed the circle he had begun when he went into the
stockyards in 1905 to examine how cattle were
slaughtered.
Born in 1878 in Baltimore, Upton Sinclair
survived his fathers alcoholism and his mothers
poverty. He grabbed what crumbs of education
were available to him, and searched for the source
of the injustice that doomed his own household
and the lives that surrounded it. In the process,
he discovered first poetry, then religion, then
socialism.
Sinclair went to Battle Creek, Michigan, to find
health with cereal inventor William Kellogg,
where he met and courted Mary Craig, who would
remain his wife and best friend until she died in
1961. Along with Jack London, he founded the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1905. By 1913
he had discovered the secrets of health, the sanity
of monogamy, and the importance of publicity in
facing down the industrial giants of twentiethcentury America. He published The Cry for Justice
in 1915, the first anthology of protest literature in
English, which contained 5,000 years of writings
on workers, socialism, religious persecution, and
artistic revolt.
With Mary Craig he came to California; they
settled in the Southland, where he played
tennis with Henry Ford, hiked with Charlie
Chaplin, performed psychic experiments with
Albert Einstein, and corresponded daily with
everyone from Margaret Sanger to George
Bernard Shaw. Sinclair worked at his life assiduously and ardently, tending his friendships,
his roses, and his typewriter in the gardens of
823
his homes in Pasadena, Long Beach, and finally

Monrovia.
Mary Craig owned some property that was
leased for oil development in Long Beach, and
this experience was the impetus for Sinclairs most
acclaimed novel since The Jungle, Oil! The character Dad from Oil! is often cited as one of the
most sympathetic portrayals of a businessman in
American literature. Dad is also a devastating
parody of patriarchal authority, and this searing
portrait of an oil man demonstrated the grace
and irony of Sinclairs writing. Upton Sinclair is
not generally seen as an environmentalist, but in
fact he was deeply influenced by the natural
world and outraged by its impending destruction.
Upton Sinclair first discovered the California
redwoods in 1935 while traveling to recover debts
from his gubernatorial campaign. The Gnomobile
(1937) may have been the first childrens story
with an environmental message to save the
redwoods. Eventually, Sinclair convinced Walt
Disney to produce this story as a film for children,
in 1962.
Like the protagonists of Sinclairs novel The
Wet Parade (1931), Sinclair grew up hating liquor
and the destruction it creates. Usually films about
alcoholism document the behavior of a fascinating and self-destructive alcoholic. Sinclair chose
to construct a different narrative. He wrote The
Wet Parade to remind the country about the
origins of the Prohibition movement in the tragedies of alcoholic families.
Unlike many twentieth-century writers, Sinclair renounced the tendency to abuse alcohol. He
was willingly arrested many times to support
labor and free speech issues, yet has been often
ridiculed since his death for his bluenose
identity. Recent scholarship on the history of
masculinity and the politics of personal life
choices could productively revise these judgments. Sinclairs conviction that the personal
was indeed political was derived both from his
temperance marches with his mother and from
his friendships with powerful women activists
throughout his life.
Sinclairs final literary achievement occurred
during the 1940s with the Worlds End series, for
which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1942.
The series profoundly affected the American publics willingness to join World War II. The series
describes the adventures of an American named
824
SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS
Lanny Budd who sees first-hand the development

of fascism in Europe and the need for America
to join the Allies to stop it. The first eight novels
sold over 1 million copies in the US alone and
were translated into 20 languages. Sinclairs
Autobiography was published in 1962; he died
in 1968.
Sinclair, U. (1960). My Lifetime in Letters. Columbia:

Sinclair, U. (1962). The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair.
Stone, I. (1947). The Upton Sinclair Anthology.
Hollywood, CA: Murray and Gee.
Yoder, J. (1975). Upton Sinclair. New York: Ungar.
SEE ALSO: London, Jack (AF); Naturalist

Fiction (AF); Norris, Frank (AF); Politics and the
Novel (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Ahouse, J. (1994). Upton Sinclair: A Descriptive,
Annotated Bibliography. Los Angeles: Arundel.
Arthur, A. (2006). Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair.
Bloodworth, W. (1977). Upton Sinclair. Boston:
Twayne.
Dell, F. (1927). Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest.
New York: Doran.
Gottesman, R. (1973). An Annotated Checklist. Kent,
OH: Kent State University Press.
Herms, D. (1999). Upton Sinclair: Literature and Social
Reform. New York: Peter Lang.
Mattson, K. (2006). Upton Sinclair and the Other
American Century. New York: Wiley.
Mitchell, G. (1992). The Campaign of the Century. New
York: Random House.
Mookerjee, R. N. (1988). Art for Social Justice: The
Major Novels of Upton Sinclair. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow.
Nakada, S. (1990). Japanese Empathy for Upton Sinclair.
Tokyo: Central Institute.
Sinclair, M. C. (1957). Southern Belle. New York:
Crown.
Sinclair, U. (1906). The Jungle. New York: Doubleday.
Sinclair, U. (1915). The Cry for Justice. Philadelphia:
Winston.
Sinclair, U. (1917). King Coal. New York: Macmillan.
Sinclair, U. (1924a). The Millennium 1907. Girard, KS:
Haldeman-Julius.
Sinclair, U. (1924b). The Singing Jailbirds. Long Beach,
CA: n.p.
Sinclair, U. (1927). Oil! New York: Boni.
Sinclair, U. (1931). The Wet Parade. New York: Farrar,
Rinehart.
Sinclair, U. (1937). The Gnomobile. New York: Farrar,
Rinehart.
Sinclair, U. (19409). Worlds End Series. New York:
Viking.
Sinclair, U. (1950). Another Pamela. New York: Viking.
PETER C. HERMAN
Highly prolific, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904July

24, 1991) wrote over 16 novels, 12 books of short
stories, childrens books, memoirs, and numerous
non-fiction essays and more works as yet untranslated. His collected short fiction is available in
editions published by the Library of America.
Singer came to prominence with the publication
of his short story Gimpel the Fool in 1953, and
by the 1960s he regularly published stories in the
New Yorker and mass-circulation magazines.
Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.
Singers father was a Hasidic rabbi and his
mother the daughter of a rabbi, who took a more
rational, less mystical approach to Judaism. She
and a younger brother died after being deported
to Kazakhstan in 193941. While in Warsaw in
1923, Singer started cobbling together a living
through proofreading, translating, and publishing occasional pieces in the New York Yiddish
newspaper, the Forward (Forvertz). In 1935, he
moved to the United States.
Up until 1968, Singers translated works focused on the Hasidic world of pre-Holocaust
Poland, drawing on the intellectual culture of
Talmudic study, the ecstatic religion of Hasidim,
and the superstitious folklore that coexisted with
it. He departed from the traditions of Yiddish
literature by dealing with topics that he believed
established Yiddish writers deliberately avoided.
Instead he wrote about sex explicitly, the Jewish
underworld, and what he called the great
adventures inherent in Jewish history. Singers
first novel, Satan in Goray (19334, trans. 1955),
graphically describes a small towns adherence
to the false messiah and descent into sexual
depravity, and The Family Moskat (1943, trans.
1950) features a double adultery on Yom Kippur
Eve. Singer wrote, using a female narrator,
about lesbianism (Zeitl and Rickel, The Seance
SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS
[1968]) and transvestitism (Yentl the Yeshiva

Boy, Short Friday [1964]). A novel about Jewish
gangsters, Yarma and Keyle, was serialized
between 1956 and 1957 (only one chapter has
been translated).
Singers shtetl fiction features greater psychological and sexual realism in Yiddish literature
combined with plots revolving around fantastic
and supernatural events. In his most famous short
story, Gimpel the Fool, the spirit of Gimpels
departed, adulterous wife returns to prevent her
husband from fouling the dough Gimpel uses to
bake the towns bread (1945, trans. 1953). In The
Gentleman From Cracow (1957), Satan, disguised as a wealthy visitor, nearly destroys a town,
and in Zeidlus the Pope (1943, trans. 1964),
the Evil One, as Singer calls him, tempts and
destroys a deeply pious man. In A Crown of
Feathers (trans. 1972), Singer details how the
Devil tricks a pious woman into abandoning her
fiance and converting to Christianity; years later,
she marries the man she abandoned, who subjects
her to sadistic punishments.
After the Holocaust destroyed Eastern European Jewish culture, Singers shtetl fiction was interpreted less in terms of expanding the horizons
of Yiddish literature and more about memorializing a lost civilization. In his later, self-reflexive
novel, Meshugah (19813, trans. 1994), a character
exclaims, A whole world collapsed before my very
eyes. But you, my favorite author, are bringing it to
life again (31). Many of his novels, such as The
Family Moskat (1950), The Magician of Lublin
(1960), The Estate (1969), and The Slave (1962),
focus on re-creating the pre-Holocaust Jewish
experience.
Singers most powerful fiction, however, explicitly concerns the problem of post-Holocaust
Judaism and the difficulty of belief after Auschwitz. Shadows on the Hudson (19478, trans.
1999) explores a variety of responses to the Holocaust through the lives of Boris Makaver and his
family. In Enemies: A Love Story (1972), Herman
Broder insists upon the impossibility of belief in
God after the Holocaust while at the same time
believing that the only way to prevent becoming a
Nazi is to turn to God. In his acceptance speech
for the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction,
Singer announced, I am happy to call myself a
Jewish writer, a Yiddish writer, an American
writer. Yet Singer does not fit comfortably into
825
any of these categories. While powerfully attracted

to traditional Judaism, even in his pre-Holocaust
stories, belief in God is fragile. After the Holocaust,
Singer became deeply skeptical of a God who
would allow the destruction of European Jewry
without intervening. A central paradox that God
is necessary for morality, yet after the Holocaust,
belief in a merciful, beneficent deity is impossible
animates much of Singers fiction.
At the same time, Singer considered American
culture backward and vulgar. He kept his Englishand Yiddish-speaking audiences separate. On the
one hand, he maintained that all translations of
his works be based on the English versions, yet the
Yiddish versions of his fiction are often quite
different from the English ones.
While his fiction remains in print, critical
interest in Singer has declined since his death on
July 24, 1991. Perhaps because he focused on
either Eastern Europe or Holocaust survivors,
his works have not found an audience beyond
Singers immediate contemporaries. Singers
novels and short stories are therefore ripe for
rediscovery.
Expatriate Fiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF)
Allentuck, M. (1969). The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis
Singer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press.
Cohen, J. (1998). Disgrace of Revelation: I. B. Singers
Holocaust Impiety. Textual Practice, 12(3), 44357.
Farrell, G.(ed.) (1996). Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis
Singer. New York: G. K. Hall.
Hadda, J. (1997). Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Herman, P.C. (2005). Shadows on the Hudson: Isaac
Bashevis Singer and the Problem of Post-Holocaust
Judaism. Studies in American Jewish Literature, 24,
15879.
Sherman, J. (1988). Author Versus Narrator in The
Penitent: Reconsidering Isaac Bashevis Singers
Tirade. Journal of Narrative Technique, 18(3),
24357.
Singer, I. B. (1950). The Family Moskat. New York:
Knopf.
Singer, I. B. (1955). Satan in Goray. New York:
Noonday.
Singer, I. B. (1960a). In My Fathers Court. New York:
826
SMILEY, JANE
Singer, I. B. (1960b). The Magician of Lublin. New York:

Noonday.
Singer, I. B. (1972). Enemies: A Love Story. New York:
Singer I. B. (1978). Shosha. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Singer, I. B. (1984). Love and Exile: A Memoir. New
York: Doubleday.
Singer, I. B. (1992). Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations
(ed. G. Farrell) Oxford: University Press of
Mississippi.
Singer, I. B. (1994). Meshugah: A Novel. New York:
Singer, I. B. (1998). Shadows on the Hudson. New York:
Singer, I. B. (2004a). Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka
to Passions. New York: Library of America.
Singer, I. B. (2004b). Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to
The Letter Writer. New York: Library of America.
Singer, I. B. (2004c). Collected Stories: One Night in
Brazil to The Death of Methuselah. New York: Library
of America.
Wolitz, S. L. (2001). The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Smiley, Jane
NEIL NAKADATE
Jane Smiley is an American novelist, short story

writer, and essayist; she was awarded the 1992
Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres (1991). Her
career reflects an early and ongoing interest in
diverse subjects and fictional genres, and her
many essays, articles, and reviews cover a wide
range of cultural, social, economic, and political
issues. Smiley was elected to membership in the
Letters in 2001, and in 2006 received the PEN
USA Lifetime Achievement Award.
Smiley was born in Los Angeles, California in
1949, but grew up in suburban St. Louis,
Missouri. She was surrounded by numerous
storytelling members of an extended family, read
voraciously, and grew during the seventh grade
from average size to six feet and 125 pounds and
from having a conventional girls perspective to
having an atypical, somewhat androgynous understanding of experience. She graduated from
the John Burroughs School in 1967 and Vassar
College in 1971; soon after, she enrolled in the
doctoral program at the University of Iowa, and
was subsequently accepted into the Iowa Writers

Workshop. She received her PhD in 1978, and
beginning in 1981 taught literature and creative
writing courses at Iowa State University.
Her early fiction, reflecting her admiration for
British novelists such as Jane Austen, George
Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, typically involves
individuals in relation to families or family-like
groupings and is often narrated from the perspective of a sensitive but imperfectly perceptive observer. This is the case in the short story Lily
(1984), the novella The Age of Grief (1987), and
A Thousand Acres, among the most widely read
and appreciated of her early works. Given its
emergence from a torrent of inspiration and its
focus on a doomed fourteenth-century colony,
The Greenlanders (1988b) is exceptional in
Smileys oeuvre but not atypical of her imagination; it reflects her extensive study of the Middle
Ages at Iowa, her need to understand people in
relation to their environments, and her interest
in placing private lives within complex social
systems. Her examination of human activity in
terms of weblike interrelationships is as revealing
of the academic community of the comic novel
Moo (1995) as it is of the violent 1850s Kansas
Territory in The All-True Travels and Adventures of
Lidie Newton (1998). In this respect, Smiley is more
akin to Don DeLillo than to the writers of domestic
realism with whom she is sometimes associated.
A Thousand Acres reflects Smileys need to
analyze and critique American culture and political ideology, especially during the American
1980s, in her view a period of highly problematic
political and economic change. It is set at the
beginning of the decade, and in presenting
a domestic tragedy criticizes patriarchal authority
and disruptive changes in the Midwestern and
Great Plains landscape during the farm debt crisis.
Moo, set in 1989 at a land-grant university similar
to the one she taught at, incorporates a diverse
roster of characters in a satirical critique of
academic-industrial agriculture. Good Faith
(2003) is sympathetically satirical regarding its
narrator and central character, but sharply
critical of conduct in the real estate business and
the impact of banking deregulation during the
Reagan administration.
Smiley left college teaching in 1996 as a Distinguished Professor, moving to northern California, where her production continued apace not
SOCIAL-REALIST FICTION
only novels but also book reviews and articles on

myriad topics such as marriage, travel, and equestrian sports, and a biography of Charles Dickens
(2002), long one of her favorite writers and
influences. Her later writing generally reflected
her preference for the comic vision, which she
blended in Horse Heaven (2000a) with romanticism, her intimate knowledge of thoroughbred
horse culture, and elements of magic realism. A
Year at the Races (2004) provides a personal,
non-fictional view of the same subject.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005) is
an outgrowth of Smileys decision, following the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to read
or reread well over 100 key novels; the book
articulates her understanding of the novel and
the reading of novels, and also her aesthetic
convictions as a writer. The novel Ten Days in
the Hills (2007) was inspired by Boccaccios
Decameron and is set in the early days of the
Iraq War, thus confirming Smileys embrace of
postmodern reality.
SEE ALSO: DeLillo, Don (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF)
827
Smiley, J. (1987). The Age of Grief. New York: Knopf.

Smiley, J. (1988a). Catskill Crafts: Artisans of the Catskill
Mountains. New York: Crown.
Smiley, J. (1988b). The Greenlanders. New York: Knopf.
Smiley, J. (1989). Ordinary Love and Good Will. New
York: Knopf.
Smiley, J. (1991). A Thousand Acres. New York: Knopf.
Smiley, J. (1993). Can Mothers Think? In K. Brown
(ed.), The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft.
Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf. pp. 315.
Smiley, J. (1995). Moo. New York: Knopf.
Smiley, J. (1998). The All-True Travels and Adventures
of Lidie Newton. New York: Knopf.
Smiley, J. (1999). Shakespeare in Iceland. In M. Novy
(ed.), Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary
Womens Re-Visions in Literature and Performance.
New York: St Martins, pp. 15979.
Smiley, J. (2000a). Horse Heaven. New York: Knopf.
Smiley, J. (2000b). Why Marriage? Harpers, 300,
15159.
Smiley, J. (2002). Charles Dickens. New York: Viking.
Smiley, J. (2003). Good Faith. New York: Knopf.
Smiley, J. (2004). A Year at the Races: Reflections on
Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck. New York:
Knopf.
Smiley, J. (2005). Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.
New York: Knopf.
Smiley, J. (2007). Ten Days in the Hills. New York:
Knopf.

Bacon, K. (1998). The Adventures of Jane Smiley.
Atlantic Unbound (May 28). At www.theatlantic.
com/unbound/bookauth/ba980528.htm, accessed
Jan. 18, 2010.
Birnbaum, R. (2003). Jane Smiley: Pulitzer Prize
Winner, Author of Good Faith Talks with Robert
Birnbaum. Identity Theory (June 18). At www.
identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum111.php,
Bonetti, K. (1998). An Interview With Jane Smiley.
Missouri Review, 21(3), 89108.
Conroy, T. (2001). Jane Smiley. In P. Meanor & R. E.
Lee (eds.), American Short-Story Writers Since World
War I, 3rd Series, Detroit: Gale, pp. 2728.
Nakadate, N. (1999). Understanding Jane Smiley.
Smiley, J. (1980a). Barn Blind. New York: Harper and
Row.
Smiley, J. (1980b). Say It Aint So, Huck: Second
Thoughts on Mark Twains Masterpiece. Harpers,
292, 617.
Smiley, J. (1981). At Paradise Gate. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Smiley, J. (1984). Duplicate Keys. New York: Knopf.
Social-Realist Fiction
LEIGH ANNE DUCK
The term social realism is typically associated

with the art and literature of the 1930s, a time
when poverty, unemployment, and exploitative
working conditions received unprecedented attention in the United States. Shaped by the circumstances of the Great Depression, these debates
nonetheless reflect ongoing concerns about social
realisms task of portraying society in a way that
both reveals injustice and stimulates transformative impulses or action.
Different literary schools had, after all, been
claiming paramount authority in their representation of reality since the late nineteenth century,
and their quarrels over method reflect divergent
views of social life. William Dean Howells, for
example, celebrated how realism, in its representation of the whole field of human experience,
could widen the bounds of sympathy, but he
828
argued that social circumstances in the US were so

favorable that its novelists could focus on the
more smiling aspects of life, such as refinements
of thought and spirit (142, 15, 127, 128, 144). A
decade later, however, Frank Norris argued that
the realism Howells championed was stultifie[d]
by its focus on normal life and the surface
of things; he advocated that fiction penetrate
deep into the motives and character of type-men,
whether poor or middle-class (27). Though Norris
dubbed this literary mode romance, it is generally
referred to as naturalism and differed from
Howellss realism also in its approach to plot:
whereas the more overtly bourgeois mode focused
on individual agency in the pursuit of personal gain
and social progress, naturalism, which sought to
understand the elemental forces in society and in
human character, often suggested that those forces
were inherently overwhelming by depicting the
decline of characters into inertia or even bestiality
(Norris 27).
Questions of human type and agency have
played an important role in European Marxist
literary criticism as well. Friedrich Engels urged
that realism should provide, beside truth of
detail, the truth in reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances (269); and
Georg Lukacs warned against the bourgeois and
nihilistic belief that the individual . . . must be a
helpless victim of historical forces (Lukacs 91).
For the purposes of US literary history, however,
it is important to note that, in the works of many
writers from the early twentieth century
including Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and
Theodore Dreiser naturalist and realist tendencies appear side by side, as characters strive
energetically and often productively against the
social forces arrayed against them and yet, at
other points in the narrative, revert to type or
accept, with resignation or torpor, the fate their
status allots them.
This concern with futurity would become central to debates regarding social realism in the US,
for by the onset of the Great Depression, its most
vigorous theorists were committed to economic
transformation, and thus described their work as
proletarian or socialist realism a set of aesthetic
ideals influenced, though not dictated, by the
cultural policies of the Soviet Union. Though
they convened around clubs and journals, these
writers were hardly monolithic in their approach;
they disagreed vehemently over form, content,

and perspective, and their alliances and individual
opinions shifted over time, particularly as leftists
and liberals began to unite later in the decade in a
formation known as the Popular Front. Discussions of socialist literature frequently cite Mike
Golds Proletarian Realism, which advocated
that writers describe material conditions and
labor with concrete detail, terseness, and
revolutionary elan, rejecting pessimism for
confidence in workers ability to produce transformation (2068). Though such pronouncements are sometimes taken as communist orthodoxy and were overtly oriented toward global
revolution, Gold could sound, during the
same period, like a liberal nationalist seeking to
articulate an American literary tradition. What is
notable here is less inconsistency than a willingness to draw from divergent paradigms if their
usage could support the working class in its
struggle against capitalism: though Marxism was
repeatedly described, at the time, as a science, its
aesthetic theory as manifest in the US often
emerged from intuitions that were honed
through debate.
This process led writers to describe proletarian
literature in ways that can be misleading in retrospect, particularly regarding the relationship between modernism and social realism. Leftists regularly proclaimed their disdain for fiction that
represented the perspective of alienated individuals without more systematically probing the
society that caused such feelings of isolation and
futility, and these diatribes against subjectivism
have often been read as attacks on modernism
more generally. But critics have recently shown
that these literary boundaries were actually quite
porous. During the 1930s, for example, leftist
writers including many who had participated
in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s criticized
the earlier movement for its decadence and primitivism, tropes associated with bourgeois modernism. One could argue, however, that in portraying
African American perspectives on how the boundaries of social status are maintained and experienced, the Harlem writers, like the realists and
local colorists of other ethnic groups, supplied
some of the forms from which proletarian literature drew its energy. Certainly, the two schools
shared a concern with how to incorporate folklore
into transformative literature, as evidenced by
Alain Lockes assessment (1992 [1925]) that it

could serve as the basis for racial nationalism, and
Richard Wrights later view, in Blueprint for
Negro Writing (1937), that it might be used to
inculcate socialist values and ideas.
Indeed, socialist realisms vigorous production
of manifestos and its effort, in John Dos Passoss
words, to discover the deep currents of historical
change at a time when terms are continually
turning inside out, designate it as one form of
modernism (quoted in Hart 82, 78). Dos Passos, of
course, is a particularly apt figure for demonstrating such continuity, as his U.S.A. trilogy portrays
class struggle in ways that negotiated the modernist interest in the complexities of individual subjectivity with the socialist demand for concrete
representation of broad socioeconomic trends. In
this debate, which was central to European and
American discussions of politics and aesthetics,
critics on each side noted that modernists interior
monologues implied a critique of capitalism, but
leftists felt that a narrative focused on subjective
dynamics must necessarily displace social ones.
Dos Passos, in a method praised repeatedly at the
leftist American Writers Congress in 1935, juxtaposed sections of prose that followed realist formal
conventions chronological descriptions of events
situated in an omniscient narrative perspective
with Newsreel prose montages that suggest the
experience of a sensory assault by news media
chronicling daily class conflict, as expressed
through strikes, exploitation, and economic corruption. These are further contrasted with impressionistic Camera Eye sections that focus tightly
on the economic aspects of individual lives while
emphasizing the difficulty or estrangement that
occurs when an outsider attempts to comprehend the lived experience of unfamiliar material
circumstances. By 1938, when the last volume of
this series was published, Dos Passoss politics had
shifted decidedly to the right. But his efforts to
convey how understandings of the real can vary
according to classed experience exemplify how
such concerns incited modernists formal innovations, a process evinced in other literary modes
also, such as Muriel Rukeysers poetic The Book of
the Dead (1938) and James Agee and Walker
Evanss photodocumentary Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men (1941).
Certainly, this question of perspective was central to definitions of proletarian literature. Edwin
829
Seaver, for example, claimed it could be defined

solely through the political orientation of the
novelist (quoted in Hart 101), while Joseph Freeman warned that the workers life revolves precisely around those experiences which are alien to
the bourgeois aesthete, who loathes them, who
cannot believe they are experiences at all (quoted
in Hicks 12). Few leftists denied the possibility that
middle-class writers could contribute to the proletarian cause, especially given the fact that the
Great Depression had altered the economic status
of so many. But these writers were concerned that
the difference between classes might render the
reality of each inaccessible to the other, a possibility explored, for example, in Albert Maltzs
short story Man on a Road (1935). Here, the
narrator, a member of the petit bourgeoisie, is
fascinated by the persistent silence of his hitchhiker, an unemployed miner. What the narrator
imagines to be a psychological or even categorical
difference the narrator repeatedly describes the
miner as inhuman, ghostly, or corpse-like turns
out to be a direct result of economic status: the
miner is suffering from silicosis, which results
from the coating of mining dust in his lungs and
renders speech difficult. The story, in other words,
describes a shift in consciousness on the part of the
narrator, requiring him to cease idealizing or even
fetishizing material differences. Such questions of
how to represent and understand economic diversity were widespread during a decade that was
focused on documenting the effects of economic
change, but where New Deal agencies and photo
magazines tended either to present unemployment as a brief lapse in a heroic national narrative
or to commodify the spectacle of poverty; realists
in the proletarian movement offered more careful
considerations of how the class struggle they
sought to represent might be reflected in their
artistic choices.
Those who sought to articulate working-class
perspectives were also confronted with the significance of other social differences. Indeed, literary
works and commentaries from this period regularly negotiated how preconceptions regarding
race, region, and gender inflect writers and readers perspectives on reality. Though communists
were eager to organize women and African Americans, their vision of the revolutionary class was
notably virile, and their understanding of capitalism was one in which certain social forms are
830
anachronistic. Accordingly, writers concerned

with differences within the proletariat sought ways
to articulate their experiences within a proletarian
framework. For instance, The Iron Throat (1974
[1934]), written by Tillie Lerner (later Olsen),
observes how the economic exploitation and uncertainty experienced by a miners family are
exacerbated by its internal patriarchy, as the plans
and opinions of the wife and mother are silenced
by her often abusive husband. Though passages in
Richard Wrights Uncle Toms Children (1938)
correspond with the Marxist position that the
agricultural workers of the Southern Black Belt
constituted a peasantry a class whose experiences
and values were chronologically misaligned with
the idea of proletarian revolution several of his
stories narrate a process of transformation, as
characters abandon a passive Christianity for faith
in activism and social change. Still, participants in
the movement disagreed regarding the realism and
the effectiveness of some representations. Though
many praised Erskine Caldwells representations
of Southern poverty, for example, Kenneth
Burke described them in 1935 as distinctly
grotesque . . . extravaganzas less expressive of
social propaganda than of balked religiosity
(354, 352). In representations of region, as of class,
theorists often suggested that only personal experience and group identification could prevent
writers from distorting the circumstances and
potential within marginalized populations. Arguing that Midwesterners have experienced a unique
intensity of laissez faire colonization, for instance, Meridel Le Seuer counseled patience for
the regions realists, who sought to represent a
cultural landscape that others might not understand (in Hart 1358).
Though this tradition of social realism did not
end with the Depression shaping African American writing, especially, into the 1950s it did
decline, becoming the subject of aesthetic debate
during the second half of the twentieth century.
Critics and writers have suggested that concerns
over perspective are central to this shift: Gayl
Jones, for example, contends that the formal
conventions of naturalism and realism followed
the whites definition of African American social
reality (33). Arguing that the Black Aesthetic
Movement, like the proletarian one, constrained
individual voices, she explains that writers from
all ethnic positions that begin in a subordinate
position to another literature or literary

heritage seek to integrate distinct cultural expressions into their fiction (30, 180). The style
she advocates, which incorporates forms and
narratives from mythic and spiritual traditions
into narratives about contemporary life, is antithetical to conventional definitions of realism,
which mandate that representation adhere closely to the particularities of material existence.
Nonetheless, Jones attributes to such fiction a
goal that Howells aligned with nineteenthcentury realism grappling with visibility
within the democracy a similarity that
emerges all the more sharply given the number
of contemporary writers who eschew sharp
distinctions between legend, fantasy, and
actuality (178).
Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior:
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) may
be the most famous example, as it incorporates
myth and speculative history into a genre
autobiography that would seem to be restricted
to realistic representation. Paradoxically criticized as a fake and celebrated for its psychological
realism, this experimental narrative exemplifies a
contemporary critical predicament: how to classify works that incorporate supernatural effects
into otherwise mimetic representation. In keeping with previous discussions of social realism,
interpretations of such writing typically consider
political motivation and efficacy. Where Jose
David Saldivar (90104) argues that magic realism allows authors to demonstrate how perceptions of reality are shaped and differentiated by
oppressive histories and continuing injustice,
Fredric Jameson (1988 [1975]) expresses concern
that when narrative is reduced to the telling of
the truth of a private situation alone one
delimited, for example, by concerns related to
ethnicity, gender, or locale it obscures the
possibility of political action by emphasizing
social incoherence (1312). Such debates have
arguably been superseded, however, by the poststructuralist argument that the realist project is
inherently flawed, because texts, whatever their
aims, necessarily function more to produce a
certain sense of reality than to represent the chaos
and contingency of the actual world.
In 1989, Tom Wolfe blamed such perceptions
for the decline of big novels . . . that wallow . . .
enthusiastically in the dirt of everyday life and the
dirty secrets of class envy and are obviously

relished by the mob (47). Arguing that, in order
to portray the innermost life of the individual,
one must also depict the panorama in which that
life takes shape, Wolfes fiction incorporates an
array of characters in disparate social positions, as
shaped by class, race, gender, and geographic
locale. Novels like A Man in Full (1998) illuminate
how such broad social networks as corporations
and media affect seemingly distant lives, aligning
with Jamesons later argument (1992) that contemporary art should facilitate audiences
cognitive mapping of late global capitalism.
Wolfes tendency toward caricature, however,
suggests that the proletarians concern with
authorial perspective in realistic representation
remains trenchant. Scholarship on such questions in contemporary fiction tends not to use
the term social realism, however, which impedes an understanding of how the debates
shaping earlier forms of realism in the United
States may be relevant to todays literature.
Given the admirable strides made by recent
criticism on proletarian realism as well as that
of the late nineteenth century, the stage is well
set for work that might provide such diachronic
analysis.
Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF);
Poltics and the Novel (AF); Realism/Magical
Realism (WF)
Burke, K. (1973). The Philosophy of Literary Form:
Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd edn. Berkeley:
of American Culture in the Twentieth Century.
London: Verso.
Engels, F. (1975). Letter to Margaret Harkness [1888].
In D. Craig (ed.), Marxists on Literature: An
Anthology. New York: Penguin, pp. 26971.
Foley, B. (1993). Radical Representations: Politics
and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 19291941.
Gold, M. (1972). Proletarian Realism [1930]. In Mike
Gold: A Literary Anthology (ed. M. Folsom). New
York: International, pp. 2038.
Hart, H. (ed.) (1935). American Writers Congress.
New York: International.
831
Hicks, G. (ed.) (1935). Proletarian Literature in the

United States: An Anthology. New York:
International.
Higadisha, C. (2003). Aunt Sues Children:
Reviewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard
Wrights Radicalism. American Literature
75, 395425.
Howells, W. D. (1892). Criticism and Fiction. New York:
Harper.
Irr, C. (1998). The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in
the United States and Canada during the 1930s.
Jameson, F. (1988). Beyond the Cave: Demystifying
the Ideology of Modernism [1975]. In The
Ideologies of Theory: Essays 19711986, vol. 2:
The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Jameson, F. (1992). Postmodernism: or, The Cultural
University Press.
Jones, G. (1991). Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in
African American Literature. Cambridge, MA:
Kaplan, A. (1988). The Social Construction of
American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Locke, A. (1992). Foreword [1925]. In The New Negro.
New York: Atheneum, pp. xxvxxvii.
Lerner, T. (1935). The Iron Throat In G. Hicks (ed.),
Proletarian Literature in the United States: An
Anthology. New York: International, pp. 10310.
Lukacs, G. (1971). Realism in Our Time: Literature and
the Class Struggle (trans. J. Mander & N. Mander).
Maltz, A. (1935). Man on a Road. In G. Hicks (ed.),
Proletarian Literature in the United States: An
Anthology. New York: International, pp. 11622.
Maxwell, W. J. (1999). New Negro, Old Left: African
American Writing and Communism Between the
Wars. New York: Columbia University Press.
Morgan, S. I. (2004). Rethinking Social Realism: African
American Art and Literature 19301953. Athens:
Norris, F. (1903). The Responsibilities of the Novelist,
and Other Literary Essays, New York: Doubleday.
Olsen, T. (1974). The Iron Throat [1934] In
Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New York:
Delacorte.
Rideout, W. B. (1956). The Radical Novel in the United
States, 19001954: Some Interrelations of Literature
and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
832
SONTAG, SUSAN
Saldivar, J. D. (1991). The Dialectics of Our America:

Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History
Schocket, E. (2006). Vanishing Moments: Class and
American Literature. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Wolfe, T. (1989). Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A
Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel.
Harpers, 279, 4556.
Wolfe, T. (1998). A Man in Full. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Wright, R. (1937). Blueprint for Negro Writing. New
Challenge, 2, 5365.
Sontag, Susan
SOHNYA SAYRES
Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, Susan

Sontag spent her childhood in Arizona. Avid
and intense, she flew through her high school
years in Los Angeles, entering college at age 15
and transferring to the University of Chicago at
age 16. A year later she met and married sociologist Philip Rieff, with whom she had a son,
David. The couple moved east, where Sontag
pursued graduate degrees in philosophy, literature, and religion at Harvard, then at Oxford
and the Sorbonne. Subsequently, she divorced
Rieff and began her career as an independent
writer, dividing her time between Europe and
New York. By her early thirties, she established
herself as an interpreter of culture at ease with
erudition while discussing an array of contemporary topics. By the 1970s, she began to win
prestigious awards, including the MacArthur
Fellowship (19905); her notable courage in the
public arena included creating theater for the
besieged city of Sarajevo (19936). She succumbed to leukemia, an outcome of treatments
for cancer that she contracted at 42, just shy of
her 72nd birthday.
Sontags work is compelled by ideas in all of her
vehicles, which include fiction, essays, films, criticism, and memoir. As was true of her mentors,
Kenneth Burke, Iris Murdoch, and Simone de
Beauvoir, the pause between philosophy and
criticism and the fictional impulse was not long,
and that pause was particularly shortened by
Sontags focus on aesthetics and intellectual life
as intermingled sets of concerns.
Sontags early essays, including the famous

Notes on Camp (1966), take on an eclectic
array of topics, including films, dance, happenings, and sensibilities. While she argues for works
of art that resist didacticism, she also argues
against nihilism and excess for its own sake. In
the last collection of essays, one can find her
asking, what does it mean to use the writers, or
the artistic, life as an expression of the radical will?
Her answer was truth-seeking, grand vision, and
seriousness the will to create, rescued from
the undertow of inwardness that many of her
figures experienced.
Sontag also knew the complexity of taking
oppositional political positions while absorbed
in the need to understand her trips to Hanoi and
later China read as notes to herself. When she
contracted breast cancer, she turned her attention
to the cultural perceptions of tuberculosis and
cancer, as she did later with AIDS. Her thoughts
brought edifying solace to a wide audience. Her
two books on photography exemplify the importance to her of ethical questions: how does the
ubiquity of images sensitize or inure us to social
concerns?
Her work in fiction began with a demanding,
arch novel, The Benefactor (1963). Situated in
Paris, the novel describes the surrealist ideal of
descending into ones own dreams to live as
closely as possible by their dictates. The novels
protagonist acts abruptly, criminally, tormented
by an authority figure. He exists as a chilled
raconteur who finally reveals the depths of his
suffering as the result of shock therapy. Her
second novel, Death Kit (1967), is an American
parable. Diddy, a young American salesman,
experiences his suicide as a train roaring toward
Buffalo, then stalled in a tunnel which is also
a charnel house. Sontag believed she was writing
in a vein similar to that of Norman Mailers Why
We Are in Vietnam. Like Mailer, she also created
another death of a salesman, only to this younger
one, the rude, empty landscape of America had
exposed an underlying killer instinct.
With the short story collection, I etcetera
(1978a), Sontag returns to the metier of America.
Her formalism lightens into kaleidoscope effects
so that she catches hyper-energized, fractious
selves thrown into soul searching. The whole
collection could be called The Way We Live
Now, the title of her much appreciated piece
SORRENTINO, GILBERT
(1986) based on the voices of friends as they

helplessly watch a man dying of AIDS. In middle
age, Sontag found keen pleasure in writing
a historical novel, The Volcano Lover (1992), her
best large work. If its movement is stilted, many
of her techniques catalogues, commentary,
letters, monologues, crossed perspectives, blatant alter egos, aphorisms, and reflections on
types are deployed with original effect upon
the story of the Napoleonic years in the repulsive court of the Kingdom of Naples. It is here
where the English ambassador Hamilton famously
loses his wife to Lord Nelson. Sontag was to take
up the historical mode again in Alice in Bed
(1991), a play about Alice James, dying of cancer
at age 42. Imagined figures come to Alices tea
party to help her argue through her invalidism,
both symbolic and real. Here, as throughout
Sontags work, the life of the mind is elegantly
validated.
Sontags final novel, In America (2000), draws
upon the story of a nineteenth-century Polish
actress who comes to start a utopian community,
a la Brooks Farm, in California. Maryna returns to
the stage to swiftly conquer America. Historical
riches abound in the novel, but the puzzle of
writing a narrative of overcoming difficulties
with such ease is not resolved. The underrealized
portrait of Maryna may have been Sontags
intention as a metaphor for Americas power to
deracinate.
Mailer, Norman (AF); Murdoch, Iris (BIF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Kennedy, L. (1995). Susan Sontag: The Mind as Passion.
Rollyson, C., & Paddock, L. (2000). Susan Sontag: The
Making of an Icon. New York: Norton.
Sayres, S. (1990). Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist.
Seligman, K. (2004). Sontag and Kael. New York:
Counterpoint.
Sontag, S. (1963). The Benefactor. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation. New York:
Sontag, S. (1967). Death Kit. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
833
Sontag, S. (1968). Trip to Hanoi. New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux.
Sontag, S. (1969). Styles of Radical Will. New York:
Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Sontag, S. (1978a). I, etcetera. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Sontag, S. (1978b). Illness as Metaphor. New York:
Sontag, S. (1980). Under the Sign of Saturn. New York:
Sontag, S. (1989). AIDS and Its Metaphor. New York:
Sontag, S. (1991). The Way We Live Now. New York:
Sontag, S. (1992). The Volcano Lover. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Sontag, S. (2000). In America. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Sontag, S. (2001). Where the Stress Falls. New York:
Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New
Sontag, S. (2007). At the Same Time. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Sorrentino, Gilbert
MARTIN RIKER
One of the great formal innovators of twentiethcentury letters, Gilbert Sorrentino was and
remains an unclassifiable writer. Although an
accomplished poet and superior critic, he is
known primarily for over 20 works of fiction,
each of which creates or appropriates its own set
of styles, characters, and narrative strategies, the
author finding in each new work an opportunity
to reinvent his art in startlingly original ways.
Born in Brooklyn in 1929, Sorrentino attended
public school and later studied English literature
and classics at Brooklyn College. In the 1950s, he
founded the small magazine Neon, and through
Neon worked with such influential writers
as William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley,
as well as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), with whom
Sorrentino later coedited the magazine Kulchur.
He worked as an editor at Grove Press during the
1960s, after which he taught at schools in the New
York area, until eventually accepting a position at
Stanford University, where he taught for several
834
SORRENTINO, GILBERT
decades. Upon retirement, he returned to Brooklyn, where he died in 2006.

Like other innovative writers of the latter half
of the twentieth century, Sorrentino drew his
aesthetics from various modernist predecessors.
Beyond Pounds dictum to make it new, he was
perhaps most guided by the violently imaginative,
precise language of William Carlos Williams
and Arthur Rimbaud, who are also the subjects
of Splendide-H^
otel (1973), his aesthetics manifesto composed in alphabetical vignettes. His early
novels, The Sky Changes (1966) and Steelwork
(1970), show in particular the influence of Williams in their eschewal of grand literary themes in
favor of immediate experience. The Sky Changes,
an unsentimental chronicle of a cross-country
family trip during which the family falls apart, is
the only one of Sorrentinos fictions devoid of
satire or farce. Steelwork, which narrates the demise of a Brooklyn neighborhood before and after
World War II, is similarly unsentimental in its
treatment of human degradation, yet introduces
also the scathingly black humor that would mark
the rest of the authors career.
His third novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual
Things (1971), draws its title from Williams,
although the narrative form a series of satirical
portraits of decadent figures in the New York art
scene was suggested by Wyndham Lewiss Apes
of God. It uses a broad range of farcical narrative
techniques, including a highly opinionated narrator, contrarian footnotes by fictional critics,
and inserted letters, second-rate poems, and
self-critique.
These techniques and many others found
their full expression in Sorrentinos magnum
opus, Mulligan Stew (1979), which tells the story
of a second-rate novelist who sets out to write
an experimental novel but, in his eagerness
to comply with whatever literary style is in
vogue, manages to switch his novels style with
every chapter. An encyclopedia of caricatured
literary styles and forms, Mulligan Stew is in
many ways the comic antithesis of Sorrentinos
own career.
After Mulligan Stew, Sorrentino stepped out of
the farcical mode with Aberration of Starlight
(1980), a novel told through contrasting perspectives on a single set of events. Structurally reminiscent of Faulkners The Sound and the Fury,
Aberration evinces also a Faulknerian precision in
its complex portraits of human anger, ignorance,

and pettiness.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Sorrentinos indifference to content grew more obvious: he wrote
the novels Crystal Vision (1981a) and Blue Pastoral (1983) that retold, in farcical form, his earlier
books Steelwork and The Sky Changes; he began
composing novels based on compositional constraints, such as the trilogy collected in Pack of Lies
(1997); the Raymond Roussel-inspired Under the
Shadow (1991); and Gold Fools (2000), a novel
based on a boys adventure story and composed
entirely of questions.
The masterpiece of his later years was Little
Casino (2002a), an open-form collage-novel
that calls to mind, if anything, Williamss Kora
in Hell. After Little Casino, Sorrentino published
a collection of his short fiction as well as three
novels Lunar Follies (2005), A Strange Commonplace (2006), and The Abyss of Human Illusion
(2009) that revisit experiences and subjects
he had written about throughout his career, each
time rendered into new artistic form.
Sorrentino received numerous awards
throughout his career, including a Lannan
Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, two
Guggenheim Fellowships, two PEN/Faulkner
nominations, three National Endowment for the
Arts grants, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and an award from the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Faulkner, William (AF); Lewis, Wyndham (BIF);
Andrews, D. (2001). Gilbert Sorrentino. Review of
Lewis, W. (1930). Apes of God. London: Arthur.
McPheron, W. (1991). Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive
Bibliography. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive.
OBrien, J. (ed.) (1980). Gilbert Sorrentino [special
issue]. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1(1).
Sorrentino, G. (1966). The Sky Changes. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Sorrentino, G. (1970). Steelwork. New York: Pantheon.
Sorrentino, G. (1971). Imaginative Qualities of Actual
Things. New York: Pantheon.
Sorrentino, G. (1973). Splendide-H^
otel. New York: New
Directions.
THE SOUTHERN NOVEL
Sorrentino, G. (1979). Mulligan Stew. New York: Grove.

Sorrentino, G. (1980). Aberration of Starlight. New
York: Random House.
Sorrentino, G. (1981a). Crystal Vision. San Francisco:
North Point.
Sorrentino, G. (1981b). Selected Poems: 19581980.
Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow.
Sorrentino, G. (1983). Blue Pastoral. San Francisco:
North Point.
Sorrentino, G. (1991). Under the Shadow. Elmwood
Park, IL: Dalkey Archive.
Sorrentino, G. (1995). Red the Fiend. New York:
Fromm.
Sorrentino, G. (1997). Pack of Lies (omnibus
comprising: Odd Number [1985], Rose Theatre
[1987], and Misterioso [1989]) Normal, IL: Dalkey
Archive.
Sorrentino, G. (2000). Gold Fools. Los Angeles: Green
Integer.
Sorrentino, G. (2002a). Little Casino. Minneapolis:
Coffee House.
Sorrentino, G. (2002b). Something Said [1984], rev.
edn. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive.
Sorrentino, G. (2004a). The Moon in Its Flight.
Sorrentino, G. (2004b). New and Selected Poems,
19581998. Los Angeles: Green Integer.
Sorrentino, G. (2005). Lunar Follies. Minneapolis:
Coffee House.
Sorrentino, G. (2006). A Strange Commonplace.
Sorrentino, G. (2009). The Abyss of Human Illusion.
The Southern Novel

JOHN T. MATTHEWS AND LISA HINRICHSEN
The US Souths modern literary culture reflects

the regions fitful, often violent struggle to
modernize following the Confederacys defeat
in the Civil War. Loss in 1865 left a devastated
country: a generation of white males decimated, slaves having deserted, an agricultural
economy in ruins, widespread poverty, physical destruction, and explosive racial rage. The
regions future was difficult to imagine. Former
elites bid to regain power, provoking the federal
government to take control of ex-Confederate
states and enforce Reconstruction. When occupying forces withdrew in the 1870s, the region was
left to figure out what a New South might
look like.
835
Between the 1880s and World War I, a generation of visionaries spurred the region toward
commercial and industrial renovation. Boosters
like Henry Grady, a prominent newspaper editor
in Atlanta, envisioned a New South predominated
by benevolent factory owners and merchants,
contented white workers, deferential free blacks
all sharing racially segregated towns: a modern
society, yet distinctively Southern in culture,
mores, and customs. Writers like Joel Chandler
Harris got to work creating nostalgic fantasies of
antebellum plantation life that reassured potential Northern investors about the continuing
docility and inexpensiveness of the Souths black
workforce, and signaled white Southerners
determination to reconcile past differences with
their Northern brothers. Harriss volumes of Brer
Rabbit tales (beginning with the phenomenally
successful Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings
[1880]), popularized old-timey slave tales while
underscoring the purported harmony of plantation life. Plantation fiction like Thomas Nelson
Pages Marse Chan stories (1884) and his romance
Red Rock (1898) more plaintively lamented a lost
way of life, but, as C. Vann Woodward observed,
the Old South was essentially an invention of the
New anyhow one that enabled individuals to
move forward by giving them the imaginative
recompense of a beautiful yet irrecoverable past.
As blacks began to protest new forms of subjugation the Jim Crow legislation that prohibited racial intermingling in public spaces, the
recourse to lynching to terrorize African Americans plantation fiction grew more desperate
and shrill in its insistence on earlier fantasies of
order. Thomas Dixon, Jr. fused racial dread and
regional pride in a series of repugnant white
supremacist novels, including The Leopards Spots
(1902) and The Clansman (1905). Imagining that
black sexual menace demanded vigilante defense
of white womanhood, the novels inspired D. W.
Griffiths magisterially innovative film The Birth
of a Nation (1915), which enflamed racism
throughout the nation. The chimera of white
purity continued to inspire plantation narratives
as historical needs changed: Stark Youngs bestselling So Red the Rose (1934), for example, portrayed antebellum plantation society as the ideal
of cultivated leisure, a lost alternative to the
mongrelization and materialism afflicting modern life after World War I. Thomas Wolfes debut
836
THE SOUTHERN NOVEL
novel, the autobiographical Look Homeward,

Angel (1929), unwittingly demonstrated how
white supremacy structured identity even in the
hamlets of the mountains of North Carolina,
while his posthumously published You Cant Go
Home Again (1940) reflected on the pain of telling
the truth about Southern clan life. Margaret
Mitchells spectacularly popular Gone With the
Wind (1936) fantasized that a modern young
(white) woman might appropriate a tradition of
Southern self-making and racial privilege to enfranchise herself in modern entrepreneurial
life. Allen Tates The Fathers (1938) elegized an
Arcadian South, the casualty of fading respect for
social and sexual discrimination. Tate and Young
belonged to a group of poets and scholars who
shared the belief that the Old South, even granted
the blemish of slavery, constituted an acme of
culture, a way of life to be preferred to the
materialistic rat race run by industrial capitalism
in Northern cities. The most illustrious of these
so-called Vanderbilt (University) Agrarians, Robert Penn Warren wrote with greater awareness of
the Old Souths flaws, however, and his greatest
novel, All the Kings Men (1946), dramatizes the
conflict between nostalgia and guilt, recognizing
the justness of change without generating any
enthusiasm for it.
Reverence for the plantation ideal did not go
unchallenged. The counter-experiences of African Americans fueled anti-plantation fiction later
in the nineteenth century, just as ex-slave narratives before the Civil War had refuted plantation
romances. Charles Chesnutt contradicted Joel
Chandler Harriss honeyed tales with The Conjure
Woman (1899), a set of stories that insisted on the
violence of slavery and confronted white obliviousness. Chesnutt traced the illogic of race and
blood in The House Behind the Cedars (1900),
depicted the murderous violence unleashed by
Jim Crow in The Marrow of Tradition (1901),
then, frustrated with national indifference, gave
up writing fiction. Frances Ellen Watkins
Harpers Iola Leroy (1892) suggests how racial
barriers block desire, how racism corrupts all
other morals, and how black self-sacrifice might
be required for racial redemption. Pauline Hopkins represented the intermingling of races as the
inescapable result of plantation life, most powerfully in her novel Contending Forces (1900), a
study of the sexual trauma at the heart of racial
exploitation. Even after World War I, Jean

Toomer revisited the Georgia plantation past in
his modernist work Cane (1923), in part to complicate the simplistic celebration of primitive
black folk culture under conditions of modern
metropolitan alienation, and in part to suggest the
neo-plantation stain on contemporary attitudes
toward race. White Southerners like Julia Peterkin
wrote appreciatively but sentimentally about surviving black folk culture in works like Black April
(1927). Zora Neale Hurston pursued such questions even more extensively beginning in the late
1920s, measuring the power of individual imagination to counteract histories of racial exploitation in fiction like Jonahs Gourd Vine (1934), the
much celebrated Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), and numerous short stories, as well as
dedicating herself to the professional study of
African American and African Caribbean folk
culture. Ralph Ellisons mid-century masterpiece,
Invisible Man (1952), preoccupied as it is with the
alienation of black Americans from contemporary society after World War II, returns to the
premises of plantation history to chart formative
attitudes toward black education, leadership,
sexuality, and relations to white authority.
Kate Chopin suggests the corresponding ways
many white women chafed under the demands of
Southern paternalism. In her most familiar work
of fiction, The Awakening (1899), the broader
confinement of women by Victorian mores takes
on a Southern tinge, the setting in cosmopolitan
New Orleans tempting the protagonist with
greater opportunities to fulfill her needs than
anywhere else in the provincial Deep South. In
her earlier novels, Ellen Glasgow tried to imagine
the outgrowth of independent womens lives
from the hearty individualism of small landowning farmers in Virginia; Barren Ground (1925)
explores tensions between ethnic immigrant farm
culture, modern scientific progress, changing
opportunities for women, and the growth of the
national state. Later works like The Sheltered Life
(1932) test the constraints of town existence on
women. More skeptical writers mocked what the
traditional South offered women: Anita Looss
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and Frances
Newmans The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) and
Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928) subject
paternalistic (Southern) culture to deliriously
mordant wit.
THE SOUTHERN NOVEL
Eudora Weltys short stories examine the heavy

undergrowth of repression that stunts and saddens womens lives in the early-twentieth-century
South; pieces like Why I Live at the P.O., The
Petrified Man, June Recital, and Clytie compose a taxonomy of female suffering, while the
larger scale of her major novels, Delta Wedding
(1946), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimists
Daughter (1972), permits more elaborate efforts
to work through losses, particularly in the company of other women. Carson McCullers probes
womens discontentment more soberly in the
novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940),
Reflections in a Golden Eye (1940), The Member
of the Wedding (1946), and The Ballad of the Sad
Cafe (1951); the second of these is especially
remarkable for exploring homoerotic longing
frankly here that of a man although McCullers
herself was sexually attracted to both women and
men. The notes of homosexual desire in Weltys
writing about women gain amplification from the
boldness of her fellow Southerner McCullers.
Weltys satire tends to the wryly droll; her later
contemporary Flannery OConnor invites broader
laughter as she surveys an outlandish, Godforsaken terrain marked by perdition so grotesque
as to exceed mere historical transgression and
suggesting instead the very corruption of the
human soul. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s,
OConnor sought to remind the nation, as it
perked along in material prosperity and consumer gratification, the confident antagonist to
Cold War communism, that such overvaluation
of the carnal smothered the spirit. Like Welty, she
perfected her vision in her short stories; the
collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)
and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
are studies in misbelief, while her novels, Wise
Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960),
puzzle over the paradoxical power of religious
faith to both redeem and deform human nature.
A surprising number of modern American
novelists came from the South, and wrote about
it. This burst of literary creativity was taken as
something of a Southern Renaissance, the regions cultural achievement vaulting over its continued economic and social backwardness. Still,
most of this writing, however determined it was to
tell about the South from the Southern standpoint, hardly celebrated the regions pride in its
distinctive history and sense of community. The
837
freedom associated with the experimental methods of international modernist art coincided with
what we have already seen as gathering complaint,
criticism, skepticism in the modernizing South.
In the years between the two World Wars, the
South began to surrender economic and social
habits formed a century earlier. Many of the
regions best writers were drawn to describing
this upheaval. Faulkner, the Souths consummate
novelist of the period, set about excavating the
rotten foundations of the plantation system that
had defined his Mississippi. His leading novels
explore the many facets of the pasts survival in
the present: The Sound and the Fury (1929) empathizes with the bereavement suffered by those
who lose their privileged status; As I Lay Dying
(1930) explores the hard lives of small-time farmers confronting catastrophic failure; Light in
August (1932) searches out the contradictions of
absolutist racial beliefs; and Absalom, Absalom!
(1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942) with its
centerpiece, The Bear, trace the moral outrages
secreted away in the plantation past. Erskine
Caldwell, as well thought of in the 1930s as
Faulkner, conveys the extremes of Southern deprivation by scandalizing his readers with the
depravity that poverty causes. In describing
the physical deformities, animalistic sexuality,
and numbing lethargy of poor whites in his
two best-known novels, Tobacco Road (1932)
and Gods Little Acre (1933), Caldwell makes
Depression-era audiences voyeuristic accomplices to the abjection of those worse off than
themselves. In Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith
imagines the personal tragedies of love and family
life caused by segregation.
Richard Wright, an African American born in
Mississippi, brought to national attention the
suffering of Southern black people during the
1930s in his powerful collection of short stories,
Uncle Toms Children (1937). It suggests how
blacks efforts to join radical political movements
were frustrated by the persistence of Southern
racism. Wrights major work, the novel Native
Son (1940), focuses on the devolution of a young
black man who comes to Chicago and encounters
racial prejudice subtler but no less toxic than what
he has known in his native Mississippi. The
Negro problem has become the nations problem in modern America, as W. E. B. Du Bois
predicted in his pronouncement that the question
838
THE SOUTHERN NOVEL
of the color line was the question of the twentieth

century. Katherine Anne Porter, particularly in
her early collection Flowering Judas and Other
Stories (1930), reminds readers that the US South
extends westward to the areas bordering Mexico.
Fiction from such contact zones details the realities of exchange and creolization increasingly
operant in US Southern society and culture.
The literature of the present-day South continues to engage in evolving debates over the idea
of a distinctive Southern identity while dismantling exclusionary mythologies and exhausted
tropes of Southern belonging. Literary production in the contemporary South can be characterized by the resurgence of a renewed literary
realism (as seen in the fiction of Dorothy Allison,
Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and Bobbie Ann
Mason) and the rise of iconoclastic writing
(Cormac McCarthy, Randall Kenan) that functions to undermine past notions of community
and tradition. Yet contemporary Southern writing does not fully set itself free of past themes and
subject matters: it continues to examine issues of
race, gender, class, family, community, and religion, but does so from changed perspectives and
from previously marginalized voices.
Recent Southern fiction by Ellen Douglas,
Walker Percy, James Dickey, Harry Crews,
Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry
Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Truman Capote, Reynolds
Price, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac
McCarthy, Doris Betts, Charles Portis, and Barry
Hannah questions and complicates what it means
to be Southern, stressing the social construction
of both communal and individual identity. While
these authors derive inspiration from traditional
motifs of history, place, race, and community,
they also place new emphasis on social class,
sexuality, and gender, challenging conservative
notions regarding the thematic range of Southern
literature. Though they continue high modernisms concerns with concepts of individual alienation and the loss of communal values, these
writers extend its experimentation with new narrative forms and methods, but frequently stop
short of the overt postmodern techniques found
in other American literatures. Writing from a
revitalized realist tradition (frequently termed
dirty realism or grit lit), Mason, Crews,
Portis, and Brown reveal the everyday struggles
of the world of the perennially poor. The work of
Allison, Betts, Gibbons, Price, Capote, and Kenan,

which focuses on gender, race, and sexuality,
forms fiction that is at once identifiably
Southern and yet is also distinctly subversive
in its treatment of patriarchy, gender roles, and
the coherence of the nuclear family. Whether
through Fords mass-produced consumer landscape, Hannahs mingling of the Civil War and the
Vietnam War, or the fierce frontier of McCarthys
Southern novels, these authors revisit, assess,
and sometimes assail the cultural foundations
from which the Southern Renaissance arose.
In deconstructing and decoding ways of being
Southern, contemporary writers in the South
have frequently found themselves reckoning with
how the past and the present engage each other in
everyday life. The tempestuous violence of the
Civil Rights era led Southern writers to revisit
in their fiction the racial brutality central to
Southern experience: William Styrons The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Alex Haleys Roots
(1967), and Ernest Gainess The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman (1971) turn back to the past to
probe the origins and consequences of racial
violence, while work such as Harper Lees To Kill
a Mockingbird (1960) investigates the present-day
world of racial inequality. African American writers in particular (Randall Kenan, Gayl Jones,
Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Henry Dumas,
Margaret Walker, Rita Mae Brown, and Edward
P. Jones) reveal the ongoing cultural and psychological costs of the history of slavery and
segregation. Yet while these writers illuminate the
insidious ways in which racial bias maintains a
presence in American culture, their work surmounts a mere recitation of injury and injustice
to focus instead on the ways in which individual
dignity and self-worth can be achieved and
maintained.
Investigations of injury are manifest in latetwentieth-century Southern literature, and reveal
the continuing power of the mode of the Southern
grotesque and the gothic: Flannery OConnors
Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away
(1960), Dorothy Allisons Bastard Out of Carolina
(1992), Lee Smiths Black Mountain Breakdown
(1980), Kaye Gibbonss Ellen Foster (1987), and
Alice Walkers The Color Purple (1982) investigate
sexual and social violence within families, while
the work of Cormac McCarthy (Child of God
[1973], Suttree [1979], and Blood Meridian
THE SOUTHERN NOVEL
[1985]), William Gays Twilight (2006), and

Tom Franklins Poachers (1999) probes the
edges of the Western frontier and the Southern
backwoods to reveal an American landscape
littered with perversity and violence. Native
writers such as Lewis Owens and Diane Glancy
speak to the traumatic dislocation of traditional
tribal culture within the South. Writers such as
Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country, 1985), Jayne
Anne Phillips (Machine Dreams, 1984), Barry
Hannah (Ray, 1989; Airships, 1978), Clyde
Edgerton (The Floatplane Notebooks, 1988),
Winston Groom (Forrest Gump, 1986), and
Robert Olen Butler (A Good Scent From a Strange
Mountain, 1992) grapple with the ramifications
of the Vietnam War. Such narratives tend to
personalize rather than politicize war, weighing
its imprint on individual identity and American
domestic life.
The 1950s and 1960s brought massive changes
to the South: waves of immigration and emigration, greater civil rights for minorities, the waning
of traditional patriarchal and aristocratic Southern mores, and further loss of Southern distinctiveness in the face of mass market products and
chains. The Southern economic boom of the
1970s reignited old fears about cultural authenticity and the Americanization of Dixie, as John
Edgerton put it in the title of his popular 1974
book, which charted the myriad ways in which
the South now mirrored the rest of the nation.
Novels such as James Dickeys Deliverance (1970)
dramatize how this material prosperity, which
was concentrated in urban centers, threatened
local cultures and created battles over space, place,
and cultural power, while Walker Percys The
Moviegoer (1961), The Last Gentleman (1966),
and Lancelot (1977) reveal psychic struggles with
melancholia, madness, and amnesia brought on
by contemporary rootlessness and alienation. The
rise of consumer culture can be seen in work by
Bobbie Ann Mason, whose characters immerse
themselves in pop culture and search for meaning
on the television screen. Kaye Gibbons (Charms
for the Easy Life, 1993) and Jill McCorkle (The
Cheerleader, 1984) likewise investigate the fragmentation of the American family within a
media-driven world. In direct resistance to the
homogenizing impact of mass culture, however,
Southern writers such as Ron Rash, Lee Smith,
Josephine Humphreys, Fannie Flagg, Wendell
839
Berry, and Ellen Gilchrist turn toward oral narratives and folk traditions as means of maintaining a distinctive regional identity. The boisterous,
bawdy hold of Southern humor continues in John
Kennedy Tooles A Confederacy of Dunces (1980),
Guy Owens The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man
(1965), Lewis Nordans The All-Girl Football
Team (1986), and William Price Foxs Southern
Fried (1962).
The changes that global capitalism has created
in the South can be seen in the way its newest
literature reflects a recent surge of immigrants to
the South from Southeast Asia, the Caribbean,
and Mexico. In revealing Southern issues from an
outsiders perspective, these assimilation narratives challenge assumptions that one must be
born in the South to understand it, and has led
to an outpouring of new novels since the 1990s
that help to realign racial conflicts previously
thought of in terms of black/white binaries. Work
such as Lan Caos Monkey Bridge (1997), Roberto
Fernandezs Holy Radishes! (1995), and Susan
Chois The Foreign Student (1998) reconceptualize exclusionary and exceptionalist notions of
nation and region by placing the South in
transnational perspective. As Southern writers
continue to examine issues of region and
nation from a global viewpoint, the US South
will be understood in solidarity with other
Global Souths: developing countries with
similar economic histories of belated capitalist
modernization, slavery, and exploitation of labor
and raw materials.
SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Ethnicity and
Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF);
Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Modernist
Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)

Bibler, M. (2009). Cottons Queer Relations: Same-Sex
Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation,
19361968. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press.
Bone, M. (2005). The Postsouthern Sense of Place in
Contemporary Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
Brinkmeyer, R. H., Jr. (2009). The Fourth Ghost:
White Southern Writers and European Fascism,
840
SPECULATIVE FICTION
19301950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press.
Duck, L. A. (2006). The Nations Region: Southern
Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism.
Gray, R. J. (1977). The Literature of Memory: Modern
Writers of the American South. Baltimore: Johns
Guinn, M. (2000). After Southern Modernism: Fiction
of the Contemporary South. Jackson: University
Hobson, F. (1991). The Southern Writer in the
Postmodern World. Athens: University of Georgia
Press.
Jackson, R. (2005). Seeking the Region in American
Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence,
Innovation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press.
Jones, A. G. (1981). Tomorrow Is Another Day: The
Woman Writer in the South, 18591936. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Jones, A. G., & Donaldson, S. V. (eds.) (1997). Haunted
Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press.
Jones, S. W., & Montieth, S. (eds.) (2002). South to a
New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Baton Rouge:
King, R. H. (1980). A Southern Renaissance:
the Cultural Awakening of the American South,
19301955. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kreyling, M. (1988). Inventing Southern Literature.
McPherson, T. (2003). Reconstructing Dixie: Race,
Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South.
Romine, S. (2008). The Real South: Southern Narrative
in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Baton Rouge:
Smith, J., & Cohn, D. (2004). Look Away! The U.S. South
in New World Studies. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Yaeger, P. (2000). Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing
Southern Womens Writing, 19301990. Chicago:
Speculative Fiction
GERALD R. LUCAS
Most frequently, speculative fiction is a synonym for science fiction. Since its genesis as an
adventure narrative, science fiction has always
speculated about what is beyond from across
the sea, space, and time based on contemporaneous worldviews and technologies. Historically
situated, like other incarnations of science fiction,
speculative fiction was coined in 1948 by Robert
Heinlein and represents the concerns of the increasingly fragmented world of high technology
evident after World War II. Speculative fiction
often poses a What if? question that challenges
assumptions of empirical experience or reality.
Speculative fiction includes all of the characteristics of science fiction, but often has a broader
scope, including alternate histories, magic realism, contemporary fantasy, and so on. As part
of its more inclusive purview, speculative
fiction also breaks with the traditional concerns
of a white, male-dominated readership and
authorship to include marginalized voices and
concerns like those of differing class, race, gender,
and sexuality.
Speculative fiction grows out of the centurieslong tradition of the fantastic voyage in the
tradition of Gilgamesh, Homers Odyssey, and
other mythological travelogues like those of
Heracles and Jason and the Argonauts. However,
speculative fiction has been equally influenced
by the utopian tradition dating back to Athens
Golden Age and Platos Republic (fourth century
BCE). These two traditions were often fused, with
the former acting as a framing device for the
latter, in works like Thomas Mores Utopia
(1516) and Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels
(1726). This coupling suggests a concern with
the progress and extension of human knowledge and its relationship to the benefit or
detriment of humanity, producing narratives
of monumental travel, like going to the moon
or the center of the earth, based on our increasing technological sophistication. Out of the
Industrial Revolution came a greater reliance
on science and technology in human affairs.
This shift had its impact in early speculative
fiction with a refocusing of the supernatural
elements of the fantastic voyage into a concentration on the products of science and technology, like Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818)
and several of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
These early tales were often accompanied by
the trappings of the gothic tradition, reflecting
the sinister and darker aspects of the human
psyche made manifest by a persons often monomaniacal scientific striving.
SPECULATIVE FICTION
Jules Verne, who disregarded the sinister in

favor of careful extrapolations of contemporary
science, created imaginary tales of voyages extraordinaires that put locomotion at their center.
Vernes extravagant tales, such as Journey to the
Center of the Earth (1863) and 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea (1870), became internationally
popular, particularly in America, where writers
began to out-Verne Verne by constructing a myth
of the West where a fantastical future could
be located via technological sophistication. In
England, a blur of periodicals began publishing
Verne-like romances, but it was H. G. Wells who
refocused Vernian voyages into tales about the
future evolution of humanity and produced
the scientific romance. In novellas like The
Time Machine (1895), Wells used rational inquiry to explore space and time and eschewed the
outmoded narrative elements of the fantastic
voyage in favor of futures based on contemporary science, like the time machine, to produce
stories that seriously speculated about the
possible implications often moral of these
technologies.
The early twentieth century saw an explosion of
American speculative fiction, whose burgeoning
popularity was directly linked with the advent
of the pulp magazines that serialized melodramatic extraterrestrial adventures, like Edgar Rice
Burroughss Mars series, as well as reprinting
Wellss stories and more serious fabulations
from Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Writers
like Burroughs were influenced by Wells, but
employed pseudo-scientific devices to explore the
dream-like realms that populated their exotica.
Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories in
1926, beginning the first magazine dedicated
to scientifiction, while Weird Tales began to
publish writers like H. P. Lovecraft, an acolyte
of Poes, who wrote tales of cosmic horror, and
Robert E. Howard, who is credited with inventing
sword-and-sorcery fiction. Both of these traditions have left their mark on speculative fiction
and influenced further variations on the genre like
C. L. Moores science fantasy.
Gernsback published stories that combined
the technological focus of Verne and Wells with
that of the romantic melodramas of Burroughs to
sell it to pulp audiences mostly adolescent boys
who craved adventure, mystery, and romance.
He saw science fiction primarily as a teaching
841
tool a way to promote the future as a utopian

world built on science and technology rather
than just an escapist genre. Among his visions of
the future, Gernsback advocated atomic energy,
television, and radio as technologies that would
likely change the world for the better. This
approach developed a cult status and began the
widespread popularity of science fiction in
America.
The formula for these early Gernsbackian stories was based more on the adventure romance
than any serious speculation about science and
technology, like E. E. Doc Smiths space operas
in the vein of Flash Gordon. Space operas were
very formulaic: equipped with ray guns and various other technological gizmos, the handsome
hero pilots his spaceship through unimaginable
dangers and interplanetary distances to defeat evil
aliens threatening the citizens of Earth and to
rescue the buxom heroine. These early stories
developed many of the conventions of science
fiction aliens, robots, spaceships, the future,
gizmos, and extraterrestrial locales and coupled
them with the spectacle of high adventure,
including fantastic cover illustrations like those
of Frank R. Paul.
The pulp movement continued to define
American science fiction through the end of the
1930s, even surviving the Great Depression. This
new era saw John W. Campbell, Jr. taking the
helm at Astounding Science-Fiction and ushering
in a Golden Age. While Campbell shared
Gernsbacks enthusiasm for atomic power and the
educational value of the space opera, he emphasized scientific speculation by encouraging reader
feedback about science in the pages of Astounding
and at fan conventions. Campbell eschewed
mysticism, addressed an audience of scientifically
knowledgeable fans, and brought fresh writers into
the fold, like Lester Del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein,
Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, and Theodore
Sturgeon, who would change the face of science
fiction through the 1940s.
Even as Astounding promoted fresh voices in
the 1940s, other writers like Ray Bradbury,
Richard Matheson, Philip Jose Farmer, and Alfred
Bester began to explore more sociological and
personal visions that would develop throughout
the 1950s and transform science fiction into
a more mature, adult genre. The pulps were being
replaced by more professional, digest-sized ma-
842
SPECULATIVE FICTION
gazines like the Magazine of Science Fiction and

Fantasy and Galaxy Science Fiction that featured
edgier, urban, and more literary tales that challenged the pulp taboos against sex, religion, and
race. Robert Heinlein, in his 1948 essay On
Writing of Speculative Fiction, coined the term
speculative fiction and suggested a departure
from science fiction, but, as Heinlein would later
emphasize, not including fantasy. Later, many
proponents of the switch, including Isaac Asimov,
suggested that speculative fiction maintain the
use of sf, but eliminate the science to allow for
a broader scope. During this time, neglected
literary works of science fiction from abroad, born
out of reactions to the realities of totalitarianism
and the two World Wars, began to influence
American speculative fiction. With the influx of
these novels from abroad and the increasing
American taste for grown-up speculative fiction,
the era of the magazine came to an end by 1960.
The 1960s brought an acceleration of technologies into the everyday: atomic power, television,
computers, and space flight suggested that the
future postulated in the pages of science fiction
stories had become reality. Yet, the promise of
a golden tomorrow was overshadowed by the
sinister specters of the Cold War and political
unrest like the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the escalating
war in Vietnam that manifested themselves in
the cultural consciousness of the time. Popular
culture responded with films depicting aliens who
threatened the Earth from space, growing dissent
in music and political movements that resisted
imposed control and order, New Age reactions
against technology and progress with the use of
narcotics and hallucinogens, and recurring
images of the constant threat of annihilation from
a nuclear war that seemed inevitable.
Science fictions New Wave borrowed its title
from the French movement in film that broke
with narrative traditions by emphasizing the importance of the image, stylistic experimentation,
and plotless digressions. In science fiction, darker
and more introspective visions were a reaction
against much of the puerile, formulaic, and optimistic writing that had come out of the pulp era.
Writers of the sf New Wave, even more than their
Golden Age predecessors, sought a transcendence
from an imploding reality. This new reality challenged patriarchal views of white, heterosexual
manhood and developed a renewed interest in

feminism that allowed for the expression of marginalized voices including women, homosexuals, and non-whites such as Ursula K. Le Guin,
Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany,
James Tiptree Jr. (the pseudonym for Alice Sheldon), Marge Piercy, and others. Other American
science fiction writers to emerge from the 1960s
and 1970s include Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut,
Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, and
Poul Anderson.
If the sf New Wave was characterized by
a writerly revision of the Golden Age, science
fiction after 1980 becomes postmodern in its
radical questioning of reality, its reaction to
a growing emphasis on information, and its focus
on cyberspace. By 1980, science fiction was making headway in the academy and had obtained
maturity as a genre, and everyday technology
began to catch up with science fictions visions
of the future. 1984 had arrived differently
from Orwells vision, and 2001 was looming
in the headlights: speculative fiction became a
mature genre in literature and a technologically
sophisticated America in reality. The introduction of the Apple Macintosh coincided with the
publication of William Gibsons Neuromancer in
1984, ushering in a new era of information and
views of the future that were distinctly countercultural: anti-government, fragmented, hybridized, and digitally enhanced. The cyberpunks
embraced a punk garage band aesthetic, a love
of style, a streetwise edginess, and a respect for the
ideas of their progenitors (Sterling x). The works
of William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling,
Rudy Rucker, Neil Stephenson, Paul di Filippo,
and others are populated with ruptures and
dislocations fragmented societies, racially mixed
characters and cyborgs, marginalized figures, sublime technologies, virtual and alternate realities,
and a stylistic playfulness making cyberpunk a
postmodern expression that continues to influence science fiction (McCaffery 2).
Other voices that define science fiction from
the mid-1980s to the present are those that look to
the Golden Age and update their big ideas into
expressions born out of cyberpunk. Orson Scott
Cards Enders Game (1985) seems a combination
of Heinleins Starship Troopers (1959) and the
interior world of cyberpunk. Vernor Vinge
expanded his vision from cyberspace in True
SPECULATIVE FICTION
Names (1981) to that of the galaxy in his complex revisions of the space opera in A Fire Upon the
Deep (1992) and A Deepness in the Sky (1999).
Other writers, like Greg Bear, Dan Simmons,
and Neal Stephenson, expand their visions into
worldwide, historically engaged narratives of
revision, environmental concerns, and further
implications of the information age.
The question remains how speculative fiction
can be differentiated from science fiction. If
science fiction was born out of a modernist drive
to the perfect society, speculative fiction has its
genesis in postmodern sensibilities of the contemporary world after World War II. Whereas science
fiction typically deals with, refers to, or issues from
the perspective of science and technology, speculation fiction is more inclusive, regarding texts
from other genres, like fantasy, under it aegis (Le
Guin 1997, 23). Science fiction and fantasy both
seem to present a world that is not here, but that
uses reality as a touchstone. Particularly useful in
understanding how speculative fiction differs
from science fiction and fantasy is Le Guins
supposition that science and technology are
integral elements of science fiction, while fantasy
holds magic at its center; speculative fiction
narratives can comfortably accommodate various conventions and subgenres (234). Therefore, rather than a specific genre of fiction,
speculative fiction often crosses genre lines, like
science fantasy, magic realism, and horror, yet
not all expressions of these genres can accurately
be called speculative. The artifacts of the narrative are not as central to speculative fiction as the
presentation of its alternate reality.
Speculative fiction consciously explores and
questions reality by situating itself in the intersection of the mundane and the not quite right.
Speculative fiction positions reality in a way to
make its solid surfaces less opaque, its angles not
quite so straight. It questions the empirical reality
by positing a strange newness, causing a cognitive
estrangement in the reader. As Darko Suvin posits,
speculative fiction brings the fantastic, the imaginative, and the speculative into the rational discourse of the everyday be it scientific, political,
or historical to defamiliarize the familiar and
provide a critical distance (Gunn and Candelaria
257). Therefore, speculative fiction provides
a reflection of reality, but this critical distance
also allows for reflection on reality.
843
Speculative fiction will often answer an implied

What if? question that posits an alternative
reality as its primary narrative drive. The distorted
or altered reality explicitly propels the narrative
while implicitly challenging quotidian assumptions of reality and those forces that comprise it
history, science, technology, politics, and metaphysics. Speculative fiction presents an existential
disruption by showing a reality that does not exist
or is not a lived reality; therefore, the dissonance
created encourages the reader to interrogate the
importance of historical events, technological
breakthroughs, and mystical discoveries by their
absence in reality. With this disruption, readers
question the nature of their own reality. Furthermore, speculative fiction challenges basic assumptions readers hold about themselves and their
world, especially how they define human.
J. G. Ballard, for instance, has characterized his
fiction as investigating the surrealism of everyday
life, and indeed many writers, from Mary Shelley
to Octavia Butler, seem to embrace this idea in
their literary experiments.
Many critics use speculative fiction as
a replacement for the study of science fiction to
create greater academic credibility and further
distance it from mainstream sci-fi. Increasingly,
feminist and African American scholars choose
to replace the science of science fiction with
speculative in order both to broaden the scope
of texts and voices included under this rubric
and to give a critical and deliberate distance to the
romantic, pulp-driven, and phallocentric past of
science fiction.
Perhaps the most enduring quality of speculative fiction is the link between its contemporary
expressions and those of the distant past the
enduring quest for something more, something
better, something beyond the sunset. Speculative
fiction seems to ask, How would human communities change as a result of . . .? Finishing
this sentence is what speculative fiction does at
its core.
Science Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian
Fiction (AF)
Asimov, I. (1941). Nightfall. New York: Atlas.
Asimov, I. (1950). I, Robot. New York: Gnome.
844
SPIEGELMAN, ART
Asimov, I. (1951). Foundation. New York: Gnome.

Barron, N. (ed.) (2004). Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical
Guide to Science Fiction 5th edn. Westport, CT:
Libraries Unlimited.
Bear, G. (1985). Blood Music. New York: Arbor House.
Bradbury, R. (1953a). Fahrenheit 451. New York:
Ballantine.
Bradbury, R. (1953b). The Martian Chronicles. Garden
Butler, O. (1979). Kindred. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Butler, O. (1996). Blood Child. In Blood Child and Other
Stories. New York: Seven Stories.
Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1938). Who Goes There? New York:
Atlas.
Card, O. S. (1985). Enders Game. New York: Doherty.
Delany, S. R. (1966). Babel-17. New York: Ace.
Delany, S. R. (1968). Nova. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Dick, P. K. (1962). The Man in High Castle. New York:
Putnams.
Di Filippo, P. (1996). Ribofunk. New York: Four Walls
Eight Windows.
Ellison, H. (1967). I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
New York: Pyramid.
Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace.
Gunn, J. & Candelaria, M.(eds.) (2005). Speculation on
Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow.
Heinlein, R. (1961). A Stranger in a Strange Land. New
York: Putnam.
Herbert, F. (1965). Dune. Philadelphia: Chilton.
James, E., & Mendlesohn, F. (eds.) (2003). The
Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge:
Le Guin, U.K. (1969). The Left Hand of Darkness. New
York: Ace.
Le Guin, U.K. (1974). The Dispossessed. New York:
Harper and Row.
Le Guin, U.K. (1997). Introduction: Clearly and
Firmly into the Tarpit. In B. Attenbury & U.K. Le
Guin (eds). The Norton Book of Science Fiction.
pp. 1534. New York: Norton.
Matheson, R. (1970). I Am Legend. New York: Walker.
McCaffery, L.(ed.) (1991). Storming the Reality Studio.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Moore, C. L. (1944). No Woman Born. New York: Atlas.
Piercy, M. (1976). Women on the Edge of Time. New
York: Knopf.
Pringle, D. (1985). Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.
New York: Carroll and Graf.
Russ, J. (1975). The Female Man. New York: Bantam.
Russ, J. (1984). When It Changed. In Extra(ordinary)
People. New York: St Martins.
Simmons, D. (2003). Ilium. New York.

Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash. New York:
Bantam.
Sterling, B. (1986). Preface. In Mirrorshades: The
Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace, pp. ixxvi
Sheldon, A. [Tiptree, J., Jr.] (1975a). Warm Worlds and
Otherwise. New York: Ballantine.
Vinge, V. (1999). A Deepness in the Sky. New York:
TOR.
Vonnegut, K., Jr. (1963). Cats Cradle. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
Vonnegut, K., Jr. (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. New
York: Delacorte.
Spiegelman, Art
HILLARY L. CHUTE
Art Spiegelman, a cartoonist, permanently

expanded the category of literature and public
conceptions of comics with his two-volume
Maus: A Survivors Tale (1986, 1991), which won
a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. A 13-year project in
which Spiegelman recorded his father Vladeks
testimony of surviving the Holocaust, Maus
demonstrated that the medium of comics is
capable of engendering serious, sophisticated,
and intricate work. Spiegelman has altered the
critical landscape of contemporary literature by
focusing attention on the relationship between
form, memory, and history.
Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden in
1948. He immigrated with his parents, Polish
Jews, to the United States in 1951, and grew up
in Rego Park, Queens. Spiegelman published his
first drawing in a local paper in 1961, and began
working for Topps Chewing Gum in 1965, an
association that lasted through 1987. Spiegelman
studied art and philosophy at Harpur College
(now SUNY Binghamton) and in the late 1960s
created experimental comic strips in the magazine
Witzend; other projects included distributing
surrealistic drawings as free leaflets to passersby.
Eventually Spiegelman moved to San Francisco
to become part of the burgeoning underground
comics movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Over a series of projects, Spiegelman brought
the formal concerns of both visual and literary
modernism to the field of comics, experimenting
with spatiality and temporality on the page.
SPIEGELMAN, ART
With the publication of Breakdowns: From

Maus to Now (1978), a hardcover collection of
his underground work (and whose subtitle refers
to the three-page prototype for his later, longer
text), Spiegelman established himself as one of
the major innovators of contemporary art and
literature. Breakdowns weaves high and low
cultural registers through the visual-verbal
form of comics and marries an interest in genre
fiction the hard-boiled detective narrative
with an exploration of autobiography. Continuing this examination of comics properties,
Spiegelman co-founded, with his wife Francoise
Mouly, the avant garde comics magazine RAW in
1980. Maus was serialized in RAW in chapterlength installments before its publication by
Pantheon in two volumes.
Maus was born out of a desire to create, as
Spiegelman has remarked, a comic that needed
a bookmark. It knits together two stories: one
from the past Vladek Spiegelmans experience
before, during, and after World War II, including
his residence at the Auschwitz concentration
camp and one from the present Art
Spiegelmans struggle to elicit his fathers testimony and shape it into a verbal and pictorial
narrative. The book is overlayered with a deliberately unstable animal metaphor that resignifies
Nazi propaganda, in which Jews are drawn as
mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Maus is
a profoundly self-reflexive text, everywhere marking through its visual narrative its own seams and
elisions, the struggle to grasp and comprehend
history, conveyed in simplified but savvy blackand-white drawings. A central premise is that
the past invades the present. In Maus II, the legs
of hanged Auschwitz inmates dangle from the top
of a comics frame as the Spiegelman family automobile winds its way up a road in 1979.
Spiegelman generated a new idiom with Maus,
which has been at the center of critical investigations into memory, narrative, and representation.
He has also protested the notion that Maus can be
considered fiction and wrote a letter to the New
York Times asking them to move Maus II from
their fiction to non-fiction bestseller list, as per the
books Library of Congress description. In the
first such move in their history, the paper printed
his letter and made the switch.
Following the success of Maus, Spiegelman
concentrated on his role as a staff artist and
845
writer at the New Yorker from 1993 to 2003. He

has created and edited childrens books, and
illustrated the 1928 poem The Wild Party by
Joseph Moncure March in a lush, decorative
style. The events of 9/11, which he witnessed
first-hand, inspired new comics such as In the
Shadow of No Towers (2004), a collection of 10
dense and experimental broadsheet-sized color
comics pages that express the disorientation
generated from the World Trade Center
tragedy.
Pantheon republished the influential Breakdowns (2008) with a new work, Portrait of the
Artist as a Young %@& !, as an introduction.
Portraits fragmented structure of short but
overlapping episodes replicates the structure of
memory itself, and stands as a meta-memoir.
Spiegelmans next work, about making Maus, is
titled MetaMaus. He was included in Time
magazines list of the Worlds Most Influential
People in 2005. Spiegelman lives in New York City
with his wife and two children.
Fiction (AF)

Chute, H. (2006). The Shadow of a Past Time:
History and Graphic Representation in Maus.
Twentieth-Century Literature, 52(2), 199230.
Geis, D. R.(ed.) (2003). Considering Maus: Approaches
to Art Spiegelmans Survivors Tale of the Holocaust.
Hirsch, M. (19923). Family Pictures: Maus,
Mourning, and Postmemory. Discourse, 15(2), 330.
Hirsch, M. (2004). Collateral Damage [editors
column]. PMLA, 119(5), 120915.
Silverblatt, M. (1995). The Cultural Relief of Art
Spiegelman. Tampa Review, 5, 316.
Spiegelman, A. (1978). Breakdowns: From Maus to Now,
an Anthology of Strips. New York: Belier.
Spiegelman, A. (1986). Maus: A Survivors Tale, vol. 1:
My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon.
Spiegelman, A. (1987). Read Yourself Raw: Pages From
the Rare First Three Issues of the Comics Magazine for
Damned Intellectuals (ed. A. Spiegelman & F.
Mouly). New York: Pantheon.
Spiegelman, A. (1991). Maus: A Survivors Tale,
vol. 2: And Here My Troubles Began. New York:
Pantheon.
846
STEGNER, WALLACE
Spiegelman, A. (1997). Open Me. . . Im a Dog! New

York: Joanna Cotler.
Spiegelman, A. (1999). The Wild Party: The Lost Classic
by Joseph Moncure March. New York: Pantheon.
Spiegelman, A. (2000). Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tale
Funnies (ed. A. Spiegelman & F. Mouly). New York:
HarperCollins.
Spiegelman, A. (2004). In the Shadow of No Towers.
New York: Pantheon.
Spiegelman, A. (2008a). Breakdowns/Portrait of the
Artist as a Young %@& ! New York: Pantheon.
Spiegelman, A. (2008b). Jack and the Box. New York:
Toon.
Spiegelman, A. (2010). MetaMaus. New York:
Pantheon.
Spiegelman, A., & Kidd, C. (2001). Jack Cole and Plastic
Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. San Francisco:
Chronicle.
Versluys, K. (2006). Art Spiegelmans In the Shadow of
No Towers: 9/11 and the Representation of Trauma.
White, H. (1992). Historical Emplotment and the Problem
of Truth In S. Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of
Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 3753.
Stegner, Wallace
STEVEN HARTMAN
In a career spanning more than half a century

Wallace Stegner produced some 30 books, including 15 volumes of fiction. He undertook his
literary work with an unyielding belief in the
writers duty to expose the erasures and distortions of history promoted by an increasingly
throwaway popular culture, emerging as the most
prominent literary mediator and public intellectual of the American West in his time. Believing
that modern transformations of American landscapes, no less than American culture and society,
occurred more rapidly and visibly beyond the
100th meridian, Stegner turned to the West of
present and past as the setting, inspiration, and
site of reflection for his most enduring fiction.
Born in Iowa on February 18, 1909, Stegner
grew up in various parts of the American West, his
early years in the Great Plains and Salt Lake City
profoundly influencing his engagement as a
writer in the geocultural development of the
West. Earning a PhD from the University of Iowa
in 1935, Stegner taught at Harvard (193945)
before accepting a tenured professorship at Stanford University (194571), where he mentored

such writers as Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry,
Ernest J. Gaines, Ken Kesey, Thomas McGuane,
Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, Robert
Stone, and Tillie Olsen. His most celebrated works
as a novelist appeared after his retirement from
academia. He died April 13, 1993.
Stegners literary career can be divided into
three phases. In the first of these he produced
four short novels, Remembering Laughter (1937),
The Potters House (1938), On a Darkling Plain
(1940), and Fire and Ice (1941), and an expansive
family saga, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943),
his first major critical success. Partly due to
Stegners experimentation with diverse subjects
and modes of storytelling, these early novels lack
the aesthetic, situational, and philosophical coherence of later works. The first and last novels are
the standouts, providing an interesting study in
contrasts. Modeled on the tragic history of
Stegners own family, The Big Rock Candy Mountain attempts to revise prevailing myths of the
West by portraying the rugged individualist Bo
Mason as a gifted loser unable to reconcile his
limitless sense of opportunity with the realities of
frontier existence. The novels patient historical
realism, epitomizing Stegners best work, contrasts sharply with the restrained psychological
realism of Remembering Laughter in its terse,
impressionistic portrayal of infidelity in a small
family.
Stegners second phase is noteworthy for the
dearth of novels produced over the next 24 years
and for his considerable achievements in nonfiction. Major works include a biography of John
Wesley Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
(1954); a history of the Mormon Trail, The Gathering of Zion (1964); and Wolf Willow (1962),
a masterful mixed-genre work subtitled a history, a story and a memory of the last plains
frontier. The periods novels are solid: Second
Growth (1947), reprising Bruce Mason from his
previous novel; The Preacher and the Slave (1950);
and A Shooting Star (1961), the least representative of Stegners mature novels. The most accomplished fictions of this phase were Stegners short
stories, routinely selected for the Best American
Short Stories and O. Henry Awards collections.
Yet even these works are eclipsed by the periods
non-fiction, in which Stegner developed a holistic
STEIN, GERTRUDE
vision of the land and of culture to which history

(geological and human) was essential, a so-called
continental vision. An ethic of land stewardship,
this vision emphasized the importance of families
and communities rooting themselves in a particular place over generations in deliberate, disillusioned cognizance of the physical limitations
of land and climate. Such were the lessons, selftaught through painstaking research as he wrote
his unromantic histories and biographies on
quintessentially Western subjects, that enriched
Stegners fiction in the final and most fruitful
phase of his literary career.
Works from this last phase include the first Joe
Allston novel All the Little Live Things (1967); the
Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose (1971),
widely considered Stegners masterpiece; the
National Book Award-winning The Spectator Bird
(1976), reprising Stegners sardonic late-life alter
ego Joe Allston; Recapitulation (1979), which
offered a final installment in the life of Bruce
Mason, Stegners earliest fictional alter ego;
and his last novel, Crossing to Safety (1987), a
masterful work of quiet poignancy. During
this phase, Stegner also produced several fine
collections of essays on literature, the environment, and the West in the context of American
culture and history, including Where the
Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992),
which perfectly complement his novels, making
more transparent the synergy and unity of his
diverse literary projects.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF)
847
Stegner, W. (1940). On a Darkling Plain. New York:

Harcourt Brace.
Stegner, W. (1941). Fire and Ice. New York: Duell, Sloan
and Pearce.
Stegner, W. (1943). The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
Stegner, W. (1947). Second Growth. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Stegner, W. (1954). Beyond the Hundredth Meridian:
John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the
West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Stegner, W. (1961). A Shooting Star. New York:
Viking.
Stegner, W. (1962). Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and
a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. New York:
Viking.
Stegner, W. (1964). The Gathering of Zion: The Story of
the Mormon Trail. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Stegner, W. (1967). All the Little Live Things. New York:
Viking.
Stegner, W. (1969). Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel.
[originally pub. as The Preacher and the Slave, 1950]
Stegner, W. (1971). Angle of Repose. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Stegner, W. (1976). The Spectator Bird. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday.
Stegner, W. (1979). Recapitulation. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Stegner, W. (1987). Crossing to Safety. New York:
Random House.
Stegner, W. (1990). Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner.
Stegner, W. (1992). Where the Bluebird Sings to the
Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West.
Watkins, T. W. (2000). Books by Wallace Stegner: An
Annotated Bibliography. Montana State
University (June 25). At www.montana.edu/
stegner/Stegner/bib.html, accessed Jan. 19, 2010.

Benson, J. J. (1998). Wallace Stegner: A Study of the Short
Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Fradkin, P. L. (2008). Wallace Stegner and the American
West. New York: Knopf.
Hartman, S. Invading Walden, Part II: The
Thoreauvian Dilemmas of Wallace Stegners On
a Darkling Plain. Thoreau Society Bulletin, 252, 17.
Meine, C. (ed.) (1997). Wallace Stegner and the
Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History, and
Landscape. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Stegner, W. (1937). Remembering Laughter. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Stegner, W. (1938). The Potters House. Muscatine, IA:
Prairie.
Stein, Gertrude
OMRI MOSES
Gertrude Stein, once considered a minor writer

because of her extreme and rather forbidding
experimental impulses, is now often ranked
among the earliest and most important literary
modernists. Her fictional writing style is notable
for its use of repetition, non-standard grammar
and punctuation, narrative digressions and
848
STEIN, GERTRUDE
disjunctiveness, unsettling narrative tone and

authority, and other formal features meant to
challenge expectations about the novel as a form,
to explore the nature of existential time, and to
expand the repertoire of intellectual and emotional effects produced in readers. As a rule, she
focuses on humdrum events, including family
power struggles and amorous relationships in
a domestic context. She also explores how individuals coincide with or deviate from fixed social
and racial types. She took her cues from the
experimental visual arts most notably from
cubism as well as from realist and naturalist
writers such as Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, in turn influencing numerous younger
writers whom she befriended, such as Ernest
Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Thornton
Wilder. She has impacted and inspired feminist
critics and writers, avant garde poets, and artists
of the present moment, including members of the
LANGUAGE school. Her allusions
in her work to same-sex desires and her nearpublic lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas
have also been a source of interest to theorists of
sexuality.
Born on February 3, 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, she spent her early childhood first in
Vienna, then in Paris. Her successful German
Jewish immigrant family relocated to Oakland,
California when she was 6. In her mid-teens,
her parents died. Family investments provided
her with a small but adequate provision of income. In 1892, Stein departed for Baltimore, and
subsequently followed her brother Leo, to whom
she was close, to Harvard. There, she enrolled
in the Harvard Annex, later called Radcliffe.
She studied with several intellectual luminaries,
including the psychologist William James, whom
she credited with inspiring her lifelong experimental disposition. Later, after abandoning
pursuit of a medical degree at Johns Hopkins,
she moved to Paris with Leo. The two began
collecting avant garde art, in the process establishing a salon where successive generations of the
most important artists and writers circulated. A
famous conversationalist, she struck up an enduring friendship with Picasso while modeling for
him. Later Alice Toklas moved in with her, and
became her lifelong domestic companion, acting
as homemaker, secretary, and supporter. After
falling out with Leo in 1913, the two split their art
collection and never spoke again. During World

War I, Stein aided the war effort by driving
a supply truck for wounded French soldiers. In
the late 1920s, she began collaborative projects
with a number of artists, including A Book Concluding With As a Wife Has a Cow, A Love Story,
illustrated by Juan Gris; a volume of very free
translations of a young French poet, George
Hugnet; and one of several opera librettos for
Virgil Thompson. She achieved wider literary
celebrity in 1933 when she published the first of
two autobiographies, The Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas (written from the point of view of
her companion), filled with amusing anecdotes
about her life as an artist. Stein, always a great
self-promoter, parlayed this into a successful
American lecture tour in 19345. She returned
to France and spent World War II the years of
the German occupation in a small country home
sometimes billeted by German soldiers. As an
unacknowledged Jew, she was under the precarious protection of important friends in the
Vichy government. In 1944, after the end of
the occupation, she moved back to Paris. She
died of complications from stomach cancer on
July 27, 1946.
Steins difficult writing perceived by many
critics of her generation to be willful, capricious,
sloppy, mindlessly repetitive, artless, oblique, and
excessively demanding prevented her from
achieving more than skeptical notoriety from
many of her readers. She published her first novel,
Three Lives (1909), largely at her own expense.
Like other expatriate modernists, she relied on
avant garde subscription magazines with small
circulations to publish her early experimental
efforts, including the Transatlantic Review (edited by Ford Madox Ford), where The Making of
Americans (1995 [1925]) was first serialized; and
The New Criterion (edited by T. S. Eliot) and
Camera Work (edited by Alfred Stieglitz), which
published her experimental portraits. The literate public was often treated to short excerpts
from her writing in the newspapers, quoted
along with derisory commentary. Stein, for her
part, was amused at the mode of conveyance
and suggested that any work of art has a tendency to be irritating, annoying stimulating
before it is credited as a classic, and enters into a
settled-upon regime of literary classification. In
1931, Edmund Wilson famously complained of
STEIN, GERTRUDE
her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on

numbers. He went on to say that most of us
read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of
her presence in the background of contemporary literature and we picture her . . . eternally
and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the
vibrations of a psychological country like some
august human seismograph whose charts we
havent the training to read (Wilson 252). Her
influence on more mainstream modernists insured her historical place in the development of
modernism, but her fiction was slow to achieve
recognition in its own right. Her reputation
gained considerably from new methodologies
and a wave of feminist and poststructuralist
criticism emerging in the 1980s, which helped
make sense of characters that deviated from
sexual norms, and metafictional writing that
referred to its own self-undermining processes
of composition.
Stein, fond of destabilizing genre categories,
has relatively few instances of conventional
fiction, chiefly Q.E.D. and Furnhurst, her earliest
written and least significant novellas (not published in her lifetime). Of her remaining output,
Three Lives (1909) is a transitional work, bearing
obvious resemblance to Flauberts fictional Trois
contes (trans. Three Tales), of which she attempted
a translation. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
offers only degrees of difference between fiction
and non-fiction. Though Stein refers to The Making of Americans as a novel, it has an almost nonexistent narrative, and consists of a compendium
of sensibilities or types set out in a digressive,
experimental list structure. She applies confounding labels to her work, such as the landscape
play A Saint in Seven (1922), in which scenery
takes on some of the parts normally assigned to
people, and Lucy Church Amiably, a novel in the
guise of an engraving. She is interested in the way
language structures expectations and orders
experience. By abusing linguistic rules, and irreverently crisscrossing incompatible genres, she
aims to form new connections between aspects
of experience normally separated. She bursts
intellectual frameworks in order to draw out what
is strange in familiar perceptions and thoughts. In
the process, she upsets conceptual hierarchies:
849
genres and titles stand in oblique if not misleading

relation to the body of work; sentences take on the
structural role of paragraphs; adverbs providing
logical connection and subordination (e.g., however, but, nonetheless, etc.) are dropped or else
exploited without making good on their implied
grammatical antithesis. Some of her effects seem
calculated and intentional, while others the result
of accident or sloppiness. On the most general
level, she erodes the difference between rarified
aesthetic intention in art and ordinary mistakes
and solecisms.
Her earliest published volume, Three Lives,
presents three portraits, The Good Anna,
Melanctha, and The Gentle Lena, each
a self-contained story, but together comprising
a fabric-of-life novel in a form later adapted by
Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
and Ernest Hemingway in his In Our Time (1925).
The narrative arc, which traces each of the titular
characters lives, comes to an end as their vitality
flags and they die, closely resembling the plot
trajectory of Theodore Dreisers naturalist novel,
Sister Carrie. Stein also credits Paul Cezannes
post-impressionist compositional style which
attempts to give each element in the representational field equal weight as an important influence. His stylistic lessons pushed her to elevate
minor and repetitive events that seem redundant
from the point of view of the narrative, but which
fill in important transitions between events.
Steins simplified diction explores the resonating
significance of commonly deployed words in
a shifting context. She begins a practice of overusing and misusing the present-progressive tense
(e.g., is going, am understanding) in order to
accentuate the process unfolding in events over
their punctual arrival. In this way, she expresses
what in her essay, Composition as Explanation,
she subsequently labels the continuous present.
Her reiterating phrases and descriptions underscore how much language depends for its meaning on its evolving context.
The Good Anna and The Gentle Lena are
about house servants performing their ordinary
domestic duties, and deals with their simple
demonstrations of fidelity. Like Flaubert, she
focuses on their repeated conditions of life, quotidian relationships, and unselfconscious attitudes, but does without some of the French
novelists crushing irony. Instead of their deluded
850
STEIN, GERTRUDE
impotence, Stein emphasizes their assertions

of will as a basic feature of their character. The
last to be written, and most experimental story,
Melanctha about a mulatta characters
evolving and fading relationship to various lovers
and friends is one of the earliest sustained
fictional efforts to explore African American
experience in its relative independence from
white experience. The story is based on an earlier
autobiographical novella, Q.E.D., which deals
with a love triangle between three white women.
By representing the complicated same-sex entanglements of Q.E.D. in a mostly heterosexual
ethnic context, Melanctha relies on what critics
have called racial masquerade to look at life at
the margins of bourgeois morality. The story also
ventriloquizes African American dialect patterns
with the intention of eroding the privilege
of standardized language. The experiments are
a jumping-off point for investigating fundamentally non-mimetic speech acts. Though significant
African American writers such as Nella Larsen and
Richard Wright admired her story, recent critics
have sometimes argued that her fictional schemas
veer upon racist stereotypes. Even censorious
critics, however, acknowledge that the tone and
authority of Steins narrator are difficult to assess.
The elaborate masking techniques, and the shifting registers in which pronouncements and
observations are made, sometimes appear simple
and nave, and other times exhibit surprising
authorial complexity.
Stein began The Making of Americans in 1903,
though she put the project on hold until after
she finished Three Lives in 1906, at which point
its formal structure changed substantially. Too
eccentric and anomalous to appeal to conventional publishers, and too long (at over 900 pages), the
manuscript was not published until 1925, though
it was completed in 1911. The book begins as a
cross-generational saga, tracing two clans, the
Herslands and the Dehnings, as they confederate
by bonds of marriage and pursue their intertwined fortunes. Its subject is the evolving formation of individual and national character as
ordinary but energetic immigrants establish and
integrate themselves in America. It is also about
the struggle of successive generations as they
resist the authority of their fathers. It retains
Steins early narrative vignettes, but the plot
quickly disappears leaving the trace of its own
evolving compositional structure as an element

of its content. Stein modeled some of her techniques on the dadaist and surrealist practice of
automatic writing. But in her case, the effort to
avoid self-censorship is a means of displaying
habits of thought rather than a way to expose
unconscious messages. As something of a constructivist, Stein thought that new ways of producing texts create new kinds of experiences, and
therefore new meanings for them.
The Making of Americans is structured as
a genealogy of psychological types, each based
on Steins local observations while she was writing. The book ends up being as much a grammatical experiment as a fictional one, considering
how specific instances of people modify the
categories mobilized to define them. It contains
a series of abstract, deeply repetitive statements
about character. Each time new fictive personages
are introduced, the narrative circles back to consider a surplus of details that comprise the
whole of their character. This process of
beginning again creates a perpetually wandering or stalling structure that prevents the central
narrative trajectory from moving forward. Eventually, Stein begins reflecting on the inevitable
failure of any effort to exhibit character in its
wholeness. The novel parades an exasperating
refusal to convey any new information or to tell
a conventional story.
After The Making of Americans, Steins experimental writing slowly moved away from fiction
that made reference to distinct characters. She
began A Long Gay Book (191113 [1933]) as
a sequel to The Making of Americans, this time
dealing with personality types as they are defined
by pairings and sodalities. However the last third
of the volume switches into a series of abstract,
fragmentary, highly associative language patterns
that elude direct reference, and resemble Steins
subsequent effort in Tender Buttons (itself
modeled on cubist collages). A Novel of Thank
You (19256), written in murky, challenging
prose style, substitutes the story content of a
work of fiction with a meditation on the difference between a novel and a story. As Stein
said in a letter, it describes itself. It has no
narrative teleology.
Through the 1920s, Stein produced a series of
critical pieces that set out to explain her compositional methods and style while still making use
STEIN, GERTRUDE
of her characteristic indirectness. She produced

another anti-realist novel, Lucy Church Amiably
(1927), full of images of pastoral landscape. The
title character is named after a church in Lucey, a
region of Belley. The book may be said to treat
language as landscape with fluid structures (like
river water), and a profusion of highly variable
but harmonious details. Repetitive, modulating
phrases flow into each other, producing different
syntactical combinations. It attempts to reflect on
the meaning of place without simply naming the
elements of the scenic backdrop.
After writing the first of several successful
memoirs in the 1930s, which Stein ranked among
her minor works despite their popularity, she
returned to novelistic structure in The World Is
Round (1939), a childrens book. The narrative,
about two children, Rose and Willie, who contemplate their names, and their relation to their
identities and sense of themselves, allowed her to
explore many of her perennial themes through the
prism of childhood experience. The whimsical
story loosens the formal rigidity of narrative structure in order to capture less scripted connections
between events, and to restore experiences of
the world before adult logical linkages inhibit
the playfulness of language. The narrative fabula (the story events) is often determined by the
linguistic surface itself, the singsong rhyming
of words, the puns, and linguistic jokes. The
episodic structure appears in certain respects
disjointed and paratactical, if not outright
capricious, because it does not internalize
rules about narrative proportionality and plausibility. The children undergo enigmatic experiences, explore the world, and overcome
their fears, eventually marrying when they discover that they are not cousins.
Ida (1941), Steins much labored-over next
novel, is, like her childrens book, composed of
a series of incidents that do not advance a consistent plot line. Funny things happen to Ida
before any logical connection is established to
them. She lives in the suspended present,
constantly resting, failing to react, wandering,
marrying, escaping relationships, and observing
insignificant details of the world that pointedly do
not link up with her life. Ida symbolizes a wholly
disengaged individual, achieving improbable
freedom by resisting and evading the worlds
construction of her identity. She corresponds
851
with an imaginary twin, Winnie, from whom she

subsequently retreats. Winnie may symbolically
represent Idas public side. Orphaned early in the
novel, Ida betrays Steins fantasies of autogenesis.
During this period, Stein was obsessed with
celebrity culture, and her celebrity in particular,
worrying that publicity might be able to overshadow or rewrite identity. Idas life is thought to
allude to news stories about the then Duchess of
Windsor. Donald Sutherland suggests that Ida is
a publicity saint, a composite of Helen of Troy,
Dulcinea, and Garbo, among others, who by sheer
force of existence in being there holds the public
attention and becomes a legend (Sutherland 154).
Steins last novels deal with life during wartime. Mrs. Reynolds (19402), one of Steins
longest novels, examines a couple who pass an
existence of quiet domesticity in occupied
France. It includes characters modeled on the
lives of Hitler and Stalin, and dwells on
the ordinary underpinnings of evil. It considers
the role of prophecy and superstition as cultural
practices whose function is to help people prepare for and assimilate unprecedented and
largely alarming forms of experience. Brewsie
and Willie (1946) consists almost entirely of
reported conversations of young US soldiers
abroad. It has virtually no plot, and aims to
present the experience of life as it is registered
through the prism of talk. The soldiers discuss
their attitudes about race and their sense of
gender relations, reflecting on changes effected
by wartime experience. Stein presents their colloquial speech patterns as they engage in bluster
and casual bantering, though the conversations
also partake of the mannered grammatical prose
style that marks many of Steins experimental
writings. The work reflects her affection for
American soldiers.
Steins later fiction has not received the same
notice from critics as her early novelistic writing,
for which she remains most famous. Her later
experimental style remains difficult to assimilate
or to appraise according to traditional literary
claims of value such as stylistic precision or
storytelling capacity. Instead, critics have examined the performative dimensions of her texts,
especially the effects created through indeterminate language. Steins writing has enjoyed an
efflorescence of attention in recent years. Scholars
have discussed her relationship to philosophical,
852
STEINBECK, JOHN
scientific, and political discourses of her time,

paying special attention to her treatment of race,
gender, sexuality, and class.
The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Dreiser, Theodore
(AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Expatriate
Fiction (AF); Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Gender
and the Novel (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF);
James, Henry (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);

Curnutt, K. (ed.) (2000). The Critical Response to
Gertrude Stein. New York: Greenwood.
Haas, R. (ed.) (1971). A Primer for the Gradual
Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Los Angeles: Black
Sparrow.
Stein, G. (1969). Lucy Church Amiably [1927, pub.
1930]. New York: Something Else.
Stein, G. (1980). Mrs. Reynolds [1940-2, pub. 1952]. Los
Angeles: Sun and Moon.
Stein, G. (1993). A Stein Reader (ed. U. E Dydo).
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Stein, G. (1994). A Novel of Thank You [1925-6,
pub. 1958]. Chicago: Dalkey Archive.
Stein, G. (1995). The Making of Americans: Being a
History of a Familys Progress [1925]. Chicago:
Dalkey Archive.
Stein, G. (1998a). Writings: 19031932. New York:
Library of America.
Stein, G. (1998b). Writings: 19321946. New York:
Library of America.
Sutherland, D. (1971). Gertrude Stein: A Biography
of Her Work. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Wilson, E. (1931). Axels Castle. New York: Scribners.
Steinbeck, John
MIMI REISEL GLADSTEIN
John Steinbeck is a major American novelist of

the mid twentieth century whose sympathetic portrayals of the plight of migrant workers are enduring classics. Translated worldwide, Steinbecks
works garnered serious national and international
recognition during his lifetime: he received a
Drama Critics Circle Award for the stage version
of his novel Of Mice and Men (1937); the Pulitzer
Prize for his epic Dust Bowl exodus, The Grapes of
Wrath (1939); and the United States Medal of

Freedom in 1964. Steinbecks international status
was acknowledged in 1962 when he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for literature. In a writing career
characterized by diversity of genre and tone,
Steinbeck moved easily from the sweep of the epic
and historical novel to light comic satire; playnovelettes, screenplays, and serious studies of
marine biology attest to his willingness to experiment with new techniques and subject matters.
Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in
1902, the only son among the four children of
Olive and John Steinbeck. The original family
name was Grossteinbeck. His mother, Olive
Hamilton, a one-time schoolteacher, fostered his
early love for literature. A gift of Malorys Le
Morte DArthur created a lifelong influence. Steinbeck was working on a contemporary English
edition of this text when he died at age 67 in his
New York home. Salinas was a small rural community in a rich farm valley where local boys like
John sometimes worked in the fields during the
summers. Through such experiences, Steinbeck
became familiar with the circumstances of some
of the migrant workers he was to portray in his
later works. He also picked up a rudimentary
Spanish from them and his friend Max Wagner,
whose family had lived in Mexico. Mexico became
a favorite destination and the setting and source
for some of his significant film, fiction, and nonfiction works.
After his graduation from high school in
Salinas, Steinbeck became a desultory student
at Stanford for five years, leaving without a
degree, but trained in two fields of his greatest
predilections: writing and marine biology. After
college he went briefly to New York City, where
he worked as a laborer on the construction of
Madison Square Garden and as a reporter. He
returned to California, where he married Carol
Henning. She provided both financial and editorial support in the early days of his career. His
first published novel was Cup of Gold (1929),
based loosely on Harry Morgan, the pirate. Neither it nor his next novel, To A God Unknown
(1933), garnered much critical attention. However, the 1935 publication of Tortilla Flat
brought him a national reading audience and
the attention of Hollywood, which adapted the
novel in a film starring Spencer Tracy, John
Garfield, and Hedy Lamar.
STEINBECK, JOHN
In the early days of their marriage, John and

Carol Steinbeck lived rent-free in a small home in
Pacific Grove owned by the elder Steinbecks.
During this time, Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts, who
was to play a significant role in his life and writing.
The men became close friends, business partners,
and writing collaborators; in fact, Steinbeck used
Ricketts as a model for one of his most famous
fictional characters, Doc, in Cannery Row (1945)
and Sweet Thursday (1954).
Critics generally agree that John Steinbecks
best and most effective works are set in the land
he knew so well, the Salinas Valley and its close
environs. The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a group
of loosely connected short stories set in a small
community, owes much to the form and themes
of Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio. Like
Anderson, Steinbecks collection exploits the
ironic distance between the idyllic setting and
the inner anguish of its inhabitants. The
Pastures is a fictionalized Corral de Tierra,
a small, enclosed valley off the road between
Salinas and Monterey. To the stranger it looks
Edenic, but the stories of its inhabitants reveal
lives of quiet and not-so-quiet desperation. The
introductory chapter reflects Steinbeck at his
revisionist best, recounting a non-Eurocentric
presentation of the settling of California. Long
before various civil rights groups called for it,
Steinbeck offered non-chauvinistic interpretations of the Wests settlement, sympathetic portrayals of minority and dispossessed groups, and
keen analyses of the psychology of prejudice.
During the 1930s, Steinbeck established himself as a key chronicler of the plight of the agricultural migrant worker. Some of the characters
and events of In Dubious Battle (1936) are modeled on actual communist organizers and strikes
of the period. The main characters are Mac, a
seasoned labor organizer, and Jim, a fervent
young disciple. Mac teaches Jim that they must
use any and all opportunities to further their
cause. Doc Burton, who volunteers his medical
expertise to help the strikers, is one of the first of
many characters modeled on Ed Ricketts.
The next year Steinbeck published Of Mice and
Men, the story of two migrant workers, one
a retarded but powerful man-child. Since Steinbeck had written it as a play-novelette, very little
adjustment was needed from novel page to play
script. Not only was the work widely praised (even
853
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt called it beautifully

written), but it was also a Book of the Month
Club selection. The play, starring Broderick
Crawford, Wallace Ford, and Clare Luce, was an
immediate success and has remained a staple of
summer stock and little theater for over 70 years.
Its timeless and universal quality has inspired
multiracial casts; in one revival, James Earl Jones
played Lennie. The story has also generated numerous adaptations, from operas, ballets, and
cartoons to two Hollywood adaptations and one
television version. Steinbeck claimed his play was
about the hopes and dreams of everyone, but his
choice to set it in a bunkhouse of migrant workers
and his characters longing for a place of their own
speak to the plight of the itinerant agricultural
workers of that time and all times.
The Grapes of Wrath, considered to be
Steinbecks masterpiece, developed from an
assignment by a San Francisco newspaper to
write a series about the Dust Bowl immigrants
that were flooding California in the 1930s. The
series was then published as a pamphlet, Their
Blood Is Strong, to raise funds and awareness
about the migrants terrible treatment and labor
conditions. On some of his interview forays,
Steinbeck was accompanied by Horace Bristol,
who took photographs later published in Life
magazine. In his novel, Steinbeck created a
fictional family, the Joads, to embody the
Oklahomans. This novel familiarized the world
with the derogatory term Okie. Steinbecks
novel was denounced in the Oklahoma legislature
as well as by California agricultural magnates and
associations.
The novels plot follows the Joad family from
their repossessed home in Oklahoma across the
New Mexico and Arizona deserts on Route 66 and
into California, where they search for work,
encamping at a number of sites reserved for
migrants. The bright spot is a government camp
where the people are self-governing, but when
work in the area dries up, the family must move
on. One by one, members of the family leave or
die, culminating in a flood that leaves them
destitute and homeless. They take refuge in
a barn, where Rose of Sharon offers her breast
to a starving man. This final scene, which Steinbeck likened to the Earth Mother feeding her
children, shocked many and caused the book to
be banned from a number of libraries. Steinbeck
854
STEINBECK, JOHN
fought his publishers in order to be allowed to use

realistic language and situations.
Grapes realist presentation of the Joads plight
is buttressed by several layers of myth, both
secular and biblical, as well as penetrating
psychological and sociological observations.
Steinbeck once remarked about The Grapes of
Wrath, There are five layers in this book, a
reader will find as many as he can and he wont
find more than he has in himself (1975, 1789).
Steinbecks archetypal structure of the immigrant experience creates a resonance between
his topical depiction of the actual Dust Bowl
migration and subsequent migrant situations,
such as the Moroccans in Spain, the Turks in
Germany, or the Koreans in Manchuria, thus
ensuring the novels universal appeal and global
influence.
Following the public success of The Grapes of
Wrath, Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts
outfitted a boat and made a scientific collecting
trip to the Sea of Cortez, the waterway between
Mexico and Baja California. The resultant book,
Sea of Cortez (1941) records the flora, fauna, and
sea life collected on the expedition and has
become a classic in the field of marine biology.
Steinbecks narrative, called the log in the
original book, was later published on its own as
Log From the Sea of Cortez (1951) after the death
of Ed Ricketts and contains an additional laudatory essay titled, About Ed Ricketts. The Log is
also noteworthy because, in it, Steinbeck articulates ecological and environmental concerns that
were far ahead of his time. He was to emphasize
these qualms in a number of works, both fiction
and non-fiction. America and Americans (1966)
offers one of his strongest statements about the
negative impact of Americas behavior on the
environment.
When the United States entered World War II,
Steinbeck was quick to offer his service to his
country. However, his proletarian novels of the
1930s had branded him as a communist or
communist sympathizer in certain parts of the
government, and the FBI had a dossier on him
that stymied his attempts to join the armed
services or cover the war as a reporter. His second
attempt at the play-novelette form, The Moon Is
Down was not as successful as its predecessor.
Although it was condemned by American critics,
after the war the king of Norway presented
Steinbeck with the Haakon Cross for his contributions to the war effort, in particular how
this novel inspired the resistance. Although
couched in generic language, the novel is about
the defiance of a conquered people, much like
the Norwegians, against an oppressor, much
like the Nazis.
Cannery Row (1945) is a nostalgic return to
the carefree life before fame and the war. An
undercurrent of death and loss belies its superficially comic tone. Initially dismissed for its
apparent lack of seriousness, today it is newly
admired for its ecological perspective. The Red
Pony (1945), initially published as four separate
short stories, was re-issued as a book and has
enjoyed success as a staple for high school
reading. The serious themes of the death of
old men and horses enrich the surface story of a
boy and his pony.
After his divorce from Carol Henning, Steinbeck married Gwyn Conger, who was the mother
of his two sons, Thom and John IV. That marriage also ended in divorce, and in 1950 Steinbeck married Elaine Scott. East of Eden (1952)
chronicles the multigenerational stories of two
families: the Hamiltons, his mothers family; the
Trasks, a fictional family. The Cain and Abel
myth underlies its theme of the human choice to
conquer evil. Elia Kazan directed the awardwinning film version that made James Dean a
star. East of Eden was also made into a television
mini-series.
Steinbeck continued to publish both fiction
and non-fiction until the end of his life. Steinbecks
sense of a deteriorating national moral compass
and sham patriotism infuses his last work of
fiction, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), the
story of Ethan Hawley, descendant of an old
New England family. The novel was cited by the
Nobel Committee as evidence of a return to
the vitality of his best works. They stated their
reasons for awarding the prize thusly: For his
realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen
social perception.
Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Naturalist
Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular Front
Fiction (AF)
STEPHENSON, NEAL

Beegel S., Shillinglaw, S., & Tiffney, W. N., Jr. (eds.)
(1997). Steinbeck and the Environment. Tuscaloosa:
Benson, J. J. (1984). The True Adventures of John
Steinbeck. Writer. New York: Viking.
Parini, J. (1994). John Steinbeck: A Biography. London:
Heinemann.
Steinbeck, J. (1932). Pastures of Heaven. New York:
Covici-Friede.
Steinbeck, J. (1935). Tortilla Flat. New York: CoviciFriede.
Steinbeck, J. (1936). In Dubious Battle. New York:
Covici-Friede.
Steinbeck, J. (1937). Of Mice and Men. New York:
Viking.
Viking.
Steinbeck, J. (1942). The Moon Is Down. New York:
Viking.
Steinbeck, J. (1945). Cannery Row. New York: Viking.
Steinbeck, J. (1952). East of Eden. New York: Viking.
Steinbeck, J. (1961). The Winter of Our Discontent. New
York: Viking.
Steinbeck, J. (1975). Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (ed.
E. Steinbeck & R. Wallstein). New York: Viking.
Stephenson, Neal
JONATHAN P. LEWIS
Neal Town Stephensons first two novels, The Big

U (1984) and Zodiac (1988), would likely have
been forgotten had it not been for the explosive
popularity of his breakthrough novel Snow
Crash (1992). Combining cyberpunks fusion of
Japanese anime and Samurai cultures and American noir with the The Metaverse, an immersive
virtual reality that inspired Second Life and
other massively multiplayer online role-playing
games (MMORPGs), Snow Crash established
Stephensons voice in contemporary American
literature. The Diamond Age (1995) and Cryptonomicon (1999a) proved that Stephenson sees
clearly that the development of new technologies
is the driving force in human cultures, but that
such innovations can be enslaving and terrorizing
while claiming to liberate and entertain.
Stephenson has been favorably compared to
William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and other firstgeneration cyberpunk writers, but since Snow
855
Crash, Stephenson has extended the domain of

science fiction and erased any remaining sense of
science and speculative fiction as non-literary
genres. His style is often more humorous and
lighter than that of Gibson, Margaret Atwood, or
Ursula K. Le Guin, but not as purely comic as that
of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. or as inclusive of puns,
slapstick, and grotesque humor as that of Thomas
Pynchon, authors to whom Stephenson is also
compared.
Born at Fort Meade, Maryland on Halloween
1959, Stephenson grew up the eldest of three
children of academic scientists. Both of his grandfathers were college professors, Edward Beattie
Stephenson in physics and Wilbur Gordon
Jewsbury in chemistry, respectively, and
Stephensons father, David Town Stephenson, is
emeritus professor of electrical and computer
engineering at Iowa State. Stephensons mother,
Janet Elaine Jewsbury Stephenson, was a researcher in the Biology department at Iowa State for
more than 20 years. Stephenson graduated from
Boston University with a degree in geography in
1981. After living in Iowa, New Jersey, and
Virginia, Stephenson moved to Seattle in 1991,
where he lives with his wife, the physician Ellen
Lackermann, and family.
As a writer, Stephenson creates gripping
scenarios involving the creators and users of
bleeding-edge technologies. As articulated in
Cryptonomicon, the conflicts in Stephensons
works focus on the pattern of behaviors the
ancient Athenians identified with Ares, the god
of war reckless, bloodthirsty, arrogant, tyrannical, and despotic and with their patron Athena,
the goddess of technology, intelligence, and defensive and tactical war. Stephensons modern
Athenians include Hiro in Snow Crash, Nell in
The Diamond Age, and the various Waterhouses,
Shaftoes, Hacklhebers, and Gotos in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle (20034). The
Aresians include L. Bob Rife in Snow Crash,
bent on world domination, and the duc
dArcachon, a slaver in The Baroque Cycle. In
Anathem (2008), the Athenian pattern is present
in such avout as Erasmus, Ala, Jaad, and Orolo,
but the margins of the Titanomachia are less
clear-cut than in his earlier works, perhaps signifying that the Manichaean binaries that exist in
Snow Crash are both less realistic and less fruitful
for narrative.
856
STONE, ROBERT
Stephensons works display his remarkable

ability to incorporate a variety of disciplines,
interests, philosophies, vocabularies, and novelistic discourses as he moves from Earths past,
present, and future to a world with its own long
history of cycles of invention and destruction
similar to Earths. One of Americas finest writers,
Stephensons career promises continued, relentless challenges to notions of genre fiction while
aggressively setting real-world intellectual and
technological agendas.
He won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1996
for The Diamond Age, which was also nominated
for the Nebula Award, and was nominated for
the Hugo again in 1999 for Cryptonomicon. He
has also received the Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, and
Prometheus Awards.
Stephenson, N. (1999b). In the Beginning ... Was the

Command Line. New York: Avon.
Stephenson, N. (2000a). The Diamond Age: or, A
Young Ladys Illustrated Primer [1995]. New York:
Bantam.
Stephenson, N. (2000b). Snow Crash [1992]. New York:
Bantam Spectra.
Stephenson, N. (2001). The Big U [1984]. New York:
Perennial.
Stephenson, N. (2003). The Baroque Cycle, vol. 1:
Quicksilver. New York: Morrow.
Stephenson, N. (2004a). The Baroque Cycle, vol. 2: The
Confusion. New York: Morrow.
Stephenson, N. (2004b). The Baroque Cycle, vol. 3: The
System of the World. New York: Morrow.
Stephenson, N. (2007). Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller [1988].
New York: Grove.
Stephenson, N. (2008). Anathem. New York:
Morrow.
SEE ALSO: Gibson, William (AF);

Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Speculative
Fiction (AF)
Stone, Robert

Baruth, P. E. (1997). The Excesses of Cyberpunk: Why
No One Mentions Race in Cyberspace. In E. A.
Leonard (ed.), Into Darkness Peering: Race and
Color in the Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
pp. 10518.
Browning, B. (1996). When Snow Isnt White. Women
& Performance, 17(1), 3553.
Clayton, J. (2002). Convergence of the Two Cultures: A
Geeks Guide to Contemporary Literature. American
Hayles, N. K. (2004). Performative Code and Figurative
Language: Neal Stephensons Cryptonomicon. In
P. Freese & C. B. Harris (eds.), The Holodeck in
the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary
American Fiction. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive,
pp. 327.
Johnston, J. (2001). Distributed Information:
Complexity Theory in the Novels of Neal Stephenson
and Linda Nagata. Science Fiction Studies, 28(2),
22345.
Porush, D. (1996). Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern
Metaphysics and Stephensons Snow Crash. In R.
Markley (ed.), Virtual Realities and Their Discontents.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
pp. 107141.
Stephenson, N. (1999a). Cryptonomicon. New York:
Avon.
MARK LEVENE
Despite a small body of work compared to that

of Philip Roth and John Updike, Robert Stone
remains one of the preeminent writers of post1960s American fiction. Regarded as a supreme
prose stylist and celebrated for his courage in
anatomizing loss and longing, violence and war,
he is rare in submerging his personal ego and
history in the demands of character and narrative
and in the service of inhabiting the readers
consciousness for often lacerating shocks of moral
recognition. Rarely do reviews avoid invocations
of Melville and Conrad, although his preference
for big themes and big books does not always
travel well, particularly in England, the homeland
of Graham Greene, who wrote big themes in
smaller books. There Stone is perceived to be
addicted to machismo and unsound religious
hankerings, an epistemological imperialist; for
the less intimidated of Stones subjects and the
stories in which they unfold are indicative of an
incomparable intellectual and narrative strength
and independence.
Robert Anthony Stone was born in Brooklyn,
New York on August 21, 1937, and it was not long
before he became an embodiment of William
Faulkners perception that the human spirit will
not simply endure, it will prevail. Periodically
separated from his mother when she was institu-
STONE, ROBERT
tionalized for schizophrenia, he was permanently

separated from his father, darkly perfect in his
absolute absence. Stone intermittently inhabited
a New York orphanage he experienced as his first
territory of combat; flirted with urban gangdom;
preferred telling himself stories; spent three years
in the Navy and one at New York University;
received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, where
he began his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967);
and ran with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
He went to Vietnam as a journalist, and in Dog
Soldiers (1974) for which he received the
National Book Award created one of the quintessential novels of a dope-and dream-driven age.
Since then he has published five other predominantly realistic novels; a collection of stories,
Bear and His Daughter (1997); a memoir, Prime
Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007); and a
number of extraordinary political and literary
essays. He has taught at Amherst and Johns
Hopkins, among other distinguished schools,
and most recently was writer-in-residence at
Yale University.
A Hall of Mirrors, set in New Orleans on the
verge of a right-wing-induced riot, has in Rheinhardt the first and least endearing of Stones
sociopathic figures whose chief talent is in aggravating the various kinds of loss he experiences
and evokes in others. The novel also introduces
the core absence in Stones fiction, the Gnostic
separation from the divine, and a complex,
nuanced form of dark comedy. Stylistically more
assured and compelling, Dog Soldiers is even
bleaker in its conjunction of individual and social
turmoil and sealed the identification of Stone with
the portrayal of drugs as desire and epistemological catalyst. A Flag for Sunrise (1981) remains his
masterwork, locating a world far from God,
a few hours from Miami in an invented Central
American country (analogous to Costaguana in
Conrads Nostromo) where notions of history,
revolution, and religion play out in his most fully
realized sequences of terrifying and strangely
funny predation. In Sister Justin, one of the rich,
subtle women who dominate Stones fiction, he
invests beauty and terror and makes the horror
that shadows her inevitable, even grotesquely
natural.
In the unfairly beleaguered and underappreciated Children of Light (1986), Stone gravitates
to an unusual spareness shaped by dialogue and
857
at the same time a metaphoric narrative rooted in

literary analogues. The allusions, most of them to
As You Like It and King Lear, present readers not
with problems of identification, but with integration, how one reads his translation of the heath
scene and the different shadings (Rosalind, Lear,
and Edna in Kate Chopins The Awakening) in Lu
Anne, a film actor enthralled by her own lovely
hallucinatory visions. Outerbridge Reach (1992) is
another large book, but different too in that
Stones cosmic edginess gives way to the compulsions of both loyalty and language. Originating in
the 1968 Sunday Times solo transglobal yacht
race, the novel details the deepening madness of
Owen Browne, based on Donald Crowhurst.
Honorable in its research and the majesty of its
prose, it encountered a concerted and disgraceful public assault and controversy. Never
known for failure of nerve, Stone then, out of
considerable turmoil, wrote Damascus Gate
(1998), which is steeped in his unique religious
learning, the complexities of Jerusalem, and the
messianism it fosters. Equally demanding in its
intellectual and psychological range, Bay of
Souls (2002) is a comparatively brief but almost
overwhelmingly intense narrative that concludes in a surrealism similar to that in his
first novel. Bear and His Daughter is Stones one
collection of stories. Uneasy about the form in
general, he has in Helping and Miserere
created extraordinary examples of its density
and richness.
His works have received numerous awards
the American Academy and Institute of Arts
and Letters Award (1982) for A Flag for Sunrise
(also a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize), the
John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (1982),
and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1983).
SEE ALSO: Conrad, Joseph (BIF); Greene,
Graham (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
Fredrickson, R. S. (1996). Robert Stones Decadent
Leftists. Papers on Language and Literature, 32(3),
31534.
Levene, M. (1992). Introduction. In K. Lopez & B.
Chaney (eds.), Robert Stone: A Bibliography, 19601992. Hadley, MA: Numinous, pp. 1319.
858
STYRON, WILLIAM
Ruas, C. (1984). Robert Stone. Conversations With

American Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.
26594.
Smith, P. (2003). A Stone Unturned. Nation, pp. 304
(Apr. 14).
Solotaroff, R. (1994). Robert Stone. New York: Twayne.
Stephenson, G. (2002). Understanding Robert Stone.
Stone, R. (1967). A Hall of Mirrors. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Stone, R. (1974). Dog Soldiers. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Stone, R. (1981). A Flag for Sunrise. New York: Knopf.
Stone, R. (1986). Children of Light. New York: Knopf.
Stone, R. (1989). Outerbridge Reach. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Stone, R. (1998). Damascus Gate. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Stone, R. (2003). Bay of Souls. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Stone, R. (2007). Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.
New York: Ecco.
Woods, W.C. (2006). Robert Stone [Interview, 1985].
In The Paris Review Interviews, I. New York: Picador,
pp. 30335.
Styron, William
GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKES
William Styrons literary significance rests on the

enduring impact of ambitious, risk-laden novels.
His work explores difficult subject matter with
an elegant complexity achieved through years of
composition. Entwined with this is his experience
with clinical depression, about which he writes
with characteristic eloquence. His depressive
tendency was perhaps partly circumstantial. Born
William Clark Styron, Jr. in Newport News,
Virginia in 1925, he was 13 when his mother died
of cancer. But it may also have been a genetic
inheritance from his father, an engineer in
shipbuilding. Lost mother-figures and supportive
father-figures feature prominently in a body of
fiction that is also of epic historical scope.
Drawn to writing while at Davidson College,
Styron attended Duke University in 1943 and
studied under William Blackburn. In 1944 he
trained as a marine on Parris Island, where he
spent time on a VD ward with trench mouth,
misdiagnosed as syphilis an experience he would
later use for the play In the Clap Shack (1973). But
for the dropping of the atomic bomb, Styron
would probably have been involved in the invasion of Japan. He returned to Duke in 1946,
worked briefly at McGraw-Hill in New York, and
enrolled in a writing class run by Hiram Haydn.
Fired from McGraw-Hill, he began a novel entitled Inheritance of Night that would become Lie
Down in Darkness (1951).
Published when Styron was 25, Lie Down in
Darkness tells the tragedy of the Loftis family. The
novel opens with a train ride from New York to
Port Warwick, a fictionalized Newport News,
where Milton Loftis meets the coffin of teenage
daughter Peyton after her suicide. It unfolds as
a series of family scenes from her childhood
onward and ends with the stream-of-consciousness of her final days. While Lie Down in Darkness
is semiautobiographical and mildly derivative,
Styrons influences ensure that, stylistically and
structurally, the novel belies its authors youth.
Built very much in the shadow of twentiethcentury Southern literature, as well as modernism, its opening train ride echoes the start of
Robert Penn Warrens All The Kings Men
(1946). Several characters resemble members of
William Faulkners Compson family from The
Sound and the Fury (1929), even while Peytons
monologue also draws on Faulkners inspiration
for Quentins: James Joyces Ulysses (1922). Such
ambitiousness set the bar for Styrons subsequent
career.
Hiram Haydn managed to have Styrons recall
for the Korean War postponed so that he could
complete the novel. His subsequent return to the
military was short-lived but shaped The Long
March (1956), a novella first serialized as Long
March in Discovery in 1952. The Long March is
a mental tussle between regular officer Colonel
Templeton and Captain Al Mannix, as seen by
Mannixs co-reservist, Captain Culver. In the
wake of the deaths of eight marines in a mortar
accident, Templeton orders a forced march.
Mannix determines to obey the order to the letter
as an act of perverse defiance akin to an existential
rebellion. Culver sees the rebellion as hopeless in
the face of Templetons indifference, but admires
Mannixs heroic defiance.
Styron wrote The Long March while in Europe
as winner of the Prix de Rome (1952). During this
time he also helped found the Paris Review and
STYRON, WILLIAM
met Rose Burgunder. They settled in Connecticut

in 1954, and lived there and on Marthas Vineyard
until his death in 2006. Styrons next novel, Set
This House on Fire (1960), makes use of his time in
Europe. In Part 1, Southern lawyer Peter Leverett,
who is involved in the Marshall Plan for postwar
European reconstruction, tells of visiting wealthy
old school friend Mason Flagg in Italy. On the first
night, he witnesses a struggle between Mason and
Cass Kinsolving, an alcoholic artist with a wife
and children to support. The next morning he
learns of the murder of Mason and of a peasant
girl, Francesca. In Part 2, Casss first-person narrative takes over. Cass reveals the truth about
Mason, Francesca, and his own involvement in
events. Peter then wraps up the narrative.
Modernist influences remain evident. Peter is
reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgeralds Nick Carraway
in The Great Gatsby (1925), while Faulkners
shadow again looms over the telling of the
same story from different perspectives. But the
most pertinent aspect of this experimental novel
is the dual narration whereby the first-person
narrator effectively allows a third-person character to take over. This exploration of viewpoint
options would help Styron shape the narrative
of his most celebrated novel, Sophies Choice
(1979).
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) is the
bridge between these works. Winner of the 1968
Pulitzer Prize, it presents a first-person rendition
of this historical figure describing the slave
insurrection he led in Virginia in 1831. Calling
his work, in the authors note, less an historical
novel in conventional terms than a meditation
on history, Styron drew on available information, including Turners confession as recorded by
a contemporary lawyer, but also used the utmost
freedom of imagination. Thus the ideas of intellectuals including Albert Camus, Erik Erikson,
and James Baldwin are as important to the novel
as the historical sources. With Baldwin especially,
Styron had numerous conversations about American history, slavery, and race relations. His aim
was to create less a black hero than a complex
black character of the kind white American writing had rarely produced.
For a twentieth-century white Southerner to
depict a black slave in the first person was a brave
step when Styron began the novel in 1963 but
appeared, to some, provocative and foolhardy by
859
the time of its publication. During that time the

mood among African American Civil Rights
activists had shifted from reconciliation to selfdefinition. The result was a controversy played
out in readings, interviews, reviews, essays, and
books. Within a year, John Henrik Clarke edited
a collection of essays entitled William Styrons Nat
Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968). The
volume attacked the novel on many, sometimes
contradictory, counts, but several contributors
accused Styron of ignoring historical references
to Turner having a wife. Styrons portrayal of him
as isolated and sexually repressed seemed like
a deliberate distortion of the record. Lauded
initially by writers and critics both black and
white, the novel now seemed to have seriously
backfired. The controversy has since come to be
seen as a forerunner of late-twentieth- and earlytwenty-first century concerns about writing and
censorship as well as a product of the political
climate of the 1960s. Albert Stones The Return of
Nat Turner (1992) treats the novel as a key
document of the 1960s, of American history, and
of contemporary American culture.
It took nearly a decade before Styron produced
his final, best-known novel. Set in Brooklyn in
1947, Sophies Choice is about a young writer,
Stingo, who befriends a Polish Catholic survivor
of Auschwitz and her Jewish boyfriend. Sophie
and Nathan are psychologically unstable, and
Stingo finds himself caught up in the whirlwind
of their abusive, ultimately destructive relationship. Prior to the denouement, Sophie reveals to
Stingo the story of her childhood in Cracow
with her anti-Semitic father, her deportation to
Auschwitz, and the nature of her choice. The
novel is also concerned with seeking connections
between the Nazi concentration camps and the
history of slavery in the American South.
Sophies Choice won the first National Book
Award and received both acclaim and criticism in
equal measure. For John Gardner (in Casciato &
West 1982), Styrons novel provided a powerful
juxtaposition of good and evil. Others, notably
Elie Wiesel (in Sirlin & West 2007), doubted the
possibility of anyone beyond survivors having
the capacity to depict accurately the Holocaust
in art. But for several critics (e.g., Crane 1984;
Ruderman 1987; Coale 1991), Sophies Choice is
about much more than its headline subject
matter. As a tapestry of human emotions and
860
STYRON, WILLIAM
experiences, it offers affirmations of life even as

it portrays personal and collective tragedy.
Its audacity as art is most evident in Styrons
successful implementation of the technique of
a shared narrative he piloted in Set This House
on Fire. Drawing on cinematic convention to
cut back and forth between the present moment
seen through Stingos eyes, and the past seen
through Sophies and the older narrators,
Sophies Choice unfolds as both a chiaroscuro
of the senses and a dialogue between youth and
maturity.
Sophies Choice proved to be the culmination of
Styrons career as a novelist, but he did produce
This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982,
expanded 1993); A Tidewater Morning: Three
Tales from Youth (1993); and Darkness Visible:
A Memoir of Madness (1990). The essay collection
includes detailed discussion of his motivations
and experiences in writing his most enduring
novels, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophies
Choice. The title story of A Tidewater Morning
follows a boy on his paper route under the twin
shadow of his mothers imminent death and the
declaration of war in Europe. As such it is as direct
an account of Styrons tragic childhood as he
would ever write. In Shadrach, a former slave
returns to the Virginia of his youth. Love Day
concerns maneuvers in the Pacific in anticipation
of the invasion of Japan. The three stories thus
reflect Styrons preoccupations with loss, war, and
slavery. Darkness Visible, in turn, draws his
work together as a study of the depressive illness
that his writing had both staved off and perhaps
contributed to. It helps explain his ability to
depict not just the clearly autobiographical Stingo, but also the many characters in his novels who
are in search of either mother- or father-figures,
mentally unstable, alcoholic, suicidal, or a combination of these things.
William Styron is a novelist in the tradition
of the great nineteenth-century writers who
place characters in the stream of history and
examine human nature when tested by extreme
events. He is also a consummate stylist, a skill
not unconnected to his old-fashioned mode of
composition, which involved longhand in 2B
pencil on yellow legal pads, as immortalized in
Stingos writing habits in Sophies Choice. His
aim, and achievement, was to produce novels of
depth and subtlety that would stand the test
of time. In his last months he worked to bring

together a final volume, posthumously published as Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays
(2008).
Historiographic Metafiction (AF); The Novel
and War (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF);

Casciato, A. D. & West, J. L. W. III (eds.) (1982).
Critical Essays on William Styron. Boston:
G. K. Hall.
Clarke, J. H. (ed.) (1968). William Styrons Nat Turner:
Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon.
Coale, S. (1991). William Styron Revisited. Boston:
Twayne.
Cologne-Brookes, G. (1995). The Novels of William
Styron: From Harmony to History. Baton Rouge:
Crane, J. K. (1984). The Root of All Evil: The Thematic
Unity of William Styrons Fiction. Columbia:
Morris, R. K., & Malin, I. (eds.) (1981). The
Achievement of William Styron, rev. edn. Athens:
Ross, D. W. (ed.) (1995). The Critical Response to
William Styron. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Ruderman, J. (1987). William Styron. New York:
Ungar.
Sirlin, R. (1990). William Styrons Sophies Choice:
Crime and Self-Punishment. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press.
Sirlin, R., & West, J. L. W. III (eds.) (2007). Sophies
Choice: A Contemporary Casebook. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars.
Stone, A. E. (1992). The Return of Nat Turner: History,
Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America
Styron, W. (1951). Lie Down in Darkness. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1951.
Styron, W. (1956). The Long March. New York:
Viking.
Styron, W. (1960). Set This House on Fire. New York:
Random House.
Styron, W. (1967). The Confessions of Nat Turner. New
York: Random House.
Styron, W. (1973). In the Clap Shack. New York:
Random House.
Styron, W. (1979). Sophies Choice. New York: Random
House.
STYRON, WILLIAM
Styron, W. (1990). Darkness Visible: A Memoir of

Madness. New York: Random House, 1990.
Styron, W. (1993a). A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales
from Youth. New York: Random House.
Styron, W. (1993b). This Quiet Dust and Other Writings
[1982], expanded edn. New York: Random House.
861
Styron, W. (2008). Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays.

West, J. L. W., III (1985). Conversations With William
Styron. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
West, J. L. W., III (1998). William Styron: A Life. New
York: Random House.
T
Tan, Amy
YUAN SHU
Amy Tan enjoys great popularity as a Chinese

American fiction writer. Beginning with the success of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989),
Tan has sought to represent Chinese American
womens life experiences across cultural spaces
and historical periods and to explore popular
themes such as motherdaughter relationships,
generational conflicts, matrilineal inheritance,
biculturalism, as well as reconnection with ethnic
heritage in American contexts. She has so far
produced five novels, two juvenile novels, and
one book collection of essays.
Born into a Chinese immigrant family in
Oakland, California in 1952, Tan grew up under
the parental pressure to become a medical professional but defied her parents wish by majoring in language studies. She received her BA and
MA in English and linguistics at San Jose State
University and pursued her PhD in linguistics at
the University of California, Santa Cruz and
Berkeley before she finally left the program in
1976. She worked as a successful technical writer
for several years but soon committed herself
wholeheartedly to creative writing.
The Joy Luck Club, as Tans first success, defines
a major thematic pattern in her work the evolving motherdaughter relationship embedded in
complex historical and cross-cultural contexts.
Structured around 16 interrelated stories of
four Chinese immigrant mothers and their
four US-born daughters, the novel dramatizes
generational conflict from the perspectives of the

Americanized daughters, but complicates the
meanings of the conflict by allowing the immigrant mothers to speak in their own voices, thus
evoking a cultural logic derived from their life
experiences in China. The final reconciliation in
this light not only suggests a better understanding
between mothers and daughters but also highlights the mothers eagerness to share their knowledge of mysterious Chinese cultural traditions
and social practices.
Tans second novel, The Kitchen Gods Wife
(1991), reinforces the thematic pattern of an
evolving motherdaughter relationship and accentuates the mothers previous experience in
China as central to the final reconciliation. In
detailing the mothers struggle in a politically
unstable and culturally feudal China, this novel
redefines the mothers experience in terms of
survival strategy and unpredictable human nature. As the mother reveals her dark secret of
infanticide in the end, reconciliation becomes
a matter of forgiveness on the part of the
daughter.
As both of her two novels received critical
attention and achieved commercial successes,
Tan started working on juvenile novels and produced The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the
Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which would address
in depth some underexplored themes in her
previous work. While the former text is an extended elaboration of a chapter with the same title
in The Joy Luck Club, the latter is about a mother
cat telling her kittens the story of their ancestor

TELEVISION AND FICTION
Sagwa of China, and trying to outwit an evil

magistrate who gives bad orders in the kingdom
of cats.
In her third novel, The One Hundred Senses
(1995), Tan focuses on a slightly different theme
and explores the relationship between two halfsisters, Olivia, born and raised in the United
States, and Kwan, born in China but recently
arriving in the United States. Through a dramatization of Kwans mysterious world of Yin and
superstitious understanding of reincarnation,
Tan exposes the absurdity of the old world of
China on the one hand, but validates its spiritualism and mysticism on the other. Through her
journey to China with her European American
husband and Kwan, Olivia as the protagonist
finally develops a better sense of her own identity,
and appreciates her half sister.
The Bonesetters Daughter (2001) shows Tans
return to her familiar theme of the mother and
daughter relationships and her employment of
autobiographical elements in her work. Through
the revelation of two packets of documents left
behind by the mother, who had Alzheimers
disease, the daughter, a San Francisco-based
ghostwriter for technical books, discovers the
extraordinary life that her mother had lived in
China and the curse that the family had inherited,
and finally makes sense of her mothers coming to
America. This novel is interestingly juxtaposed to
her essay collection, The Opposite of Faith (2003),
which reflects upon Tans personal experiences in
relation to her family with implicit references to
the novel.
Tans latest novel, Saving Fish From Drowning
(2005), marks her departure from her familiar
theme of motherdaughter relationships and her
willingness to investigate broader social political
issues such as genocide and human rights abuse in
Burma, which serves as the setting of the novel.
Though told with great humor and sarcasm, this
work lacks the kind of critical insight and cultural
familiarity manifested in Tans other novels. In a
sense, Tan is now at a crossroads in her career
regarding whether to continue to write on her
familiar theme of motherdaughter relationships
or to experiment with new subjects, styles, and
settings.
863

Bow, L. (2001). The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. In S.-L.
C. Wong & S. Sumida (eds.), A Resource Guide to
Asian American Literature. New York: Modern
Language Association, pp. 15971.
Ma, S.-M. (2001). Chinese and Dogs in Amy Tans
The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive
a la New Age. MELUS, 26(1), 2944.
Tan, A. (1989). The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnams.
Tan, A. (1991). The Kitchen Gods Wife. New York:
Putnams.
Tan, A. (1992). The Moon Lady. New York: Macmillan.
Tan, A. (1994). The Chinese Siamese Cat. New York:
Macmillan.
Tan, A. (1995). The One Hundred Secret Senses.
New York: Putnams.
Tan, A. (2001). The Bonesetters Daughter. New York:
Putnams.
Tan, A. (2003). The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings.
New York: Putnams.
Tan, A. (2005). Saving Fish From Drowning. New York:
Putnam.
Wong, S.-L.C. (1995). Sugar Sisterhood: Situating the
Amy Tan Phenomenon. In D. Palumbo-Liu (ed.),
The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and
Interventions. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, pp. 174210.
Yuan, Y. (2002). Mothers China Narrative: Amy
Tans The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen Gods Wife.
In The Chinese in America: A History From Gold
Mountain to the New Millennium. Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira, pp. 35164.
Television and Fiction

MARC C. OXOBY
Television was initially dismissed by many as a

faddish gimmick, but it quickly became clear
that this was not so. TV was here to stay. Still, in
the mediums early years, the literary worlds
reaction remained limited, perhaps because it had
already dealt with the perceived similar threat of
film. Writers reacted swiftly to the advent of
cinema in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Whereas the movie industry feared
television would drain its audience, writers regarded this as merely more of the same. Ultimately,
however, television would prove to have a unique
identity, bringing with it new aesthetics and issues
to which writers would eventually have to respond.
Additionally, the popularization of TV, with its
864
own popular narrative component, seen by some

as cutting into the market for prose fiction even
further than film had, prompted writers and others
in the publishing industry to rethink their craft,
creatively and commercially.
Television, in its earliest form, was pioneered
by people like John L. Beard, Charles Francis
Jenkins, Philo Farnsworth, and Allen B. DuMont
in the 1920s and 1930s as a communications
device, much more akin to telephony or radio
than to cinema. But by the time of the first
commercial broadcasts of 1939, TV had come to
be regarded as a medium of entertainment. Initial
broadcasts were national and sporting events,
and after a wartime slump in programming and
production, these were joined by variety shows
and the narrative programming of TV dramas
and sitcoms. Largely supported by this kind of
programming, television sales and audiences
boomed during the 1940s and 1950s. Despite its
origins, however, many early observers saw TV as
little more than movies which could be watched
from the comfort of ones own home. Consequently, with few exceptions, it was some time
before psychologists, sociologists, and educators
made concentrated studies of the mediums particular impact. It took even longer for writers of
fiction to respond to TV with anything more than
off-handed, topical allusion.
Indeed, by the time writers of fiction began to
critically engage television, the nature of nonfiction writing about TV had already changed
direction significantly. Writing about TV, up to
and including Marshall McLuhans Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), had
largely seen the medium as benign, and in some
cases was even celebratory. McLuhan applauded
televisions mode of presentation as demanding a
level of viewer participation which is communal
rather than private, inclusive rather than exclusive (189). More typical in the years since
Understanding Media, however, was a kind of
anti-television tract, presenting arguments which
have become part of the popular discourse against
TV. Writers like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, Ron
Powers, and Marie Winn attacked TV for reinforcing corporate and political power structures, for
promoting an anti-communitarian impulse, for
creating unrealistic ideals of appearance and lifestyle, for fomenting cultural homogeneity, for
being ill suited to convey messages of any kind
of subtlety, for encouraging physical and social

lethargy, and, of course, for diminishing the
audience for printed media.
Whatever the validity of these claims, it is this
attitude that has the greatest thematic influence
on the earliest writers to take on TV, and it
remains a potent influence on contemporary
writers. Although most American fiction of the
early years of television skirted discussion of the
medium (which is also true of many contemporary works), a growing number of writers have
called for more attention to TVs role in American
culture and consequently, to how it has affected
the literary landscape. Among these was Kurt
Vonnegut, who from early in his career repeatedly
commented on televisions power, and in a 1989
interview lamented all these people who are
writing novels about fathers and sons finally
making peace, a baby dying, about divorce and
all that, and totally ignoring this very powerful
character, television (Abadi-Nagy 2930). Belying
Vonneguts concerns, writers like John Updike
(Rabbit Run, 1960, and its sequels), Jerzy Kosinski
(Being There, 1971), Raymond Carver (Cathedral,
1981), and Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country,
1985) have actively explored televisions role,
and particularly the part it plays in fomenting
characters alienation from each other and their
world.
As important as these overt themes are, so too is
the impact of television on fictional forms. With
the advent of cinema, writers sought not only to
imitate certain features of this new form but also
to distinguish the unique features of printed
fiction, those that could not be reproduced in
any other narrative form. This tendency continued with the popularization of television, and
this can best be seen in the work of those often
characterized as postmodernists, such as John
Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon.
Indeed, postmodern fiction is frequently associated with the popularization of television because
of their parallel development, and also because of
the rather dramatic literary effects that it creates,
effects that both employ televisual language and
amplify the unique and unfilmable characteristics
of the printed word.
For instance, critics have often noted the
fragmentation of information conveyed via TV.
Raymond Williams, for example, noted how 1970s
American television not only compartmentalized
information in half-hour blocks, but also shattered the flow of this information with commercials and other breaks in the continuity of
programming, marking the occasional bizarre
disparities a single irresponsible flow of images
and feelings (92). This description well applies
to much postmodern fiction. Vonneguts work
simply looks fragmented on the page, with its
quickly sketched scenes and frequent page breaks
perhaps most notable in Breakfast of Champions
(1973), which is further broken up by crude
illustrations, and Hocus Pocus (1990), in which
we are told, The author of this book did not
have access to writing paper of uniform size and
quality.. . . The unconventional lines separating
passages within chapters indicate where one
scrap ended and the next began. The shorter the
passage, the smaller the scrap (7). Pynchons
work, on the other hand, looks more conventional on the page, but it quickly becomes clear
that bizarre disparities are a defining characteristic of his highly allusive prose, in which he
effortlessly mingles discussions of Jacobean revenge dramas, the laws of thermodynamics, and
TVs Perry Mason, as he does in The Crying of Lot
49 (1966). And yet these allusions, combined
with examples of stream-of-consciousness and
historiography, emphasize what visual media
typically avoid and perhaps are incapable of.
In 1990, an important new statement about
television and fiction was published by David
Foster Wallace. The essay E. Unibus Pluram:
Television and U.S. Fiction renews the clarion
call to writers to pay closer attention to televisions cultural power, but it sets this call in a
new context, observing that many younger writers, including Wallace himself, have never known
a world without TV, which no longer feels like an
intruder, but has instead become an essential part
of American life. As such, Wallace proposes that
writers of fiction should treat television as part of
their own cultural sphere, rather than as a foreign
body within it. Using the term Image-Fiction,
Wallace explores the use of transient received
myths of popular culture as a world in which to
imagine fictions about real, albeit pop-mediated, characters (50). Building upon this, Wallace
cites what he sees as an oddly hollow example in
Mark Leyner (81), but also considers writers such
as Robert Coover (The Babysitter, 1969),
William T. Vollmann (You Bright and Risen
865
Angels, 1987), and Don DeLillo, who treat the

subject of television and media with appropriate
seriousness.
For example, in DeLillos White Noise (1985),
one character remarks, For most people there are
only two places in the world. Where they live and
their TV set (66); but the border between these
two places is depicted as being indeterminate and
permeable, as when the narrator sees Babette, his
wife, on TV and feels himself being shot through
with Babette. Her image was projected on our
bodies, swam in us and through us (105). Ultimately, the narrator must make a special point
of reminding himself that this image is not his
wife, and this kind of disquiet is typical of
much Image-Fiction. And as several critics have
pointed out, the characterizations that Wallace
applies to Image-Fiction can also certainly
be applied to his own fiction.
The interactions between American fiction and
television have also, of course, taken on a much
more overtly commercial dimension, which can
be divided into two parts: adaptation and promotion. As with literatures relationship with
cinema, adaptation has played an important role.
However, the serial nature of much television
programming, as well as its adherence to exacting
scheduling and program durations, have naturally given TVs adaptation of fiction a character
distinct from cinematic adaptation. Such adaptation has basically taken three forms: TV movies,
miniseries, and continuing series.
The earliest movies broadcast on television
were originally theatrical releases, and some of
these were, naturally, adaptations of popular fiction. But in the mid-1960s, the television industry
began producing its own movies. The first movie
commissioned for TV was an adaptation of Ernest
Hemingways The Killers (which, however, was
ultimately released first to theaters in 1964). There
have, however, been relatively few works of fiction
licensed for adaptation to the conventional TV
movie form. This results, perhaps, from the fact
that cinema has conventionally had greater
cachet, and almost certainly from the perception
of TV productions as B-movie fare. However,
television does have an advantage over cinema in
its ability to go beyond the typical two-hour-long
guideline of theatrical releases. Consequently,
adaptations of novels have thrived in the form of
the miniseries, with its greater flexibility with
866
length and duration. The first American miniseries was the 1974 adaptation of Leon Uriss QB
VII, significant for a $2.5 million budget, well
beyond that of typical TV fare. An adaptation of
Irwin Shaws Rich Man, Poor Man followed in
1976, and then in 1977 Alex Haleys Roots was
adapted and became the highest-rated TV program up to that time. The 1980s saw a boom in
miniseries productions, and many of the highest-profile shows were based on novels, including James Clavells Shogun (1980) and Noble
House (1988), Herman Wouks The Winds of War
(1983) and War and Remembrance (1988), and
Larry McMurtrys Lonesome Dove (1989). The
miniseries has continued to draw from American
fiction to the present, including adaptations of
Armistead Maupins Tales of the City (1993),
Marion Zimmer Bradleys The Mists of Avalon
(2001), and Michael Crichtons Andromeda Strain
(2008). There have also been at least seven miniseries based on the works of Stephen King.
Furthermore, there have been a few cases of
works of American fiction developed into continuing series. Some of these, like Dashiell
Hammetts The Thin Man (19579) and
M A S H (197283, from the book by Richard
Hooker), built on the success of movie versions.
Perhaps the most successful TV series drawn from
the printed page was Perry Mason, created by Erle
Stanley Gardner in 1933, and previously brought
to both film and radio before his 1957 TV debut.
One of TVs longest-running dramatic series, the
show ended in 1966 and experienced several
revivals into the 1980s. Equally long-lived was
Little House on the Prairie (197483), based upon
the series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Of course, these
programs cannot be thought of as strict adaptations. Despite Gardners prolific output, for instance, television scheduling outran the number
of printed Perry Mason stories, meaning that
entirely new stories featuring Mason were written
for the small screen.
While television has drawn significantly from
printed fiction for its material, there has been
comparatively little reciprocation. Television has,
indeed, provided material for a significant body of
printed material, but the creation of novels based
on TV programming has been in no way systematic. Few TV shows have been novelized, and most
of those have had a particular niche appeal. Far
and away the most successful TV-based fiction
has been that developed from fantasy and science

fiction programming, with shows like Babylon 5,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Stargate all represented. Direct adaptations constitute part of this
output, though most of these novels present new
stories set in the universes created by the shows.
The output based on the above shows, however,
pales in comparison to the show which has inspired the greatest number of novels, adapted and
spun off from the series. The various Star Trek
programs have inspired hundreds of books, most
of which present new stories featuring the popular
characters from the original series (19669),
The Next Generation (198794), Deep Space Nine
(19939), Voyager (19952001), and Enterprise
(20005). The earliest novel of this series was
published in 1967, and after the cancellation of
the original series, publication continued, tapping
into the growing cult fan base for the original
series, who, initially at least, had no other avenues
by which to catch up with their favorite characters. Although many of these novels were written
by relative unknowns, the line did benefit from
several significant names in science fiction, including Greg Bear, James Blish, Joe Haldeman,
Larry Niven, and Theodore Sturgeon. Often overlooked by cultural critics, and even by some Star
Trek aficionados, the proliferation of this line
truly makes it a publishing phenomenon.
The other part of literatures commercial relationship with TV, promotion, has taken many
forms, from traditional advertising, to talk show
interviews with authors, to TV book clubs,
none more significant than that started by Oprah
Winfrey. Winfreys book club was started in
September 1996, but this was not her first effort
to promote literature on her show. Most of the
books using The Oprah Winfrey Show as a platform were self-help books, but Winfrey occasionally showcased the work of poets and novelists,
and in July 1993 she hosted a week-long series
spotlighting books and their authors, specifically
Maya Angelou, Andrew Vachss, Elie Wiesel,
M. Scott Peck, and Deepak Chopra. The official
book club kicked off with Jacquelyn Mitchards
debut novel, The Deep End of the Ocean (1996),
and in the years that followed, the club also
featured work by Ernest J. Gaines, Barbara Kingsolver, Wally Lamb, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice
Hoffman, and Cormac McCarthy, to name
but a few. The book club episodes of her show
typically featured a gathering of Winfrey, the

author, and viewers lucky enough to be invited,
based on their letters to the show regarding the
book at hand. Though a highly orchestrated affair,
the book discussions were presented as part of
an elegant dinner party.
Winfreys involvement with literary promotion
has not been without controversy, however. In
2001, Jonathan Franzen, who was to appear on the
show to discuss his book club-selected The Corrections, was disinvited when he publicly criticized
the book club and some previous selections as
schmaltzy and one-dimensional. The move
arguably cost Franzen more, both financially and
in terms of reputation, than it cost Winfrey,
though the withdrawal of the invitation was seen
by some as a retaliatory exercise of power on a
comparatively less powerful literary voice.
Winfrey also received criticism, which she again
effectively diffused, when it was revealed that
James Freys allegedly autobiographical A Million
Little Pieces, featured prominently in 2005, was
a dramatically fictionalized account. In 2002,
Winfrey discontinued the book club, remarking
that it had become too difficult to find books she
wished to share with her audience. However, the
club was resurrected the next year with a slightly
different focus, initially presenting classics by
Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Pearl Buck,
John Steinbeck, and others, then opening up to
contemporary authors again in 2005. Throughout
its history, the club greatly stimulated sales for the
selected titles and inspired a number of similar,
though less successful, televised book clubs, most
notably on Good Morning America and The Today
Show. Perhaps writer Kathleen Rooney appropriately subtitled her book Reading With Oprah: The
Book Club That Changed America (2005).
As television is still a relatively new medium,
its relationship with printed fiction is still very
much developing, and the complexity of that
relationship still largely unexplored. However, this
complexity calls the notion that TV is purely a
detriment to literature into question. It seems clear
that printed fiction will continue to thrive, but that
commercially and aesthetically it has not come
away from its contact with television unchanged.
SEE ALSO: Film/Television Adaptation and
Fiction (WF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood
(AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
867

Abadi-Nagy, Z. (1996). Serenity, Courage, Wisdom:
A Talk With Kurt Vonnegut, 1989. In P. Reed &
M. Leeds (eds.), The Vonnegut Chronicles:
Interviews and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
pp. 1534.
Barnouw, E. (1975). Tube of Plenty: The Evolution
of American Television. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Birkerts, S. (1994). The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate
of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York:
Fawcett.
De Lillo, D. (1985). White Noise. New York:
Penguin.
Docker, J. (1994). Postmodernism and Popular Culture:
A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mander, J. (1978). Four Arguments for the Elimination
of Television. New York: Quill.
Marc, D. (1995). Bonfire of the Humanities: Television,
Subliteracy, and Long-Term Memory Loss. Syracuse:
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. New York: Signet.
Mullen, B. (1988). A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual
Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver.
Critique, 39(2), 99114.
Murphet, J., & Rainford, L. (2003). Literature and
Visual Technologies: Writing After Cinema.
ODonnell, J.J. (1998). Avatars of the Word: From
Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Postman, N. (1986). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York:
Penguin.
Powers, R. (1994). The Cruel Radiance: Notes of
a Prosewriter in a Visual Age. Hanover, NH:
Middlebury College Press.
Rooney, K. (2005). Reading With Oprah: The Book Club
That Changed America. Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press.
Rowe, J. C. (1994). Spin-Off: The Rhetoric of
Television and Postmodern Memory. In J. Carlisle
& D. R. Schwarz (eds.), Narrative and Culture.
Simmons, P. E. (1997). Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture &
History in Postmodern American Fiction. Athens:
Vonnegut, K. (1990). Hocus Pocus. New York: Berkeley.
Wallace, D. F. (1990). E. Unibus Pluram: Television and
U. S. Fiction. In A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do
Again. Boston: Little, Brown pp. 2182.
Williams, R. (1975). Television: Technology and
Cultural Form. New York: Schocken.
868
THOMPSON, JIM
Winn, M. (1977). The Plug-In Drug: Television,

Children, and the Family. New York: Penguin.
Thompson, Jim
JOSH LUKIN
James Myers Thompson was an Oklahoman novelist, journalist, and screenwriter whose violent
and pessimistic work achieved prominence in
the noir fiction of the 1950s, sank into obscurity
for 20 years thereafter, and was revived to
great posthumous acclaim in the mid-1980s.
Thompsons novels reflect his lifelong socialism
and alcoholism along with an interest in psychoanalysis and the contrast between Americans
public personae and their authentic selves. His
work is distinguished for its intellectual depth,
its suspicion of gender norms, its bleak satirical
vision, and its tendency toward experimental
narrative. Thompson numbered Faulkner and
Dos Passos among his influences as well as more
traditional stylists such as Nelson Algren, Richard
Wright, and Dorothy Canfield. Born on September 27, 1906, Thompson became a novelist in
middle age, writing 30 books and co-authoring
two screenplays (The Killing in 1956 and Paths of
Glory in 1957) between 1940 and 1972, and killing
himself on April 7, 1977.
The two literary novels Thompson published
before turning to crime fiction already incorporate his works major themes. Now and on Earth
(1942) is a bleak naturalist tale which depicts the
quotidian terrors in the life of an aircraft plant
laborer who is ultimately red-hunted out of his
job. The protagonists growing paranoia as he
finds himself barred from the American dream
of prosperity, the novels meticulous attention
to its antiheros work and his workplace, and the
storys Sophoclean family romance reappear
throughout Thompsons oeuvre. Heed the Thunder (1946) is a panorama of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Nebraska in which abuses on the
political, economic, familial, and religious fronts
corrupt human potential for productive community and ecological harmony.
His first novels having been darkly ironic takes
on the worlds of James T. Farrell, Willa Cather,
and in 1949s Nothing More Than Murder
James M. Cain, Thompson found a less derivative
approach with his first paperback original, 1952s

The Killer Inside Me. This noir Western is told
from the point of view of Deputy Sheriff Lou
Ford, a sadistic psychopath who attempts to hide
his homicidal career behind a slow-witted, folksy,
generous facade. Like many of Thompsons firstperson narrators, Ford is a wry, witty, and literate man with a clear view of societys ills and a gift
for rationalizing murder. The Killer Inside Me
ruthlessly parodies pulp cliches, among them the
heroic masculinity of the Western marshal, the
homespun simplicity of the populist leader, and
the sexual conservatism of the hard-boiled detective. Ford blames his homicidal nature on
sexual proclivities that he traces to a childhood
trauma, but the story raises the possibility that
his murders are completely calculated and selfserving acts of vindictiveness, independent of his
sexual outlawry.
Versions of Lou Ford reappear in two subsequent Thompson novels, Wild Town (1957) and
The Transgressors (1961). Thompsons other
major recurring character is Isidore Kossmeyer,
the diminutive, histrionic, and thin-skinned
Jewish lawyer who will readily sacrifice ethics
in the name of a just outcome, committing
bribery, bullying, or burglary to pursue his
liberal goal of defending societys victims. The
five novels involving Kossy include two, The
Criminal (1953a) and The Kill-Off (1957), in
which Thompson effectively uses the Faulknerian tactic of presenting a different characters
narration in each chapter to make a novel in
which the point-of-view character is an entire
community. The Criminal centers upon a suburban rape-murder that is never solved, as each
of the members of the community with the
potential to address the mystery is revealed to
be impotent, indifferent, or malicious. The violent deaths in The Kill-Off are all ultimately
explained, but the identities of their perpetrators end up less important than the theme of
how people can become what they pretend to be,
destroyed by losing control of the personae they
have strategically assumed.
Other Thompson novels featuring experiments
in structure and narrative include Savage Night
(1953b) and A Hell of a Woman (1954). A Hell of a
Woman is a story of a dim-witted salesman who
makes sense of the murders he commits by reimagining himself as a pulp hero, and ends with a
TOOMER, JEAN
split first-person narrative in which two different

catastrophic denouements compete in alternating lines of prose. Savage Night begins as a
conventional gangster story and, as the naturalist
form shatters in the face of the horrors of its
heros life, ends surreally on a New England farm
where the sickly, diminutive gangster narrator
and his crippled assassin mistress become aphasic and resort to crawling about in a cellar as
howling goats stand on their heads outside until
she dismembers him with an axe. Thompsons
last major novel, Pop. 1280 (1964), is another tale
of a killer sheriff, which in its confrontation of
small-town politics, racism, and prudery exhibits more overt social engagement than did The
Killer Inside Me.
SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Noir Fiction
(AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF)
Cochran, D. (2000). America Noir: Underground
Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Forter, G. (2000). Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of
Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel.
New York: New York University Press.
Lukin, J. (1998). Aspects of the Western Hero in
Jim Thompsons The Killer Inside Me. Paradoxa, 9,
2941.
McCann, S. (2000). Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled
Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal
Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
OBrien, G. (1985). Hardboiled America: Lurid
Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, expanded edn.
New York: Da Capo.
Polito, R. (1995). Savage Art: A Biography of Jim
Thompson. New York: Vintage.
Thompson, J. (1942). Now and on Earth. New York:
Modern Age.
Thompson, J. (1946). Heed the Thunder. New York:
Greenberg.
Thompson, J. (1949). Nothing More than Murder.
New York: Harper.
Thompson, J. (1952). The Killer Inside Me. New York:
Lion.
Thompson, J. (1953a). The Criminal. New York: Lion.
Thompson, J. (1953b). Savage Night. New York: Lion.
Thompson, J. (1954). A Hell of a Woman. New York:
Lion.
Thompson, J. (1955). After Dark, My Sweet. New York:
Popular Library.
869
Thompson, J. (1957). The Kill-Off. New York: Lion

Library.
Thompson, J. (1959). The Getaway. New York:
Signet.
Thompson, J. (1963). The Grifters. New York: Regency.
Thompson, J. (1964). Pop. 1280. Greenwich, CT:
Gold Medal.
Toomer, Jean
JESSICA S. BALDANZI
Author Jean Toomer is most commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the literary and
cultural movement centered in Harlem, New
York City, in the 1920s and 1930s. Toomer is
seen by most critics past and present to have
contributed, with his most famous work Cane
(1988 [1923]), the first artistic representation of
African American life to what Alain Locke dubbed
the New Negro movement. However, Toomer
himself saw his heritage as a uniquely American
mix of races and ethnicities, and resisted his
association with the movement, deeming its racial
categorizations oversimplified and restrictive to
the potential of the human race as a whole.
While some of the biographical details of
Toomers life remain disputed, scholars have
reached accord on some basic milestones. Born
in Washington, DC in 1894, Nathan Eugene
Toomers father left only months after his birth.
Toomer spent most of his early life in Washington, although his mother moved him to Brooklyn,
then New Rochelle, New York, after she remarried
in 1907. After her death in 1909, Toomer returned
to Washington to live with his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, was
an imposing public figure who had built his career
in the Reconstruction-era government of Louisiana, and Toomer spent much of his early life
circling in Pinchbacks stern orbit, returning to
live with his grandparents during breaks in his
erratic schooling. Although Toomer never finished a formal degree, he spent time at many
colleges, studying agriculture in both Madison,
Wisconsin and Massachusetts, then physical
education in Chicago.
Toomer decided to devote himself to the literary life in 1919, after dropping out of a pre-law
program at City College of New York. He took on
870
TOOMER, JEAN
a number of odd jobs from Milwaukee to New

Jersey in his attempts to support himself as a
writer, but the most defining moment of his
literary career was his three-month trip to Sparta,
Georgia in 1921 to work as a substitute principal
at a vocational school for black students. Despite
Toomers ambivalence about his black heritage
at this stage he listed himself, for example, as
French Cosmopolitan on his City College application (ODaniel 42) this brief immersion in
a rural black community in the South provided
him with new material and creative energy. He
later made an even briefer trip to South Carolina
with the writer Waldo Frank. These short visits
became the inspiration for Cane, which is still
hailed as Toomers greatest work.
The complicated form of Cane, a mix of poetry,
short fiction, and drama, echoes Toomers lifelong attempts to resist easy categorizations of
his own identity. Despite the fact that Toomer
himself called the work a swan song upon the
eve of its publication (1988 [1923], 156), and
chastised his publisher for the companys attempts to feature Negro in the advertising for
the book (1988 [1923], 157), most Harlem Renaissance critics lavished praise upon the work,
deeming Toomer the very first artist of the race
(Locke 44).
The first and third sections of the three-part
Cane take place in the rural South, while the
books middle section is explicitly urban, set in
Washington, DC and Chicago. Nevertheless, the
tone of the work remains predominantly rural, as
established by Karintha, the brief, impressionistic opening story in which the eponymous character delivers a stillborn infant in the woods.
Karintha is followed by two poems, then another short story, Becky; this alternating structure continues for the rest of section 1. Becky,
about a white woman with two black sons, represents another emotionally detached woman
whose reproductive efforts are fraught or failed, as
are those of Carma, Fern, and Esther, the
main characters in the short stories that follow.
The poems that Toomer intersperses between
these stories deploy lyrical images of nature, yet
as the section progresses, even the sleepy and
soothing pastoral lullabies hover over a metaphorical undercurrent of violent racial tensions.
Section 1 ends with a disturbingly explicit description of a lynching the outcome of a cross-
racial love triangle at the end of the short story

Blood-Burning Moon.
Whereas the first section of Cane ends with
Southern rural tensions between black and white,
the second section, set mostly in Washington,
DC, explores racial hierarchies within urban
African American society. Toomer contrasts
Washingtons mulatto aristocracy particularly
in the short story Box Seat with the citys less
privileged blacks, as represented by chorus girls
in stories such as Theater, and prostitutes like
the protagonist of Avey. The urban setting at
times cynically recasts the first sections rural
nostalgia. At the end of the short sketch Rhobert,
for example, the spiritual Deep River, invoked
as a funereal chant, is clearly superficial and out
of place in this setting. Yet the interspersed
poems tell another story, employing rural imagery more sincerely and convincingly to represent
the Southern heritage of many of Washingtons
black urbanites. The final story of section 2,
Bona and Paul, moves to Chicago and returns
to the theme of a cross-racial relationship, this
time between two mutually attracted college
students, a white Southern woman and a lightskinned man who is attempting to negotiate his
identity amidst social pressure to label himself
black.
Canes third section consists of the single piece
Kabnis, which is usually categorized by scholars
as a play, although a number of its extended,
lyrical scene descriptions sound more like fictional narration. This final section of Cane represents
a return to the South, but features two central
characters, Kabnis and Lewis, who hail from
Northern cities, thus melding the settings of the
first two sections. Many critics see Kabnis as the
most heavy-handed section of Cane. Yet the plays
direct treatment of the continuing trauma of
white oppression and violence in the rural
South particularly its references to a gruesome
historically-documented lynching of a pregnant
woman and her near-term fetus provides Cane
with a powerful conclusion that maintains the
poetic, descriptive vision of the work as a whole.
After the critical success of Cane, Toomer
published essays, poems, and occasional short
fiction sporadically, and with little critical attention. Many biographers attribute this decline in
literary output to his move into religious and
philosophical circles. Toomer first became a
TOOMER, JEAN
follower of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff. It was within Gurdjieffian circles that he met
both of his wives: author Margery Latimer, who
died in childbirth in 1932, then Marjorie Content,
whom he married in 1934 and moved with to a
Pennsylvania farm. In 1940, Toomer and his
wife joined Pennsylvania Quaker society, whose
Friends Intelligencer published his final essays
through 1950.
Toomers only other major publications after
Cane were Essentials (1991 [1931]), a privately
published book of aphorisms, and Toomers
last literary work, the long poem The Blue
Meridian, which was published in The New
Caravan in 1936. Despite dramatic, and often
disappointing, changes in his writing style after
Cane, Toomers writing whether his topic is
race, ethnicity, nationality, or the spiritual development of the individual as part of the human
race is united by his ceaseless exploration of
individual and collective identity.
Despite its initial critical acclaim, Cane fell out
of print for 40 years. Its first reprinting in 1967,
the year of Toomers death, was largely spurred
by the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s.
Although Toomer likely would have resisted his
resurrection at the hands of another cultural
movement defined by a circumscribed racial heritage, todays readers are fortunate for Canes
recovery. Toomers iconoclastic creative voice has
helped maintain his status among scholars as a
subject of both adulation and continuing debate.
The struggles of Toomer to define himself, and to
represent himself both in his writing and as a
public figure, continue to resonate powerfully in a
twenty-first-century North American society still
grappling with its own questions of race, heritage,
and identity.
The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and
Fiction (AF); Frank, Waldo (AF); The Harlem
Renaissance (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF)
Baker, H. (1987). Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baker, H. (1974). Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black
American Literature. Washington, DC: Howard
University Press.
871
Bone, R. A. (ed.) (1965). The Negro Novel in America.

New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fabre, G., & Feith, M. (eds.) (2001). Jean Toomer and
the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Favor, J. M. (1999). Authentic Blackness: The Folk in
the New Negro Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Ford, K. J. (2005). Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and
the Poetics of Modernity. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press.
Gates, H. L., Jr. (1989). Figures in Black and White:
Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self. New York:
Hutchinson, G. (1995). The Harlem Renaissance
in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Jones, R. B. (1993). Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of
Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit. Amherst:
Kerman, C. E., & Eldridge, R. (1987). The Lives of Jean
Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge:
Larson, C. R. (1993). Invisible Darkness: Jean
Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press.
Locke, A. (ed.) (1992). The New Negro: Voices of
the Harlem Renaissance [1925]. New York:
Atheneum.
McKay, N. Y. (1984). Jean Toomer: Artist: A Study
of His Literary Life and Work, 18941936.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
ODaniel, T. B. (ed.) (1988). Jean Toomer: A Critical
Evaluation. Washington, DC: Howard University
Press.
Scruggs, C., & VanDemarr, L. (1998). Jean Toomer and
the Terrors of American History. Philadelphia:
Toomer, J. (1980). The Wayward and the Seeking: A
Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (ed. D. T.
Turner). Washington, DC: Howard University
Press.
Toomer, J. (1988). Cane [1923] (ed. D. T. Turner).
New York: Norton.
Toomer, J. (1988). The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer
(ed. R. B. Jones & M. T. Latimer). Chapel Hill:
Toomer, J. (1991). Essentials [1931] (ed. R. P. Byrd).
Toomer, J. (1993). A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected
Unpublished Writings (ed. F. L. Rusch). New York:
Toomer, J. (1996). Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and
Literary Criticism (ed. R. B. Jones). Knoxville:
872
TRAVEN, B
Toomer, J. (2003). The Uncollected Works of American

Author Jean Toomer, 18941967 (ed. J. C. Griffin).
Toomer, J. (2006). The Letters of Jean Toomer,
19191924 (ed. M. Whalan). Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press.
Wintz, C. D. (ed.) (1996). The Emergence of the Harlem
Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance 19201940,
vol. 1. New York: Garland.
Woodson, J. (1999). To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff,
Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson:
Traven, B
SCOTT HENKEL
B. Traven is the most common nom de plume for

the author who also used the names Ret Marut,
Hal Croves, and Traven Torsvan, among others.
Travens works include The Death Ship (1926),
which is rumored to be the book Albert Einstein
would have taken to a desert island; the six
Jungle Novels (193140); and The Treasure
of the Sierra Madre (1927), later adapted into
John Hustons 1948 film starring Humphrey
Bogart. Travens line, delivered by a Mexican
rebel to Bogarts character, Dobbs, is one of the
most famous in American film: Badges? We
dont need no stinking badges! Like his rebel
character, Travens ideas place him in a dissenting literary tradition, and his secrecy makes him
an archetype of the reclusive, wandering American author.
Scholars assume that Traven was born in
Chicago in 1890, immigrated to Germany and
participated in the 19189 Bavarian revolution,
and, after the Bavarian republic was suppressed,
escaped from a death sentence for treason. Traven
then lived in Mexico until his death in 1969.
Travens legendary secrecy, however, means that
no detail of his biography is beyond debate. As the
editor of the German journal Der Ziegelbrenner
(The Brick Burner one who makes material to
build a new world), he delivered public readings
from behind a darkened lectern. Traven misled
journalists and aspiring biographers, and argued
that his writing should get attention, not his
biography.
Traven wrote 15 novels, many short stories, and

one work of nonfiction about Chiapas, Mexico,
Land des Frulings (Land of Springtime) (1928).
Travens first editions appeared in German and
have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Travens content is also international: his characters are American drifters, European workers,
and Mexican campesinos. Because so many tattered copies of Travens works can be found in
Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya writes that B. Traven is
alive and well in Cuernavaca. German, Mexican,
and American scholars all claim Traven for their
national literatures.
The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre led to Travens international popularity
and display his recurring themes: a defense of
the dispossessed and downtrodden; an antiauthoritarian framework that excoriates the concentrated power of dictators, employers, and
bureaucracies; and an anarchists hostility to the
use of that power.
Travens writing is intensely political and
prone to philosophical digression. Gerard Gales
is the main character in The Death Ship; The
Cotton Pickers (1926), originally published as
Der Wobbly; and The Bridge in the Jungle
(1929). As Der Wobbly suggests, Gales shares much
in common with the members of the Industrial
Workers of the World, a radical labor union whose
members were nicknamed Wobblies. Gales is
not a tubthumper, but, especially in The Cotton
Pickers, he leaves a trail of rebellion behind him.
Gales is also a testament to the value that Traven
places upon the lowest of the low: whether Gales
works the worst job aboard ship, under the sun as a
picker in the cotton fields, or as a cattle driver
negotiating with bandits, Traven insists on the
dignity such work deserves.
In The Death Ship, Gales is a sailor whose ship
has left port without him, but with his papers on
board. Without a sailors card or a passport, Gales
cannot convince the authorities of his personhood, and he is deported by a succession of state
bureaucracies. The nation states through which
Gales and his fellow workers wander refuse to
recognize them without papers, and they must
work in deplorable conditions on ships that are
to be scuttled for the insurance money.
The Jungle Novels Government, The Carreta,
March to the Montera, Trozas, The Rebellion of
TYLER, ANNE
the Hanged, and The General from the Jungle

represent Travens mature fiction, and they are
his strongest case for the right of the wretched of
the Earth to rebel. Like Diego Riveras murals,
these novels show revolt writ large. Traven
displays the Mexican Revolution of 191017 as
an arc of severe repression, cathartic revolt, and
ambivalent violence. The campesinos are tricked
into debt slavery and are coerced to repay their
debts by working in the mahogany lumber
camps in Chiapas. This violence compels the
campesinos to organize themselves into a rebel
army powerful enough to defeat the federal
army and the Rurales, the special forces who
are trained to repress domestic uprisings and
labor strikes.
SEE ALSO: Anaya, Rudolfo (AF); Expatriate
Fiction (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF);
873
Traven, B. (1994). The Bridge in the Jungle [1929].

Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Traven, B. (1994). The Carreta [1931]. Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee.
Traven, B. (1994). March to the Montera [1933].
Traven, B. (1994a). The Rebellion of the Hanged [1936].
Traven, B. (1994b). Trozas [1936]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Traven, B. (1995). The Cotton Pickers [1926]. Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee.
Traven, B. (1995). General from the Jungle [1940].
Traverton, E., (1999). B. Traven: A Bibliography.
London: Scarecrow.
Zogbaum, H. (1992). B. Traven: A Vision of Mexico.
Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.
Tyler, Anne
SUSAN ELIZABETH SWEENEY

Anaya, R. (2006). B. Traven Is Alive and Well in
Cuernavaca. In C. Garca (ed.), Bordering Fires:
The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and
Chicano/a Literature. New York: Vintage.
Guthke, K. (1991). B. Traven: The Life Behind the
Legends. Chicago: Lawrence Hill.
McAleer, S. (2004). The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and
Environmental Virtue Ethics. Film and Philosophy,
8, 3041.
Mezo, R. (1993). A Study of B. Travens Fiction: The
Journey to Solipaz. San Francisco: Mellen Research
University Press.
Pateman, R. (2005). The Man Nobody Knows: The Life
and Legacy of B. Traven. Lanham, MD: University
Press of America.
Payne, K. (1991). The Rebellion of the Hanged:
B. Travens Anti-Fascist Novel of the Mexican
Revolution. International Fiction Review, 18(2),
96107.
Stone, J. (1977). The Mystery of B. Traven. Los Altos,
CA: Kaufmann.
Traven, B. (1938). Land des Frulings [1928]. Z
urich:
B
uchergilde Guttenberg.
Traven, B. (1984). The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
[1927]. New York: Hill and Wang.
Traven, B. (1991). The Death Ship [1926]. Chicago:
Lawrence Hill.
Traven, B. (1993). Government [1931]. Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee.
Anne Tylers keen observation, acute sense of

comedy and tragedy, and distinctive voice transcend such categories as Southern literature or
domestic fiction. With increasing subtlety,
her 17 novels explore how individuals develop
relationships with others.
Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on
October 25, 1941 and raised on Quaker communes in the South and Midwest. Her favorite
book as a child was Virginia Lee Burtons The
Little House, whose theme of remaining oneself
despite changes in time and place resonates
throughout Tylers fiction. Eventually her family
settled in North Carolina, where she entered
Duke University at 16. Tyler majored in Russian,
studied writing with Reynolds Price, and, after
graduate study at Columbia, worked briefly as
a Russian bibliographer.
Her first novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
and The Tin Can Tree (1965), were barely noticed.
In 1967, Tyler and her husband Iranian novelist
and psychiatrist Taghi Modaressi moved
to Baltimore, the setting of all her subsequent
fiction. Tylers next books depict women who
quietly rebel by affiliating themselves with more
exotic individuals a rock musician in A SlippingDown Life (1970), and an entire family in The
Clock Winder (1972). Celestial Navigation (1975),
which portrays a reclusive visual artist, drew
874
TYLER, ANNE
significant praise from critics for the first time.

Searching for Caleb (1976) and Earthly Possessions
(1977) both feature adults who run away: a greatuncle who disappeared 60 years earlier, and a
woman who leaves her husband, and is taken
hostage and befriends her abductors. Morgans
Passing (1980) offers a similar but more nuanced
plot: Morgan Gower keeps escaping from humdrum domesticity, only to end up in the same
situation once more.
After Morgans Passing, which garnered both
nominations and awards, Tylers next three
books revealed new levels of psychological insight, irony, and craft. Dinner at the Homesick
Restaurant (1982), her darkest novel, is considered by many including Tyler to be her best.
Its thematic and narrative structure recalls William Faulkners As I Lay Dying, although the
setting and plot differ. Spanning 60 years and
various perspectives, Dinner at the Homesick
Restaurant shows how Pearl Tull and her three
children attain moments of individual happiness
despite a history of abandonment, abuse, rivalry,
and betrayal. After Pearl dies, her husband, who
had walked out on them decades earlier, even
marvels that his children seem like a real family.
The Accidental Tourist (1985) blends tragedy and
comedy to recount how, after his son dies and his
wife leaves him, Macon Leary learns to resist his
familys tendency to hide from the world. As the
author of guidebooks for reluctant travelers a
business juxtaposing closeness and separation,
like the restaurant where Ezra Tull offers comfort
food to homesick diners Macon benefited
from the Learys suspicion of anything unfamiliar. Now he finds himself drawn to cheerfully
adventurous Muriel in a relationship between
opposites that Tylers fiction often dissects.
Breathing Lessons (1988) depicts another mismatched pair: impulsive, bubbly, hopeful Maggie Moran, who always meddles in other peoples
lives, and her sardonic husband, Ira. This time,
however, in a brilliant tour de force, Tyler captures all the facets of their dynamic complementarity during a long road trip on a single day.
Tylers next novel, Saint Maybe (1991), is
bleaker: Ian Bedloe, whose jealousy and resentment led to his brothers death, spends the rest of
his life making amends. Ladder of Years (1995)
features another runaway, a middle-aged woman
who abandons her family to attempt a new exis-
tence under a different name. A Patchwork Planet

(1998) the only book Tyler recounts in the first
person is narrated by a young man who, like
Ian in Saint Maybe, seeks atonement for his
overwhelming sense of guilt and failure.
Tylers husband died in 1997, and her subsequent novels have explored the aftermath of a
long marriage. In Back When We Were Grownups
(2001), a widowed grandmother tries out the life
she might have had if she never met her husband;
in The Amateur Marriage (2004), a mismatched
couple divorce after 30 years. Digging to America
(2006) recasts Tylers recurring issues of identity,
difference, and belonging in terms of immigration
and adoption. It examines another widowed character an Iranian grandmother who feels like an
outsider in America and traces the complex
interconnections between two families who adopt
children from Korea.
Tyler belongs to the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters and has received
many honors, including the Janet Heidinger
Kafka Prize for Morgans Passing (1980), the
National Book Critics Circle Award for The
Accidental Tourist (1985), and the Pulitzer Prize
for Breathing Lessons (1989). Digging to America
was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. After an
enormously successful 1988 film based on The
Accidental Tourist, other novels were adapted for
cinema or television. Meanwhile, Tyler still lives
in Baltimore, declining book tours and granting
few interviews, but writing steadily.

Bail, P. (1998). Anne Tyler: A Critical Companion.
New York: Greenwood.
Petry, A. H. (ed.) (1992). Critical Essays on Anne Tyler.
Salwak, D. (ed.) (1994). Anne Tyler as Novelist. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press.
Stephens, R. C. (ed.) (1990). The Fiction of Anne Tyler.
Tyler, A. (1964). If Morning Ever Comes. New York:
Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1965). The Tin Can Tree. New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1970). A Slipping-Down Life. New York:
Knopf.
TYLER, ANNE
Tyler, A. (1972). The Clock Winder. New York: Knopf.

Tyler, A. (1974). Celestial Navigation. New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1976). Searching for Caleb. New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1977). Earthly Possessions. New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1980). Morgans Passing. New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1982). Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1985). The Accidental Tourist. New York:
Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1988). Breathing Lessons. New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (1991). Saint Maybe. New York: Knopf.
875
Tyler, A. (1995). Ladder of Years. New York: Knopf.

Tyler, A. (1998). A Patchwork Planet. New York:
Knopf.
Tyler, A. (2001). Back When We Were Grownups.
New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (2004). The Amateur Marriage. New York:
Knopf.
Tyler, A. (2006). Digging to America. New York: Knopf.
Tyler, A. (2010). Noahs Compass. New York: Knopf.
Voelker, J. C. (1989). Art and the Accidental in Anne
Tyler. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
U
Updike, John
JONATHAN L. PRICE
John Updike was a tireless novelist, a transcriber

of the individual consciousness in contemporary
culture as well as history. His protagonists constantly confront in dramatic and explicit ways the
topology and emotions of adulterous sexuality
but at the same time are drawn to a dialectical
religiosity influenced by the philosopher Sren
Kierkegaard and the Protestant theologian Karl
Barth. Writing until his death at the age of 76,
Updike was a former New Yorker staffer who
began his literary career with a short story in the
early 1950s and continued to produce works in
nearly all genres, though focusing on fiction. His
oeuvre includes more than 20 novels, 12 collections of short stories, six books of poetry, a
memoir, anthologies of prose essays, and a book
on golf.
Updike was born March 18, 1932 in Shillington,
Pennsylvania, where he lived most of his early life
before attending Harvard University, graduating
summa cum laude in 1954, and then attending for a
year the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at
Oxford. He served at the New Yorker from 1955 to
1957, and lived after that in Massachusetts. In 1953
he married Mary Pennington, and they had four
children. After his divorce in 1977, he married
Martha Bernhard, acquiring three stepchildren.
He also had three grandchildren. Updike won
the Pulitzer Prize twice as well as the National
Book Award, and the Howells Medal for the
best American novel in the last five years.
Updikes most remarkable creation is the tetralogy of Rabbit novels, chronicling the evolution of
a middle-American male, the near-everyman Harry Rabbit Angstrom: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit
Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at
Rest (1990). In an interview early in his career
Updike acknowledged his subject as the American small town middle class. I like middles. It is in
middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity
restlessly rules (Howard 1966). Rabbit is such a
middle figure, living in a small Pennsylvania town,
but eventually also part of the year in Florida;
though he begins as a member of the lower middle
class, selling a vege-peeler, then becomes a printer,
he eventually emerges in the upper middle class, an
entrepreneur Toyota dealership owner; for three
of the novels, he is middle-aged. His experiences
and antenna seem to echo a middle register of the
impressions of historical events and cultural patterns from 1959 to 1989, such as moon landings
and airplane crashes, pop songs and cocaine abuse.
These four novels and a coda (Rabbit Remembered, 2000b), appearing about once a decade,
trace the young adulthood and gradual aging of
the protagonist. The novels also provide a breathtaking and probing portrait of American culture
and the interior experience of it over 30 years and
could be seen as Updikes version of Dos Passoss
U.S.A. trilogy. But whereas Dos Passos chose
breadth, fragmentation, and vignettes portraying some 16 representative fictional Americans
between the turn of the century and the Great
Depression Updike chooses depth via the consciousness of a single individual.

UPDIKE, JOHN
Rabbit Angstrom is at once the cuddly, animallike, incurably sexual rabbit, yet somehow representative of a broad spectrum of experiences and
also a minute victim of vast social forces, an
angstrom unit (one-hundred millionth of a centimeter) used in scientific measurement. Though he
begins as a social rebel testing moral limits in
small-town America by leaving his wife and young
child to live with a quasi-prostitute, he is also an
icon of the failed American dream, a former high
school basketball star who searches for a better life
than the one he seems to have found. In Rabbit,
Run he leaves his wife in Pennsylvania and drives
toward an imagined Florida pastoral, but ironically circles home. This first self-defeating circle
marks the broad pattern of the novel and of the
novels to come. Rabbit is a runner, a has-been
athlete, constantly in motion, searching nostalgically for something better. By Rabbit at Rest, he is
in his mid-fifties, and seems successful and admired enough to portray Uncle Sam in the July 4th
parade. Underneath, however, he is the same
Rabbit, an ambiguous figure still searching emotionally and sexually. Though he appears superficially conventional, he still assaults social-sexual
norms, spending an incestuous night with his
daughter-in-law and escaping again, this time to
his Florida condo. Eventually Rabbit, like America,
is vulnerable and moribund, threatened by a poisonous indolence: he overeats, and his son has
covertly become a cocaine addict and embezzler.
Updikes fictional method owes a great deal to
modernist art, which he frequently acknowledges
in many ways by echoes in character names, by
employment of the stream-of-consciousness
technique made famous by James Joyce in Ulysses,
and by allusion to Joyce and T. S. Eliot. The
technique is evident in works as different as
Couples (1968) and Bech: A Book (1970). For all
his experimentation in style and technique and his
familiarity with the great modernists as well as
many of his contemporaries, Updike is primarily
a realist, who writes about believable characters in
well-known milieux living recognizable lives in
chronological order. Although minutely attuned
to social and artistic trends and aware of postmodernism in criticism and fiction, Updike is
essentially a traditionalist. For example, in Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), there is
an epigraph from Derrida the noted deconstructionist but Updikes protagonist, an academic
877
historian, is antagonistic to deconstructionist

theories that view history as merely texts.
Updikes wide-ranging mind has focused on a
variety of topics that have worked their way into
his novels, including among others Jewish
writers, terrorists, dystopian communards, religious fanatics, golfers, and staffers in presidential
administrations. He has a keen, observant eye for
the daily life of American cities and towns as it
changes from moment to moment due to the
minutiae of culture and technology.
Updikes career is such that many of his works
are reinvestigations of previous material. Obviously one of the recurrent figures is Rabbit, while
another of a very different type is the protagonist
of Updikes Bech series. In Bech: A Book the
character is a Jewish American novelist viewed
in mid-life, long past his early success with two
novels, Travel Light and Brother Pig. He is a comic
figure in a novel verging on parody and satire
employed to examine the daily experience of the
writers life during a prolonged stage of decay and
writers block. Bech is an alter ego, an artist
manque who suffers exaggerated wounds that
perhaps every author, including Updike, has
feared. His tentative, often imagined affairs serve
often as the backdrop for the commentary and
analysis of personal frustration and ironic failure.
The treatment also serves as a critique of superficial media reception and audience perception of a
writer, as seen in his affair with an attractive
young British woman that turns out to be merely
a device for her to advance her career by writing an
expose-diary entry about him in a tabloid. In the
final sketch, Bech enters heaven by being recognized at a ceremony in uptown Manhattan
honoring significant others. These others, revealed through analysis and dialogue, are rather
trivial human beings. And, as Bech observes after
his induction into the heavenly host, Now
what? The sketches are ironically framed with
a foreword containing a letter from Bech to
Updike himself offering his blessing and commenting on the indignities America offers to its
writers, and the multiple appendices purporting
to be Bechs diary, a postcard, and a bibliography
with essays by a number of the academys wellknown literary critics such as Alfred Kazin and
George Steiner.
In Bech Is Back (1982) the Jewish writer reembarks on foreign travels only to meet further
878
UPDIKE, JOHN
cultural misunderstandings, and in the collections final story, White on White, experiences familiar inadequacy in comparing himself
to the presumed artistic achievements of a pantheon similar to that in his induction into a
heavenly group in the first volume. In the last
volume in the series, Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel
(1998), the author finally receives the Nobel Prize,
only to be troubled by gradual recognition that it
is the result of political maneuver and compromise. He remains beset by existential panic in a
Czech episode echoing Kafka, and throughout
by the issues of infidelity and multiple sexual
attractions that have led him romantically back
and forth between two sisters.
Updike even reinvestigates the seemingly
fixed characters created by other writers, re-examining classic works by both Shakespeare and
Hawthorne. In Gertrude and Claudius (2000a),
Updike is sympathetic to Hamlets mother and
stepfather and portrays Hamlet himself as not
only moody but also antagonistic to his own
father. Updike emphasizes this process of artistic
reworking by organizing his narrative around
three different source materials for the Hamlet
legend. As the reader moves through the novels
three parts, Hamlets mother changes from the
adolescent Gerutha on the verge of marriage
from the historian Saxo Grammaticus to the
adulterous Geruthe of Histoires tragiques, to
Shakespeares Gertrude in the days before
Shakespeares play is set. Hamlets father, Hamlet
Sr. (the ghost in Shakespeare), is a significantly
more fleshed-out character in Updikes novel, at
first Horwendil, a conquering hero ominously
nicknamed by his brother Feng the Hammer,
more sexually aggressive and less sympathetic
than Shakespeares ghostly figure, far more commanding, but also cold and officious. Feng, a
promiscuous adventurer and an exciting alternative for an often neglected Geruthe, is the figure
who becomes Claudius. These characters are set in
a medieval Denmark with an archaic and formal
English, but observed in scenes and interior
monologues that disclose contemporary needs
and attitudes.
Updike has similarly reinvented the classic
Scarlet Letter in a trilogy: Month of Sundays
(1975), Rogers Version (1986), and S. (1988).
Updike comically reconfigures the three primary
characters, Dimmesdale, Roger (Chillingworth),
and S., a relative of Hester. The three exist in a

modern world of universities, motels, computers,
and ashrams that questions the ministers religious seriousness amid an interest in sexual dalliance, that reworks the scientist prying into the
lives of others, and that offers a contemporary
feminist who is a rebel and escapist.
One of Updikes primary concerns is the
potential for religious transformation as articulated by a serious Christian theology. He writes
in a literary era often characterized by critiques
of religious orthodoxy that find belief in God
absurd, as one can see in Hellers Catch-22
(1961) and DeLillos White Noise (1985). While
Heller and DeLillo seem to endorse a comic
atheism, many of Updikes characters are
searching for or modeling a path to God. While
Rabbit regularly assaults the moral values and
mores of his communities, he also seeks for
something that wants me to find it. Similarly,
Piet Hanema in Couples (1968), despite his
adulteries, is the only adult member of his family
found regularly praying by himself in a
Catholic church.
Updike died of lung cancer on January 27,
2009.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); DeLillo,
Don (AF); Heller, Joseph (AF); Social-Realist
Fiction (AF)

Bloom, H. (ed.) (1987). John Updike: Modern Critical
Views. New York: Chelsea House.
Boswell, M. (2001). John Updikes Rabbit Tetralogy:
Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press.
Howard, J. (1966). Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?
Life, 74 (Nov. 4).
Hunt, G. (1980). John Updike and the Three Great
Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans.
Pritchard, W. H. (2000). Updike: Man of Letters. South
Royalton, VT: Steerforth.
Ristoff, D. I. (1998). John Updikes Rabbit at Rest:
Appropriating History. New York: Peter Lang.
Schiff, J. A. (1998). John Updike Revisited. New York:
Twayne.
Updike, J. (1959). The Poorhouse Fair. New York:
Knopf.
Updike, J. (1960). Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1963). The Centaur. New York: Knopf.

Updike, J. (1968). Couples. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1970). Bech: A Book. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1971). Rabbit Redux. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1975). Month of Sundays. New York:
Knopf.
Updike, J. (1981). Rabbit Is Rich. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1982). Bech Is Back. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1984). The Witches of Eastwick. New York:
Knopf.
Updike, J. (1986). Rogers Version. New York:
Knopf.
Updike, J. (1988). S. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1989). Self-Consciousness. New York:
Knopf.
Updike, J. (1990). Rabbit at Rest. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1992). Memories of the Ford Administration.
New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1996). Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf.
New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1998). Bech at Bay. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (1999). More Matter. New York: Knopf.
Updike, J. (2000a). Gertrude and Claudius. New York:
Knopf.
Updike, J. (2000b). Rabbit Remembered. New York:
Knopf.
Updike, J. (2006). Terrorist. New York: Knopf.
Utopian and Dystopian

Fiction
MARK S. FERRARA
Although the genre of utopian literature in the

West begins with Platos The Republic (c.375
70 BC), fictional depictions of better places have
grown rapidly since the publication of Thomas
Mores Utopia (1516). American literary utopias
of the twentieth century respond to modernity in
surprising ways by taking a diversity of forms
(including one populated exclusively by women
who reproduce asexually and another that employs behavioral engineering to improve social
cohesion). From the nineteenth century onward,
American literary depictions of dystopian worlds
reflect a century of war and increasing technological and governmental intrusions into social life.
Thomas More coined the term utopia
(meaning no place in Greek), although his
intentional homophonic pun on eutopia,
(good place) deliberately provides a double
meaning. Because contemporary usage of the
879
term utopian has come to connote an impractical scheme of social regeneration, as something
ideal or chimerical, it has given rise to the
literary dystopia, meaning a depiction of a bad
place. Although an ultimate definition of utopia
has eluded scholars, a literary text may be said to
be utopian when the work portrays a society
earthly or otherworldly that springs from a
radical dissatisfaction with the imperfections of
the world, and concomitantly proclaims not the
perfection but amelioration of society. Literary
utopias emphasize the dialectical tension
between the ideal order and status quo. Dystopian
(or anti-utopian) fiction relies on a similar opposition between the status quo and a darker social
vision, though in this case to reinforce the notion
that the current age is itself the best of all
possible worlds and to advocate the abandonment
of the utopian project as unrealistic. Although
the great number and variety of utopian
and dystopian literary texts defy easy categorization, both imply reference back to the world
of concrete acts and familiar experience that
fantasy excludes.
Generally speaking, in the nineteenth century
the United States witnessed an increase in literary
utopianism (as well as intentional or experimental communities such as Oneida in New York and
Amana in Iowa) informed by a diversity of communal and socialist principles. The first full
American utopia, Equality: or, A History of
Lithconia (1802), was published in the Philadelphia weekly the Temple of Reason. In this society,
all land is held in common, there is no money, and
women have full rights. Furthermore, an ambivalence toward both city and country life results in
a preference for an even geographical population
distribution with all amenities available locally.
Edward Bellamys Looking Backward (1888)
was one of the most influential utopian texts
from American writers who came later. In it the
protagonist, Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 and
reawakens in the year 2000 to a radically transformed Boston, Massachusetts. Crime, war, class
struggle, competition, and other social ills have
been eliminated, and the state now guarantees the
nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from cradle to grave. Bellamy, drawing heavily from the late-nineteenthcentury nationalist movement in the United
States, portrays the beneficial effects of the
880
centralization of communication, production,

and distribution.
In addition to this emphasis on communal
living and equitable distribution of resources,
itself a critique of the perceived shortcomings of
industrialization (such as exploitation of labor
and increasing environmental destruction),
American utopianists in the twentieth century
explored the religious, psychological, scientific,
and even sexual dimensions of social reform in
their depictions of fictional societies. For instance,
in Walter Henrys Equitania: or, The Land of
Equity (1914), four parties consisting of Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims all land
simultaneously on an island. In light of the circumstances, they all agree that religion is a
personal matter that should be separated from
the joint government they formed. Since they
deem abiding happiness the aim of existence,
selfishness, which is wholly incompatible with it,
must be eliminated and moral virtue cultivated
so that ones desires might be satisfied without
hurting others. In this religious utopia, morality is
the sum of all individual duties owed to the
community and the natural world.
Active in the American suffrage movement,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated that women
work outside of the home as a way to achieve
economic independence and freedom from the
confines of traditional maternal social roles. In
Herland (1915), and to a lesser extent in its sequel
With Her in Ourland (1916), Gilman depicts a
bucolic world populated by sturdy and highly
intelligent women who procreate through virgin-birthing (parthenogenesis) and practice a
one-child policy so as not to exhaust their limited
natural resources. As in many works of utopian
fiction, such as Samuel Butlers Erewhon (1872),
the Herland utopian community is geographically isolated and unknown to the outside world
until intrepid adventurers, in this case three men,
stumble upon it. Discovery, of course, threatens
the very existence of these utopian societies (even
merely encountering inhabitants from the outside
world is considered potentially contaminating).
This is all the more true of the three men who find
Herland for they are a sexual, as well as social,
threat to the Herland communal way of life
and religious worship of the chthonian mother
goddess (and its accompanying ethic of love
and service).
In Walden Two (1948), B. F. Skinner, a Harvard

psychologist, describes a behaviorally engineered
utopia that actually inspired a number of communal societies, including Twin Oaks in Virginia
and East Wind in Missouri. The fictional Walden
Two community contains 1,000 people living
together with the stated goals of happiness and
an active drive toward the future. T. E. Frazier, the
fictional founder of Walden Two, declares that his
community will only be satisfied with cultivating
a most alert and active group intelligence.
To achieve this goal, behavioral engineering is
employed to affect a change in human nature
through the use of positive reinforcement. This
society is governed by a board of planners, who
along with managers, workers, and scientists
make up the four classes of the Walden Two social
structure. Members endeavor to lower consumption and thereby raise the living standard for
everyone, and by working together and practicing
a code of behavior based on the principles of
liberty, equality, and brotherhood, they strive to
increase leisure time by distributing social
responsibility.
By contrast, in Island (1962) Aldous Huxley,
who lived in the United States from 1937 until his
death in 1963, posits the possibility of a mental
utopia, or eupsychia. Pala is a remote paradisal
island in isolation from, and in juxtaposition to,
the decidedly dystopian outside world characterized by Rendang and ruled by a colonel given
to the pleasures of vanity and bullying. Huxley
draws from Eastern traditions in formulating
the Palanese religion, particularly the Mahayana
Buddhism that he embraced in the late 1930s.
Palanese Buddhism advocates the development of
concentration (dhyana) in order to experience the
fundamental unity of subject and object (resulting
in prajna, or wisdom). On this unified field of
perception, one meets the stranger as the other
half of your own self, and the same as your notself. This non-dualistic principle informs every
aspect of Palanese religion. To speed young inhabitants along in this direct experience of the
divine, they ingest moksha medicine once a year to
evoke mystical experiences. In this light, the ending of the novel, in which Rendang invades Pala,
reinforces the notion that utopia for Huxley is an
internal and completely subjective state carried
within the enlightened individual regardless of
external factors.
In Always Coming Home (1985), Ursula Le

Guin posits a post-apocalyptic society that, like
Island, locates the ideal social order among a
people, in this case the Kesh, who emphasize
oneness with nature and value community
over competition. They survive contact with the
warlike Condors and their authoritarian, patriarchal, and class-based society. While the Kesh
employ inventions of our civilization (such as a
massive computer network called City of Mind),
they reject government, cities, and human domination of the natural environment. Her other
novels The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)
further explore the genres possibilities.
Dystopian (or anti-utopian) fictions, however,
rely on an opposition between the status quo and
a darker social vision either to critique the
excesses of the current age or, more commonly
and conversely, to reinforce the notion that the
current age is itself the best of all possible worlds.
In the case of the latter, the dystopian vision is at
war with the utopian impulse for a just and free
society (advocating instead the abandonment of
the utopian contestation as unrealistic). Common tropes of the dystopian novel help to express
dread at the results or implications of the utopian
project. For instance, the influential novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by the English writer
George Orwell deliberately projects the immediate present into the immediate future in his
depiction of an authoritarian surveillance government. Likewise, this dystopia responds to the
widespread technological imperative from World
War I onward by pointing out its incongruity with
moral, social, and political progress.
Kurt Vonneguts first novel, Player Piano
(1952), also takes place in a near-future American
society whose increasing mechanization replaces
jobs once held by the lower class and creates a class
conflict with the engineers and managers who keep
it running. Cats Cradle (1963) depicts an equally
grim future after scientific experimentation and
military incompetence render the world unlivable.
Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932) features
the development of a society that uses biological
and psychological techniques, in conjunction with
the drug soma, to satiate its members.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) by
the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick responds to events in the 1960s and 1970s by
881
positing a second American civil war between an

increasingly global police state and revolutionary
students who live in hedonistic subterranean
communes that permit free sex and the use of
recreational drugs. The revolutionary students
eventually surrender and voluntarily enter
forced-labor camps. His Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? (1968) also presents a grim future
of ecological disaster and technological insanity.
Octavia E. Butler sets Parable of the Sower
(1993) in a dystopian America beset by disease
and madness caused by the ills of global warming
and racial tensions. In the Los Angeles area, those
still employed wall themselves in their homes to
keep out the hordes of unemployed who threaten
them. Like other dystopias that resist the characteristic subversion of utopia, in Parable of the
Sower the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, suffers
from hyper-empathy, a genetic condition that
causes her to experience the pain of others as her
own, and she dreams of a better place after she is
forced from her home by the unemployed hordes.
He, She and It (1991) by Marge Piercy also
features a female protagonist. Set in the mid
twenty-first century when North America has
become a toxic wasteland controlled by monolithic corporations that replaced the government
and whose workers have become indentured servants, a few free-towns survive that essentially
become utopian enclaves. The Road (2006) by
Cormac McCarthy, likewise set in a post-apocalyptic United States, follows the trials of a father
and son who traverse a barren landscape scarred
by a nuclear cataclysm that burns forests, destroys
wildlife, and covers everything in gray ash.
Scavenging to subsist, the father struggles to keep
his son alive in an unrelentingly bleak world
where famine has left most human survivors
bereft of morality and their self-centeredness
threatens the very existence of the species.
The issues of the utopian and dystopian formulae play themselves out in distinctly American
ways in terms of the longstanding themes of the
American dream and the American nightmare.
While not a strictly utopian or dystopian novel,
F. Scott Fitzgeralds examination of the American
dream and nightmare is brilliantly elaborated in
The Great Gatsby (1925). In fact, throughout the
twentieth century a diverse group of writers has
developed these themes through manipulations
of the utopian and dystopian conventions. These
882
include Jack Londons The Iron Heel (1907), Ayn

Rands Anthem (1938), Nathanael Wests The Day
of the Locust (1939), Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit
451 (1953), Thomas Bergers Regiment of Women
(1973), and Paul Austers In the Country of Last
Things (1987). Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler, a pair of writers working in a popular
genre, have also addressed the same themes in
their dystopian fictions The Maltese Falcon (1930)
and The Little Sister (1949).
Critical and theoretical approaches to utopian
and dystopian literature in the twentieth century
were as various as the depictions of other worlds
that they seek to critique. The first section of Joyce
Hertzlers book History of Utopian Thought
(1923) chronologically treats the ethico-religious
dimensions of literary utopias, beginning with the
Old Testament prophets, whose messianic vision
and ethical demands constitute a utopian vision.
Hertzlers survey ends with utopian fictions from
the early twentieth century. In the 1940s, two
studies opened new critical horizons. In Paths in
Utopia (1949), Martin Buber explores the utopian
wish for what should be in the context of the same
longing in Hebrew prophetic eschatology for a
perfect time and perfect place. Buber locates this
desire for right order in science as well as in
utopian socialism. His messianic eschatology is
tied to a belief in the redemption of the world
through a leap out of the realm of necessity into
that of freedom.
In Ideology and Utopia (1946), the sociologist
Karl Mannheim identifies four utopian mentalities in social history: the utopian Chiliasm of the
Anabaptists, the Liberal Humanitarian utopia,
the Conservative utopia, and the SocialistCommunist utopia. Mannheims sociological
approach became a template for scholars seeking
a typological understanding of literary utopianism. Paul Ricoeurs phenomenological and hermeneutic interpretation, Lectures in Ideology and
Utopia (1986), drew on some of Mannheims
notions.
Ernst Blochs three-volume study, The Philosophy of Hope (1959), mixes the religiosity of utopia
with materialist Marxism. In volume 1, Bloch
examines how we learn to hope through our
youthful daydreams of beautiful foreign lands and
to fantasize about the wonderful adventures the
future shall bring. In middle age, our daydreams
help ease regrets by depicting what could have
happened had we taken a different path. In our

winter years, observes Bloch, we wish for wine and
purse, evoke our youth, and hope for physical
health into maturity. This anticipatory consciousness may be found in every field of human endeavor from fairy tale to film, and from architecture to
technology. Bloch also examines literary utopia
from Diogenes to Edward Bellamy in volume 2 of
The Philosophy of Hope, and then reflects on the
utopian content of various religions.
Robert Elliots historical study of literary
utopia, The Shape of Utopia (1970), traces utopian
satire from the ancient Greeks through the twentieth century, while Dorothy Donnellys Patterns
of Order and Utopia (1998) and Miriam EliavFeldons Realistic Utopias (1982) take typological
approaches to literary utopianism. The Concept of
Utopia (1990) by Ruth Levitas is notable for its
acknowledgments of the problematic nature of
defining utopia and of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of utopian studies.
Specifically dystopian critiques include Technology and Utopian Thought (1971) by Mulford
Sibley, which investigates of the role of technology
in literary texts such as Huxleys Brave New World
and Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Moylans
Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), which explores
the poetics and politics of dystopian narratives,
including the defining characteristics of the new
form of the critical dystopia of the 1980s and
1990s. In terms of future critical directions, because social, political, scientific, and gender-based
approaches to literary utopias and dystopias have
received the bulk of recent critical attention, the
trend is toward more interdisciplinary studies,
specifically those that probe the religious and
philosophical dimensions of literary utopias and
dystopias.
Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction
(AF); Speculative Fiction (AF)
Baker-Smith, D.(ed.) (1987). Between Dream and
Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Bellamy, E. (1996). Looking Backward. New York:
Dover.
Bloch, E. (1996). The Principle of Hope, 3 vols.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Buber, M. (1949). Paths in Utopia. Boston: Beacon.

Butler, O. E. (2000). Parable of the Sower. New York:
Grand Central.
Dick, P. K. (1993). Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
New York: Vintage.
Donnelly, D. (1998). Patterns of Order and Utopia.
Eliav-Feldon, M. (1982). Realistic Utopias: The Ideal
Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance. Oxford:
Elliott, R. C. (1970). The Shape of Utopia. Chicago:
Firchow, P. (2001). Brave at Last: Huxleys Western and
Eastern Utopias. Aldous Huxley Annual, 1.
Gilman, C. P. (1988). Herland. New York: Dover.
Gregory C., & Sargent, L. T. (eds.) (1999). The Utopia
Reader. New York: New York University Press.
Henry, W. (1971). Equitania: or, The Land of Equity.
New York: Arno.
Huxley, A. (1946). Brave New World. New York: Harper.
Huxley, A. (1962). Island. New York: Perennial.
Levitas, R. (1990). The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse:
Le Guin, U. (1985). Always Coming Home. New York:
Harper and Row.
Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia: An
Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York:
Harcourt.
883
More, T. (1999). Utopia. In Three Early Modern

Utopias (ed. S. Bruce). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Moylan, T. (2000). Scraps of Untainted Sky: Science
Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Negley, G., & Patrick, J. M. (1952). The Quest for Utopia:
An Anthology of Imaginary Societies. New York:
Henry Schuman.
Patrick, J. M., & Negley, G. R. (1968). A Definition of
Utopia. In W. Nelson (ed.), Twentieth Century
Interpretations of Utopia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Piercy, M. (1991). He, She and It. New York: Knopf.
Plato. (1945). The Republic of Plato (trans. F. M.
Cornford). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1986). Lectures on Ideology and Utopia
(ed. G. H. Taylor). New York: Columbia University
Press.
Sargent, L. T. (1976). Themes in Utopian Fiction in
English Before Wells. Science Fiction Studies 3(3),
27582.
Sayer, K., & Moore, J. (eds.) (2000). Science Fiction:
Critical Frontiers. New York: St. Martins.
Sibley, M. (1971). Technology and Utopian Thought.
Minneapolis: Burgess.
Skinner, B. F. (1969). Walden Two. New York:
Macmillan.
Vonnegut, K. (1952). Player Piano. New York:
Scribners.
V
Van Vechten, Carl
JUSTIN D. EDWARDS
The American novelist, photographer, journalist,

and critic Carl Van Vechten (18801964) was an
advocate of modernist music, dance, and literature in the early years of the twentieth century. His
literary output included several clever and amusing novels about the wealthy and privileged urbanites of the 1920s for which he received critical
acclaim. Van Vechten, however, is best known for
his promotion and support of the visual artists,
dramatic performers, and writers in the cultural
movement that came to be known as the Harlem
Renaissance. His financial assistance, critical endorsement, and general enthusiasm helped to
publicize the creative production of African
Americans throughout the 1920s.
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Van Vechten was
educated at the University of Chicago. He then
moved to New York City and worked as a theater
and music critic for the Broadway Magazine and
the New York Times. His critical writings from this
period are collected in Red (1925b) and Excavations (1926a). In New York literary circles, he
helped rediscover Herman Melville and introduced Ronald Firbank to the United States; he
also helped Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens
to publish their first collections of poetry, and
was a tireless promoter of Gertrude Stein. Additionally, he assisted in the publishing ventures of
countless African American writers (including
Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Nella
Larsen), and made a substantial contribution
to the advancement of black scholarship in the
James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of

Negro Arts.
In 1924, Van Vechten published the comic
novel The Tattooed Countess, which depicted life
in small-town Iowa. This work continued the
satirical style and campy tone he had developed
in his first successful novel, Peter Wiffle (1922),
which depicts a young man and his adventures in
Paris and was based on his own experiences in an
era of elegant decadence. It was at this time that he
became interested in African American culture,
and he began visiting the parties, speakeasies,
cabarets, and nightclubs of jazz age Harlem. In
1924, he met the African American novelist and
diplomat James Weldon Johnson, and it was
through this luminary, one of the founders of
the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), that Van Vechten was
introduced to many prominent names in the arts
who would play important roles in the Harlem
Renaissance. It was these uptown journeys that
inspired Van Vechten to write Nigger Heaven
(1926b), a novel about the so-called authentic
black life in Harlem. This text offers a voyeuristic
gaze into a culture that was, according to Van
Vechten, less restrained by Nordic rationalism.
Sexual liaisons take place throughout the novel:
white men solicit black prostitutes, while white
patrons cruise the nightclubs in search of erotic
possibilities. Ostensibly, the novel revolves
around a love triangle plot, but really served to
offer white readers a glimpse into the political and
social life in Harlems large black community.
Nigger Heaven was a commercial success. But it
also received harsh criticism, with some critics

VIDAL, GORE
referring to it as sensationalist, fatuous, and

amoral. Moreover, many African American intellectuals and political leaders (such as W. E. B.
Du Bois) condemned the novel as an unjust and
unrealistic depiction of black culture.
Van Vechtens other novels depict characters
leading decadent and extravagant lifestyles. The
Blind Bow-Boy (1923) and Firecrackers (1925a),
for instance, represent the sophisticated and artistic set of New York, offering definitive portraits
of the excesses and recklessness of the Jazz Age.
Spider Boy (1928) is a satirical novel about dissolute Hollywood stardom in the superficial
world of the American film industry. Likewise,
Parties (1930) is a satirical portrait of wealthy
New Yorkers and their endless bouts of drunken
parties and utter boredom. These novels are
particularly interesting because they utilize and
develop an urban and camp sensibility that is
often associated with gay culture.
885
Van Vechten, C. (1925a). Firecrackers. New York:

Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1925b). Red. New York: Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1926a). Excavations. New York:
Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1926b). Nigger Heaven. New York:
Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1928). Spider Boy. New York: Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1930). Parties. New York: Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1932). Sacred and Profane Memories.
New York: Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1955). Fragments From an Unwritten
Autobiography. New Haven: Yale University
Library.
Van Vechten, C. (1974). The Dance Writings of Carl Van
Vechten (ed. P. Padgette). New York: Dance
Horizons.
Van Vechten, C. (1979). Keep A-Inchin Along:
Selected Writings of Carl Van Vechten About Black
Art and Letters (ed. B. Kellner). Westport, CT:
Greenwood.
Van Vechten, C. (1987). Letters of Carl Van Vechten
(ed. B. Kellner). New Haven: Yale University Press.

Harlem Renaissance (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
Vidal, Gore
NIKOLAI ENDRES
Edwards, J. D. (2001). Carl Van Vechtens Sexual

Tourism in Jazz Age Harlem. In Exotic Journeys:
Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature.
Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,
pp. 14255.
Ikonne, C. (1981). From DuBois to Van Vechten: The
Early New Negro Literature. Westport, CT:
Greenwood.
Kellner, B. (1968). Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent
Decades. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Kellner, B. (1989). Carl Van Vechtens Black
Renaissance. In. A. Singh, W. S. Shriver, & S. Brodwin
(eds.), Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations. New York:
Garland, pp. 2333.
Lueders, E. (1965). Carl Van Vechten. New York:
Twayne.
Scruggs, C. (1987). Crab Antics and Jacobs Ladder:
Aaron Douglass Two Views of Nigger Heaven. In
V. A. Kramer (ed.), The Harlem Renaissance Reexamined. New York: AMS, pp. 14984.
Van Vechten, C. (1922). Peter Wiffle. New York:
Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1923). The Blind Bow-Boy. New York:
Knopf.
Van Vechten, C. (1924). The Tattooed Countess.
New York: Knopf.
The prolific Gore Vidal is one of Americas most

controversial writers: a political liberal who corresponded with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy
McVeigh and was invited to his execution; a
critic of the hacks of academe about whom
he complains they have slighted him; a classicist
who claims that the scandalous Roman satirists
Petronius and Apuleius are his favorite models;
and a gay rights pioneer who believes that
homosexual should be an adjective, not a noun.
In 1968, as an ABC commentator at the infamous Democratic National Convention in
Chicago, Vidal confronted his political nemesis,
William F. Buckley, Jr., insulting him as a cryptoNazi (Buckley snapped back with You queer).
A few years later, on The Dick Cavett Show, Vidal
engaged in fistfights with another nemesis,
Norman Mailer, whom he implicitly linked to
Charles Manson.
Born in 1925, Gore Vidal comes from an
illustrious family. His grandfather was a senator
from Oklahoma, his father an aviation pioneer,
and his mother a famous socialite whose lovers
included Clark Gable. Vidal attended Phillips
886
VIDAL, GORE
Exeter Academy and was stationed in the Aleutians during World War II. Twice, Vidal ran
(unsuccessfully) for Congress. During his long
career, he became friends with Amelia Earhart,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, Paul
Newman, Anas Nin, and Jackie Kennedy. Vidal
spent half his life abroad in Italy, but when his
long-time companion, Howard Austen, died, he
returned to Los Angeles.
Vidals main achievement rests on his
American Chronicles: Burr (1973); Lincoln
(1984); 1876 (1976); Empire (1987); Hollywood
(1990); Washington, D.C. (1967); and The Golden
Age (2000), which collectively span two centuries
of American history. According to Vidal, we
cannot know the present if we ignore the past;
otherwise, we live in the United States of Amnesia.
Burr views the honored American patriots
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and
Alexander Hamilton through the lens of a demonized traitor. Lincoln explodes the sentimental
myth of honest Abe and ends with a Shakespearean tyrant who had sacrificed the Constitution and abused presidential authority by suspending habeas corpus. In 1876, readers find a
contested Electoral College, a stolen presidency,
and the end of Reconstruction. Empire signals
Vidals conviction that the Founding Fathers
republican ideals were being betrayed in favor of
imperialist ambitions, here embodied by William
Randolph Hearsts media colossus and Teddy
Roosevelts colonialism. Hollywood centers on
the emerging movie industrys pervasive illusion,
where all reality can be invented and all history
revised. The Golden Age cements the United
States transition into empire, through both
Franklin Delano Roosevelts machinations to involve a reluctant nation in World War II
and Harry Trumans Cold War against the
Soviet Union.
Vidal has also written inventions, wide-ranging avant garde satires that parody academic
pretentiousness and postmodernist jargon. Myra
Breckinridge (1968), a model text for queer theory,
explores fluid sexualities, reveling in a carnivalesque world of high camp. The City and the Pillar
(1965 [1948]), on the other hand, depicts the gay
protagonist as virtually indistinguishable from
straight men; hailed as the first American gay
novel, City appeared the same year as the Kinsey
Report and created an outrage, leading the
New York Times to refuse to review Vidals future

books. In the irreverent Live From Golgotha
(1992), subtitled The Gospel According to Gore
Vidal, religion becomes mere entertainment, and
the crucifixion is exposed as a fraud and broadcast
retroactively to re-establish the certainty of faith.
Hollywood made a deep impression on Vidal,
who realized that the novel was on its way out
not because there were no great writers, but
because people, ever more stultified, stopped
reading. He consequently composed television
plays, most notably Visit to a Small Planet
(1955) and The Best Man (1960), which satirize
the McCarthy witch-hunts and the political jockeying for presidential nominations. Vidal also
wrote the screenplays for Ben Hur (1959, with
his name missing from the credits), injecting a
distinctly homoerotic scene between Ben-Hur
and Messala, and Suddenly, Last Summer
(1959). Moreover, in the 1950s, Vidal, under the
pseudonym Edgar Box, produced popular mystery fiction, and in the recent play On the March
to the Sea (2004), Vidal condemns the Iraq War
as being as unnecessary as the American Civil
War.
Vidal has consistently practiced the high art of
essay writing, with his pieces collected in United
States: Essays 19521992 (recipient of the National
Book Award in 1993) and The Last Empire: Essays
19922000. The Twelve Caesars (1959), like his
novel Julian (1964) about the apostate emperor,
reveals his fascination with ancient Rome. The
Holy Family (1967) takes issue with the glorification of the Kennedy White House as Camelot,
and in Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1981),
Vidal argues that pro-Israel evangelists have become gay bashers. Monotheism and Its Discontents (1992) criticizes the abuse of religion
for justifying slavery, the oppression of women,
and intolerance toward different denominations.
More recently, Vidal has commented on the
impeachment of Bill Clinton, the BushCheney
junta, the loss of civil liberties in the national
security state, and drugs, which, Vidal contends,
should be legalized and sold at cost, thus eradicating addiction and decreasing crime.
Modern Fiction and Hollywood (AF);
Queer Modernism (AF); Television and
Fiction (AF)
V I R A M O N T E S , H E L E N A M A R I A

Altman, D. (2005). Gore Vidals America. Cambridge:
Polity.
Baker, S., & Gibson, C. S. (1997). Gore Vidal: A Critical
Endres, N. (2004). Roman Fever: Petronius Satyricon
and Gore Vidals The City and the Pillar. Ancient
Narrative, 4, 99141.
Frank, M. (2005). How to Be an Intellectual in the
Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal. Durham, NC:
Jshi, S. T. (2007). Gore Vidal: A Comprehensive
Bibliography. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.
Kaplan, F. (1999). Gore Vidal: A Biography. New York:
Doubleday.
Parini, J. (ed.) (1992). Gore Vidal: Writer Against the
Grain. New York: Columbia University Press.
Vidal, G. (1964). Julian. Boston: Little, Brown.
Vidal, G. (1965). The City and the Pillar [1948], rev. edn.
Vidal, G. (1967). Washington, D.C. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Vidal, G. (1968). Myra Breckinridge. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Vidal, G. (1973). Burr. New York: Random House.
Vidal, G. (1976). 1876. New York: Random House.
Vidal, G. (1984). Lincoln. New York: Random House.
Vidal, G. (1987). Empire. New York: Random House.
Vidal, G. (1990). Hollywood. New York: Random
House.
Vidal, G. (1992). Live From Golgotha. New York:
Random House.
Vidal, G. (1993). United States: Essays 19521992.
Vidal, G. (1995). Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York:
Random House.
Vidal, G. (2000). The Golden Age. New York:
Doubleday.
Vidal, G. (2001). The Last Empire: Essays 19922000.
Viramontes, Helena Mara

KATHY JURADO
Chicana writer, community organizer, and academic, Helena Mara Viramontes was born on
February 26, 1954 in East Los Angeles, California
to a working-class family of Mexican descent.
With a writing career that spans nearly three
decades, Viramontes stands amongst the most
celebrated contemporary Chicana/o authors.
Her published works consist of a broad spectrum
of writings that include coediting (with Maria
887
Herrera-Sobek) two prominent works of criticism that are Chicana centered: Chicana Creativity and Criticism (1988) and Chicana (W)rites: On
Word and Film (1995). In 1993 she also wrote a
screenplay titled Paris Rats in E.L.A. that was
produced by the American Film Institute. Viramontes, however, is most widely known for her
works of fiction, which include the critically
acclaimed collection of short stories, The Moths
and Other Stories (1985), and her equally lauded
first novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1994). She has
recently published her long-awaited second novel, Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), which has
received positive praise by reviewers.
Growing up during the 1960s in East Los
Angeles one of the epicenters of the Chicano
Movement undoubtedly shaped and informed
Viramontess personal and professional life. Viramontes attended and graduated from Garfield
High School, which was one of the five schools
that participated in the Chicano Blowouts of
1968. The Blowouts, which constituted a series
of student-organized walkouts that protested
against the unequal conditions of East Los Angeles public schools, provided Viramontes with a
dynamic introduction to social activism and community organizing that remains evident in her
written work and commitment to student mentorship. In 1975 Viramontes earned her BA from
Immaculate Heart College in California and
shortly thereafter was accepted into the MFA
program at the University of California, Irvine.
She left the program in 1981, during which time
she continued to write and successfully published
several short stories in magazines. Viramontes
returned several years later to University of
California, Irvine and completed her graduate
work in the creative writing program, receiving
her MFA in 1994.
Issues of social justice and the resilience of the
Mexican American community in spite of social
and economic oppression comprise a prominent
focus in her works of fiction. From tough,
urban gang bangers to humble migrant workers,
Viramontes crafts her characters with depth,
complexity, and dignity, managing to avoid any
replication of stereotypes. Acting like a recurring
character in many of her works is the city of Los
Angeles, which is frequently a backdrop that
constitutes a significant social and cultural landscape that informs her narratives. In particular,
888
VIZENOR, GERALD
Viramontes is concerned with representing a

kaleidoscope of everyday experiences and challenges that Chicanas face within both mainstream
Anglo society and the Chicano community.
Viramontess first book of short stories, The
Moths and Other Stories, sketches the lives of
Chicanas at different ages, within a variety of
contexts and circumstances. Within this collection, two stories are most frequently anthologized
and the subject of literary criticism: the title story,
The Moths, and The Cariboo Cafe. In The
Moths, a 14-year-old girl is asked to care for her
dying grandmother and lovingly honors her duty
even while questioning the oppressive gender
roles imposed upon her by an overbearing father.
In Cariboo Cafe, Viramontes showcases a fragmented narrative that weaves a multiplicity of
voices in a story about a Central American woman
refugee told from three different perspectives.
This narrative sketch of a mother fleeing the death
squads from her native El Salvador that have
murdered her young son highlights a unique
Central American immigrant experience not
often addressed by Chicana/o authors.
Viramontess first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus,
leaves the urban setting of Los Angeles and instead
offers the vast, rural landscape of the agricultural
fields of California. The story of 13-year-old
Estrella is the foundation of this Bildungsroman
that accounts the experience of a migrating family
of farm workers as they follow the harvest circuit.
In what has become emblematic of Viramontess
narrative aesthetic for her two novels, Under
the Feet of Jesus is written in a fragmented,
non-linear format forming a framework that
allows for the past and present to come together,
as well as providing a space for multiple voices
and perspectives.
In her most recent novel, Their Dogs Came With
Them, Viramontes returns to Los Angeles during
the turbulent 1960s and 1970s when urban renewal and the construction of freeways uprooted
entire communities. Once again, women are at
the heart of the narrative. Bound together as
residents of the same community, Viramontes
deftly weaves together the lives of four women
who do not know each other, but who inhabit the
same space and witness the literal gutting of
their neighborhood. Viramontes ascribes the
bulldozers with zoomorphic qualities such as
having teeth and muzzles, thus highlighting
the violence of deterritorialization. Stylistically

speaking, the novel exemplifies Viramontess
mastery of her literary craft.
Helena Mara Viramontes is the recipient of
several awards, which include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1989), a Sundance
Institute Fellowship (1989), the John Dos Passos
Prize for Literature (1996), and the Luis Leal
Award (2006). Most recently, Viramontes was
named a 2007 USA Ford Fellow by United Artists.
Currently, she is a professor in the Department of
English at Cornell University, where she teaches
courses in creative writing and literature. Viramontes is undoubtedly one of the literary cornerstone authors within Chicana literature and the
broader field of US Latina/o literature.
and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF)
Carbonell, A. M. (1999). From Llorona to Gritona:
Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and
Cisneros. MELUS, 24(2), 5374.
Shea, A. (2003). Dont Let Them Make You Feel You
Did a Crime: Immigration Law, Labor Rights and
Farmworker Testimony. MELUS, 28(1), 12344.
Swyt, W. 1998. Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos
in Two Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes.
MELUS, 23(2), 189201.
Viramontes, H. M. (1985). The Moths and Other Stories.
Viramontes, H. M. (1995). Under the Feet of Jesus.
New York: Dutton.
Viramontes, H. M. (2007). Their Dogs Came With
Them. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Viramontes, H. M., & Herrera-Sobek, M. (eds.) (1988).
Chicana Creativity and Criticism. Houston: Arte
Publico.
Viramontes, H. M., & Herrera-Sobek, M. (eds.) (1996).
Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film. Berkeley: Third
Woman Press.
Vizenor, Gerald
BENJAMIN D. CARSON
Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) is one of the most

prolific Native American novelists, poets, essayists, and scholars working today, and his work has
had a profound influence on Native American
literature and scholarship. Author and editor
VIZENOR, GERALD
of over 30 works, Vizenor is a unique and at

times controversial figure in the world of Native
American discourse.
Gerald Vizenor, professor emeritus of the
University of California, Berkeley and professor
of American studies at the University of New
Mexico, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on
October 22, 1934 to LaVerne Peterson and
Clement Vizenor, a mixed-blood of French and
Anishinaabe ancestry. Although Clement Vizenor
came from White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, Gerald grew up in Minneapolis and was raised
by his paternal grandmother, Alice Beaulieu, and
several aunts and uncles after his mother abandoned him and his father was brutally murdered
in a Minneapolis alley. Vizenor dropped out of
high school shortly before graduation and joined
the US Army. On his way to Korea, during the
Korean War, Vizenor spent time in Japan and was
introduced to Japanese literature, which would
have a marked influence on all of his later writings. Vizenor would go on to publish a series of
books of original haiku, and Hiroshima Bugi:
Atomu 57 (2003) engages directly the literature
and politics of Japan. After teaching in China, in
1983 Vizenor wrote Griever: An American Monkey
King in China, which puts the Chinese Monkey
King in dialogue with the Anishinaabe trickster,
Naanabozho.
Throughout his career, Vizenor has worked
tirelessly to challenge dominant societys stereotypical definition of Indian; and to indicate that
dominant societys conception of Indian is
an invention by European American colonizers,
Vizenor writes Indian in lowercase and italics:
indian. The indian, Vizenor writes in Manifest
Manners (1999), is an occidental misnomer, an
overseas enactment that has no referent to real
native cultures or communities (p. vii). In other
words, representations of indians (e.g., as savages,
innately spiritual, drunkards, or a relic of the past)
have no historical referent but are characterizations used by the colonizers (and social scientists
in the academy) to dominate and victimize indigenous peoples.
Readers coming to Vizenor for the first time
need to be familiar with Vizenors specialized
vocabulary and style of writing. The central trope
in all of Vizenors novels is the trickster, a figure
that shatters certainties, challenges received ideas,
and exposes contradictions. Vizenor writes
889
trickster novels, and for Vizenor, since the

trickster is postmodern, the trickster novel is
postmodernist fiction. Stylistically, Vizenors novels (written in the oral tradition) are fragmented,
disjunctive, and digressive, and play with genre.
In Trickster of Liberty (1998b), Vizenor weaves
together fiction and theory, breaking off the
narrative to quote French theorists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists.
Vizenor writes to challenge manifest manners (a play on Manifest Destiny), or those
dominant racialist notions in discourse that attempt to render authentic constructed representations of indians and indian cultures. His
narratives of survivance a word of Vizenors
creation, bringing together survival and resistance record the active presence of Native
cultures (rather than their absence), and repudiate dominance, tragedy, and victimry. They challenge preconceived definitions, or terminal
creeds. If indians are an invention, postindians
are those who come after the colonial invention of
the indian has been exposed as an invention.
Postindians actively create a Native presence, an
act of self-fashioning that breaks free from the
past simulations of indianness.
Vizenors genre-busting novels are unique in
American literature and deserve widespread readership. They not only challenge readers to rethink
everything they think they know about indians,
but also invite us to imagine the limitless possibilities of imaginative literature.
Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF)

Blaeser, K. M. (1996). Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the
Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Coltelli, L. (1990). Winged Words: American Indian
Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Lee, A. R. (ed.) (2000). Loosening the Seams:
Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Bowling Green,
OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Velie, A. R. (1982). Four Indian Literary Masters:
N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko,
and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
890
VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T.
Vizenor, G. (1984). The People Named the Chippewa:

Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Vizenor, G. (1987). Griever: An American Monkey King
in China. Normal: Illinois State University Press.
Vizenor, G. (1990). Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles
[1978]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Vizenor, G. (1990). Interior Landscapes:
Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Vizenor, G. (1991a). The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press.
Vizenor, G. (1991b). Landfill Meditations: Crossblood
Stories. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
Vizenor, G. (1992). Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the
New World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Vizenor, G. (1993a). Narrative Chance: Postmodern
Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures.
Vizenor, G. (1993b). Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe
Lyric Poems and Stories. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Vizenor, G. (1998a). Fugitive Poses: Native American
Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln:
Vizenor, G. (1998b). The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal
Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Vizenor, G. (1999). Manifest Manners: Narratives on
Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Vizenor, G. (2000). Chancers: A Novel. Norman:
Vizenor, G. (2003). Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln:
Vizenor, G. (2006a). Almost Ashore: Selected Poems.
Cambridge: Salt.
Vizenor, G. (2006b). Bear Island: The War at Sugar
Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Vizenor, G. (2008). Survivance: Narratives of Native
Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Vollmann, William T.
ROBERT REBEIN
William T. Vollmann is a prolific author of fiction

and non-fiction whose sprawling, eclectic works
make use of an array of literary techniques to
explore themes of violence, poverty, addiction,
and the historical tendency of the strong to dominate the weak. Best known for the maximalist
length of his work (a typical Vollmann novel runs
700 pages, and one of his books, the seven-volume
Rising Up and Rising Down, exceeds 3,300 pages),

Vollmann has received high praise for his preternatural talent and ambition as a writer; however,
in-depth critical attention to his work has not
always followed, with the result that, 20 years into
his remarkable career, William Vollmann finds
himself in the paradoxical position of being one
of the highest regarded and yet least read authors
in contemporary American literature.
William Tanner Vollmann was born in
Santa Monica, California in 1959. In 1968, when
Vollmann was 9 years old, his younger sister Julie
drowned in a shallow pond in New Hampshire
while he was supposed to be watching her. After a
subsequent childhood filled with nightmares and
guilt, Vollmann attended Big Springs College and
Cornell University, where he studied comparative
literature and wrote a thesis treating, among other
subjects, Dante, deconstruction, and a group of
anti-nuclear protestors whose exploits he observed and reported on in voluminous detail.
Thus Vollmanns twin desires to be both a writer
and a witness were established early on.
In 1982, Vollmann left Cornell and traveled to
Afghanistan in an idealistic attempt to help the
Mujahedin in their struggle against the Soviet
Union, an experience that provided the material
for his first-written book, An Afghanistan Picture
Show: or, How I Saved the World (1992a). Back
from Afghanistan, Vollmann enrolled in graduate
classes at Berkeley before dropping out to take a
job as a computer programmer in Silicon Valley.
It was here, sleeping in his cubicle between
stints at the computer, that Vollmann wrote
his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels
(1987), a playful, metafictional satire that
inspired immediate comparisons to the novels of
Thomas Pynchon among other giants of literary
postmodernism.
However, the real breakthrough, at least in
terms of what we now regard as Vollmanns
signature stance and mode as an author, came
two years later with the publication of The Rainbow Stories (1989), a raw, visceral work that
combined reportorial and fictional techniques to
powerfully depict the lives of prostitutes,
drug addicts, and skinheads on the streets of
San Franciscos Tenderloin district. Subsequent
works in this mode Whores for Gloria (1991b),
Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs (1991a),
and The Butterfly Stories (1993) won Vollmann a
VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T.
sizable cult following, particularly among the

young, and inspired magazines such as Spin,
Esquire, and the New Yorker to underwrite his
further adventures in search of extreme subject
matter. Much of this later work is collected in The
Atlas (1996), which won the PEN USA West
Award, and Rising Up and Rising Down (2003),
Vollmanns long treatise on violence, which was
nominated for the National Book Critics Circle
Award.
In interviews and essays on the subject,
Vollmann has explained his penchant for dangerous situations and extreme subject matter by
remarking that frequently the extreme case illustrates the general case and sometimes it can
do this more forcefully and memorably than the
ordinary is able to do (McCaffery 10). This idea,
along with the notion that authors have a responsibility to portray important human problems
with accuracy and empathy, forms the backbone
of Vollmanns aesthetic as a writer.
That aesthetic is on prominent display in
Vollmanns Seven Dreams series of novels, an
extended, as yet unfinished work that promises
to chronicle the entire symbolic history of New
World conquest and settlement, from the arrival
of the Norse in Greenland in the tenth century to
our own centurys battles over land and oil in the
western United States. The first volume in the
series, The Ice-Shirt, appeared in 1990, followed
by Fathers and Crows in 1992, The Rifles in 1994,
and Argall in 2001. Three additional volumes, The
Poison-Shirt, The Dying Grass, and The CloudShirt, await completion. In these long, complex
works, Vollmann vaults back and forth across
time, juxtaposing history with myth and fiction
with autobiography, buttressing the whole with
hundreds of pages of glossaries and source notes.
The result is a dense, idiosyncratic work that has
been praised for its range and ambition even as
it has been derided as jumbled and overblown.
A more balanced and complete assessment of the
works place in the canon of American literature
will no doubt commence once the final volume in
the series appears.
In 2004, Larry McCaffery and Michael
Hemmingson published Expelled From Eden:
A William T. Vollmann Reader, a retrospective
anthology featuring some of Vollmanns most
representative and important work to date. In
2005, Vollmanns Europe Central, a long novel-in-
891
stories set in World War II-era Germany and

Russia, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Whether these milestones, together with the publication of an abridged version of Rising Up and
Rising Down in 2004, represent a turning point
in the history of Vollmanns critical reception
remains to be seen.
SEE ALSO: Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF);
Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF)

McCaffery, L. (ed.) (1993). Younger Writers Issue:
William T. Vollmann, Susan Daitch, David
Foster Wallace. Review of Contemporary Fiction
13(1), 967.
McCaffery, L., & Hemmingson, M. (eds.) (2004).
Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader.
New York: Thunders Mouth.
Vollman, W. T. (1987). You Bright and Risen Angels.
New York: Atheneum.
Vollman, W. T. (1989). The Rainbow Stories. New York:
Atheneum.
Vollman, W. T. (1990). The Ice-Shirt: A Book of North
American Landscapes, vol. 1 of Seven Dreams.
New York: Viking.
Vollman, W. T. (1991a). Thirteen Stories and Thirteen
Epitaphs. New York: Pantheon.
Vollman, W. T. (1991b). Whores for Gloria. New York:
Pantheon.
Vollman, W. T. (1992a). An Afghanistan Picture Show:
or, How I Saved the World. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Vollman, W. T. (1992b). Fathers and Crows, vol. 2 of
Seven Dreams. New York: Viking.
Vollman, W. T. (1993). Butterfly Stories: A Novel.
New York: Grove.
Vollman, W. T. (1994). The Rifles, vol. 6 of Seven
Dreams. New York: Viking.
Vollman, W. T. (1996). The Atlas. New York: Viking.
Vollman, W. T. (2000). The Royal Family. New York:
Viking.
Vollman, W. T. (2001). Argall, vol. 3 of Seven Dreams.
New York: Viking.
Vollman, W. T. (2003). Rising Up and Rising Down:
Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent
Means, unabridged edn. New York: McSweeneys.
Vollman, W. T. (2004). Rising Up and Rising Down:
Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent
Means, abridged edn. New York: Ecco.
Vollman, W. T. (2005). Europe Central. New York:
Viking.
892
VONNEGUT, KURT
Vollman, W. T. (2006). Uncentering the Earth:

Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Spheres. New York: Norton.
Vollman, W. T. (2007). Poor People. New York: Ecco.
Vollman, W. T. (2008). Riding Toward Everywhere.
New York: Ecco.
Vonnegut, Kurt
JAKE MATTOX
Kurt Vonnegut was a prolific, uniquely inventive,

and bestselling fiction writer, essayist, humorist,
and public presence. His writing combines ironic
dark humor, postmodern techniques, and antiestablishment politics to offer an intensely humanist critique of the twentieth century, especially the brutality and destruction of war and the
abuses or excesses associated with technological
advancement, capitalist individualism, and political and corporate power. His oeuvre includes
short stories, drama, drawings, and 14 novels, and
his work was frequently transferred into television
and film.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis on
November 11, 1922, the youngest of three children. He attended Cornell University to study
science, but withdrew and joined the US Army.
His experiences in World War II helped form the
thematic and moral foundations for much of his
work; especially important was his witnessing, as a
prisoner of war, the Allied firebombing of the
non-military city of Dresden, which killed tens of
thousands of German civilians. After the war,
Vonnegut worked in journalism and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago; he began
selling short stories to popular magazines while
working in the public relations department of
General Electric. He was married twice and raised
seven children, including three adopted nephews
after the deaths of his sister and her husband.
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Vonneguts most
famous novel, appeared during a time of intense
public opposition to US military involvement in
Vietnam. Its account of the destruction of Dresden and the tragic experiences of the very young
men serving as soldiers resonated with arguments
against US militarism and war in general. The
novel also contains some of the imaginative
practices associated with science fiction; for
example, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is
kidnapped by aliens and displayed like a zoo

animal on their planet. In addition, Billy periodically becomes unstuck in time, and the novel
follows his unpredictable movements between
disconnected moments in his own life. Billys
usually undemonstrative reactions to the vastly
differing sometimes tragic, sometimes bitterly
comic experiences of his life are consistent with
the understated narrative voice found in the novel
and in much of Vonneguts work.
Other stories and novels by Vonnegut, such as
Unready to Wear (1953), The Sirens of Titan
(1959), Cats Cradle (1963), Galapagos (1985),
and Timequake (1997), also imagine scenarios in
which technological advancements or other radical changes, often of a global scale, leave humans
in starkly altered and often exaggeratedly difficult
situations. This link to the science fiction genre,
along with the fact that his early stories were
published in slick popular magazines and his
early novels only appeared in paperback pulp
editions, has resulted in much criticism that views
Vonneguts work as trivial or non-literary.
Throughout his career, Vonneguts writings
spanned multiple genres. For example, Jailbird
(1979) and Mother Night (1962) are historically
realistic works, and the latter borrows as well from
the spy thriller. He also published several collections of speeches, essays, interviews, and reviews,
many of which more directly critique or satirize
the topics covered in his fiction. The humor of his
works, at times dark and satirical, at times light
and joyful, has generated comparisons to other
great US humorists such as Mark Twain.
Vonneguts stories also employ techniques often
associated with postmodern fiction fragmented
narrative structures, metafictive self-awareness,
and a refusal to accept conventional frameworks
of understanding the world.
Stylistically, Vonneguts novels offer a conversational style marked by simple prose, short paragraphs, laconic syntax, and repeated phrases such
as and so it goes. Many feature his fictional alter
ego, the prolific but largely unread short story
writer Kilgore Trout, and Vonnegut writes himself into such works as Breakfast of Champions
(1973) and Timequake. His work often shifts from
farce and irony to sentimentalism and nostalgia;
the narratives typically affirm middle-class,
Midwestern values and critique corporate power,
Christian hypocrisy, and anthropocentrism, the
VONNEGUT, KURT
idea that humans are the only important actors on

Earth and in the universe. Above all, Vonneguts
writings stress the connectedness of humans
to each other and the need for common decency
to all.
In addition to the stories, novels, and essays
Vonnegut wrote over six decades, he taught at the
Iowa Writers Workshop, Harvard, Smith College, and the City University of New York. He
received a lifetime achievement award from the
Sciences. He believed in the idea of the author
as an activist, and he was dedicated to teaching
people to refuse to accept social structures and
behaviors that devalue human life. He continued
delivering public lectures and publishing until his
death on April 11, 2007.
Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian
Davis, T. F. (2006). Kurt Vonneguts Crusade. Albany:
SUNY Press.
Klinkowitz, J. (2004). The Vonnegut Effect. Columbia:
Marvin, T. F. (2002). Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical
Morse, D. E. (2003). The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut:
Imagining Being American. Westport, CT: Praeger.
893
Reed, P. J. (1997). The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut, K. (1952). Player Piano. New York:
Scribners.
Vonnegut, K. (1959). The Sirens of Titan. New York:
Dell.
Vonnegut, K. (1962). Mother Night. Greenwich, CT:
Fawcett.
Vonnegut, K. (1963). Cats Cradle. New York: Holt,
Vonnegut, K. (1965). God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Vonnegut, K. (1968). Welcome to the Monkey House.
Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. New York:
Delacorte.
Vonnegut, K. (1973). Breakfast of Champions. New
York: Delacorte.
Vonnegut, K. (1976). Slapstick. New York: Delacorte.
Vonnegut, K. (1979). Jailbird. New York: Delacorte.
Vonnegut, K. (1981). Palm Sunday. New York:
Delacorte.
Vonnegut, K. (1982). Deadeye Dick. New York:
Delacorte.
Vonnegut, K. (1985). Galapagos. New York:
Delacorte.
Vonnegut, K. (1987). Bluebeard. New York: Delacorte.
Vonnegut, K. (1990). Hocus Pocus. New York: G. P.
Putnams.
Vonnegut, K. (1997). Timequake. New York: G. P.
Putnams.
Vonnegut, K. (2005). A Man Without a Country.
Vonnegut, K. (2008). Armageddon in Retrospect.
New York: Putnams.
W
Walker, Alice
MARCI R. MCMAHON
Alice Walker is one of the foremost African

American female authors of the post-1970s. A
prolific short story writer, poet, essayist, novelist,
and childrens book author, Walker has profoundly shaped the way audiences think about
African American female subjectivity. Walkers
comment that black women are the most
oppressed people in the world underpins most
of her work (quoted in Christian 1994).
Born to a rural sharecropping family in
Eatonton, Georgia in 1944, Walker showed early
promise as a student and was educated on scholarships at Spelman and Sarah Lawrence Colleges.
After graduation, she became an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement. Walker cites
Harlem Renaissance writers Zora Neale Hurston,
Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes as significant
literary influences, and like Walker, these authors
represent the lives and experiences of the black
South. Walker wrote a biography of Hughess life
for young adult readers in 1974 and edited and
published one of the first anthologies of Hurstons
writings in 1979. This dedication to Hurstons
career led Walker to locate Hurstons unmarked
grave in Florida.
Walkers most successful novel, The Color
Purple (1983), won the Pulitzer Prize, the first
ever awarded to a black woman for fiction. The
novel was on the New York Times bestsellers list
for over 25 weeks and was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film directed by Steven
Spielberg in 1985 and a Broadway musical in
2005. The epistolary format tells the story of

Celie, a poor and barely literate woman who
escapes the degradation and violent treatment of
black men. With the help of a supportive community of women, including her husbands mistress, Shug Avery, and Celies sister, Nettie, Celie
gradually frees herself from a history of incest
and physical abuse. Walkers focus on the axes of
domination black male over black female
instead of an exclusive concern with white racism quickly led to charges of male-bashing by
many critics. Critics often link The Color Purple
with Walkers two subsequent novels: The Temple
of My Familiar (1989), which features Celies
granddaughter Fannie, and Possessing the Secret of
Joy (1992), which portrays Tashi, the African wife of
Celies son.
Everyday Use, (1973b) Walkers most anthologized short story, provides insight into
Walkers validation of black Southern rural traditions and her disdain of black urban identity
politics. The story follows Dee, an Afrocentric
daughter from the North who has come back to
visit her mother and her sister, Maggie, in the
rural South. With an idealized vision of identity,
Dee views the objects of her familys Southern
culture as fashionable museum pieces to be consumed. The story concludes with the mother
refusing to give Dee the familys heirlooms, and
the narrative thereby affirms the value of the
mother and her black Southern heritage.
Walkers other novels center the impact of
poverty and discrimination on the private sphere.
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) depicts
three generations of an agrarian Southern black

WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER
family dealing with the debilitating effects of

oppression, specifically its impact on male
female relationships. Meridian (1976) foregrounds the role of revolution for a younger
generation of black women seeking to become
agents of change. Both novels forecast Walkers
theories about black female subjectivity in In
Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose
(1983). In response to white feminisms exclusive
focus on gender, Walker has proposed and coined
the term womanism to address the need for an
African American feminism rooted in black
womens creativity and emotional strength.
Even though Walker is mostly known for her
novels, her first contributions to literature were
books of poetry. Her early collections Once
(1968) and Revolutionary Petunias and Other
Poems (1973) focus on the interplay between the
public and private spheres. Her later poetry
collections Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the
Earth (2003) and A Poem Traveled Down My
Arm (2005) are spiritual and philosophical in
tone.
Walkers essay collections, including the New
York Times bestseller Anything We Love Can Be
Saved (1997) and We Are the Ones We Have Been
Waiting For (2006), foreground her political
convictions about anti-war, anti-nuclear, and
environmental movements. Walker has also
published four childrens books, including To
Hell With Dying (1988), which as an earlier
short story received praise by Langston
Hughes; and Why War Is Never a Good Idea
(2007). Walkers literary and personal archives
can be found at Emory University in Atlanta,
Georgia. She resides in northern California,
where she lives and writes today.
Gender and the Novel (AF); Hughes, Langston
(AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern
Novel (AF); Toomer, Jean (AF)
895
Gates, H. L., Jr., & Appiah, K. A. (eds.) (1993). Alice

Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New
York: Amistad.
Holt, P. (ed.) (1996). Alice Walker Banned. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute.
Walker, A. (1968). Once: Poems. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Walker, A. (1970). The Third Life of Grange Copeland.
Walker, A. (1973). Revolutionary Petunias and Other
Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Walker, A. (1973b). In Love and Trouble: Stories of
Black Women. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Walker, A. (1974). Langston Hughes, American Poet.
New York: Crowell.
Walker, A. (1976). Meridian. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Walker, A. (1979). I Love Myself When I Am Laughing
. . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and
Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. New York:
Feminist Press.
Walker, A. (1982). The Color Purple. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Walker, A. (1983). In Search of Our Mothers Gardens:
Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
Walker, A. (1988). To Hell With Dying. San Diego:
Voyager.
Walker, A. (1989). The Temple of My Familiar.
New York: Pocket.
Walker, A. (1992). Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York:
Pocket.
Walker, A. (1997). Anything We Love Can Be Saved.
Walker, A. (2003). Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the
Earth. New York: Random House.
Walker, A. (2004). Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart.
Walker, A. (2005). A Poem Traveled Down My Arm.
Walker, A. (2006). We Are the Ones We Have Been
Waiting For. New York: New Press.
Walker, A. (2007). Why War Is Never a Good Idea.
White, E. C. (2005). Alice Walker: A Life. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Wallace, David Foster

STEPHEN J. BURN

Bloom, H. (ed.) (1989). Alice Walker: Modern Critical
Views. New York: Chelsea House.
Christian, B. T. (1994). Everyday Use: Women Writers,
Texts and Contexts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
If American literature in the 1980s was dominated

by minimalist writers, whose clipped prose and
skeletal plots were built upon the belief that less is
more, then the publication in 1987 of David
Foster Wallaces first novel, The Broom of the
System, indicated a reaction against the dominant
896
WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER
aesthetic, recalling instead the deliberately excessive fictions of Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo.
Like works by Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen,
and William T. Vollmann who published first
novels in the same decade Wallaces book both
overlapped with, and subtly diverged from, the
practice of older postmodernists. By mixing multiple perspectives and different media, drawing
attention to its intertextual allusions and selfreflexive strategies, Wallaces novel demonstrated
in a decade of literary downsizing that sometimes
more really was more.
The son of a philosophy professor and an
English teacher, Wallace was born in Ithaca, New
York in 1962, and raised in Illinois. Despite initial
promise as a junior tennis player, Wallaces early
achievements were academic, and he was educated at Amherst, the University of Arizona, and
Harvard. While he began his student career as
a philosophy major with a specialization in math
and logic, he traced his decision to become
a writer to an encounter with a single story,
Donald Barthelmes The Balloon. This funny
metafictional story uses the inflation of a massive
balloon over Manhattan as the vehicle to parody
the consumption of contemporary art by both
critics and the general public, and the early influence of such work clearly shaped the evolution of
his career, as his writing clearly imitated, and
attempted to break free from, the self-reflexivity
and irony that he believed characterized and
limited much postmodern fiction.
Though Wallaces output is distinguished by its
diversity ranging from a short story that is only
79 words long, to a book about transfinite mathematics a common thread through much of his
work is his emphasis on writing as a symbiotic
exchange between reader and writer that attempts
to avoid the danger of narcissism that he associates with metafiction. Refusing to return to
a nave belief in language as a mirror of reality,
Wallace attempted to use metafictional strategies
to expose the narcissistic loop of postmodern
metafiction in his first novel, and in later stories
such as Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
Way (in 1989) and Octet (in 1999). Much of
the theorizing that seems to underlie these works
is outlined in an important essay about postmodern fiction and television titled E. Unibus
Pluram and collected in A Supposedly Fun
Thing Ill Never Do Again (1997).
While Wallaces essay has been quite influential,

his reputation rests largely upon Infinite Jest
(1996), an encyclopedic novel whose scale and
range of reference provoked comparisons to
Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow. The narrative
energy of Infinite Jest is artfully dispersed and
punctuated by endnotes (which are something of
a Wallacetrademark), but despitethe novels many
branching offshoots, its plot is concentrated
upon a narrative foundation that recalls James
Joyces Ulysses, an ancestor text that Wallaces
identified by using the famous Joycean compound
scrotumtightening. Both texts have one foot in
Hamlet, and both are organized around two narrative arcs that set a youthful prodigy, who has
problems with his father, next to an older man,
who is less educated but more humane than his
counterpart. In both works the author begins with
the younger talent, but moves toward the older
figure as the book approaches its end. In Wallaces
novel, the Leopold Bloom figure is provided by
Don Gately, an enormous former burglar who is
trying to lead an earnest life and recover from
addiction at a halfway house. Balanced against
this story is the Stephen Dedalus figure, provided
by Hal Incandenza, a teenage lexical and tennis
prodigy who is descending into addiction even as
Gately makes his escape. Between the cynicism
of youth and the developing sincerity of the
recovering addict, Wallace attempted to explore
what he called the souls core systems, probing
his characters sometimes nebulous sense of
self.
One of the notable features of Wallaces earlier
work is its fascination with younger characters. The
Broom of the System is mainly about a 25-year-old
telephone operator. Infinite Jests twinned protagonists Hal and Don are 17 and 28, respectively.
But in the last work of fiction to be published before
his suicide in 2008, the short story collection Oblivion (2004), Wallaces work shifted toward characters who are getting older and watching the promise
of their youth dissipate. Though this book extends
his earlier investigations into the problems of selfreflexivity, these are mainly stories about aging, as
Wallace moved toward explorations of the quiet
desperation of adulthood, and the full horror of
monotonous working life.
Franzen, Jonathan (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist
WARREN, ROBERT PENN

Television and Fiction (AF)

Boswell, M. (2003). Understanding David Foster
Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press.
Burn, S. J. (2003). David Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest:
A Readers Guide. New York: Continuum.
Burn, S. J. (2004). The Machine-Language of the
Muscles: Reading, Sport, and the Self in Infinite Jest.
In M. Cocchiarale & S. D. Emmert (eds.), Upon
Further Review: Essays on American Sports Literature.
Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 4150.
Goodwin, J. (2003). Wallaces Infinite Jest. Explicator,
61(2), 1224.
Jacobs, T. (2007). The Brothers Incandenza:
Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevskys The
Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallaces
Infinite Jest. Texas Studies in Literature and Language,
49(3), 26592.
LeClair, T. (1996). The Prodigious Fiction of Richard
Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster
Wallace. Critique, 38, 1237.
Moore, S. (2003). The First Draft Version of Infinite Jest.
The Howling Fantods (May 11). At www.
thehowlingfantods.com/ij_first.htm, accessed
Jan. 18, 2010.
Wallace, D. F. (1987). The Broom of the System.
New York: Penguin.
Wallace, D. F. (1989). Girl With Curious Hair.
New York: Norton.
Wallace, D. F. (1996). Infinite Jest. Boston: Back Bay.
Wallace, D. F. (1997). A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never
Do Again. Boston: Back Bay.
Wallace, D. F. (1999). Brief Interviews With Hideous
Men. Boston: Little, Brown.
Wallace, D. F. (2003). Everything and More. New York:
Norton.
Wallace, D. F. (2004). Oblivion. Boston: Little, Brown.
Wallace, D. F. (2005). Consider the Lobster and Other
Essays. Boston: Little, Brown.
Warren, Robert Penn

PATRICIA L. BRADLEY
Robert Penn Warrens voice and reputation dominated twentieth-century writing across diverse
forms and genres, including poetry, fiction,
biography, pedagogy, drama, memoir, literary
criticism, and social commentary. Although the
897
bulk of Warrens literary legacy is almost six

decades of poetic output, especially the poetry of
his later life, the yeomanry of his fiction also
reveals a Southerner struggling with dichotomous
aspects of his twentieth-century milieu: high
and low culture, mythic past and uncertain
present, place-boundedness and expatriate yearnings homeward.
Born in 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky to parents
who set high standards of achievement and
self-sacrifice, Warren enrolled at Nashvilles
Vanderbilt University and majored in literature
when he was included in the heady camaraderie
of the Fugitive Group, which included John
Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. Both promoted
Warrens early poetry, critiqued his later fiction,
and remained his good friends until their
deaths.
Warrens relationship with the Fugitives and
the Agrarians helped establish him as a poet and
academic, yet he also needed to write fiction to
establish himself financially. His first novel, Night
Rider (1939), exemplified the circumstances that
would drive Warrens writing. Set in the South in
his own Kentucky, it drew upon memories of the
Tobacco Wars shared with him by his Grandfather Penn while expanding upon the novella
Prime Leaf (1931), itself written during
Warrens early extended absence not only
from Kentucky but also from the South. Warrens
At Heavens Gate (1943) followed, reutilizing
a thematically useful technique from Night Rider.
In both, Warren counterpoints the hollow lives of
his upwardly mobile and seemingly enlightened
primary characters with those of more humble
country folk who have achieved through
their greater understanding of the natural world
a liberating, sometimes frighteningly individualistic, vision of their places in it.
Warrens Pulitzer Prize-winning blockbuster,
All the Kings Men (1946), emerged in part from
his productive academic years at Louisiana State
University, where as an indirect beneficiary of
Huey Longs gubernatorial largesse he became
coeditor of the newly founded Southern Review.
Long is often considered a model for Warrens
Willie Stark, and the novels two screen versions
(in 1949 and 2007) and one literary homage,
Joe Kleins Primary Colors (1996), attest to the
renewed timeliness of the story of Starks political
downfall and Jack Burdens deadly paralysis in the
898
WARREN, ROBERT PENN
face of history and the awful responsibility of

Time. Warrens single volume of short fiction,
The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories (1947),
soon followed, its title story providing a gloss for
the artistic process Warren experienced writing
All the Kings Men. The equally notable second
story of the collection, Blackberry Winter, reveals how Warrens initially reluctant departure
from the South may later have become a conscious choice. Like Seth, the young narrator
who follows the mysterious tramp, a dark father
surrogate, Warren leaves his home region permanently around this period, subsequently relying
upon his memory to accomplish fictional and
poetic reworkings of his Southern past.
Although none achieved the literary status of
All the Kings Men, Warrens remaining novels
spanned two and a half additional decades of his
life and explored topics of cultural and historical
interest to him. World Enough and Time (1950)
fictionalizes historical materials of a scandalous
murder in early nineteenth-century Kentucky
and questions the reckless idealism of its young
protagonist, Jeremiah Beaumont. Band of Angels
(1955) tells the story of a Kentucky belle who
learns only at her planter fathers death of
her mixed parentage. Sold into enslavement,
narrator and protagonist Amantha Starr survives
the Civil War but yearns for a fixed sense of
identity. Warren returns to that time period in
Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War (1961), but
with a markedly spare style and focus in the story
of Adam Rosenzweig, a Bavarian immigrant
whose idealism is tested during his Civil War
experiences.
Warren returns imaginatively to Tennessee in
The Cave (1959) and in Flood: A Romance of Our
Time (1964). In the former, the search for lost
caver Jasper Harrick forces reconsiderations of
personal and communal identity among his
friends and family. In the latter, Warren recalls
the Nashville and surrounding areas of his Vanderbilt years, creating in the morally adrift Brad
Tolliver a character similar to Jack Burden from
All the Kings Men. Meet Me in the Green Glen
(1971), possibly a homage to Faulkner, dwells
upon illicit sexual longings, racial tensions, and
a decaying Old South patriarchy. A Place to Come
To (1977), Warrens final novel, gathers many
of his past themes and devices failed fathers
and their surrogates, an idealistic protagonist
alternately vulnerable to a harsh world or hidden

from it behind hard-boiled cynicism, and the
lure of the past and home to tell the story of Jed
Tewksbury, a successful academic and classicist
who, much like Warren himself, cannot escape
the boy he had been in the Southern backwater of
his birth.
Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF);
The Southern Novel (AF); Styron, William (AF)

Blotner, J. (1997). Robert Penn Warren: A Biography.
Bradley, P. (2004). Robert Penn Warrens Circus
Aesthetic and the Southern Renaissance. Knoxville:
Burt, J. (1988). Robert Penn Warren and American
Idealism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Justus, J. (1981). The Achievement of Robert Penn
Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Millichap, J. (1992). Robert Penn Warren: A Study
of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Runyon, R. (1990). The Taciturn Text: The Fiction
of Robert Penn Warren. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press.
Warren, R. P. (1939). Night Rider. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Warren, R. P. (1943). At Heavens Gate. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Warren, R. P. (1946). All the Kings Men. Harcourt
Brace.
Warren, R. P. (1947). The Circus in the Attic and
Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Warren, R. P. (1950). World Enough and Time:
A Romantic Novel. New York: Random House.
Warren, R. P. (1955). Band of Angels. New York:
Random House.
Warren, R. P. (1959). The Cave. New York: Random
House.
Warren, R. P. (1961). Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil
War. New York: Random House.
Warren, R. P. (1964). Flood: A Romance of Our Time.
Random House.
Warren, R. P. (1971). Meet Me in the Green Glen.
Warren, R. P. (1977). A Place to Come To. New York:
Random House.
Warren, R. P. (1998). The Collected Poems of Robert
Penn Warren (ed. J. Burt). Baton Rouge: Louisiana
WELCH, JAMES
Welch, James
LINDA PALMER
Novelist and poet James Welch (BlackfeetGros

Ventre) is a major voice of the Native American
Literary Renaissance, a movement that began
with N. Scott Momadays 1969 novel House Made
of Dawn and includes notable American writers
Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Simon
Ortiz, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, and Gerald
Vizenor. Since 1969, these novelists, poets, memoirists, and critics have added significantly to an
understanding of American literature and culture
as they portray Native American experience in
contemporary society, explore the results of loss
of land and culture, and demonstrate the lifesustaining role of native traditions such as storytelling, ceremony, ritual, and myth, as well as
revealing the potency of trickster and absurdist
humor in the face of cultural destruction. James
Welchs internationally acclaimed literature
places him at the heart of the Native American
Renaissance and of contemporary American
literature.
Welch was born November 18, 1940 in Browning, Montana, center of the Blackfeet Reservation,
where he grew up immersed in Indian tradition
and reservation life and saw first-hand the often
tragic results of cultural diaspora. He received his
BA from the University of Montana, where he also
studied in the MFA program before beginning his
writing career and teaching at the University of
Washington and the University of Montana.
He was honored with a Lifetime Achievement
Award for Literature from the Native Writers
Circle, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and an
Emmy Award for a PBS documentary. In 2000,
Welch was knighted by France for his literary
contributions. He died August 4, 2003 in Missoula, Montana.
Welchs first published work was a poetry
collection, Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971), in which
he explores in powerfully spare images issues that
would become his major themes: alcoholism
(warriors face down in wine sleep), hard deaths
in hard country, and faltering searches for identity. But, as in the rest of his work, despair is
countered by the great buoyancy of traditional
myth, ritual, and trickster humor in the narratives
899
of his people. Welch continued to publish poetry

but increasingly emphasized fiction, writing five
novels. He also co-wrote and directed an Emmy
Award-winning PBS documentary, Last Stand at
Little Bighorn (1992), and a companion revisionist historical study, Killing Custer (1994), which
brilliantly questions Americas iconic history of
Indianwhite encounters.
Welchs novels focus on the Native American
individual, culture, and land in the context of
dispossession and appropriation of that land and
the accompanying loss of individual and cultural
identity. While drawing deeply on Native American tradition, Welchs style is frequently postmodernist, as his characters (often mixed-bloods)
struggle (with limited success) for identity in
a fractured, disjointed world in which space, time,
story, and tradition have been ripped and cultural
touchstones essential for identity are unavailable.
In his first novel, Winter in the Blood (1974),
a nameless 32-year-old narrator stumbles
through a life without meaning or ties to his
Native heritage. In prose frequently praised for
its brilliant imagery and tightness, Welch explores
no-names shattered attempts to find a self in
a fractured landscape of Montana bars, polluted
rivers without fish, and graves with Styrofoam
crosses and plastic flowers. Welchs portrayal of
the narrators emptiness, mirrored in the lands
barrenness, is a masterpiece of black comedy, as
old men drop dead in their porridge, elevators do
not go up or down, and dialogue collapses into
comically unintelligible cross-talk. Still, critic
Louis Owens speaks of Welchs acts of recovery,
and indeed glimmers of meaning emerge as the
narrator accidentally discovers his traditional
grandfather and from him begins to recover
the cultural story essential to his own identity.
The hope offered is small, but perhaps the smallest
recovery in a disjointed world where winter reigns
in the blood is all to be hoped for in the novels
bitterly humorous portrayal of the fractured
existence of the dislocated Indian in modern
America. The Death of Jim Loney (1979) and The
Indian Lawyer (1998) both continue Welchs
focus on mixed-bloods trying to connect the
disparate parts of their lives, placing his work
centrally in the Native American Renaissance
interest in the contemporary Indian who has lost
culture and identity.
900
WELTY, EUDORA ALICE
Welch then departed from his focus on the

contemporary Native American with his epic
masterpiece, Fools Crow (1990), seemingly a gift
to the lost souls of the earlier novels. Welch turns
the clock back to a nineteenth-century Blackfeet
world intact, whole but caught in the moment
of contact with white America, as the 1869
Transcontinental Railway blasts through Native
land and the Blackfeet are being herded onto
reservations and decimated by smallpox and
white mans liquor. Welch brilliantly draws the
non-Native reader into a Blackfeet world so
blessed with tradition, coherence, and placesense that even in the face of potential decimation from white encroachment, the possibility of
cultural survival seems possible. The book ends
with spring, rain, animals, laughter, and children, and thus with soaring hope that is perhaps
Welchs best gift to American literature and to
his people.
Historiographic Metafiction (AF)
Cotelli, L. (1990). Winged Words: American Indian
Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
McFarland, R. (2000). Understanding James Welch.
Owens, L. (1992). Other Destinies: Understanding the
American Indian Novel. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Vangen, K. (1996). James Welch. In A. Wiget (ed.),
Handbook of Native American Literature. New York:
Garland.
Velie, A. (1982). Four American Indian Literary Masters.
Welch, J. (1971). Riding the Earthboy 40. Lewiston,
ID: Confluence.
Welch, J. (1974). Winter in the Blood. New York:
Penguin.
Welch, J. (1979). The Death of Jim Loney. New York:
Harper and Row.
Welch, J. (1990). The Indian Lawyer. New York:
Norton.
Welch, J. (with Stekler, P.) (1992). Last Stand at Little
Bighorn. PBS.
Welch, J. (with Stekler, P.) (1994). Killing Custer: The
Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains
Indians. New York: Norton.
Welch, J. (2000). The Heartsong of Charging Elk.
Welty, Eudora Alice

MICHAEL KREYLING
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on

April 13, 1909 and raised in a household filled
with books and reading. She graduated from high
school at the age of 16, attended Mississippi State
College for women for two years, and finished her
BA (English) at the University of Wisconsin
Madison in 1929. In 1930 she went to Columbia
University, where she enrolled in an advertising
and secretarial program. New York City was
a bigger classroom, but Weltys education outside
the South was cut off when her father died in 1931.
She would return many times for visits, and even
worked at the New York Times Book Review during
World War II, but Jackson remained her home
and the hub of her writing career for the rest of her
life. She died July 23, 2001.
As a Southern writer, Welty worked within and
often against regional stereotypes and cliches, and
when she began to place stories in magazines with
regional circulation in the mid-1930s, Southern
cliches were strong. Erskine Caldwells stories of
rural and poverty-depressed Georgia, Gods Little
Acre (1933) and Tobacco Road (1932), had lodged
the facts of Southern poverty, illiteracy, uninhibited sexuality, ignorance, and fundamental
resistance to the progress of civilization in the
popular mind. Stories in Weltys A Curtain of
Green and Other Stories (1941) play changes on
these themes. The Whistle, for example, concerns a couple who grows tomatoes for the metropolitan market and lives in poverty which may
have bound them like a disaster too great for any
discussion (58). Hearing the packing company
whistle warning of freeze, they douse most of what
they own with kerosene and burn it to keep the
tiny tomato plants alive. Unlike Caldwells primitives, Weltys, particularly the wife, show a
capacity for wonder and joy surviving the rigor
mortis of poverty and work.
Lily Daw and the Three Ladies spoofs the
Southern stereotype of uninhibited (female) sexuality. Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden takes
on race and white guilt. Death of a Traveling
Salesman analyzes the bias of the civilized against
the so-called backwoods primitives to whom they
mistakenly condescend. In each story, Welty steps
carefully through the minefield of cliche, not so
WELTY, EUDORA ALICE
much writing in a unique voice as fighting off

ventriloquists.
A Curtain of Green is a miscellany of all the
stories (with the exceptions of A Worn Path and
Powerhouse) she had published by 1941. As an
ensemble, they represent the well-written short
story of the time, as explicated in the reigning
textbook, Understanding Fiction (1943). Not surprisingly, the editors of that textbook, Robert
Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, were also the
editors of the Southern Review. Warren and
Brooks had published a few of Weltys stories in
Southern Review. Perhaps more famously, they
had rejected others, like Petrified Man, a work
in Weltys comic voice that has since become
almost universally popular.
The writer who emerges in Weltys first collection is recognizably Southern, yet stylistically
modernist. She does not avoid the topic of race,
as stories like Keela, Powerhouse, and A
Worn Path attest. But in writing about African
Americans she locates the reader directly within
the other race and culture, representing the other
without making him or her picturesque. At the
same time, she avoids Faulkners South, and
the racesexmemory triad of Light in August
(1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1934).
Weltys next collection, The Wide Net and
Other Stories (1943), is a more clearly modernist
work in that she consciously seeks literary ways
(trope, theme, image) to unify discrete stories into
an integral whole. Subject matter gives ground to
technique. She chose as the central trope the
Natchez Trace, a 400-mile route from Nashville
on the Cumberland River to Natchez on the
Mississippi. Before white settlers entered the territory, the trace was a game trail used by Native
peoples for hunting and migration. In the 1930s,
when Welty chose it as a central trope, the Natchez Trace was being graded and paved as a parkway
by the Works Progress Administration. Welty
used the Trace in all of its incarnations. In the
story First Love, it is a zone of imagination and
contest for the protagonist of the story, a deaf boy
who experiences on the Trace both the trauma of
an Indian attack in which his parents are killed
and a meeting with Aaron Burr who occupies the
boys imagination as larger than history. In other
stories the Trace is a contemporary lovers lane
where rites of sexual initiation are acted out,
the aesthetic and ethical space where the artist
901
(John James Audubon) works out problems of

representation, or the magical zone where mythical creatures make themselves visible.
Weltys first novel, Delta Wedding (1946),
began as a long short story with composition
problems she could neither resolve nor abandon.
Working for the New York Times Book Review in
1944, Welty and Virginia Woolfs posthumously
published A Haunted House and Other Stories
(1944) found each other. Woolfs feminist authorial consciousness and her confident technique of
allowing event, plot, and character to follow that
centering consciousness (rather than being
administered and controlled by a fictional consciousness exterior to the work) enabled Welty to
revision the subject matter of Delta Wedding
the family events, moods, and emotions surrounding the wedding of the daughter of a Delta
plantation owner to the overseer. The result is
a work placed in the Mississippi Delta of the early
1920s, but deliberately free of the historical issues
of its time and place. Several reviewers, looking to
the Southern writer to protest social and political
injustice (segregation, sharecropping, and Huey
Long-style demagoguery), found fault with Delta
Wedding, preferring a type of fiction Welty would
never write.
If Weltys earlier collection, The Wide Net,
attempted to unify discrete stories through the
power of a physical setting, The Golden Apples
(1949) attempts to make the experience of formal
unity itself the place where the readers sense of
fiction occurs. Like The Wide Net, The Golden
Apples is unified by geographical place the
fictional small town of Morgana, Mississippi
but Welty unifies stories with other recurring
motifs. The seven stories are composed self-consciously along musical lines, alternating short
stories with longer that is, novella-length
pieces to create concerto-like movements. Characters return from story to story, alternating from
background to foreground. Conflict is generated
by familial and personal relationships. While
mothers and daughters dominate, fathers and
sons are also present, as are husbands and wives,
lovers (heterosexual and, by means of suggestion,
homosexual), brothers, social groups, and races.
Several other imagistic patterns circulate through
the stories: classical mythology, the poems of
W. B. Yeats (still strong from her undergraduate
years), elements of contemporary Mississippi
902
WELTY, EUDORA ALICE
political and social history, Jungian archetypes,

classical and popular music, even haircuts. Any
summary relays the impression of the work as
a puzzle, but The Golden Apples is an integrated
work of modernist literary imagination, running
on the rails of story (characters and events in
conflict leading to resolution) and of modernist
text (changes rung, absences filled, and patterns
repeated as variations resolve themselves into the
whole).
Her next published work is the novella The
Ponder Heart (1954), a comic tale that returns
to the comic voice of early stories such as
Petrified Man and Why I Live at the P.O.
The Ponder Heart is told in the voice of the
spinster Edna Earle Ponder, who watches her
Uncle Daniel lavish the Ponder estate on a series
of much younger girlfriends and finally a trophy
wife whom Uncle Daniel attempts to tickle to
death. The story was rewritten as a play for
Broadway and enjoyed a modest run in 1956.
Less popular were Weltys concurrent stories,
collected in The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other
Stories (1955). These seven stories, united by
mood and temperament, commonly focus on the
central character of a woman seeking a relationship commensurate with her capacity for joy
and usually not finding it with the men whom she
meets. Critics and reviewers, with some exceptions, expressed regret at Weltys obscurity in
these stories and usually announced a preference
for what they remembered as her Southern
fiction.
Fifteen years elapsed before Weltys next novel
was published, Losing Battles (1970). Her return
from oblivion was not universally celebrated.
As some welcomed the writer back among the
living, they lamented that her chosen genre was
moribund: the big Southern novel. Losing Battles
is, indeed, big, the longest of her works in an
oeuvre devoted to shorter forms of fiction. Unlike
many earlier works, Losing Battles is composed
predominantly of voices in dialogue. But like
earlier work, the central theme is family and kin
surviving against forces of disintegration, both
external and internal.
A year before Losing Battles, Welty had published a long short story, The Optimists
Daughter, devoted to the theme of family
survival. Revised only slightly, The Optimists
Daughter (1972) won the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction in 1973. Out of the same family theme

Welty wrote her memoir, One Writers Beginnings (1984), delivered as the Massey Lectures in
American Civilization at Harvard. One Writers
Beginnings pulls the thread of the coming into
being of the writer out of the more tangled skein of
family life. Most prominent among all of those
threads is that of being a daughter to two quite
different parents: her father, who seemed to
encourage her risk-taking, and her mother, who
strove to keep her daughter close in a world she,
the mother, saw as much too full of sorrow, hurt,
and disappointment.
At her death in 2001, Eudora Welty had lived
a life full of literary honors and awards. While
earlier in her career her fiction had found a critical
home in the New Criticism, the aesthetic formalism that reigned over classroom teaching and
academic literary taste from the 1940s into the
1960s, in her later years (and surely at the time of
her death) Weltys work had become a frequent
issue in feminist criticism. Her status as a Southern writer, an equal to Flannery OConnor,
Katherine Anne Porter (an early mentor), and
William Faulkner himself, has never been seriously questioned. Close scrutiny of her work, however, may show more traces of the modernist
temperament and relocate Welty to the transatlantic modernism of her century.
SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Modernist
Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); Woolf,
Virginia (BIF)
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Bloom, H. (ed.) (1986). Eudora Welty. New York:
Chelsea House.
Harrison, S. (1996). Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf:
Gender, Genre, and Influence. Baton Rouge:
Kreyling, M. (1991). Author and Agent: Eudora Welty
and Diarmuid Russell. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Mark, R. (1994). The Dragons Blood: Feminist
Intertextuality in Eudora Weltys The Golden Apples.
Marrs, S. (2005). Eudora Welty: A Biography. Orlando,
FL: Harcourt.
Marrs, S., & Pollock, H. (2001). Eudora Welty and
Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? Baton Rouge:
WEST, NATHANAEL
Prenshaw, P. W. (ed.) (1979). Eudora Welty: Critical

Essays. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Prenshaw, P. W. (ed.) (1984). Conversations With
Eudora Welty. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Welty, E. (1941). A Curtain of Green and Other Stories.
Welty, E. (1942). The Robber Bridegroom. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday.
Welty, E. (1943). The Wide Net and Other Stories.
Welty, E. (1946). Delta Wedding. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Welty, E. (1949). The Golden Apples. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Welty, E. (1954). The Ponder Heart. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Welty, E. (1955). The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other
Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Welty, E. (1970). Losing Battles. New York: Random
House.
Welty, E. (1971). One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the
Depression. New York: Random House.
Welty, E. (1972). The Optimists Daughter. New York:
Random House.
Welty, E. (1978). The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays
and Reviews. New York: Random House.
Welty, E. (1980). The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.
New York: Harcourt Brace. (Some stories slightly
revised by Welty for this edition. See Welty 1998b.)
Welty, E. (1984). One Writers Beginnings. Cambridge,
Welty, E. (1989). Eudora Welty: Photographs. Jackson:
Welty, E. (1998a). Welty: Complete Novels. New York:
Library of America.
Welty, E. (1998b). Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir.
New York: Library of America. (Short stories in this
edition in first book publication versions.)
West, Nathanael
JUSTUS NIELAND
Nathanael West (190340), novelist, screenwriter, and one of the funniest and most despairing
satirists of the twentieth century, published only
two novels and two novellas, yet his critical esteem
has risen sharply since his death at the age of 37. In
the charged political climate of the 1930s, Wests
books, as he put it, seemed to meet no needs
except [his] own. They were too bleak for leftist
radicals, too mired in the world of consumer
903
culture for highbrow critics, too crude for the

popular press. Today, however, Wests fiction
with its canny attention to the psychological
dynamics of mass and consumer culture; its devastating skepticism about American nationalism,
nativism, and naive folksiness; its avant garde
deployment of nihilistic humor in the service of
social critique; and its deft borrowing of the
forms, cliches, and idioms of American popular
culture is as fresh and relevant as ever. As
a shrewd analyst of the politics of sentiment, as
a Hollywood writer, and as a late modernist
obsessed with the status of America-as-simulacra,
West has also proven a crucial figure in the broad
reassessment of literary modernism over the last
decade, which has proven more hospitable to
bad modernisms that challenge the high modernist caricature of aesthetic arch-seriousness.
The writer who legally became Nathanael
West in 1926 was born Nathan Weinstein in
New York City, the son of German-speaking
Russian Jews whose families had emigrated to
the US in the late 1880s as a result of tsarist
anti-Semitism. While Wests fiction is obsessed
with the inauthenticity of personality and human
character, West himself forged a number of identities in his youth. He doctored his public high
school transcript to get into Tufts University,
where he changed his name to Nathaniel
Weinstein, participated in Jewish fraternities,
skipped class, and earned the failing grades that
forced him to withdraw during his first year.
Later, he managed to pass off the transcript of
another Nathan Weinstein as his own, a stunt that
got him into Brown University. There, where his
Jewishness excluded him from frat life, West
remade himself as a dandy and aesthete named
Nathaniel von Wallenstein Weinstein. At
Brown, he founded an intellectual society called
The Hanseatic League, went to the movies with
his classmate S. J. Perlman, and devoured Wilde
and Pater, the French and English symbolists,
Greek drama, theories of religious ritual and
myth, and modern American writers like Fitzgerald, Crane, and cummings. After graduating in
1924, West lived in Paris on his uncles dime, met
surrealist Max Ernst and American expatriate
Henry Miller, and began writing The Dream Life
of Balso Snell, his first major work.
Eventually published in 1931 by Robert
McAlmons Contact Editions in Paris (and at the
904
WEST, NATHANAEL
recommendation of William Carlos Williams),

The Dream Life of Balso Snell is an experimental
novella steeped in the anti-bourgeois pranks of
the Continental avant gardes. The advertising
leaflet West wrote for Balso proclaims his vanguard self-fashioning: In his use of the violently
disassociated, the dehumanized marvelous, the
deliberately criminal and imbecilic, he is much
like Guillaume Apollinaire, Jarry, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Raymond Roussel, and certain of the
surrealists. Good company, that. The book
begins with a series of crass puns and jokes as
the titular Balso, a lyric poet inexplicably wandering about Troy, discovers the famed wooden
horse and makes a posterior entry (O Anus
Mirabilis!). Wests opening gag about the sodomitic Greeks begins the texts cynical challenge
to idealisms of all sorts, and its relentless emphasis
on the wildness of the human body at its most
material and sexual. The structure is episodic,
a kind of equine picaresque, and follows Balsos
encounters with a series of bizarre personages:
a Catholic mystic writing the biography of St.
Puce, a flea in the armpit of Christ; John Raskolnikov Gilson, a psychotic high school student who
writes Dostoevskian crime fiction to bed his
teacher, Miss McGeeney, a fan of Russian novelists; McGeeney herself, who has embarked on
a biography of the biographer of the biographer
of the biographer of Boswell, biographer of Samuel
Johnson an attempt to join herself in a brilliant
literary chain (1931, 30); and a beautiful, disconsolate hunchback, deserted by her artist-lover
Beagle Darwin. The poor girl turns out to be
a character in Balsos dream, just as McGeeney
impossibly reveals herself as Balsos erstwhile
sweetheart. Reunited in the horses belly, Balso
and McGeeney have sex, but not before pondering
the act in its political, philosophical, aesthetic, and
temporal dimensions. The analysis finally ends,
the lovers screw, and the book ends in orgasm, as
Balsos body is swarmed by an army of sensations,
and a deathly release.
A funny, nonsensical, cruel book, Balso establishes a characteristic split in Wests work between
the brutal chaos of nature and the body and
a world of relentless discursivity. There is no
surrealist plumbing of the authentic depths of
the unconscious in Balso, but plenty of comic
difficulty in discovering the Real (1931, 32),
inaccessible as it is proven to be through layers of
cliche, representational convention, and poses.

Art, Balso argues, is nature digested, sublime
excrement, or a series of highly self-aware performances of feeling designed, usually, as gambits
for sexual gratification (1931, 9). As in Wests
later work, the frustration of (male) aesthetic
ideals and desires leads to grotesque violence and
brutality, usually against women, whose bodies
are too often interchangeable with the kinds of
sentimentalism West attacks.
This gendering of feeling, and its relationship
to the operations of Depression-era mass culture,
are at the cold heart of Wests next, and arguably
his finest, book, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Inspired in part by Wests introduction to Susan
Chester, an advice columnist for the Brooklyn
Eagle, the novella was first published in Williamss
short-lived little magazine Contact, where West
worked as an associate editor. It concerns the
tortured relationship between the titular Miss
Lonelyhearts, a male advice columnist for
a newspaper in an unnamed urban wasteland,
and his desperate readership the physically and
ideologically deformed people that raise collectively the specter of the mass man so common
in 1930s writing. A devotee of silent comedy and
the moribund traditions of vaudeville performance, West stages this relationship tragic on
the face of it as a grotesque form of slapstick
comedy, mixing surrealist black humor with
a stark, unsentimental presentation of violence.
Wests folk suffer obscene forms of abuse and
comprise the audience for Miss Lonelyheartss
rhetorical performances of sympathy. Yet Lonelyhearts so-called Christ complex, diagnosed
and relentlessly mocked by the papers nihilistic
features editor, Shrike, fails to save anyone or
relieve the pervasive misery of modern life. Over
the course of the spare plot, Lonelyhearts meets
some of his abject readers in the flesh, but his
optimistic bromides dont work, and he ends up
sleeping with one female reader just to restore
some sensation to his body. Miss Lonelyhearts,
like Wests modernity writ large, is numbed beyond belief, and eventually loses faith in any form
of escape religious, aesthetic, pastoral, nativist,
or primitivist from the commodified banality of
the modern world. West is a cynics cynic, and
leaves his readers unsure how exactly to feel about
the suffering of his characters. At the same time,
Miss Lonelyhearts offers a savage critique of the
WEST, NATHANAEL
modern reification of human desire what

the novel calls the business of dreams by the
machinations of the culture industry, whose
promises of a better life are swallowed by his
characters, hook, line, and sucker. Ultimately,
these promises prove as hollow as Lonelyheartss
quest to become a secular savior, which leads to the
psychosis he experiences at the books abrupt end.
Blurbed by Wests friends Edmund Wilson,
Dashiell Hammett, Erskine Caldwell, and Josephine Herbst, Miss Lonelyhearts sold well enough
for West to option the rights to Daryl Zanuck at
Fox. The result was the defanged, utterly forgettable adaptation, Advice to the Lovelorn (1933).
In July 1933, West accepted a contract from
Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood to
begin a screenwriting career, working alternately
for Columbia, RKO, Universal, and Republic over
the next seven years, and becoming active in the
Screenwriters Guild and, later, the Hollywood
Anti-Nazi League. In Hollywood, West also sold
the rights to his novelistic follow-up to Miss
Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million (1934). A brutal
parody of the Horatio Alger bootstraps story,
Wests novel, subtitled The Dismantling of
Lemuel Pitkin, recycles, only to demolish, every
tired cliche about self-made Americanism, and
outs the 1930s obsession with native American
culture as a species of domestic fascism. When the
mortgage of his widowed mother is foreclosed
upon, Pitkin, a teenage rube, appeals to the town
patriarch, bank owner, and ex-president of the
US, Nathan Shagpoke Whipple for help, only to
be instructed to win his way in the land
of opportunity. Pitkins blind optimism is the
obverse of the novels unchecked cynicism about
the American ideology of honesty and industry.
His progress through Wests America is an absurd
form of regression that ends in bodily dismemberment, self-commodification, and unwitting
participation in a fascist revolution. He is
scammed by New York con men, physically beaten, wrongly imprisoned (losing his teeth and
catching pneumonia in the process), rewarded
for good deeds by the loss of his eye, assailed by a
spy for the Third International, pimped out to a
maharajah in the same brothel where his hometown sweetheart has ended up, scalped by an
Indian chief in an act of revenge for Americas
foundational genocide, and finally exhibited by
Shagpoke who is, it turns out, a raving fascist
905
and anti-Semite in a Chamber of American

Horrors. No horror, in Wests world, is so great
as to be unmarketable, and so Pitkin is promoted
by Shagpoke as the last man to have been scalped
by the Indians (1934, 221). Eventually, Pitkin
is killed as a soldier in Shagpokes National
Revolutionary Party, and ironically celebrated as
an American martyr in a revolution that delivers
the country from sophistication, Marxism, and
International Capitalism, helping America
become American again (1934, 238).
This devastating anatomy of Americas
history and potential future of violence in
the name of national purity was poorly reviewed, but led West to write a satirical play
about World War I (eventually produced as
Good Hunting in 1938), and laid the conceptual
groundwork for The Day of the Locust (1939),
one of the best and darkest Hollywood novels
ever written. Wests final novel tells the story of
Yale-trained painter Tod Hackett, lured to
Hollywood by the promise of a good paycheck
as a set designer, and greeted in the land of
sunshine, oranges, and dreams by a herd of
dislocated Midwesterners like sad-sack Homer
Simpson, who have come to California to die
(1939, 242). Wests Hollywood, like its most
famous products, is pervaded by the ersatz and
the simulacral, which contaminates everything
from the shoddy imitations of its architecture
to the feelings of Wests eccentric characters
less human beings than compulsive performers
of personality, like the broken-down vaude
Harry Greener, befriended by Tod. Most interesting about Harry for Tod is his beguiling
daughter, Faye, a soulless aspiring actress who,
in Wests hands, comes to embody the mystery
of commodity fetishism itself, even as she
cements a familiar modernist equation between
the feminine and mass culture. Tods sexual
desire for Faye, set into a competitive dynamic
with Homer and any number of other men
attracted by Faye, produces rape fantasies, and
serves to double the novels most pressing
concern Hollywoods cynical manipulation
of mass desire (the novels working title was
The Cheaters and the Cheated). In the novels
concluding chapter, this process fuels a riot
outside of a movie theater, where a crowd has
gathered to see its favorite celebrities and is
unreasonably moved to violence when someone
906
WEST, PAUL
shouts, Look, its Gary Cooper! For West, the

scene is apocalyptic, and the violence non-cathartic.
Tod, contemplating the scene, is first moved to
think of his painting, The Burning of Los Angeles, at
which hes been toiling to confer aesthetic order
upon his confused experience of the city. But he
too is swept up in the crowd, and ends the novel in a
police car not removed from or above the fray, but
still somehow in it, laughing and loudly imitating
the hysterical siren.
Unlike Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
whose culture industry thesis Wests final novel
anticipates by five years, West finds less hope in
modernist arts capacity to resist reification. His
brand of cynicism has proven immensely influential nonetheless, and Wests soaring critical
reputation today attests to the power of what he
once called his curious kind of joking, which
continues to fascinate, unsettle, and provoke. On
December 22, 1940, one day after the death of his
friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, West and his wife Eileen
were killed in a car accident while returning from
a hunting trip in Mexico.
Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel
(BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)

Barnard, R. (1995). The Great Depression and the
Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael
West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. Cambridge:
Martin, J. (1970). Nathanael West: The Art of His Life.
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Nieland, J. (2008). Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of
Public Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Solomon, W. (2002). Literature, Amusement, and
Technology in the Great Depression. Cambridge:
Strychacz, T. (1993). Modernism, Mass Culture, and
Professionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Veitch, J. (1997). American Superrealism: Nathanael
West and the Politics of Representation. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
West, N. (1931). The Dream Life of Balso Snell. New
York: Moss and Kamin.
West, N. (1933). Miss Lonelyhearts. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
West, N. (1934). A Cool Million. New York:

Covici-Friede.
West, N. (1939). The Day of the Locust. New York:
Random House.
West, N. (1997). Nathanael West: Novels and Other
Writings (ed. S. Bercovitch). New York: Library
of America.
Wilson, E. (1941). The Boys in the Back Room: Notes
on California Novelists. San Francisco: Colt.
West, Paul
DAVID W. MADDEN
Paul West is one of the most prolific and important voices to emerge in post-World War II
fiction. His career spans a variety of fictional
experiments, but beginning in the early 1980s he
has consistently produced challenging postmodern historiographic novels. In addition to 23
novels and a volume of short stories, he has nine
memoirs, seven works of criticism, and three
collections of poetry.
Paul Noden West was born in Derbyshire,
England on February 23, 1930; he attended
Oxford University, and taught for over 30 years
at Pennsylvania State University. His first major
success came with a trilogy about his native village
Alley Jaggers (1966), Im Expecting to Live Quite
Soon (1970), and Bela Lugosis White Christmas
(1972) that initially established him as one
of Englands angry young men. In 1971, after
becoming an American citizen, West began writing highly experimental novels such as Calibans
Filibuster, in which the reader is trapped in the
mind of a frustrated screenwriter traveling across
the Pacific Ocean.
With the publication of The Very Rich Hours
of Count von Stauffenberg in 1980, West began
fictionally reinventing history to reveal the overlooked corners of human experience that often
run contrary to the established historical record.
In this novel, he enters the mind of Hitlers
unsuccessful assassin to examine fissures in the
granite edifice of Nazism, notions of individual
responsibility and heroism, and a postwar conscience that never informs political adventuring.
Rat Man of Paris (1986) is one of his most
compassionate books and extends some of the
issues of Stauffenberg. Lord Byrons Doctor (1989)
concentrates on John Polidori, Byrons personal
WEST, PAUL
doctor, who, in Wests hands, develops a destructive personal competition with the poet. The
Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper
(1991), The Tent of Orange Mist (1995b), and
OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday
(2000), while each separate and unique, focus on
either well-known public figures or events and in
the process redefine the historical record.
Sporting With Amaryllis (1997), based on some
of John Miltons Latin lyrics and his brief suspension from Oxford, not only challenges the poets
position as a serious Puritan writer but also
emphasizes Wests longstanding concentration
on and dedication to the creative consciousness.
Consistently, Wests protagonists are artists or
creators of one kind or another, and their
adventures, whether private or public, center on
the yearning for aesthetic beauty and independence. Identical concerns can be found in The
Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery (2000), in which
a frustrated Hitler recounts his student days and
exasperation over his abortive painting career.
Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun (2002) presents
a hilarious encounter between the pharaoh and
one of his staunchest critics, the Greek historian
Herodotus. Both figures are artists, creating their
own monuments to immortality, yet thoroughly
in conflict with one another.
West has periodically explored his own life
and most intimate relationships, transforming
the notion of history into the most personal of
realms. In Loves Mansion (1992), he imagines
the courtship of his parents, children of different social classes in their village, who somehow
fall in love and marry in spite of overwhelming
obstacles. Similarly in Life With Swan (1999),
West offers a moving paean to his spouse, the
poet Diane Ackerman, and their enduring love
affair. He returns to develop portraits of both
parents in a pair of loving memoirs My
Mothers Music (1996) and My Fathers War:
A Memoir (2005) that reinforce Wests passion
for personal history and offer new opportunities to explore the mysteries of human
personalities.
He has also written accounts of his determination to learn to swim in midlife (Out of My Depths:
A Swimmer in the Universe, 1983), his recovery
from a stroke (A Stroke of Genius: Illness and SelfDiscovery, 1995a), and a reminiscence of his
teaching a group of gifted students (Master Class:
907
Scenes From a Fiction Workshop, 2001). In these

and other memoirs he brings all the inventiveness
of the novelist, and in interviews he has confessed
that traditional distinctions between the two
genres are for him artificial.
In addition to various honors, West received a
Lannan Literary Award (1993) for Loves Mansion, the American Academy and Institute of Arts
and Letters Prize for Fiction (1985), and the
Chevalier de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres from
the French government (1996). Despite a second
stroke in 2004, West continues to write and
publish.
Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); The Novel
and War (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF)

Madden, D. W. (ed.) (1991). Paul West. Review of
Madden, D. W. (1993). Understanding Paul West.
Maguire, T. (1998). Paul West. War, Literature, and
the Arts, 10(1), 13286.
Morrow, B. (1988). Paul West: An Interview by
Bradford Morrow. Conjunctions, 12(4), 14171.
Saltzman, A. M. (1994). Beholding Paul West and The
Women of Whitechapel. Twentieth Century Literature,
40(2), 25671.
Tissut, A.-L. (2003). Paul West. Paris: Belin.
West, P. (1966). Alley Jaggers. New York: HarperCollins.
West, P. (1970). Im Expecting to Live Quite Soon.
West, P. (1971). Calibans Filibuster. New York:
Doubleday.
West, P. (1972). Bela Lugosis White Christmas.
West, P. (1980). The Very Rich Hours of Count von
Stauffenberg. New York: HarperCollins.
West, P. (1983). Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in
the Universe. New York: Doubleday.
West, P. (1989). Lord Byrons Doctor. New York:
Doubleday.
West, P. (1991). The Women of Whitechapel and Jack
the Ripper. New York: Random House.
West, P. (1992). Loves Mansion. New York: Random
House.
West, P. (1995a). A Stroke of Genius: Illness and SelfDiscovery. New York: Viking.
908
WHARTON, EDITH
West, P. (1995b). The Tent of Orange Mist. New York:

Scribners.
West, P. (1996). My Mothers Music. New York: Viking.
West, P. (1997). Sporting With Amaryllis. New York:
Overlook.
West, P. (1999). Life With Swan. New York: Scribners.
West, P. (2000). OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc
Holliday. New York: Scribners.
West, P. (2001). Master Class: Scenes From a Fiction
Workshop. New York: Harcourt.
West, P. (2002). Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun.
West, P. (2005). My Fathers War: A Memoir. Kingston,
NY: McPherson.
Wharton, Edith
DONNA M. CAMPBELL
Edith Wharton was a twentieth-century novelist

and short story writer whose work ranges far
beyond the genre of the novel of manners with
which she is often associated. She is best known
for her fiction of Old New York, which chronicles the clash between traditional upper-class
New York society and the brash, moneyed social
climbers who invade and destroy it. Writing
frequently about divorce and its complications
at a time when divorce was socially taboo,
Wharton delves beneath the mannerly facades of
her well-to-do characters to explore the missed
chances, thwarted love affairs, and instances of
human cruelty imposed by a restrictive social
system and the suffocating levels of hypocrisy
needed to keep it in place.
Born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862
to an upper-class New York family, Wharton was
educated by private tutors and studied philosophy, science, and several languages, lessons
reinforced by her familys frequent trips to France,
Italy, and Germany. After her marriage in 1885 to
Edward Teddy Wharton, she lived the life of
a well-to-do society matron, living in New York,
spending summers in fashionable Newport, and
traveling to Europe every year, yet she continued
to write. She had already co-authored a book on
interior design, The Decoration of Houses (1897),
and published three collections of stories, a novella, and a historical novel by 1905, the year in
which she wrote The House of Mirth. From this
period until her death she published one or more
books every year, alternating novels with short

stories, novellas, essays, and books of travel such
as Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and A
Motor Flight Through France (1908). After moving
to Paris in 1911 and divorcing her husband in
1913, Wharton rarely returned to the United
States. At the onset of World War I, she turned
her considerable energies to organizing relief
charities for refugees and the poor while still
finding time to travel to the front lines. With The
Age of Innocence (1920), a novel of old New York,
Wharton became the first woman to win the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honor matched by
that of being the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, in 1923.
Whartons other novels of the 1920s were less
enthusiastically received, however, and she was
criticized as an expatriate out of touch with the
jazz age so deftly captured by F. Scott Fitzgerald
and younger writers. Wharton died at her home in
Hyeres, in the south of France, on August 11, 1937.
The first 15 years of Whartons career, beginning with five poems that appeared in The Atlantic
in 1880 and culminating in the publication of The
House of Mirth, show the range of themes that
would mark her later work. The three collections
Wharton published before The House of Mirth
The Greater Inclination (1899), Crucial Instances
(1901), and The Descent of Man and Other Stories
(1904) contain some of her best short fiction.
Although several stories in these collections, such
as The Muses Tragedy and The Rembrandt,
examine Jamesian conflicts between life and art,
and between reality and representation, others
such as Souls Belated and The Other Two
anticipate Whartons later explorations of adultery, divorce, and the inescapable bonds of social
convention. In Souls Belated, Lydia Tillotson
has eloped to Italy with her lover, Ralph Gannett,
leaving behind her husband and the stuffy society
he represents. Like Newland Archer in The Age of
Innocence, Lydia wants to find an ideal place
where the lovers can live free from conventional
rules, yet as an encounter with a flashy divorcee
reminds her, knowledge of her unconventional
affair will cause her to be ostracized. She realizes
belatedly that convention will always bind her,
first to her husband and now to Ralph, in ways
that she cannot escape.
The Other Two, by contrast, presents a comic
take on serial divorce in which a refusal to
WHARTON, EDITH
acknowledge ones feelings and a sense of irony

become the verbal lubricant that greases the
wheels of society. Waythorn, the point-of-view
character, consistently indulges in the joy of
possessorship when looking at his new bride,
the twice divorced Alice, but the presence of one
or the other of Alices two previous husbands,
Haskett and Varick, interrupts his idyll each time
(1904, 386). As Waythorn grows to know Haskett
and Varick, he also grows to know Alice more
completely, including the lies she tells to preserve
the marital peace, her vulgar interest in money,
and the pliancy that has rendered her as easy
as an old shoe a shoe that too many feet had
worn (393). Waythorn studies the physical attributes of the thin, nondescript Hackett and the
ruddy sensualist Varick but cannot bring himself
to acknowledge the jealousy that disturbs him in
thinking of Alice with either man, any more than
he can see the sexual implications of his easy as
an old shoe simile. Instead, he takes refuge in the
modern manners that deny such problems as he
cloaks the entire situation in the impersonal
language of the stock market: he held so many
shares in her personality and his predecessors
were partners in the business (393). When
Alice serves tea to all three, Waythorn takes the
third cup with a laugh (396), realizing, with a
modern sense of irony, that he can never be
anything but the third man to share any experience with Alice.
The House of Mirth presents a tragic rather than
comic perspective on the social rules that govern
marriage. Following Henry Jamess advice after
The Valley of Decision (1902) to do New York
(Powers 34), Wharton wrote it to show that
a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys
(1934, 940). What the frivolity of fashionable New
York society destroys is Whartons heroine, Lily
Bart, a 29-year-old woman whose ambivalence
about its false values manifests itself in an inability
either to commit to the marriage market that is
her only chance for survival or to reject it entirely
as does her plain, earnest friend Gertie Farish. As
Wai-Chee Dimock and others have pointed out,
the novel treats the stock market and the marriage
market as extensions of one another, with Lily as
a commodity whose stock falls with each passing
year and each mark upon her reputation. But
despite her waning resources, both physical and
909
monetary, Lily repeatedly gambles in the marriage

marketplace, attracting suitors such as the dull
Percy Gryce only to be distracted by the republic
of the spirit that she shares with the elusive
bachelor Lawrence Selden (1905, 108). Unable to
commit herself to the necessary closing step of the
transactions she begins selling herself in marriage to a man like Gryce, whom she does not love,
or using Seldens letters to blackmail her enemy,
Bertha Dorset, into silence Lily is a failure of
Darwinian adaptation. As the narrator explains
near the end of the novel, she was an organism as
helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock (486), and like all
such highly evolved endangered species, she cannot survive in a hostile environment. Whether
considered as a naturalistic novel, with its themes
of determinism and decline; as a tragedy, which its
references to the Oresteia would suggest; or as an
indictment of a shallow culture that treats its
women as disposable objects, The House of Mirth
represents a serious treatment of a culture, New
York society, that until Wharton had been primarily the subject only of light, popular novels.
Whartons fiction from 1907 to 1920 shows her
experimentation with various types of novels,
including fiction in a Jamesian mode (Madame
de Treymes, 1907; The Reef, 1912), the Progressive-era social problem novel (The Fruit of the
Tree, 2000 [1907]), and the war novel (The Marne,
1918). This period also includes three works
considered to be among her greatest: Ethan Frome
(1922 [1911]), The Custom of the Country (1913),
and The Age of Innocence. Begun in Paris and
written initially in French, Ethan Frome gains
much of its tragedy from its intensely American
setting, the frozen, isolated spaces of western
Massachusetts, and from the long-time residents
for whom the determinism of extreme poverty has
ordered their lives as surely as a belief in predestination governed that of their Puritan forebears.
As Wharton explained in a 1922 preface to the
novel, her method of overlapping fragments compiled by a narrator was suggested by Balzacs La
Grande Bretêche, with each of her first-person
narrators informants supplying one part of
Ethans story. Trapped in a loveless marriage to
a dour hypochondriac, Zeena, Ethan falls in love
with his wifes cousin, Mattie Silver, but when
Zeena tries to send Mattie away, Ethan is powerless to stop the process. When he and Mattie take
910
WHARTON, EDITH
a last sled ride together, they decide to commit

suicide but the attempt fails, leaving Ethan disabled and Mattie a helpless invalid. Like her young
heroine Charity Royall of Summer (1917), who is
trapped by pregnancy and threatened with disgrace in a novel that Wharton called her hot
Ethan (1989, 389), Ethan, too, is trapped by his
body. Caught by physical and psychological circumstances, the infirmity of his body, and the
sense of duty with which he tends Zeena and
Mattie, Ethan cannot rid himself of the burden
of his wife or his now querulous former love,
Mattie.
By contrast, Undine Spragg of The Custom of
the Country discards husbands almost as easily, if
not as frequently, as she discards ball dresses. The
comically vulgar daughter of a Midwestern couple
from Apex City, Undine Spragg comes to New
York with two purposes in life: to find out what
the best society is, and to be part of it. Undine is
the anti-Lily Bart: she sees the world in commercial terms, and instead of a republic of the spirit,
she consistently longs for a republic of material
objects and status always just beyond her reach.
Discarding her first husband, Elmer Moffatt,
when his schemes for riches have crumbled,
Undine captures her genteel second husband,
Ralph Marvell, and the old New York society
to which he belongs, later discarding him as
well in favor of the French aristocracy represented by her third husband, Raymond de
Chelles. Her return to the now immensely
wealthy Elmer Moffatt finds her once again
longing for the one thing she cannot have: as a
divorced woman, she cannot be the wife of an
ambassador, the one part she was really made for
(1913, 594). A satiric take on the American culture
of consumption and the nouveau riche Invaders
(78) who lay waste to the values of honor and family
tradition that old New York represents, The Custom
of the Country asserts that the triumph of materialism and selfishness is part of the modern age, with
Undine Spragg as a perfectly adapted specimen of
its values.
Written after World War I and at the beginning
of the jazz age, The Age of Innocence looks back
once again to the vanished New York of the 1870s
from a perspective at once nostalgic and unsentimental. Wharton again uses the devices of the
delayed decision, as in The House of Mirth, and
a protagonist who is yoked to a partner that can
neither understand him nor let him go, as in Ethan

Frome. Engaged to May Welland, a perfectly blond
and perfectly bland woman of his own social set,
Newland Archer meets her cousin, Ellen Olenska,
after the latters failed marriage to a Polish count.
Half fascinated by Ellens unconventionality
and half worried about the opprobrium that her
Bohemian ways will inspire, Newland seeks to
rescue her but does so in ways that tighten the
bonds of convention that bind him to May, such as
urging Ellen to see the beauty in self-sacrifice in the
name of duty, the uselessness of which is a consistent theme in Whartons work. As in The Custom
of the Country, the novels core issue is the conflict
between individualism and social obligation, with
divorce the pivot upon which these issues revolve.
Wharton takes an anthropological, almost clinical,
approach to this study of the bonds with which old
New York secures its captives, a perspective that
she signals through the visit that Ellen and Newland make to the new Metropolitan Museum of
Art, with its objects, use unknown, from
forgotten people whose rituals once seemed as
important as those of the whole tribe of old New
York (2003 [1920], 186, 201). Like that of Ethan
Frome, Newlands tragedy is that he understands
that duty, not love, will imprison him in a life that
circumstances have made for him and that individual will is nearly powerless when pitted against
the will of the tribe and the need of those who,
like Newland, ultimately value belonging over
individuality.
The fiction that Wharton produced from 1921
until her death in 1937 has often, and somewhat
unfairly, been dismissed as less accomplished than
masterpieces like The House of Mirth, Ethan
Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age
of Innocence. Although few would agree with
Whartons opinion that Hudson River Bracketed
(1929) was her best book (Lewis 490), recent
reassessments have underscored the significance
of the novels and stories of the 1920s and 1930s.
The earliest of these novels, The Glimpses of the
Moon (1922), revisits the plot of The House of
Mirth by following an impoverished society couple, Susy Branch and Nick Lansing, who marry
instead of parting as Lily Bart and Lawrence
Selden do. With the exception of Old New York,
a quartet of novellas on nineteenth-century New
York, the work of this late period often focuses
on satirizing modernity and the jazz age, as in
WHARTON, EDITH
Twilight Sleep (1927); on mothers and the varieties of self-sacrificial or neglectful mothering, as in
The Mothers Recompense (1925) and The Children (1928); or, in a return to earlier themes, on
the position of the artist, the subject of Hudson
River Bracketed and its sequel, The Gods Arrive
(1932). Other late stories feature favorite Wharton themes from early in her career: illegitimacy,
illicit love affairs, and concealment and exposure,
as in The Old Maid from Old New York and
Roman Fever (1934). Wharton also published
an increasing number of ghost stories during this
period, including one of her best, All Souls, the
last story she completed before her death.
Whartons works continue to enjoy popular
acclaim, with several film adaptations of her
novels during the past 15 years. After a period
of relative critical neglect following her death in
1937, her critical reputation continues to rise. For
several decades during the mid twentieth century
she was considered to be merely an echo of Henry
James, but since the 1970s she has been recognized
not only as an acute observer of the social scene
but also as an author whose wide reading in
evolutionary theory, anthropology, and philosophy infused her observations with depth and
complexity. Although her style is realistic and
satiric rather than experimental and modernist,
Wharton brings a modern, twentieth-century
sensibility to the study not only of her cultures
manners but also of its materialism. Her fiction
studies the psychological and physical toll
exacted by a social system organized like the
ruthless capitalism of the early twentieth century,
a social Darwinist universe in which a few, like
Undine Spragg, triumph while others, like Ralph
Marvell and Lily Bart, perish because of their
inability to compete.
SEE ALSO: Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Gender and
the Novel (AF); James, Henry (AF); Modernist

Bauer, D. M. (1994). Edith Whartons Brave New
Politics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bell, M. (1995). The Cambridge Companion to
Edith Wharton. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
911
Beer, J. (1997). Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction.
Bendixen, A., & Zilversmit, A. (1992). Edith Wharton:
New Critical Essays. New York: Garland.
Dimock, W.-C. (1985). Debasing Exchange: Edith
Whartons The House of Mirth. PMLA, 100(5),
78392.
Joslin, K., & Price, A. (1993). Wretched Exotic: Essays on
Edith Wharton in Europe. New York: Peter Lang.
Kassanoff, J. A. (2004). Edith Wharton and the
Politics of Race. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lee, H. (2007). Edith Wharton. New York: Knopf.
Lewis, R. W. B. (1985). Edith Wharton: A Biography.
New York: Fromm.
Powers, L. H. (ed.) (1990). Henry James and Edith
Wharton: Letters, 19001915. New York: Scribners.
Singley, C. J. (1995). Edith Wharton: Matters of
Mind and Spirit. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Totten, G. (2007). Memorial Boxes and Guarded
Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture.
Wharton, E. (1904). The Other Two. New York:
Scribners.
Wharton, E. (1905). The House of Mirth. New York:
Scribners.
Wharton, E. (1912). The Reef. New York: Scribners.
Wharton, E. (1913). The Custom of the Country. New
York: Scribners.
Wharton, E. (1917). Summer. New York: Appleton.
Wharton, E. (1922). Ethan Frome [1911]. New York:
Scribners.
Wharton, E. (1922). The Glimpses of the Moon. New
York: Appleton.
Wharton, E. (1925). The Mothers Recompense. New
York: Appleton.
Wharton, E. (1927). Twilight Sleep. New York:
Appleton.
Wharton, E. (1934). A Backward Glance. New York:
Appleton.
Wharton, E. (1968). The Collected Short Stories of Edith
Wharton. 2 vols. (ed. R. W. B. Lewis). New York:
Scribners.
Wharton, E. (1989). The Letters of Edith Wharton (ed. R.
W. B. Lewis & N. Lewis). New York: Collier.
Wharton, E. (1990). Old New York [1924]. In Novellas
and Other Writings. New York: Literary Classics of
the United States, pp. 315549.
Wharton, E. (2000). The Fruit of the Tree [1907] (intro.
D. Campbell). Boston: Northeastern University
Press.
Wharton, E. (2003). The Age of Innocence [1920] (ed.
C. Waid). New York: Norton.
912
WHITE, EDMUND
White, Edmund
NICHOLAS F. RADEL
Perhaps more than any other author, Edmund

White provides the literary and social outlines for
understanding that moment in American history
when homosexuality was transformed from
a psychiatric condition to an identity. His dominant themes are the legitimacy of gay lives and
sexual experiences and the differences between
homosexual and heterosexual social identities.
Born January 13, 1940 to an upper-middle-class
businessman and his wife, Edmund Valentine
White III spent his childhood and adolescence in
the American Midwest: first in Cincinnati, then,
when his parents divorced, primarily Evanston,
Illinois near Chicago. After earning a BA at the
University of Michigan, White divided his adult
life between Paris and New York, cities that figure
significantly in his work. At present, he is professor
of creative writing at Princeton University.
Although White rarely repeats the virtuoso
formal and stylistic experiments that mark individual works, his fiction can be classified into
several categories: innovative early novels displaying a masterly, baroque style suited to the mannered social worlds they explore; socially realistic
novels and stories about the lives of gay American
men like White himself; and recent historical
novels that combine fiction with biography and
autobiography.
His earliest novels, Forgetting Elena (1973) and
Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) as well as
the later Caracole (1985) look toward Continental
models, especially Marcel Proust and Vladimir
Nabokov, in focusing on memory and identity,
albeit White wryly suggests that memory may
impede rather than enable his characters developing identities. The novels reflect philosophical
tensions contemporary with their composition, as
existentialist anxiety about authenticity gave way
to structuralist and poststructuralist theories of
the contingency of identity.
This concern with identity links Whites early
novels to his most famous and accessible ones,
a trilogy A Boys Own Story (1982) The Beautiful
Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony
(1998) that chronicles middle-class gay life in
America from the 1950s through the 1990s. An
acknowledged masterpiece, A Boys Own Story is a
coming-out tale, a narrative of coming to

terms with ones homosexuality that remains
an oral and literary form in gay subcultures.
Unlike sentimental examples of the genre, however, Whites focuses on the psychological distortion resulting from his nameless narrators
alienation as a homosexual.
When he wrote A Boys Own Story, White was
a member of the Violet Quill, a briefly convened
collective of gay writers in New York that
addressed questions of form and content in gay
autobiographical writing. As evidenced by the
increasingly sophisticated experimentation with
autobiographical fiction in his later work, these
issues continued to interest White.
Other realistic works such as The Married
Man (2000); stories about AIDS in A Darker
Proof (1987) and Skinned Alive (1995); and
Chaos (2007), a collection of short fiction about
aging gay characters notably develop another
key theme: the body as a simultaneous site of
creative desire and physical disintegration.
Whites latest novels echo an emphasis on
history among other gay novelists at the turn of
the century. In Fanny: A Fiction (2003), Frances
Trollope, a fictional version of the novelist-mother
of Anthony Trollope, pens the biography of
Frances Wright, a fictional version of the noteworthy social reformer and utopian thinker. With
Hotel de Dream (2007), White envisions the last
months of the American author Stephen Crane,
who died of tuberculosis in Germany at the age of
28, and he embeds within that narrative the tale of
a gay prostitute Crane was rumored to have
destroyed before he died.
Both novels are metafictional, questioning
relations between historical figures and modern
sensibilities as well as connections between
fictional and real selves that are implicitly
thematized in Whites autobiographical work.
Hence, they help clarify some of the ways Whites
oeuvre is concerned with pressures placed on
individuals by socially specific, discursive formulations of sex of which, Hotel de Dream suggests,
the novel is one example.
An indefatigable writer of non-fiction, White
became an early gay celebrity in the 1970s with
The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) and, later, an American
travelogue, States of Desire (1980). His biography
of Jean Genet won the National Book Critics
WHITEHEAD, COLSON
Circle Award, although his study of Proust remains controversial for its sexual emphasis, as
does his autobiography, My Lives (2005). Innumerable essays on art, literature, and gay life
collected in The Burning Library (1994) and Arts
and Letters (2004) confirm Whites role as an
important interpreter of gay and straight cultures,
in America and abroad.
A member of the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Sciences, White was also
honored by the French government as an Officier
de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres for his work on
Genet.
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism
(AF)
913
White, E. (1995). Skinned Alive: Stories. New York:

Knopf.
White, E. (1998). The Farewell Symphony. London:
Chatto and Windus.
White, E. (1999). Marcel Proust. New York: Viking
Penguin.
White, E. (2000). The Married Man. London: Chatto
and Windus.
White, E. (2003). Fanny: A Fiction. New York: Ecco.
White, E. (2004). Arts and Letters. San Francisco: Cleis.
White, E. (2005). My Lives: An Autobiography. London:
Bloomsbury.
White, E. (2007). Chaos: A Novella and Stories. New
White, E. (2007). Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel.
New York: Ecco.
Whitehead, Colson
SAUNDRA LIGGINS

Barber, S. (1998). Edmund White: The Burning World.
London: Picador.
Bergman, D. (2004). The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill
and the Making of Gay Culture. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Radel, N. (1994). Self as Other: The Politics of Identity
in the Works of Edmund White. In R. J. Ringer (ed.),
Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the
Construction of Homosexuality. New York: New York
Spear, T. C. (2001). Interview: Edmund White on
Queer Autofiction, Biography, and Sidafiction. A/B:
AUTO/BIOGRAPHY, 15(2), 26176.
White, E. (1973). Forgetting Elena. New York: Random
House.
White, E. (with Silverstein, C.) (1977). The Joy of Gay
Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures
of a Gay Lifestyle. New York: Crown.
White, E. (1978). Nocturnes for the King of Naples. New
York: St. Martins.
White, E. (1980). States of Desire: Travels in Gay
America. New York: E. P. Dutton.
White, E. (1982). A Boys Own Story. New York: E. P.
Dutton.
White, E. (1985). Caracole. New York: E. P. Dutton.
White, E. (with Mars-Jones, A.) (1987). The Darker
Proof: Stories From a Crisis. London: Faber and Faber.
White, E. (1988). The Beautiful Room Is Empty. New
York: Knopf.
White, E. (1993). Genet: A Biography. New York: Knopf.
White, E. (1994). The Burning Library: Essays (ed.
D. Bergman). New York: Knopf.
Colson Whitehead contributes an innovative

voice not just to the field of African American
literature, but also to American literature in general. He offers a vision of the African American and
American experiences that reflects the modern
preoccupations with technology and identity,
using unconventional plots, settings, and themes
to construct narratives that challenge the readers notions of the relationship between the past
and future. Despite the fact that Whiteheads
desire to become a writer stemmed from his
reading a novel by the horror author Stephen King
when Whitehead was young, Colson Whitehead is
most notably an heir to the tradition of African
American literature that critiques the nature of
race relations in the United States. While Whiteheads name fits naturally among such African
American authors as Ralph Ellison and Richard
Wright, he is also in the same company as such
contemporary white authors as Don DeLillo and
Thomas Pynchon, writers who offer stinging commentaries on contemporary American culture.
In addition to contributing essays and reviews to
the New York Times Book Review, Granta, and
Harpers, Colson Whitehead has published three
novels and one work of non-fiction. He also wrote
the introduction to Get Your War On by David
Rees, a collection of cartoons criticizing the United
States war on terrorism that was published in
2002.
914
WHITEHEAD, COLSON
Colson Whitehead was born in New York City

in 1970. He attended Harvard University,
before becoming a freelance writer and television
columnist for the Village Voice. He published his
first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999. The rights to
the novel have been purchased by filmmaker
Jonathan Demme (director of The Silence of the
Lambs and Philadelphia).
The Intuitionist tells the story of a black female
elevator inspectors search for the cause of an
elevator accident. In the process, the inspector,
Lila Mae Watson, gets caught in the middle of
a conflict between two rival elevator companies
and the hunt for the missing plans of a new,
revolutionary elevator system. A finalist for the
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First
Fiction, The Intuitionist is more than simply
a reconfiguration of the detective novel genre. In
the text, Whitehead tackles issues such as racial
passing, generational conflicts within the African
American community, and economic and racial
progress.
The idea of progress on all levels is central to
Whiteheads text. The modern, unnamed city
that is the setting of the novel is one marked
by segregated neighborhoods and workplaces,
unemployment, and poverty a city that economic and social progress seems to have bypassed.
Throughout the novel, Lila Mae must navigate
through and confront organizations and individuals that seek to impede not just the progress of
her investigation, but also the progress of her
career. Advancement is central to the elevator
industry, as the competing companies are each in
search of the mythological black box, the plans
for the elevator of the future. The fact that the
designer of this new elevator was an African
American male makes the device that much
more significant to both the black citizens of the
city and the white executives of the elevator
companies.
Whiteheads second novel, John Henry Days,
published in 2001, was a National Book Critics
Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist. In
a conversation with Walter Mosley, Whitehead
revealed that John Henry the steel-driving
man who, according to legend, entered into
a contest with a steam-powered drill to drive
spikes into the railroad, ultimately winning the
contest but losing his life was the first black
superhero that he knew as a black child growing
up in the 1970s. Whitehead reintroduces John

Henry to the American public, and questions the
implications of Henrys absence in John Henry
Days. In the novel, a black freelance reporter,
J. Sutter, is hired by a website to go to a small
West Virginia town to cover the ceremony celebrating the unveiling of a commemorative postage stamp honoring John Henry. In addition to
covering the historic past of John Henry, J. is
determined to make a little history of his own; he
is determined to set the record for the most
consecutive days attending a publicity event.
The juxtaposition of the presentation of the
noble feats of John Henry with the cynicism of
J.s quest does seem a bit jarring. But Whiteheads resurrection of John Henry is a reminder
to the audience of the importance of remembering ones history.
Colson Whitehead ventured into non-fiction
with The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen
Parts. Published in 2003, the book is a collection
of Whiteheads reminiscences of growing up in
New York, and of his still present love affair with
the city. He takes the reader on a tour of such
iconic locations as the Port Authority and Central
Park, Broadway and Times Square, yet he also
makes note of the hole-in-the-wall bars, anonymous street vendors, and seemingly countless
subway lines that make up the city.
Whitehead makes Americas fascination with
labeling the focus of Apex Hides the Hurt (2006).
The protagonist, a nomenclature consultant
who, ironically, remains anonymous throughout
the text, is hired by Winthrop, a Midwestern town
in search of a new name. The disputes over the two
main choices for the new name, one representing
Winthrops past and the other its future, are not
merely disagreements over a new name, but over
the very identity of the town and its people.
Whiteheads latest work, Sag Harbor: A Novel,
was published in 2009.
Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postmodernist
Fiction (AF)
Eavesdropping: A conversation between Walter
Mosley and Colson Whitehead. Book (May 2001),
447.
WIDEMAN, JOHN EDGAR
Liggins, S. (2006). The Urban Gothic Vision of Colson

Whiteheads The Intuitionist (1999). African
American Review, 40(2), 35969.
Miller, L. (1999). The Salon Interview: Going Up. Salon.
At www.salon.com/books/int/1999/01/cov_si_12int.
html, accessed Jan. 17, 2010.
Russell, A. (2007). Recalibrating the Past: Colson
Whiteheads The Intuitionist. Critique: Studies in
Whitehead, C. (1999). The Intuitionist. New York:
Anchor.
Whitehead, C. (2001). John Henry Days. New York:
Doubleday.
Whitehead, C. (2002). Introduction. In D. Rees, Get
Your War On. New York: Soft Skull.
Whitehead, C. (2003). The Colossus of New York: A City
in Thirteen Parts. New York: Doubleday.
Whitehead, C. (2006). Apex Hides the Hurt. New York:
Doubleday.
Wideman, John Edgar

BONNIE TUSMITH
John Edgar Wideman is an African American

writer of extraordinary skill, intellect, and commitment. His literary career spans some 40 years
with 18 books and numerous essays, including
10 novels, four volumes of short stories, and four
memoirs. Born in Washington, DC in 1941, he
was raised in Homewood, a black community in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he won all-Ivy
status on the basketball team and, subsequently,
attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
In their narrative strategies, self-reflexive tone,
and sense of alienation and despair, Widemans
first three novels A Glance Away (1967), Hurry
Home (1970), and The Lynchers (1973) might be
categorized as high modernist. During an eightyear hiatus, he reconnected with his African
American roots and worked to forge a new literary
language grounded in the storytelling tradition of
his family that resulted in three works of fiction
Damballah (1981a), Hiding Place (1981b), and
Sent for You Yesterday (1983) published as The
Homewood Trilogy (1985). The third work in the
trilogy received the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Fiction and established the author as a major
American writer.
Three novels published in the 1990s are set in
Philadelphia, an American city with a traumatic
past. Philadelphia Fire (1990) addresses the citys
915
1985 bombing of the MOVE organizations

house, which killed 11 residents and burned
down the neighborhood. With Part 2 structured
as a letter to Widemans incarcerated son, the
novel clearly engages James Baldwins The Fire
Next Time (1963). The devastating social changes
that have moved American society from the 1960s
to the 1980s and the further divide between
black fathers and sons this has engendered are
movingly depicted and analyzed. This novel also
won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, making
Wideman the first writer to receive the award
twice. The Cattle Killing (1996) takes place during
Philadelphias 1793 yellow-fever epidemic. It
employs viral disease as a metaphor for racial
hatred, a device Wideman first used in a short
story entitled Fever. The novels elegant, timeappropriate eighteenth-century prose displays
Widemans virtuosity. In its combination of genres (picaresque, epistolary, medical journal, conversion narrative), this unique and compelling
work exemplifies what literary scholars have
termed historiographic metafiction. Two Cities
(1998) examines the potential for healing and
redemption within endangered black urban communities. Widemans version of a love story is
anything but a conventional romance. Bridge
imagery abounds, metaphorically linking the
rivers of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia across
generational, gender, and racial divides.
Wideman has consistently received high praise
for his artistry, especially for his ability to render
voice and multiple perspectives through seamless,
variegated prose that resembles a jazz performance.
It dont mean a thing if it aint got that swing is
the motto that informs Widemans writing. Play,
improvisation, words, and images that transform
and shape-shift these characteristics can be
attributed to his unique brand of postmodernist
discourse. Widemans footloose, orally based
poetic prose defies labeling, in ways similar to that
of the trickster novelist Ishmael Reed and the
magic realist Toni Morrison. In addition, the
technique of metanarrative, whereby the author
steps in and comments on the writing process, is an
especially effective device in Widemans hands.
Openly acknowledging the conscious construction
of the text not only invites reader participation,
but also conveys honesty a sense that the writer
is making every effort, through the medium of
language, to tell a human story.
916
WILDER, THORNTON
Honesty is a salient trait in any Wideman text. In

tracing, articulating, and debunking what he identifies as the historically destructive paradigm of
race operative in the US and elsewhere, Wideman
has been unsparing in his critique. Above all, his
works convey profound insight into racial issues
and the damage that racism has wrought in American culture and society. In A Letter to Fanon (in
Wideman, 2008), he reveals a lifetime interest in
writing a novel about the Algerian political activist
because I wanted to be somebody, an unflinchingly honest, scary somebody like Frantz Fanon
whose words and deeds just might ignite a revolution, just might help cleanse the world of the plague
of racism (4). He has failed, the narrator/author
concludes, but he keeps trying.
Although Fanon is not the book Wideman had
intended to write, this novel about trying to
write a novel on Fanon is actually the successful
culmination of Widemans literary efforts. As
a courageous writer and risk-taker, Wideman
has not worked to make his writing palatable or
comfortable for the reader, especially when it
comes to topics such as race and sexuality. In his
intensity, skill, and overall achievement, Wideman
is on a par with the Nobel Prize-winner Toni
Morrison. However, unlike Morrison, Widemans
works all tend to be treated as autobiographical,
partly because he interweaves family members and
real-life incidents into his narratives. A consummate artist who is obviously in control of his
craft, Wideman often chooses to relinquish the
protection afforded by fiction. The emotional
rawness found in his works and the desperate
world he portrays risk losing readers who simply
do not want to go there. Despite these potential drawbacks, however, adventurous readers
who seek intellectually challenging, brilliantly
innovative, brutally honest, and deeply compassionate writing will be more than compensated
for their efforts.
Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic
Metafiction (AF); Morrison, Toni (AF);
Byerman, K. (1998). John Edgar Wideman: A Study of
the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Coleman, J. W. (1989). Blackness and Modernism: The

Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson:
Julien, C. (ed.) (1999). John Edgar Wideman: The
European Response [special issue]. Callaloo, 22(3).
TuSmith, B. (ed.) (1998). Conversations With John Edgar
Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
TuSmith, B., & Byerman, K. (eds.) (2006). Critical
Essays on John Edgar Wideman. Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press.
Wideman, J. E. (1981a). Damballah. New York: Avon.
Wideman, J. E. (1981b). Hiding Place. New York: Avon.
Wideman, J. E. (1983). Sent for You Yesterday. New
York: Avon.
Wideman, J. E. (1989). Fever. New York: Henry Holt.
Wideman, J. E. (1990). Philadelphia Fire. New York:
Henry Holt.
Wideman, J. E. (1996). The Cattle Killing. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Wideman, J. E. (1998). Two Cities. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Wideman, J. E. (2005). Gods Gym. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Wideman, J. E. (2008). Fanon. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Wilder, Thornton
NANCY BUNGE
Thornton Wilder aspired to write so well that his

work would help his contemporaries understand
the importance of treating each other kindly.
Thornton Wilder was born April 17, 1897 in
Madison, Wisconsin to Amos Parker Wilder,
a newspaper owner and editor, and Isabella
Thornton Niven Wilder. He received a broad
education, both in the classroom and out of it.
In 1906, when his father moved to China as consul
general to the British colony of Hong Kong,
Thornton went with him and attended school
there for six months. Wilder received the rest of
his early education in California except for time
he spent at the Inland Mission School, Chefoo,
China in 1910. In 1915, he began undergraduate
studies at Oberlin College in classics, later transferring to Yale, where he received his BA in 1920.
He then went to Rome to study archaeology at the
American Academy. After receiving his degree, he
lingered in Rome studying art and in Paris studying language. He returned to the United States
and taught at Lawrenceville, a preparatory school
in New Jersey. While there, he composed and
WILDER, THORNTON
published his first novel, The Cabala (1926),

which appeared the same year he earned an MA
in French from Princeton University.
Not surprisingly, given this background,
Wilders first three books, The Cabala (1926),
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), and The
Woman of Andros (1930), use gorgeous language
to describe foreign settings and characters. While
the other two books concentrate on the upper
classes, The Bridge of San Luis Rey includes
characters from a variety of backgrounds and
raises broad questions about fate. It received the
Pulitzer Prize in 1928. Some critics complained
that the concerns at the center of Wilders work
seemed remote from the Depression-era United
States.
Despite these accusations, Wilder made clear in
the introduction to The Angel That Covered the
Waters (1928) that he had no intention of writing
for aesthetes; he wanted to produce work that
would awaken all readers and audiences to their
better selves. Wilder saw a culture that had lost
respect for kindness and generosity; he hoped to
remind people that these qualities matter by
creating literature that evoked lifes spiritual resonance. Wilders believed point of view would
play a central role in this enterprise because he
aimed to produce work that would coax audiences to arrive at these insights themselves.
His next novel, Heavens My Destination
(1935), a comic novel describing the adventures
of a textbook salesman, was set in America, and
used common speech and experiences. But it did
not succeed nearly as well as Wilders next effort,
the play Our Town (1938), also composed with
ordinary events and language. While Heavens
Our Destination has fallen into oblivion, Our
Town won a Pulitzer Prize and continues to
garner praise, most notably from playwrights
who testify to the plays influence on their own
work.
Perhaps Wilder concluded that using familiar
events worked better on a stage than in fiction, for
his next novel, The Ides of March (1948), takes
place in Rome. Since the novel presents imagined
letters from people like Cicero and Caesar, here, as
in a play, the job of synthesizing and making
meaningful the information the letters present
rests with the reader. The novel affirms the importance on entertaining various points of view,
especially by linking this capacity to love, and
917
nudges its readers toward intellectual flexibility

since they must create a significant whole from the
letters.
The Eighth Day (1967) presents Wilders
theme, lifes spiritual unity and imaginations
essential role in realizing it, more overtly than
any of his earlier novels. Not only does its narrator
state it repeatedly, but also the book fills out
the concept with rich, complicated characters
described in dense detail. Critics believed that
this approach worked so well that Wilder won
the National Book Award for the book.
Wilders fictional career consists of a series of
experiments with point of view that led him
through a rich collection of materials from both
the contemporary world and the ancient past, as
well as a variety of writing styles ranging from the
spare simplicity of Heavens My Destination to the
dense particularity of The Eighth Day.
Wilders final novel, Theophilus North (1973),
again offers an affirmative vision through its
characterization of Theophilus, a narrator-hero
whose imaginative abilities allow him to give
those he encounters advice that frees them by
inviting them to regard events from new points of
view. Theophilus, like his creator, spends his life
trying to liberate others from their imaginative
limits. In a way, this novel takes Wilders fiction
career full circle in that The Cabala also presented
a narrator who attempted, much less successfully
than Theophilus, to help his friends; revealingly,
at the novels conclusion, Theophilus decides to
become a writer.
Naturalist Fiction (AF)

Blank, M., Brunauer, D. H., & Izzo, D. G. (eds.) (1999).
Thornton Wilder: New Essays. West Cornwall, CT:
Locust Hill.
Harrison, G. (1983). The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton
Wilder. New York: Ticknor and Fields.
Walsh, C. (1993). Thornton Wilder: A Reference Guide
19261990. New York: G. K. Hall.
Wilder, T. (1926). The Cabala. New York: Boni.
Wilder, T. (1928). The Angel That Troubled the Waters.
New York: Coward-McCann.
Wilder, T. (1930). The Woman of Andros. New York:
Boni.
918
WOLFE, THOMAS
Wilder, T. (1934). Heavens My Destination. New York:

Harper.
Wilder, T. (1938). Our Town. New York: Harper and
Row.
Wilder, T. (1939). The Bridge of San Luis Rey. New York:
Boni.
Wilder, T. (1942). By the Skin of Our Teeth. New York:
Harper.
Wilder, T. (1948). The Ides of March. New York: Harper
and Brothers.
Wilder, T. (1954). General Report. In The Artist in
Modern Society [report of International Conference
of Artists, Venice, 1952]. Venice: n.p.
Wilder, T. (1967). The Eighth Day. New York: Harper
and Row.
Wilder, T. (1973). Theophilus North. New York: Harper
and Row.
Wilder, T. (1979). American Characteristics and
Other Essays (ed. D. Gallup). New York: Harper
and Row.
Wilder, T. (1985). The Journals of Thornton Wilder. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Wolfe, Thomas
TERRY ROBERTS
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American

novelist of the first half of the twentieth century,
whose long-term reputation rests largely on the
impact of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel
(1929), and on the short fiction that appeared
during the last years of his life. Wolfe was born on
October 3, 1900, and his promising writing career
was cut off by his premature death from tubercular meningitis on September 15, 1938. Wolfes
biography is particularly significant because his
own life was the source for much of his fiction,
and he was haunted throughout his career by the
charge that he could only write thinly disguised
autobiography. This is unfortunate, because
time has shown Look Homeward, Angel to be
one of the finest American coming-of-age
novels, and his widely celebrated short fiction
ranges far beyond his personal experience.
During the last 20 years, scholars have realized
that Wolfes lasting value has little to do with
autobiography but rather with his lifelong
experiments in form and style.
Wolfe was born and reared in the small mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of the seven children of W. O. and Julia Wolfe
who survived infancy. His raw and sometimes

violent family history is retold as that of the Gant
family in Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe was educated in the public schools of Asheville and in
a private academy run by John Munsey Roberts
and his wife Margaret, whom Wolfe later called
the mother of [his] spirit. He enrolled at the
University of North Carolina when he was 16 and
graduated in 1920. Widely read and intensely
sensitive, he convinced his mother to finance
further study at Harvard University, where he
enrolled in the celebrated English 47 playwriting
workshop taught by George Pierce Baker. He had
two plays produced by the workshop while at
Harvard and graduated with his MA in 1922.
After Harvard, Wolfe moved to New York and
accepted a teaching position at the Washington
Square College of New York University, intending
to pursue a career as a playwright. His plays were
characteristically long and complex, and he was
unable to find a producer for them. In 1924, he
sailed for Europe to further his education the
first of seven trips he made there during his short
lifetime and during the return voyage in August
1925, he met Aline Bernstein, a respected costume
designer in the New York theater world. Their
turbulent relationship (which both went on to
describe in fiction) was the primary intimacy of
Wolfes life. It was Bernstein who encouraged
Wolfe to give up playwriting for fiction,
and during a 1926 trip to Europe with her, Wolfe
began the Autobiographical Outline that
became the basis for Look Homeward, Angel.
Although their relationship would not withstand
the pressures of extreme differences in background and circumstance, Bernsteins faith in
Wolfes talent freed him to devote his life to
writing, which he was to do until his death in
1938. The result was one more monumental
novel, Of Time and the River (1935b), and a
collection of short stories, From Death to Morning
(1935a), published during his life, as well as three
controversial posthumous works.
Significantly, the other important, non-familial relationships in Wolfes life had to do with
editing his work. The first was with Maxwell
Perkins, the legendary editor at Charles
Scribners Sons who nurtured the careers of
Hemingway and Fitzgerald as well as Wolfe.
The second was a young agent named Elizabeth
Nowell, who became Wolfes confidante, agent,
WOLFE, THOMAS
and editor in the late 1930s, often laboring

tirelessly to cut his short stories to a length that
magazines would accept.
Wolfes first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is
a quintessential Bildungsroman, describing the
boyhood and young manhood of its protagonist
Eugene Gant. It was edited and championed by
Perkins, who helped Wolfe cut and shape the
original manuscript (entitled O Lost: A Story of
the Buried Life) to produce what he regarded as
a publishable book. Early reviews were extraordinarily positive despite the books length and
apparent lack of plot. In form, Look Homeward,
Angel is a portrait of the life of its protagonist from
birth to his university graduation that focuses on
his rich inner life as it evolves; the evolution of
Eugene Gants buried life, rather than an external plot, provides the books structure. Reviewers
found the book new and different in a deeply
moving way, at once scathingly honest and at the
same time profoundly evocative. The heightened
prose seemed perfectly appropriate to its highly
sensitive protagonist.
Many readers in Wolfes home town of
Asheville, however, were outraged at his portrayal of recognizable individuals and events.
The controversy surrounding the extent to
which the novel was autobiographical fueled
what was to become one of the two most
consistent criticisms of Wolfes work: that it
was little more than thinly disguised personal
history and that Wolfe himself lacked critical
control of his materials. These criticisms
were not blunted by the appearance of Wolfes
second novel six years later, Of Time and the
River, a 912-page continuation of the story of
Eugene Gant.
Of Time and the River is a sprawling, modern
epic that inspired ecstatic initial praise from many
reviewers who saw it as the prototypical great
American novel at a time when the demise of the
novel was being widely discussed. Of Time and the
River is divided into eight books with classical
titles that continue the story of Eugene Gants
search for understanding through graduate
school, teaching in New York, and exploration
of Europe; as with Look Homeward, Angel, the
book has no traditional plot but rather takes its
form from the evolution of the protagonists
sensibility. Comparisons to Melville and
Whitman were common because of Wolfes lush,
919
poetic prose and his willingness to confront complex, deeply human questions head-on. Even in
the midst of the praise, however, some critics
began to ask just what sort of books Wolfe was
producing: were Look Homeward, Angel and Of
Time and the River truly novels, or were they
catalogues, anatomies, or even histories? This
uncertainty as to form contributed to the critical
backlash that was to follow.
Among those who questioned Wolfes maturity
as a writer was historian Bernard DeVoto, who in
1936 published an essay review infamously titled
Genius Is Not Enough, in which he argued that
Wolfes books had been created by the assembly
line at Scribners. Stung by this and other attacks,
Wolfe cut all professional ties with Perkins and
Scribners just prior to his death and signed a new
publishing contract with the young editor Edward
C. Aswell at Harper and Brothers. After Wolfes
unexpected death in 1938, Aswell would go on to
publish three books that he stitched together out
of the thousands of Wolfe manuscript pages with
which he was left books whose authorship has
sparked continuing scholarly argument in
the years since. Notably, the phrase most often
associated with Wolfe You Cant Go Home
Again was the title of one of those books (1940).
Although he was extraordinarily popular
during his life, Wolfes posthumous reputation
continued to decline until the very end of the
twentieth century, in part because his books
seemed all the more voluminous in an era of
increasingly short, tightly plotted novels. Further,
his rich, impressionistic style, which had seemed
so new when it first appeared between the wars,
came to seem more bloated than powerful.
A number of commentators dismissed even Look
Homeward, Angel as a book that only young,
emotional readers could love, not a mature work
of art.
By the last decade of the twentieth century,
however, the critical tides again shifted in Wolfes
favor. First, there has been a renewed interest in
his shorter fiction the stories and novellas that
appeared during the last years of his life and for
this reason the publication of The Short Novels of
Thomas Wolfe in 1961 and of his Complete Short
Stories in 1987 are both significant events. This
trend has removed the critical spotlight from
his long, often autobiographical novels and
turned it instead on his shorter, more objective
920
WOLFE, THOMAS
fiction. Second, there has been a slow but steady

re-evaluation of his importance as a modernist
innovator that has come from international as
well as American scholars. This trend has challenged the stereotype of Wolfe as an overwrought
romantic.
The original and mistaken image of Wolfe
as an overgrown adolescent spewing words at
the page with ferocious and uncontrolled glee
finally died out of the popular mind, leaving
room for genuine reassessment. Scholars have in
many instances returned to what made Wolfe
unique in the first place: his lifelong willingness
to experiment with narrative structure combined with his lush, evocative style. When the
unsuspecting reader first opens the cover of
Look Homeward, Angel whether in 1929 or
2009 he or she encounters something rare:
a genuinely poetic novel about raw American
experience.
In addition, the new generation of readers and
scholars has noticed how, late in his career, Wolfe
turned his attention outward rather than inward,
and in so doing, focused on lives other than his
own. In a series of stories and short novels like
Child by Tiger, I Have a Thing to Tell You,
Web of Earth, Party at Jacks, and The Lost
Boy, he not only experimented with point of
view and narrative structure, but also captured
the inner lives of a wide variety of compelling
characters. As C. Hugh Holman and others have
pointed out, Wolfes eventual reputation may
well rest on his mastery of the short novel his
ability to paint on the smaller rather than the
larger canvas.
The growing interest in Wolfes short fiction
and renewed interest in his lifelong willingness to
experiment with form bode well for his eventual
place in the canon because they counteract
what has become the stereotypical view of
Wolfes fiction as critically immature. They
suggest, instead, what is in the final analysis
a more balanced view of Thomas Wolfe that
of a deliberate and innovative craftsman, a writer
who sought constantly throughout his career to
expand the power of language to convey human
experience.
SEE ALSO: Kerouac, Jack (AF);
Modernist Fiction (AF); The Southern
Novel (AF)

Conroy, P. (2000). A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe.
Thomas Wolfe Review, 24, 2137.
DeVoto, B. (1935). Genius Is Not Enough. Saturday
Review of Literature, 13, 34, 1415.
Donald, D. H. (1987). Look Homeward: A Life of
Thomas Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown.
Frings, K. (1958). Look Homeward Angel: A Play
Based on the Novel by Thomas Wolfe. New York:
Scribners.
Gurko, L. (1975). Thomas Wolfe: Beyond the Romantic
Ego. New York: Crowell.
Harper, M. M. (1990). The Aristocracy of Art in Joyce and
Wolfe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Holman, C. H. (1975). The Loneliness at the Core:
Studies in Thomas Wolfe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
Kennedy, R. S. (1962). The Window of Memory: The
Literary Career of Thomas Wolfe. Chapel Hill:
Melloni, M. (1999). The Web of Earth: Wolfes Art in
a Nutshell. Thomas Wolfe Review, 23, 310.
Nowell, E. (1960). Thomas Wolfe: A Biography. New
York: Doubleday.
Reeves, P. (1968). Thomas Wolfes Albatross: Race and
Nationality in America. Athens: University of Georgia
Press.
Rubin, L. D. (1955). Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His
Youth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Tattoni, I. (1992). The Unfound Door: Innovative Trends
in Thomas Wolfes Fiction. Rome: Bulzoni.
Wolfe, T. (1929). Look Homeward Angel: A Story of the
Buried Life. New York: Scribners.
Wolfe, T. (1935a). From Death to Morning. New York:
Scribners.
Wolfe, T. (1935b). Of Time and the River. New York:
Scribners.
Wolfe, T. (1936). The Story of a Novel. New York:
Scribners.
Wolfe, T. (1939). The Web and the Rock. New York:
Harper.
Wolfe, T. (1940). You Cant Go Home Again. New York:
Harper.
Wolfe, T. (1941). The Hills Beyond. New York: Harper.
Wolfe, T. (1956). The Letters of Thomas Wolfe
(ed. E. Nowell). New York: Scribners.
Wolfe, T. (1961). The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe
(ed. C. H. Holman). New York: Scribners.
Wolfe, T. (1970). The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe.
2 vols. (ed. R. S. Kennedy & P. Reeves). Chapel Hill:
Wolfe, T. (1987). The Complete Short Stories of Thomas
Wolfe (ed. F. E. Skipp). New York: Scribners.
WOLFE, TOM
Wolfe, T. (2000). O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life

(ed. M. J. Bruccoli & A. Bruccoli). Columbia:
Wolfe, Tom
LEONARD MUSTAZZA
Tom Wolfe is a prolific journalist, essayist, and

novelist whose innovative style and astute social
commentaries have had a profound influence on
American intellectual life for more than a half
century. He was one of the founders of the 1960s
school of writing known as the New Journalism
and the inventor of pervasive cultural catchphrases, including Radical Chic, the Me Generation, and the Right Stuff. His 1987 novel,
The Bonfire of the Vanities, virtually defined the
political and social climate of the 1980s and
continues to serve as a cultural touchstone for
New York City politics.
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. was born in
Richmond, Virginia on March 2, 1931. He earned
a doctorate in American studies from Yale in 1957,
and, over the course of the next decade, worked as
a writer of feature articles for various national
newspapers and magazines. Many of Wolfes early
articles were collected and published in his first
book in 1965, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby. The book is important less for its
content than for its innovative style, which has
come to be known as the New Journalism,
a narrative technique whereby the journalist
approaches his or her subject in much the same
way as a novelist does, preferring subjective
impression over objective description, combining
factual exposition with invented scenes, and eliciting emotional reactions from readers.
Wolfe did not actually turn his attention to
fiction proper until some three decades into his
career. An admirer of William Makepeace
Thackerays Vanity Fair, Wolfe set out to satirize
the narcissistic excesses and class injustices of New
York City in the 1980s in much the same way that
Thackeray did nineteenth-century London. Like
Thackeray, too, Wolfe originally published his
novel in serial installments. The Bonfire of the
Vanities appeared in Rolling Stone magazine from
July 1984 to August 1985 and was published as
a hugely successful novel in 1987. Wolfe takes as
921
his satiric targets an arrogant wealthy bond trader

named Sherman McCoy and the political and
media parasites who come to prey on him after
he and his mistress fail to report an accident that
they have one night in the South Bronx. In his
superbly etched portraits of various self-promoting politicians and manipulative news reporters,
Wolfe brings to bear all of the observational and
narrative skills that he had honed as a practitioner
of the New Journalism. For all its literary acclaim,
however, the 1990 film adaptation, directed by
BrianDePalmaandstarringTomHanksandBruce
Willis, was a commercial and critical disaster.
Another decade went by before Wolfe published his second novel. A Man in Full (1998)
tells the story of Charlie Croker, a struggling
Atlanta real estate developer who is recruited
by the citys scheming mayor to help protect
a promising black college football player from
a rape charge. Rejecting the minimalist style of
late twentieth-century fiction, this novel, like
Bonfire, is a sprawling, multiplotted satire of
politics, class, and media in late twentieth-century
America. Although it was much anticipated at the
time, the book was not well received by literary
critics, nor was it as commercially successful as its
predecessor.
Likewise, Wolfes third fictional outing, I Am
Charlotte Simmons (2004), did not fare well
critically. The novel tells the story of a poor,
hardworking, academically talented, and naive
young students experiences at a fictional Ivy
League university, where sports, casual sex,
parties, and drinking are the principal student
interests, and wealth, fame, material possessions,
and social status the main goals. Although Wolfe
succeeds at times to bring his keen eye and verbal
wit to bear on the contemporary youth scene,
critics generally found the book tedious and its
sexual passages excessive. Indeed, the British publication Literary Review even awarded the novel its
Bad Sex in Fiction Award that year.
Wolfe won the American Book Award in 1979
for The Right Stuff and the John Dos Passos Prize
for Literature in 1984. He delivered the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in 2006.
In January 2008, the New York Times reported
that Wolfe had left his long-time publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and that Little, Brown had
acquired the rights to his forthcoming novel, Back
to Blood.
922
WPA AND POPULAR FRONT FICTION

Wolfe, T. (2000). Hooking Up. New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux.
Wolfe, T. (2004). I Am Charlotte Simmons. New York:

Bloom, H. (ed.) (2001). Tom Wolfe. New York: Chelsea
House.
Card, J. (1991). Tom Wolfe and the Experimental
Novel. Journal of American Culture, 14(3), 314.
Masters, J. (1999). Race and the Infernal City in Tom
Wolfes Bonfire of the Vanities. Journal of Narrative
Theory, 29(2), 20827.
Kennedy, L. (1997). Its the Third World Down
There! Urban Decline and (Post)National
Mythologies in Bonfire of the Vanities. Modern Fiction
Studies, 43(2), 93111.
McKeen, W. (1995). Tom Wolfe. New York: Twayne.
Mustazza, L. (1992). The Limits of Narcissism: Self and
Society in Tom Wolfes The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Popular Culture Review, 3(2), 318.
Ragen, B. A. (2002). Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion.
Salamon, J. (1992). The Devils Candy: The Bonfire of the
Vanities Goes to Hollywood. New York: Dell.
Scura, D. M. (ed.) (1990). Conversations with Tom
Wolfe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Shomette, D. (ed.) (1992). The Critical Response to Tom
Wolfe. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Wolfe, T. (1965). The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Wolfe, T. (1968a). The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New
York: Bantam.
Wolfe, T. (1968b). The Pump House Gang. New York:
Wolfe, T. (1970). Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the
Flak Catchers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wolfe, T. (1973). The New Journalism. New York:
Harper and Row.
Wolfe, T. (1975). The Painted Word. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Wolfe, T. (1976). Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter
and Vine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wolfe, T. (1979). The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Wolfe, T. (1980). In Our Time. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Wolfe, T. (1981). From Bauhaus to Our House. New
Wolfe, T. (1982). The Purple Decades. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Wolfe, T. (1987). The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York:
Wolfe, T. (1998). A Man in Full. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
WPA and Popular Front

Fiction
PAULA RABINOWITZ
The 1937 novel Murder in the WPA by Alexander

Williams combines the sensibilities of the hardboiled crime story a desiccated newspaperman is
embroiled in solving a series of murders for which
he appears to be a potential suspect with the
political perspectives of Popular Front coalitions
of communists, left-wing unions, and New Deal
government employees, all of whom work with
a diligent urban police force to expose a protofascist group organized within the Works Projects
Administration. Williams, scion of a Washington,
DC family with longstanding ties to government
employment, based his tale on the fractious New
York WPA, especially its Arts Projects, riven
with leftist sectarian politics, pressures from the
Workers Alliance and other unions, high-profile
publicity, and an ever-changing local administration that faced ongoing assaults by the national
press and Congress (Martin Diess House UnAmerican Activities Subcommittee). The novel
probes the workings of city homicide squads and
the internal office politics of the WPA, with a
simultaneous nod to Dashiell Hammett and John
Dos Passos. As a literary investigation of the WPA
Arts Projects, it cannot compare to insider novels,
such as Jack Balchs Lamps at High Noon (1941),
Vardis Fishers Orphans in Gethsemane (1960), or
Norman Macleods You Get What You Ask For
(1939); but, deploying a popular form (detective
fiction), it was the first to explore the politics of
the WPA, outlining its deep association with
Popular Front aesthetics.
According to Jerre Mangiones history/memoir
of the Federal Writers Project, the dream of
a federally funded commitment to American
arts and the deal of its actuality could barely
be bridged. Yet, during its brief existence,
the Writers Project succeeded in producing
hundreds of books and pamphlets, including the
indispensible American Guide series (John Steinbeck owned all 48 state guides); collected countless oral histories of slaves and Southern tenant
farmers; ferreted out arcane historical records
from dusty archives; and recorded innumerable
examples of folksay from across the continent,
as folklore editor Benjamin Botkin dubbed them.
At its height, in 1936, it employed almost 7,000
writers; 40 percent were women. Many of them
were unemployed reporters, recent college graduates, or anyone in states not known as hotbeds
for literature such as Wyoming and South
Dakota who could write a coherent sentence.
But the literary centers of the United States New
York, Chicago, and San Francisco housed projects that nurtured the careers of John Cheever;
Harold Rosenberg; Kenneth Fearing; Claude
McKay; Ralph Ellison; Anzia Yezierska; Richard
Wright, who transferred from Chicago and finished Native Son (New York); Margaret Walker;
Jack Conroy; Willard Motley; Arna Bontemps;
Frank Yerby; Nelson Algren; Studs Terkel;
Katherine Dunham; Saul Bellow (Chicago);
Kenneth Rexroth; Kenneth Patchen; and Miriam
Allen de Ford (California). Zora Neale Hurston
collected Florida folklore, publishing three books
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Tell My
Horse (1938), and Moses, Man of the Mountain
(1939) while on the projects payroll. Meridel
Le Sueur rode around Minnesota delving into its
secret history including her pioneering family
of socialists for its Guidebook; novelist Vardis
Fisher of Idaho a state sparsely populated,
particularly with writers almost single-handedly crafted its Guidebook; and Sterling Brown
developed studies on the Negro as a part of
Life in America. Those project offices in the
larger cities and states boasted contributions to
their Guidebooks from an array of upcoming
and established writers who somehow managed,
with the help of keen editing at the national
office headed by Henry Alsberg, to craft their
diverse voices into a coherent, lively expression
of Americana its geographic, economic, folk,
ethnic, religious, and political histories all
accessible by road. By the mid-1930s, despite
the Depression, over 25 million Americans
owned cars; these government-sponsored Baedeckers were meant to encourage citizens to see
the USA in [their] Chevrolet, as Dinah Shore
crooned a generation later.
923
While the Federal Writers Project, or any of the

WPA, was not part of the Popular Front, its
employees, who were overwhelmingly left-wing,
often viewed their work as a contribution to
Popular Front efforts to unite liberals, communists, and others against the threat of fascism. As
did the press, which relished sensationalized
headlines such as the one following demands to
censor the number of pages the Massachusetts
Guidebook devoted to Sacco and Vanzetti:
Guide Book seizure urged on Governor, Reds
linked to Guide Book, Purge of Communist WPA
writers demanded (Mangione 216). Paradoxically, while acknowledging press red-baiting of
striking WPA writers sitting in at the New York
headquarters, Williamss mystery turns on the
discovery of a homegrown militia, Four-Square
Americans, based on the Ku Klux Klan (except
the robes were purple), that was planning a fascist
takeover by infiltrating government programs.
Displacing the threats to the New Deal from
Republicans and conservative newspapers, the
novel posits debates within the WPA as a representative microcosm of American ideology
during the Depression. Were the unemployed
who worked on various WPA projects from
writers to ditch diggers truly needy or freeloaders? Was the effort by the federal government
to aid workers a step toward socialism or a prop
for capitalism?
We tend to romanticize the WPA today,
particularly Federal One, its Arts Projects, as the
sole consolidated government support of artists
in American history; yet tremendous shame
attached to WPA jobs, even those in the elite Arts
Projects. In order to qualify for WPA employment, one must have been on relief and declared indigent. Many writers, firmly middle-class,
refused to declare themselves paupers, and so
remained ineligible, despite eventual exemptions
for up to 25 percent of the workforce (and all of
the Projects administration). Those doing pick
and shovel work, the vast majority of WPA jobs,
were branded as relief cases, shaming their
families when they participated in Public Works
projects, often quite publicly. Assistant administrator of the WPA Ellen Woodward, testifying to
the Dies Committee, reminded the Congressmen
that we are dealing with thousands upon thousands of people who are pretty well licked by this
Depression (Mangione 312).
924
Social worker turned novelist Caroline Slade

gave up work in New Yorks child welfare offices
to write fiction after witnessing the ambivalence
among unemployed men upon receiving a WPA
job and the utter neglect of unemployed women
by the government. Proud to be able to feed their
families, the men nevertheless became symbols of
deprivation, while the women were consigned to
prostitution; this was the implicit argument of her
novels, The Triumph of Willie Pond (1940) and
Sterile Sun (1936). Public disclosure of impoverishment was bad enough; the realization, when
work began drying up as the Roosevelt administration cut back funding after 1937, that without
the WPA job a family would retreat into poverty
led unemployed father Willie Pond to triumph
over the system of regulations restricting eligibility by committing suicide, leaving his children
dependants qualifying for government aid.
Slades critique, coming in 1940 when the Popular
Front coalition was in tatters after the Non-Aggression Pact signed in 1939 between Hitler and
Stalin, revealed how tenuous were the connections between government programs (though not
necessarily their employees) and Popular Front
organizations and ideas. The WPA was always
conceived by the Roosevelt administration as
a temporary solution to unemployment, but
artists and progressives saw it quite differently:
as a model for federal support of artists and other
workers to refashion American mass culture into
a truly democratic vernacular form.
At the League of American Writers second
congress in 1937, Alsberg argued, We must get
over the idea that every writer must be an artist of
the first class, and that the writer of the second and
third class has no function (Hart 245). His case
for a range of writers working across genres from
news reports to folklore collections to travelogue
to fiction and poetry implicitly updated Michael
Golds earlier calls for a new kind of proletarian
writer drawn from the mines, mills, and farms
across the nation. Despite the Communist Partys
replacement of the John Reed Clubs (meant to
develop these proletarian writers) with the more
expansive League (designed to appeal to established authors), Alsbergs call suggested a model
for encouraging writing from below: in addition
to assigning acclaimed authors to work, let mediocre ones contribute; they too have a right to eat.
If some writers balked at assignments those on
the Arts Project could spend time in their studios

painting rather than being tied to an office desk,
like newspaper reporters, or buried in a citys hall
of records, like legal secretaries the research they
gleaned from library archives, legal documents,
and urban legend often found its way into
their later fiction, or generated new literary
forms. Jack Conroy, whose novel The Disinherited
(1933) exemplifies proletarian fiction, worked
on the Chicago Project collecting material that
would find its way into They Seek a City (1945),
the sociological study of black migration he
co-authored with another WPA writer, Arna
Bontemps. Such writers shared a democratic urge
to give voice to common people through oral
histories, record folksay, reconstruct the seedy
history behind a city government, or poke into
local traditions. But their work also demonstrated
how the Popular Front and Federal One might
conjoin public, popular, and folk cultures and,
with the employment of many writers in radio
and movies (both also part of Federal One), mass
media.
The Popular Front, never stable, amalgamated
multiple perspectives: viewed one way, it
represented a repressive top-down effort by the
Communist Party to rein in various factions
comprising the Left in defense of Soviet (and
Stalins) survival. Thus the cynical shift away from
nurturing a radical proletarian culture to encouraging a broad coalition of progressives in support
of the people was really an attempt to undermine criticisms of the Soviet Union and to squash
diverse elements within the working class in an
effort to stanch fascism not only seizing power
across Europe in Spain, Italy, and Germany, but
also taking root in America. Alan Wald sees this
anti-fascist crusade as more complex, however,
because the literary Left, especially Jewish and
black writers, found ways to critique racism and
anti-Semitism within the nation and within
the party, even when these efforts defied Popular
Front policies.
The Popular Front also represented a democratic effort to widen the reach of culture and
politics across classes and social groups, thereby
producing a truer picture of the complexities
of modern society through the guise of a
simple formula: support striking workers; fight
racism and fascism. Yet this Popular Front
sensibility could appear as a sugar-coated vision
of solidarity, an effort to submerge differences

within the working class by connecting African
Americans, workers, hoboes, housewives, intellectuals, organizers and anyone else living in
this land [that] was made for you and me, as
Woody Guthrie sang. This was essentially the
criticism of the anti-Stalinist Left and continued
throughout the Cold War years. Those associated
with Partisan Review, critics Robert Warshow,
Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and Philip
Rahv among them, saw through what Wilson
called, describing Ernest Hemingways work in
a 1938 essay for the New Republic, the snow
blindness of communisms allure for writers
during the Depression. Michael Denning argues
that the Popular Front should best be understood as essentially a cultural movement
responding to vast demographic changes in the
United States as first- and second-generation
immigrants and migrants flooded the workforce
following World War I, transforming Americas
cities with new languages and socialist politics.
This laboring of American culture, Denning
argues, permeated music, movies, literature, and
drama, just as mass culture was developing
new modes of communication radio, magazines, and cinema to attract these very audiences. As Murray Kempton noted, by 1937,
Popular culture replaced proletarian culture;
the New Masses offered unguarded pleasantries
to Fannie Hurst . . . Albert Maltz went to
Hollywood; and others went to radio (145).
A Time to Remember (1936), Leane Zugsmiths
novel about the Orbachs department store workers strike, offers a keen synopsis of Popular Front
sensibilities as they were translated into fiction.
Far less well known than John Steinbecks Grapes
of Wrath or Hemingways For Whom the Bell Tolls
both classic examples of critically acclaimed
Popular Front novels dealing with the Dust Bowl
and the Spanish Civil War, respectively A Time
to Remember updates Theodore Dreisers Sister
Carrie (1900). It traces the story of a lowermiddle-class second-generation Brooklyn Jewish
girls radicalization as she takes the train actually, the subway to the big city, joins a union,
goes on strike, meets members of different ethnic
and racial groups, falls in love, collaborates with
left-leaning society types to organize the League of
Women Shoppers in support of the striking shop
girls, and defies her traditional parents to enter
925
mainstream American culture through labor,

union organizing, and shopping.
Unlike reportage or poetry, novels cannot be
topical in quite the same way as short work meant
to respond viscerally to the moment; for the
former, there is considerable lag time between
conception, writing, and publication. Richard
Wrights Native Son (1940), begun in 1938 in
response to what he felt to be a misconstruing of
his collection of stories, Uncle Toms Children,
and to his outrage over the Robert Nixon case
blazing across Chicago tabloids, could benefit
greatly from the WPA; Wright was among the
few New York authors allowed to work from
home on his own writing. His essay for the WPA
anthology American Stuff, The Ethics of Living
Jim Crow, a scathing indictment of racism
placed at the heart of a collection by WPA authors
meant to showcase their work to elicit congressional and popular support for Federal One,
became the basis for his 1945 autobiography,
Black Boy, which first appeared in print after
World War II, without the sections on Wrights
party affiliation. Native Son concludes with communist lawyer Max explaining Biggers murders
through the lens of pre-Popular Front ideas about
the Black Belt but incorporating Popular Front
sensibilities about the grand coalition linking
wealthy left-wing whites, such as Mary Dalton,
to street toughs like Bigger. All of which is to say
that even loyal party members and diligent
Writers Project authors produced work that was
temporally, and temperamentally, out of synch
with the theories and institutions supporting
a progressive writer.
Meridel Le Sueurs novel The Girl, published in
1974, was written in 1939 while she worked for the
Minnesota Writers Project collecting stories
from unemployed women through the Workers
Alliance and researching St. Paul history. Its
description of the getaway that a girl and her
lover Butch take through the Minnesota countryside following their botched bank robbery reads as
a variant of the road tours elaborated in the
Minnesota Guidebook. Her novel failed to find
a publisher, despite her use of the gangster and
fallen woman plots so popular in early 1930s
Hollywood to augment a female proletarian
novel, because it seemed too far-fetched by
the late 1930s; it may have preached worker
solidarity, but the workers who unite were all
926
females working in bars or walking the streets,

a far cry from the upbeat picture expected of
Popular Front literature as Roosevelt geared
for war and the party denounced war after the
HitlerStalin Pact. Philip Roths novels, especially
I Married a Communist (1998) and The Plot
Against America (2004), take up the residual affect
created in boys by the Popular Front culture from
the late 1930s through World War II. In their
attention to the ways radio, movies, and magazines spread a wholesome version of left-wing
sentiment about America, the New Deal, and then
the war, Roths novels convey the contradictory
impact of the New Deal and the Popular Front on
American vernacular culture. During the 1930s, it
was not fiction but the mass media that normalized Popular Front and WPA programs: Gary
Cooper and Ingrid Bergman are the powerful
emblems of Spanish Loyalists; John Carradine
and Jane Darnton driving the Joads jalopy into
the New Deal camp are the people. These
ironies extend to Margaret Mitchells bestseller,
Gone With the Wind, written during the 1920s at
the height of Ku Klux Klan violence but published
in 1936, which became a Hollywood blockbuster
in 1939. This nostalgic paean to Jim Crow competed with MGMs Popular Front version of The
Wizard of Oz, in which various segments of
working-class Oz intellectuals, youth, farmers,
tradesmen, even dogs; some native-born, some
immigrants join together and overcome the
sinister control of monomaniacal leaders beyond
and within its borders. Roths novels capture
these antinomies within postwar popular culture
to reveal the complicated and lasting legacy of the
Popular Front and WPA on American fiction.
Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist
Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Working-Class
Fiction (BIF)
Aaron, D. (1977). Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Alsberg, H. G. (1937). Extemporaneous Remarks at
the Second American Writers Congress, June 1937.
In H. Hart (ed.), The Writer in a Changing World.
New York: Equinox Cooperative.
Bontemps, A., & Conroy, J. (1945). They Seek a City.

Botkin, B. A. (ed.) (1944). A Treasury of American
Folklore. New York: Crown.
of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New
York: Verso.
Federal Writers Project, Federal Arts Project. (1937).
American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse. New
York: Viking.
Foley, B. (1993). Radical Representations: Politics and
Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 19291941.
Garman, B. K. (2000). A Race of Singers: Whitmans
Working-Class Hero From Guthrie to Springsteen.
Kazin, A. (1942). On Native Grounds. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Kempton, M. (1955). Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and
Monuments of the Thirties. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Le Sueur, M. (1978). The Girl. Cambridge: West
End.
Mangione, J. (1983). The Dream and the Deal: The
Federal Writers Project, 19351943. Philadelphia:
McElvaine, R. (1984). The Great Depression: America,
19291941. New York: Times.
Roth, P. (1998). I Married a Communist. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2004). The Plot Against America. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Saal, I. (2007). New Deal Theater: The Vernacular
Tradition in American Political Theater. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Slade, C. (1936). Sterile Sun. New York: Vanguard.
Slade, C. (1940) The Triumph of Willie Pond. New York:
Vanguard.
Szalay, M. (2000). New Deal Modernism: American
Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State.
Wald, A. (2007). Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and
the Antifascist Crusade. Chapel Hill: University of
Welky, D. (2008). Everything Was Better in America:
Print Culture in the Great Depression. Urbana:
Williams, A. (1937). Murder in the WPA. New York:
Robert McBride.
Wright, R. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper.
Zugsmith, L. (1936). A Time to Remember. New York:
Random House.
WRIGHT, RICHARD
Wright, Richard
WENDY W. WALTERS
Richard Wright was the most famous African

American novelist of his era, and remains today
one of the most prominent black writers in the
world. His work spans multiple genres, including
the short story, autobiography, novel, poetry,
travelogue, essay, and haiku. He was the first
African American writer to be able to support
himself (and his family) solely from his writing,
which has been widely translated throughout the
world. Native Son (1940c), Wrights most successful novel, was published to great acclaim by
Harper and Brothers, a major American publisher. It was a landmark event since this was the first
African American novel to be offered by the Book
of the Month Club as one of its main selections.
Wrights work is philosophically driven by the
major ideas and movements that influenced his
life and his reading, including social realism,
communism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis.
He was particularly interested in the ways an
individual is shaped by his or her environment.
Wrights upbringing in poverty in the Jim Crow
American South, his migration to the urban
North of Chicago, and his final expatriation in
France all shaped his ideas and helped mold his
global perspectives on literature, politics, and the
human condition.
Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on a
Mississippi plantation, about 20 miles east of
Natchez, on September 4, 1908. His father was an
illiterate sharecropper, and his mother was for a
time a schoolteacher. All four of Wrights grandparents were born in slavery. The first 19 years of
Wrights life were spent in Mississippi and Tennessee, where his family struggled with the racist
social structure and its concomitant conditions of
poverty, illness, violence, and hunger. Wrights
schooling was erratic, and he and his family moved
often, seeking affordable housing, available employment, andassistance for his mothers illhealth,
as his father had early on deserted the family.
Despite these circumstances, Wright was an avid
reader, and graduated from Smith Robertson
Junior High in 1925 as the school valedictorian.
Asserting his independence as a writer, he insisted
on presenting his own speech, resisting the
principals pressure to author it for him.
927
Wright often worked to support his family and

to afford his own schoolbooks, and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), details his experiences
working in the American South under heavy
racial oppression. Wright always found ways to
get reading material, often using his various places
of employment to facilitate his access to books
otherwise forbidden to black people in the South.
One of these formative experiences, which he
describes in Black Boy, concerns his reading of
H. L. Mencken, a long-time critic of the South. In
reading Mencken, Wright discovered that words
could be used as weapons, and this realization
solidified in him a desire to fight injustice with
his writing. The constriction of living in the
South finally became untenable, and, like so many
other Southern-born African Americans in the
first decades of the twentieth century, Wright
migrated north to Chicago with his aunt in 1927.
While working at various jobs in Chicago,
including the post office, Wright met members
of the John Reed Club, a literary organization
sponsored by the Communist Party. He became
involved in this group, reading its journals,
submitting his own revolutionary poetry, and
eventually joining the Communist Party in
1934. During this time he also read widely among
such authors as Gertrude Stein (who would later
become a friend), Henry James, Walt Whitman,
Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Theodore
Dreiser, and many others. In 1935 he published
a now widely anthologized poem about lynching,
Between the World and Me, in the Partisan
Review. In 1935 he was also hired by the Federal
Writers Project, a part of the Works Progress
Administration. He continued to support his
family, to organize for the Communist Party, to
meet with and organize various writing groups in
Chicago and the Midwest, and to publish his
work. His story Big Boy Leaves Home was
published in the anthology The New Caravan
(1936).
Wrights involvement with the Communist
Party exemplifies his complex position and
philosophy as an artist, since he was attracted by
the partys promise of social and political equality,
and yet frustrated as the party leadership demanded more and more control over its writers
and artists. For Wright, as a poor person, a
working person, and a black man in America,
928
WRIGHT, RICHARD
the ideals of equality and freedom espoused by

the party had appeal. And yet throughout his
life, Wright sought to define himself apart from
various groups, believing ultimately in the importance of both individual and artistic freedom. In
1937, he moved to New York City to attempt to
earn a living as a writer, soon publishing an
important essay, Blueprint for Negro Writing,
in which Wright took an authoritative position
against earlier African American literature, which
he accused of pandering to whites, dressed in the
knee-pants of servility. He argued for a more
social-realist aesthetic one offering direct political confrontation with social inequalities, and in
a sense ushering in his own forthcoming protest
fiction. Wrights positioning here demonstrates
his human complexity and contradiction: he
sought artistic freedom, and at the same time
crafted a blueprint for future writing.
Another important essay published in 1937 was
The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch, in American Stuff: WPA
Writers Anthology. This essay would later become
a part of his autobiography, Black Boy, and was
also later included in the second edition of his
well-received collection of short stories, Uncle
Toms Children (1940d [1938]). In this essay, he
details some of the specific and myriad injustices
faced by African Americans in the South. The
House Special Committee on Un-American
Activities denounced the essay, which initiated
a long history of US state surveillance of Wright.
His work also drew the attention of the literary
establishment, and he received several important
awards for his short fiction, culminating in
a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939. During this
time he was active in various Harlem literary
circles, which included such writers as Langston
Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and others.
Wrights first novel, Native Son (1940c), sold
215,000 copies in the first three weeks. The effect
of Native Son is hard to overstate. In this novel,
mainstream American readers saw a compelling
and dramatic portrayal of the effects of American
racism on a set of Northern, urban characters,
especially on Wrights difficult protagonist, Bigger Thomas. Wright uses Bigger, a poor, African
American youth living in a segregated part of
Chicago, to depict the ways that social exclusion
damages ones consciousness. In the interaction
between Bigger and the wealthy white Dalton
family, readers also see the effects of residential

segregation in the North. Bigger murders two
women, the white Mary Dalton and his black
girlfriend, Bessie, and ends the book facing the
electric chair. Many have characterized the novel
as a wake-up call (it opens with the ringing of
Biggers alarm clock) about the potentially violent
outcome of racism in America.
Shortly after Native Son was published, Wright
gave a lecture in New York entitled How Bigger
Was Born, and this text has been appended to
later versions of Native Son. It provides an analysis
of Wrights aims for his novel and for his social
critique in general. Wright explains that he felt his
earlier collection of short stories, Uncle Toms
Children, was the kind of book even bankers
daughters could read and weep over and feel good
about, and he determined to write a book no one
could weep over, that would offer no salve for its
hard and painful truths. Discussing the genesis of
his protagonist, Wright cites several Biggers he
had known growing up, African American males
constrained by the racism of the South, and
responding with violence of various kinds. He
shows how the options for this character are
limited to violent death, jail, or insanity. Influenced by the Chicago School of Urban Sociology,
Wright created a social and literary experiment by
placing his character in an urban Northern environment. The Chicago School sought to provide
meaning to sociological statistics by way of individual life histories. In this sense the narrative of
Biggers life sheds light on the plight of many of
the urban poor. In his essay, Wright explains that
there are also white Biggers, and thus Native Son
can be read as a critique of American consumerism, materialism, and greed, finding no remedy in
any healing communal value system. Here again
the theme of hunger is present, as Bigger hungers
for access to the glittering things that the media
show him, as well as for opportunity.
In writing of Biggers interaction with
Chicagos police force and the court system,
Wright drew upon the actual case of Robert
Nixon, an African American youth tried for
murder in Chicago in 1938. Some of Wrights
portrayals of Bigger in the press, the police force,
and the courts come directly from the Nixon trial,
and stand as a scathing expose of the ways African
Americans are viewed by these dominant American institutions. As Wright further explains in
WRIGHT, RICHARD
How Bigger Was Born, it is this fact of social

(and legal) exclusion from the vital processes of
the nations life that creates Biggers anguish, his
emotional and cultural hunger. He explains that
Bigger is a dispossessed and disinherited man . . .
who lives amid the greatest possible plenty on
earth. Native Son was also staged as a Broadway
play, directed by Orson Welles and starring
Canada Lee, and eventually it was also made into
a movie, starring Wright himself as Bigger Thomas. Later, African American writers James Baldwin
and Ralph Ellison would address Wrights dominance by critiquing the portrayal of black culture
in Native Son. Baldwins essays Everybodys
Protest Novel (1949) and Many Thousands
Gone (1952) critiqued the one-dimensionality
of Bigger Thomas and the efficacy of social protest
fiction in general. Though Wright had earlier
assisted Baldwin in his career in Paris, these essays
led to a break between Wright and Baldwin.
Wright continued his interest in examining
how the Northern urban environment in many
ways continued the forms of social exclusion
practiced in the South, and he collaborated with
Edwin Rosskam on 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk
History of the Negro in the United States (1941).
Influenced by the Chicago School of Urban
Sociology, this photodocumentary essay visually
depicts the crumbling kitchenette apartments and
poor living conditions that faced many African
American migrants to the cities of the North. In
his essay, Wright forcefully argues that the former
tenant bosses of the South were simply replaced
by the bosses of the buildings, who enforce
a new kind of segregation in the Northern city.
After the publication of this book, the FBI began a
formal investigation of Wright to determine if the
book was prosecutable as sedition. FBI interest in
Wright continued throughout his life, despite
his formal break with the Communist Party in
1942. That same year, Wright was awarded the
NAACPs Spingarn Medal for the highest achievement by an African American.
Wright published his autobiography, Black
Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, in 1945
with Harper and Brothers. The book was very well
reviewed, and maintained the number-one spot
on the bestseller list for over a month. The publishing history of Black Boy sheds light on some of
the various forces affecting African American
literature more generally, and Wrights career
929
specifically. Originally Wrights autobiography

was titled American Hunger, and contained two
parts: his early years in the South, followed by his
migration to the North and his life in Chicago.
The Book of the Month Club, however, told
Wrights publisher they would only accept the
first section, so Wright changed the title to Black
Boy. The second section of Wrights autobiography, then titled American Hunger, was only
published 32 years later, after Wrights death.
Though Wrights experience with the Communist Party perhaps spurred his thinking toward
internationalism, he had also expressed Biggers
kinship with other oppressed people globally in
his 1940 essay about his protagonist. In 1941
Wright married Ellen Poplar, a white woman of
Jewish descent, and they had two daughters, Julia
(b. 1942) and Rachel (b. 1949). Frustrated with
the racism facing his young interracial family in
New York, Wright moved them to Paris in 1947,
where he associated with Simone de Beauvoir and
Jean-Paul Sartre. Wrights novel, The Outsider
(1953) reflects his interest in existentialist philosophy, especially in its portrayal of a black antihero, Cross Damon. Wright also became a kind of
spokesman and father figure for the community
of expatriate African American artists often
gathered at the Cafe Tournon, including James
Baldwin, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith,
and Ollie Harrington. Wright and his family
continued to live in Europe (primarily Paris) until
Wrights death in 1960.
Throughout his expatriation, Wright traveled
widely in Europe, Asia, and Africa, associating with
many international intellectuals, including George
Padmore, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz
Fanon, and Eric Williams, and writing and recording his experiences. His trip to Africa in 1953 was
centered in the Gold Coast, which was then
a British colony with a growing independence
movement that would eventually lead it to become
the first independent African nation, Ghana.
Wright traveled approximately 3,000 miles by car,
meeting various African dignitaries, including
Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. He also visited
several slave forts and confronted his own questions about the relationship between his African
inheritance and his identity as a Western intellectual. His lengthy account of this journey was
published in 1954 as Black Power: A Record of
Reactions in a Land of Pathos. Also in 1954, Wright
930
WRIGHT, STEPHEN
published Savage Holiday, a Freudian experimental novel about a psychopathic murderer, featuring
only white characters.
Wright pursued his interest in the genres of
travel writing and cultural analysis, journeying to
Spain in 1954, and eventually publishing Pagan
Spain (1957). Wrights international political
interests also led him to attend a conference of
non-aligned nations in Bandung, Indonesia in
1955. Wrights book about this conference, The
Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), argued that these rising Third World
nations were motivated by the forces of religion
and race, not along lines of communism and
democracy as had been depicted by Cold War
superpowers.
Throughout the first half of the 1950s, Wright
had also been lecturing across Europe in his role as
one of the worlds most famous African American
authors. These lectures are collected in the book
White Man, Listen! (1957). Here Wright continues
his perspective as a world writer interested in the
global kinship he had earlier implied between his
most famous protagonist, Bigger Thomas, and
other oppressed peoples of color around the world.
Wright also continued to work on fiction
during the late 1950s, finishing a novel set in
Mississippi, The Long Dream (1958), and beginning work on Island of Hallucinations, which is
still unpublished. A new genre for Wright in 1958
was haiku. He eventually completed approximately 4,000 haiku before his death in Paris of
heart failure in 1960. Also before he died, Wright
had completed proofreading another collection of
stories, Eight Men, which was then published
posthumously in 1961. Wright had also begun
a new novel, A Fathers Law, which was published
in its unfinished state on the centenary of his birth
in 2008.
SEE ALSO: Ellison, Ralph (AF); Ethnicity
and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF);
Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction
(AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF)
Fabre, M. (1993). The Unfinished Quest of Richard

Wright, 2nd edn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gates, H. L., Jr., & Appiah, K. A. (eds.) (1993). Richard
Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New
York: Amistad.
Hakutani, Y. (1996). Richard Wright and Racial
Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
JanMohamed, A. (2005). The Death-Bound Subject:
Richard Wrights Archaeology of Death. Durham, NC:
Rampersad, A. (ed.) (1995). Richard Wright: A
Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Wright, R. (1937). Blueprint for Negro Writing. New
Challenge, 2, 5365.
Wright, R. (1940a). The Ethics of Living Jim Crow
[1938]. In Uncle Toms Children: Four Novellas. New
York: Harper.
Wright, R. (1940b). How Bigger Was Born. In Native
Son. New York: Harper.
Wright, R. (1940c). Native Son. New York: Harper.
Wright, R. (1940d). Uncle Toms Children: Four
Novellas [1938]. New York: Harper.
Wright, R. (1941). Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk
History of the Negro in the United States. New York:
Viking.
Wright, R. (1953). The Outsider. New York: Harper.
Wright, R. (1954a). Black Power: A Record of Reactions
in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper.
Wright, R. (1954b). Savage Holiday. New York: Avon.
Wright, R. (1956). The Color Curtain: Report from the
Bandung Conference. Cleveland: World.
Wright, R. (1956). Pagan Spain. New York: Harper.
Wright, R. (1957). White Man, Listen! New York:
Doubleday.
Wright, R. (1958). The Long Dream. New York:
Doubleday.
Wright, R. (1961). Eight Men. Cleveland: World.
Wright, R. (1963). Lawd Today. New York: Walker.
Wright, R. (1977). Black Boy. (American Hunger).
(Originally published as Black Boy, 1945). New York:
HarperCollins .
Wright, R. (2008). A Fathers Law. New York:
HarperCollins.
Wright, Stephen
DAVID W. MADDEN

Bloom, H. (ed.) (1987). Richard Wright. Philadelphia:
Chelsea House.
Butler, R. (ed.) (1995). The Critical Response to Richard
Wright. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Stephen Wright is an experimental writer dedicated to challenging fictional complacencies

and traditions in postmodern fictions that examine American culture in all its extravagances.
His subjects range among the Vietnam War,
WRIGHT, STEPHEN
interstellar aliens, middle-class boredom, and the

American Civil War, each distinguished by
extraordinary stylistic virtuosity.
Stephen Wright was born in 1946 in Cleveland,
Ohio and attended Ohio State University. When
he lapsed into academic jeopardy because of
poor grades, he left the university and was
drafted into the Army and educated at the
US Army Intelligence School. He was sent to
Vietnam, and that experience figures prominently in his first and (less overtly) fourth novels.
After his discharge from the military, he returned
to Ohio State and then entered the Iowa Writers
Workshop MFA program, where he studied
under John Irving.
His first novel, Meditations in Green (1983), is
an intricately constructed novel composed of
three narrative strands. One is the subjective
rumination of a drugged-out James I. Griffin,
a Vietnam War veteran. The second is a thirdperson narrative of Griffins exploits in Vietnam,
and the third offers 15 meditations on plant life
(primarily poppies) from another subjective
viewpoint. Griffin exists in a kaleidoscopic,
hallucinatory condition, with dreadful nightmares of conflict, drug-addled days in postwar
America, and projections of vegetable experience.
Both Vietnam and Griffins narrative are
postmodern in their shifting perspectives and
uncertain boundaries. Like other chroniclers
of Vietnam, Wright leaves the reader with an
overriding sense of despair and utter waste.
M31: A Family Romance (1988) is set in the rural
Midwest, a departure from the jungles of Asia or
the urban centers of America in his last novel.
However, the bland exterior reveals another kind
of mania in the figures of Dash and Dot and their
four children, who believe they are extraterrestrials
from the galaxy M31, to which they expect to
return imminently. When the couple are not attending UFO conventions or preaching on latenight radio, they commit incest, terrify a pair of
visitors, and interpret the wailings of their youngest child as communications with their home
planet. Through this collection of grotesques,
Wright interrogates fundamental American concerns of the pioneer spirit, evangelical faith, and
consumer obsessiveness.
Going Native (1994) is usually considered his
magnum opus, a reconfiguration of the classic
American road novel with far more sinister
931
implications. Here Wylie Jones (later Coyote),

a nondescript suburbanite, leaves his family,
steals a car, and drives through the Western states
on a bizarre crime spree. Composed of eight
narratives, the novel presents a metafictional
nesting of stories within stories united primarily
by Wylies protean definitions of random selves.
The novel teems with intertextual allusions
to Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Truman
Capote, Herman Melville, and Joseph Conrad,
not to mention scores of films.
The most extended and compelling of these
narratives is a rewriting of The Heart of Darkness,
in which a bored Hollywood couple journey
through the wilds of Borneo to experience something new, only to interpret everything in terms of
their vapid lives. Here, as he does throughout,
Wright emphasizes the maze of postmodern
simulations that define modern existence in
a commercial culture. As he emphasized in each
of his previous novels, when people lose their
connection to any belief system larger than
their immediate environment or their appetite
for commodities, they are doomed.
After an extended hiatus from writing, Wright
returned with The Amalgamation Polka (2007),
a novel he had been planning since finishing
Meditations in Green. Set during the Civil War,
it follows Liberty Fish, son of abolitionist parents
and slaveholding grandparents, on a chronically
straightforward picaresque journey from North
to South and through battlefields. After deserting
from the Union troops and terrors of battle,
Liberty visits his racist grandparents and wanders
into another horror show. The analyses of cultural
failure and moral drift are once more presented in
a fierce examination of slavery its origins and
legacy Americas longest and most troubling of
nightmares.
Wright enjoys a solid standing in the academic
community and has received a number of awards
and grants, including the Maxwell Perkins Prize
(1983), a Hodder Fellowship (1985), Guggenheim
Fellowship (1989), the Whiting Writers Award
(1990), and a Lannan Literary Award (1994). He
has taught at Princeton and Brown Universities,
Goucher College, and The New School. He lives in
New York City.
SEE ALSO: The Novel and War (AF);
Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF)
932
WRIGHT, STEPHEN

Beidler, P. D. (1990). Re-Writing America: Literature
as Cultural Revision in the New Vietnam Fiction.
In Owen W. Gilman, Jr., & Lorrie Smith (eds.),
America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature
and Film of the Vietnam War. New York: Garland,
pp. 39.
Byers, T., ODonnell, P., & Schaub, T. (1998). An
Interview with Stephen Wright. Contemporary
Carpenter, L. (2003). IT DONT MEAN NOTHIN:
Vietnam War Fiction and Postmodernism. College
Marn, P. (1989). Entropy in Meditations in Green.
Atlantis, 11(12), 13747.
Mayer, R. (2005). Just Driving: Contemporary Road
Novels and the Triviality of the Outlaw Existence.
In Klaus Benesch & Kerstin Schmidt (eds.), Space
in America: Theory, History, Culture. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, pp. 36984.
Metress, C. (1989). Hopeless Tatters: The American
Movie Tradition and Vietnam in Stephen Wrights
Meditations in Green. Studies in the Humanities,

16(2), 11120.
ODonnell, P. (1996). Speed, Metaphor, and the
Postmodern Road Novel: Stephen Wrights Going
Native and Others. Mississippi Review Online. At
www.mississippireview.com/1996/odonnell.html,
Ringnalda, D. (1986). Chlorophyll Overdose: Stephen
Wrights Meditations in Green. Western Humanities
Review, 40(2), 12540.
Stewart, M. (1993). Stephen Wrights Style in
Meditations in Green. Critique: Studies in
Wright, S. (1983). Meditations in Green. New York:
Scribners.
Wright, S. (1988). M31: A Family Romance. New York:
Harmony.
Wright, S. (1994). Going Native. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Wright, S. (2007). The Amalgamation Polka. New York:
Vintage.
Y
Yezierska, Anzia
TYRONE SIMPSON
We can find the making of Anzia Yezierska as a

literary luminary in the publication history of her
first short story, The Free Vacation House
(1915). It is the tale of a poor immigrant mother
and family who gain a paid retreat to the country,
only to find themselves fettered to the effete lodge
rules of the bourgeois woman who hosts them.
The story emerged from a painstaking collaboration between the writer and her older sister,
Annie, who at the time of the storys conception
was a mother of five children and the former
victim of such condescending hospitality. Anzia
coached her sibling into recalling her emotional
response to the insulting treatment and asked her
advice about how to represent the immigrant
tongue on paper. Born from their partnership
were the proletarian realism and ghetto dialect
that gave Yezierskas fiction its distinct accent, as
well as the recurring themes of her sustained,
albeit mercurial literary career: the vexations of
married life and parenting, the uncertain fruits of
assimilation, the spectacular material differences
between the lives of the moneyed and those of the
poor, the disappointments that attend the pursuit
of beauty, the alienations forged by polite or
malicious xenophobia, and the myriad sexisms
that the ensuing jazz age would seek to remit.
Using the raw materials of her own life and that of
other Gotham-bound Jewish immigrants at the
turn of the century, Yezierska deployed narrative
to decipher the riddle of (a newcomers) pure
desire.
Yezierskas interest in desires vagaries fed off

a lifetime of abiding by their demands. Born in
Plotsk, a rural town in Russias Poland, on some
day in 1882, Anzia was one of six children that the
Yezierskys shepherded to the US in 1890. In 1899,
at the age of 17, Yezierska fled the devout and
patriarchal traditions of her father in search
of education, availing herself of several of the
opportunities available for young women in lower
Manhattan. She boarded at the Clara de Hirsch
Home for Girls, went to New York City Normal
College, and then attended Columbia University,
for degrees in teaching and the domestic arts.
At Columbia, Yezierska had a propitious brush
with the elite public intellectualism of John
Dewey, which sparked their passionate yet unconsummated love affair, and enabled her to
study social and political philosophy. She served
as a translator and researcher in Deweys ethnography of an immigrant Polish community in
Philadelphia, benefited from his editorial advice
on her early stories, and was encouraged to mine
the sublimity of the immigrant experience that
she and her familiars had endured and knew the
best.
The sudden and heartbreaking demise of their
relationship in the fall of 1918 left Yezierska to
forge her fate on her own. The following year, she
published the tale for which she had had Deweys
aid, Soap and Water and the Immigrant, in the
New Republic. Shortly afterward, another highbrow magazine, Century, published The Fat of
the Land, a narrative brimming with the distress
of a young woman first too poor to provide for her
children and later, following their professional

934
YEZIERSKA, ANZIA
success, made too rich to be comfortable in her

adopted land. This portrait of an immigrants
unyielding social discomfort and awkwardness,
despite her material circumstances, caught the
attention of Edward J. OBrien, then editor of
the Best Short Stories series, and in 1920 earned the
writer the award named in his honor for the most
distinguished sketch of the previous year.
In six of the 12 months of 1920, Yezierska had
her stories appear in reputed literary magazines.
By the end of the year, many of these stories had
been collected by Houghton Mifflin and released
as a set under the title of Hungry Hearts. Anguishing over the critical silence that greeted the collection, Yezierska stormed the office of yet another Anglo male in search of intellectual justice and
opportunity (Dewey was the first). The recipient
of her appeal was Hearst columnist Dr. Frank
Crane, whose subsequent account of their conversation and of the book made her a preoccupation of the American punditry and culture makers
for years to come. The following year, Goldwyn
studios tendered her a contract, a $10,000 advance, and a train ticket west, to help draft the
screenplay that would transform the collection
into a motion picture.
Over the next 11 years, Yezierska published
several books, and in doing so joined the ranks of
other realist artists like Mary Antin, Fannie Hurst,
and Michael Gold. There was Salome of the Tenements (1923), a novel about a manipulative Jewish
female striver who marries herself into the dissatisfaction of gentile materialism; the hybrid of
short fiction and narrative essays, The Children
of Loneliness (1923), which explored further the
excruciating cultural interstitiality of immigrant
Americans; The Arrogant Beggar (1927), a philosophical novel about the virtues and vices of
organized charities as they engaged with immigrants; and a novel that fictionalized the heartwrenching vicissitudes of her stillborn relationship with Dewey, entitled All That I Never Could
Be (1932a). Of this work, Bread Givers (1925) was
the most accomplished. Its elaborate narrative
traces the immigrant struggles of the observant
and socially striving young heroine Sara Smolinsky
from ghetto austerity to mainstream acceptance
and comfort. Dogged vigilance prevents Sara from
becoming a breadgiver, a woman who sacrifices
her own dreams and individuality to prop up
those of the man in her life, be it father or spouse.
The novels feminist message would reignite

Yezierskas popularity in the 1980s. It also exemplifies her knack for spellbinding dialogue and
her ability to depict characters that rhapsodize
and ululate without irrevocably sliding into the
sentimental.
Though she continued to write through the
Depression, Yezierska was never able to recapture
the success she achieved after World War I. She
wrote with the WPA in the 1930s, befriending
a young Richard Wright. She spent the twilight of
her writing career auspiciously nonetheless, publishing to acclaim at age 68 an autobiographical
novel, Red Ribbon on a White Horse in 1950 and
spending the balance of the next decade reviewing
books for the New York Times. Her career closed
with several stories and essays about societys
neglect of the aging, a topic that renewed the
indignation that gave Yezierskas prose its heat
and energy. She passed away in 1970.
Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gold, Mike (AF);
Social Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and
Popular Front Fiction (AF)

Dearborn, M. V. (1988). Love in The Promised Land: The
Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. New York:
Free Press.
Dearborn, M. V. (1989). Anzia Yezierska and the
Making of an Ethnic American Self. In W. Sollors
(ed.), The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford
Henriksen, L. L. (1988). Anzia Yezierska: A Writers Life.
Kessler-Harris, A. (2003). Introduction. In A. Yezierska,
Bread Givers, 3rd edn. New York: Persea, pp. xxi
xxxvi.
Schoen, C. B. (1982). Anzia Yezierska. Boston: Twayne.
Simpson, T. (2009). The Love of Colour in Me: Anzia
Yezierskas Bread Givers and the Space of White
Racial Manufacture. MELUS, 34(3), 93114.
Yezierska, A. (1920). Hungry Hearts. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Yezierska, A. (1923). Salome of the Tenements. New
York: Boni and Liveright.
Yezierska, A. (1925). Bread Givers. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
Yezierska, A. (1927). Arrogant Beggar. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
YOUNG, MARGUERITE
Yezierska, A. (1932a). All I Could Never Be. New York:

Brewer, Warren, and Putnam.
Yezierska, A. (1932b). Children of Loneliness. New York:
Funk and Wagnalls.
Yezierska, A. (1950). Red Ribbon on a White Horse. New
York: Scribners.
Young, Marguerite
PATRICK ODONNELL
Though she has a strong cult following, Marguerite Young (190895), novelist, poet, and
essayist, has been regrettably overlooked as
a significant modernist writer. Her neglected masterpiece, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), was
the work of two decades, and stands in company
with James Joyces Ulysses (1922), Herman Brochs
The Death of Virgil (1945), or William Faulkners
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as an encyclopedic
novel that explores myriad relations between complex psychological interiorities and the labyrinths
of modern culture. Equally, Young stands alongside Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Anas Nin,
and Djuna Barnes as a major woman writer who
charted the modernist terrain of ecriture feminine
and expanded the reach of the novel in her experiments with language and form. It is difficult to say
why Young has been so ignored: in 1993, Dalkey
Archives reissued Miss MacIntosh, My Darling in
two volumes of over 600 pages each perhaps it is
the prolixity of her work or the demands it makes
upon the reader that have led to her non-recognition. The Dalkey reissue has led to a moderate
outburst of new interest in her work, that ironic
form of belated visibility as a writer before her
time.
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana,
Young studied English and French literature at
Butler University and the University of Chicago,
where she received the BA and MA, respectively.
During her undergraduate and graduate years,
Young began writing poetry, and she published
her first book of poetry, Prismatic Ground, in 1937
while teaching high school in Indianapolis. At this
time, Young became interested in utopian communities and lived for various periods in New
Harmony, Indiana. She subsequently entered the
English PhD program at the University of Iowa,
and taught briefly as a lecturer at the university,
935
but moved in the early 1940s to Greenwich Village

in order to seek her living as a writer; she remained
in Manhattan for most of the rest of her life as
a writer and teacher at universities in and around
New York City. Awarded Guggenheim and
Rockefeller Fellowships, in addition to Miss
MacIntosh, My Darling, Young published during
her lifetime two volumes of poetry; Angel in the
Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945), a lyrical
historical account of the founding of New
Harmony; and numerous reviews and essays. At
the time of her death, she was in the midst of the
work of a quarter century, a multivolume biography of the social reformer Eugene V. Debs; an
edited, one-volume version of the project
was posthumously published as Harp Song for a
Radical in 1999.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a dreamlike,
surrealistic portrayal of the complex relationship
between Vera Cartwheel, a young girl growing
up in a realm of eccentric and uncaring adults on
a decaying New England sea coast estate, and
Georgia MacIntosh, hired to serve as Veras governess, outwardly an elderly, down-to-earth,
common sense native of What Cheer, Iowa.
Miss MacIntosh takes on the role of mentor, spirit
guide, and occasional alter ego to Vera; the
seven years of their relationship comes to an end
when Georgia commits suicide by waking into the
ocean when Vera is 14 years old. The event, and
their years together, haunt Vera for the rest of her
life as she undertakes a hallucinatory journey
through a landscape of shifting personalities and
mutable identities an erotic, physical, and spiritual voyage that only comes to an end when Vera
takes up permanent residence and family life in
southern Indiana.
This bare summary does little to elicit the cast
of characters, events, ancillary narratives, and
stylistic experiments that fill the pages of Miss
MacIntosh, My Darling. If, as the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky posited, the work of literature
is to defamiliarize the reader to make the
world strange then Youngs novel is an epic
instance of the world made strange, its secret
corners opened up for examination. Like Malcolm Lowrys Under the Volcano, Miss MacIntosh,
My Darling renders a multilayered world that
operates analogically the spiritual and the physical, the mundane and the extraordinary intertwined in the fatally connected personae to be
936
YOUNG, MARGUERITE
encountered in the dream-journey of life. An

example of the prolixity, inventiveness, and oddity of Youngs prose is revealed in a passage in
which Vera considers the relation between existence and non-existence:
There was simply, one must deduce still from
all her energetic, caustic certainties, and I
believed then that Miss MacIntosh, even
though she might go against the grain, was
right, no shadowy borderland where that exists
which does not exist, where headless horsemen
ride about in purple fog or old emperors play
water polo or men have heads like dice, or if
there was, then it was Gods murky business
and not ours to tamper with or change, for
God had suffered due to this erroneous creation and had quite frankly been filled with the
greatest remorse ever since the day of the
beginning which was not too far different from
the day of the end. (1: 193)
This passage is exemplary of the novel in its
entirety, which is invested in discerning the
shadowy borderlands between life and death,
body and mind, self and other. It is without
qualification one of the most important novels
written in twentieth-century America, and though
it was the only novel that she wrote, it elevates
Marguerite Young to the unenviable status of the
most significant unknown writer of her time.

Modernist Fiction (AF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)

Burke, K. (1945). The Work of Regeneration. Kenyon
Review, 7(4), 696700.
Eichenlaub, C. (n.d.). Who Is Marguerite Young? At
www.home.earthlink.net/eichfr/youngweb.htm,
Durand, R. (1975). La Fabrique de la Fiction: Lecture du
Roman de Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My
Darling. Caliban, 12, 4560.
Fuchs, M. (ed.) (1994). Marguerite Young, Our
Darling: Tributes and Essays. Normal, IL: Dalkey
Archives.
Shaviro, S. (1990). Lost Chords and Interrupted Births:
Marguerite Youngs Exorbitant Vision. Critique, 31,
21322.
Young, M. (1937). Prismatic Ground. New York:
Macmillan.
Young, M. (1944). Moderate Fable. Cornwall, NY:
Reynal and Hitchcock.
Young, M. (1993). Miss MacIntosh, My Darling [1965].
2 vols. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives.
Young, M. (1994). Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale
of Two Utopias [1945]. Normal, IL: Dalkey
Archives.
Young, M. (1994). Inviting the Muses: Stories, Reviews.
Young, M. (1999). Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and
Times of Eugene Victor Debs. New York: Knopf.
Editors
John Clement Ball is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, Canada,
specializing in postcolonial and Canadian fiction. He is the author of Satire and the Postcolonial
Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (2003) and Imagining London: Postcolonial
Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (2004).
The Encyclopedia of
Volume III
Twentieth-Century
World Fiction
Volume editor:
John Clement Ball
Acknowledgments
My involvement in the Encyclopedia of TwentiethCentury Fiction began three years ago with an
invitation from Emma Bennett of Wiley-Blackwell and Brian Shaffer, the projects editor-inchief. Both were tremendously helpful throughout the process and a pleasure to work with, as
were Isobel Bainton and Amy Clark. I was assisted
immeasurably in developing my list of headwords
by colleagues who generously agreed to look over
my draft lists and offer feedback; they all agreed to
write entries as well, and I am grateful to them all:
Jennifer Andrews, John Eustace, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Laura Moss, and Neil ten Kortenaar.
Two anonymous reviewers for Wiley-Blackwell
also made helpful suggestions before the assignments began, as did various contributors at later
stages. I could not have finished this project on
time without the expertise of three graduate
students who worked as research or editorial
assistants. Linnet Humble and Laura Pearson did
exhaustive searches of criticism on the authors
and topics covered by the volume so I could
identify prospective contributors; Laura also
tracked down several hundred email addresses.
Joshua Prescott diligently and effectively corrected formatting and suggested line edits on
numerous draft entries. For their dedication,
intelligence, and work ethic, I thank all three of

these most promising young researchers; my
gratitude as well to the University of New Brunswick for providing funding and for sabbatical
release during the busy final year in which the
draft entries were submitted and edited.
To the 161 authors or co-authors of the
volumes 196 entries, this volume is as much your
collective creation as it is mine. I tip my hat to you
all for your willingness to hop aboard when I
asked, for the insightfulness and elegant concision
of your work, and for putting up with my cuts,
comments, and questions. Although I know many
of you, I have met the majority of you only by
email, since you are as international a group as is
the volume itself. Special thanks to contributors
who offered or agreed to take on more than one
entry, and to Rowland Smith, whose excellent
entry on Nadine Gordimer arrived just three
weeks before he passed away; it thus became,
unexpectedly, his final piece of scholarly writing
after a distinguished career.
My final thanks to my family, as always, for
your loving support and inspiration.
John Clement Ball
Notes on Contributors to Volume III
Michelene Adams is an assistant professor of

English at St. Georges University in Grenada.
A Trinidadian, she graduated from the University
of New Brunswick, where she wrote a doctoral
thesis on Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid. She
has published articles on Caribbean womens
narrative in Sargasso, the College of the Bahamas
Research Journal, and Anthurium.
Chiji Akoma is associate professor of English at
Villanova University. He teaches African diaspora
literatures and anglophone postcolonial studies.
Author of Folklore in New World Black Fiction, he
has also published essays in such journals as
Research in African Literatures, Oral Tradition,
Wasafiri, and Modern Fiction Studies.
Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru is associate professor of English at the University of Bucharest.
She holds a PhD in postcolonial literature from
the University of East Anglia and has published
widely on contemporary Indian fiction in English,
postmodernism, womens literature, and ethnic
studies. Her latest book is Identity Performance in
Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction
(2008). She is currently working on a book entitled Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English.
American literature and the co-author of Border

Crossings: Thomas Kings Cultural Inversions
(2003). She recently completed a new monograph
on contemporary Native North American women
poets.
John Attridge did his PhD at the University of
Sydney on Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and
the rise of professionalism. He has written articles
on Ford, Conrad, Henry James, and Murray Bail
for journals such as Modernism/Modernity, ELH,
and the Henry James Review. He currently teaches
at the Paris Diderot University.
John Clement Ball, editor of the World Fiction
volume of the ETCF, is a professor of postcolonial
and Canadian literatures in the Department of
English at the University of New Brunswick. He is
the author of two books, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis
(2004) and Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V. S.
Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (2003),
and coeditor of the journal Studies in Canadian
Literature.
Stella Algoo-Baksh, professor of English at the

Memorial University of Newfoundland, is the
author of Austin C. Clarke: A Biography and
Austin C. Clarke and His Works. Her articles and
reviews appear in The Reordering of Culture: Latin
America, the Caribbean and Canada: In the Hood
and in Canadian Literature, English Studies in
Canada, Canadian Journal of African Studies, and
Journal of West Indian Literature.
Mita Banerjee is professor and chair of American

studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her
research interests include postcolonial literature
(The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie,
Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the
Postcolonial Debate, 2002), ethnic American literature (Race-ing the Century, 2005), and the American Renaissance (Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary
Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 2008). She is currently working on a project
that explores the intersection between naturalism
and naturalization in nineteenth-century American fiction.
Jennifer Andrews is a professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick and the coeditor (with John Clement Ball) of
Studies in Canadian Literature. She is the author
of numerous articles on English Canadian and
Salhia Ben-Messahel is the author of Mind the

Country: Tim Wintons Fiction, the first booklength critical study of one of Australias major
authors. Her publications include the editing of
Des frontieres de linterculturalite, with Presses du
xvi
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
Septentrion, Charles de Gaulle UniversityLille 3,

and several articles on Australia, place, and representation. She is senior lecturer of English at the
Charles de Gaulle UniversityLille 3.
Bruce Bennett is emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales. He is an Officer of the
Order of Australia and a fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities. He has held visiting
appointments at universities in Asia, Europe, and
North America. His books include Spirit in Exile
(1991), An Australian Compass (1991), The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998), Australian Short Fiction (2002), and Homing In (2006).
Neil Kalman Besner has taught Canadian literature at the University of Winnipeg since 1987,
where he has been chair of the English Department, Dean of Humanities, Dean of Arts, and
Deputy Provost and Associate Vice President
(International). He has written books on Mavis
Gallant (The Light of Imagination, 1988), and on
Alice Munros Lives of Girls and Women (1991);
he has edited two collections of essays on Carol
Shields (1995,2003), a translation of a Brazilian
biography of Elizabeth Bishop (Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 2002), and coedited collections
of short stories (The Short Story in English, 1991)
and poetry (Uncommon Wealth, 1997).
Delys Bird is a senior honorary research fellow in
English and cultural studies at the University of
Western Australia. Her major publications have
been on Australian women writers, in particular
Elizabeth Jolley and Katharine Susannah Prichard.
Nicholas Birns is editor of Antipodes and coauthor of A Companion to Australian Literature
Since 1900. He teaches at the New School in New
York. In 2008, he was a visiting fellow at the
Literature, Identity, and Culture project at the
University of Wollongong in Australia.
Ann Blake is an honorary associate of La Trobe
University, Melbourne, and formerly a senior
lecturer. She is the author of Christina Steads
Politics of Place (1999) and co-author of England
through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2001). She has published articles on Shakespeare and other dramatists, crime fiction, and
Christina Stead. Her latest publications are new
editions of Sheridans The School for Scandal and
Farquhars The Beaux Stratagem.
M. Keith Booker is the James E. and Ellen Wadley

Roper Professor of English and director of the
program in comparative literature and cultural
studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
He has written or edited more than 30 books on
literature, culture, and literary/cultural theory,
including The African Novel in English: An Introduction and The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia.
Clare Bradfords articles appear in journals including Childrens Literature, Childrens Literature Association Quarterly, Canadian Childrens
Literature, Childrens Literature in Education, and
Journal of Australian Studies. She is the author and
co-author of 11 books, of which five are works of
fiction for children. Her 2001 book Reading Race
won the Childrens Literature Association Book
Award and the International Research Society for
Childrens Literature Award. She is a professor of
literary studies at Deakin University.
Sarah Brouillette is an assistant professor in the
Literature Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, where she teaches contemporary
British, Irish, and postcolonial writing, and topics
in print culture and media studies. Her first book,
Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, was published in 2007.
Heidi Butler is a doctoral candidate in English at
the University of New Brunswick. Her academic
interests include Canadian historical fiction, Atlantic literature, and Canadian invadersettler
narratives. In 2007, she was awarded a Canada
Graduate Scholarship by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada; her
doctoral dissertation examines contemporary
Atlantic Canadian novelists representations of
adolescent girls.
David Callahan teaches at the University of
Aveiro in Portugal, concentrating on world literature in English. The author of Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital (2009),
he has also edited Australia Who Cares? (2007)
and Contemporary Issues in Australian Literature
(2002).
M. Y. Chiu is assistant professor and undergraduate program coordinator in the Department of
English at the University of Macau. Chiu teaches
literature with special emphases on colonial writing and world literatures in English.
Rohit Chopra is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. He is the author of Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from
Colonialism to Cyberspace (2009). He has published articles in several journals including Cultural Studies, the Economic and Political Weekly,
and South Asian Review, as well as book chapters
in edited volumes.
Maureen Clark is an honorary research fellow at
the University of Wollongong where she teaches
across the disciplines of media and cultural studies and English Studies. Her monograph Mudrooroo: A Likely Story was published in 2007.
She has also published numerous book chapters
and articles on the writing of both Mudrooroo
and Janette Turner Hospital with refereed journals including Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of the Association for the Study of
Australian Literature, Australian Literary Studies,
Kunapipi, and New Literatures Review.
Anne Compton is the author of Opening the
Island (2002), winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize,
and Processional (2005), winner of the Governor
Generals Award for Poetry. Her critical work
includes A. J. M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical
(1994), Meetings with Maritime Poets: Interviews
(2006), and an article on Jane Urquhart. She is the
editor of The Edge of Home: Milton Acorn from
the Island (2002) and coeditor of Coastlines: The
Poetry of Atlantic Canada (2002). In 2008, she was
awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence
in the Literary Arts.
Ralph Crane is professor of English and Head of
the School of English, Journalism and European
Languages at the University of Tasmania. He has
published widely in the areas of Indian and AngloIndian literatures. His recent books include scholarly editions of four Raj novels with Oxford
University Press India: Charles Pearces Love
Besieged, Maud Divers Lilamani, Margaret
Wilsons Daughters of India, and A. E. W. Masons
The Broken Road.
David Creelman is a professor at the University of
New Brunswick in Saint John, where he teaches
Canadian literature and modern British literature. He has published articles on twentieth-century Canadian fiction and produced a book on
Maritime realist fiction entitled Setting in the East.
xvii
Isagani R. Cruz is the author of six books of plays,

four books of literary criticism, two books on
education, three biographies, several encyclopedia articles, and thousands of newspaper columns
for Philippine media (including the Philippine
Star). More than 120 of his scholarly articles have
appeared in English Today, Media Development,
Portal, World Englishes, and other journals and
books. He is a professor emeritus of De La Salle
University, a visiting professor at Ateneo de Manila University, and an academic administrator at
Far Eastern University.
Beverley Curran teaches linguistic, cultural, and
media translation at Aichi Shukutoku University
in Nagoya, Japan. Her publications include Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan: Native Voices, Foreign Bodies
(2008), a collaborative Japanese translation of
Nicole Brossards Journal intime (2000) and articles in a range of collections and journals, including Canadian Literature and Theatre Journal.
Frank Davey retired in 2005 from the Carl F.
Klinck Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. He is the editor of the
journal Open Letter and author of more than 30
books of poetry and literary and cultural criticism, including The Abbotsford Guide to India
(1986), Post-National Arguments: The Politics of
the Anglophone-Canadian Novel Since 1967
(1993), Canadian Literary Power (1994), Cultural
Mischief (1996), Mr. & Mrs. G.G. (2003), and
Risky Propositions (2005).
Roco G. Davis is associate professor of literature
and Director of the Institute of Liberal Arts at the
University of Navarra, Spain. She has published
Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood (2007) and Transcultural
Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles (2001).
Fran de Groen is adjunct associate professor in
the research group Writing and Society at the
University of Western Sydney. She has published
a biography of Xavier Herbert and articles about
his life and work; she has also coedited his letters
with Professor Emeritus Laurie Hergenhan. Her
most recent publication is Serious Frolic: Essays on
Australian Humour (2009), coedited with Peter
Kirkpatrick.
xviii
R. K. Dhawan, a senior academic from University

of Delhi, is widely traveled and has lectured on
Indian literature at several Indian and foreign
universities. He has published a number of articles
and books, especially on Indian women novelists.
Currently he is on the advisory board of the
International Journal of Transnational Literature
(Australia) and chief editor of the Commonwealth
Review (New Delhi), a biannual journal of new
literatures in English.
Brian Dibble, emeritus professor of comparative
literature, founded the Western Australian Institute of Technologys (later Curtin Universitys)
School of English and Language Studies, in 1973,
where he started Australias first BA in Australian
studies and its first in creative writing. In 1975 he
hired Elizabeth Jolley to teach on the latter course.
He has published his own poems and stories and
edited two volumes of William Hart-Smiths
poetry, a bicentennial anthology of Western Australian literature, and a collection of Australian
folk humor/wisdom. His biography of Jolley,
Doing Life, was published in 2008.
Kieran Dolin is a senior lecturer in English at the
University of Western Australia, where he teaches
Australian literature, literature and the law, and
nineteenth-century studies. He is the author of
two books, Fiction and the Law (1999) and A
Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (2007).
He has published articles on Australian fiction in
Southerly, Westerly, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
Gillian Dooley is an honorary research fellow at
Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.
Her publications include From a Tiny Corner in
the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003), as editor, and V. S. Naipaul, Man and
Writer (2006), and she coedited Matthew Flinders
Private Journal 18031814 (2005). She has published essays on Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, V. S.
Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee, and is editor of
Transnational Literature. She is currently writing
a book on the novels and memoirs of J. M.
Coetzee.
Marta Dvorak is professor of postcolonial literatures at the University of the New Sorbonne. She
has published books on Nancy Huston, Carol
Shields, and Ernest Buckler. Her most recent
books are The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desais
In Custody (2008), and Tropes and Territories:

Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian
Writings in Context, coedited with W. H. New
(2007).
Juniper Ellis is professor of English at Loyola
College in Maryland, where she teaches Maori,
Pacific Islands, and US literature. Her book Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin
(2008) was made possible by Fulbright, NEH, and
Andrew W. Mellon fellowships. She has published
articles in journals including PMLA, Ariel, and
Arizona Quarterly.
John Eustace is an associate professor in English
at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia,
where he teaches postcolonial literature and theory. He has published articles on Joyce Cary, Peter
Carey, Margaret Laurence, Rohinton Mistry, and
Australian culture.
Patrick Evans is professor of English at the University of Canterbury, where he has taught New
Zealand literature since 1978. His publications
include two books and several articles on Janet
Frame, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (1990), and The Long Forgetting: PostColonial Literary Culture in New Zealand (2007).
Moira Ferguson was born in Glasgow and taught
in the Department of English at the University of
NebraskaLincoln for many years where she was
also the founding chair of womens studies. Her
publications include Subject to Others: British
Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 16701834
(1992) and Gender and Colonial Relations from
Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (1994).
Among her forthcoming books are A Human
Necklace: Paule Marshalls Fiction, 19592000
and Locked Up and Free: Female Political Prisoners
from Mary Prince to Amina Lawal. She is currently
professor of English at New York University in
London.
Janice Fiamengo is associate professor of English
at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches
Canadian literature. She has recently published
The Womans Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in
Early Canada (2008).
Roger Field is a senior lecturer in the Department
of English at the University of the Western Cape.
He has published a biography of Alex La Guma and
coedited books on La Gumas early writing, and on
landscape and memory (Trauma and Topography,

2000). His current research interests include the
reception and appropriation of Constantine
Cavafy in South African poetry and prose fiction.
Susan Alice Fischer is professor of English at
Medgar Evers College of the City University of
New York. She is coeditor of Changing English: An
International Journal of English Teaching and
book reviews editor of the online journal Literary
London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London. Her essays and reviews have
appeared in The Swarming Streets: Twentieth
Century Representations of London, and in Tulsa
Studies in Womens Literature, the Womens Review of Books, Critical Engagements, and elsewhere. She is completing a book about contemporary womens London narratives.
Annie Gagiano, emeritus professor in the English
Department of the University of Stellenbosch,
specializes in African English-language fiction
studies and, more broadly, postcolonial writing.
She has published a detailed account of Dambudzo Marecheras full oeuvre in Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa (2000), as
well as three journal articles and two book chapters on his work in essay collections. Since retiring
from teaching in early 2008, she remains active as
a researcher and in supervising dissertations.
Fernando Galvan is professor of English literature at the University of Alcala, Spain, and currently President of the European Society for the
Study of English (ESSE). His most recent publications include essays on Caryl Phillips, J. M.
Coetzee, and Anita Desai. His interview with Amit
Chaudhuri was published in Wasafiri (1999).
Carole Gerson, a professor in the Department of
English at Simon Fraser University, has published
extensively on early Canadian women writers and
Canadian literary history. She is one of the editors
of the three-volume History of the Book in Canada
(20047) and, with historian Veronica StrongBoag, has co-authored two books on E. Pauline
Johnson. Her new book, Canadian Women in
Print, 17501918, was published in 2010.
D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, emeritus professor of
English, University of KelaniyaSri Lanka, has
been international chair of the Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies;
xix
Henry Charles Chapman Visiting Fellow at the

Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London;
and guest professor at the University of T
ubingen.
His books include Developing Countries in British
Fiction (1977), Images of the Raj (1988), Joseph
Conrad: Beyond Culture and Background (1990),
Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (2007), Salman Rushdie (1998), and Sri Lankan English
Literature and the Sri Lankan People 19172003
(2005).
Yogita Goyal is an assistant professor of English at
the University of California, Los Angeles, where
she specializes in African American, black Atlantic, and postcolonial studies. She has recently
published essays and reviews on black diaspora
fiction in Diaspora, Modern Fiction Studies, New
Formations, and Wasafiri, and is currently completing a book that explores nationalism and
literary form in black Atlantic literature.
Brenna Clarke Gray is a doctoral candidate and
Canada Graduate Scholar in the Department of
English at the University of New Brunswick. Her
dissertation explores cultural responses to September 11 through the writing and visual art of
Douglas Coupland.
Anna Guttman is assistant professor of postcolonial literature at Lakehead University. She is the
author of The Nation of India in Contemporary
Indian Literature (2007) and coeditor of The
Global Literary Field (2007). Her current research
examines the representations of Jews and Jewishness in South Asian literature.
Ambreen Hai teaches anglophone postcolonial
and British literature at Smith College. She has
published essays on Bapsi Sidhwa, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, and Sara
Suleri in a number of scholarly journals. Her
book, Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, is forthcoming
from Ohio University Press.
Aparna Halpe is a doctoral candidate affiliated
with the English Department and the Centre for
South Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Her
research is on the function of myth in contemporary postcolonial fiction from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Her essays
have appeared in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature and in Across Cultures: Issues of
xx
Identity in Contemporary British and Sri Lankan

Writing. Halpe is also a poet and her work can be
found in Postcolonial Text and Channels.
Faye Hammill is senior lecturer in English at the
University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Her research areas are Canadian literature and interwar
middlebrow culture, and publications include
Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada
17602000 (2003; winner of the Pierre Savard
prize), Canadian Literature (2007), and Women,
Celebrity and Literary Culture between the Wars
(2007). She is editor of the British Journal of
Canadian Studies and is currently leading the
Middlebrow Network, funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council.
Brecken Rose Hancock is a doctoral candidate at
the University of New Brunswick. Her research
areas include contemporary non-mimetic Canadian fiction and cultural theory. Her articles have
appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature, the
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and Early Modern Literary Studies.
Heike Harting is associate professor of English at
the University of Montreal and is editor-in-chief
of Postcolonial Text. She has coedited special
issues of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East (2008) and University of
Toronto Quarterly (2009). She has published recent articles in Studies in Canadian Literature and
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the
Middle East. Her book manuscript Unruly Metaphor: Nation, Body, and Diaspora in Contemporary
Fiction in English Canada is currently under
review.
Anthony J. Hassall is emeritus professor of English literature at James Cook University and
honorary research consultant at the University
of Queensland. He has written extensively on
Australian fiction and eighteenth-century English
fiction, including books on Henry Fieldings Tom
Jones, Randolph Stow, and Peter Carey. He is the
founding general editor of the University of
Queensland Presss Studies in Australian Literature series.
Jonathan Heawood is Director of English PEN,
which campaigned successfully for the amendment of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act
(2006) and the repeal of the laws of blasphemous
libel, seditious libel, criminal defamation, and

obscene libel in the UK. He was previously editorial director of the Fabian Society and deputy
literary editor of The Observer and wrote the
introduction to a collection of George Orwells
Observer journalism.
Colin Hill teaches in the Department of English at
the University of Toronto and is the director of
the Canadian studies program at the universitys
Mississauga campus. He is author of several articles on Canadian literature and a forthcoming
book on the interplay of modernism and realism
in Canadian fiction. He is editor of a critical
edition of Irene Bairds Waste Heritage and is
currently editing editions of previously unpublished novels by Hugh MacLennan and Raymond
Knister.
Gugu Hlongwane is an assistant professor of
English at Saint Marys University. Her essays on
South African and Canadian literature appear in
Ariel: A Review of International English Literature,
Postcolonial Text, Studies in Canadian Literature,
and the Journal of Literary Studies.
David Huddart is an associate professor in the
Department of English at the Chinese University
of Hong Kong. He is the author of two books:
Homi K. Bhabha (2006) and Postcolonial Theory
and Autobiography (2008).
Huma Ibrahim is associate professor at Zayed
University and has published Bessie Head: Subversive Identities in Exile (1996). She has also
edited and contributed to a collection, Emerging
Perspectives on Bessie Head (2004). Her book
Epistemology of Colonial/Postcolonial Violence is
currently in press and she is working on The Other
Woman: Sexuality Silence Spectacle and Punjabi
Weave, a collection of twentieth-century Punjabi
womens poetry in translation.
C. Lyn Innes worked as an assistant editor on
Okike Magazine and coedited two collections of
African short stories with Chinua Achebe. She
published a study of his work, Chinua Achebe, in
1990. Her other books are The Devils Own Mirror:
The Irish and the African in Modern Literature
(1990); Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and
Society, 18801935 (1993); A History of Black and
Asian Writing in Britain (2008); The Cambridge
Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
(2007); and Ned Kelly (2008). She is emeritus

professor of postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
Douglas Ivison is an associate professor in the
Department of English at Lakehead University in
Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is the editor of Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers (2002)
and coeditor, with Justin D. Edwards, of Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (2005); he
has published articles on Canadian literature and
popular culture, among other topics, in books
and journals, including Studies in Canadian Literature and English Studies in Canada.
Lyn Jacobs is an associate professor in humanities
(Australian literature and Australian studies) and
research fellow at Flinders University. She is a
contributor to the Australian Literature Resource
(Australian literary responses to Asia), the author
of Against the Grain: Beverley Farmers writing
(2001), and of multiple analyses of Australian
fiction, most recently an article on Tim Winton
in A Companion to Australian Literature Since
1900 (2007).
Louis James is emeritus professor of English
literature at the University of Kent. His publications on British and Commonwealth literature
include Fiction for the Working Man, 183050
(1963), Caribbean Writing in English (1999), and
The Victorian Novel (2006).
Sharanya Jayawickrama is a graduate of University College London and Cambridge University,
where she wrote her PhD dissertation on Sri
Lankan literature in English. Her main research
interests are in postcolonial literatures and theory
with a focus on South Asian literatures in English.
Her articles appear in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and in edited collections on
black British fiction, postcolonial womens writing, and international childrens literature. She is
currently a lecturer in literatures in English at the
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.
Lawrence Jones is emeritus professor of English
at the University of Otago. He was editor of the
Journal of New Zealand Literature from 1990 to
2000 and has edited or coedited several books. His
critical and historical writings on New Zealand
literature include Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays
on New Zealand Prose (1987, 1990), The Novel
xxi
in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in

English (1991, 1998), and Picking Up the Traces:
The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture
19321945 (2003). He is a trustee of the Janet
Frame Literary Trust and a fellow of the New
Zealand Academy of the Humanities.
Chelva Kanaganayakam is professor of English
and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto. His publications include Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction
(2002), Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry
of Rienzi Crusz (1997), Configurations of Exile:
South Asian Writers and Their Worlds (1995), and
Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar
Ghose (1993).
Jennifer Kelly teaches in the international Indigenous studies program at the University of Calgary. Her interests include Indigenous literatures
and interpretive/pedagogical practices, Indigenous film, and research ethics. She is a coordinator (with Delia Cross Child, Ramona Big Head,
and Georgette Fox) of You May Laugh: Surviving, Remembering, and Transforming Residential
School Experience, with members of the Kainai
Nation, southern Alberta.
Michelle Kelly is a graduate of the National
University of Ireland, Galway and the University
of York, where she is currently a teaching fellow in
the Department of English and Related Literature.
Her research interests are in the field of postcolonial fiction and autobiography, particularly South
African literature, the relationship between literature and the law, especially human rights law,
and literary and historical connections between
Ireland and South Africa. She is currently at work
on a book on confession in J. M. Coetzees work.
Michelle Keown is lecturer in English literature at
the University of Edinburgh. She has published
widely on Maori, New Zealand, and Pacific writing
and is the author of Postcolonial Pacific Writing:
Representations of the Body (2005) and Pacific
Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (2007). She has
also published on diaspora theory and culture and
is coeditor (with David Murphy and James Procter) of Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas (2009).
Khurram N. Khurshid is a doctoral candidate at
the University of New Brunswick, Canada. His
xxii
research areas include postcolonial literature and

theory, colonial discourse, and Indian and Pakistani fiction. He grew up in Pakistan, where he
taught English literature at various colleges of the
Punjab University for a number of years. His
dissertation explores Muslim consciousness in
the fiction of Ahmed Ali, Attia Hosain, and
Mumtaz Shahnawaz.
Neil Ten Kortenaar is an associate professor of
English at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. He is the author of Self, Nation, Text in
Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (2004)
and has published numerous articles on African
and Caribbean literature in PMLA, Ariel, English
Studies in Canada, and other journals.
Sue Kossew is associate professor of English at the
University of New South Wales in Sydney. Her
work is in contemporary postcolonial literature,
with a focus on South Africa and Australia, on
gender issues and women writers. Her publications include Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial
Reading of J. M. Coetzee and Andre Brink
(1996), Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee (1998),
Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives
(2001), edited with Dianne Schwerdt, and Writing
Woman, Writing Place: Australian and South African Fiction (2004). She is editing a collection of
essays and interviews on Kate Grenville to be
published by Rodopi Press.
Benedicte Ledent teaches Caribbean literature at
the University of Liege, Belgium. She is the author
of Caryl Phillips (2002) and has edited several
volumes of essays. The latest, in collaboration
with Kathleen Gyssels, is entitled The Caribbean
Writer as Warrior of the Imaginary (2008).
Judith Leggatt is an associate professor and chair
of the English Department at Lakehead University. She has published articles on postcolonial
pedagogy, Lee Maracle, Salman Rushdie, Jane
Eyre, and the challenges of reading First Nations
literature through a postcolonial lens. Her present
research explores the representation of First Nations peoples in science fiction, and she is currently working on a book-length study of Indigenous science fiction.
Peter Leman is a PhD candidate and Jacob K.
Javits Fellow in the Department of English at the
University of California, Irvine. His dissertation
examines literary appropriations of traditional

orature in East Africa in relationship to colonial
and postcolonial law, particularly in its authoritarian forms. He has presented papers on postcolonial literature and law in the UK, Canada, and
the US, and his work on the poet Okot pBitek is
forthcoming in Research in African Literatures.
Liew-Geok Leong taught at the Department of
English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, from 1981 to 2002. The
author of two collections of poetry, Love Is Not
Enough (1991) and Women without Men (2000),
she edited More than Half the Sky: Creative Writings by Thirty Singaporean Women (1998). She
contributed 24 entries on Singaporean literature
in English to Singapore: The Encyclopedia (2006),
and wrote the Literature in English section for
Literature in Singapore (2007).
Andrew Lesk is an assistant professor at the
University of Toronto, where he teaches Canadian literature. He has published widely on Canadian fiction (including two articles on Sinclair
Ross), theory, film, and cultural studies.
Ping-Hui Liao is distinguished professor of literary and critical studies at National Tsinghua
University, Taiwan.
Maria Helena Lima is a Brazilian who is a professor of English and comparative literature at the
State University of New York at Geneseo, teaching
Caribbean and womens studies. She translated
and coedited with Miriam Alves a bilingual anthology of short fiction by Afro-Brazilian Women, Women Righting/Mulheres Escre-vendo
(2005). Forthcoming are her entries on Andrea
Levy, Dorothea Smartt, and Meera Syal for the
Dictionary of Literary Biography special issue on
black British literature.
Shao-Pin Luo teaches at Dalhousie University in
Halifax, Canada. She has published articles in
book collections and in such journals as Critique,
Commonwealth Literature, and Dalhousie Review
as well as an English translation of a contemporary Chinese novel. Her research interests are in
diaspora and translation studies.
Gerald Lynch is the author of Stephen Leacock:
Humour and Humanity (1988), The One and the
Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles
(2001), and four books of fiction. He has also
xxiii
edited a number of essay collections, critical editions, and anthologies. He teaches English at the
University of Ottawa.
extensive bibliography, Elizabeth Jolley: A Bibliography 19652007; her most recent article appeared in Australian Literary Studies (2008).
Lynne Macedo teaches Caribbean and contemporary literature and film at the University of
Warwick. Her recent publications include No
Land, No Mother, coedited with K. Karran
(2007), contributions to The Oxford Companion
to Black British History (2007) and Fiction and
Film: The Influence of Cinema on Writers from
Jamaica and Trinidad (2003).
Katherine Miller is an English instructor at Concordia University College and Grant MacEwan
University in Edmonton, Alberta. She has published book reviews in Canadian Literature and an
article on Bharati Mukherjees Desirable Daughters in Studies in Canadian Literature.
Obi Maduakor, formerly professor of English at

the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, is currently
teaching English as adjunct professor at Tyndale
University College, Toronto. He is the author of
Wole Soyinka: An Introduction to His Writing, and
over 50 articles in learned journals.
Sylvia Martin is an honorary associate of the
School of English, Journalism and European Languages, University of Tasmania. Her biographies
of Australian women include Passionate Friends:
Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin and Ida Leeson: A Life, which was the recipient
of the Magarey Prize for Biography in 2008.
Andrew Mccann is associate professor in the
Department of English at Dartmouth College. He
is author of Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (1999),
Marcus Clarkes Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne (2004), and two
novels, The White Body of Evening (2002) and
Subtopia (2005).
John Mcleod is professor of Postcolonial and
Diaspora Literatures at the School of English,
University of Leeds, England. He is the author
of Beginning Postcolonialism (2000), Postcolonial
London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004), and
J. G. Farrell (2007), and has edited The Revision
of Englishness (2004) and The Routledge Companion
to Postcolonial Studies (2007).
Barbara Milech, associate professor at Curtin
University, teaches narrative, cultural, and feminist studies. She has published widely on Elizabeth
Jolley, including essays in the Journal of the Association of Australian Literature, Antipodes (USA),
Australian Studies (UK), and the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, along with an
Rajeswari Mohan is associate professor of English

at Haverford College. Her articles on fictions of
empire, postcolonial literature, and Indian film
have appeared in Textual Practice, Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, Genders, and College
Literature. She is currently working on a book
about narratives of womens militancy.
Linda Morra is an associate professor at Bishops
University. Her publications include articles
about Jack Hodgins, Mordecai Richler (Studies
in Canadian Literature), and Emily Carr (Canadian Literature), and an interview with George
Elliott Clarke (Open Letter). Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth, was published in 2006, and Troubling
Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations, coedited with Deanna Reder, appeared in 2009.
Laura Moss is an associate professor of Canadian
and postcolonial literatures at the University of
British Columbia and the Director of the UBC
Canadian Studies Centre. She is the coeditor, with
Cynthia Sugars, of Canadian Literature in English:
Texts and Contexts, vols. 1 and 2 (20089), and
editor of Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling
Canadian Literature (2003).
Miguel Mota is associate professor of English at
the University of British Columbia. His research
interests are in post-1950 British literature and in
the relationships between film and print cultures.
His book Invisible Texts: The Screenplay in Print
Culture is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.
Evan Mwangi teaches anglophone African literature at Northwestern University. He is the coauthor of The Columbia Guide to East African
Literature in English since 1945 (2007) and author
of Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender,
Sexuality (2009).
xxiv
Supriya M. Nair is an associate professor in the

Department of English at Tulane University. She
is the author of Calibans Curse: George Lamming
and the Revisioning of History (1996) and is currently completing a book on anglophone Caribbean literature. She has published essays and
articles on African and Caribbean literature.
William New is University Killam Professor
Emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
His more than 40 books include Dreams of Speech
and Violence (1987), Land Sliding (1997), Borderlands (1998), Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of
Form (1999), The Encyclopedia of Literature in
Canada (2002), Grandchild of Empire (2003), and
A History of Canadian Literature (2nd edn. 2003).
He is also the author of nine books of poetry and
four books for children, and for 17 years he edited
the critical quarterly Canadian Literature. He was
awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal
Society of Canada and the Governor Generals
Prize in International Canadian Literature. In
2006 he was named an Officer of the Order of
Canada.
Stephanie Newell teaches African and postcolonial literatures at the University of Sussex, England. She has published extensively on West African literature and colonial newspaper history.
Andrew Hock Soon Ng teaches Theories of Authorship, Contemporary Fiction, and Postcolonial Literature at Monash University, Malaysia.
He is the author of Dimensions of Monstrosity in
Contemporary Narratives (2004) and Interrogating Interstices (2007), and the editor of Asian
Gothic (2008) and The Poetics of Shadows (2008).
Ode Ogede is professor of English at North
Carolina Central University. His books include
Art, Society, and Performance: Igede Praise Poetry (1997), Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast:
Pitting Imaginary Worlds against the Actual
(2000), Achebe and the Politics of Representation: Form against Itself from Colonial Conquest
to Post-Independence Disillusionment (2001),
Teacher Commentary on Student Papers
(2002), and Achebes Things Fall Apart: Readers Guide (2007).
James Ogude is a professor of African literature at
the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
He is the author of Ngugis Novels and African
History: Narrating the Nation (1999). He has also

edited several books, including a compilation of
essays of Eskia Mphahlele. His recent book (edited
with Joyce Nyairo) is Urban Legends, Colonial
Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East
Africa (2007). He has published widely on Ngugi
and popular culture in leading journals, including
the Canadian Journal of African Studies and African Affairs.
Sanya Osha holds a PhD in philosophy and is a
senior researcher at the School for Graduate Studies, University of South Africa. He has also published extensively in the fields of anthropology,
politics, and critical theory. He is the author of
Kwasi Wiredu and Beyond: The Text, Writing and
Thought in Africa (2005) and Ken Saro-Wiwas
Shadow: Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest
Movement (2007).
Ruth Panofsky, professor in the Department of
English at Ryerson University in Toronto, specializes in Canadian literature and culture, publishing history, and textual studies. She has published widely on Adele Wiseman, most recently
The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele
Wiseman (2006). She is also a poet whose 2007
volume, Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices,
received the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry.
Uma Parameswaran was born and educated in
India. She has written extensively on Indo-English
and diasporic literature, and on postcolonial topics. Her most recent collections of critical essays
are Writing the Diaspora and Early Fiction of
Salman Rushdie. She has lived in Canada for many
years, and recently retired from the University of
Winnipeg. She has published 10 books of creative
writing, including the award-winning What Was
Always Hers (1999).
Makarand Paranjape is a critic, poet, fiction
writer, and literary columnist with over 30 books,
100 published academic papers, and more than
200 reviews, notes, and popular articles to his
credit. He is currently professor of English at
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His
latest book is Another Canon: Indian Texts and
Traditions in English (2009).
Laura Pearson studies and writes about various
aspects of South and East Asia, migration, and
postcolonial literature. She recently completed

her MA in English and creative writing at the
University of New Brunswick.
Donald E. Pease, professor of English and Avalon
Foundation Chair of the Humanities at Dartmouth College, is an authority on nineteenthand twentieth-century American literature and
literary theory. He is the author of Visionary
Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (1987) and The New American
Exceptionalism (2009), and coeditor (with Amy
Kaplan) of The Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993).
Joshua Prescott is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick. His research explores
the relationship between sexuality, citizenship,
and nation in contemporary Canadian Caribbean
fiction, with a particular interest in the writing of
Dionne Brand, Shani Mootoo, and M. NourbeSe
Philip.
Clive Probyn is professor of English at Monash
University, Victoria, Australia. He has coedited all
of Henry Handel Richardsons novels, translations, and letters, as well as the letters of Henry
and Sarah Fielding, and is the author of several
books on Jonathan Swift, a study of the English
eighteenth-century novel, and a biography of the
linguist and philosopher James Harris. He is a
fellow of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities.
Harshana Rambukwella completed a doctoral
study on nationalist discourse in Sri Lankan
anglophone and Sinhala-language writing at the
University of Hong Kong in 2008. He continues to
work as a researcher at the same university and
teaches part-time in Hong Kong.
Archana Rampure is a postdoctoral research
fellow at Dalhousie University, where she is affiliated with the Department of English and the
School of Information Management. She locates
her work at the intersection of cultural studies,
postcolonialism, and contemporary popular
culture.
Ruby Ramraj teaches in the Department of English, University of Calgary. Her areas of interest
are Victorian fiction, science fiction, and postcolonial studies. She has published articles on Neil
Bissoondath, Amitav Ghosh, Sara Suleri, Olive
xxv
Senior, Isaac Asimov, Robert Sawyer, and Nalo

Hopkinson.
Victor J. Ramraj is professor of English at the
University of Calgary. From 1990 to 2001, he was
editor of Ariel: A Review of International English
Literature, and he has numerous publications on
international English Literature, including an
early book on Mordecai Richler (1983). He is
editor of Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World
Writing in English (1995), and coeditor of Postindependence Voices in South Asian Writing
(2001), with Alamgir Hashmi and Malashri Lal.
He is currently studying the politics of differences
and affinities in international English literature
and working on theories of mimicry in postcolonial literatures.
Ruvani Ranasinha is senior lecturer in postcolonial literatures at the Department of English,
Kings College London. She specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, especially relating to
South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her
publications include Hanif Kureishi (2002) and
South Asian Writers in Twentieth Century Britain:
Culture in Translation (2007).
Don Randall is associate professor in the Faculty
of Humanities and Letters at Bilkent University in
Ankara, Turkey. Having received his PhD from
the University of Alberta in 1995, he subsequently
held two postdoctoral fellowships in Canada before beginning his Bilkent career in 1999. His
main research areas are postcolonial literature
and British imperial literature, and he has published numerous articles in international journals.
He is the author of two books: Kiplings Imperial
Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity (2000)
and David Malouf (2007).
Antje M. Rauwerda is an assistant professor of
postcolonial literature and theory at Goucher
College in Baltimore, USA. She has published in
Antipodes, Canadian Literature, Continuum, InBetween, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Victorian Literature and Culture, and the South Asian Review.
Her current work is on expatriate fiction.
Norman Ravvin is chair of Concordia Universitys Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies.
His books include the novel Lola by Night and the
story collection Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard
xxvi
Yiddish. His essays on Canadian and American

Jewish writing appear in A House of Words: Jewish
Writing, Identity and Memory. He is also the
author of Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue
and coeditor, with Richard Menkis, of The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader.
Deanna Reder, of Cree-Metis heritage, holds a
joint appointment as assistant professor in Simon
Fraser Universitys First Nations studies program
and the Department of English. Her main fields of
study are Indigenous literary theories and autobiography theory, with a particular focus on Cree
and Metis life writing. She is series editor for the
Aboriginal Studies series at Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Josna Rege is associate professor of literature at
Worcester State College in Massachusetts, where
she teaches postcolonial, world, and contemporary British literatures, and is affiliated with the
womens studies and global studies programs.
Her book, Colonial Karma: Self, Action and Nation in the Indian English Novel, was published in
2004, and she is currently studying new forms of
transnational cultural production.
Constance S. Richards is the author of On the
Winds and Waves of Imagination: Transnational
Feminism and Literature, which examines, from a
postcolonial critical perspective, issues of identity
in the works of Virginia Woolf, Zoe Wicomb, and
Alice Walker. She is also the author of several
essays, including one on Wicomb and Michelle
Cliff published in Research in African Literatures.
She teaches English, womens and gender studies,
and African American and African Studies at
Ohio Wesleyan University and Ohio State
University.
Ian Richards is an associate professor at Osaka
City University, Japan. He is the author of To Bed
at Noon: The Life and Art of Maurice Duggan
(1997) and Dark Sneaks In: Essays on the Short
Fiction of Janet Frame (2004). He maintains a
website on New Zealand literature at http://nofrillsnzlit.angelfire.com/index.html.
Christian Riegel is associate professor of English
and head of Department at Campion College
at the University of Regina. He has published
Twenty-First Century Canadian Writers (2007);
Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning
(2005); Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence and the

Work of Mourning (2003); A Sense of Place: ReEvaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing (1997); and Challenging Territory:
The Writing of Margaret Laurence (1997). He has
published essays on a number of Canadian and
American writers, and also writes poetry and
fiction.
Leah Rosenberg is an associate professor in the
English Department at the University of Florida
where she teaches Caribbean and Atlantic studies.
She is the author of Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (2007).
Anjali Gera Roy is professor in the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian
Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She has published Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London
and Beyond (2009); Partitioned Lives: Narratives of
Home, Displacement and Resettlement (2008); Rohinton Mistry: An Anthology of Recent Criticism
(2007); Wole Soyinka: An Anthology of Recent
Criticism (2006); New Directions in African Writing (2005); and Three Great African Writers:
Achebe, Soyinka, Tutuola (2001), as well as several
essays on postcolonial literature, culture, and
theory.
Meg Samuelson is an associate professor in the
English Department, Stellenbosch University. She
has published articles on Yvonne Veras fiction in
collections and journals such as Sign and Taboo:
Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera,
Research in African Literatures, English Studies in
Africa, and African Identities. Her other research
focuses on the politics of gender in South African
literature, with publications including her study
Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women?
Stories of the South African Transition (2007), and
on African urban cultures and the Indian Ocean
world.
Elaine Savory is associate professor of literature at
the New School in New York City. She coedited
Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990), and has written flame tree time
(1993), Jean Rhys (1998), and The Cambridge
Introduction to Jean Rhys (2009), as well as many
essays on Caribbean and African literatures. She is
presently writing a study of anglophone elegiac
poetry from the Atlantic rim.
Kamila Shamsie is the author of five novels,

including Kartography and Burnt Shadows, which
have publishers in 18 countries. She reviews for a
number of publications, including The Guardian,
The Telegraph, and the TLS. Between 2000 and
2006 she had a recurring position as visiting
assistant professor of English at Hamilton College, New York.
Muneeza Shamsie is a Pakistani writer and critic
and editor of three pioneering anthologies of
Pakistani English literature. She contributes to
the online Literary Encyclopedia, is the Pakistan
bibliographical representative for the Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, is managing editor of
the forthcoming Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Pakistan, and is writing Hybrid Tapestries:
The Development of Pakistani English Literature.
Paul Sharrad is associate professor in English
literatures at the University of Wollongong in
Australia. He has written widely on postcolonial
fiction and has a special interest in writing from
the Pacific and India.
Susan Sheridan is adjunct professor of English
and womens studies at Flinders University. Her
books include Christina Stead (1988), Along the
Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian
Womens Writing 1880s to 1930s (1995), and Who
Was That Woman? The Australian Womens
Weekly in the Postwar Years (2002); and, as
editor, Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism
(1988), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the
1890s (1993, with Sue Rowley and Susan Magarey), and Thea Astleys Fictional Worlds (2006, with
Paul Genoni).
Rezzan Kocaoner Silk
u is an associate professor
of English literature at Ege University, Izmir,
Turkey, where she received her PhD in 1996 for
her dissertation on Doris Lessings novels. Her
teaching and research areas range from Victorian
fiction to postcolonial studies. She has published
on George Eliot, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf,
Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Arundhati Roy,
Flora Nwapa, and she is the author of Industrialization, Modernity and the Woman Question.
Tony Simoes da Silva teaches in the School of
English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages at
the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the
author of The Luxury of Despair: George
xxvii
Lammings Fiction as Decolonizing Project

(2000), coeditor of Interactions: Essays on Literature and Culture in the Asia-Pacific (2000), and of
numerous journal articles and book chapters on
African writing in English and Portuguese.
Hyacinth Simpson is an associate professor in the
Department of English and the MA program in
immigration and settlement studies at Ryerson
University in Toronto, where she specializes in
Caribbean literature and diaspora studies. She is
the editor of MaComere, the international journal
of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers
and Scholars. She has published in numerous
journals, and has completed an edited book of
essays on Caribbean migration, transnationalism
and diaspora.
Amardeep Singh is associate professor of English
at Lehigh University, where he teaches anglophone postcolonial and modern British literature.
He has published a book, Literary Secularism:
Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2006), and essays on E. M. Forster, James
Joyce, colonial modernist prefaces, and the politics of naming in the South Asian diaspora. In
2008, he coedited a special issue of South Asian
Review entitled Imagining South Asia. He is
currently working on a book-length analysis of
the films of Mira Nair.
Eric D. Smith is assistant professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he teaches
courses on anglophone postcolonial and modern/
postmodern British literatures. His work appears
in journals such as Genre, Modern Fiction Studies,
Critique, James Joyce Quarterly, Journal of Narrative Theory, Ariel, and Journal of Commonwealth
Literature.
Rowland Smith was born and raised in South
Africa. A former Rhodes Scholar, he had a distinguished career as a professor of English and senior
administrator at three Canadian universities: Dalhousie University, Wilfrid Laurier University, and
the University of Calgary, where he was Dean of
Humanities at the time of his death in 2008,
shortly after submitting his entry for this volume.
His many scholarly publications include a
monograph on Roy Campbell and two edited
collections, including Critical Essays on Nadine
Gordimer (1990).
xxviii
Heather Smyth is an assistant professor in the

Department of English Language and Literature
at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her
publications on multiculturalism, sexuality, and
postcolonialism appear in Ariel: A Review of
International English Literature, Journal of the
History of Sexuality, Small Axe: A Caribbean
Journal of Criticism, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural
Studies.
Kenneth Strongman completed a BSc and PhD in

psychology at London University, worked at the
University of Exeter and then took up a chair of
psychology at the University of Canterbury, New
Zealand. He has written 10 books, several book
chapters, more than 100 academic papers, and
over 1,000 popular articles and reviews. He is a
fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and is
currently Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Arts) at
Canterbury.
Lindy Stiebel is professor in English Studies at the

University of KwaZuluNatal. She has published
books on nineteenth-century fictional and artistic
constructions of Africa (Imagining Africa, 2001;
Thomas Baines and the Great Map, 2001); and
Australia (Thomas Baines in Australia, 2008).
Recently completed is a volume on Rider Haggard
for the series Lives of Victorian Literary Figures
(2009). She has published on South African writing, particularly the work of Lewis Nkosi; and
leads the KZN Literary Tourism research project,
which features Nkosi, among other writers.
Luke Strongman teaches humanities at the Open

Polytechnic of New Zealand, where he is also
research facilitator. His book Booker Prize and
the Legacy of Empire was published by Rodopi in
2002.
Cheryl Stobie lectures in English studies on the

Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of
KwaZuluNatal. She has presented numerous
papers on postcolonialism and representations
of gender, sexuality, and spirituality in literature.
She is one of the editors of the journal Current
Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa,
and her articles, chapters in books and book
reviews have been published in South Africa,
Nigeria, the United States, the United Kingdom,
Germany, Austria, Holland and Morocco. Her
book Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels
appeared in 2007.
Nora Foster Stovel is professor of English at the
University of Alberta. She has published books
and articles on twentieth-century writers specifically D. H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Laurence, and Carol Shields as well as
essays on Jane Austen. She edited four books by
Margaret Laurence and recently published Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete
Writings (2008). She is currently composing
Sparkling Subversion: Carol Shieldss Vision and
Voice. She is also planning Women with Wings:
The Ballerina in Romantic Ballets of the Nineteenth
Century.
Cynthia Sugars is an associate professor in the

Department of English at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches Canadian literature and
postcolonial theory. She has published numerous
articles on Canadian literature and is the editor of
Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian
Postcolonialism (2004), Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (2004),
and Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and
the Postcolonial Gothic (2009). She has recently
coedited a new two-volume anthology of Canadian literature with Laura Moss, entitled Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts
(20089).
Cheryl Suzack is an assistant professor of English
at the University of Victoria. She edited the critical edition of Beatrice Culleton Mosioniers In
Search of April Raintree (1999) and coedited
Indigenous Women and Feminism: Culture, Activism, Politics (forthcoming).
Andrew Teverson is principal lecturer and director of studies in English literature and creative
writing at Kingston University, London. He is the
author of Salman Rushdie (2007), and has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on Rushdies work. He is currently researching a book on the uses of folk narrative and fairy
tales in colonial and postcolonial literature.
John Thieme teaches at the University of East
Anglia and has held chairs at the University of
Hull and London South Bank University. His
books include The Web of Tradition: Uses of
Allusion in V. S. Naipauls Fiction (1987), The
Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in

English (1996), Derek Walcott (1999), Post-Colonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2001),
Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary
(2003), and R. K. Narayan (2007). He is editor
of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and
general editor of the Manchester University Press
Contemporary World Writers series.
Alex Tickell is senior lecturer in English at the
University of Portsmouth. He has published
widely on colonial and postcolonial fiction, especially South Asian fiction, and also works on travel
writing and literature and terrorism. His publications include a critical edition of Shoshee Chunder Dutts writing: Selections from Bengaliana
(2005), and Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation
and Communalism (2005), coedited with Peter
Morey. He has recently completed a student
guide, Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things
(2007), and is currently working on an AHRCfunded monograph project on violence and
empire.
Hildi Froese Tiessen is a professor of English and
peace and conflict studies at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo. She has
published numerous articles and edited nine volumes of work by and about Mennonite(s) writing
in Canada, including Rudy Wiebe: A Tribute
(2002). She is coeditor, with Paul Tiessen, of a
scholarly edition of Lucy Maud Montgomerys
letters to an aspiring Mennonite writer: After
Green Gables: L. M. Montgomerys Letters to
Ephraim Weber, 19161941 (2005).
Alison Toron is a PhD candidate at the University
of New Brunswick in Fredericton. She has published in the universitys Journal of Student Writing and has presented papers on gender performativity, trauma, and masculinity. Supported by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, she is writing her dissertation
on feminist humor in novels by three Canadian
women writers.
Tony Tremblay is professor of English at St.
Thomas University and Canada Research Chair
in New Brunswick Studies. Primarily a Canadianist who specializes in Maritime studies, he has
published widely in the fields of technology, film,
media, pedagogy, and literary modernism. His
recent editorial work includes the books George
xxix
Sanderson: Editor and Cultural Worker (2007) and

David Adams Richards: Essays on His Work
(2005). Co-director of the New Brunswick and
Atlantic Studies Research and Development Centre, he is currently researching New Brunswicks
modernist cultural workers.
Harish Trivedi, professor of English at the University of Delhi, is author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1995), and has
published reviews and articles on R. K. Narayan,
Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, and Vikram Seth. He
is the coeditor of Interrogating Postcolonialism
(1996, repr. 2000, 2006), and Literature and Nation: Britain and India 18001990 (1999). He also
writes in Hindi.
Anthonia (Tonia) Inyang Umoren is a senior
lecturer, researcher and head of the Department
of English and Literary Studies at the University of
Calabar, Nigeria. She is the author of three books
and several journal articles and book chapters.
Her books include The Portrait of Womanhood in
African Literary Tradition: Reflections on Elechi
Amadi (2002) and Literature and Society: Social
Order in the Novels of Elechi Amadi (2004). She has
organized international conferences for the
Womens Health Network and convened the
International Conference on African Literature
and the English Language in 2008.
Susan Vanzanten is professor of English and
Director of the Center for Scholarship and Faculty
Development at Seattle Pacific University. Her
books include Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature (2002)
and A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzees Fiction
in Context (1991). She also edited Postcolonial
Literature and the Biblical Call to Justice (1994).
Shunzhu Wang teaches Chinese language and
literature at Rider University. As a literary critic,
he has published essays, in both Chinese and
English, in literary journals and books on a variety
of subjects in modern Chinese literature, classic
Chinese literature, Asian American literature, and
modern American literature. He has published
translations from English to Chinese of fiction as
well as of critical theory. His current translation
and editing projects are American Literary Criticism Since the 1980s by Vincent Leitch and Theory
Mapped, Analyzed, and Defended: A Leitch Reader,
schedule for publication in 2010.
xxx
Abigail Ward is lecturer in postcolonial studies at

Nottingham Trent University and is finishing a
monograph on representations of slavery in the
work of Fred DAguiar, David Dabydeen, and
Caryl Phillips. She has published essays in a range
of books and in the Journal of Commonwealth
Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and
Moving Worlds.
Tracy Ware is a professor of English at Queens
University in Kingston, Ontario, where he teaches
Canadian literature. He has published on Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Poe, Trilling, Naipaul,
Keneally, and various aspects of Canadian literature. He edited A Northern Romanticism: Poets of
the Confederation (2000) and The Uncollected
Short Stories of Duncan Campbell Scott (2002).
Marita Wenzel is associate professor of English at
North-West University in Potchefstroom, South
Africa. Her main fields of interest are South
African and postcolonial novels and feminist and
translation studies within a comparative literary
framework. She has published several articles in
South African periodicals as well as chapters in
books, and is also an accredited translator (from
Afrikaans, German, and Spanish into English) for
the South African Translators Institute.
Darryl Whetters articles appear in Studies in
Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada,
and the Journal of Indian Writing in English, and
have been anthologized by Presses de la Sorbonne
Nouvelle and Americas National Poetry Foundation. He is also the author of two books of
fiction, 15 published stories, and numerous book
reviews for Canadian media (including the Globe
and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, and the Vancouver Sun). He is currently an assistant professor of
English at Dalhousie University.
Mark Williams has written extensively on New

Zealand, postcolonial, and modern literature. His
books include Maoriland: New Zealand Literature
18721914 (2006), written with Jane Stafford,
Patrick White (1993) and Leaving the Highway:
Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists (1990).
He was coeditor with Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory OBrien of An Anthology of New Zealand
Poetry in English (1997). He is currently professor
of English at the University of Canterbury.
R. John Williams is an assistant professor of
English at Yale University. His interests include
postcolonial/transnational literature, film, and
comparative American studies. He has published
articles in Research in African Literatures, Transformations, and Comparative Critical Studies, and
has articles forthcoming in Cultural Critique and
American Literature.
Sheena Wilson is assistant professor at the University of Alberta. Her research interests involve
an interdisciplinary approach to the study of
human and civil rights abuses as they are represented in literature, film, and media. Related areas
of interest include patterns of exclusion exercised
on non-dominant communities within the paradigm of state multiculturalism. She is particularly
interested in the reception of ethno-cultural media representations, as well as the ways in which
women writers and filmmakers represent
marginalization.
Lorraine York is professor of English and cultural
studies at McMaster University. She has written
books on photography and Canadian fiction,
Timothy Findley, contemporary womens collaborative writing, and Canadian literary celebrity.
She is currently writing a book about the Margaret
Atwood industry.
Introduction to Volume III
At the four corners of the Albert Memorial in

Londons Kensington Gardens are four large
sculptures whose stylized groupings of animals
and people allegorically represent Europe, Asia,
Africa, and the Americas an imperial version of
the biblical four corners of the earth, it would
seem, with only Australia and the South Pacific
conspicuously missing from this display of Victorian Englands global reach. The bronze statue
at the center of the memorial shows Albert himself
seated, staring resolutely southeast, and holding
in his right hand a catalogue of the 1851 Great
Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all
Nations. Since, from a distance, the Prince Consorts reading matter could be any book at all, it is
tempting (in a playfully postcolonial sort of way)
to imagine the contents of his hand being regularly replenished by the literary works of the
nations from those four corners in the years since
the statue was built. Perhaps he has just now
finished Things Fall Apart (1958), the most widely
read novel by a black African a writer whose
given name, not coincidentally, is Albert, but who
is better known to the world as Chinua Achebe.1
What, we might wonder, would Victorias Albert,
enthusiastic sponsor of the Great Exhibitions
display of worldly creativity, have made of this
other Alberts works? Or, to extend our fanciful
musings, of the more recent fiction of Samoas
Albert Wendt? As he sits in his visionary pose,
looking perennially about to begin a book or as
though he has just finished one, what pleasures
(or pains) might the Prince get from the emerging
canon of fiction in English that his wifes vast
empire unwittingly helped create, a body of work
that, over the course of the twentieth century,
moved from the peripheral corners of literary
consciousness to take its place at the center of
English-language writing?
The novel is a European genre and the novel in

English was, until the end of the nineteenth
century, a primarily English genre, with notable
contributions from the ex-colony of the United
States and the then current one of Ireland. While
English-speaking settlers in Canada, South Africa,
Australia, and New Zealand were also writing
during that century, composing such notable
fictions such as John Richardsons Wacousta
(1832), Olive Schreiners Story of an African Farm
(1883), and Miles Franklins My Brilliant Career
(1901) the latter published during the eventful
year in which Victoria died, Australia became a
nation, and the new century began more fully
developed and confidently embraced national
literary traditions would not emerge in these
young nations until the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, in 1930, in a manifestation
of what the critic A. A. Phillips would later call
the Cultural Cringe,2 H. M. Green began An
Outline of Australian Literature with the humble
statement that Australian literature is a branch of
English literature, and however great it may become and whatever characteristics it may develop,
it will remain a branch;3 similar assessments of
their literatures branch-plant status, immaturity,
belatedness, and the like legacies of colonial
paternalism were typical in the other settler
nations as well, despite the originality and international successes of writers such as L. M. Montgomery and Stephen Leacock of Canada, Henry
Handel Richardson and Katharine Susannah Prichard of Australia, and Katherine Mansfield of
New Zealand. In those imperial footholds that
Britain continued to occupy well into the twentieth century, the colonies of invasion in the West
Indies, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, little
or no English-language fiction was written by
colonized residents in the nineteenth century; in

938
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME III
the first half of the twentieth, before widespread

decolonization began after World War II, just a
smattering of enduring home-grown writers
emerged notably Jean Rhys of Dominica and
Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Raja Rao in
India.
In the postwar period, however, fiction from
both the settler societies and the colonies of
invasion, which were now becoming independent
Third World nations, flourished to the point
where it could, by centurys end, claim to be
central to the story of English-language fiction
as a whole. With various forms of political and
cultural nationalism fostering national identities
that were now officially untethered from an imported or imposed Englishness, and with burgeoning publishing industries, education systems,
and interest in local stories told by local voices,
writers from ex-colonies enhanced and extended
the novel and short story genres, appropriating
and transforming their formal conventions and
linguistic raw material, and generally enlivening
the literary scene. In the 1980s and 1990s writers
from the West Indies, Africa, and India won top
awards such as the Nobel Prize for Literature or
the Booker Prize for Fiction; they were seriously
taught and researched and theorized about in
institutions of higher learning; and their fiction
captured the imaginations of readers worldwide,
topping bestseller lists and comprising a significant enough phenomenon to be celebrated on the
cover of Time magazine.4 These new voices told
the stories a decolonizing, globalizing, increasingly multicultural and transnational world wanted
to hear.
Not all world fiction in English comes from
former colonies, of course; some of it originates in
China, the Philippines, and other places without a
British colonial past. But the global spread of
English and its emergence as the dominant language of world literature can be overwhelmingly
traced back to the success of the British imperial
adventure, which sent not just English people and
institutions and forces across the oceans but their
language and literature and culture as well the
pen that so mightily complemented the sword.
The world fiction on which this volume of the
ETCF is focused is mostly (but not exclusively) a
phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth
century and of a group of national literatures that
collectively came into focus in the 1950s and
1960s with the emergence of writers such as Doris

Lessing, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Wole
Soyinka, Patrick White, and the poet-playwright
Derek Walcott (all of them Nobel Prize winners),
not to mention Achebe, Ng~
ug~, Sam Selvon,
George Lamming, Mordecai Richler, Janet Frame,
Khushwant Singh, Kamala Markandaya, and
many others.
The study of these writers was encouraged,
beginning in the 1960s, by the development of
university courses and research on these new
national literatures, particularly in the countries
themselves, as an addition to the study of British
and American literatures. At the same time, comparative study was fostered internationally by the
then new field of Commonwealth literature and
the founding of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies
(ACLALS); though the association and its regional branches remain strong, Commonwealth literature has, since the late 1980s, largely ceded its
ground to the more politicized rubric of
postcolonial literatures and postcolonialism,
which have transformed English studies over the
past two decades. The post in postcolonial
(spelled with or without a hyphen) is, in simple
terms, understood as a marker not so much of a
temporal shift to political independence as of a
psychic awareness a consciousness that oneself
and ones people have been colonized, and a
consequent desire to engage critically and imaginatively with the implications and legacies of that
transformative historical fact. For the authors of
The Empire Writes Back (1989), the influential
first book to offer a synoptic theory of postcolonial literatures, What each of these literatures has
in common beyond their special and distinctive
regional characteristics is that they emerged in
their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by
emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre.5
The realm in which this tension, difference, and
resistant assertion are most palpable is that of the
writers most fundamental tool the word. When
writers of the postcolonial world use the language
of Shakespeare and Austen (which may or may
not be their mother tongue), they transform it,
bending and reshaping it to reflect local speech
rhythms, names, idioms, cosmologies, and other
languages with which it comes in contact. In the

West Indies, many generations of plantation slavery, indenture, British-controlled education, and
suppression of African languages had produced
forms of creolized English as the language(s) most
people spoke; writers often departed from standard literary English to embrace these variant
Englishes in their fiction, as V. S. Reid and Sam
Selvon did in their early novels New Day (1949)
and The Lonely Londoners (1956) respectively.
And while English was most West Indians mother tongue, this was usually not the case in Asia and
Africa. As Raja Rao observed in the famous preface to his novel Kanthapura (1938), to write in
English about the life of an Indian village has not
been easy. One has to convey in a language that is
not ones own the spirit that is ones own.6 For
Salman Rushdie, in a Times article entitled The
Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance (1982),
the history of colonialism means that the English
language is tainted by history: The language,
like much else in the newly independent societies,
needs to be decolonized, to be remade in other
images, if those of us from positions outside
Anglo-Saxon culture are to be more than artistic
Uncle Toms.7 Rushdies own novels are often
applauded for their Indianized (or chutneyfied)
English, as were those of predecessors such as
Ahmed Ali (Twilight in Delhi, 1940) and G. V.
Desani (All about H. Hatterr, 1948), and successors such as Shashi Tharoor (The Great Indian
Novel, 1989) and Arundhati Roy (The God of
Small Things, 1997). However, in India, the majority of literary writing and reading takes place in
Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, or the nations many other
official languages. English is the literary language
of a minority of writers there, as it is elsewhere
in Asia and in Africa, where a vigorous debate
took place in the 1970s on the suitability of
English as a medium for conveying African
experience in literature. Squaring off most
prominently were Achebe (who maintained that
English has, for better or worse, become an
African language and is flexible enough to
ug~ wa
convey African experience)8 and Ng~
Thiongo, who abandoned the English of his
early novels for his native G~k~
uy~
u beginning
with Devil on the Cross (1982), arguing in
Decolonising the Mind that language is a carrier
of culture and is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a
939
specific form and character, a specific history, a

ug~,
specific relationship to the world.9 For Ng~
continuing to write in the colonizers language
would therefore be a capitulation to continued
domination and alienation. (In a similar spirit,
Malaysian government policies in the 1970s
subordinated English, despite its widespread
use, in an effort to promote Malay as the
language of the new nation; this discouraged
writing in English for a generation, though the
new millennium has witnessed a comeback.)10
Although the outpouring of English-language
fiction from the postcolonial world in the past few
decades suggests that many writers voted with
their pens (or perhaps, more cynically, their
pocketbooks) and sided with Achebes rather than
Ng~
ug~s approach, there is a widespread perception that English-language literature from former
colonies of invasion is the product of a mobile,
often foreign-educated and expatriate elite out of
touch with and unable to speak to the experience
of common people. And while writers such as
Indias R. K. Narayan, Jamaicas Erna Brodber,
and Nigerias Cyprian Ekwensi remained lifelong
residents of their countries of birth, they are the
exceptions that prove the rule, and a majority of
the most prominent English-language authors
from Asia, the West Indies, and Africa have spent
their adult lives largely in Britain or other Western
nations as diasporic migrants or, in some cases,
as unwilling exiles from their original homeland. Nonetheless, these migrant writers continued to write about those homelands and their
people, their cultures and histories, along with
the contemporary experiences of immigration
and adaptation, alienation and transformation,
that their own lives have embodied and witnessed. In the process, such diverse figures as
Austin Clarke (Barbados/Canada), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua/US), Bharati Mukherjee (India/
US), Romesh Gunesekera (Sri Lanka/UK), M. G.
Vassanji (Tanzania/Canada), and Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria/UK), have enhanced the literatures of their nations and regions of birth as well
as offering new literary lenses through which to
see their adoptive national (and increasingly
mixed) societies. World fiction of the late twentieth century is therefore a fiction of multiple
cultural and geographical influences and affiliations: it is as transnational and cross-cultural as
it is postcolonial.
940
Throughout the world, fiction in English has

pushed generic and stylistic conventions into new
territory. Beyond the linguistic experimentation
of writers like the aforementioned Selvon and
Rushdie, or of Nigerias Amos Tutuola (The
Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952), Ken Saro-Wiwa (Sozaboy, 1984), and Ben Okri (The Famished Road,
1991), the foundational realism of the English
novel also, like its language, proved an attractive
tool for twentieth-century writers to use and to
resist. The referential breadth of realism its
implicit claim that any kind of object, person,
place, or experience could be worth including in a
work of imaginative fiction made it appealing to
writers interests in representing the previously
unrepresented (or misrepresented) world they
knew. But realisms presumption of objective
observation and truth-telling limited its ability
to represent subjective states of consciousness,
or spiritual or supernatural experiences, or contradictory perceptions of reality; furthermore,
ideas of objectivity, truth, and authority had
been tainted by the Empires imposition of
self-serving, oppressive truths that distorted and
diminished the world of the colonized other.
And so, as the modernists and postmodernists of
British and American literature sought alternatives to realism in order to find suitable literary
expressions of contemporary crises of faith (in
God, in a coherent and unified world, in secular
authority, in the signifying word), writers from
the postcolonial world sought fictional forms
that would convey the disjunctions their histories of colonization and displacement had produced between peoples, places, cultures, discourses, worldviews, and knowledges. Magic
realism is renowned as one distinctively postcolonial innovation (with origins in Latin America
and furthered by Indian and African writers),
and the importance of oral storytelling in many
developing countries and indigenous cultures
was reflected in numerous works infused with
oral traditions and narrative forms that predated
colonial contact, including mythic and religious
materials. In their pursuits of cultural recuperation, political resistance, and aesthetic innovation, writers of world fiction also developed their
own uses for and ways of writing satire, fantasy,
stream of consciousness, historical fiction, epistolary fiction, childrens fiction, crime fiction,
and more.
For many writers, activism and fiction have

gone hand in hand. Whether as anti-colonial
nationalists (Wole Soyinka), anti-apartheid activists (Alex La Guma), feminists (Margaret Atwood), socialists (Mulk Raj Anand), pacifists
(Katharine Susannah Prichard), anti-racists (Chinua Achebe), environmentalists (Arundhati
Roy), gay activists (Dionne Brand), or as advocates of multiple causes, numerous authors have
eschewed an art-for-arts-sake approach to their
writing. Parlaying their profiles as writers into
prominent roles as essayists and public speakers
for their causes at home and abroad, they may
suffer censorship (Rushdie), exile (Soyinka), imprisonment (Ng~
ug~), and even death (SaroWiwa) for their pains. But whether or not the
authors themselves are publicly active, their fiction frequently foregrounds social and political
issues. The power politics of colonialism and
neocolonial rule loom large, not surprisingly,
particularly in historical fiction (a favored genre
throughout the postcolonial world), but also in
works with contemporary or speculative settings.
Minority groups struggles for recognition and
rights Muslims and Parsis in India, West Indians
in London, indigenous peoples in Canada are a
common subject; the search for origins and the
place of home is another, whether from a locally
rooted or diasporically routed perspective. The
social and cultural transformations that a century
of colonization and decolonization, wars and
coups, migrations and resettlements, sexual and
social and cultural and political revolutions have
produced provide a seemingly bottomless (and
variously exhilarating and disheartening) set of
contexts whose human dimensions it is the novelist and short story writers task to explore.
Of course, there is a marked difference between
the overt polemics of activist non-fiction and the
indirect, exploratory themes of politically engaged fiction. As Ikem Osodi, a character in
Achebes Anthills of the Savannah (1987), memorably says, Writers dont give prescriptions . . .
They give headaches!11 As we return to the image
of Albert, Prince Consort, sitting with book eternally in hand, we might guess that a steady stream
of world fiction over the past century would give
him something of a headache. After all, he was
married to the monarch most associated with the
ascent of empire and the expansion of British
power to the four corners of the earth, and the
fiction he would be endlessly reading does not

offer much in the way of thanks for that achievement. But even as he wishes he had a hand free to
reach for an aspirin, he might also find his mind
expanding, the ideas in his bronzed brain changing, as he is led to see Africa though Ng~
ug~s eyes,
India through Anita Desais, Australia through
Peter Careys, New Zealand through Janet
Frames, Canada through Alice Munros, America
through Bharati Mukherjees, Singapore through
Catherine Lims, and England through David
Dabydeens. And we can guess that for them and
for most of the other writers covered by this
volume, the combination of headache and opened
mind would be just about ideal.
Editing the World Fiction volume of the ETCF has

been an exciting challenge and a daunting responsibility. How to cover such a vast, heterogeneous
field, and so many fascinating and important
writers, in fewer than 200 entries of 1,000,
2,000, or 3,000 words each? Some working principles helped guide my (sometimes agonizing)
choices. Authors receiving one of the 162 author
entries were expected to have established a significant international reputation as writers of literary
fiction for adults before the end of the twentieth
century, even if they have gone on to publish more
941
and more significant work in the twenty-first.

However, contributors were asked to bring those
entries up to date as of their submission so as not
to artificially halt coverage of an authors career at
the year 2000. Authors who published most of
their work in the nineteenth century but continued into the twentieth were generally not included. Length of entries was guided primarily by
relative scholarly reputation and, in some cases,
of output, with 3,000-word entries limited to
Nobel Prize winners and a handful of other figures
who have dominated their respective national
literatures and achieved international renown.
The 34 subject entries cover the major national
and regional literatures covered by the volume, as
well as a limited selection of synoptic entries
covering theoretical topics, genres, and/or worldly contexts for the study of twentieth-century
fiction, as in the other volumes. Undoubtedly
some readers will lament the omission of a favorite author or question the inclusion of another;
like every other quasi-canonizing process, this
one is inevitably imperfect, but I trust the final
result will nonetheless prove useful and illuminating to scholars, students, and other fiction
enthusiasts.
John Clement Ball
Notes
1 Chinua Achebe, Named for Victoria, Queen of England, in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London:
Heinemann, 1975), p. 67.
2 A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture, 2nd edn. [1966] (Melbourne: Longman,
1980), p. 112.
3 H. M. Green, An Outline of Australian Literature (Sydney: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1930), p. 9.
4 Pico Iyer, The Empire Writes Back, Time (Feb. 8, 1993), pp. 549.
5 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 2.
6 Raja Rao, Authors Foreword, in Kanthapura [1938] (New York: New Directions, 1967), p. vii.
7 Salman Rushdie, The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance, The Times (July 3, 1982), 8.
8 Chinua Achebe, The African Writer and the English Language, in Morning Yet on Creation Day, pp. 6570.
9 Ng~
ug~ wa Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey,
1986), pp. 13, 16.
10 The question of language is less fraught in the former settler colonies, though a substantial portion of Canadian
literature is written in French, and in South Africa, Andre Brink writes fiction in both English and Afrikaans.
11 Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah [1987] (London: Picador, 1988), p. 161.
A
Abrahams, Peter
YOGITA GOYAL
Though often neglected by scholars of African

fiction, Peter Abrahams is one of the earliest
voices in black South African fiction and an
important theorist of nationalism, transnationalism, and exile. His works reveal the competing
and complementary intersections of liberal humanism, Marxism, and Black Nationalism.
Abrahams was born on March 19, 1919 in
Vrededorp, a Johannesburg slum, to an Ethiopian
father who worked the mines and a Cape Malay
mother leaders of an impoverished Afrikaansspeaking household classified as colored. In Tell
Freedom (1954), Abrahams explains that his writing career stemmed from two sources of artistic
inspiration. The first was African American writers and poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Abrahams discovered the writings of Countee Cullen,
Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey,
and W. E. B. Du Bois in the mid-1930s as part of
his work at the Bantu Mens Social Center, later
describing his encounter with their thinking as a
catalyst for the awakening of racial and cultural
pride. His second source of inspiration came
when a young Jewish woman narrated Charles
Lambs version of Othello to an 11-year-old Abrahams. Though drawn to the United States with
the possibility of meeting the Harlem writers, he
journeyed instead to England in 1939 by working
his passage on a freighter. Abrahams invoked
England as the home of Lamb, John Keats, and
P. B. Shelley, suggesting that the metropolis
would offer a refuge for his literary pursuits. In
London, he became involved with the Communist

Party, writing for the Daily Worker, but soon broke
with the party over their attempts to control his
artistic freedom. Joining a community of African
and Caribbean intellectuals, he helped organize
the 1945 Pan-African Conference in Manchester
before moving to Jamaica in the mid-1950s with
his wife, Daphne, where they still reside.
Following a volume of poetry, A Black Man
Speaks of Freedom! (1941), Abrahamss collection
of short stories and reminiscences, Dark Testament
(1942), offers unsentimental realist and naturalist
sketches of South African urban squalor. His first
novel, Song of the City (1945), presents a panoramic view of a group of characters in Johannesburg,
linked by the organizing motif of the song a
ballad improvised in the beer halls recounting the
journey to the big city as an allegory for the larger
transition from tribal past to Western present. The
well-received novel Mine Boy (1946) further represents the impact of urbanization by tracking
the movement from rural to urban forms of
political consciousness, exploring the possibility
of freedom in a world marked by the exploitation
of miners in a racist society. The Path of Thunder
(1948) addresses similar issues, this time through
the lens of interracial love, as it probes the ultimately tragic encounter between a colored schoolteacher and an Afrikaans woman, exploring the
contradictions of the color line in the northern
Cape Province. The historical novel Wild Conquest (1950) challenges the pioneer myth of the
Great Trek: the Boer migration of the 1830s and
1840s into the Southern African interior seeking a
homeland free of British control, which later

ACHEBE, CHINUA
became a founding event in Afrikaner nationalism. The narrative persona in these novels is often
dispassionate, in contrast to Abrahamss vivid
autobiographical writing in Return to Goli
(1953) and Tell Freedom (1954).
His successive novels address broad conceptions of national liberation and the development
of new governments, often thematizing the process of independence as a clash between personal
freedom and the pull of tradition. They also
explore interracial relationships, especially between black men and white women, as testing
grounds for explosive racial antagonisms and
liberal, sentimental beliefs in love, personal freedom, and friendship. A Wreath for Udomo (1956)
uses the trope of betrayal to portray pan-African
intellectuals in exile in London (including a harsh
portrait of George Padmore), their relations with
white women, and conflicts within complex artistic and political debates, all of which play out
when they move to a fictional country, Panafrica
(widely seen as modeled on Kwame Nkrumahs
Ghana), bordered by Pluralia, a black majority
nation tyrannized by a white racist regime and
clearly reminiscent of South Africa. The novel
opposes individualism to tribalism, and the need
for privacy to the need for community. Though
limited by its stereotypical invocations of the
mysterious market woman or tribal man, the
novel offers a dazzling and prophetic account of
the intricacies of independence, especially the gap
between transnational visions birthed in exile
and local realities. The political thriller A Night
of Their Own (1965) turns to South Africa to
imagine its protagonist returning home in a submarine to challenge the racist regime. This Island
Now (1966), a Caribbean counterpart to A Wreath
for Udomo, offers a complex portrayal of the
coming of independence and the inevitable betrayals and challenges brought on when a radical
politician comes to power in a Caribbean island.
The View from Coyaba (1985) offers a magisterial
sweep across Jamaica, the American South,
Liberia, and Uganda to depict struggles for black
autonomy.
Abrahamss most recent autobiography, The
Black Experience in the Twentieth Century (2000),
displays an expansive geographical and historical
scope as Abrahams mulls over the meaning of his
life, placing it in a matrix of black liberation
struggles across the globe.
943

The City in Fiction (WF); The Harlem
Renaissance (AF); Historical Fiction (WF);
Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial
Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Southern
African Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
Abrahams, P. (1941). A Black Man Speaks of Freedom!
Poems. Durban: Universal.
Abrahams, P. (1942). Dark Testament. London:
Allen and Unwin.
Abrahams, P. (1945). Song of the City. London:
Dorothy Crisp.
Abrahams, P. (1946). Mine Boy. London: Dorothy
Crisp.
Abrahams, P. (1950). Wild Conquest. London: Faber
and Faber.
Abrahams, P. (1953). Return to Goli. London: Faber
and Faber.
Abrahams, P. (1954). Tell Freedom. London: Faber
and Faber.
Abrahams, P. (1956). A Wreath for Udomo. London:
Faber and Faber.
Abrahams, P. (1965). A Night of their Own. London:
Faber and Faber.
Abrahams, P. (1966). This Island Now. London:
Faber and Faber.
Abrahams, P. (1985). The View from Coyaba.
Abrahams, P. (2000). The Black Experience in the
Twentieth Century: An Autobiography and
Meditation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ogungbesan, K. (1979). The Writing of Peter Abrahams.
Wade, M. (1972). Peter Abrahams. London: Evans.
Achebe, Chinua
C. LYN INNES
Regarded by many as the father of contemporary

African fiction, Chinua Achebe is almost certainly
the worlds best-known African author. His
groundbreaking first novel Things Fall Apart
(1958) has been translated into over 55 languages
and has sold more than 10 million copies. With its
sympathetic depiction of a complex traditional
African society, its adaptation of English to convey African speech and thought, and its portrayal
of the tragic but flawed protagonist Okonkwo,
944
ACHEBE, CHINUA
who seeks to resist the imposition of colonial

culture, Things Fall Apart provided a theme and
a model that was to influence writers from many
parts of the African continent. Together, Achebes
five novels provide a history of Nigeria over a
century of colonial and neocolonial rule. As a
critic and editor, Achebe has also played a major
part in the development of writing throughout
the African continent since the 1960s. He was
the founding editor of the Heinemann African
Writers Series, which under his guidance between 1962 and 1972 published more than 100
African writers, including many emerging artists,
in an affordable paperback format.
Born in Ogidi in the Igbo-speaking area of
eastern Nigeria on November 16, 1930, Achebe
was christened Albert Chinualumogu, the fifth
child of Christian converts. Achebe has argued
that living at the crossroads of cultures gave him
a particular advantage as a recorder of traditional
Igbo society, for although as the son of a Christian
catechist he was supposed to abhor the heathen
practices of his uncle and cousins, he found
himself fascinated by the ritual and the life on
the other arm of the crossroads. And, Achebe
continues, I believe two things were in my favour
that curiosity, and the little distance imposed
between me and it by the accident of my birth. The
distance becomes not a separation but a bringing
together like the necessary backward step which a
judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas
steadily and fully (1988, 23).
A star pupil at school, Achebe was awarded a
scholarship to study medicine at the newly established University College in Ibadan. There he
published his first essays and stories in the student
paper, the University Herald. Although slight,
these first works already display qualities characteristic of his later writing a keen eye for detail,
a gentle irony, and an interest in the divergence
between traditional African beliefs and customs
and supposedly more sophisticated European
ways of behaving. University College brought
together from different regions of Nigeria young
men and women who developed a sense of a larger
nation and different traditions, and who shared a
growing impatience with colonial rule and attitudes. It was there that Achebe decided to drop
his Christian name Albert and become known as
Chinua, and it was also here that he encountered colonialist writing about Africa novels by
authors such as Joseph Conrad, Rider Haggard,

Edgar Wallace, and Joyce Cary, as well as histories
that assumed it was Europeans who had brought
civilization to Africa. Achebe tells us, At the
university I read some appalling novels about
Africa (including Joyce Carys much praised
Mister Johnson) and decided the story we had to
tell could not be told for us no matter how gifted
or well intentioned (1988, 25). In a controversial
later essay Achebe denounced Conrad as a
thoroughgoing racist, above all in his dehumanizing depiction of Africans and his denial of
speech to them in Heart of Darkness (1975a, 38).
Soon after his graduation from University
College in 1954, while employed in the Talks
Department of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service,
Achebe began writing his first novel, partly in
reaction to what he deemed Carys most superficial picture not only of the country but even of
the Nigerian character (Duerden & Pieterse 4).
The novel was intended to cover the story, told
from the inside (4), of three generations,
beginning with the arrival of European missionaries in eastern Nigeria toward the end of the nineteenth century, and ending with the story, paralleling Carys, of a young Nigerian who works for the
colonial administration and is found guilty of
taking bribes. However, in the process of writing,
Achebe realized that he had the foundation for two
separate novels, which eventually became Things
Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease (1960).
A story told from the inside involved not only
crucial differences in attitude toward representing
Nigerian society and character, but also a radical
departure from the historical narratives that
had dominated colonialist writing. Moreover, as
Simon Gikandi (7) points out, there is in all of
Achebes novels a fundamental link between the
idea of the nation, the concept of a national
culture, and the quest for an African narrative.
Achebe was to declare later, in a lecture titled The
Role of the Writer in a New Nation, that as an
African writer his fundamental theme must be
that African peoples did not hear of culture for
the first time from Europeans (1964b, 157).
Thus, he set himself the difficult task of representing by means of the English language and literary
tradition an oral culture rooted in the language
and complex traditions of the Igbo people. The
contrast between an oral culture and history
and a colonialist written history is powerfully
ACHEBE, CHINUA
conveyed through the disparity between the opening and closing paragraphs of Things Fall Apart.
The opening paragraph introduces us to Okonkwo
as the hero of the story about to be told, to the
world and values he seeks to uphold, and to the
legends and myths which sustain that world and
which are passed down from one generation to the
next. The final paragraph, a summary of the
history the English district commissioner plans to
write, consigns the 185-page novel we have just
read to a reasonable paragraph used to illustrate
the European Pacification of the Primitive Tribes
of the Lower Niger (185). Between those two
paragraphs the reader inhabits the vibrant social,
artistic, and religious culture of the Igbo village of
Umuofia, which becomes present through the
voices of Igbo speakers, and understands the tensions caused by divisions within the society as well
as by the impact of the missionaries who make
their appearance in the last third of the novel.
Things Fall Apart is an anti-colonial novel that
refuses to paint precolonial society as one glorious technicolour idyll (Achebe 1964b, 157). It
does not evade the fact that it is a representation
of precolonial society written after colonial
power and culture have irretrievably changed that
society. The novels title, taken from W. B. Yeatss
famous poem The Second Coming, foregrounds Achebes acknowledgment of his own
dual heritage, Igbo and European, and of contested historical narratives. But the narrative voice
is also a compound of Igbo and English cultural
traditions, shifting seamlessly from allusions to
the significance of the yam in local economic and
symbolic systems to Tennysons reference to nature red in tooth and claw (Achebe 1958, 10).
When, alienated by the sacrifice of his foster
brother, Okonkwos son Nwoye takes Isaac as his
Christian name, the reader is reminded of the
biblical story of Abrahams willingness to obey his
gods command to slay his son. As Gikandi points
out, these allusions remind us that Achebes novel
is in dialogue with colonialist representations
of Africans as marginal, as barbaric, as lacking
speech or coherence; they also allow the narrator
to provide shifting perspectives and sustain an
ambivalent ethics. On many occasions the narrator seems to promote one perspective or world
view but in the process also calls our attention to
the negative side of that point of view (Gikandi
445). This double perspective is demonstrated
945
not only in descriptions of social practice and

attitudes, but also in the representation of
Okonkwo as a heroic but dogmatic and authoritarian defender of his community, and in the very
language that Achebe adapts and lays bare in the
novel, as in the description of the missionary
Mr. Smiths attitudes: He saw things as black
and white. And black was evil. He saw the world
as a battlefield in which the children of light
were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of
darkness (Achebe 1958, 164).
Things Fall Apart is the novel that has made
Achebe famous and that has had the greatest
influence on African writers and on readers
throughout the world. Wole Soyinka described
it as the first novel in English which spoke from
the interior of an African character, rather than
portraying him as exotic, as the white man would
see him (Jaggi 6). To some extent its extraordinary impact has overshadowed Achebes subsequent novels, which engage less with colonialist
writing about the past and more with contemporary issues affecting the progress of Nigeria as
an independent state. Although set in the 1920s,
Achebe writes Arrow of God (1964a), with its focus
on problems of leadership within the Igbo community amid disputed versions of community
history and knowledge, at a time when contests
for power between the different peoples of Nigeria
(mainly Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa) were becoming
apparent. This novels main protagonist, the
priest Ezeulu, is an intellectual rather than a
warrior, and at stake is the relationship between
power and knowledge, between personal status
and commitment to an exterior principle or
authority. For some critics, Arrow of God, with
its more complex portrayal of a changing African
society, its powerful characterization of the proud
and tragic priest who refuses to accept an appointment as warrant chief, and the secular power
offered by the colonial administration, surpasses
Things Fall Apart. It was awarded the Jock Campbell New Statesman Prize in 1965.
Two novels set in contemporary Nigeria explored the dilemmas and challenges faced by
young Nigerians. No Longer at Ease (1960) opens
and closes with the trial of Obi, the grandson of
Okonkwo, who has returned from university
studies in England determined to become part
of the new leadership as Nigeria gains independence. But he is unable to commit himself deeply
946
ACHEBE, CHINUA
to either the beliefs that sustain his parents or

the modern view that rejects such traditional
attitudes as the acceptance of a caste system.
When Obi falls in love with a member of the
despised osu caste, he is unable to defy his parents
opposition to their marriage, or to withstand the
expectation that he acquire the status symbols,
such as a car and expensive flat, that appertained
to the colonial rulers. As Obi travels between his
comfortable urban world and the rural village
where his parents live, the reader experiences the
disparities in material and ethical being that
characterized Nigeria on the verge of independence, and that Achebes later novels, A Man of the
People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987),
demonstrate. For Obi, as for Odili Samula, the
protagonist of A Man of the People, the problem of
finding an appropriate form of language is crucial;
rather, the language these characters use is a
means for the reader to judge them. Obi describes
his society through the prism of a European world
view: amid the malodorous gutters of Lagos he
adapts lines from T. S. Eliot to express his repugnance and, having witnessed police taking
bribes, he compares the task of cleansing Nigeria
of corruption to that of Hercules clearing the
Augean stables. Indeed, the significance of that
European cultural tradition in distancing Obi
from his home community is highlighted by the
title of the novel, a quotation from Eliots poem
Journey of the Magi, in which the Magi declares
himself no longer at ease, finding his people and
their gods now alien (Eliot 110). In A Man of the
People Odili narrates his own story, and the reader
must discern his unreliability as a narrator, seeing
through his breezy and often cliched justifications
for his changing political allegiances.
With A Man of the People Achebe moves from
the tragic and ironic modes of his earlier novels to
a sharply satiric portrayal of contemporary postcolonial Nigerian politics. Achebe demonstrates
how easily Odili is seduced by the government
minister Chief Nangas power, wealth, and rhetoric. Indeed, seduction becomes a metaphor for
Nigerian politics, as the various groups of voters
are symbolized by Nangas loyal first wife from his
home village; Elsie, his fickle city mistress; and
Edna, the young semi-educated rural girl he seeks
as a second wife. In the end Odili courts and wins
Edna, but at considerable cost. The novel closes
with a military coup, an ending that coincided
with an actual coup in Nigeria a few months

after the novels publication, precipitating the
massacre of Igbos in northern Nigeria, the events
that led to the secession of eastern Nigeria (as
Biafra), and the Nigerian Civil War (196770).
Achebe was Minister for Information for the
prospective state of Biafra, and toured the world
seeking support for the state. During the months
and years of fighting, his home and university in
Nsukka were bombed and he witnessed widespread suffering, including starvation, amid a
population besieged by the federal government.
There was no space to write novels, but he wrote
many poems and several short stories in response
to the violence and misery he witnessed. Immediately after Biafra surrendered in 1970, he set
about the task of reconstruction with fellow writers and intellectuals at the University of Nsukka,
and the salvaging of the ideals that had inspired his
initial involvement on behalf of Biafra. He edited
the university journal Nsukkascope and founded
Okike: A Nigerian Journal of New Writing with the
aim of providing a forum for writing by Africans
and debating the criteria by which African writing
should be judged. He also helped establish a
publishing house, Nwamife Books (Enugu),
whose first publications included fiction by Flora
Nwapa, Emannuel Obiechinas groundbreaking
study of Onitsha Market Literature, and Beware
Soul Brother (1972a), a collection of Achebes
poetry which was awarded the Commonwealth
Poetry Prize in 1972. He also published a collection
of stories, Girls at War and Other Stories (1972b),
and a number of books for children.
Between 1972 and 1977, Achebe taught at
several American universities before returning to
the University of Nsukka and continuing his
activities as a teacher, international lecturer, editor, and essayist. He also became deputy national
president of the Peoples Redemption Party, expressing his analysis of the failure of Nigerias
political leadership in the booklet The Trouble
with Nigeria (1983). The ideas that inform his fifth
novel, Anthills of the Savannah, set in a fictional
state with strong resemblances to Nigeria, are in
line with that booklet, although the novel is more
complex and eschews dogmatism. Anthills acknowledges the changes that have taken place in
African writing and African societies since 1960,
particularly with regard to the changing role of
women and the concern to create an all-inclusive
ACHEBE, CHINUA
society embracing different religions, cultures,

and classes, especially the poor. One of its central
characters, Beatrice Okoh, an English honors
graduate and a senior administrator in the Ministry of Finance, becomes a narrator of the novel
and the leader of a group of women who may
represent a more positive future for Nigeria.
Speech, rhetoric, and storytelling remain, as in
the earlier fiction, central concerns, but in this
novel the role of writers and writing also becomes
a significant issue.
In 2007 Chinua Achebe became the second
writer to be awarded the International Man Booker Prize. One of the three judges, the distinguished
South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, commented that Achebe had achieved what one of
his characters brilliantly defines as the writers
purpose: a new-found utterance for the capture
of lifes complexity. This fiction is an original
synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean
stream of consciousness, the post-modern breaking of sequence. He is a joy and an illumination to
read (Jaggi 7).
SEE ALSO: Cary, Joyce (BIF); Conrad, Joseph
(BIF); English Studies, the Academy, and
Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to
Canonical English Narratives (WF);
Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and
Satire (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);
Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Soyinka,
Wole (WF); West African Fiction (WF)

Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1960). No Longer at Ease. London:
Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1964a). Arrow of God. London:
Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1964b). The Role of the Writer in a
New Nation. Nigeria Magazine, 81, 157160.
Achebe, C. (1966). A Man of the People. London:
Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1972a). Beware Soul Brother: Poems.
London: Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1972b). Girls at War and Other Stories.
London: Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1975a). An Image of Africa: Racism in
Conrads Heart of Darkness. The Chancellors Lecture
947
Series, 197475. Amherst: University of

Achebe, C. (1975b). Morning Yet on Creation Day:
Essays. London: Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1983). The Trouble with Nigeria. Enugu:
Fourth Dimension.
Achebe, C. (1987). Anthills of the Savannah. London:
Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1988). Hopes and Impediments: Selected
Essays 196587. Oxford: Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (2001). Home and Exile. New York:
Random House.
Achebe, C. (2009). Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text,
Contexts and Criticism (ed. F.A. Irele). New York:
Norton.
Booker, M. K. (ed.) (2003). The Chinua Achebe
Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Carroll, D. (1990). Chinua Achebe. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Duerden, D., & Pieterse, C. (1972). African Writers
Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews. London:
Heinemann.
Eliot, T. S. (1974). Collected Poems 19091962. London:
Faber and Faber.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto, (1997). Chinua Achebe: A Biography.
Oxford: James Currey.
Gikandi, S. (1991). Reading Chinua Achebe:
Language and Ideology in Fiction. London:
James Currey.
Innes, C. L. (1990). Chinua Achebe. Cambridge:
Innes, C. L., & Lindfors, B. O. (eds.) (1978). Critical
Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Washington, DC:
Three Continents.
Irele, A. (1990). The African Experience in Literature
and Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Jaggi, M. (2000). Profile of Chinua Achebe. Guardian,
pp. 67 (Nov. 18).
Killam, G. D. (1977). The Writings of Chinua Achebe.
London: Heinemann.
Lindfors, B. O. (ed.) (2000). Conversations with
Chinua Achebe. Oxford, MS: University of
Mississippi Press.
Newell, S. (2006). West African Literatures: Ways of
Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Obiechina, E. (1975). Culture, Tradition and Society in
the West African Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ogede, O. (2001). Achebe and the Politics of
Representation. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Wren, R. M. (1980). Achebes World: The Historical and
Cultural Context of the Novels of Chinua Achebe.
Washington, DC: Three Continents.
Yousaf, N. (2003). Chinua Achebe. Tavistock:
Northcote House.
948
AIDOO, AMA ATA
Aidoo, Ama Ata

NEIL TEN KORTENAAR
Ama Ata Aidoo is a Ghanaian dramatist and

fiction writer whose voice is distinguished by its
concern for womens issues and African nationalism, but equally by its awareness of intellectual
conundrums and its openness to dialogue and
multiple perspectives.
Born Christina Ama Ata Aidoo on March 23,
1942 into a Fante royal household in Abeadzi
Kyiakor, she attended the University of Ghana in
Legon, where she graduated in 1964. She wrote
her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965),
while still a student. Her subsequent writing
career has, however, been characterized by slender
works appearing at long intervals. Her parental
duties, her need to support herself mostly by
university teaching, often in North America the
difficulties of publishing in a male-dominated
literary environment, and the political hazards
of publishing under dictatorships all contributed
to the difficulty she has had in maintaining her
literary career. The challenges faced by writers are
the subject of a short story, Choosing, from the
collection The Girl Who Can and Other Stories
(1997). In 1982 she spent a brief term as minister
of education under the Jerry Rawlings government. She subsequently lived in Zimbabwe for
several years and was active in encouraging
womens writing there.
The Dilemma of a Ghost details the crisis that
arises in a marriage between a Ghanaian man and
an African American woman because his family
cannot accept her nor she their ways. Anowa
(1970a) retells a story Aidoo heard from her
mother of a rebellious girl who chose her husband
against her familys wishes and who later stood up
to him, objecting to his buying of slaves. Aidoo
subsequently turned to prose fiction, but her
fiction reveals the sources of her inspiration in
drama. Characters debate with each other, with
themselves, and sometimes with the implied reader; husbands discuss with wives, mothers with
daughters, African women with African men.
Passengers in a taxi talk over problems (The
Message); as do passengers in a plane (Nowhere
Cool). In Choosing, a writer and her mother
discuss not just the problems of writing in Africa,
but also why they feel as they do and why they
say what they say.
Some of Aidoos best stories are dramatic

monologues which address an audience directly
in the second person. The story Payments, in
The Girl Who Can, is in the voice of a market
trader. Aidoo has been taken to task for the
intemperateness of the African nationalism in
her first novel Our Sister Killjoy (1977), subtitled
Reflections of a Black-Eyed Squint, but what appears as bitterness is best considered an experiment in allowing free rein to an incomplete but
legitimate emotional response on the part of the
sister of the title. Unusual for an African novel of
that generation, Our Sister Killjoy recounts the
experience of a young African abroad. Sissie lives
in Germany but returns to Africa and calls on all
African emigrants to do the same. (Sissie is also the
name of the protagonist in the stories Everything
Counts, Lice, and Nowhere Cool.)
While experimenting with what it is possible
for an African woman to say or do, Aidoo deliberately challenges orthodoxy and invites scandal.
Her other novel, Changes (1991), explores what
happens when an educated professional woman
leaves her husband in an assertion of independence but then chooses to become the second
wife of a Muslim with whom she falls in love. The
polygyny here is in fact more modern than her
original monogamous marriage because it involves only the individuals in the marriage and
not their extended family ties.
Aidoos protagonists often express the authors
ideas and feelings about patriarchy, colonization,
and sexual fulfillment, but they are less mouthpieces than explorations of Aidoos questions.
Her educated women characters think in broad
categories like Westernization and authenticity,
through which they define themselves, usually in
argument with others, who may, however, be
absent. In Everything Counts, the opening story
in No Sweetness Here (1970), a woman lecturer
involved in an African intellectual revolution
engages in mental dialogue with her male counterparts about the significance of straight-hair
wigs. The first story in The Girl Who Can, Her
Hair Politics, is also about wigs: a woman in
discussion with a saleswoman believes they are
invidious, but is unsure how to weigh the fact that
the poor may rely on selling their hair in order
to survive.
One of Aidoos great concerns is with class.
The story For Whom Things Did Not Change
ALI, AHMED
involves a discussion among middle-class characters about the appropriateness of having domestic servants, juxtaposed with a discussion
between a cook steward and his wife. The characters in Changes met in school, have white
collar jobs, and employ maids. They take
modern conveniences, international travel, and
education for granted. They are also aware of
how trivial their quest for personal fulfillment
might seem against the background of African
poverty.
Aidoo also stages dialogue across cultures, as
in Dilemma, Our Sister Killjoy, and a story like
Nutty, about the tensions that surface between a
Ghanaian and her white American friend. Part of
the tension between characters is cultural, but it
always also involves things larger than the characters such as history and politics. The fierce
resentment the characters feel arises from the
fear that they are judged as representatives of
their culture and, concomitantly, from the need
to defend it.
SEE ALSO: Humor and Satire (WF);
Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF);
West African Fiction (WF)

Aidoo, A. A. (1965). The Dilemma of a Ghost.
Accra: Longman.
Aidoo, A. A. (1970a). Anowa. London: Longman.
Aidoo, A. A. (1970b). No Sweetness Here. Harlow:
Longman.
Aidoo, A. A. (1977). Our Sister Killjoy. Harlow:
Longman.
Aidoo, A. A. (1985). Someone Talking to Sometime.
Harare: College Press.
Aidoo, A. A. (1987). Birds and Other Poems. Harare:
College Press.
Aidoo, A.A. (1991). Changes: A Love Story. London:
Womens Press.
Aidoo, A. A. (1992). An Angry Letter in January.
Coventry: Dangaroo.
Aidoo, A. A. (1997). The Girl Who Can and Other
Stories. Legon: Sub-Saharan.
Azodo, A. U., & Wilentz, G. (ed.) (1999). Emerging
Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. Trenton, NJ:
Africa World Press.
949
Ali, Ahmed
HARISH TRIVEDI
Ahmed Ali was an Indian fiction writer, poet, and

translator who wrote in both Urdu and English.
He published his first novel, Twilight in Delhi
(1940), in the same decade as the founding trinity
of Indian fiction in English, R. K. Narayan, Mulk
Raj Anand, and Raja Rao published theirs, but his
career did not unfold to match theirs. His two
other slim novels, Ocean of Night (1964) and Of
Rats and Diplomats (1985), have long been out of
print; neither came close, in any case, to the
inspired vision and artistry for which Twilight in
Delhi is acclaimed as a minor classic.
Ali was born on July 1, 1910 in Delhi and
brought up there. His forebears had acted as
ulema or Muslim priests, though his father had
received modern education and was an official of
the British government in India. Ali received his
BA in 1930 from the Aligarh Muslim University
and his MA in English literature in 1931 from the
University of Lucknow. He taught at the universities of Lucknow, Allahabad, and Calcutta, and
was a visiting professor in Nanking, China in 1947
when India was partitioned. Ali opted to go to
Pakistan, apparently not without some anguish
and even bitterness at leaving the places he had
lived in and lovingly written about. He served as a
Pakistani diplomat in China and Morocco, and
following retirement in 1960 set up a business.
Ali was awarded the high state honor, the Sitarae-Imtiaz, in 1980. He died on January 14, 1994.
Though his fame rests mainly on the work he
produced in English, Ali had begun writing in
Urdu. He was one of the four contributors to the
collection of radically irreverent short stories
Angarey (Zaheer 1932), which was later banned,
and he published a collection of short stories
under the title Sholay (1934). He continued to
write short stories in Urdu and his novels in
English. When Twilight was translated into Urdu,
however, readers wondered how it could possibly
have been written in English. Ali also published
a contemporary translation of the Quran from
Arabic and edited an anthology of Urdu poetry
in English.
Twilight in Delhi, which was originally begun
as a short story, Hamari Gali (Our Lane), offers
a lyrical and elegiac account of the decline of old
950
AMADI, ELECHI
Delhi, a city built in the seventeenth century by

the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan; in the second
decade of the twentieth century, when the novel is
set, it was being systematically ravaged by British
rulers who were beginning to build their own
grand capital, New Delhi, right next door. The
novel dramatizes in poignant personal terms the
extinction of indigenous Muslim traditions and
the incursion of Western modernity. There are
two set pieces at the heart of the novel: one
describes in celebratory detail a joyous Muslim
wedding, while the other bears angry witness to a
triumphal procession led by King George V from
the famed seat of Mughal power, the Red Fort.
So effectively is the poetry of nostalgia complemented by the politics of outrage in the novel
that when its British printers came to the latter
episode, they stopped work on it for fear of
prosecution for sedition, especially in the fervid
climate of World War II. While literary works in
the Indian languages were routinely banned by
the British on the basis of sedition, Twilight is one
of the few Indian works in English to have come
close to this distinction.
Alis second novel, Ocean of Night (1964), is set
in another city associated with Muslim culture
and glory, Lucknow, and again has for its theme
the dying out of that culture, though the transition to modernity is treated in a more positive
light here. Huma, a young courtesan whose first
lover in the novel is an old and dissolute nawab,
clandestinely steps out of her feudal ambience to
have a liaison with a poor, young admirer, a
lawyer. The story spans a period of one year,
19389, and though there are passing references
to the Congress Party, the Muslim League, and
Hitler, the novel is largely apolitical. Alis third
and least successful novel, Of Rats and Diplomats
(1985), is satiric and acerbic in tone, with the
diplomat hero even growing a rat-like tail.
Ali promised much but did not deliver nearly
enough, and is now often regarded as a one-novel
author. He was an early member of the Progressive Writers movement but, as Sajjad Zaheer
recounts in his foundational narrative of the
movement, Ali shortly afterwards receded into
his shell of egoism, and disappeared from the
literary world (2006, 68). Nonetheless, he has
recently been acclaimed as a founder of Pakistani
literature and a distinctly Muslim novelist (see
Malak 2004). Today, in an age dominated by
monolingual South Asian writers who know only

English, Alis chief distinction is that of having
written creatively in Urdu as well as English, and
of having inflected English with his Indian mother
tongue in inventive ways comparable to those of
Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao.
SEE ALSO: Anand, Mulk Raj (WF);
Censorship and Fiction (WF); The City in
Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian
Fiction (WF); Narayan, R. K. (WF); Pakistani
Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction
(WF); Rao, Raja (WF)
Ali, A. (1934). Sholay. Lahore: Maktaba-e-Urdu.
Ali., A. (1940). Twilight in Delhi. London: Hogarth.
Ali, A. (1964). Ocean of Night. London: Peter Owen.
Ali, A. (trans.) (1984). Al-Quran: A Contemporary
Translation. Karachi: Akrash.
Ali, A. (1985). Of Rats and Diplomats. Hyderabad:
Sangam.
Coppola, C. (ed.) (1974). Marxist Influences and
South Asian Literature. East Lansing: Michigan
State University.
Coppola, C. (ed.) (1994). Ahmed Ali: A Tribute [special
issue] Annual of Urdu Studies 9.
Malak, A. (2004). Muslim Narratives and the Discourse
of English. Albany: SUNY Press.
Trivedi, H. (1985). Ahmed Ali: Twilight in Delhi.
In N. S. Pradhan (ed.), Major Indian Novels: An
Evaluation. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann,
pp. 4173.
Zaheer, S. (ed.) (1932). Angarey. Lucknow: Nizami.
Zaheer, S. (2006). The Light: A History of the Movement
for Progressive Literature in the Indo-Pakistan
Subcontinent. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
(Original work in Urdu published 1954.)
Amadi, Elechi
ANTHONIA (TONIA) I. UMOREN
Elechi Amadi is a Nigerian writer and an enigmatic thinker whose literary career spans several
decades and three literary genres. Amadi has
published five plays, four novels, several poems
and essays, the Civil War diary Sunset in Biafra
(1973b), and Ethics in Nigerian Culture (1982),
an attempt to establish a philosophy for Nigeria.
He is a prolific and versatile contributor to African literature whose work reflects his strong belief
in discipline and a quest for social order.
AMADI, ELECHI
Born on May 12, 1934 in Aluu, Rivers State,

Nigeria, Amadi spent his youth there before migrating to Ibadan University where he studied
mathematics and physics. The secondary school
he attended (Government College, Umuahia)
made the reading of novels in the college library
a compulsory activity three evenings a week, thus
exposing Amadi to a world of literature in which
he became increasingly interested. After university, he worked at a number of jobs, including as
a secondary school teacher, part-time lecturer at
the College of Education, and commissioner and
head of the Ministry of Education, all in Port
Harcourt. He was also briefly engaged in land
surveying and was commissioned into the army
where he rose to the rank of captain during the
Civil War of 196770, an experience that provided the basis of Sunset in Biafra.
Each job experience served as material for
Amadis literary writing, all of which engages in
a worldview that is essentially patriarchal, based
on a traditional religion that determines the roles
of gods and men and is restrictive to women. Like
his contemporary, Chinua Achebe, Amadi does
not believe in art for arts sake but is a committed
writer who delicately balances his message and
his medium. He uses a variety of stylistic devices
to capture characters, events, and impressions
vividly: proverbs to ground his narratives in local
images and symbols; simple present tense for
dramatic effect and immediacy; periphrases or
circumlocutions to challenge stereotypes; and
varied lexical patterns, including culturally specific names for everyday things, to add local
flavor.
Amadis first three novels, The Concubine
(1966), The Great Ponds (1969), and The Slave
(1978), form a trilogy with a common background in his community of Ikwerre, Aluu. The
trilogy explores contentious topics such as peoples complex relationship with the gods and the
supernatural and their futile attempts to pacify
their gods in pursuit of a harmonious coexistence.
With dry humor, Amadi suggests that the dread
of these imposing and poorly understood deities
generates potentially destructive inner contradictions in their followers. The Concubine tells the
story of a tragic heroine whose dual identity (as a
gods wife and a mans concubine) disrupts
the social order not just of the Omokachi society
but also of the gods. In The Great Ponds, Amadi
951
humorously satirizes the communities engaged

in a war of attrition over the Great Ponds of
Wagaba, whose economic potential is threatened
as it teems with fish begging to be harvested by the
rightful owners. The Slave treats the vexed issue of
the caste system, in which an individual is labeled
a slave or free depending on where and to
whom he or she was born and where the conception took place. Amadi captures a prevailing
frustration at the complexity of the societys many
inexplicable social conventions, and presents the
saga of individuals needing deliverance from rigid
adherence to constraining, culture-bound ethics.
Estrangement (1986), Amadis fourth novel,
indeed estranges Amadi from his Ikwerre background; it is set in urban Port Harcourt in the
post-Civil War period. In this novel, Amadi directs his novelistic eye to the debilitating effects
of war on the family and the larger society. He
satirizes those who engage in futile acts of war.
Amadis five plays Isiburu (1973a), The Dancer of Johannesburg (1977a), Peppersoup and The
Road to Ibadan (1977b; two plays in one volume),
and The Woman of Calabar (2002) address
social activities, touching on the getting of titles,
nightlife, relationships, polygamy, wrestling, and
various forms of entertainment. Ethics in Nigerian
Culture (1982) spells out the sexual taboos, beliefs, and myths that weigh heavily on women in
particular.
Unlike his peer Achebe, who holds external
forces responsible for his societys disintegration,
Amadi believes that it is the functional roles
played by its individual members that make or
mar society. These roles are gendered: for instance, the man takes all the important decisions
in the family and society while the woman cooks
and takes care of the children. He sees the societys
narrow codes of convention, which can rob individuals of their voice and threaten their very
existence, as a major stumbling block in the path
to a much needed global accord.
Amadi has served as a keynote speaker at
international conferences and has been honored
by many international bodies, including the Association of Nigerian Authors, the International
Conference on African Literature and the English
Language, and the University of Calabar, for his
dexterity and literary craftsmanship. His novels
are widely read in Nigerian secondary schools
and universities. Amadis poetic and dramatic
952
ANAND, MULK RAJ
language underscores the politics of individuals

and establishes the communities he portrays as
microcosms of the larger society.
SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF);
Amadi, E. (1966). The Concubine. London: Heinemann.
Amadi, E. (1969). The Great Ponds. London:
Heinemann.
Amadi, E. (1973a). Isiburu. London: Heinemann.
Amadi, E. (1973b). Sunset in Biafra. London:
Heinemann.
Amadi, E. (1977a). The Dancer of Johannesburg.
Ibadan: Onibonoje.
Amadi, E. (1977b). Peppersoup and The Road to Ibadan.
Ibadan: Onibonoje.
Amadi, E. (1978). The Slave. London: Heinemann.
Amadi, E. (1982). Ethics in Nigerian Culture. London:
Heinemann.
Amadi, E. (1986). Estrangement. London: Heinemann.
Amadi, E. (2002). The Woman of Calabar: A Play.
Port Harcourt: Gitelle.
Amadi, E. (2004). Elechi Amadi: Collected Plays.
Port Harcourt: Pearl.
Eko, E. (1991). Elechi Amadi: The Man and His Work.
Lagos: Kraft.
Feuser, W., & Eko, E. (eds.) (1994). Elechi Amadi at 55:
Poems, Short Stories and Papers. Ibadan: Heinemann.
Umoren, T. (2002). Portrait of Womanhood in African
Literary Tradition. Calabar: Clearline/Cats.
Umoren, T. (2004). Literature and Society: Social Order
in the Novels of Elechi Amadi. Calabar: University of
Calabar Press.
Anand, Mulk Raj

R. K. DHAWAN
Mulk Raj Anand is a pioneer of Indian English

fiction. As a novelist and short story writer, Anand
stands out prominently among his contemporaries through the vast range of his work, his wealth
of living characters, his ruthless realism, and his
fervent championing of the underprivileged.
Born into a Hindu family on December 12,
1905 in Peshawar, Northwest Frontier Province
(now in Pakistan), Anand spent the first 20 years
of his life in the Punjab area. In 1920, he entered
Khalsa College, Amritsar, where he joined the

non-violent struggle against the British government and courted arrest. In 1925, he graduated
from Punjab University with honors in English
and received a scholarship to study philosophy
in London. He completed a dissertation on John
Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell and was awarded a PhD by the
University of London in 1928. During these years,
Anand became interested in Indian art, avant
garde movements, and left-wing politics.
In London he also began creative writing. He
was deeply influenced by the Progressive Movement in literature of the 1930s, and came under
numerous literary, political, and social influences,
synthesizing his own brand of Marxist leanings
with humanist thought. Moreover, the General
Strike of 1926, initiated with the goal of acquiring
specific rights for mine workers (which Anand
supported but which ultimately failed), also had a
profound influence on his work. Although he had
admired Britain for its achievements in science
and technology, the strike shattered his illusions,
making him increasingly conscious of a growing
class war within British society.
Following the destruction of World War I,
European society plunged anew into the shadows
of economic depression and cynicism. Alarmed at
the situation, some Western intellectuals led by
Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann,
and E. M. Forster assembled in Paris, where
Forster urged his fellow writers to fulfill their
public calling to arouse readers to act and
struggle in the name of creating a just, humane
society. Inspired by these ideas, Anand and other
Indian students studying in England formed the
Progressive Writers Association, claiming that
the principal function of literature was to reflect
and express the aspirations and fundamental
problems of the toiling masses, and ultimately to
help in the formation of a pluralistic society.
Accordingly, Anands own writing is marked by
his eclectic humanism, his zeal for social reform,
and his humanitarian compassion for the downtrodden. These themes receive their best fictional
treatment in his first novel, Untouchable (1935).
With a laudatory preface by Forster, the novel
received worldwide recognition and, now translated into 36 languages, is acknowledged as a
classic. It broke new ground in Indian fiction
by presenting an archetypal tension between
ANAND, MULK RAJ
individual and society from the point of view of

a protagonist drawn from the downtrodden classes. It explores the issue of untouchability within
the Hindu society as it describes an eventful day in
the life of Bakha, a young sweeper outcaste. A
well-built young man of 18, Bakha is entrusted
with the work of cleaning the latrines, but as a
victim of the caste system, he is slapped in the face
for failing to announce the polluting shadow of
his sweeper presence. The incident is followed
by other humiliating events the upper-caste
womans hatred for the sweeper and the priest
Kalinaths attempt to molest Bakhas sister. He
feels outraged but cannot hit back until a speech
by Mahatma Gandhi gives him hope for a brighter, more equitable future.
Bakha is a prototype of the protagonists of
several novels that Anand published soon after.
Both Coolie (1936) and Two Leaves and a Bud
(1937) deal with landless peasants, another underprivileged group. Coolie depicts the lives of
displaced laborers who are exploited by various
economic forces, including colonialism. Munoo is
a rustic orphan hillboy forced to leave his idyllic
village in the Kangra valley so that he can work and
see the world. Working as a coolie with a bank
clerk who has a shrewish and vindictive wife,
Munoo is eventually knocked down by the car of
an Anglo-Indian woman and taken to Simla as her
servant, where he dies of tuberculosis watching the
hills and valleys he had abandoned. Two Leaves
exposes the conditions of plantation life in British
India. It recounts the tragedy of Gangu, a Punjabi
peasant lured to a British-owned tea plantation in
Assam, where he is bullied, starved, and killed by a
British official who tries to rape his daughter.
The conditions of the 1930s account for many
close resemblances between Anand and George
Orwell, including their passionate sense of social
justice. Both men hated the social prejudices that
helped maintain the oppressive status quo
Englands class system and Indias caste system
and shared a profound dislike of colonialism.
In tone and temper, Orwells Road to Wigan Pier
carried the same burden as Anands Coolie.
The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters
(1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942b)
form an ambitious trilogy on the theme of war,
set in Europe and Asia. The novels are unified
through the central character of Lal Singh,
a young peasant who is 17 as The Village opens
953
and 24 as The Sword and the Sickle ends. Over the

course of the trilogy, he rebels against village
mores, fights in World War I in Flanders, is taken
prisoner by the Germans, and finally becomes a
communist. Across the Black Waters, the only
World War I novel written by an Indian, covers
the adventures of the Sikh hero as a soldier serving
in France; it is a severe indictment of modern
civilization. The Sword and the Sickle depicts the
struggle of peasants against oppression, showing
the hero returning home from the German prison, hobnobbing with communists, and ending up
in prison again. Both communism and Gandhism
are treated ironically.
The Big Heart (1945) depicts one day in the life
of a young coppersmith who unsuccessfully
champions modernity in a traditional society;
the novel debates the virtues of the machine and
modernity. All these early novels portray the
doomed lives of the downtrodden and the oppressed. Anands protagonists a sweeper, a
coolie, and a peasant are victims of social
exploitation, class hatred, race hatred, and inhuman cruelty. In a notable exception, Anands
historical novel Private Life of an Indian Prince
(1953) introduces a protagonist from the privileged class of Indian princes.
In 1951, Anand published Seven Summers, the
first in a series of seven planned autobiographical
novels that correspond to Shakespeares seven
ages of man in As You Like It. Seven Summers is
an engaging fictional account of his childhood
where a small boy looks at social life and customs
in pre-world war Punjab. Morning Face (1968),
the second novel, received the Sahitya Akademi
Award for 1971. Its hero grows up at the beginning of the Gandhian era. The novel is set in
Punjab during the violent years of Lal Lajpat Rai,
the Rowlatt Acts and Jalianwala Bagh massacre.
Confession of a Lover (1976) followed and was
given the E. M. Forster Award. It describes the
heros college years and an unsuccessful love
affair. The Bubble (1984), Little Plays of Mahatma
Gandhi (1991), and Nine Moods of Bharata: Novel
of a Pilgrimage (1999) continued the series, in
which Krishan Chander Azad emerges as a fictional image of the author.
The novels of the 1960s are novels of affirmation, illustrating Anands faith in mans ability to
reconstitute himself. The Old Woman and the Cow
(1960; republished as Gauri in 1976) explores
954
ANAND, MULK RAJ
peasant life and the pressures that drive people to

inhumanity in order to survive; it is a spirited
study of a docile, rustic girls transformation into
a rebel.
The Road (1961) travels the same territory as
Untouchable, and Death of a Hero (1964) deals
rather superficially with the Kashmir freedom
movement. Reflections on the White Elephant
(2002), Anands last novel, deals with the
conflict between religious fundamentalism and
liberalism.
One of Anands literary achievements is the
invention of an English that has the flavor of
Punjabi, characterized by the literal translation
of expletives and turns of phrase and proverbs
from his mother tongue. Anands word patterns
suggest unplanned and spontaneous speech,
which contrasts with the controlled language of
the descriptive passages. His use of Indian words
falls into three categories: untranslated Hindi or
Punjabi words such as girija ghar, harijan, or
babu; proverbs and swear words translated into
English such as son of a pig, cock-eyed son of
a bow-legged scorpion, or rape-mother; and
English words that have entered the Indian vocabulary by being adapted to Indian pronunciation: injun, gentreman. His free use of slang, lowlife epithets, and verbal coinages take Anand
nearer to his avowed purpose of evolving a
language as rich and powerful as Irish or Welsh
English.
An adept storyteller, Anand wrote more than
70 short stories, published in various collections;
he also published two collections of retellings of
older Indian tales. He contributed to the study of
Indian art, notably as founder editor of the prestigious art journal Marg in 1946. Anand received
wide recognition for his championing of the poor
and the homeless. He was awarded the World
Peace Councils International Peace Prize in 1952
for promoting peace through his literary works,
and the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government in 1967 for distinguished service to art
and literature. He was honorary president of Lalit
Kala Akademi, New Delhi, from 1966 to 1971 and
Tagore Professor of Punjab University in 19734.
He died in 2004.
SEE ALSO: Ali, Ahmed (WF); Forster, E. M.
(BIF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction
(WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF);
Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian

Diaspora (BIF); Rao, Raja (WF)
Anand, M. R. (1934). The Lost Child and Other Stories.
London: J. A. Allen.
Anand, M. R. (1935). Untouchable. London: Laurence
and Wishart.
Anand, M. R. (1936). Coolie. London: Laurence and
Wishart.
Anand, M. R. (1937). Two Leaves and a Bud. London:
Laurence and Wishart.
Anand, M. R. (1938). Lament on the Death of a Master
of Arts. New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books.
Anand, M. R. (1939). The Village. London: Cape.
Anand, M. R. (1940). Across the Black Waters.
London: Cape.
Anand, M. R. (1942a). Letters on India. London:
Routledge.
Anand, M. R. (1942b). The Sword and the Sickle.
London: Cape.
Anand, M. R. (1944). The Barbers Trade Union and
Other Stories. London: Cape.
Anand, M. R. (1945). The Big Heart. London:
Hutchinson.
Anand, M. R. (1946a). Apology for Heroism. London:
Lindsay Drummond.
Anand, M. R. (1946b). Indian Fairy Tales (Retold).
Bombay: Kutub Popular.
Anand, M.R. (1947). The Tractor and the
Corn Goddess and Other Stories. Bombay:
Thacker.
Anand, M. R. (1951a). The Private Life of an Indian
Prince. London: Hutchinson.
Anand, M. R. (1951b). Reflections on the Golden Bed
and Other Stories. Bombay: Current.
Anand, M. R. (1951c). Seven Summers. London:
Hutchinson.
Anand, M. R. (1959a). Lajwanti and Other Stories.
Bombay: Jaico.
Anand, M. R. (1959b). The Power of Darkness and
Other Stories. Bombay: Jaico.
Anand, M.R. (1960). The Old Woman and the Cow.
Anand, M. R. (1963). The Road. Bombay: Kutub
Popular.
Anand, M. R. (1964). Death of a Hero. Bombay:
Kutub Popular.
Anand, M. R. (1968). Morning Face. Bombay: Kutub
Popular.
Anand, M. R. (1973). Between Tears and Laughter.
New Delhi: Sterling.
Anand, M. R. (1976). Confession of a Lover. New Delhi:
Arnold-Heinemann.
ANDERSON, JESSICA
Anand, M. R. (1978). Seven Little Known Birds of the

Inner Eye. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.
Anand, M. R. (1981). Conversations in Bloomsbury.
Anand, M. R. (1984). The Bubble. New Delhi:
Arnold-Heinemann.
Anand, M. R. (1990). Pilpali Sahib. New Delhi: Arnold.
Anand, M. R. (1991). Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi.
New Delhi: Arnold.
Anand, M. R. (2002). Reflections on the White Elephant.
New Delhi: Har-Anand.
Bheemaiah, J. (2005). Class and Caste in Literature:
The Fiction of Harriet B. Stowe and Mulk Raj Anand.
New Delhi: Prestige.
Dhawan, R. K. (1992). The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand.
New Delhi: Prestige.
Fisher, M. (1985). The Wisdom of the Heart: A Study of
the Works of Mulk Raj Anand. New Delhi: Sterling.
Savio, D. (2006). Voice of the Voiceless: Mulk Raj Anand
and Jayakanthan. New Delhi: Prestige.
Sharma, K. K. (ed.) (1978). Perspectives on Mulk Raj
Anand. Ghaziabad: Vimal.
Sinha, K. N. (1972). Mulk Raj Anand. New York:
Twayne.
Anderson, Jessica
SUSAN SHERIDAN
Australian novelist Jessica Anderson first gained

widespread acclaim for Tirra Lirra by the River
(1978), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary
Award. Her first three novels, published in England and misleadingly marketed as genre fiction,
attracted little attention. In the 1980s, however,
Australian publishing developed rapidly, igniting
a renewed interest in Australian fiction as well as
a significant new audience for women writers. In
this encouraging milieu Anderson enjoyed the
reception she had long deserved, becoming one
of the major female voices of a period in which it
seemed as though Australian women writers had
regained the dominance in fiction they enjoyed in
the 1930s. Their number included several other
women of Andersons generation, such as Elizabeth Jolley, who had also been late starters.
Jessica Anderson was born on September 25,
1916, the youngest of four children. Her father
was a government-employed scientist, and both
her parents were politically radical and encouraged intellectual independence. She grew up in
suburban Brisbane, attending the State High
955
School and the Technical College Art School. If

her autobiographical tales in Stories from the
Warm Zone (1987) are any guide, her childhood
was serene, affectionate, and materially secure,
although her much loved father died when she
was only 16. At 18 she left home for Sydney,
landing in Kings Cross, the only Bohemian
centre in the whole of the country in the
1930s, lovingly described in Tirra Lirra (Willbanks 17). There she lived with the man she would
marry when she was 21, Ross McGill, and went
with him to London for several years, returning
in 1940. Her daughter Laura was born in 1951.
She and McGill divorced, and it was during her
second marriage that she was able to turn her
hand to the serious fiction she had always intended to write.
Until she was in her forties, Anderson had
earned her living from writing for magazines
(formulaic stories, always under pseudonyms)
and for radio. By her own account, she started
late because she could not afford the leisure to
write seriously: What prompted me was Times
dread chariot, what allowed me were easier financial circumstances (Barry 5). Writing for radio
original plays as well as adaptations from Charles
Dickens and Henry James served as an excellent
literary apprenticeship for the kinds of novels
she would write.
Her first novel, An Ordinary Lunacy (1963),
concerns a Sydney lawyers fascination with a
woman charged with her husbands murder; they
begin an affair but, when he ends it, the woman
commits suicide. The novel began as a short story
that grew and grew. When finally it was pruned to
her satisfaction, Anderson decided to approach
London publishing houses because, in the early
1960s, she could find no Australian publisher
who had issued anything like this book. Other
dramas of sexual obsession by Christina Stead
and by Elizabeth Harrower were set and published overseas (Barry 56). Her second novel
could not find a publisher, but her third, The Last
Mans Head (1970), a book in which an apparently criminal act becomes the focus of personal
and sexual conflict, was accepted by Macmillan.
To her distress, it was marketed as a crime novel.
Likewise her fourth, The Commandant (1975),
was marketed as a historical romance, although its
well-researched setting in the penal colony that
later became Brisbane is the scene of a story of
956
ANTHONY, MICHAEL
brutality narrated by a gently reared but independent-minded young woman whose critical perspective on events is more like that of an Elizabeth
Gaskell heroine.
Tirra Lirra by the River, published by Macmillan Australia, was an immediate success. The
subject of a womans life from youth to age,
covering most of the twentieth century in Brisbane, Sydney, and London, the themes of memory
and reconciliation with the past, together with
Tennysonian echoes from the title, captivated
readers. The focus on a single character, Nora
Porteous, lent this novel a more accessible inner
dimension than its predecessors. Like Ordinary
Lunacy, this novel also had earlier lives as a short
story and a radio play. It and her later books
were all published in Australia, Britain, and the
United States.
In 1980 Anderson won the Miles Franklin
again for The Impersonators (published in the
US as The Only Daughter). Here she returned to
multiple characters in a family rendered complex
by divorce and remarriages; the situation is the
death of the patriarch, a love affair between his
only daughter and one of his stepsons, and
conflict over inheritance. All her fiction from
here on has contemporary Sydney as its setting,
except for the pieces in Stories from the Warm
Zone (1987). The latest two novels have youthful
protagonists caught up in sexual confusions
Taking Shelter (1989) and dealing with grief
One of the Wattle Birds (1994) though in each
case an older woman plays a somewhat mysterious presiding role.
Andersons admiration for James is evident in
her attention to the uses of power, and the power
of money, while Henry Green is another favorite
writer. She has said that she felt little affinity with
other Australian writers and the documentary
fiction that she felt predominated, but that Stead,
in writing about Sydney, gave her courage.
SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); The City
in Fiction (WF); Green, Henry (BIF); Historical
Fiction (WF); James, Henry (AF); Jolley, Elizabeth
(WF); Joyce, James (BIF); Stead, Christina (WF)
Anderson, J. (1963). An Ordinary Lunacy. London:
Macmillan.
Anderson, J. (1970). The Last Mans Head: Chip-Chop,

Chip-Chop, the Last Mans Head off! London:
Macmillan.
Anderson, J. (1975). The Commandant. London:
Macmillan.
Anderson, J. (1978). Tirra Lirra by the River.
Melbourne: Macmillan.
Anderson, J. (1980). The Impersonators. Melbourne:
Macmillan.
Anderson, J. (1987). Stories from the Warm Zone and
Sydney Stories. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin.
Anderson, J. (1989). Taking Shelter. Ringwood, Vic.:
Viking.
Anderson, J. (1994). One of the Wattle Birds. Ringwood,
Vic.: Penguin.
Barry, E. (1996). Fabricating the Self: The Fictions of
Jessica Anderson. St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press.
Willbanks, R. (1992). Jessica Anderson Interview.
In Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and Their
Work. Ringwood Vic.: Penguin, pp. 1525.
Anthony, Michael
TONY SIMOES DA SILVA
Michael Anthonys work is characterized by simple but intricately crafted depictions of the everyday lives of Trinidad people, represented in his
fiction by the folk of Mayaro. Typically, a novel by
Anthony is narrated by a young boy, usually of
Afro-Caribbean and lower socio-economic background, and involves a close relationship between
father and son. Through the interiorized world
of experience of the young narrator, Anthonys
work offers a celebration of a tightly knit Trinidadian community and of the ways in which
identities are formed relationally.
Anthony was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, on
February 10, 1930. The author of over 25 books,
mostly novels, he is also a historian, focusing
mainly on the local history of Mayaro and Trinidad. Although he has spent most of his life in
Trinidad, Anthony wrote and published his first
works while living in Britain, initially with the
support of V. S. Naipaul. Anthonys first novel,
The Games were Coming (1963), offers a snapshot
of the central aspects of his work. The novel
records the subtle but dramatic processes of maturation 15-year-old Leon undergoes in his
quest to become the bicycle-race champion in
Trinidads Southern Games. Crowned the winner
ANTHONY, MICHAEL
at the novels conclusion, a consciously self-aware

Leon has learned the virtues of hard work, perseverance, and courage, but he has also come to
appreciate the value of family and community
support, and the duty they deserve. Leons consciousness provides a filter through which the
heightened tension and anxiety leading up to the
games are viewed as a stage for his own psychological development.
The Year in San Fernando (1965), Anthonys
second novel, is again set in Mayaro and tells the
story of a young boy sent by his mother to live as
a servant companion to an old woman. This is
undoubtedly Anthonys best-known work,
though not his most accomplished piece of writing, and is the only one that remains easily
available. The novel concludes with Franciss
return to Mayaro and to his mother, a year older
and perhaps wiser but nevertheless still a child. It
is this ability to engage truthfully with the consciousness of a child that Anthonys writing has
come to embody most clearly. The point is especially significant because this is also Anthonys
most overtly autobiographical novel.
In Green Days by the River (1967), Anthony uses
yet another adolescent narrator, the shy and
sensitive Shell, to paint a richly textured portrait
of a family confronted with the impending death
of Shells father. At 16, Shell finds himself between
the nurturing world his parents created for him
and a volatile, self-directed future. Help comes in
the character of Mr. Ghidaree, one of various
father figures in Anthonys work, who recognizes
a mutual attraction between his daughter and
Shell, and thus creates the right conditions for
the union to take place. The contortions both
young lovers experience as the story develops are
slightly overdone, but the real issue is the emerging closeness between Mr. Ghidaree and Shell.
Described by one critic as the most complex of
Anthonys early novels (Griffiths 1973, viii),
Green Days by the River confirms the craftsmanship of earlier work and highlights Anthonys
commitment to depicting the myriad ways the
relational self emerges. Anthonys later work also
delves into these earlier concerns, though occasionally through experimentation with different
genres, as in All That Glitters (1981).
The influential Caribbean critic Kenneth
Ramchand has referred to Anthony as practicing
an art of fiction of a very subtle kind (209), and
957
perhaps for this reason his work has not benefitted

from the impact of postcolonial studies, which
propelled so much Caribbean writing onto the
world stage. While Louis James sees Anthonys
concern with the stories of ordinary people as the
mark of writing truly indigenous to the Trinidadian common people (48), the charge of a lack
of political concern was underscored by comparison to George Lammings In the Castle of My
Skin (1953), a novel also told through the eyes
of an Afro-Caribbean boy. To view the treatment
of domestic servants in Anthonys novels as
a metaphor for the slavery of the West Indian
past (Boxill 43) seems rather extreme, but certainly the political emerges in Anthonys writing
in the celebration of the everyday lives of
Trinidadians.
Anthonys works each tell a relatively simple
story, in language that is both uncomplicated and
carefully measured, but by virtue of its concern
with ordinary Trinidadians Anthonys sizable
body of writing emerges as a powerful historical
and cultural document. He does not overtly gesture toward the political, but at the center of his
most important fictions is a concern with the
formative impact of social and familial relationships. While historical influences are only faintly
outlined, they remain crucial to that process, and
his writing forcefully re-enacts the personal as
inherently political.
SEE ALSO: Lamming, George (WF); Naipaul,
V. S. (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West
Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); West Indian
Fiction (WF)
Anthony, M. (1963). The Games were Coming.
London: Deutsch.
Anthony, M. (1965). The Year in San Fernando.
London: Deutsch.
Anthony, M. (1967). Green Days by the River.
London: Deutsch.
Anthony, M. (1973a). Cricket in the Road. London:
Deutsch.
Anthony, M. (1973b). Sandra Street and Other Stories.
London: Heinemann.
Anthony, M. (1975). Profile Trinidad. London:
Macmillan.
Anthony, M. (1976). Streets of Conflict. London:
Deutsch.
958
ANTONI, ROBERT
Anthony, M. (1981). All That Glitters. London:

Deutsch.
Anthony, M. (1982). Bright Road to El Dorado. Port of
Spain: Nelson.
Anthony, M. (1988). A Better and Brighter Day. Port of
Spain: Circle.
Anthony, M. (1996). In the Heat of the Day. London:
Heinemann.
Anthony, M. (2001). High Tide of Intrigue. London:
Heinemann.
Baugh, E. (ed.) (1978). Critics on Caribbean Literature.
Boxill, A. (1979). The Beginning to 1929. In King
(1979), pp. 3044.
Griffiths, G. (1973). Introduction. In M. Anthony,
Green Days by the River [1967]. London: Deutsch.
Griffiths, G. (1978). A Double Exile: African and West
Indian Writing between Two Cultures. London:
Marion Boyars.
James, C. L. R. (1969). Discovering Literature in
Trinidad. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 7,
7380.
James, L. (ed.) (1979). Islands in Between: Essays on
West Indian Literature. London: Oxford
University Press.
King, B. (ed.) (1979). West Indian Literature. London:
Macmillan.
Ramchand, K. (1983). The West Indian Novel and Its
Background. London: Heinemann.
Antoni, Robert
ERIC D. SMITH
As Edouard Glissant observes, an abiding preoccupation of West Indian writers is the longing for
the ideal of history (79) a desire as impossible
as it is indispensible. The novels of Robert Antoni
vividly exemplify this call for a new historical
consciousness. Incorporating an encyclopedic
breadth of genres and discourses and exploring
the possibilities of mythology, folklore, science,
history, and both canonical and postcolonial
literary traditions, his fiction enacts Glissants
prophetic vision of the past (64), a creative
reconstitution of a fragmentary Trinidadian history that figures, in the very act of its necessary
failure, a Caribbean social reality to come.
Born in Detroit, Michigan on May 7, 1958 to
Trinidadian parents, Antoni grew up in the Bahamas. He holds a masters degree from Johns
Hopkins University and a doctorate from the
Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He
has taught creative writing and literature at the
University of Miami and Columbia Universitys

Barnard College. Though he currently lives in
New York City, his fiction sustains a persistent
focus on the island of Trinidad, where his family
claims a 200-year history. Because of his lack of an
immediate childhood experience with Trinidad
and the mythic dimensions the island assumed in
his imagination as the primordial family locus
Antoni maintains in all but his most recent novel
a fictional distance from it by setting his work on
the fictional island of Corpus Christi, where he
explores what Glissant calls the sustained links
between History and Literature (71) through
their earliest known mediator, myth.
Antonis fascination with mythmaking is most
clearly evident in Divina Trace (1992), winner of
a Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first
book and widely regarded as a landmark in contemporary Caribbean fiction. The most formally
complex of his four novels, Divina Trace concerns
the recovery and reconstruction of the lost history
of La Divina Pastora (a black Madonna statuette
that is an object of cross-cultural veneration
in Trinidad) through the variant personal and
discursive perspectives of seven narrators, each
mediated by the dominant consciousness of
90-year-old Johnny Domingo, who searches his
aged memory for the true story of the miraculous
death and resurrection of the frog-child of Magdalena Divina/La Divina Pastora. Johnnys quest
leads him through the corridors of personal and
collective cultural memory to the point where
landscape, language, and identity merge at the
matrix of Maraval Swamp and ultimately to the
foil mirror placed at the novels heart. A selfconscious iteration of the search for Glissants
la trace primodiale, Johnnys quest is equally a
figuration of postcolonial Trinidadian identity
that clears space for the islands polyphony of
cultures without lapsing into merely syncretic or
multiculturalist narratives of nationhood that
often belie internal struggles for power and
representation.
Blessed is the Fruit (1997) deploys familiar
elements of Afro-Trinidadian culture (mas, calypso, and carnival) to explore further this (re)
formation of a postcolonial national identity,
particularly the intertwined narratives of African
and Creole. Concentrating on the overlapping
personal histories of an alcoholic white Creole
mistress, Lil, who inhabits a history-haunted
ARASANAYAGAM, JEAN
colonial estate fallen to ruin, and her pregnant

and despairing Afro-Trinidadian servant, Vel, the
novel examines the limits and fluidities of race,
language, religion, and gender as it offers hope in
the form of Vels unborn child. Blessed is the Fruit
is also characterized by substantial literary experimentation, such that the form of the book often
bodies forth its content. Most notable is the
novels central section, actually the anticipatory
dream of Vels unborn child, which features the
twin narratives of the two protagonists braided
into alternating couplets. This long poem is
bisected by a transparent plastic membrane at
the books center, symbolizing both the racial/
cultural boundaries separating the two women
and the possibility of their transcendence.
A collection of short tales given coherence by
a play on the Scheherazade motif, My Grandmothers Erotic Folktales (2000) features the return
of Granny Myna of Divina Trace, who must
nightly entertain the US soldiers stationed on
Corpus Christi/Trinidad during World War II by
providing them with the Caribbean spice that they
crave both culinary and narrative in order to
divert their attention from the islands young girls,
many of whom have been forced into prostitution
following the economic disruptions caused by the
US presence. A wickedly bawdy and politically
understated commentary on the transition from
British colonial to American neocolonial dominion, Folktales uses comically exaggerated grotesquery to lampoon Western cultural icons such
as Walter Raleigh, Dwight Eisenhower, Ernest
Hemingway, and even Colonel Sanders.
A drastic departure from Antonis previous
idiom, Carnival (2005) parodically reauthors
Hemingways The Sun Also Rises as a story of
West Indian identity. Written in the realist mode,
with standard English replacing dialect, Carnival
also dispenses with the facade of Corpus Christi.
Set in contemporary Trinidad, it tells the story of
three friends living abroad who return home to
Trinidad during carnival season in order to
reconnect with their homeland and with one
another only to discover that such connections
are irrevocably severed. Haunted by personal and
national trauma, guilt, and the homelessness of
the exile, it is Antonis most deeply autobiographical work and perhaps his grimmest.
Each of Antonis books explores the simultaneous need for and impossibility of the
959
reclamation of lost history. Yet in the face of this

necessary failure, the potential is consistently
suggested for new personal, communal, and national narratives liberated from the inhibiting
forms of the past. This subtle utopian impulse is
perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of Antonis work. It is therefore not surprising that his
most recent work in progress confronts a group
of nineteenth-century European utopianists who
seek in the Americas the terra nullius on which to
erect their ideal society. The project signals a
definitive shift in Antonis work toward the overtly socio-political in its interrogation of EuroAmerican ideals of the best possible world.
SEE ALSO: Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Migration,
Diaspora and Exile in Fiction (WF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/
Magic Realism (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
Antoni, R. (1992). Divina Trace. New York: Overlook.
Antoni, R. (1997). Blessed is the Fruit. New York:
Henry Holt.
Antoni, R. (2000). My Grandmothers Erotic Folktales.
New York: Faber and Faber.
Antoni, R. (2005). Carnival. New York: Black Cat.
Glissant, E. (1989). Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays
(trans. J. M. Dash). Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press.
Arasanayagam, Jean
HARSHANA RAMBUKWELLA
A richly lyrical diction that speaks to themes of

collective and individual identity, positioned
within narratives of national belonging and unbelonging, has long characterized Jean Arasanayagams literary craft. Dutch Burgher by birth
and married to a Tamil, Arasanayagam has articulated the creative tensions arising from the confluence in Sri Lanka of these multiple heritages, or
what she has described as her split-inheritance
(Arasanayagam 2008). She is one of few resident
anglophone Sri Lankan writers to be published
internationally. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages, and
she has held several international writing fellowships. Beginning with poetry, Arasanayagams
960
ARASANAYAGAM, JEAN
oeuvre has expanded over the years to include

a significant body of prose.
As a Dutch Burgher born in 1930, Arasanayagam (nee Solomons) belongs to one of the
countrys smallest minorities, which has seen its
numbers reduced and ethos threatened in postindependence Sri Lanka. The uncertainties of
their cultural location have been an abiding concern in Arasanayagams work. In the title poem of
her first collection, Kindura (1973), Arasanayagam draws upon Buddhist legend to explore the
ambiguous potential of hybridity. Half-human
and half-bird, the Kindura is seen as both exotic
and alluring, but also stifled and unable to fully
realize itself. This early work anticipates her later
writings more explicit probing of the complexities and contradictions of a hybrid condition
constrained by a national frame.
The year 1983, which marked Sri Lankas worst
ethnic rioting, was a watershed in Arasanayagams
career. Her home was attacked because her husband was Tamil, and the family fled to government refugee camps. Apocalypse 83, published
immediately after these traumatic events, received
significant attention for its chronicling of ethnonationalist violence. But these poems, largely
impressionistic accounts of the futility of violence, lacked a specific historical or local focus.
It is in her post-1983 writing that Arasanayagam
begins a deeper investigation of her Burgher and
Tamil heritages, using them as the basis for a claim
of national identity.
Arasanayagams memoir A Nice Burgher Girl
(2006) is social history from a personal perspective. It records the diverse influences and traditions that shaped Burgher identity, including
multicultural culinary creations that are part of
Sri Lankan cuisine, to affirm Burghers as a truly
local community. But the titles ironic invocation
also suggests a critical attitude toward received
genealogies. Arasanayagam does not conform to
the ideal Burgher identity that some community
members were historically committed to preserving, instead exploring cultural identity as inherently fluid, implicitly questioning the arbitrary
boundaries that often frame communal self-perceptions and nation-building projects.
The stories collected in All is Burning (1995),
In the Garden Secretly (2000), and The Dividing
Line (2002) consider the socio-political turmoil
of contemporary Sri Lanka. Collectively, they
convey a society divided on ethnic and class lines,

though the individuals in them often attempt to
affirm a common humanity. For instance, in In
the Garden Secretly, a Sinhalese Air Force pilot
reflects on whether, during ethnic conflict with
Tamil rebels, he is perceived as liberator or oppressor. A statue of Christ that he finds in an
abandoned house in previously rebel-occupied
territory reminds him of the commonalities,
like religion, that bind the two communities.
The stories in The Cry of the Kite (1984), The
Outsider (1989), and Peacocks and Dreams (1996)
focus on Tamil culture in northern Sri Lanka and
Arasanayagams fraught experiences within this
community. While poignantly chronicling a traditional culture in transition, they also critique
its more intransigent aspects. Fascination with
Hindu ritual and the minutiae of life in the region
is intermingled with a critique of its exclusionary
dimensions, personified by the Tamil Hindu
mother-in-law. Both in Arasanayagams poetry
and fiction this matriarchal figure often embodies
cultural exclusivity, which the Burgher Christian
daughter-in-law has to contest or negotiate with
to find acceptance an encounter that represents
the larger themes of cultural contact and conflict
in her work.
Arasanayagams latest prose work, Dragons in
the Wilderness (2007), revisits the theme of hybridity through its protagonist Marian Laing. She
is the daughter of a British planter who abandons
her sister Marian and their village-born Sinhala
mother but nevertheless bestows his name on
the children and ensures they have an anglophone
upbringing through a convent education. Despite
cherishing memories of her mother, Marian cannot reconnect with her local ethos following her
socialization in an anglicized environment. The
text traces Marians lifelong quest to define her
subjectivity as she moves from colonial Ceylon to
Europe, marriage to a Burgher, widowhood, and
a return to convent life in post-independence Sri
Lanka. Her itinerant life provides a critical commentary on the unsettling legacies of colonialism.
Arasanayagams literary voice spans Sri Lankas
fraught transition from colony to independent
nation. Her insistent focus on the countrys multiple heritages is a reminder that decolonization
cannot simply erase the past but must engage
with and reconsider what the past bestows upon
the present.
ARMAH, AYI KWEI
SEE ALSO: Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);

Sri Lankan Fiction (WF)
Arasanayagam, J. (1973). Kindura. Kandy: privately
published.
Arasanayagam, J. (1984). The Cry of the Kite: A
Collection of Short Stories. Kandy: Godamunne.
Arasanayagam, J. (1985). A Colonial Inheritance and
Other Poems. Kandy: privately published.
Arasanayagam, J. (1987). Trial by Terror: Sri Lankan
Poems. Hamilton, New Zealand: Rimu.
Arasanayagam, J. (1989). The Outsider. Nagasaki:
Nagasaki University, Faculty of Liberal Arts.
Arasanayagam, J. (1991). Reddened Water Flows Clear.
London: Forest.
Arasanayagam, J. (1993). Shooting the Floricans. Kandy:
Samjna.
Arasanayagam, J. (1995). All is Burning. New Delhi:
Penguin.
Arasanayagam, J. (1996). Peacocks and Dreams.
New Delhi: Navrang.
Arasanayagam, J. (2000). In the Garden Secretly and
Other Stories. New Delhi: Penguin.
Arasanayagam, J. (2002). The Dividing Line. New Delhi:
Indialog.
Arasanayagam, J. (2003). Apocalypse 83. Colombo:
International Centre for Ethnic Studies.
Arasanayagam, J. (2006). A Nice Burgher Girl.
Colombo: Social Scientists Association.
Arasanayagam, J. (2007). Dragons in the Wilderness.
Colombo: Godage.
Arasanayagam, J. (2008). Looking Back on the Writing
of A Nice Burgher Girl. Island Midweek Review
(July 23), p. IV.
de Mel, N. (2001). Women and the Nations Narrative:
Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Sri
Lanka. New Delhi: Women for Kali pp. 162202.
Ho, E. Y. L., & Rambukwella, H. (2006). A Question of
Belonging: Reading Jean Arasanayagam through
Nationalist Discourse. Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 40(2), 6181.
Kanaganayagam, C. (1997). Jean Arasanayagam
[interview]. In Configurations of Exile: South Asian
Writers and Their World. Toronto: TSAR, pp. 1225.
Armah, Ayi Kwei

ODE OGEDE
Ayi Kwei Armahs writing is distinguished by its

simultaneous urbanity and obloquy a style at
961
once crisp and elaborately encrypted, concrete

and ornate, naturalistic and symbolic, coarse and
sublime, exhortatory and modulated. Typified
by its propensity to jolt orthodox certainties and
dogmatic convictions, his writing participates in
the tradition of exploratory fictions by formerly
colonized subjects: though initially devoted to
articulating the gamut of the African experience
in the wake of the colonial encounter, he has
broadened his subject matter to accommodate
the contemporary adventures of African Americans who sojourn in Africa in search of their
roots.
Born in 1939 in Takoradi, the Gold Coast (now
Ghana), following his primary school education
he attended the Prince of Wales College, then
worked for eight months as a Radio Ghana scriptwriter, producer, and announcer. He left for the
United States at 19 on a Carnegie Corporation
scholarship, eventually studying at Harvard, but,
like his fictional double Modin Dofu, he dropped
out before receiving his degree in response to
white racism. He later completed his Harvard
degree by correspondence and went on to obtain
an MFA at Columbia, followed by work as a
translator for Revolution Africaine magazine in
Algiers; as an editor for Jeune Afrique in Paris; as
an English schoolteacher in Ghana and at a teachers college in Tanzania; and as a professor at
several universities in the United States and in
Lesotho.
As a writer relentlessly searching for new forms
and styles, Armahs signature themes include his
stance on troubled African realities such as the
demoralizing effects of post-independence political corruption, the inferiority complexes that
assailed the Westernized African elite and hampered decolonization efforts, and urban malaise
all of which are memorably captured in his debut
novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968).
Published to worldwide critical acclaim, it details
the efforts of an anonymous railway office cargo
clerk to conduct himself with integrity, and the
subsequent disillusionment that overtakes him
during a losing fight against institutionalized
corruption. Its sequel, Fragments (1970), a
semiautobiographical novel also set in Ghana,
extends these themes and features the sanguine
experiences of Ghanaian artist protagonist Baako
Onipa, who returns from his studies abroad
to face the shocking discovery that political
962
ARMAH, AYI KWEI
independence has merely compounded problems

inherited from colonial rule a disappointment
that results in his mental breakdown as he wages
a lonely battle to restore integrity to his nations
moral fiber.
Why Are We So Blest? (1972) experiments with
the diary form in an attempt to record the failure
of Westernized African intellectuals and wouldbe revolutionaries in Ghana. Armahs protagonists, Ghanaian scholar Modin Dofu and his
white American mistress Aimee Reitsch, return
to Africa hoping to enroll in a liberation movement but are denied enlistment by the recruitment committee. While Two Thousand Seasons
(1973) uses Akan storytelling to represent the
repercussions of slavery and colonialism through
a bilateral assault mounted on Africa, first by Arab
conquerors from the north and then by their
European counterparts from the south, The Healers (1978) utilizes the epic-historical narrative
frame to issue a call for a return to African
indigenous communal values as both a source of
revitalization and a counter to the dehumanizing
impacts of domination. Both novels show the
profound influence of Ujaama policies of collectivization that were pursued under President
Julius Nyerere.
Osiris Rising (1995) presents Armahs vision
for African American involvement in spreading
democratic ideals within the context of military
dictatorships in Africa, and KMT: In the House of
Life (2002), his least artistically satisfying work to
date, is an esoteric claim for the blackness of
ancient Egyptian civilization and the purported
relevance of its feudal empires to contemporary
Africa. Part memoir, part criticism, The Eloquence
of the Scribes (2006) resonates with Armahs
convictions in his role as a spokesperson for
marginalized cultures. Although expansive when
declaring his literary tastes, denouncing the deadly exploitative tendencies of Western publishing
conglomerates, or outlining his longstanding
ambition to achieve publishing independence,
he remains guarded and reticent beyond these
professional matters.
While Armah has written across diverse genres
including criticism, essays, short fiction, memoir,
and poetry, he is best known for his work as a
novelist. The versatility of his style has garnered
an abiding interest in his analytical, introspective,
realistic, and visionary fiction, and the volatility
of his themes has galvanized heated controversy

and polarized his readership. He has turned his
back entirely on the West and on Western publishers such as Heinemann and Houghton Mifflin, and relocated to Popenguine, Senegal, in
West Africa, where he now runs his own publishing outfit, Per Ankh Publishers. If it has been his
intention to be the enfant terrible of African
literature, as some critics have claimed, it is a role
he has played with astonishing confidence. While
his most intense admirers have described his
attempt to interrogate social ills as brilliant and
compelling, his ardent detractors have commonly
portrayed his temper as bitter, decadent, and
disillusioned. Armahs role as a prose stylist in
African literature, it would appear, will continue
to spark controversy in perpetuity.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Humor
and Satire (WF); Politics/Activism and
Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);
The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF);
Armah, A. K. (1968). The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet
Born. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Armah, A. K. (1970). Fragments. London: Heinemann.
Armah, A. K. (1972). Why Are We So Blest? New York:
Doubleday.
Armah, A. K. (1973). Two Thousand Seasons. Nairobi:
East African Publishing House.
Armah, A. K. (1978). The Healers. Nairobi: East African
Publishing House.
Armah, A. K. (1985). One Writers Education. West
Africa 26, 17523.
Armah, A. K. (1995). Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past,
Present, and Future Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh.
Armah, A. K. (2002). KMT: In the House of Life.
Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh.
Armah, A. K. (2006). The Eloquence of the Scribes.
Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh.
Fraser, R. (1980). The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: A
Study in Polemical Fiction. London: Heinemann.
Lazarus, N. (1990). Resistance in Postcolonial African
Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ogede, O. (2000). Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast:
Pitting Imaginary Worlds against the Actual. Athens:
Ohio University Press.
Wright, D. (1989). Ayi Kwei Armahs Africa: The Sources
of His Fiction. London: Hans Zell.
ASLAM, NADEEM
Aslam, Nadeem
KHURRAM N. KHURSHID
A novelist of tragic vision, the Pakistan-born

British novelist Nadeem Aslam writes narratives
that confront violence, bigotry, and oppression in
the contemporary world. While such forces are
opposed by love and compassion in his work,
the latter prove inadequate in the face of violent
turmoil and are regularly thwarted by moribund
social and religious conventions.
Aslam was born in 1966 in Gujranwala, a small
town in Punjab, Pakistan. When he was 14, his
father, a Communist, poet, and filmmaker,
migrated with his family to England, fearing
persecution by Pakistans military regime. Aslam
studied biochemistry at the University of Manchester for two years but then left to pursue a
career in writing. A meticulous craftsman and
imagist, he revises his narratives laboriously and
isolates himself completely when he writes, a habit
that he links to the creative process: I always
think of the silence and the darkness of a root that
enables the flower to grow (Brace 2004). Aslams
plots unfold on the confluence of war, violence,
and intrigue, punctuated with minutely detailed
imagery. His intensely atmospheric narratives are
immaculate constructs that trace the impact of
religion and politics on the lives of individuals and
on societies and cultures.
Aslams first novel, Season of the Rainbirds
(1993), won the Betty Trask Award and the
Authors Club First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys
Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Set in
a small Pakistani town in the 1980s, during the
repressive military rule of General Zia ul-Haq, it
exposes the power wrangling that ensues as a
cleric, a feudal landlord, and a government bureaucrat vie for influence and control in the town.
In the seven-day-long plot, with each chapter
marking one day of the week, the murder of a
judge is under investigation and a mailbag lost in
a train crash 19 years ago has been found, while
the country is on the verge of uncertainty and fear
following an assassination attempt on its president. The novel captures what Aslam sees as the
decadence and retrogression of Pakistani society,
as dogmatic religiosity and embedded prejudices
erect barriers between people and become tools
of oppression in the hands of the powerful.
963
Aslams novel evinces compassion for the religious minorities in Pakistan, with its sympathetic
portrayal of the marginalized Christian family
and Mr. Kasmi of the Ahmadiya sect. It also
spotlights the plight of women trapped in a
patriarchal culture: Kulsum, whose son is killed
by Mujeeb Alis thugs; Zebun, the ex-prostitute
whose lover abandons her for fear of social shame;
and Elizabeth Masih, who is brutalized by the
mob. With delicate imagery and in chiseled prose,
Season of the Rainbirds is a compelling portrayal
of a society in the throes of panic and prejudice as
it contends with a dangerous combination of
oppression, bigotry, and power.
Aslams widely acclaimed second novel, Maps
for Lost Lovers (2004), which took 11 years to
write, won the 2005 Encore Award and the 2005
Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. It depicts the
lonely and agonizing lives of Britains expatriate
Pakistani community in a small British town,
which has been rechristened Dasht-e-Tanhai
(Desert of Loneliness) by its unhappy residents.
Precariously situated on the crossroads of culture,
nation, and religion, Shamas and Kaukab struggle
to find meaning in their lives, while their children
are crushed by the clash of opposing cultures and
their mothers rigid, suffocating faith. Religion
and tradition also become motives for the twin
murders at the heart of the story, while Islams
marriage laws come in the way of Surayas happiness, allowing her no agency in her marital crisis.
Aslams migrant groups fail to evolve new, hybridized selves or reinvented identities, getting
caught in a head-on cultural collision. Maps for
Lost Lovers is a scathing attack on obscurantist
Islamist culture and a moving depiction of the
tragic and fragmented lives of Pakistani minority
groups in Britain. Sometimes excessively sentimental and melancholic, the novel underscores
the transience of joy and the impermanence of
existence, enacting the fractured lives of its characters amid exquisite descriptions of landscape
and the natural world.
The Wasted Vigil (2008), Aslams third novel, is
set in Usha (Teardrop), a city in war-torn Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires (259). Marcus
Caldwell, an Englishman, plays host to an American CIA agent, a Russian woman, and a young
Afghan in his house where the wall paintings
have been covered with mud and the books are
nailed to the ceiling for fear of Taliban reprisals.
964
ASTLEY, THEA
A chronicle of the destruction and violence afflicting contemporary Afghanistan, The Wasted
Vigil is vitriolic in its indictment of war and
religious bigotry, and passionate in its appeal for
humanism and compassion. With graphic depictions of the atrocities of war, Taliban-style executions and amputations, and the treachery and
infighting of Afghan warlords, the narrative gradually pieces together the stories of its three main
characters in measured prose interspersed with
delicately wrought imagery. Overseeing the war
and destruction is the giant statue of the Buddha,
the god of knowledge, the god who repented
(121), which brings Afghanistans present violence into stark contrast with the peace and
brotherhood associated with its ancient civilization. Despite the efforts of the main characters,
love does not triumph in the book, being trampled by violence and hatred, and the narrative
ends on a note of despair and grief.
With sensitivity to the politics and cultures of
the places about which he writes, Nadeem Aslam
champions the cause of humanism and indicts
prejudice, intolerance, violence, and religious
bigotry. He is an important voice in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction.
Pakistani Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and
Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British
South Asian Diaspora (BIF)
Aslam N. (1993). Season of the Rainbirds. London:
Deutsch.
Aslam N. (2004). Maps for Lost Lovers. London:
Faber and Faber.
Aslam N. (2008). The Wasted Vigil. New York: Knopf.
Brace M. (2004). Nadeem Aslam: A Question of
Honour (June 11). At www.independent.co.uk,
Ranasinha R. (2007). South Asian Writers in
Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation.
Astley, Thea
SUSAN SHERIDAN
Thea Astley, one of Australias outstanding fiction

writers of the twentieth century, is admired for
her unflinching confrontations with the violence

that human beings commit against one another
both the daily aggressions of class and gender in
suburban and small-town life, and the violent past
and present of colonialism. Although satire,
marked by gallows humor and sometimes brutal
irony, is the dominant mode of representing these
conflicts in her fiction, her portrayal of social
outsiders is ultimately compassionate. Her narratives are condensed, her language characterized
by metaphor and word play.
Astley was born on August 25, 1925 in Brisbane, the daughter and granddaughter of journalists. She always wrote poems and stories, though
she claimed that she would have preferred a talent
for music, which she loved. Raised a Catholic
her only brother became a Jesuit priest she was
educated at All Hallows Convent and the University of Queensland. She attended university as an
evening student while undertaking teacher training. During this time she was introduced to a
group of young writers who produced their own
journal, Barjai, where she published poems.
For five years she taught in rural Queensland,
including Townsville in the far north the setting
for her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958).
After her marriage to Jack Gregson, the couple
moved to Sydney in 1949, where their son Edmund was born in 1955. She taught in primary
and secondary schools for over 20 years. In 1967
she was appointed to teach creative writing
at Macquarie University in Sydney. On
retirement, she and her husband moved first
to Kuranda, near Cairns in north Queensland,
and later to the coast south of Sydney. Astley
continued to publish to wide acclaim, and her last
novel, Drylands (1999), won Australias oldest
and most prestigious literary award, the Miles
Franklin Literary Award. She died in 2004.
Astley was the only Australian woman novelist
of her generation to have won early success, publishing continuously throughout the 1960s and
1970s. Her third book, The Well Dressed Explorer
(1962), was awarded the Miles Franklin Award, as
were two other books, The Slow Natives (1965) and
also The Acolyte (1972). This was an unprecedented success for a young woman at the time.
She often named The Acolyte as her favorite
novel, and indeed it displays her stylistic pyrotechnics most brilliantly. It is a key work as well,
in that as a study of the acolyte, not the artist
ATWOOD, MARGARET
whom he served, it brings a new dimension to her

fascination with outsiders, misfits, and failures.
I was getting sick of great men, she remarked
(Sheridan & Genoni 27), as usual looking askance
at the male-dominated Australian tradition of
lauding explorers and pioneers.
During the 1970s Astley struck out in several
new directions. A Kindness Cup (1974) was the
first of her novels to take a historical perspective
on settlerAboriginal relations, and Hunting the
Wild Pineapple (1979a) was her first book of
connected stories, a technique of discontinuous
narrative which she later used frequently. In the
1980s these two innovations came together in Its
Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album
(1987). Astley thought highly of the short story
form, admiring among its practitioners Raymond
Carver, John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, and Carson
McCullers.
Another development in Astleys art during the
1980s was the invention of a female narrator. After
her first and largely autobiographical book, she
habitually used a male narrative point of view,
believing that no one would read novels written
from a female perspective. She said later, I felt Id
been spiritually neutered by society (Ellison
567). Her later novels, however, often feature
females among their multiple narrators, and with
Belle in Reaching Tin River (1990) and Kathleen in
Coda (1994) she achieves a recognizably female,
sometimes outrageously feminist, narrative voice.
Astley always set her fiction in the tropics, mostly
her heartland of Queensland, but also, as in A Boat
Load of Home Folk (1968) and Beachmasters (1985),
on small Pacific islands. Some of the tropical
norths special significance for her is captured in
the essay Being a Queenslander, where she writes:
Queensland is where the tall yarn happens, acted
out on a stage where, despite its vastness, the
oddballs see and recognize each other (Sheridan
& Genoni 19). Most of her main characters are
outcasts or exiles of one kind or another. As she
came to include Aboriginal characters in her stories, they too shared this characteristic of being out
of place, but doubly so displaced in their own
country, and from their own land, by colonialism.
SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Feminism
and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF);
Humor and Satire (WF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF)
965

Astley, T. (1958). Girl with a Monkey. Sydney:
Angus and Robertson.
Astley, T. (1960). A Descant for Gossips. Sydney:
Astley, T. (1962). The Well Dressed Explorer. Sydney:
Astley, T. (1965). The Slow Natives. Sydney: Angus and
Robertson.
Astley, T. (1968). A Boat Load of Home Folk. Sydney:
Astley, T. (ed.) (1970). Coast to Coast: Australian Short
Stories 19691970. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Astley, T. (1972). The Acolyte. Sydney: Angus and
Robertson.
Astley, T. (1974). A Kindness Cup. Melbourne: Nelson.
Astley, T. (1979a). Hunting the Wild Pineapple and
Other Related Stories. Melbourne: Nelson.
Astley, T. (1979b). Three Australian Writers.
Townsville: Townsville Foundation for Literary
Studies.
Astley, T. (1982). An Item from the Late News. St. Lucia:
University of Queensland Press.
Astley, T. (1985). Beachmasters. Ringwood, Vic.:
Penguin.
Astley, T. (1987). It s Raining in Mango: Pictures from
the Family Album. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking.
Astley, T. (1990). Reaching Tin River. Port Melbourne:
Heinemann.
Astley, T. (1992). Vanishing Points. Port Melbourne:
Heinemann.
Astley, T. (1994). Coda. Port Melbourne: Heinemann.
Astley, T. (1996). The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow.
Ringwood, Vic.: Viking.
Astley, T. (1997). Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University
of Queensland Press.
Astley, T. (1999). Drylands: A Book for the Worlds Last
Reader. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking.
Ellison, J. (1986). Thea Astley. Rooms of Their Own.
Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin pp. 5069.
Sheridan, S., & Genoni, P. (eds.) (2006). Thea Astleys
Fictional Worlds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars.
Atwood, Margaret
CYNTHIA SUGARS
We need to know about here, because here is

where we live, wrote Margaret Atwood in her
landmark literary manifesto, Survival: A Thematic
Guide to Canadian Literature (1972b, 19). Atwood has contributed to that literature in myriad
966
ATWOOD, MARGARET
ways, becoming the twentieth centurys most

celebrated and well-known Canadian writer. It is
not an exaggeration to say that Atwood put
Canada on the literary map. She was a central
voice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, promoting
the importance of Canadian national identity
against the cultural inferiority complex that had
come to dominate Canadian society, particularly
in relation to the United States. Survival became
something of a rallying cry to writers and readers
of that generation. However, it is not only the
politics of Canadian nationalism that has informed Atwoods writing. She has taken on many
of the political and social issues of her time,
including womens equality, violence against
women, totalitarianism, religious fundamentalism, environmentalism, genetic modification,
American cultural imperialism, consumerism,
freedom of speech, authors rights, Amnesty International, and many more. Atwood is an enviably multitalented writer and thinker: a poet,
novelist, short story writer, literary critic, editor,
satirist, childrens author, painter and illustrator,
cultural commentator, and mentor to numerous
Canadian writers.
Atwood was born on November 18, 1939 in
Ottawa, and moved with her family to Toronto in
1946. Her childhood was unusual, especially for
a family in the 1940s: they spent every spring,
summer, and autumn living in the bush in northern Quebec or Ontario while her father, an entomologist, did field research on insects. As a result,
Atwood grew up with a foot in two worlds: the
isolated and unsophisticated world of outhouses
and log cabins (without electricity or running
water), and the middle-class world of 1950s Toronto. This experience gave her an observers
perspective on much of the social conformity and
materialism of urban life at the time.
From early on, Atwood knew that she wanted
to be a writer. Her stated ambition, as recorded
in her high school yearbook, was to write THE
Canadian novel (Sullivan 75). Atwood graduated with a BA in English literature from the
University of Toronto in 1961, where she was
a student of Northrop Frye. Under Fryes influence, Atwood absorbed a sense of the underlying
mythological structure of all stories, a motif
that runs throughout her writing, even as late as
2005 when she published her revision of
Homers Odyssey in The Penelopiad. Her extensive
background in English literary forms (particularly

gothic literature) is evident in her varied body of
writing, in which she plays with multiple genres:
the dystopian novel (The Handmaids Tale, 1985),
gothic literature (Lady Oracle, 1976), speculative
fiction (Oryx and Crake, 2003; The Year of the
Flood, 2009), fairy tales (Bluebeards Egg, 1983;
The Robber Bride, 1993), and the thriller (Bodily
Harm, 1981a). In 1961 Atwood entered Harvard
Universitys Radcliffe College, receiving her MA
in 1962 and beginning a PhD in Victorian literature. After some time teaching English at the
University of British Columbia, Atwood returned
to Harvard in 1965. However, she was spending
more and more time on creative writing, having
completed her first novel, The Edible Woman
(1969), while in Vancouver. After winning the
Governor Generals Award for Poetry for The
Circle Game (1966) the youngest recipient ever
at that time Atwood decided not to complete her
PhD. Yet undeniably her experience at Harvard
gave her a sense of Canadians distinctiveness
from Americans.
From early on, Atwood was an important part
of the burgeoning literary and cultural scene in
Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s, publishing widely in little magazines alongside writers such as
Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, and George
Bowering. After leaving Harvard, she devoted
herself to writing, editing, and reviewing, including a stint on the editorial board of the newly
established House of Anansi Press. Atwood also
faced the problem of defining the woman writers
role in this milieu of very strong, and sometimes
misogynistic, male personalities. Fellow poet Irving Layton accused her of treading into male
territory, and in a world where women were
typically regarded as muses to male writers rather
than as artists in their own right, Atwood struggled to find a place for herself. Many of her
writings, including her first book of poems,
Double Persephone (1961), provide tongue-incheek meditations on female stereotypes.
Atwood wrote prolifically after her Governor
Generals success, publishing numerous poetry
collections, including The Animals in That
Country (1968), The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970a), Procedures for Underground (1970b),
Power Politics (1971), and Two-Headed Poems
(1978). Her poetry is marked by a curiously
clinical style mixed with startling, often macabre
ATWOOD, MARGARET
or gothic, imagery. The clash between the deadpan tone and the almost hallucinatory imagery is
a trademark of Atwoods work. These early books
are also replete with mythological resonance
and scientific imagery, the latter emerging from
Atwoods longstanding interest in biology. Susanna Moodie is a key collection from this period,
lauded for its attempt to resuscitate a forgotten
Canadian ancestor, a British settler who immigrated to Canada in 1832 and wrote about her
experiences in the bush. The collection posits
Susanna Moodie as an archetypal Canadian who,
caught between the Old World and the New,
emblematizes the divided nature of the Canadian
psyche, or what Atwood in her Afterword termed
Canadian cultures paranoid schizophrenia
(1970a, 62) a theme she also explored in Survival. The poems have strangely gothic undertones: boundaries between self and other, human
and animal, civilization and wilderness are dissolved as Moodie metamorphoses into something
different from what she started out to be. This
interest in uncovering a buried history is echoed
by many Canadian writers from this period, such
as Rudy Wiebe, Margaret Laurence, and Robert
Kroetsch. Atwoods remarkable collection of elegiac poems, Morning in the Burned House (1995a),
published years later after her fathers death, is
also preoccupied with personal and cultural
memory and forgetting.
In the late 1960s, Atwood established herself as
a fiction writer with The Edible Woman, which
humorously critiques consumer society including the consumption of womens bodies and
identities through a protagonist who enacts a
refusal of materialist values by engaging in willed
anorexia. This and Atwoods subsequent novels,
Surfacing (1972a) and Lady Oracle, along with her
early poetry, earned her a reputation as a notable
feminist writer and social commentator, though
her tongue-in-cheek comments also took the
womens liberation movement to task for its
sometimes myopic intolerance of any but a woman-centered agenda. Surfacing is perhaps
Atwoods most important novel of this early
period, addressing some of the major issues of
late 1960s Canada as the protagonist journeys into
the Quebec wilderness and, internally, into her
personal past to search for her lost father. It is a
groundbreaking novel for its skeptical engagement with such ideological developments of the
967
late 1960s and early 1970s as Canadian nationalism, anti-Americanism, the Quiet Revolution in
Quebec, the sexual revolution, and environmentalism, simultaneously empathizing with these
burgeoning movements and examining them
critically. Lady Oracle similarly satirizes many
fashionable topics of the day (sexual mores,
womens lib, the peace movement), but its importance rests in its self-conscious parody of the
gothic genre. The protagonist, Joan Foster, has
faked her own death to escape various ruses and
disguises under which she has been living. One
of her false identities is that of Louisa Delacourt,
the pseudonym under which she writes cheap
gothic romances. The novel engages with the
theme of illusion and disguise by presenting
Joans self-fashioning, indeed gothicizing, of
her identity, construing herself according to a
series of contrived plot lines. Atwoods unique
contribution to the female Kuntslerroman destabilizes the very premise of the artists growth,
especially when Joan attributes her literary success
to automatic writing over which she has no
conscious control.
With Graeme Gibson (her future husband),
Atwood became involved in the 1970s movement
to establish the Canadian Writers Union, becoming its president from 1981 to 1982. Also in the
1970s she published her momentous work of
Canadian literary criticism, Survival. Lamenting
the absence of Canadian content in Canadian
schools (it was in part intended as a manual for
high school and college English teachers), the
book proposed a characteristic mode of expression in Canadian literature: that of survival.
This thematic approach undoubtedly emerged
out of the periods sense that Canada was under
threat by the weight of established British tradition and by the world dominance of the US,
though it also took its lead from Fryes postulation of the garrison mentality in Canadian
culture a tendency to cordon oneself off from
the perceived threat of the surrounding world,
including nature, animals, or people perceived as
other discussed in his Conclusion to a Literary
History of Canada (1965). In Survival, Atwood
outlined a series of victim positions that were
identifiable in Canadian literature, concluding
that the real test was to discover how to be a
creative non-victim. Today, Atwoods thesis
is criticized by many Canadian scholars for
968
ATWOOD, MARGARET
being overly simplified, homogenizing, and for

excluding many non-mainstream voices. Nevertheless, Survival garnered much support for
Canadian literature and supplemented government-led initiatives to promote the teaching of
Canadian content in schools and universities.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Atwood extended her
interests beyond Canadian national and cultural
questions to issues of international human rights.
She became a prominent member of the human
rights organization PEN International, acting as
president of its Canadian branch from 1984 to
1986. This political and social engagement took a
unique form in Bodily Harm, set on a fictional
Caribbean island on the brink of revolution. The
protagonist, Rennie, flees her Toronto home after
a struggle with breast cancer, ostensibly to write a
travel article about the island. Rennies naivety in
the face of poverty and political upheaval becomes
a stark commentary on Canadians ignorance of
international affairs. Finding herself increasingly
out of her depth, subsumed within the turmoil
overtaking the island, she is forced to acknowledge the privilege and narcissism that cushion her
life back home. Atwoods groundbreaking novel
The Handmaids Tale, which won the Governor
Generals Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, catapulting her into international prominence, launches a harsh critique of fundamentalist totalitarianism and the oppression of women.
In its bleak dystopian vision, women are forced
into slavery as handmaids to produce children
for the governing elite. While set in a futuristic
United States, it clearly condemns the threat of
absolutist and misogynistic dictatorships worldwide. A similar interest emerges in Atwoods
political poetry from this period, particularly in
True Stories (1981b). Two poems from this collection, Footnote to the Amnesty Report on
Torture and Notes Towards a Poem That Can
Never Be Written, are among the most powerful
and unflinching human rights poems ever produced in Canada.
Biographer Rosemary Sullivan states that for
Atwood the writers responsibility is to expose
the conventions . . . by which we invent convenient versions of ourselves. She sees modern man
as being . . . committed to an anachronistic belief
in civilized order that is patently contradicted by
the barbarism of the twentieth century (64).
This is certainly true of much of Atwoods writ-
ing, particularly The Handmaids Tale, but critiques of conformity and totalitarianism are also
evident in other novels such as Bodily Harm,
Cats Eye (1988), The Robber Bride, Oryx and
Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Cats Eye charts
the horrific machinations that take place in the
social circles among girls in grade school in the
1950s. Elaine Risley, returning home decades
later for a retrospective exhibition of her paintings, recalls her childhood years as the target of a
sadistic schoolgirl, Cordelia. The novel moves
powerfully back and forth between the childhood trauma and the artworks that contain
masked versions of past events, a textual encryption that is common to many of Atwoods writings, including Lady Oracle and The Blind Assassin (2000). The Robber Bride tackles similar
territory as four women living in 1980s Toronto
are brought together through shared trauma. It
opens with the women meeting in a Toronto
cafe, and through flashbacks delineates how each
was in turn duped and betrayed by Zenia, an
ingenious Machiavellian shape-shifter who stole
the men in their lives. Zenia represents the kind
of female villain that Atwood argues has been
suppressed in much contemporary womens
writing, which seeks to present more positive
portrayals. The novels genius is its refusal to
allow a final assessment of Zenias character: her
behavior is reprehensible, but she might also
represent an empowered woman who gets what
she wants by whatever means she can.
Atwood has written numerous short story collections, such as Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeards
Egg, Wilderness Tips (1991), and Good Bones
(1992). Wilderness Tips contains memorable
stories that reflect ironically on Canadian cultural
icons, including the Group of Seven (in
Wilderness Tips) and John Franklin (in The
Age of Lead). Her 1995 essay collection Strange
Things identifies the Franklin Expedition as one
of the central image-clusters in Canadian literature because of its links with the Far Norths
allure and terror. In The Age of Lead Atwood
parallels Franklins hubris with contemporary
consumerism and environmental destruction.
These themes are present throughout Atwoods
impressive oeuvre, which as a whole addresses
the dangers of a utilitarian individualist ethos
underwritten by social conformity and exploitation. This subject is evident in Atwoods specula-
ATWOOD, MARGARET
tive fiction Oryx and Crake, which echoes the

dystopian themes of The Handmaids Tale in
envisioning the end of civilization through the
character of Snowman, apparently the last human being on earth. Engaging the scientific and
technological trends of the early twenty-first century, the novel critiques the increased commodification of humanity through technologies of
genetic modification, organ transplants, and
germ warfare and anticipates their potentially
devastating consequences for the future.
Atwoods writings are marked by an elegiac
quality, often positing a dialogue between past
and present, living and dead evident in Susanna
Moodie, but also in two historical novels, Alias
Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin. The former,
based on a famous case, focuses on Grace Marks,
a nineteenth-century servant accused of murdering her employer and his housekeeper in
1843. Like other contemporary historical fictions, it plays on the instability of historical
evidence, though here it is framed in the context
of late nineteenth-century theories of psychology and spiritualism as Grace claims to have no
conscious recollection of the murders. The Blind
Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000, is a
tour de force of various Atwoodian interests: the
continuity between life and art; the layering of
texts within texts; the tenacity of buried secrets;
the gothic underlay of everyday experience; the
precariousness of identity. The novel centers on
two sisters: Iris, an old woman remembering her
youth, and Laura, who commits suicide by driving off a bridge after World War II. As in Lady
Oracle, the novel takes its title from a novel
embedded within it, ostensibly written by Laura.
Within that novel is yet another story, a science
fiction tale about a blind assassin. This multiple
layering proceeds by gradual revelation and
contributes to the sense that voices are speaking
from beyond the grave as events in the fictional
narratives begin overlapping with events in the
main text.
Atwood has always been fascinated by the
underside of appearances, particularly by
the irony that the mask or the false side of the
individual often passes for the reality. This interest also applies to her analysis of societal norms
and political regimes that impose an often suspect
version of truth. Atwoods fascination with the
969
gothic and the supernatural is part of this interest

in unseen or hidden depths. In her essay An End
to Audience? in Second Words: Selected Critical
Prose (1982), Atwood defines writing as a kind of
sooth-saying, a truth-telling . . . . Its also a witnessing. Come with me, the writer is saying to the
reader. There is a story I have to tell you, there is
something you need to know (348).
SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Fantasy,
Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction
(WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Kroetsch, Robert
(WF); Laurence, Margaret (WF); Ondaatje,
Michael (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction
(WF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF);
Atwood, M. (1961). Double Persephone. Toronto:
Hawkshead.
Atwood, M. (1966). The Circle Game. Toronto:
Anansi.
Atwood, M. (1968). The Animals in That Country.
Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Atwood, M. (1969). The Edible Woman. Toronto:
Atwood, M. (1970a). The Journals of Susanna Moodie.
Atwood, M. (1970b). Procedures for Underground.
Atwood, M. (1971). Power Politics. Toronto:
Anansi.
Atwood, M. (1972a). Surfacing. Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart.
Atwood, M. (1972b). Survival: A Thematic Guide to
Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi.
Atwood, M. (1976). Lady Oracle. Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart.
Atwood, M. (1977). Dancing Girls and Other Stories.
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Atwood, M. (1978). Two-Headed Poems. Toronto:
Atwood, M. (1981a). Bodily Harm. Toronto:
Atwood, M. (1981b). True Stories. Toronto: Oxford
University Press.
Atwood, M. (1982). Second Words: Selected Critical
Prose. Toronto: Anansi.
Atwood, M. (1983). Bluebeards Egg. Toronto:
Atwood, M. (1985). The Handmaids Tale. Toronto:
970
AUSTRALIAN FICTION
Atwood, M. (1988). Cats Eye. Toronto: McClelland

and Stewart.
Atwood, M. (1991). Wilderness Tips. Toronto:
Atwood, M. (1992). Good Bones. Toronto: Coach
House.
Atwood, M. (1993). The Robber Bride. Toronto:
Atwood, M. (1995a). Morning in the Burned House.
Atwood, M. (1995b). Strange Things: The
Malevolent North in Canadian Literature.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Atwood, M. (1996). Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart.
Atwood, M. (2000). The Blind Assassin. Toronto:
Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the Dead:
A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Atwood, M. (2003). Oryx and Crake. Toronto:
Atwood, M. (2005). The Penelopiad. Toronto:
Knopf.
Atwood, M. (2009). The Year of the Flood. Toronto:
Cooke, N. (1998). Margaret Atwood: A Biography.
Toronto: ECW.
Davey, F. (1984). Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics.
Vancouver: Talonbooks.
Davidson, A., & Davidson, C. (eds.) (1981). The Art of
Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism. Toronto:
Anansi.
Frye, N. (1965). Conclusion. In Literary History
of Canada: Canadian Literature in English
(ed. C. F. Klinck). Toronto: University of Toronto
Press pp. 82149.
Grace, S. (1980). Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret
Atwood. Montreal: Vehicule.
Howells, C. A. (2005). Margaret Atwood. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Howells, C. A. (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge Companion
to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ingersoll, E. (ed.) (1990). Margaret Atwood:
Conversations. Willowdale: Firefly.
Moss, J., & Kozakewich, T. (eds.) (2006). Margaret
Atwood: The Open Eye. Ottawa: University of
Ottawa Press.
Nicholson, C. (ed.) (1994). Margaret Atwood: Writing
and Subjectivity. New York: St. Martins.
Sullivan, R. (1998). The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood
Starting Out. Toronto: HarperFlamingo.
York, L. (ed.) (1995). Various Atwoods: Essays on the
Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Concord, ON:
Anansi.
Australian Fiction
BRUCE BENNETT
Australia became postcolonial in 1901, when the

six colonies federated and formed the Commonwealth of Australia. The 1880s and 1990s had
produced a crop of writers who tested an emergent sense of Australian identity against British
values and attitudes. The outstanding literary
figure of this period was the short story writer
Henry Lawson, whose While the Billy Boils (1896)
and Joe Wilson and His Mates (1901) explored
Australian frontier masculinity and mateship,
and their limits. Joseph Furphys novel Such is
Life (1903), sometimes referred to as Australias
Moby-Dick, interweaves the voices of outback
bullock drivers with a freewheeling set of philosophical speculations by the autodidactic narrator
Tom Collins, whose favorite writer is Shakespeare. Steele Rudds stories were also born in
the nineteenth century but continued well into
the twentieth. From On Our Selection (1899) to
Dad Rudd MP (1940), Rudds stories comically
dramatize the hardships and ingenuity of rural
Australian battlers.
Several major novelists of the early twentieth
century were expatriates living in Europe or
North America. They include Miles Franklin,
Henry Handel Richardson, Martin Boyd, Frederic
Manning, and Christina Stead. Franklins novel
My Brilliant Career (1901) was written before she
left Australia in 1906 for North America and
Europe. Franklin never forgot her sense of an
identity forged in the Australian bush and wrote
family sagas set in cattle and farming country. It is
fitting that the Miles Franklin Literary Award,
bequeathed on her death in 1954, has become
Australias most recognized annual award for
fiction.
The expatriate experiences of Richardson and
Boyd incorporated both the Continent and
England. Richardsons Maurice Guest (1908) is
set in Leipzig where the author was a music
student, but her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard
Mahony (1930) returns to the Australia of her
upbringing, her parents ill-matched marriage,
and the tragedy of a restless doctors failure to
find home in either his native Britain or his
adoptive Australia. Boyds novels trace the fortunes of an artistic aristocracy whose members
sailed regularly between Australia and Europe.
AUSTRALIAN FICTION
From The Montforts (1928) to Lucinda Brayford

(1946), and in the postwar Langton quartet, Boyd
explores issues of birth, sexuality, money, class,
the impact of war, and the possibility of transcendence through art or religion. Experience of
World War I was the catalyst for Frederic
Mannings The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929).
Mannings protagonist, Private Bourne, and his
comrades in arms are depicted chiefly through the
minutiae of military life, although the few battle
scenes and Bournes death are finely rendered.
Steads expatriate experience and literary temper led to a more politically aware and vigorously
satiric fiction, targeting Europeans, Americans,
and Australians whose financial, political, or intellectual pursuits are subverted by overweening
ambition, ineptness, or greed. Steads novels
range from House of All Nations (1938), about
international bankers and their associates in Paris,
to the more autobiographical, Australian-based
novels The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and
For Love Alone (1944).
Unlike these expatriate writers, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Vance Palmer wrote novels
and short stories set mainly in Australia. Though
both traveled widely in Europe (and Prichard in
the Soviet Union), they espoused literary nationalism as a way of expressing the distinctive qualities of Australian life. From their respectively
straight left and center-left political persuasions, Prichard and Palmer produced fiction
through the 1920s and 1930s that threw a critical
spotlight on Australians at work, the growing
pains of children and adolescents, and the special
problems of Indigenous Australians. In 1920
Prichard became a founding member of
Australias Communist Party; during this decade
she traveled widely in Western Australia and
wrote two major social-realist novels, Working
Bullocks (1926) and Coonardoo (1929), and stories
that appeared in Kiss on the Lips (1932). Palmers
first major works were also written in regional
Australia, including Caloundra, a Queensland
fishing port where he wrote his novel The Passage
(1930). Palmers short fiction in Separate Lives
(1931), Sea and Spinifex (1934), and Let the Birds
Fly (1955) shows a developing interest in impressionist techniques.
A powerful sense of place is exhibited also
in Xavier Herberts novel Capricornia (1938),
which dramatically renders scenes in Australias
971
Northern Territory from 1885 to 1930. Herberts

anti-racist stance confronts white prejudice
against Aborigines, half-castes, and Chinese. The
half-caste protagonist Norman discovers his Aboriginal heritage alone in the bush.
Australias most eminent novelist, Patrick
White, criticized the dull realism of postwar
Australian writing. Although unfair to many writers, Whites criticism was a platform from which
he could launch his own brand of non-realist
fiction that was rich in metaphor, idiosyncratic
syntax, and bizarre characters. White completed
his third novel The Aunts Story (1948) on a sea
voyage home from serving as an RAF intelligence
officer in the Middle East. The Tree of Man (1955)
and Voss (1957) give the eras of pioneering and
exploration an epic, ironic, and psychological
dimension. White was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1973, the year of his ninth novel
The Eye of the Storm. The citation was both
personal and national, referring to earlier novels
as well as The Eye: To Patrick White for an epic
and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature (quoted in
Marr 535). Two major novels followed: A Fringe
of Leaves (1976) and The Twyborn Affair (1979).
Randolph Stows novels To the Islands (1958)
and Tourmaline (1965) also employ poetic and
symbolic prose to reimagine outback Australian
landscapes and outlandish Australian characters.
Other major work includes the semiautobiographical Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965) and
Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (1967).
An increase in literary fiction in the 1970s and
1980s was accompanied by a new diversity in
subject, style, and point of view. The short story
led this break from the still persistent bush yarn;
international influences also contributed to a new
sophistication in short fiction. Peter Cowan,
influenced by Sherwood Anderson and others,
adopted a realistimpressionist style to convey the
loneliness of individuals in Western Australian
land- or seascapes. The more autobiographical
Hal Porter drew attention to his narratorial
performance as a freewheeling, idiosyncratic
raconteur of Victorian country towns and of
postwar occupation forces in Japan. Another
idiosyncratic stylist was the English-born Elizabeth Jolley, whose stories and novels of migrants
arriving and settling in Australia have a sweet
and sour flavor.
972
AUSTRALIAN FICTION
Experimentation with structure and texture in

short fiction was led by Frank Moorhouse, whose
chronicle of the 1970s, Days of Wine and Rage
(1980), pays homage to Sydney and the libertarian
spirit. The country-bred Moorhouse saw the city
and inner suburbs as a laboratory of emergent
attitudes toward sexuality, relationships, and
political activism. The Americans, Baby (1973) is
a discontinuous fiction exploring a new generations simultaneous attraction and resistance
to American values. The English-born Michael
Wilding also dramatized the alternative Sydney
of beach, pubs, parties, and drugs and excelled as
a parodist half in love with his subject. When
Moorhouse turned to the novel he produced two
long ones, Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace
(2000), set in interwar Geneva.
Helen Garner, Robert Drewe, and Peter Goldsworthy are renovators of realism. Garners short
fiction in Postcards from Surfers (1985) and her
novel The Spare Room (2008) show how close
observation of people and situations can yield
searing insights into motives and feelings.
Drewes sharp awareness of contemporary events
combines with an ironic and compassionate interest in the motives that drive people and the play
of chance in their lives. From his early novel about
race relations, The Savage Crows (1976), to his
sixth, Grace (2005), Drewe skillfully combines
narrative pace with psychological insight; in The
Bodysurfers (1983), a series of linked stories, he
shows the place of the beach in the sexual and
psychic lives of Australians. Peter Goldsworthy is
a physician who draws on personal and professional experience to provide sharply rendered,
tragic-comic scenes of suburban Australia.
When Thomas Keneallys Schindlers Ark won
the Booker Prize in 1983 a controversy ensued:
was this novel about Oskar Schindler, who saved
over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, really
faction or fiction? In 1993, director Steven
Spielberg turned Schindlers Ark into an awardwinning film, Schindlers List. Many of Keneallys
Australian novels, including The Chant of Jimmie
Blacksmith (1972) and A Family Madness (1985),
also explore the impact of violence and the possibility of redemption.
Peter Carey left Australia for New York in
mid-career in 1989, one year after winning the
Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda. The eccentric
young vicar Oscars gambling and its effect on
spirituality and human relationships is explored

by Carey in a risk-taking historical novel of surrealistic verve, filmed in 1998 by director Gillian
Armstrong. Careys True History of the Kelly Gang,
which ventriloquizes Australias most famous
bushranger, won the 2001 Booker Prize. Like
Keneally and Carey, Kate Grenville has mined
Australian history. She returned to the first phase
of European Australian history in The Secret River
(2007), which shows the precarious relations and
violent outbreaks between Australias first inhabitants and the newcomers.
Novelists in Australia have often been regionally based and demonstrate a strong interest in
place. Tim Winton has set his major novels,
including the magic-realist Cloudstreet (1991), in
his native southwest corner of Western Australia,
but Dirt Music (2001) moves to the northwest,
where his character survives difficult terrain and
begins to find himself spiritually. In Breath
(2008), Wintons protagonist never outgrows the
adrenalin rush of surfing and is both made and
damaged by his encounters with the great western
ocean. David Malouf is associated with his native
Brisbane through his semiautobiographical novel
Johnno (1975) and the essay-story 12 Edmonstone
Street (1985). In contrast, An Imaginary Life
(1979) explores exile through a narrative of the
Roman poet Ovid and a wild child. Set in midnineteenth-century Queensland, Remembering
Babylon (1993) explores exile through the experience of a white black man. Richard Flanagans
Tasmanian wilderness is brought alive in Death of
a River Guide (1994) and in his experimental
novel Goulds Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
(2002). The expatriate Queenslander Janette
Turner Hospital returns frequently to her formative experiences in north Queensland in short
fiction and novels ranging from Oyster (1996) to
Orpheus Lost (2007), employing postmodern
techniques to dramatize the transitory states of
transnational characters.
Indigenous Australian fiction has shown welcome signs of renewal with Kim Scotts novel
Benang (1999) and Alexis Wrights Carpentaria
(2006), both winners of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Scotts novel is set among southwest
Australias Nyoongar people and is something of
a sequel to Sally Morgans My Place (1987) in
revealing the pain and pleasure of discovering
an Aboriginal identity. Carpentaria, set in
AWARDS AND PRIZES
northwestern Queensland, portrays Aboriginal

and white communities at loggerheads over mining developments. Race relations in Australia
and the relationship of Indigenous Australians
to their country are also explored in Alex Millers
Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Landscape
of Farewell (2007).
Australias increasing links with Asia have been
a persistent theme and challenge in Australian
fiction since the 1970s in work by Christopher
Koch, Nicholas Jose, and Brian Castro. In his
essay Crossing the Gap (1987), Koch wrote of the
family closeness that links Australia with the
Indo-European zone which includes India and
Indonesia. Most of Kochs novels deal with AustralianAsian tensions and relationships including Across the Sea Wall (1965, 1982), The Year of
Living Dangerously (1978), Highways to a War
(1995), and The Memory Room (2007). Joses
book of essays Chinese Whispers (1995) explains
his close interest in China. His novel Avenue of
Eternal Peace (1989), set in China and completed
in 1987, foreshadows the Tiananmen Square
massacre.
Asian immigrants have made their presence
felt in Australian fiction since the 1980s. Hong
Kong-born Brian Castros novels present China
from an insider-outsiders perspective. Noting
that the word Asia is found within Australia,
Castro advocates presenting Asia as part of Australia in Birds of Passage (1983), After China
(1992), and Shanghai Dancing (2003). Adib Khan
was born in Dhakar, Bangladesh and moved to
Australia in 1973; his novels reflect the traumas
and pleasures of straddling cultures.
(WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science
Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical
Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF);
Indigenous Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora,
and Exile in Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction
(WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);
Southeast Asian Fiction (WF); South Pacific
Fiction (WF)
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. At
www.austlit.edu.au, accessed Jan. 13, 2010.
973
Bennett, B. (2002). Australian Short Fiction: A History.

St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Bennett, B., & Strauss, J. (eds.) (1998). The Oxford
Literary History of Australia. Melbourne: Oxford
University Press.
Clancy, L. (1992). A Readers Guide to Australian
Fiction. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Gelder, K., & Salzman, P. (1989). The New Diversity:
Australian Fiction 197088. Melbourne: McPhee
Gribble.
Hergenhan, L. (ed.) (1988). The Penguin New Literary
History of Australia. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin.
Marr, D. (1991). Patrick White: A Life. Sydney: Random
House.
Webby, E. (2000). The Cambridge Companion to
Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wilde, W., Hooton, J., & Andrews, B. (eds.) (1994).
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature.
Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Awards and Prizes

LUKE STRONGMAN
Literary prizes confer status upon books, authors,

and publishers; they are commendations to
authors and publishers for a job well done. Prizes
that reflect serious literary judgment can impart a
sense of literary clout to a work of fiction. They
also help publishers sell books and are an important part of the promotion and marketing activities of the book industry. Despite Richard Todds
claim in 1996 that only the Booker and the
Whitbread Prizes really have any significant impact on fiction sales (62), literary prizes have
proliferated since the 1980s in tandem with the
rise of world literatures and globalization. Their
profusion is a positive influence insofar as they
help stimulate writers, publishers, and readers,
but negative insofar as arbitrary or ill-defined
awards may be seen more as a tool of commercialism than of literary discrimination. The organizations that bestow prizes may perform a
canonizing function by validating dominant metropolitan voices; they may, through their choices,
extend the terms of reference for the novel or
short story as an art form: for instance, by recognizing experimental forms of narrative, politically
disenfranchised authors, or minority cultures.
Prizes can be understood as devices for achieving cultural objectives along social, institutional,
974
AWARDS AND PRIZES
ideological, economic, historical, and artistic lines

(English 2005a, 50); they help to preserve and
shape the development of the genre. By providing
external and independent forms of recognition
and reward to authors, publishers, and the styles
of literature they represent, they are a form of
cultural credentialing (English 2005a, 41).
Moreover, prizes can stimulate goodwill and provide a focus for literary judgment. They may also
bring financial success and establish the careers
of authors. The benefits to winning or even being
shortlisted for a major literary prize are considerable in terms of publicity and sales. A novel
shortlisted for the Booker Prize can have its print
run boosted by 10,000 copies, even if it doesnt
win (Jury 2003). However, awards can also be
beset by scandal, the taint of which is best (but
rarely entirely) avoided by award committees, and
the awarding of prizes to particular works and
authors is often controversial. For example, when
V. S. Naipaul failed to win the 1979 Booker Prize
with his novel A Bend in the River, he reportedly
announce[d] the classic novel is in decline and
can only be resuscitated by one of a small number
of authors (Blackler 2007).
Examined thematically, prizes may reveal patterns of literary production that reflect larger
trends of cultural development. For example, the
Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth
Writers Prize reflect the emergence of cultural
changes in the aftermath of the British Empire
(see Huggan 2001; Strongman 2002). Many largescale contemporary prizes have a national agenda;
whether publicly or privately sponsored, they
intend to showcase the best examples of a nations
literary production in a particular year, as with
Britains Somerset Maugham and Geoffrey Faber
awards, or the Scotiabank Giller for Canadian
fiction. Historically, by singling out particular
novels for award, these prizes have helped shore
up national identities against the potential relativism of an increasingly globalized writing and
publishing scene.
The criteria for a literary prize reflect the values
of its sponsor, which may be a government, an
institution, a corporation, or an organization
specifically established to administer the prize.
Prize juries are most often composed of writers
but may also include academics, publishers, or
celebrities. There are three general categories:
international awards, in which a particular novel
or author is selected for distinction independently, though not exclusively, from the country of
national origin of the author; national or regional
awards, which may be privately or publicly
sponsored, and in which terms of reference for
selection are directly related to a national or
geographic compass, with criteria derived from
the authors belonging to a particular nation state
and contributing to its literature; and awards with
a transcending imperative, recognizing a particular gender or ethnicity, or emphasizing literary
production under a particular set of cultural
conditions. Some awards, such as the Nobel Prize
in Literature, share more than one set of these
characteristics.
Of the prizes with an international or global
frame of reference, the Nobel Prize is the most
renowned and prestigious. It is also the award that
carries the largest international monetary value
(currently set at just over one million euros).
Founded in 1901, the Nobel Prize is awarded
every autumn by an academy based in Sweden
for an authors work as a whole, though individual
works may be cited; writing in any language and
genre is eligible. Nobel Prize-winning writers
works invariably exhibit idealistic tendencies, and
the Nobel is arguably now seen to be as much
a literary-humanitarian award as a prize for literature, and has been won by such notable Englishlanguage writers as Wole Soyinka (Nigeria),
Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), Nadine Gordimer
(South Africa), V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad), and
J. M. Coetzee (South Africa).
The best-known international literary award
after the Nobel is the Man Booker Prize for Fiction
(formerly the Booker-McConnell Prize), awarded
each year for the best novel in English by a citizen
of the Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland.
Conceived in 1968 and inaugurated in 1969 as
a prize to rival the French Prix Goncourt, the
Booker was originally sponsored by food conglomerate Booker PLC and, as James English
suggests, was a postcolonial prize by means of
which London could couldnt not reaffirm its
domination of the formerly colonised space
(2005b, 170). The Booker Prize can also be seen
as a having a post-imperial agenda by means of
which literary recognition is conferred by the
London metropolitan center to a deserving novelist from among the Commonwealth nations. It
has evolved with new sponsorship from the Man
AWARDS AND PRIZES
Group in 2005 and broadened its geographic and

literary-political remit even further; its financial
value is currently set at 50,000.
Salman Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers
in 1993 for Midnights Children (1981), a groundbreaking novel of Indian independence that also
won the Best of the Booker in 2008 to celebrate
the prizes fortieth anniversary. The Booker is
seen as the most literary and is consequently
often the most sought-after and controversial
prize for the modern novel. In recent years its
Commonwealth aegis and literary cache was
challenged by Australian-born D. B. C. Pierres
Vernon Little God (2003), with its Texas setting
and witty adolescent monologue. Other notable
winners include Coetzee, Peter Carey, Margaret
Atwood, Arundhati Roy, and Yann Martel, whose
Life of Pi became an international bestseller after
its surprise Booker win in 2002, reportedly selling
300,000 copies within a year (Jury 2003). Complementing the Man Booker Prize is the Man
Booker International Prize, established in 2005
as a biennial literary award for excellence in world
fiction over a writers career. In 2007 the prize
went to Chinua Achebe, for his novels of African
history and consciousness that, since the late 1950s,
have provided an African literary counterpoint
to mid-twentieth-century Western modernism.
More recent in conception than the Booker,
though with similar criteria of eligibility, the
Commonwealth Writers Prize was founded in
1987 as a preeminent award for fiction among
authors of nations influenced by British colonization. It was established to encourage new
Commonwealth fiction, promoting democracy,
human development, and cultural understanding. It is currently sponsored by the Macquarie
Group Foundation. The judging committees are
composed mainly of academics and fiction writers, one consequence of which may be to promote books with academic appeal. Canadian
Lawrence Hill won the overall Best Book category for The Book of Negroes in 2008, while
Tahmima Aram from Bangladesh won the
overall Best First Book award for A Golden Age.
Previous winners include Lloyd Jones of New
Zealand for Mister Pip (2007), Australian Kate
Grenville for her novel of Australian ex-convict
colonization The Secret River (2006), and Andrea
Levy for her novel of British/Jamaican reverse
colonization, Small Island (2004). Aside from the
975
overall Best Book and Best First Book awards,

the Commonwealth Prize has a regional structure
with different judges and winners from four
different geographical regions: Africa; the Caribbean and Canada; Europe and South Asia; and
Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The two
winners from each region then compete for the
overall awards.
Of the major international literary prizes for
fiction, one is wholly dedicated to womens writing. The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction is
given annually to the female writer deemed to
have written the best eligible novel in English.
There is also an Orange Broadband award for new
writers. The Orange Prize has been controversial,
with A. S. Byatt describing it as ghettoizing
women writers (Guest 2008); Byatt and fellow
British author Anita Brookner have declined to
allow their books to be considered. In 2007 the
winner was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) for Half of a Yellow Sun, and in 2008 it was Rose
Tremain (Britain) for The Road Home. Despite its
gendered entry criteria, the Orange Broadband
judging committee remains broad and consists of
writers, critics, broadcasters, book-trade workers,
and library editors.
Inaugurated by its namesake in 1947, the Somerset Maugham Award is bestowed by the British
Society of Authors. The winners list over the years
has included most of the authors at the forefront
of British fiction (with some notable exceptions
such as Graham Swift), including Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, A. N. Wilson, Lisa St. Aubin
de Teran, and Peter Ackroyd. The award also
helped launch the prize-winning career of Ian
McEwan (for First Love, Last Rites, in 1976).
The Whitbread Literary Awards were founded
in 1971, renamed the Whitbread Book Awards in
1985, and with renewed sponsorship in 1996 by
the Costa coffee company, became the Costa Book
Awards. The Costa Awards are among Britains
most prominent international literary awards,
open to writers from the UK and the Republic
of Ireland. The Costa is more populist than the
Man Booker Prize. Winners include A. L.
Kennedy in 2007 for her novel Day and Mark
Haddons The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time (2003), a humorous, age-transcending novel of latent suburban autism.
Across the Irish Sea from London, the IMPAC
Dublin Literary Award, inaugurated in 1986, is
976
AWARDS AND PRIZES
the largest and most global of the new wave of

international literary prizes for fiction. It is
awarded annually for a single work of fiction
published in English. The award is administered
from Ireland by the Dublin City Public Libraries
from nominations submitted by public libraries
across the world. The prize is valued at 100,000
euros. Lebanese-born Canadian author Rawi
Hage won in 2008 for De Niros Game, and Per
Petterson of Ireland in 2007 for Out Stealing
Horses both inventive fiction titles situated on
the political left. Recent winners have included
French, American, Irish, and Turkish authors; in
this respect the award census seems to preclude
writers from Britain.
Further west, the longest-running Canadian
literary prize is the Governor Generals Literary
Award, given annually to the best English-language and French-language books in seven categories of Fiction, Literary Non-fiction, Poetry,
Drama, Childrens Literature (text), Childrens
Literature (illustration), and Translation. Each
laureate receives C$25,000. Michael Ondaatje,
who co-won the Booker Prize in 1992, was the
2007 winner of the Governor Generals Award for
Fiction for Divisadero. Being a prestigious statesponsored prize, the aim of the Governor Generals Literary Award is to fulfill a national agenda
of recognizing Canadian literary excellence.
The other preeminent Canadian literary award
is the Scotiabank Giller Prize, known as the Giller
Prize from its inception in 1994 until 2005.
Scotiabanks co-sponsorship produced Canadas
most financially valuable award for fiction, with a
prize value of C$50,000 for the winner. The
Scotiabank Giller has the nationalistic aim of
celebrating the best Canadian fiction for each
year but differs from the Governor Generals
Award in that it is not state-sponsored. Tanzanian-Canadian M. G. Vassanji is the Gillers only
two-time winner, in 1994 and 2003, and other
winners have included Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, and Austin Clarke.
South of the equator and established in 1948,
the Miles Franklin Literary Award continues to be
Australias most illustrious prize. Its purpose is to
celebrate annually the best Australian-published
novel or play portraying Australian life and culture. Recent winners include Steven Carroll in
2008 for The Time We Have Taken, Alexis Wright
for Carpentaria in 2007, and Roger McDonald in
2006 for The Ballad of Desmond Kate. Novels

chosen for the award usually celebrate aspects of
Australian nation formation.
A new Australian literary award, the Prime
Ministers Literary Award, was established in
2008 with two categories: fiction and non-fiction.
At A$100,000, it is the nations richest literary
award. Conceived as an international award and
open to Australian writers anywhere in the world,
it is expected to confer considerable status. Steven
Conte won the inaugural fiction award in 2008
for The Zookeepers War.
Across the Tasman Sea, the Prime Ministers
Literary Award is also the name of New Zealands top literary prize. It began in 2003 and
celebrates the careers of prominent New Zealand
writers, with a financial value of NZ$60,000.
Authors are eligible in the categories of fiction,
poetry, and non-fiction. Recent winners for
fiction include Fiona Farrell in 2007 for her
experimentations in genre and narrative, Patricia Grace in 2006 for a body of works representing Maori culture, and Maurice Gee in 2004 for
his sharply scripted novels exploring national
and regional identity.
Second to the New Zealand Prime Ministers
Literary Award, though with longer-standing origins, are the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
The main fiction prize is the Deutz Medal, which
was won by Charlotte Grimshaw for her collection
of pithy short stories Opportunity in 2008. One
of the most controversial winners was Craig
Marriners Stone Dogs (2001), a novel of New
Zealands underculture which was selected over
books by more established literary figures such as
Lloyd Jones and Elizabeth Knox.
Among the countries of the Pacific Rim and
South Asia, the leading literary prize is the Kiriyama Prize, established in 1996 to recognize
outstanding books and encourage mutual understanding of a culturally diverse region. It consists
of a cash award of US$30,000, split equally between the fiction and non-fiction winners. It was
won in 2008 by Lloyd Jones for Mister Pip, which
transposes a Dickensian narrative motif to the
setting of Papua New Guineas Bougainvillea.
Mister Pip also won the Commonwealth Writers
Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in
2007.
The Man Asian Literary Prize, a recently established adjunct of the Man Booker Prizes, is an
AWOONOR, KOFI
annual award for the best Asian novel unpublished in English. The first prize was awarded to
the Chinese writer Jiang Rong for Wolf Totem in
2007. The prize has three objectives: to bring
prominent new Asian authors to the attention of
the literary community, to facilitate Asian publishing in the English language, and to recognize
Asias developing role in world literature. It is
administered by representatives from the Man
Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the
University of Hong Kong, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Two older Japanese national literary prizes are the Akutagawa and Naoki
Prizes, both originating in 1935.
Africas two most prominent literary awards
are the biennial Macmillan Writers Prize for
Africa and the Caine Prize for African Writing.
The Macmillan Prize aims at promoting previously unpublished works of fiction by African
writers and is sponsored by Macmillan Education.
The senior category award was won in 20078 by
Jayne Bauling (South Africa) for E Eights. The
Caine Prize has been awarded since 2000 to a short
story by an African writer published in English,
whether in Africa or elsewhere. The four African
winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature Soyinka, Gordimer, Naguib Mahfouz, and Coetzee
are patrons of the Caine Prize, which has a value
currently of 10,000. It was won by Henrietta
Rose-Innes (South Africa) in 2008 for Poison
from Africa Pens.
The foremost literary prize in the West Indies is
the Guyana Prize for Literature, which began in
the 1950s as the Cheddi Jagan Gold Medal for
Literature. Past winners have included Wilson
Harris, Fred DAguiar, and David Dabydeen.
SEE ALSO: Awards and Prizes (BIF); Critical
Theory and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism
and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry
and Fiction (WF)
Blackler, T. (2007). Booker Prize Scandals We Have
Loved (and Imagined . . .). Independent. At www.
independent.co.uk, accessed Dec. 8, 2008.
English, J. F. (2005a). The Economy of Prestige:
Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural
Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
977
English, J. F. (2005b). The Literary Prize Phenomenon

in Context. In B. W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the
British and Irish Novel 19452000. Oxford: Blackwell,
pp. 16076.
Guest, K. (2008). The Big Question: Has the Time
Come to Close the Book on Women-Only Literary
Prizes? Independent. At www.independent.co.uk,
accessed Dec. 19, 2008.
Huggan, G. (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing
the Margins. New York: Routledge.
Jury, L. (2003). Beckham v. the Booker List: A OneSided Battle for Sales. Independent. At www.
independent.co.uk, accessed Dec. 17, 2008.
Strongman, L. (2002). The Booker Prize and the Legacy
of Empire. New York: Rodopi.
Todd, R. (1996). Consuming Fictions: The Booker
Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London:
Bloomsbury.
Awoonor, Kofi
OBI MADUAKOR
Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor, formerly George Awoonor-Williams, is a well-known Ghanaian novelist,

poet, professor, and diplomat. He began his career
as a lecturer at the University of Ghana (19604),
was assistant professor of English at the State
University of New York (196875), and was imprisoned in Ghana as a political detainee
(19756). Awoonor later became Ghanas ambassador to several South American countries
(19838), to Cuba (198890), and finally to the
United Nations (19904). He remains active as
an elder statesman within government circles at
Accra.
Born in Wheta, Ghana on March 13, 1935,
Awoonor gained his BA in English from the
University of Ghana (1960), MA from the University of London (1970), and PhD from the State
University of New York (1973). His early poetic
works, Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964) and
Night of My Blood (1971a), and the novel This
Earth, My Brother (1971b), are voyages of personal discovery and homecoming. Awoonor conceived of all three books as one work on the theme
of absence and return (Lindfors 49).
In Rediscovery, later reworked and integrated
into Night of My Blood, the voice of a poet
persona, a sage, clearly represents the ancestors
hectoring lost souls (in the poem Exiles) to
978
AWOONOR, KOFI
return to the clan and relearn the wisdom of their

fathers. I Heard a Bird Cry celebrates an exiles
return to origins. Awoonor derives the technique
of the early poems from Ewe oral poetry, especially the Ewe dirge with its strong rhythm, direct
address, parallel structure, and repetitions.
This Earth, My Brother presents the predicaments of an individual torn between tradition and
modernity. Amamu, a successful lawyer, abandons family, friends, and career, returning to the
shores of his native river for an encounter with a
childhood lover long dead but who, in his demented imagination, has become a sea goddess a
feature that has puzzled many critics. The novels
political sub-theme links the lands tragic destiny
to Amamus unease: the foolishness and timidity
of the signatories of the famous Bond of 1884,
who gave the land away for private gain; the greed
of the modern leader with his vain campaign
promises; and the realization that both the ancestor and the modern leader are responsible for
fathering the monstrosity that is modern Ghana.
A more serious and personal source of unease,
however, is Amamus abdication of his traditional
responsibility as priest, pledged at birth to the
ancestors and gods of the land as their special
torchbearer all his life (1971b, 12). Awoonor is
troubled here and in other works by the consequences of abdication, insisting that the tensions
within Amamu can be resolved only in death. The
Ghanaian scholar Atukwei Okai has coined the
word Amamuosis to designate Amamus pathological condition of moral impotence or selfdestructive narcissism (Anyidoho 86).
The House by the Sea (1978) collects poems
Awoonor wrote during his one-year detention at
Usher Fort. The house in the title refers to this
fort, a maximum-security facility built by the
Dutch in the seventeenth century to hold slaves
before the transatlantic journey. These prison
poemsbreathedefianceagainst Awoonorscaptors,
but they also exude confidence in his will to survive.
Comes the Voyager at Last (1992a) focuses on
African Americans during the Civil Rights movement, particularly their obsession with Africa
as homeland, and is heavily influenced by
Awoonors student experience in America during the 1960s and 1970s. The novels young hero,
Sheik Lumumba Mandela, is drawn to the image
of the Black Muslim militant. He casts off his
slave name, dons a romantic Arab title, and
attempts to reinvent himself through a kinship

with two icons of African independence (Patrice
Lumumba and Nelson Mandela). Following his
release from a New York prison for an offense he
did not commit, Lumumba goes to Africa seeking a homeland. He is welcomed into the maternal womb of Africa, where he finds a level of love
and care unavailable in Babylon, finally recognizing the supremacy of the African way of life,
and its sense of community and family solidarity,
over the exploitative instincts of Western
individualism.
The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook
(1992), Awoonors weakest poetry collection, lacks
the nervous energy and ebullient confidence of
Night of My Blood. Instead we hear the nostalgic
voice of a sober and reflective poet, conscious of his
increasingage and the incipient decline ofhispoetic
power. The collection includes commentary on
international affairs, especially the underprivileged
and oppressed people of the developing world.
Awoonor published a volume of collected
poems as Until the Morning After (1987), and a
study of African culture and literature titled The
Breast of the Earth (1975) an apologia for the
cosmology and the worldview within which he
writes. One element of this worldview, Awoonor
argues, is the deep spirituality of the African mind
best reflected in African art itself with the artist
functioning occasionally as priest, uttering words
imbued with magical power. Having established
this theoretical framework, Awoonor then discusses the continuity between oral and written
literature in the works of his favorite writers.
SEE ALSO: Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in
(WF); West African Fiction (WF)
Anyidoho, K. (1991). Kofi Awoonor. In B. Lindfors
& R. Sander (eds.), Twentieth-Century Caribbean
and Black African Writers. 1st series. Detroit: Gale
pp. 7792.
Awoonor, K. (1971a). Night of My Blood. New York:
Doubleday.
Awoonor, K. (1971b). This Earth, My Brother. London:
Heinemann.
Awoonor, K. (1975). The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of
the History, Culture and Literature of Africa South
of the Sahara. New York: Nok.
AWOONOR, KOFI
Awoonor, K. (1978). The House by the Sea. New York:

Greenfield Review.
Awoonor, K. (1987). Until the Morning After: Collected
Poems. New York: Greenfield Review.
Awoonor, K. (1991). Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. In
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 13.
Awoonor, K. (1992a). Comes the Voyager at Last:
A Tale of Return to Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa
World Press.
979
Awoonor, K. (1992b). The Latin American and

Caribbean Notebook. Trenton, NJ: Africa
World Press.
Lindfors, B. (1972). Interview with Kofi Awoonor.
In B. Lindfors, I. Munro, R. Priebe, & R. Sander
(eds.), Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in
Texas. Austin: African and Afro-American Research
Institute, University of Texas pp. 4764.
Maduakor, O. (1994). Kofi Awoonor as Critic. African
Literature Today 19, 821.
B
Bail, Murray
JOHN ATTRIDGE
Murray Bail occupies a unique place in recent

Australian literature, combining self-conscious
formalism with an idiosyncratic vision of Australianness. His small, highly wrought oeuvre
appears as a bold attempt to redefine the fiction
of national identity, eschewing the canons of
realism in favor of a more cosmopolitan modernist tradition.
Born on September 22, 1941, Bails childhood
and adolescence were spent in Adelaide, a city he
has described as the most boring place on Earth
(Hawley 44). The complacent parochialism of this
postwar milieu, dominated by the conservative
figure of Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, is
dissected in his novel Holdens Performance
(1987). Bail lived abroad between 1968 and
1975, sojourning in India and England and accumulating the travel experiences that would inform
his first novel, Homesickness (1980). With the
exception of compatriot Patrick White, Bail tends
to identify less with Australian writers than with a
European, avant garde literary tradition, acknowledging in particular the influence of Franz
Kafka (Davidson 274). His erudite interest in art
history and aesthetics is reflected in his 1981
monograph on the painter Ian Fairweather.
Bails writing has remained rigorously consistent in its style and preoccupations, although the
facetiousness of his early fiction has given way to a
more lyrical mood in the last two novels. All of his
four novels deliberately engage with the idea of
national character, often building their surreal
conceits and quirky theories around the totems
and icons of the Australian cultural imaginary.

Bails truculent take on national cliches, along
with his persistent interest in collecting and classification, were already apparent in his first book,
Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975).
In Huebler, a photographer attempts an exhaustive typology of humankind, while The
Drovers Wife a kind of suburban My Last
Duchess has a dentist narrate the back-story to
Russell Drysdales iconic painting.
Homesickness follows the itinerary of 13 Australians on a package tour that takes them to
Africa, England, Ecuador, New York, and the
USSR. The peculiarities and emotional handicaps
of the group emerge gradually against a backdrop
of satirical, often surreal, museums and attractions, like the Collection of Pygmies, containing
diminutive likenesses of Western political figures.
Although episodic in structure, the novel skillfully
develops the relationships that germinate among
the tourists, such as the romance between a
whimsical intellectual and the unhappy wife of
a sadistic dentist. Bails sharp ear for dialogue,
especially the tedium of small talk, bestows a vivid
reality on these elliptically sketched characters,
although some, like the lonely larrikin Garry
Atlas, are more burlesque than others.
Bail apparently regrets that a kind of applied
psychology has taken over story-telling, and
largely forgoes conventional characterization in
the endeavor to craft contemporary myths
(1998, 24). Both the strengths and weaknesses
of this approach are apparent in Holdens Performance, an ironic national epic that lacks the
readerly pleasures of identifying with characters,
but which effectively fuses witty sketches of

BARATHAM, GOPAL
Australias postwar evolution with the trajectory

of the eponymous protagonist. The stolid, mechanically minded Holden Shadbolt, whose
name alludes to a domestic car manufacturer,
drifts compliantly through a series of colorful
jobs and low-key adventures, eventually becoming a bodyguard to the prime minister, but
without achieving much understanding of himself or others. Alongside its portrait of uncritical,
inarticulate Australian masculinity, Holdens
Performance presents the image of an awkward,
adolescent nation, a young country, a place
existing in the consciousness as largely a blank
. . . where liberty is so vast it verged on nothingness (Bail 1987, 284).
Bails third novel, Eucalyptus (1998), was an
unwonted popular success, and brought his work
to the attention of an American readership. The
novels mocking gaze is tempered by a more overt
concern with the structure of myth and fairytale:
Holland, an eccentric landowner and collector of
eucalypts, offers his daughter Ellens hand in
marriage to the man who can name the several
hundred species assembled on his property. The
eventual victor is not the well-meaning but emotionally obtuse botanist Mr. Cave, but the
stranger who beguiles Ellen with fragmented,
enigmatic yarns, loosely inspired by the trees and
bearing buried echoes of Ellens own predicament. The novel seems to pit the narrative instinct
against the urge to classify and describe, although
both art and classification, the narrator says, serve
the same impulse to humanise nature (35, 131).
Eucalyptus won the Miles Franklin Award and the
Commonwealth Writers Prize. Bail followed its
success with a collection of two short stories,
Camouflage (2000).
Bails ongoing negotiation between a European
intellectual heritage and the laconic culture of the
Australian bush is staged most explicitly in The
Pages (2008), in which Erica Hazlehurst, a Sydney
philosophy professor, is commissioned by the
estate of a country-born autodidact to pass professional judgment on his lifes work. The novel
interleaves Wesley Antills pensees and spiritual
biography with Ericas own inverse trajectory
from her urban university to the backblocks of
western New South Wales, where she is offhandedly wooed by Wesleys younger brother,
Roger. Bails deft, understated manner of narrating emotional crises is used to great effect
981
here, while Wesley Antills European travels and

aphoristic notebooks suggest a slightly mocking
portrait of the artist.
SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF);
Humor and Satire (WF); Realism/Magic
Realism (WF); White, Patrick (WF)
Ackland, M. (2006). Murray Bail. In S. Samuels (ed.),
Australian Writers, 19752000.Detroit:Cengage
Gale, pp. 2430.
Bail, M. (1975). Contemporary Portraits and Other
Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Bail, M. (1980). Homesickness. Melbourne: Macmillan.
Bail, M. (1981). Ian Fairweather. Sydney: Bay.
Bail, M. (1987). Holdens Performance. London: Faber
and Faber.
Bail, M. (ed.) (1988). The Faber Book of Contemporary
Australian Short Stories. London: Faber and Faber.
Bail, M. (1989). Longhand: A Writers Notebook.
Melbourne: McPhee Gribble.
Bail, M. (1998). Eucalyptus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Bail, M. (2000). Camouflage. Melbourne: Text.
Bail, M. (2005). Notebooks. London: Harvill.
Bail, M. (2008). The Pages. London: Harvill.
Davidson, J. (1982). Interview: Murray Bail. Meanjin,
41(2), 264276.
Hawley, J. (1987). Murray Bail: Perfecting the Art of the
Selfish Writer. Sydney Morning Herald, p. 44
(May 16).
Observer, (1998). The Books Interview: How Many Trees
Make a Novel?, p. 17 (July 5).
Baratham, Gopal
LIEW-GEOK LEONG
Gopal Baratham was one of Singapores most

provocative writers in English. His frank, often
controversial treatment of religion, sexual relations, interethnic relationships, and the relations
between colonist and colonized, victor and vanquished, and the individual and the state gives
his fiction narrative breadth, while his pursuit of
the ambiguities and ambivalences of human
behavior imbues it with a realistic and skeptical
dimension.
Of ethnic Indian ancestry, Baratham was born
on September 9, 1935 in Singapore, the son of a
982
BARATHAM, GOPAL
doctor and a nurse. His father taught him to read

and write when he was 4, and both his father and
maternal uncle, enthusiasts of literature, encouraged him to read the English classics. Baratham
read Shakespeares King Lear with his father when
he was 8, and Miltons Paradise Lost with his uncle
when he was a little older. He attended St Andrews School when the Japanese occupation of
Malaya and Singapore ended in 1945 and, having
been persuaded by his father that a medical career
was preferable to a literary one, subsequently
graduated in medicine at the University of Malaya
(Singapore).
It was while Baratham was living abroad, first as
a graduate student of neurology at London Hospital, then as a member of the University of
Edinburghs Department of Neurosurgery, that
he began writing. Like many Singaporean writers
of his generation, Barathams first publications
were collections of short stories Figments of
Experience (1981), reissued as Love Letter and
Other Stories (1988a), and People Make You Cry
and Other Stories (1988b).
His first novel, A Candle or the Sun, was completed in 1985 but was rejected by Singaporean
publishers who thought that its content was seditious; it was eventually published in London in
1991. Depicting a political conspiracy by a religious group called the Children of the Book,
Candles plot uncannily anticipates the Marxist
plot uncovered in Singapore in 1987. Baratham
rejected the Commendation Award given Candle
by the National Book Development Council of
Singapore in 1992 because he felt it deserved the
top prize. While Candle explores the relationship
between religion and politics, Sayang (1991), the
Malay word for love, deals with the fortunes of
a group involved in sex, drugs, and religion.
Baratham has described Sayang as an ill-disguised allegory lifted from the New Testament
(2001, 379).
Barathams third collection, Memories that
Glow in the Dark (1995b), comprises 14 short
stories 11 of which deal with sexual awakenings,
escapades, and thwarted sexual desire presented
with characteristic candor. The City of Forgetting
(2001) collects his published stories and includes
two new ones (Small Change and Shelter).
Moonrise, Sunset (1996), Barathams third novel,
is a murder mystery with an improbable plot, slick
dialogue, and the ingredients for an entertaining
read: a seance, kinky sex, and psychosexual

theorizing.
Barathams fiction exhibits a pervasive preoccupation with the certainty of doubt, the unreliability or partiality of memory, and the subjective
ambivalences of truth. All, in varying degrees,
inform Living Memory, whose elderly British
protagonist recalls the glory days of Empire. The
historical background of the Japanese occupation
of Malaya and Singapore, and the Communist
insurgency that followed the return of the British
after the Japanese surrender, provides the grimmer tenor of The Interview, in which the interrogator-cum-torturer of a British prisoner of war
is executed for war crimes, and Dutch Courage,
where a Dutch captain confronts an enemy saboteur who was once his ally against the Japanese.
Death, one of the few certainties Baratham acknowledges, is poignantly treated in Roses in
December and Mandarin. In Barathams many
love stories, like Island, Love Letter, and
Gretchens Choice, protagonists are entangled
in relationships that are usually denied convenient, amicable solutions.
A political liberal, Baratham was often critical
of the long-ruling Peoples Action Party. The
Personal History of an Island in Memories critiques the evolution of Singapore from British
colony to independent state, one in which the
new freedom was worse than the old bondage
(Baratham 1995b, 5). Baratham wrote The Caning
of Michael Fay (1994) a national bestseller to
protest against the caning and imprisonment of
an American teenager for vandalism and theft.
Baratham was a manic-depressive whose personal life was marked by several crises. In 1990, he
underwent six coronary bypasses. In 1991, one of
his four sons committed suicide. Baratham and
Pauline Wong were divorced after more than 30
years of marriage. He died of complications from
pneumonia in 2002.
SEE ALSO: Politics/Activism and
Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF)
Ban, K. C. (2000). Of Memory and Desire: The Stories of
Gopal Baratham. Singapore: Times Books.
Baratham, G. (1981). Figments of Experience. Singapore:
Times Books.
BISSOONDATH, NEIL
Baratham, G. (1988a). Love Letter and Other Stories.

Singapore: Times Books.
Baratham, G. (1988b). People Make You Cry and Other
Stories. Singapore: Times Books.
Baratham, G. (1990). After Words. British Medical
Journal, 300(6738), 1531.
Baratham, G. (1991a). A Candle or the Sun. London:
Serpents Tail.
Baratham, G. (1991b). Sayang. Singapore: Times
Books.
Baratham, G. (1992). Ready for the Next Century? Index
on Censorship, 21(5), 4.
Baratham, G. (1994). The Caning of Michael Fay.
Singapore: KRP.
Baratham, G. (1995a). Defining Ourselves. Asia
Magazine, 33(K-21), 30.
Baratham, G. (1995b). Memories that Glow in the Dark:
A Collection of Short Stories. Singapore: Pipal Tree.
Baratham, G. (1997). The Scapel and the Pen: A
Memoir. Singapore Medical Journal, 38(4), N45.
Baratham, G. (2000). Of Memory and Desire: The Stories
of Gopal Baratham (ed. K. C. Ban). Singapore: Times
Books.
Baratham, G. (2001). The City of Forgetting: The
Collected Stories of Gopal Baratham (ed. K. C. Ban).
Singapore: Times Books.
Kanaganayakam, C. (2002). Ritual, Religion and
Cultural Transformation in Gopal Barathams
Moonrise, Sunset. In M. A. Quayum & P. Wicks
(eds.), Singaporean Literature in English: A Critical
Reader. Serdang, Malaysia: Universiti Putra Malaysia
Press, pp. 38491.
Klein, R. (ed.) (2001). Gopal Baratham. In Interlogue:
Studies in Singapore Literature, vol. 4: Interviews.
Singapore: Ethos pp. 80103.
Lee, T. J. (dir.) (2003). Vocation. [From The City of
Forgetting.] The Singapore Short Story Project,
episode 1. Film Formations for Mediacorp TV 12.
Leong, L. G. (2000). Dissenting Voices: Political
Engagements in the Singaporean Novel in English
World Literature Today, 74(2), 28592.
Bissoondath, Neil
RUBY S. RAMRAJ
Neil Bissoondath, a Trinidad-born Canadian fiction writer and essayist, is concerned primarily
with how immigrants adjust to adopted homelands particularly Canada. Characteristically he
approaches immigrants less as representatives of
ethnic groups than as individuals; though he does
not ignore cultural particularities, he addresses
983
human commonalities rather than differences.

Writing about diverse immigrant populations, he
has (controversially) criticized Canadas policy of
multiculturalism as divisive. Moreover, although
he portrays invariably sympathetically immigrants lives as harsh, he questions whether
their plights are of their own making, often suggesting that those who fled corruption and violence are better off (if only marginally) in Canada.
Born on April 19, 1955, Bissoondath immigrated to Canada at 18. After obtaining a BA in French
from Torontos York University in 1977, he
taught French and English in Ontario before
writing full-time and eventually moving to Quebec City. Bissoondaths uncle V. S. Naipaul felt
little regret leaving Trinidad for England, and
Bissoondath has expressed similar feelings about
moving to Canada.
Bissoondaths well-received first book, Digging
Up the Mountains (1985), is an impressive collection of stories, mainly about new Canadians from
the West Indies but including Japanese and European immigrants as well. His first novel, A
Casual Brutality (1988), a stinging indictment of
Caribbean socio-politics and some Canadians
reception of immigrants, relates the life of an
immigrant from a fictional Caribbean island. It
was followed by a second book of stories, On the
Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows (1990) and five novels: The Innocence of Age (1993), The Worlds
within Her (1998; nominated for a Governor
Generals Award), Doing the Heart Good
(2002), The Unyielding Clamour of the Night
(2005), and The Soul of All Great Designs (2008).
The emotionally alienated, ostracized immigrants that populate Bissoondaths fictions are
acutely aware of their uncertain position in the
divide between original and adopted homelands.
In stories such as Insecurity in Digging Up and
Security and Kira and Anya in On the Eve,
Bissoondath creates tension by both sympathizing with and censuring his characters. Protagonists feel trapped yet secure in communities that
are both cages and places of refuge. Bissoondath
often omits details of nationality and ethnicity, as
if to underscore the universality of immigrants
and refugees emotional and spiritual experiences.
His work consistently explores the circumstances that force immigrants from their homelands violence, prejudice, and political corruption. He does, however, raise larger issues of
984
BISSOONDATH, NEIL
responsibility and universal human rights, especially in A Casual Brutality and The Unyielding
Clamour, in which Raj and Arun respectively, like
Naipauls narrator in Tell Me Who to Kill
(1971), are victims of violence and atrocities;
despairing and haunted by a sense of nihilism,
their narratives invite readers to consider who is
responsible for such negativity the individuals,
their societies and governments, or historical
circumstances.
The Innocence of Age (1993) and Doing the
Heart Good (2002) focus on white immigrants
and their second-generation children born and
raised in Canadian cities. Gilbert Taggart of Innocence, an Italian Canadian initially resentful of
immigrants, eventually realizes the importance of
love and understanding for others. A similar
epiphany occurs in Doing when Alistair Mackenzie, a retired professor, confronts his bigotry. In
The Worlds within Her, Bissoondath further
downplays ethnicity by interweaving communal
and family issues in his portrayal of a secondgeneration immigrant, Yasmin, returning to the
Caribbean with her mothers ashes. Yasmin connects with unfamiliar extended family members
and re-establishes her roots, learning about the
racial and political problems that forced her
parents to leave.
The Unyielding Clamour is exceptional in
Bissoondaths oeuvre in addressing global terrorism through an involved plot complete with flashbacks and cinematic dissolves. He tells a compelling story of a privileged but idealistic youth,
Arun, who leaves his urban home (in a fictionalized Sri Lanka) to become a schoolteacher in a
poverty-stricken village school. As Arun becomes
increasingly disenchanted with the squalor and
despair of his students lives, his darkening vision
infects the whole novel.
The Soul of All Great Designs is on the surface
a love story between Sue (Sumintra) and Eric,
both of Indo-Canadian ancestry. Multicultural
themes are subordinated to questions of personal
identity can one recreate oneself, and what is lost
in the transformation? The characters are psychologically complex, the narrative intricate and
suspenseful.
Bissoondaths controversial non-fiction book,
Selling Illusions (1994), argues strongly against
prevailing celebratory views of Canadian multiculturalism as a form of nation building. Bis-
soondath rejects the multicultural mosaic and

so-called hyphenated identities as separating
ethnic groups from mainstream society and
each other, thus working against a necessary
assimilation.
In fiction and essays, Neil Bissoondath embraces contentious subjects and articulates his
concerns about injustices in Canada and the
larger world. In an interview, he affirms that in
his writing he speaks to the human heart (Kruk
64), yet he apportions blame to both victim and
victimizer when warranted.
SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF);
Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Politics/Activism and

Birbalsingh, F. (2005). Neil Bissoondath: IndoCaribbeanCanadian Diaspora. New Delhi: Rewat.
Bissoondath, N. (1985). Digging Up the Mountains.
Toronto: Macmillan.
Bissoondath, N. (1988). A Casual Brutality. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Bissoondath, N. (1990). On the Eve of Uncertain
Tomorrows. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys.
Bissoondath, N. (1993). The Innocence of Age. Toronto:
Knopf.
Bissoondath, N. (1994). Selling Illusions: The Cult of
Multiculturalism in Canada. Toronto: Penguin.
Bissoondath, N. (1998). The Worlds within Her.
Toronto: Knopf.
Bissoondath, N. (2002). Doing the Heart Good.
Toronto: Cormorant.
Bissoondath, N. (2005). The Unyielding Clamour of the
Night. Toronto: Cormorant.
Bissoondath, N. (2007). The Age of Confession: The
Antonine MailletNorthop Frye Lecture. Fredericton,
NB: Goose Lane.
Bissoondath, N. (2008). The Soul of All Great Designs.
Toronto: Cormorant.
Genetsch, M. (2008). The Texture of Identity: The Fiction
of M. G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton
Mistry. Toronto: TSAR.
Kruk, L. (2004). All Voices Belong to Me: An Interview
with Neil Bissoondath. Canadian Literature, 180,
5369.
Naipaul, V. S. (1971). In a Free State. London: Deutsch.
Van Toorn, P. (1995). Building on Common Ground:
An Interview with Neil Bissoondath. Canadian
Literature, 147, 12735.
BLACK BRITISH FICTION
Van Toorn, P. (1996). Neil Bissoondath and His Works.

In R. Lecker, J. David, & E. Quigley (eds.), Canadian
Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series, vol. 2.
Toronto: ECW, pp. 2370.
Black British Fiction

ABIGAIL WARD
Black British fiction is an expanding area of

twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.
The term black British literature has been used
since the 1980s, but it has been controversial
because both black and British are deceptively complex terms that cause problems of categorization for writers and critics. Novelist and poet
Fred DAguiar raised his objections in his essay
Against Black British Literature, arguing that
the term marginalizes black creativity and fails to
recognize it as part of, rather than distinct from,
Britishness (106). There is, equally, a danger of
homogenization of failing to recognize the
diversity of peoples within this grouping. Moreover, as many black British authors now reside
outside the UK Caryl Phillips and George
Lamming, among others the label seems particularly inappropriate for them. As literary critic
John McLeod has argued, the transnational elements of much black writing in Britain may be
compromised by viewing the work as solely British (2002, 59). Black writing in Britain, an
alternative phrase deployed by some critics, is an
attempt to avoid the closed-off nature of black
British, suggesting instead the potential for
movement, heterogeneity, and migration, recalling cultural theorist Stuart Halls emphasis on
diasporic identities constantly producing and
reproducing themselves anew (402).
As the historian Peter Fryer has noted (1), there
has been a black presence in Britain since Roman
times, and the earliest literary writings in existence
(fictional or otherwise) by black people in Britain
are the eighteenth-century slave narratives and
poems by such figures as Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, and Mary Prince. In the twentieth
century, although authors like C. L. R. James and
Una Marson were writing in Britain in the 1930s,
the docking of the SS Empire Windrush with 492
Caribbean immigrants on June 22, 1948 was a
crucial moment of arrival. The Windrush period
985
saw the migration of such literary figures as Lamming, Sam Selvon, Wilson Harris, Beryl Gilroy,
V. S. Naipaul, and Andrew Salkey. The postwar
novels or short stories by these writers were often
set in Britains metropolitan centers, typically
London, and are characterized by a sense of alienation and struggle in the unforgiving social climate
of the time. Authors of the late 1940s onward often
wrote of the dangerously intensifying racial tensions that culminated in the 1958 Nottingham and
Notting Hill riots. Of course, Caribbean migrants
were not the only non-whites in Britain at this
time; South Asian and African migration also
intensified from 1948 until the passing of repressive legislation in 1962, 1968, and finally 1971,
when the Immigration Act severely restricted primary immigration. Buchi Emechetas semiautobiographical novels In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974) epitomized for many the
struggle to exist as a female Nigerian migrant in
1960s Britain. Her protagonist, a young mother
with an unsupportive husband, experiences both
racism and sexism, and has the added complications of finding accommodation for, and raising,
her young family amid white fears of a growing
black population.
The 1990s saw the subject of transatlantic
slavery explored in novels by a second generation
of black British writers. Caryl Phillipss Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993), S. I.
Martins Incomparable World (1996), Fred
DAguiars The Longest Memory (1994) and
Feeding the Ghosts (1997), and David Dabydeens
A Harlots Progress (1999) all explored, in diverse
ways, the relationship between current concerns
of late twentieth-century Britain (including ongoing racial anxieties) and Britains oft-ignored
slave past. Some important British Asian writing
also appeared, including Hanif Kureishis The
Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album
(1995), and Meera Syals Anita and Me (1996)
and Life Isnt All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), the latter
novels recounting young Asian female experiences of British life. Other black British fiction
produced in this period by migrant or Britishborn authors includes writing by Andrea Levy,
Ben Okri, Courttia Newland, Jackie Kay, and
Diran Adebayo. Adebayos Some Kind of Black
(1996) explored urban black British identities
and politics, while Jackie Kays novel Trumpet
(1998) exploded boundaries of gender and
986
BOYD, MARTIN
sexuality in the poetic story of transvestite jazz

trumpeter Joss Moody.
At the turn of the century, Zadie Smiths acclaimed bestseller White Teeth (2000), with its
ironic investigation of Happy Multicultural
Land (465), won several literary prizes, and
follow-up novels The Autograph Man (2002) and
On Beauty (2005) reinforced her stature as one of
Britains most successful contemporary authors.
Like Kureishi, Smith often uses the United States
as a comparative site for exploring black British
identities, whereas Bernardine Evaristos novel in
verse The Emperors Babe (2001) makes a historical comparison between Roman Londinium and
twenty-first-century Britain. Evaristo uses the
story of Zuleika a young black woman living
in 211 AD to raise contemporary race, class, and
gender issues. With her careful blend of prose,
poetry, and script in The Emperors Babe, and in
Lara (1997) and Soul Tourists (2005), Evaristo
makes a bold contribution to black British fiction
and challenges the limits of this continually developing genre.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF);
Indian Fiction (WF); London in Fiction (BIF);
Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora
(BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South
Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction
of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West African

Ball, J. C. (2004). Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction
and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto:
DAguiar, F. (1989). Against Black British Literature. In
M. Butcher (ed.), Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers and
Critics. Sydney: Dangaroo, pp. 106114.
Fryer, P. (1984). Staying Power: The History of Black
People in Britain. London: Pluto.
Hall, S. (1993). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In
P. Williams & L. Chrisman (eds.), Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader.
Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
pp. 392403.
Low, G., & Wynne-Davies, M. (eds.) (2006). A Black
British Canon? Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
McLeod, J. (2002). Some Problems with British in a

Black British Canon. Wasafiri, 36, 569.
McLeod, J. (2004). Postcolonial London: Rewriting the
Metropolis. Abingdon: Routledge.
Owusu, K. (ed.) (2000). Black British Culture and
Society: A Text Reader. London: Routledge.
Procter, J. (ed.) (2000). Writing Black Britain
19481998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology.
Procter, J. (2003). Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British
Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Sesay, K. (ed.) (2005). Write Black Write British: From
Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Hertford:
Hansib.
Hamilton.
Stein, M. (2004). Black British Literature: Novels of
Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University
Press.
Boyd, Martin
KIERAN DOLIN
An upper-class Australian expatriate who spent

most of his adult life in England, Martin a Beckett
Boyd explored the complexities of Anglo-Australian identity and chronicled the decline of aristocratic power and culture in the twentieth century.
Having witnessed the end of an old order in
World War I, he eventually wrote with great
discernment and conviction about the psychological and social costs of modern warfare.
Boyd was born on June 10, 1893 in Lucerne,
Switzerland. Shortly thereafter, the family fortunes were halved by an economic depression,
so Boyd grew up on a dairy farm outside Melbourne. His secure, happy childhood and youth
ended with the outbreak of war. Boyd used family
connections to obtain a commission in an English
regiment and served on the Western Front before
transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. Returning
to Australia after the war, he felt acutely unsettled
and out of place. With an allowance from his
parents, he returned to England, where, after a
brief attempt at monastic life, he began to write
fiction.
Boyd made a modest living as a novelist of
manners in the 1920s and 1930s. His third novel,
The Montforts (1928), won the Gold Medal of the
Australian Literature Society, and its revelations
of a Beckett family history gave it local notoriety,
BOYD, MARTIN
but otherwise Boyds work was little noticed in

Australia. It was not until his twelfth book, Lucinda Brayford (1946), was selected by the Book of
the Month Club that Boyd found critical and
popular acclaim. On the strength of this success,
he returned to Australia in 1948 intending to
restore his grandparents country house. Physically, this dream of recreating the past was a
failure, but Boyds discovery of his grandmothers
diaries inspired an ambitious fictional architecture. Isolated and too English in Australia, he
returned to England, but felt alienated there as
well. He became convinced that Italy represented
an ideal balance of nature and culture, and moved
there in 1957. In 1965 Boyds autobiography, Day
of My Delight (1965), was published, and he died
in Rome in 1972.
In the opening pages of The Cardboard Crown
(1952), the first novel in his Langton Quartet, Boyd
wrote that Creation only comes from an inner
tension (11) a statement applicable to himself.
He felt drawn to both Australia and Europe, but
could find no abiding sense of home in either place.
He acknowledged the ethical authority of both
classical and Christian traditions, adhering to a
religious view of reality, including a moral law,
while celebrating the sensual joys afforded by
natural beauty, aesthetic pleasure, and the human
body. He tried to reconcile these in a consciously
developed philosophy that combined Christianity
and aestheticism, and his fiction and autobiographical works often stage dramatic conflicts
between this worldview and materialist or puritanical alternatives. His writing is marked by both
worldly wit and romantic idealism.
As his middle name indicates, Boyd was born if
not to the purple, then at least within its penumbra. His maternal grandfather, a chief justice and
lieutenant governor of Victoria, was descended
collaterally from Saint Thomas a Becket. Boyds
fascination with family history and with genetic
and cultural inheritance provided the imaginative
source for his best writing. Over several novels he
shaped and reshaped aspects of personal and
family experiences into an embodiment of their
class and its eclipse in colonial and metropolitan
society. His first work in this vein, The Montforts,
was a family saga tracing through the descendants
of two brothers competing systems of value one
creative and unruly, the other legalistic and conformist. In Lucinda Brayford the a Beckett avatars,
987
the Lanfrancs, are minor characters in a realist

novel focused on the newly wealthy pastoralist
class represented by the Brayfords. Boyd offers a
detailed portrait of his sympathetic heroine, tracing her growth from Australian innocent through
marriage into the English aristocracy, while following the horrific personal impact of both world
wars to a subdued, sorrowful hope. Lucinda
Brayford achieves a realistic but critical perspective on the adaptation of English customs in
Australia, the attractions and flaws of a decaying
aristocracy, and the fate of moral absolutes in
modernity.
In the first three Langton novels, The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man (1955), and
Outbreak of Love (1957), Boyd foregrounds the
search for knowledge about the past through his
narrator Guy Langtons discovery of ancestral
diaries. As in much recent fiction, these documents are the springboard for interpretation,
investigation, and a creative filling in of gaps. The
result is a series of epiphanies, what Guy in
Outbreak calls illuminations . . . of forgotten
tracts of [our] minds (6). The poignant comedy
of this family mythmaking is abandoned in the
final volume, When Blackbirds Sing (1962), as
Boyd revisits his World War I experiences. Focusing squarely on the ethical violation of killing
another in hand-to-hand combat, the novel leads
its protagonist Dominic Langton to a radical
critique of war and the centrality of violence in
English aristocratic life.
Boyd was the literary member of Australias
best-known artistic family, being uncle to the
painter Arthur Boyd and his siblings. His stories
of complex cultural affiliation are deeply infused
with classical and Christian myths, and with a
belief in the power of art, music, and literature to
challenge, inspire, and delight.
Historical Fiction (WF); Migration,
Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF)
Boyd, M. (1928). The Montforts. London: Constable.
Boyd, M. (1946). Lucinda Brayford. London: Cresset.
Boyd, M. (1952). The Cardboard Crown. London:
Cresset.
988
BRAND, DIONNE
Boyd, M. (1955). A Difficult Young Man. London:

Cresset.
Boyd, M. (1957). Outbreak of Love. London: John
Murray.
Boyd, M. (1962). When Blackbirds Sing. New York:
Abelard-Schuman.
Boyd, M. (1965). Day of My Delight. Sydney:
Lansdowne.
Boyd, M. (1988). The Langton Quartet (intro.
B. McFarlane). Melbourne: Heinemann.
Hooton, J. (2002). The Self as Homeless: The Case of
Martin Boyd. In R. Dalziell (ed.), Selves Crossing
Cultures: Autobiography and Globalization.
Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, pp.
7990.
Lever, S. (2002). Martin Boyd (18931972).
In S. Samuels (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography,
vol. 260: Australian Writers, 19151950. Detroit:
CengageGale,pp.1421.
Niall, B. (1988). Martin Boyd: A Life. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press.
Brand, Dionne
HEATHER SMYTH
Dionne Brand comes to fiction through poetry,

and her fiction demonstrates a poets tautness of
image and interrogation of language. She also
comes to writing through a commitment to social
justice, and the themes of her poetry and prose
the precarious lives of women and racialized
minorities in capitalist systems, the haunting of
traumas like the Middle Passage, the rootlessness
of the diaspora, and the hard-won joy of finding
compatriots have helped her work define Caribbean and Canadian writing.
Brand was born in Guayguayare, Trinidad on
January 7, 1953, and emigrated to Canada in 1970,
where she joined the Black Power, feminist, and
socialist movements. She began her writing career
with three poetry collections for adults and the
childrens collection Earth Magic (1979). Then,
deciding that writing is not enough (1994, 12),
Brand joined the socialist revolution in Grenada
in 1983 as an information officer and witnessed
the deaths of friends during the American invasion. She revisits this formative experience
throughout her work, including the poetry collection Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984) and the
novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). Brand
also writes short fiction (Sans Souci and Other
Stories, 1988) and essays (Bread Out of Stone,

1994) and has created three oral histories and
four documentary films about women of color.
She lives in Toronto.
Brands 1990 collection of poetry No Language
is Neutral marked her growing prominence as a
Canadian poet. Innovative in its prose/poetry
form and use of the Caribbean demotic, No
Language also introduced Brands exploration of
her lesbianism. No Language offered images and
the title for Brands first novel, In Another Place,
Not Here, which juxtaposes the perspectives of
two lovers Elizete, a cane-field laborer, and
Verlia, a Black Power revolutionary just before
the military invasion of their Caribbean island,
recognizable as Grenada, that results in Verlias
death. The title illustrates a deferral of belonging:
Elizetes subsequent undocumented migration to
Toronto shows that no place, and no country, can
be home to these women who love women in a
world that does not, and who carry the legacies of
the Middle Passage into the defeats of a capitalist
present. Elizetes ancestor Adela articulates the
losses endured by enslaved Africans: upon her
arrival in the Caribbean she done calculate the
heart of this place and gives up on names, calling
it Nowhere (1996, 18). All of Brands work takes
up this paradox: that although the incalculable
losses of the Middle Passage haunt all subsequent
experience, the geographies to which diasporic
Africans have traveled must be calculated and
mapped, and their hearts found, in attentive
testing of language.
In calculating these geographies, Brands characters move constantly and often uneasily
through spaces, marking a preoccupation with
mobility, border crossing, and the sea, as reflected
in the title of her Governor Generals Awardwinning poetry collection Land to Light On
(1997). I love this notion of wandering forever
to find a place, says Brand in an interview; That
search is a way of reaching beyond boundaries
(Methot 16). Her next novel, At the Full and
Change of the Moon (1999), charts the diasporic
wandering that flows from the Middle Passage,
illustrated by the far-flung descendants of Marie
Ursule, an enslaved woman who organizes a mass
slave suicide on a Trinidad plantation in 1824.
The fluidity of this wandering is forecast in the
eyes of her daughter Bola, full like an ocean,
whom she sends to freedom like sending

BRINK, ANDRE
messages, but not knowing their destination

(1999, 201). Marie Ursules liberating and tragic
act catalyzes the dispersal and temporary landings
of six generations of descendants, who drift to
Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, passing their relatives anonymously in the street.
All of Brands work explores a tension between
an ambivalent desire for destination and the
reality of ruptured history. In a memoir Brand
reflects on the irrecoverable losses instituted by
past and contemporary imperialisms (2001, 24).
However, she refuses nostalgia for homeland,
whether in Africa or a fuller sense of belonging to
Canada, opting for an alternative human community forged in solidarity between people sharing
histories of dispossession. The scope of these
alliances is both transnational (in the long poem
Inventory, 2006) and local: in Map, the long poem
Thirsty (2002), and the novel What We All Long For
(2005), Brand explores metropolitan cities as
places that demonstrate how we [are] all implicated in each other (2001, 166). What We All Long
For, which won the City of Toronto Book Award,
marks a shift in Brands style in its less poetic prose
and focus on characterization. The four secondgeneration migrant protagonists, however, by
boldly self-defining as citizens of Toronto rather
than Canada, illustrate the recurring themes of
Brands work. Tuyen, Oku, Carla, and Jackie
improvise their lives, creating the world they want
through visual art, poetry, and activism. Tuyens
art installations show the affinities of the intimate
but anonymous city, and the heterogeneous migrations that lead people there. Similarly, Brand
takes the measure of catastrophe and translates it
into something open and resonant.
The City in Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction
(WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration,
Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/
Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism
and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities
in Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
Brand, D. (1978). Fore Day Morning. Toronto:
Khoisan.
Brand, D. (1979). Earth Magic: Poetry for Young People.
Toronto: Kids Can Press.
989
Brand, D. (1982). Primitive Offensive. Toronto:

Williams-Wallace.
Brand, D. (1983). Winter Epigrams & Epigrams to
Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia. Toronto:
Williams-Wallace.
Brand, D. (1984). Chronicles of the Hostile Sun. Toronto:
Williams-Wallace.
Brand, D. (1988). Sans Souci and Other Stories.
Stratford, ON: Williams-Wallace.
Brand, D. (1990). No Language is Neutral. Toronto:
Coach House.
Brand, D. (1994). Bread Out of Stone. Toronto: Coach
House.
Brand, D. (1996). In Another Place, Not Here. Toronto:
Knopf.
Brand, D. (1997). Land to Light On. Toronto:
Brand, D. (1999). At the Full and Change of the Moon.
Toronto: Knopf.
Brand, D. (2001). A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes
to Belonging. Toronto: Doubleday.
Brand, D. (2002). Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart.
Brand, D. (2005). What We All Long For. Toronto:
Knopf.
Brand, D. (2006). Inventory. Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart.
Methot, S. (1999). Shes a Wanderer: Dionne Brand.
Quill and Quire (Apr.), 16.
Brink, Andre
MARITA WENZEL
The prolific South African author Andre Brink

has published 25 novels, 14 plays, six travel journals, and several short stories. His knowledge of
European languages, especially French, has inspired him to translate a variety of literary works
into Afrikaans, and he has promoted Afrikaans
literature by translating prominent authors into
English and publishing most of his own novels in
both languages simultaneously. An intense interest in South African society and politics remains
the mainstay of his oeuvre.
Born on May 29, 1935 in South Africa, Brink
graduated from a Christian university with separate honors degrees in English (1958) and Afrikaans (1959). After graduation, a thirst for knowledge and experience impelled him to travel; a
sojourn in France during the 1960s exposed him
to new ideas and led him to question and rebel
against South Africas apartheid system. His first
990

BRINK, ANDRE
novels, of which The Ambassador (1964) and Orgie

(1965) are two of the most significant, were experimental in form, modernist in sensibility, and
existentialist in influence. In The Ambassador, set
in Paris, the protagonist begins a journey of discovery and self-realization through erotic experience, a pattern that recurs in many later novels.
On returning from Europe, Brink sided with
other young dissident Afrikaans writers protesting against apartheid, and he entered a second
phase by focusing, like Nadine Gordimer, on
writing committed literature. During this period,
controversial plots and themes openly challenged
the proclaimed ideologies of apartheid as well as
common religious beliefs. His disdain for racial
discrimination and political oppression was
grounded in the historical contexts of slavery,
and he featured sexual relationships across the
color bar in novels such as An Instant in the Wind
(1976), A Chain of Voices (1982), and An Act of
Terror (1991). His defiant stance toward the
government earned him criticism from peers and
caused two novels, Looking on Darkness (1974)
and A Dry White Season (1979), to be banned by
the Censorship Board.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Brink used
fiction to contest the validity of reality and historical documentation. He experimented with
literary conventions and employed techniques
such as magic realism to subvert and challenge
Afrikaners staunch adherence to nation, tradition, and church. These novels express an acute
awareness of the construction of stories and their
role in society, and the meaning of history; they
take a postmodernist stance that challenges readers to take action and assume responsibility for
their future for instance, by leaving endings
unresolved. Devils Valley (1998) is particularly
concerned with the hypocrisy of apartheid and
Christian orthodoxy, which are exposed in the
juxtaposition of past and present as the valley is
populated with eccentric characters and resurrected spirits from times past.
Brink uses myths and stories from African oral
traditions to conflate the histories of indigenous
and European inhabitants and show a shared,
common past that could, with concerted cooperative effort, develop into one future for all. For
instance, Imaginings of Sand (1996) traces the
female lineage of Kristien from South Africas
earliest beginnings to illustrate the role of women
and their omission from historical writing. Praying Mantis (2005) invokes stories of the San god,
Tsui-Goab, and explores beliefs and myths that
originate from them; it also articulates the conflicting perspectives of colonizers and Christian
missionaries with indigenous beliefs. Through
intertextuality, Brink makes history more comprehensive, interspersing it with anecdotes and
stories that subtly underline the fictionality of
historical documentation in order to generate
new metaphors and myths.
Since the late 1990s, Brinks ongoing third
phase has focused on the role and position of the
writer. In response to challenges posed by the new
democratic political dispensation, and spurred by
the example of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission to scrutinize and confront the past,
Brink has explored gender and race from a more
personal as well as a historical perspective. In
particular, slavery, feminism, and the sexual objectification of women attain more prominence in
his novels The Rights of Desire (2000), The Other
Side of Silence (2002), and Before I Forget (2004).
Brinks most recent novel, Other Lives, was published in 2008, and his memoir, A Fork in the
Road, was published in 2009.
Brink is a three-time recipient of the South
African Central News Agency Prize and has been
shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize (in 1976 and
1978); he has also won the Martin Luther King
Prize (1980) and three prestigious awards from
France. He obtained his PhD from Rhodes University in 1975, and has taught there and at the
University of Cape Town. He has been active as a
literary critic with a thorough theoretical grounding. His status as novelist and academic has been
recognized with honorary doctorates from four
universities in South Africa and one in France.
Gordimer, Nadine (WF); Historical
Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and
Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic
Realism (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF)
Brink, A. (1964). The Ambassador. Johannesburg: CNA.
Brink, A. (1965). Orgie [Orgy]. Cape Town: Malherbe.
Brink, A. (1974). Looking on Darkness. London: Allen.
Brink, A. (1976). An Instant in the Wind. London: Allen.
BRODBER, ERNA
Brink, A. (1979). A Dry White Season. Harmondsworth:

Penguin.
Brink, A. (1982). A Chain of Voices. London: Faber and
Faber.
Brink, A. (1988). States of Emergency. London: Faber
and Faber.
Brink, A. (1991). An Act of Terror. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Brink, A. (1996a). Imaginings of Sand. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Brink, A. (1996b). Reinventing a Continent (Revisiting
History in the Literature of the New South Africa: A
Personal Testimony). World Literature Today, 70(1),
1723.
Brink, A. (1998a). Devils Valley. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Brink, A. (1998b). The Novel: Language and Narrative
from Cervantes to Calvino. London: Macmillan.
Brink, A. (2000). The Rights of Desire. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Brink, A. (2002). The Other Side of Silence. Secker and
Warburg.
Brink, A. (2004). Before I Forget. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Brink, A. (2005). Praying Mantis. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Brink, A. (2008). Other Lives. Chicago: Sourcebooks
Landmark.
Brink, A. (2009). A Fork in the Road: A Memoir.
Meintjes, G. (1996). A Chain of African Voices: The
Prose Oeuvre of Andre P. Brink. In E. Ngara (ed.),
New Writing from Southern Africa: Authors Who Have
Become Prominent Since 1980. London: Currey, pp.
319.
Brodber, Erna
MICHELENE ADAMS
Jamaican Erna Brodber has published extensively

in her fields of training sociology and history
but she also produces some of the most original
fiction in the West Indian region. She has published four critically acclaimed novels: Jane and
Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), Myal
(1988), Louisiana (1994), and The Rainmakers
Mistake (2007). Her books have garnered awards,
including the Commonwealth Writers Prize,
which she received in 1989 for Myal. Brodbers
formally inventive texts are thematically concerned with womens social and psychological
development, but the principal focus is the history of Caribbean blacks, how that history has
991
shaped their present, and how its negative impact

might be diminished. Although the Middle Passage and its aftermath are very real fragments of
the past for her, her vision extends beyond the
potentially imprisoning subjects of slavery and
racism. She looks further, into the ancestral past,
and taps into resources that have the potential to
expand the territory of history and to foster more
composite West Indian selves. Her fiction has
been associated with that of the visionary and
influential writers Wilson Harris and Kamau
Brathwaite.
Brodber was born on April 20, 1940, in the rural
village of Woodside, St. Mary, to parents who
respected education and were active in their
community. Her inherited social consciousness
has distinguished her career and her writing.
As well as serving as lecturer in sociology at the
University of the West Indies for a number of
years, she has worked for the Jamaican government and the Institute of Social and Economic
Research (ISER), for which she has produced
studies on subjects of social concern such as life
in Jamaican yards, gender stereotypes, and the
abandonment of children. In addition, she works
actively in Woodside, where she still resides,
serving on its council and spearheading Emancipation Day festivities. Her establishment of Blackspace in Woodside best demonstrates her vision:
here blacks and others are educated about the
experiences of Africans and their descendants and
discover alternative ways of seeing histories that
have previously been represented by whites.
Blackspace hosts classes for children, forums, and
reasoning sessions, where those who identify as
black discuss topical issues and come up with
practical means of dealing with social problems.
Brodbers research as a historian and sociologist has always intersected with her fiction. In fact,
she took up fiction in earnest in the 1970s to help
work through the issues she was tackling with her
students at the University of the West Indies
(OCallaghan 72). She has stated that she came
to fiction because she felt there were some issues
that she could not share in any other way (personal communication, June 2008). Her fiction is
difficult. More than simply non-linear, it generates a fluid sense of time in which events from the
past are interspersed with those of the present
without explanation or obvious context. The dead
often communicate with the living and, in one
992
BRODBER, ERNA
novel, they reincarnate through various generations, unmooring both time and space. In each
novel, narrative voices combine to create a more
composite picture of the community. The works
are multiform, shape-shifting from more traditional narrative and dialogue into song, folktale,
nursery rhyme, chant, and more. They are always
diffuse and yet Brodber manages an uncanny
symmetry, largely by means of repetition and by
her skillful handling of motif. She moves among
the registers on the Creole continuum an especially rich linguistic array born of the complex
history of the region and provides a soundscape
that reflects the Caribbeans multitextured
culture.
In engaging with the past, Brodber moves
beyond the need to accuse to the desire to help
heal the wound of history and encourage a renewed vision. A major source of renewal is African-rooted spirituality. Her writing consistently
reveals the bridges that connect peoples of the
African diaspora. Brodbers vision recalls writers
such as Edouard Glissant and Harris who believe
mythology is inextricable from history: Anancy,
the Caribbean Spider Trickster, is often present in
her texts as a figure which initiates the tumult that
will lead to necessary change. The central characters are usually females who need healing and
must journey toward wholeness. The particular
struggles that West Indian women undergo are
represented, but invariably, through their engagement with aspects of their ancestral past that have
been submerged and discounted by the dominant
culture, these women uncover their true subjectivity and find a place alongside men. The ideal
society that Brodber imagines is balanced in terms
of gender.
Brodbers concept of Africa as the source of
healing for black West Indians is not unique, but
she has set herself apart by constructing texts
whose radical forms reflect this vision and by
focusing on women to map the journey back to
wholeness. She also distinguishes herself by imbricating West Indian history with black history
generally, and the media that she uses to suggest
the overlap folk practices, folklore, mythology,
religious ritual, and music are especially
provocative.
The racial and social background of the protagonist and main narrator of Jane and Louisa
Will Soon Come Home positions her between the
black grassroots society and the lighter-skinned

middle class which attempts to live largely by
European values a common dilemma for Caribbean people and a major concern for the
regions writers. This colonial legacy is tackled in
a singular way in this novel, however, since
Brodber recruits Anancy to lead Nellie Richmond
toward a reconciliation of her divided selves. The
Trickster reflects the regions turbulent history in
his tendency toward disruption, disorder, and
disparity, and yet he tends to survive and often
to triumph by means of his inventiveness, so he
also evokes the tremendous creative potential
inherent in a society formed by the fusion of so
many disparate parts. Jane and Louisas structure
reflects the ring game that is referred to in the
novels title. Another unusual feature is the layering of folksongs upon communal dialogue upon
folktales so that readers get the impression that
they are listening to the voice of an entire community over generations. It appears initially as a
babble, but apparently irreconcilable elements
that initially collide to create chaos eventually
arrange and rearrange themselves around each
other, like the multicolored glass shards in a
kaleidoscope.
Brodbers second novel, Myal, uncovers what it
means to West Indians that the half has never
been told (1988, 34). This cryptic line, which
becomes a refrain throughout the text, indicates
that the histories of the colonized were buried
during the process of colonization. The central
storyline deals with Ella, a young woman of mixed
blood who is not white enough to bear the
children of the American man she marries but
too white to be accepted in Grove Town, her
home. Unclaimed by the villagers, she is left wide
open to the spirit thievery or zombification
that colonialism has bred. Designed to convince
West Indian colonials that what they value is
worthless, the British colonial education system
is portrayed as the major institutional means of
zombification. It is only with the help of elders in
her community who rally to rescue her elders
who have continually reincarnated and gained the
wisdom of centuries of experience that Ella is
saved.
In Louisiana, Brodber ventures beyond the
West Indies to the Southern United States to
explore how the two cultures interconnect, remaining mindful of the influence of the source of
BRODBER, ERNA
their connectivity: Africa. Set in Louisiana in the

1930s, the novel incorporates jazz history but also
involves what could be described as a jazz aesthetic. Brodber applies the principles of the music
to theme, rhythm, and narrative structure,
highlighting jazzs metaphorical significance in
black cultures. As well, she introduces the Trickster once more, establishing its connection to this
musical form that combines disruption with
harmony. Louisianas protagonist Ella Townsend, an anthropologist whose heritage is Jamaican, is recruited through the Federal Writers
Project to research a cane-cutting community in
southwest Louisiana. However, the principal research subject, matriarch Mammy King, takes
control of the project despite dying before it
gets off the ground. Speaking to Ella through her
tool the tape recorder, Mammy Kings ghost
unsettles Ellas academic principles and makes
her rethink Western assumptions about chronicling history. In the narratives the old woman
and her departed friends transmit through the
tape recorder, Ella discovers the link between
African Americans and West Indians. As well,
she learns alternative ways of conceiving of wisdom and power, time and space, and the relationship between individual and community.
Her understanding is underpinned by a newfound sense of her ethnicity and her gender and
by an awareness of how to resist absorption by
the dominant culture.
The Rainmakers Mistake, Brodbers latest novel, is her most enigmatic. It opens at the brink of
emancipation, focusing on Mr. Charlie, a plantation owner and patriarch to his slaves, whose
popular conception of their origin is that Mr.
Charlie devotedly deposited his seed into the earth
and that they are the yams that grew there. When
the patriarch announces that his yams are now free
by law, they are stupefied. They cannot imagine a
life other than the strictly organized plantation
existence centered on labor. The Rainmakers Mistake is an allegory about growth and the fear of it.
Though the freed slaves have the initiative to swim
to an island and establish a new life there, they are
uncomfortable with any signs of change in their
midst. Greying hair and weakening bodies disturb
them, as does sexual awakening; for a long period
most of them are petrified of evolving. Despite
certain markers of time, such as emancipation, the
former slaves move between present, past, and
993
future. They also travel to distant temperate lands.

This is Brodbers furthest journey into speculative
fiction, but it resembles the other novels in its
concern with the need for blacks to understand the
past in order to grow.
Erna Brodbers contribution to Caribbean,
and, more widely, to postcolonial literature has
been significant because of her uncommon ways
of seeing.
SEE ALSO: Feminism and Fiction (WF);
Harris, Wilson (WF); Historical Fiction (WF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West Indian
Fiction (WF)
Brodber, E. (1974). Abandonment of Children in
Jamaica. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and
Economic Research.
Brodber, E. (1975). A Study of Yards in the City of
Kingston. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and
Economic Research.
Brodber, E. (1980). Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come
Home. London: New Beacon.
Brodber, E. (1982). Perceptions of Caribbean Women:
Towards a Documentation of Stereotypes.
Cave Hill, Jamaica: Institute of Social and
Economic Research.
Brodber, E. (1988). Myal. London: New Beacon.
Brodber, E. (1989). Sleepings Beauty and the Prince
Charming. Kunapipi, 11(3), 14.
Brodber, E. (198990). One Bubby Susan. Jamaica
Journal, 22(4), 523.
Brodber, E. (1990a). Fiction in the Scientific
Procedure. In Selwyn R. Cudjoe (ed.),
Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First
International Conference. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux,
pp. 1648.
Brodber, E. (1990b). The Spirit Thief. In Mervyn Morris
(ed.), The Faber Book of Contemporary
Caribbean Short Stories. London: Faber and
Faber, pp. 1524.
Brodber, E. (1994). Louisiana. London: New Beacon.
Brodber, E. (1999). The People of My Jamaican Village.
Woodside, Jamaica: Blackspace.
Brodber, E. (2004a). The Continent of Black
Consciousness: On the History of the African Diaspora
from Slavery to the Present Day. London: New
Beacon.
Brodber, E. (2004b). The Second Generation of Freemen
in Jamaica, 19071944. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida.
994
BRODBER, ERNA
Brodber, E. (2004c). Woodside, Pear Tree Grove P.O.

Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.
Brodber, E. (2007). The Rainmakers Mistake. London:
New Beacon.
OCallaghan, E. (1986). Erna Brodber (1940).
In D. Cumber Dance (ed.), Fifty Caribbean Writers: A
Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport,
CT: Greenwood, pp. 7182.
Roberts, J. E. (2006). Reading Erna Brodber: Uniting the

Black Diaspora through Folk Culture and Religion.
Russell, N. (2001). Crossing Borders: An Interview with
Writer, Scholar and Activist Erna Brodber. At http://
inthefray.org/images/stories/mpn/issues/200105/
imagine/brodber2/brodber2.html, accessed Oct. 5,
2008.
C
Callaghan, Morley
COLIN HILL
Morley Callaghan was among the most significant Canadian novelists of the mid twentieth
century. In his early career, he was an originator
of Canadian modern realism and was connected
with international modernists including Ernest
Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, William
Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Sherwood
Anderson. Although he wrote fiction until his
death in 1990, he is best known for his first two
collections of short fiction A Native Argosy
(1929) and Now That Aprils Here (1936) and
for a string of social, urban realist novels published between 1928 and 1937 which were widely
read in Canada. His fiction is characterized by
a stark realism, a leftist political stance, sustained
interest in moral and religious questions, and
a sociological and naturalistic interest in human
nature and experience.
Callaghan was born on February 22, 1903 in
Toronto to literary and politically active parents.
Except for a European sojourn explored in his
memoir That Summer in Paris (1963), Callaghan
lived nearly all his life in Toronto, which is the
setting for most of his writing. He trained as
a lawyer but never joined the bar. He began
publishing short fiction in 1925, and his stories
appeared in venues such as This Quarter, the New
Yorker, Scribners Magazine, transition, and Exile.
His first novel, Strange Fugitive (1928), explored
working-class life and politics; it was published in
1928 after Fitzgerald who refereed an infamous
boxing match in which Callaghan defeated Hemingway in Paris in 1929 recommended it to Max
Perkins of Scribners. Two naturalistic novels
published in the 1930s, Its Never Over (1930)
and A Broken Journey (1932), are similar in tone
and subject matter to Strange Fugitive.
Callaghans fourth novel, Such is My Beloved
(1934), is commonly considered his finest. It
focuses on Father Dowling, a naive Catholic priest
who tries unsuccessfully to redeem two female
prostitutes against the backdrop of a generic
North American city in the grip of the Great
Depression. They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935)
is Callaghans most overtly political novel and
deals with class politics through a symbolic
and violent family conflict. The most productive
and important phase of Callaghans career came
to a close with the publication of More Joy in
Heaven in 1937. This final novel of his early period
follows a convict after his release from prison and
explores the social forces that lead him to reoffend. Callaghan would not publish serious fiction
again for a decade and a half.
In 1951, Callaghan re-emerged with The Loved
and the Lost, a social-realist novel set in Montreal
which explores various facets of racism and
social inequality using the methods of his earlier
works. His later novels, which received mixed
reviews, became increasingly experimental and
adventurous. The Many Colored Coat (1960) is
a melodrama with biblical parallels that explores
the lives of an eccentric cast of characters:
a business man, a distillery worker, an ex-boxer,
and a prostitute. Callaghan became overtly symbolic in the controversial A Passion in Rome

996
CANADIAN FICTION
(1961) and in the autobiographical and poorly

received A Fine and Private Place (1975), which
offers an underappreciated novelist as its central
character and satirizes Callaghans critics. A
Time for Judas (1983) is narrated by
a secretary of Pontius Pilate and casts Judas
Iscariot in an unusually human light. In Our
Lady of the Snows (1985), Callaghan rewrote and
expanded an earlier novella, The Enchanted Pimp
(1978), about a small-time criminal who recruits
bored housewives to work for him. His final
novel, A Wild Old Man on the Road (1988), is
an autobiographical text set in the 1920s.
Although Callaghans writing did much to invigorate Canadian nationalism at a crucial point in
the nations literary development, he was a lifelong
proponent of cosmopolitanism and insisted that
Canadian authors ought to be international in
their approaches. At one time Canadas leading
novelist and an elder statesman of Canadian
letters, his reputation has fallen into steep decline
in recent years and many contemporary readers
consider his works excessively bland, moralistic,
and contrived. Although he remains widely read
and taught, more recent writers such as Margaret
Atwood, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje have
built international reputations and Callaghans
pioneering contribution to modern Canadian
fiction has been eclipsed.
The City in Fiction (WF); Fitzgerald,
F. Scott (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF);
Historical Fiction (WF); MacLennan,
Hugh (WF); Social Realist Fiction (AF)

Boire, G. (1990). Morley Callaghan (190390).
In R. Lecker, J. David, & E. Quigley (eds.), Canadian
Writers and Their Works. Toronto: ECW, pp. 79145.
Callaghan, M. (1928). Strange Fugitive. New York:
Scribners.
Callaghan, M. (1929). A Native Argosy. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1930). Its Never Over. New York:
Scribners.
Callaghan, M. (1932). A Broken Journey. New York:
Scribners.
Callaghan, M. (1934). Such is My Beloved. New York:
Scribners.
Callaghan, M. (1935). They Shall Inherit the Earth. New

York: Random House.
Callaghan, M. (1936). Now that Aprils Here and Other
Stories. New York: Random House.
Callaghan, M. (1937). More Joy in Heaven. New York:
Random House.
Callaghan, M. (1951). The Loved and the Lost. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1960). The Many Colored Coat.
Toronto: Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1961). A Passion in Rome. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1963). That Summer in Paris. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1975). A Fine and Private Place.
Toronto: Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1978). The Enchanted Pimp. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1983). A Time for Judas. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1985). Our Lady of the Snows. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Callaghan, M. (1988). A Wild Old Man on the Road.
Toronto: Stoddart.
Conron, B. (1966). Morley Callaghan. New York:
Twayne.
Conron, B. (ed.) (1975). Morley Callaghan. Toronto:
McGraw.
Hoar, V. (1969). Morley Callaghan. Toronto: Copp
Clark.
Kendle, J. (1984). Morley Callaghan: An Annotated
Bibliography. In R. Lecker, J. David, & E. Quigley
(eds.), The Annotated Bibliography of Canadas Major
Authors. Toronto: ECW, pp. 13177.
Metcalf, J. (1993). Winner Take All. Essays on Canadian
Writing, 512 11345.
Staines, D. (ed.) (1981). The Callaghan Symposium.
Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Sutherland, F. (1972). The Style of Innocence: A Study of
Hemingway and Callaghan. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin.
Woodcock, G. (1997). Morley Callaghan.
In E. Benson & W. Toye (eds.), The Oxford
Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto:
Oxford, pp. 16465.
Canadian Fiction
DOUGLAS IVISON
The twentieth century may not have belonged to

Canada, as Sir Wilfrid Laurier famously predicted
it would, but it may have belonged to Canadian
literature. By the end of the century, the literary
institutions and infrastructure necessary for
a viable national literature were firmly in place,
CANADIAN FICTION
and Canadian fiction writers had taken their place

among the worlds leading writers in English.
Looking back at the centurys beginning, however, it is difficult to find much evidence of an
identifiably Canadian tradition in English-language fiction, nor much reason to believe that
such a tradition would develop. Before World
War I, Canada did produce some popular bestsellers, such as the animal stories of Charles G. D.
Roberts, Ralph Connors Christian adventure
tales, and Gilbert Parkers historical romances,
but few fiction writers of great significance. The
exceptions were Sara Jeanette Duncan, Stephen
Leacock, and L. M. Montgomery, all of whom are
best remembered for their fictions of small-town
Canada, most notably The Imperialist (1904),
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and
Anne of Green Gables (1908), respectively.
World War I was a transformative event that
played a key role in developing a Canadian
national identity. In its aftermath, a number of
institutions appeared, literary and otherwise, that
provided venues and support for Canadian
writers. In this context, the German immigrant
writer Frederick Philip Grove positioned himself
as being in the vanguard of the development of
a Canadian literature as a result of his familiarity
with European literary movements. Along with
fiction by Martha Ostenso and Robert Stead,
among others, Groves at the time scandalous
novel of prairie immigrant life, Settlers of the
Marsh (1925), helped establish the prairies as
a privileged literary region within Canadian
fiction, a tradition exemplified by the 1930s short
stories of Sinclair Ross, among the most anthologized in Canadian literature, and Rosss 1941
novel of small-town prairie life, As for Me and
My House. Although realism was the dominant
mode in this period, a notable exception was
Howard OHagans mythic, non-realist Tay John
(1939), a significant early attempt to address the
AboriginalEuropean cultural conflict.
Modernist fiction was generally notable by its
absence in the period between the wars, although
Morley Callaghan looked to the American
naturalists and modernists and associated with
well-known American contemporaries such as
Ernest Hemingway. Marked by a spare, modernist
prose style, Callaghans short stories and novels,
particularly from the 1920s and 1930s, are also
noteworthy for their attention to urban settings.
997
Although the dominant trends were largely

regionalist or cosmopolitan, Hugh MacLennan
explored explicitly national themes in Two
Solitudes (1945), which examined relations between French and English Canadians. Published
during a period of increasing governmental
emphasis on the development of a national culture, MacLennans work was immensely popular
at the time, if less so today. In contrast to his
conventional, even stodgy, style, novels such as
Elizabeth Smarts By Grand Central Station I Sat
Down and Wept (1945) and Sheila Watsons The
Double Hook (1959) reflected the modernist,
anti-realist aesthetic that had largely been absent
from Canadian fiction, and were notable for
their attention to the personal and archetypal
rather than the national.
After World War II, regional writing continued to be prominent. W. O. Mitchell continued
the tradition of prairie writing, emphasizing
the vernacular and comedic. Others, such as
Ernest Buckler and Ethel Wilson, continued to
write peripheral regions, rural Nova Scotia and
British Columbia respectively, into Canadian
literature.
Jewish Canadian fiction also came to prominence in the post-World War II period, with
writers such as Henry Kreisel and A. M. Klein
engaging with the complex and tragic history
of Jewish experience. In The Sacrifice (1956),
Adele Wiseman presented a portrait, deeply
grounded in biblical allusion, of Jewish immigrant experience in an unspecified Winnipeg.
Most famously, in his fictions of the Montreal
Jewish community, Mordecai Richler established himself as the foremost chronicler of
Jewish Canadian life, and one of the major
Canadian novelists and satirists of the second
half of the century.
Partly because of the increasing development of
a national literary infrastructure and institutions,
the late 1950s and 1960s saw the arrival of
a generation of major writers who could access
the material resources needed to produce, publish, and promote their works, and thus could
pursue a relatively uninterrupted literary career
and achieve commercial and critical success. In
addition to Richler, writers such as Margaret
Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro,
Robertson Davies, Rudy Wiebe, and Robert
Kroetsch established significant careers as fiction
998
CANADIAN FICTION
writers whose impact often extended beyond

Canada and into the twenty-first century.
As the above list suggests, women writers were
particularly prominent. Reflecting the success
of the womens and feminist movements, they
engaged in a critique of the patriarchal structures
of Canadian (and, more broadly, Western) society
and their impact upon womens lives and opportunities. Laurence, for example, in several novels
and stories culminating with The Diviners (1974),
articulated female desires and examined the ways
society inhibits the expression and fulfillment
of those desires. Atwood was the most famous
Canadian woman writer (arguably the most
famous Canadian writer, period) of the twentieth
century. In her novels, short fiction, and poetry,
Atwood engaged in an extended and wide-ranging feminist critique of Western culture and its
oppression of women, most notably in her dystopian novel, The Handmaids Tale (1985).
Nearly as successful internationally as Atwood,
Alice Munro is considered one of the greatest
English-language writers of short fiction. Extensively anthologized and the recipient of numerous
awards, Munro is widely admired as a master
stylist and for her complex, nuanced portraits of
womens experience. Although much less well
known to most Canadian readers, and given less
attention by Canadian critics, the Paris-based
writer Mavis Gallant is a short fiction writer
arguably the equal of Munro.
The 1960s was also notable for the increased
publication of experimental, non-realist novels by
Leonard Cohen, Scott Symons, and Graeme
Gibson, among others. The novelist, poet, and
theorist Robert Kroetsch played a key role in
introducing poststructuralist and postmodernist
concepts into Canadian literature. In his fiction,
Kroetsch playfully mixed mythological elements,
history, tall tales, and an anti-realist aesthetic,
creating a non-representational regionalism that
recognized the constructedness of place.
Historical fiction, of varying degrees of selfreflexivity, was a major Canadian genre in the late
twentieth century. Rudy Wiebes The Temptations
of Big Bear (1973), Timothy Findleys The Wars
(1977), George Bowerings Burning Water (1980),
Michael Ondaatjes In the Skin of a Lion (1987),
and Guy Vanderhaeghes The Englishmans Boy
(1996), among others, exposed the way in which
history is constructed, and challenged under-
standings of history as truth. Notable feminist

critiques of patriarchal history included Daphne
Marlatts fragmented and poetic Ana Historic
(1988) and Atwoods Alias Grace (1996).
Like Kroetsch, Jack Hodgins challenged the
representational aesthetic associated with regional writing, combining everyday realism with
elements of the mythical in order to broaden and
deepen the resonance of his tales. By contrast, the
fiction of Atlantic Canadian writers such as David
Adams Richards and Alistair Macleod was more
strongly grounded in realism. Over many novels,
Richards provided a rich, if often bleak, portrayal
of working-class New Brunswick life. Although
unprolific, having produced only two slim volumes of short fiction until his award-winning
novel No Great Mischief (1999), Alistair MacLeod
was undoubtedly one of Atlantic Canadas most
important and influential writers, producing fiction firmly grounded in the culture and traditions
of Cape Breton. Less conventionally, perhaps,
Ann-Marie MacDonald utilized Gothic and
melodramatic conventions in Fall On Your Knees
(1996), a best-selling and award-winning novel
that dealt with race and sexuality in ways that
challenged regional stereotypes. Newfoundland
fiction also experienced a renaissance in the
1980s and 1990s, with Wayne Johnston achieving
significant international success with The Colony
of Unrequited Dreams (1998).
The changing demographics of Canadian
society that resulted from immigration and the
adoption of multiculturalism as official government policy contributed to the increased
prominence of fiction by writers of color. AfroCaribbean Canadian writers achieved particular
prominence with fictions about the struggles and
hopes of Caribbean immigrants to Canada, the
challenges faced by and in the Caribbean nations
from which they came, and the tensions and
possibilities produced by the juxtaposition of
Canadian and Caribbean experiences. In particular, Austin Clarke, beginning in the 1960s,
and Dionne Brand, beginning in the 1980s, established themselves as major writers. In the 1990s,
the experiences of Chinese Canadians were
portrayed in fiction by Sky Lee and Wayson Choy.
Powerfully and memorably, Joy Kogawa recovered the lost history of the Japanese Canadian
internment during World War II and its impact in
Obasan (1981).
CANADIAN FICTION
Several writers of South Asian descent, such

as Neil Bissoondath, Rohinton Mistry, M. G.
Vassanji, and Shyam Selvadurai, achieved
prominence at the end of the century. Their
work and its success represented a challenge to
conventional understandings of the nature and
role of Canadian literature, as their fictions were
frequently set outside Canada, often featured
non-Canadian characters, and were written by
authors born elsewhere. The Sri Lankan-born
Michael Ondaatje, who came to international
prominence with The English Patient (1992),
and rivaled Atwood as Canadas best-known
novelist of the late twentieth century, has made
a career of blurring national and other boundaries. Notably, however, it is In the Skin of
a Lion, his most explicitly Canadian novel,
that has the firmest position in the Canadian
canon.
Another immigrant, American-born William
Gibson, achieved international cultural prominence by virtue of his role as the prophet of
cyberspace. His first science fiction novel Neuromancer (1984) became one of the defining texts
of postmodern culture. His success, and that of
fantasy writers Charles de Lint and Guy Gavriel
Kay, anticipated the sudden flowering of Canadian speculative fiction in the 1990s. Like Gibson,
Douglas Coupland achieved remarkable extraliterary success when his novel Generation X (1991)
captured the cultural zeitgeist of late twentiethcentury North Americas postmodern culture,
a largely urbanized, media-infused environment
also explored by Russell Smith and Catherine
Bush.
Gay and lesbian writers began to challenge the
heteronormative assumptions of Canadian society and literature in the 1960s, as novelists such as
Scott Symons and Jane Rule openly explored gay
and lesbian experiences and issues. Similarly,
Timothy Findleys fiction presented an extensive
critique of the oppressiveness and violence of
patriarchal masculinity. In the last decade of the
century, a number of queer writers, including
Brand, MacDonald, Selvadurai, Gail Scott, Shani
Mootoo, and Tomson Highway, achieved success
with novels that articulate queer experiences,
desires, and subjectivities.
One of the most important developments of
late twentieth-century Canadian fiction was the
999
success of Aboriginal writers. Historically in

Canadian fiction, Aboriginal peoples were the
subject of demeaning stereotypes and racist
representations and were frequently silenced or
invisible. Beginning in the 1980s, however,
Aboriginal authors began to publish fiction in
English. Authors such as Highway, Beatrice
Culleton Mosonier, Jeanette Armstrong, and Lee
Maracle explored the conflict between Aboriginal
and Euro-Canadians and the consequences of the
history of exploitation and racism for Aboriginals.
It was Thomas Kings humorous and complex
Green Grass, Running Water (1993), however,
that had the greatest impact. Reflecting his academic background and theoretical awareness,
Kings novel successfully integrated Aboriginal
storytelling traditions and mythologies with the
postmodern literary conventions of the late twentieth-century novel.
At the end of the century, then, Canadian
fiction had firmly taken its place on the world
stage, as the frequent presence of Canadian writers on the shortlists of the Booker Prize and other
international awards indicates. The success of
Canadian fiction was not simply manifested in
the handful of Canadian authors known around
the world, but in the sheer quantity and diversity
of Canadian novels and short stories, which
would have been unimaginable at the beginning
of the century.
Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF);
Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative
Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF);
Humor and Satire (WF); Indigenous Fiction
(WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction
(WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);
Realism/Magic Realism (WF)

Benson, E., & Toye, W. (eds.) (1997). The
Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature,
2nd edn. Don Mills, ON: Oxford
University Press.
Keith, W. J. (2006). Canadian Literature in English, rev.
edn. 2 vols. Erin, ON: Porcupines Quill.
1000
CAREY, PETER
Kr
oller, E.-M. (ed.) (2004). The Cambridge Companion
to Canadian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
New, W. H. (ed.) (2002). Encyclopedia of Literature in
Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
New, W. H. (2003). A History of Canadian Literature,
2nd edn. Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press.
Carey, Peter
NICHOLAS BIRNS
Even though Patrick White won the Nobel Prize

in 1973, it was Peter Careys generation, which
also included David Malouf, Kate Grenville, and
Frank Moorhouse, whose work brought Australian fiction to the world stage. Of these, Careys
work was both the most popular and the most
consequential. Combining the excitement-filled
plots of Victorian fiction, the imaginative splaying
of reality and fantasy pioneered by Latin American novelists, and the determination to tell the
stories of a largely unknown country shared by so
many of his Australian counterparts, Carey canvassed the dreams and nightmares of Australia as
no other writer had before him. In a nation whose
short history and heritage of conquest, dispossession, and sense of inadequacy toward the rest of
the world raised a perpetual sense of self-doubt,
Careys questioning of the nature of reality would
have had pronounced resonance in any case.
Carey, though, added to this a particular emphasis
on the vocation of the artist, both its soaring
possibilities and self-consuming inauthenticities,
and on the way national difference helps define
the reception and betrayal of art in an age of
globalization. Carey writes about national identity, but he does so in an international arena. His
validation of Australian experience opened the
door for many Australian writers not only to
publish globally, but also to realize there was an
audience interested in what they had to say.
Carey was born on May 7, 1943 in Bacchus
Marsh, Victoria, of a middle-class family that ran
a local car dealership. He won a scholarship to the
prestigious Geelong Grammar School and did
undergraduate work in zoology and chemistry at
Monash University in Melbourne, though he did
not receive a degree. For the next decade or so, he
worked in advertising in Sydney and London,

eventually becoming a partner in his own Sydney
advertising firm. While working full-time in advertising, Carey read widely and began writing
short stories. Two crucial mentors for him during
his time were the novelists Barry Oakley and
Morris Lurie.
In the 1970s, Carey began publishing short
stories, collected in his first book, The Fat Man
in History (1974). American Dreams, in which
an American visitor seeks to market a miniature
Australian town as a touristic commodity;
Kristu-Du, where an architectural palace
built by a malignant ruler turns out to be
a slaughterhouse; and The Fat Man in History,
in which a plot among fat men discriminated
against in a future society is foiled by the rebels
own structural complicity in the system, immediately marked Carey out as straddling the realms
of metafiction, fantasy, and horror, all the while
writing from a noticeably Australian perspective.
In 1981, Carey withdrew from advertising and
lived in a commune on the Bellinger River in
northern New South Wales. This experience was
reflected in his novel Bliss (1981), in which Harry
Joy finds happiness with Honey Barbara in
a paradisiacal world of nature. Harry, who like
Carey is an advertising executive, has a near-death
experience which convinces him that the world in
which he has flourished is in fact a living hell.
Harry is redeemed by the love of Honey, an earth
mother figure who provides a surprisingly
harmonious, pastoral ending to the book. Despite
the happiness of the conclusion, though, the
books critique of modern society remains
searing. Bliss was made into a film directed by
Ray Lawrence in 1985.
Illywhacker (1985) turned to history as Herbert
Badgery, a 118-year-old man, rollicks through
a colorful rendition of twentieth-century
Australia, which ends with a Japanese economic
takeover. The novel, which in many ways is an
extended commentary on Mark Twains observation, on visiting Australia, that Australian history
is full of the most beautiful lies, is animated by
the Australian love of yarn-spinning, and for all its
literary dexterity and self-reflexive knowingness
has a strong tie to a sense of oral tradition and
the fun that popular storytellers have in spinning
tall tales. The influence of Latin American
writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel
CAREY, PETER
Garca Marquez is at its strongest here. Carey,

though, adds a highly pictorial, cartoonish aspect,
laced with dry wit and wicked humor, to create
a novelistic concoction all his own.
Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won the
prestigious Booker Prize, is an unconventional
nineteenth-century love story featuring Oscar
Hopkins, a young Englishman from a strict Evangelical background whose Oxford education does
not allay his addiction to gambling. Oscar goes to
Australia where he meets Lucinda LePlastrier,
a factory heiress. Together, the two conceive of
building a glass church on a rural Australian river,
signifying the hope of creating an untarnished
version of European ideals in the new land.
That this enterprise is a fiasco and ends in tragedy
does not compromise its pathos, which resonates
as an emblem of the paradoxes of white settler
identity in Australia. Oscar and Lucinda is also
a commentary on, and expansion of, Patrick
Whites great novel Voss (1957), which similarly
features a doomed romantic couple. With comedy
and pathos, Carey supplements and augments
Whites sobriety and lyricism. Oscar and Lucinda
was made into a successful film in 1997, directed
by Gillian Armstrong, part of the wave of Australian directors who had emerged in the 1970s along
with the generation of fiction writers led by Carey.
The Tax Inspector (1992) was a far more
somber novel that showed, with increased realism, an unsparing stance toward the flaws of
Australian society; it generally met a less positive
reception. By this time, Carey had moved to
New York, eventually seeing himself as a permanent resident there. The Unusual Life of
Tristan Smith (1994) was consciously influenced
by postcolonial theory. Carey creates two fictive
nations in a world otherwise much like the
real one; Efica is a country of small islands
that is economically and politically dependent
on Voorstand, a vast continent to the north.
Efica is like Australia, except it is an archipelago,
not a continent, whereas Voorstand is like the
US with idealistic beginnings but ending up as
a great power except it is of part Dutch
heritage (a choice Carey said was influenced
both by South Africa and by the Dutch street
names in New York). The Voorstandish cult of
Bruder Mouse, the icon of the Franciscan
Free Church, and its incarnation of a kindness
to animals grown into an ideology, was influ-
1001
enced by Careys visit to Walt Disney World in

Orlando in 1990. In search of the people who
killed his mother and of a father he had never
known, Tristan Smith flees from Efica to Voorstand, where he encounters the ambiguous and
ever shifting ironies of the relation between
colonizers and colonized.
Careys next novel, Jack Maggs (1997), consciously rewrote Charles Dickenss Great Expectations in order to foreground Australian elements
that were on the margins in the original novel.
This conscious rewriting of a European classic
from a subversive Australian perspective involves
a manipulative writer, a footman with an unrevealed past, as it evokes a Victorian England that is
at once stunningly rendered in detail and strikingly grim in valence. Carey uses a family name,
Warriner, for one of his characters, tying his own
personal history, his English heritage, and his
Australian identity to his rewriting of Dickens.
There is also a particularly mordant and cutting
portrait of a Dickens-like novelist, which foreshadows the darker and more skeptical view of art
that Carey would take in his fiction of the next
decade.
Careys next novel was particularly daring in its
coming to grips with Australias paramount
national story: the trial and execution of the
renowned outlaw Ned Kelly. In True History of
the Kelly Gang (2000), Carey uses the run-on,
paratactic style of Kellys Jerilderie Letter as a kind
of homegrown Australian modernist mode of
writing. The true history of the title is ironic,
as not only is Careys novel necessarily by Carey,
not Kelly, but the approach Carey takes casts
doubt on the claims of any version of truth or
full authority, while also unapologetically championing Kelly and the spirit of subversion and
rebellion he brought to Australian culture, which,
though quashed at the time, has never been
determinatively quelled. The Kelly novel won
Carey a second Booker Prize.
Carey produced a childrens book, The Big
Bazoohley, in 1995 and two short, experimental
travelogues, Thirty Days In Sydney: A Wildly
Distorted Account (2001) and Wrong about Japan
(2004). These books were treated roughly by
reviewers but are important in giving perceptive
accounts of Careys impressions of a country he
knew well but which, because he saw it from afar,
had become unfamiliar to him. By this time,
1002
CENSORSHIP AND FICTION
Carey had become very well known on the American literary scene, and, without losing his
connection to Australia, was more comfortable
with American settings and resonances in his
fiction. Careys novels of the 2000s show an
awareness of the perils faced by an artist with, at
times, a necessarily opportunistic stance toward
experience: My Life as a Fake (2003) was based
upon the Ern Malley hoax staged by the Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart in
the 1940s. The two poets, hoping to satirize trendy
modernist practices, submitted poems under
the pseudonym Ern Malley to the journal Angry
Penguins. Carey asks what would happen if Ern
Malley actually had been, or had become, a real
person. Bob McCorkle, the Malley figure, is originally created by Christopher Chubb as a hoax but
metamorphoses into a living, three-dimensional
person. The novels Malaysian setting alludes to
the early work of Anthony Burgess, but also to the
postcolonial condition of Australia, suggesting
that the recurring motif of hoaxes in Australian
literature may indicate a continuing struggle
for identity and authenticity. Theft (2005), chronicling the interaction of the Australian artist
Butcher Bones with an unscrupulous New York
art dealer, constituted a diptych that is often
searing in its evocation of how art sometimes
must be ineluctably dishonest. His Illegal Self
(2008) takes a more political turn (returning in
this way to the atmosphere of the early short
stories), narrating the abduction of a young child
in the US by an Australian revolutionary group
led by friends of the boys activist-terrorist
mother.
This political emphasis underscored that
Careys seemingly effortless inventiveness belies
a deep involvement with the world in which
he lives. Indeed, Carey is one of the few novelists
of his generation whose career engages the constitutive social issues and artistic dilemmas of this
period. He started out to tell Australias stories; he
ended up telling the worlds.
Fictional Responses to Canonical English
Narratives (WF); Film/Television Adaptation
Magic Realism (WF)

Armstrong, G. (dir.) (1997). Oscar and Lucinda.
Meridian Films.
Bliss, C. (2007). Peter Carey. In N. Birns, & R. McNeer,
(eds.), A Companion to Australian Literature Since
1900. Rochester: Camden House, pp. 20192.
Carey, P. (1974). The Fat Man in History. St. Lucia:
Carey, P. (1981). Bliss. St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press.
Carey, P. (1985). Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University
Carey, P. (1988). Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia:
Carey, P. (1991). The Tax Inspector. St. Lucia:
Carey, P. (1994). The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St.
Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Carey, P. (1997). Jack Maggs. St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press.
Carey, P. (2000). True History of the Kelly Gang. New
York: Knopf.
Carey, P. (2003). My Life as a Fake. New York: Knopf.
Carey, P. (2005). Theft. New York: Knopf.
Carey, P. (2008). His Illegal Self. New York: Knopf.
Gaile, A. (2005). Fabulating Beauty. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Hassall, A. (1994). Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter
Careys Fiction. St. Lucia: University of Queensland
Press.
Huggan, G. (1996). Peter Carey. Melbourne: Oxford
University Press.
Lamb, K. (1992). Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame.
Pymble, NSW: Angus and Robertson.
Lawrence, R. (dir.) (1985). Bliss. Window III
Productions.
Woodcock, B. (2003). Peter Carey. Manchester:
Censorship and Fiction

JONATHAN HEAWOOD
The history of censorship in the twentieth century

is bound up with the development of free speech
as a human right. Before the publication of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
in 1948, free speech in the British Empire was
merely a residual right, consisting primarily
of whatever was not expressly forbidden in
English law. While censorship was not a feature
of the common law, colonial administrations
could draw upon a range of powers to penalize
authors whose writing they deemed blasphemous,

defamatory, obscene, or seditious. As the Empire
gave way to independence for many states in the
second half of the twentieth century, their citizens
acquired the right to freedom of speech, as set
out in international conventions and domestic
constitutions. However, free speech has proved
difficult to define and to uphold, and many states
have continued to silence authors with impunity.
Overt state censorship whereby books are submitted for approval before their publication is
not the only political means by which authorial
freedom is constrained. As the twentieth century
drew to a close, relativist and religious critiques
of the human rights framework coincided with
the rise of the Internet to globalize new forms of
suppression.
In British India, the fear of terrorism led to the
passing of the 1910 Press Act, providing the state
with enhanced powers to monitor the press and
to seize all copies of an offensive publication. The
Act was extremely broadly drafted, and it caught
both journalism and works of the imagination in
its net. Within four years, 26 plays, nine biographies, 33 songs and poems, and four studies of
Irish or Russian politics had been banned, alongside numerous political pamphlets and two
bomb manuals (Barrier 62). Books continued
to be banned throughout the 1920s and 1930s,
including Hindu Heaven, a novel by Max Wylie
that describes the jaded world of British and
American missionaries in India; Katherine
Mayos Mother India; Arthur Miless Land of the
Lingam, a study of Indian sexual practices; and
Frank Richardss Old Soldier Sahib, an account of
a veteran soldiers army service in India. All four
titles remain on the list of prohibited imports
today.
It was not only English-language writing that
caught the censors attention. An early volume of
short stories in Urdu by Ahmed Ali and other
authors, Angaray (Burning Coals), was banned by
the Indian government in 1933. In response to
this books suppression, Ali co-founded the League of Progressive Authors, which later became
the All-India Progressive Writers Association,
a leftist group opposed to political censorship.
He went on to publish Twilight in Delhi with the
Hogarth Press in 1940, despite the objections of
British printers, who refused to print passages
dealing sympathetically with the Indian War of
1003
Independence (aka the Mutiny) of 1857. Ali

later claimed that this problem was solved only
when Virginia Woolf the moving spirit of the
Press called on the support of Harold Nicolson,
the official censor, who passed the book (A. Ali,
xvii). Nicolson was serving as parliamentary
secretary at the Ministry of Information and
presumably carried enough weight to override
the printers concerns.
The experience of suppression similarly
galvanized the Jamaican journalist Roger Mais,
who was charged with sedition for publishing
a newspaper article, in July 1944, in which he
argued that soldiers from Jamaica and elsewhere
in the British Empire were defeating their own
interests by fighting alongside the British. In the
article Now We Know, published in the nationalist journal Public Opinion, Mais alleged that
Britains aim in World War II was to extend its
own interests of privilege and repression and
exploitation in order that the sun may never set
upon the insolence and arrogance of one race
toward all others (Hart 287). Mais was feted by
his compatriots, but imprisoned for six months
for sedition and endangering England in time of
war (Arnold 336). This experience contributed
to the strongly nationalist sentiment of his first
novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together, published
by Jonathan Cape in 1953. The examples of Ali
and Mais inevitably discouraged other writers
from putting their political concerns into print,
discrediting the free speech guarantee in the
UDHR.
Groups such as Alis League of Progressive
Authors and the writers association International
PEN, founded in London in 1921, countered this
tendency toward self-censorship by loudly supporting censored and persecuted writers. Under
the presidency of H. G. Wells, International PEN
drafted a Charter that articulated its members
commitment to the principle of unhampered
transmission of thought within each nation and
between all nations. By signing this Charter,
PENs members pledged themselves to oppose
any form of suppression of freedom of expression
in the country and community to which they
belong as well as throughout the world whenever
this is possible (International PEN 1948).
Wells was a pivotal figure in the evolution of
a discourse of free speech, and the terms of the
PEN Charter were closely echoed in the UDHR.
1004
Elsewhere, Wells argued against blanket censorship under the justification of national security.
He noted that the state was capable of distinguishing between the censorship of any information
likely to be of the slightest use to an enemy and
the desirability of allowing statements or suggestions that may affect public opinion in ones own
country or abroad, and which may help us toward
wholesome and corrective political action (Wells
10). This acceptance of the need for the state to
retain a power of censorship, while holding the
door open for vigorous political debate in the
public sphere, contributed to the formulation in
1948 of Article 19 of the UDHR, which promised
the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information
and ideas through any media and regardless of
frontiers (United Nations 1948). Writing in the
immediate wake of World War II, the United
Nations committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt
that drafted the UDHR described freedom of
speech as the highest aspiration of the common
people. Yet in The Hills Were Joyful Together, the
Chaplain complains that the UDHR has come to
mean nothing to us but more words in a book
(Mais 238).
Universal freedom of expression acquired legal
status through the publication in 1966 of the
International Covenant of Civil and Political
Rights (ICCPR), which came into force in
1976. However, the near-universal ratification
of the ICCPR did not signal an end to censorship
or suppression. Censorious states lobbied successfully for a series of exemptions allowing
governments to limit free speech in the interests
of the rights or reputations of others; . . . national
security or of public order (ordre public), or of
public health or morals (United Nations 1976).
In effect, these exemptions allowed states to
continue practicing some forms of censorship,
although they were now obliged to justify any
restraints on free speech as necessary, proportionate, and subject to the rule of law. The Indian
constitution, for example, repeats the terms of the
UDHR, but qualifies the right to free speech in
the interests of the sovereignty and integrity
of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency
or morality, or in relation to contempt of court,
defamation or incitement to an offence (Sorabjee 207).
These comprehensive qualifications were

exceeded by the Burmese constitution, adopted
in 1974, Article 157 of which states: Every citizen
shall have freedom of speech, expression, and
publication to the extent that such freedom is
not contrary to the interests of the working people
and socialism (Allott 5). This blanket exemption
makes a mockery of the human right to freedom
of speech, as has been shown by the Burmese
governments consistent censorship of anything
slightly subversive and the long-term imprisonment of the pro-democracy leader and writer
Aung San Suu Kyi.
International treaties alone were unable to
prevent rampant censorship in apartheid South
Africa, where the Publications Act (1975,
amended in 1978), allowed for a publication to
be declared undesirable (Coetzee 185) if it met
any one of a number of stringent conditions
that were overseen by the Publications Appeals
Board, a de facto censorship committee. Writers
of fiction including Nadine Gordimer, Peter
Abrahams, Andre Brink, Bessie Head, and Alex
La Guma were all subject to censorship.
In Nigeria, Chinua Achebe was subject to
harassment and Wole Soyinka was imprisoned
as a result of his political activism. Soyinka
later claimed that he was subjected to the most
rigorous security measures ever taken against any
prisoner in the history of Nigerian prisons, measures taken both to contain and destroy my mind
(Soyinka 8). The writer Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the military government in 1995 as
a result of his campaigns on behalf of the Ogoni
people. These authors may have been subjected to
such extreme punishment because of their literary
standing, which amplified their dissenting voices.
In India, Salman Rushdie was attacked for
Midnights Children (1980), in which he touches
on Indira Gandhis premiership, and in Pakistan
his novel Shame (1983), an allegorical satire of the
nations political history, was banned.
While it did not extinguish censorship, the
development of an international rights-based discourse of free speech at least created a framework
within which writers could defend their work
and that of their colleagues. Organizations including International PEN, Amnesty International (founded 1961), and Index on Censorship
(founded 1972) mobilized large communities of
writers and human rights advocates to ensure that
no writer languished in prison unnoticed or

unsupported.
However, the attempt of such international
NGOs to define and uphold global standards of
free speech encountered a series of major obstacles. Moral relativists questioned whether a set of
rights developed in western Europe and North
America in a particular historical context can have
universal validity. Some have suggested that rights
embody a form of Anglo-American individualism
that corrodes the more collectivist identity of
other cultures. Others have argued that rights
must reflect a specific social contract entered into
by citizens of a particular state, and cannot be
supranational.
These broadly relativist critiques have developed alongside some specific religious challenges.
In Canada, a movement led by Christian fundamentalists campaigned for Margaret Laurences
novel The Diviners (1974) to be removed from the
school syllabus in a number of counties because of
its sexual content. These attempts were largely
unsuccessful but they provoked a national debate
on the limits of free speech in which even Laurence herself concluded that there may be grounds
for censorship in the interests of protecting children from obscenity: It is not enough for citizens
to dismiss our obscenity laws as inadequate and
outdated (Cohen 88).
The Laurence case revealed a growing rupture
between faith-based groups and the discourse of
universal rights, which reached its apotheosis on
February 14, 1989, when Irans Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie,
urging Muslim believers around the world to seek
his death and that of anyone associated with the
publication of his novel The Satanic Verses (1988).
Rushdie was immediately ushered into hiding by
the British government. His Norwegian publisher
was attacked, however, and his Japanese translator killed by fanatics. The Muslim Council of
Britain sought to bring a private blasphemy prosecution against Rushdie, which failed because the
court ruled that the English blasphemy law only
protected adherents of the Church of England.
However, Rushdies barrister, Geoffrey Robertson QC, showed that the alleged blasphemies were
either the delusions of a fictional character whose
mind is unbalanced, or notions that were familiar
to Muslim scholars. Rushdie has described the
attack on The Satanic Verses as part of a broader,
1005
global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms (Appignanesi 2005, 8). In response,
it has been said that Islam is a religion of duties,
and that the concept of rights, especially of
fundamental rights, is foreign to the Sharia
(Kamali 1). The scholarly debate about the
relationship between Islam and fundamental
rights has run alongside a set of more violent
confrontations between imaginative authors and
religious groups in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first century.
When Monica Alis novel Brick Lane (2003) was
published in the United Kingdom, she was
attacked by a group of Bangladeshi Britons with
global links. Her novel portrays a young Bangladeshi woman who is transported from Sylhet to
Londons Brick Lane, where she eventually shakes
off the shackles of her unhappy arranged marriage
and finds her own place. Ali was attacked by
members of the Brick Lanes Sylheti community,
who accused her of a patronizing colonial attitude
in her portrayal of the rural Sylhetis of the novel.
Germaine Greer applauded their attempts to shut
down production of the film of the novel on Brick
Lane itself in 2006, arguing that the community
has the moral right to keep the film-makers out
(Greer 24). Reflecting on the fate of her novel and
the film, Ali has described the new economy of
outrage (M. Ali 4), in which groups and individuals capitalize on perceived insults to attract
interest. The playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti has
similarly deplored the fate of her play, Behzti,
which was removed from the stage by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 2005.
Rushdie, Ali, and Bhatti were not censored by
the British state, yet each suffered verbal or physical intimidation as a result of their work. The
state support offered to these writers has been
uneven. Whereas the British government in 1989
offered Rushdie immediate and unconditional
protection, Fiona Mactaggart, the Home Office
minister responsible, failed to condemn violent
protesters who closed down the production of
Behzti in Birmingham. The combination of
religious and relativist critiques has left the
human right to free speech fragile and vulnerable
to further erosion.
New religious-hatred legislation has put the
British governments aspiration for community
cohesion at odds with its commitment to
universal speech rights. By seeking to criminalize
1006
incitement to religious hatred, even in the context

of a novel such as The Satanic Verses, the government signaled its support for forms of censorship
that go beyond Wellss immediate harm principle;
the law sought to close down the space for vigorous debate and the exchange of information and
ideas. Writers in South Asia, the Middle East,
and western Europe have all been persecuted on
the grounds of offense, a loose category which
privileges the feelings of the supposed victim over
the right of the speaker or writer to express ideas
or to contribute to public debate or understanding. Some writers have responded by acknowledging their own practice of self-censorship.
Others have faced up to the new challenge, taking
the line that the best response to writing is more
writing; in Rushdies words, Human beings
understand themselves and shape their futures
by arguing and challenging and questioning and
saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee,
whether to gods or to men (Rushdie 4).
While the practice of censorship in the classical
sense is rare in the English-speaking world, it
remains a relevant term with which to mark the
conflict between the individual voice of the writer
and the interests of powerful groups. Censors
today may be found in law courts, religious institutions, and on the streets. The international
human rights framework has struggled to respond
to this shift from overtly political censorship to
censorship on the grounds of religious sentiment
or community cohesion, and writers who explore
such forms of cultural censorship are themselves
vulnerable to attack.
The canon of twentieth-century world fiction
in English consists of authors who successfully
navigated both the English common law tradition
and the publishing codes of their respective times
and places. It is a canon of survivors. We will never
be able to catalogue the books that went unwritten
as a result of self-censorship by writers who were
unwilling or unable to make the compromises
that were asked of them. It is difficult now to
know whether cultural censorship is leaving
behind a new generation of ghost books that
will haunt their authors imaginations but never
be published, out of reluctance to offend or fear of
the consequences of doing so.
Humor and Satire (WF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF); Politics/Activism and

Fiction (WF); Politics and the Novel (BIF);
The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)
Ali, A. (1994). Introduction: The raison dêtre of
Twilight in Delhi. In Twilight in Delhi. New York:
New Directions, pp. xixxi
Ali, M. (2007). The Outrage Economy. Guardian,
review section, pp. 46 (Oct. 24).
Allott, A. J. (ed.) (1993). Inked Over, Ripped Out:
Burmese Storytellers and the Censors. New York:
PEN American Center.
Appignanesi, L. (ed.) (1989). The Rushdie File. London:
Fourth Estate.
Appignanesi, L. (ed.) (2005). Free Expression is No
Offence. London: Penguin.
Arnold, A. J. (2001). A History of Literature in the
Caribbean, vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Barendt, E. (2005). Freedom of Expression, 2nd edn.
Barrier, N. G. (1974). Banned: Controversial Literature
and Political Control in British India 19071947.
Coetzee, J. M. (1996). Giving Offense: Essays on
Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, M. (2001). Censorship in Canadian Literature.
Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Greer, G. (2006). Reality Bites. Guardian, p. 24 (July 24).
Hart, R. (1999). Towards Decolonization: Political,
Labor and Economic Developments in Jamaica
19381945. Kingston: University Press of the
West Indies.
Index on Censorship (1972present).
International PEN. (1948). International PEN Charter.
At www.internationalpen.org.uk/go/about-us/
charter, accessed Nov. 24, 2009.
Kamali, M. H. (1997). Freedom of Expression in Islam,
rev. edn. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society.
Karolides, N. J., Bald, M., & Soba, D. B. (eds.) (2005).
120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World
Literature. New York: Checkmark.
Mais, R. (1981). The Hills Were Joyful Together [1953].
London: Heinemann.
Popescu, L., & Seymour-Jones, C. (eds.) (2007).
Another Sky: Voices of Conscience from Around the
World. London: Profile.
Robertson, G., & Nicol, A. (2007). Media Law, 5th edn.
London: Sweet and Maxwell.
Rushdie, S. (1990). In Good Faith. London: Granta.
Sorabjee, S. J. (1976). Law of Press Censorship in India.
Bombay: N. M. Tripathi.
Soyinka, W. (1972). The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole
Soyinka. London: Rex Collings.
CHANDRA, VIKRAM
United Nations (1948). The Universal Declaration

of Human Rights. At www.un.org/en/documents/
udhr/, accessed Nov. 24, 2009.
United Nations (1976). International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights. At www2.ohchr.org/
english/law/ccpr.htm/, accessed Nov. 24, 2009.
Wells, H. G. (1940). The New World Order. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Chandra, Vikram
MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU
Vikram Chandra belongs to the younger generation of contemporary non-resident Indian

authors writing in English. His fiction combines
the South Asian storytelling tradition with
a different kind of dynamic textuality inspired
by the flexible patterns of the Internet. A postmodern author influenced by John Barth and
Donald Barthelme, and supported through graduate school by work as a computer programmer,
Chandra writes fiction in which oral storytelling
and computing, history, and invention come
together.
Chandra was born in New Delhi on July 23,
1961 and completed his university schooling
in the United States. As a film student at
Columbia University, he came across the autobiography of the Indo-British Colonel James
Sikander Skinner, a legendary nineteenthcentury soldier, and Skinners life became the
inspiration for his award-winning first novel Red
Earth and Pouring Rain (1995). The novel relies
on Chandras belief that all stories have in them
the seeds of other stories (1995, 11314) and
makes conscious use of the self-generating quality
of traditional Indian storytelling. The novel is rich
in cinematic imagery and draws on the Arabian
Nights through its narrative frame and motif of
storytelling for survival. The main narrators are
Sanjay, a white monkey who, being shot, regains
human consciousness from a previous life, and
Abhay, an American-returned Indian student
who fails to readjust to Indian realities. To postpone his death, Sanjay, supported by the Hindu
protectors of storytellers Hanuman and Ganesha,
signs a contract with the death god Yama to tell
stories that will entertain a demanding audience
of story-loving children. As the stories gain a life
of their own, growing from each other like tree
1007
branches, the interchange between storyteller

and audience, maintained through the magic
word Listen, assumes greater significance than
the plot. Eventually, Sanjay cannot be saved, but
the storytelling process continues through Abhay.
Chandras second book, Love and Longing in
Bombay (1998), is a sequence of five stories (like
the traditional Indian collection the Panchatantra), some of which were previously published in
the New Yorker. Whereas Red Earth presented
features of magic realism that encouraged comparisons with Salman Rushdie, the stories here are
mostly realist in style. They are told in a city bar
called the Fishermans Rest by Subramaniam,
a retired civil servant. Once again the word
listen keeps the audience connected as each
story explores one key concept in Sanskrit philosophy, indicated by the story titles: Dharma
(moral duty), Shakti (the divine feminine principle), Kama (love), Artha (purpose, cause,
reason, meaning), and Shanti (inner peace).
The short story Kama a meditation on the
transitoriness of love and the ubiquitousness of
death features the Sikh police inspector Sartaj
Singh, one of Chandras favorite characters and
the protagonist of Sacred Games (2006).
Sacred Games is Chandras bestselling book to
date. It is a 900-page detective novel about
the Bombay underworld, which Chandra began
researching while writing Love and Longing in
Bombay. This world of policemen, criminals, and
beggars is shown as an alternative universe ruled
by the same principles written down by the man
upstairs, Chandras name for God (see Alexandru 2005, 15). As such, detective investigation
becomes an effective path toward a deeper understanding of the world. Sartaj Singh, the only
Sikh policeman in Bombay (whose religion binds
him to a life of modesty and sainthood, not really
compatible with the corruption necessary to
survive as a Bombay detective), explores life
retrospectively, starting with the death of the
crime lord Ganesh Gaitonde, whom Sartaj is lucky
enough to find, only to see him commit suicide.
Gaitonde returns as a narrator whose perspective
overlaps Sartajs in a complex game in which good
and evil are relative concepts that often overlap.
The personal lives of other characters from the
real and virtual worlds of business, finance,
cinema, television, and crime are caught in an
interlocking pattern of public violence. While
1008
CHAUDHURI, AMIT
Sacred Games, unlike Red Earth, focuses on plot, it

is actually on a different, transcendent level of
meaning that the many events in this epic thriller
gather significance, as the word sacred in the
title suggests.
An author whose popularity is on the rise,
Chandra is faithful to a nomadic life-pattern
that matches his characters positioning in
a continuous process of becoming. He lives in
Oakland, California with his wife and daughter,
and teaches creative writing at the University of
California, Berkeley; yet every year he spends
some time in Bombay, still his main source of
inspiration.
SEE ALSO: Barth, John (AF); Barthelme,
Donald (AF); Detective/Crime Fiction (WF);
Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora,
and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism
and Fiction (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF);
Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Rushdie,
Salman (WF)

Alexandru, M.-S. (2005). Virtual Reality on Infinite
Bandwidth: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by MariaSabina Alexandru. Journal of Commonwealth
Alexandru, M.-S. D. (2008a). Alternatives to the Novel
Form: Oral Storytelling and Internet Patterns in
Vikram Chandras Red Earth and Pouring Rain.
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43(3), 4560.
Alexandru, M.-S. D. (2008b). Performance,
Performativity and Nomadism in Vikram Chandras
Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Comparative Literature
Studies, 45(1), 2339.
Chandra, V. (1995). Red Earth and Pouring Rain.
Chandra, V. (1997). Eternal Don. New Yorker,
pp. 1303 (June 23 and 30).
Chandra, V. (1998). Love and Longing in Bombay.
Chandra, V. (2000). The Cult of Authenticity: Indias
Cultural Commissars Worship Indianness Instead
of Art. Boston Review. At www.bostonreview.net/
BR25.1/chandra.html, accessed Nov. 20, 2008.
Chandra, V. (2006). Sacred Games. London: Faber and
Faber.
Chandra, V. (2008). Vikram Chandra Home Page. At
www.vikramchandra.com, accessed Oct. 10, 2008.
Fadem, M. (2000). Vikram Chandra and the Sea of
Stories: Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Monsoon
Magazine. At www.monsoonmag.com/reviews/
author_vc.html, accessed Oct. 10, 2008.
Ganapathy-Dore, G. (1996). The Story-Tellers Voice in
Vikram Chandras Red Earth and Pouring Rain.
Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 19(1), 102110.
Levasseur, J., & Rabalais, K. (2001). Interview with
Vikram Chandra. Glimmer Train Stories, 40,
16074.
Rollason, C. (2003). The Storyteller in the Information
Age: Vikram Chandras Entwining Narratives. At
www.seikilos.com.ar/Chandra_en.pdf, accessed
Nov. 30, 2008.
Teverson, A. (2002) Vikram Chandra in Conversation.
Wasafiri, 37, 57.
Chaudhuri, Amit

FERNANDO GALVAN
Amit Chaudhuri achieved public and critical

acclaim as a novelist in the last decade of the
twentieth century. He is the author of five novels
and a short story collection, as well as poetry,
criticism, and reviews. His first two novels
received important literary prizes in Britain: A
Strange and Sublime Address (1991) won the
Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book
(Eurasia), having also been shortlisted for the
Guardian Fiction Prize; and Afternoon Raag
(1993) was recognized with the Encore Prize and
the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Freedom Song
(1998) and A New World (2000) have been successful in the US and India: Freedom Song received
the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction,
and A New World the 2002 Sahitya Akademi
Award, Indias highest honor for a single book.
However, his confessed vocation has always been
that of a poet, singer, and musician, and he has
published St. Cyril Road and Other Poems and an
academic monograph on D. H. Lawrence. As
a musician, Chaudhuri is trained in Indian classical singing but has also been influenced by rock
music. He has performed with his group in
India and in several European countries, and in
2007 released a CD entitled This Is Not Fusion.
Born on May 15, 1962 in Calcutta into
a prosperous, middle-class family, Chaudhuri
grew up in Bombay where he was educated in an
intellectual atmosphere and learned to appreciate
the artistic achievements of Bengali culture.
Chaudhuri has acknowledged his literary debt to
CHAUDHURI, AMIT
and admiration for Rabindranath Tagore,

Jibanananda Das, Bibhuti Bhusan Bandyopadhyay, and the film director Satyajit Ray. He moved
to Britain in 1983, reading English at University
College London and later completing a doctorate
on Lawrences poetry at Balliol College, Oxford.
He returned to Calcutta, where he lives part of
the year with his wife and daughter, although
he has also taught at British, European, and
American universities. In 2007 he was appointed
professor of contemporary literature at the
University of East Anglia.
Given his interest in poetry and music, his
novels and collection of short stories, Real Time
(2002), are not surprisingly marked by a highly
lyrical tone. For many readers, his first four novels
are the works of a miniaturist: collections of
poetic notes rather than stories with well-developed characters or actions. A Strange and Sublime
Address presents a lyrical evocation of childhood
through Sandeep, a boy from Bombay who
spends summer holidays with relatives in Calcutta. Although there are passing references to Indian
social and political realities, the dominant effect is
of personal melancholy, with epiphanies happening to the young hero as he goes through adolescent initiation rites. Afternoon Raag is written in
a similar autobiographical and nostalgic mood,
depicting the life of a young man who has left
India to study at Oxford. There are many details
in common between the anonymous first-person
narrator of this novel and the boy Sandeep: the
magical atmosphere and the affectionate picture
of his parents, particularly his mother. The novel
is built around the anonymous male character,
and each chapter is almost an independent lyrical
picture or tableau vivant of memories, evocations,
or feelings: the narrators recollections of his
childhood, the noise and traffic of Bombay and
Calcutta streets, the smells of Indian food, the
colors of Indian garments. Homesickness, nostalgia, and ambivalence about belonging to both
India and England permeate the narration.
With Freedom Song and A New World Chaudhuri left solipsism behind. In Freedom Song he
depicts the social, economic, and religious unrest
of Calcutta in 1993, presenting characters from
two families, of different ages and professions,
against the backdrop of HinduMuslim confrontation. A New World narrates the return home to
Calcutta of Jayojit, a writer recently divorced in
1009
America, and his son. Both must come to terms

with grandparents and their traditional life in the
overheated flat they share during their summer
holidays. But if the topics differ from the first two
books, Chaudhuris narrations are not sociological or politically inspired, and the dreamy and
evocative atmosphere of his previous novels persists here.
The Immortals (2009) is much longer than the
previous novels, although the lyrical and meditative tone and the musical resonances are still
predominant. It presents a realistic, psychological
portrait of everyday urban India (mainly 1970s
and 1980s Bombay), focusing on three middleclass characters connected through classical
Indian music. Western culture is never completely absent, but nineteenth-century Bengali and
Hindi modernist artistic traditions dominate.
Chaudhuris cultural and political views of
India (very unlike those of Indian writers such
as Salman Rushdie) are evident in his internationally published reviews and articles, collected
in two volumes: Small Orange Flags (2003b) and
Clearing a Space (2008). The introductory essays
in his edition of The Picador Book of Modern
Indian Literature (2001) are an excellent source
of his ideas on Indian writing.
The City in Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF);
Lawrence, D.H. (BIF); Migration, Diaspora,
and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction
Rushdie, Salman (WF)
Chaudhuri, A. (1991). A Strange and Sublime Address.
London: Heinemann.
Chaudhuri, A. (1993). Afternoon Raag. London:
Heinemann.
Chaudhuri, A. (1998). Freedom Song. London: Picador.
Chaudhuri, A. (2000). A New World. London: Picador.
Chaudhuri, A. (2002). Real Time: Stories and
a Reminiscence. London: Picador.
Chaudhuri, A. (2003a). D. H. Lawrence and
Difference: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the
Present. Oxford: Clarendon.
Chaudhuri, A. (2003b). Small Orange Flags. Calcutta:
Seagull.
Chaudhuri, A. (2005). St. Cyril Road and Other Poems.
New Delhi: Penguin.
1010
Chaudhuri, A. (2008). Clearing a Space: Reflections on

India, Literature and Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Chaudhuri, A. (2009). The Immortals. London:
Picador.
Chaudhuri, A. (ed.) (2001). The Picador Book of Modern
Indian Literature. London: Picador.
Chaudhuri, A. (ed.) (2008). Memorys Gold: Writings on
Calcutta. New Delhi: Penguin.
Galvan, F. (2003). Amit Chaudhuris Would-Be
Writers: A Joycean Rewriting. In J. Simons, J. M.
Tejedor Cabrera, M. Estevez Saa, & R. I. Garca Leon
(eds.), Silverpowdered Olivetrees: Reading Joyce in
Spain. Sevilla: Secretariado de Publicaciones de
la Universidad de Sevilla, pp. 8390.
Galvan, F. (2004). Amit Chaudhuri with Fernando
Galvan. In S. Nasta (ed.), Writing Across Worlds:
Contemporary Writers Talk. London: Routledge, pp.
21628.
Shukla, S., & Shukla, A. (eds.) (2004). The Novels of
Amit Chaudhuri: An Exploration in the Alternative
Tradition. New Delhi: Sarup.
Childrens and Young

Adult Fiction
CLARE BRADFORD
Fiction for children and young adults necessarily

reflects the social, cultural, and political contexts
in which it is produced and received. This field of
literature is deeply implicated within processes
and practices of socialization, since throughout
the world childrens books are used extensively in
family and school settings to introduce children
to cultural values. While some childrens texts
explicitly advocate ideological positions (such as
literature dealing with the environmental effects
of global warming), others implicitly propose
what is desirable and undesirable in human behavior. The language and visual images of novels
and picture books are imbued with values. In
some nations, such as China, state systems of
censorship control what books are imported and
published; Chinese writers for children have long
been regarded as engineers of childrens souls. It
should not be imagined, however, that censorship
does not exist in Western countries. Very often
authors engage in processes of self-censorship,
avoiding or moderating themes and language that
may decrease the appeal of their books to mainstream audiences. Much childrens fiction seeks to
align readers with protagonists, either through

first-person narration (particularly common in
young adult fiction) or by way of focalization
through the perspective of a character. This is
a powerful way of inducting readers into the
world of the text.
The term childrens literature is generally
understood to refer to books for children from
birth to the early teenage years, while the term
young adult (YA) is now widely used of work
for readers from the ages of around 12 to 18
(although there is enormous variation in the
interests and reading abilities of young people).
Over the twentieth century the childrens book
industry developed rapidly, and it now constitutes a key component of publishing generally. At
the same time, especially since the 1970s, research
in childrens literature increased in volume and
quality, and courses in childrens literature were
introduced in many universities and colleges.
National literatures vary considerably in the
extent and scope of their fiction for children and
young adults. Throughout the postcolonial world,
twentieth-century literature in English has been
shaped by histories of slavery, colonization, and
decolonization. In some countries, such as South
Africa, childrens books are published in several
languages, with English-language books comprising the largest component. In India, in contrast,
fiction in English comprises a relatively small
proportion of published works. There is something
of a tension between publishing in English and in
other languages in bilingual and multilingual
nations between, on the one hand, the legitimate
interests of readers who seek reading material in
their first language, and on the other, the power
and influence of global publishing in English.
In the heyday of European imperialism,
colonizing powers sought to impose European
languages and cultures on colonized peoples in
order to reduce the influence of indigenous traditions and cultural practices. In the field of childrens literature this process played out through
the introduction of canonical European texts and
pedagogical materials. The effects of these colonial strategies are evident well into the twentieth
century, in the high status attributed to canonical
European books in many former colonies, and in
the slow beginnings of local publishing for children. Rather than investing in work produced by
local writers, publishers have often focused on
translating English and American texts into local

languages. Displays of childrens literature in
bookshops in China, India, and Taiwan, for instance, are dominated by translations of Harry
Potter titles and English and American fiction.
In the West Indies, Caribbean childrens
literature in English did not begin to develop
until the 1960s, when the Jamaican novelist
Andrew Salkey published fiction for children,
using a combination of English and Creole
(a language formed through the combination of
two or more languages) not merely for the dialogue of protagonists but also for narration as
his contemporary Sam Selvon of Trinidad had
begun doing in his adult fiction in the 1950s. This
strategy, common across contemporary writing
by authors from minority cultures, avoids suggesting a hierarchy in which narration is rendered
in standard English and Creole (or a non-standard form of English) is used by characters, so
drawing attention to the fact that standard
English is the normative form. By using Creole
in narration as well as dialogue, Salkey suggested
that the old hierarchies of colonizer/colonized no
longer applied. Themes of immigration, displacement, and hybrid identities dominate Caribbean
childrens literature, in line with the lived experience of Caribbean people, many descended
from African slaves, who have sought new lives
in Britain and other countries. Indeed, most
Caribbean writers for children live and publish
outside their countries of origin; such authors
include Valerie Bloom, John Agard, Jean dCosta,
C. Everard Palmer, Grace Nichols, and James
Berry. Berry, for example, left Jamaica at 17 for
the United States, eventually migrating to Britain
where he has published highly regarded poetry
and fiction. His short story collection A Thief in
the Village (1987) is narrated from the perspective
of children growing up in Jamaica, and examines
the ways the experience of slavery has shaped
Caribbean identities. The poetry of Berry,
Nichols, and Agard draws on Caribbean Creole
and reggae rhythms in subtle and inventive ways
that often talk back to mainstream British culture
and its treatment of cultural difference. Secondgeneration authors of West Indian ancestry
include Malorie Blackman, whose Noughts and
Crosses YA sequence, beginning with Noughts
and Crosses (2001), treats race relations through
fantasy. In the dystopian, near-future setting of
1011
these novels, the black-skinned Crosses are the

dominant race, exercising power over the
white-skinned noughts, former slaves who are
denied access to economic and educational
opportunities.
Across the Indian subcontinent, publishers have
generally produced childrens texts in local languages, with some exceptions such as Adventures of
a Nepali Frog (1996), by the Nepalese author
Kanak Mani Dixit. In Sri Lanka, several works in
Sinhala and Tamil have been translated into
English, such as Sybil Wettasinghes popular The
Umbrella Thief (1956). In the Republic of India,
Hindi is the dominant language, followed by
Bengali; Indian English is the second language of
millions of Indian citizens. Following Indian
independence in 1947, publishers began to produce books for children in Hindi and English, as
well as in the languages of the various states of the
republic. The Childrens Book Trust, founded
in 1957, publishes and promotes indigenous
childrens literature. In the absence of a statefunded library system, however, locally published
books do not have a ready market, and publishers
tend to focus on the production of textbooks rather
than fiction. Ruskin Bond is an important figure in
the development of English-language childrens
literature in India. His early books The Room on
the Roof (1956), Grandfathers Private Zoo (1967),
and Angry River (1972) introduced children and
young adults to contemporary stories in Indian
settings, and his output includes short stories,
poetry, novels, and retellings of traditional stories.
In general, Indian childrens literature in English has avoided dealing with contentious topics.
However, the independent publishing houses
Tara, Tulika, and Young Zubaan have produced
picture books and novels that are inventive in
form and progressive in content. Sirish Raos Real
Men Dont Pick Primroses (On an Alpine-Style
Ascent) (1998), published by Tara, parodically
treats a climbing expedition in the Himalayas,
examining the various versions of masculinity
represented by the members of a group of young
climbers. Salman Rushdies only work for
children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990),
proceeds from the young protagonists question
Whats the use of stories that arent even true?
(20) to a self-reflexive narrative that addresses the
interplay of language and power in a repressive
society where stories are prohibited.
1012
The rich traditions of Confucian literature, epic

tales, and folklore comprise the foundations
of Chinese childrens literature. At the beginning
of the twentieth century many Western works
were translated for Chinese readers: Aesops Fables, the folktale collections of the Brothers
Grimm, and the Arabian Nights. Following the
founding of the Peoples Republic of China in
1949, childrens literature was deployed to train
readers in the principles of Marxist-Leninist
philosophy. In modern China comic books are
widely consumed and inexpensive; relatively few
books are available in English, but many Western
books are translated in addition to fiction from
Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Modern Japanese childrens literature, too, is heavily influenced by
translated works, but as in China comic books
(manga) are immensely popular and have given
rise to animations such as Miyazaki Hayaos
Spirited Away (2001) and Princess Mononoke
(1997). Korean childrens literature developed
from the magazines published in the first half of
the twentieth century, with a marked increase in
publishing since the 1980s. In Taiwan, translated
works dominate the market, although local
authors and artists are now beginning to produce
works located in Taiwanese culture, such as
the picture book Guji Guji (2004) by Chen
Chih-Yuan.
As in China, the countries of Southeast
Asia tend to regard childrens literature as
a means of propagating cultural and national
values. In Malaysia, for instance, agendas of
nation building are served through narratives in
which children of different cultures work and play
together. English serves as a lingua franca in this
multilingual nation, and publishing in English
favors stories about slightly naughty or selfish
children who learn from their mistakes within
conventional family settings where (unlike social
realities in modern Malaysia) mothers are
located firmly in the domestic sphere. The values
of simple country life are expounded in many
stories, often suggesting a nostalgic flight from
a technologized modernity. In the Philippines, the
continuing influence of American culture is visible in the dominance of imported American
books for children, while in other Southeast Asian
countries (including Vietnam, Cambodia, and
Indonesia) most childrens books are published
in local languages.
Childrens literature in Africa has been shaped

by histories of colonization and migration.
Following the scramble for Africa late in the
nineteenth century, European powers dominated
the continent until African nations achieved independence around the middle of the twentieth
century. English is used as the language of instruction in Namibia and Zambia, and imported
books in English dominate the market. In South
Africa, fiction for children is published in English
and Afrikaans, with a small number of texts in
African languages. One of the most influential
early twentieth-century South African books
for children is Sir Percy FitzPatricks Jock of the
Bushveld (1907), a novel of pioneer life that
celebrates the friendship between a boy adventurer and his dog. A notable feature of South African
childrens literature in the first half of the twentieth century is the large number of collections
of folktales from indigenous cultures that were
translated into English. As they were translated,
these narratives were converted into Western
forms familiar to English-speaking readers, losing
most of the narrative and linguistic features that
distinguished them as oral stories. Between 1948
and 1994, under the apartheid system enforced by
the National Party government, a system of censorship monitored all childrens books published
in or imported to South Africa. In the 1980s
childrens texts began to address the racism of
the apartheid laws explicitly as authors such as
Jenny Seed, Dianne Case, Lesley Beake, and Lawrence Bransby incorporated black characters into
their novels. Nevertheless, most black and colored
people were represented through the perspective
of white protagonists, who typically gained
insight or empathy through friendships with
non-whites. It remains the case that few black
South Africans publish fiction for children.
In the former British settler colonies of Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand, publishing for children during the first half of the twentieth century
was modeled on British texts and styles, with an
eye to the English market. In these three nations
the production of childrens literature began in
earnest after World War II, with a sharp increase
from the 1970s. In Australia, Mary Grant Bruces
15 Billabong books, which commenced in 1910
with A Little Bush Maid (1910) and concluded
with Billabong Riders in 1942, tracked changing
attitudes toward Australias relationship to
Britain and toward its non-white others. These

novels are set on a cattle station and trace the
progress of Norah, the little bush maid, and her
brother Jim. Whereas the first Billabong books
treat the Aboriginal farm worker, Black Billy, and
the Chinese gardener, Lee Wing, as comical and
stereotyped figures, the last books represent the
two as respected members of the community.
Nevertheless, Black Billy and Lee Wing are still
marginal to the Linton family and occupy a lowly
position in hierarchies of class.
In New Zealand, too, fiction published in the
first half of the twentieth century promoted
national mythologies of the typical New Zealander, with a focus on novels dealing with the lives
of children living on sheep stations. Esther Glens
Six Little New Zealanders (1917) constituted
a response to Ethel Turners Seven Little Australians (1894), similarly claiming a national identity
distinct from that of what was still referred to at
this time as the mother country. The Canadian
equivalent is L. M. Montgomerys Anne of Green
Gables (1908), which is located in a rural setting
on Prince Edward Island. Anne is an orphan
whose quest for a home is metonymic of the
many Canadian texts, up to the present time, that
feature characters searching for a sense of belonging. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are
nations of immigrants, and their early twentieth-century childrens texts negotiate the anxieties of newcomers to a strange and sometimes
hostile land.
Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand
childrens books since World War II have been
markedly influenced by feminism and by the
impact of multiculturalism on national identities.
Since the 1980s indigenous and mainstream publishers have produced fiction by Aboriginal and
Maori writers, with an emphasis on picture books.
In Australia, the distinguished picture book Do
Not Go Around the Edges (1990), by Daisy Utemorrah and Pat Torres, works dialogically to
suggest the complexity of Utemorrahs life and
the effects of colonialism on individuals and clans.
A key Aboriginal text in Canada is Beatrice Culleton Mosioniers In Search of April Raintree
(1983), rewritten for young readers as April
Raintree (1984). This novel traces the identity
formation of two Metis (mixed race) sisters and
addresses the systems of power and control that
limit the girls agency and construct them as
1013
marginal to mainstream culture. In New Zealand,

Gavin Bishops The House that Jack Built (1999)
presents a revisionary version of the colonial past
as the land itself encourages Maori to rise up
against the British invaders.
The New Zealand author Margaret Mahy is the
countrys preeminent childrens writer, having
produced picture books, junior novels, and YA
novels. Mahys fiction, set in contemporary New
Zealand, often plays with magic-realist elements
to suggest the irruption of ancient mythologies
into the modern world. Among her novels are The
Haunting (1982) and The Changeover (1984). The
author-illustrator Lynley Dodd has achieved
international success with her picture books based
on the adventures of the canine hero Hairy Maclary and his friends, beginning with Hairy Maclary
from Donaldsons Dairy (1983). Post-disaster
fiction has been a dominant genre in New Zealand
YA literature, including novels by Maurice Gee,
Jack Lasenby, Gaylene Gordon, and Caroline
Macdonald.
In Australia, Shaun Tan has published
a number of innovative picture books, including
The Lost Thing (2000) and The Red Tree (2001),
but his most ambitious work is the graphic novel
The Arrival (2006), which addresses questions
about belonging, cultural plurality, and identity
pertinent to refugee and diasporic populations.
Similar questions have been raised by YA authors
including Sophie Masson, Matt Zurbo, and
Melina Marchetta, some of whom are secondgeneration descendants of migrants to Australia,
who have contested national mythologies of the
fair go by pointing to the marginalization of
non-Anglo migrants.
Robert Munsch is the best-known Canadian
childrens author, having published over 40 picture books including The Paper Bag Princess
(1980) and Love You Forever (1986). Over the last
two decades fiction by writers of color has
foregrounded the experience of children who
negotiate the spaces between cultures, notably
Rachna Gilmores series of picture books featuring Gita, a young girl of Indian heritage. These
books offer children of color the experience of
narrative subjectivity by telling stories from the
perspective of minority populations; at the
same time they encourage children of the
dominant culture to appreciate and understand
difference.
1014
THE CITY IN FICTION

Childrens and Young Adult Fiction (BIF);
Indigenous Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism
and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and
Fiction (WF)
Bradford, C. (2001). Reading Race: Aboriginality in
Australian Childrens Literature. Carlton: Melbourne
University Press.
Bradford, C. (2008). Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial
Readings of Childrens Literature. Waterloo, ON:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Desai, C. M. (2006). National Identity in
a Multicultural Society: Malaysian Childrens
Literature in English. Childrens Literature in
Education, 37(2), 16384.
Farquhar, M. (1998). Childrens Literature in China:
From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe.
Hunt, P. (ed.) (2004). International Companion
Encyclopedia of Childrens Literature, 2nd edn.
London: Routledge.
Inggs, J. (2001). Bringing the Strands of History
Together: Myth and Legend in Contemporary
South African Childrens Literature. South African
Journal of Library and Information Science, 67(1), 17.
James, C. (2005). From Orature to Literature in
Jamaican and Trinidadian Childrens Folk
Traditions. Childrens Literature Association
Quarterly, 30(2), 16478.
Jenkins, E. (2006). National Character in South African
English Childrens Literature. New York: Routledge.
Khorana, M. (ed.) (1988). Critical Perspectives on
African Childrens and Young Adult Literature.
Khorana, M. (2003). The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond.
Pink, H. (2008). Magical Realism in Salman Rushdies
Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Journal of Childrens
Reimer, M. (ed.) (2008). Discourses of Childrens
Literature in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press.
Rushdie, S. (1990). Haroun and the Sea of Stories. New
York: Penguin.
Sands-OConnor, K. (2007). Soon Come Home to This
Island: West Indians in British Childrens Literature.
Stephens, J. (1992). Language and Ideology in Childrens
Fiction. London: Longman.
Viswanathan, G. (1998). Masks of Conquest: Literary
Study and British Rule in India. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Williams, S. (2003). Constructing a National Identity

through the Adventures of a Nepali Frog. Bookbird,
41(3), 369.
The City in Fiction

RUVANI RANASINHA
Twentieth-century fictional representations of

the city from writers of the postcolonial world
both appropriate and modify the urban themes of
Euro-American literature, where the city is often
defined in relation to the country. In colonial and
postcolonial contexts, the archetypal rural/urban
divide is sometimes mapped onto an international division between the colonial periphery and the
metropolitan center. If V. S. Naipauls portrayal
of Port of Spain, Trinidad, as a colonial backwater
in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) reinforces these
paradigms, then his depiction of the constrained
lives of male immigrants in decaying London in
The Mimic Men (1967) destabilizes them. Salman
Rushdies heightened evocation of Bombays
linguistic verve, vitality, and metropolitan excitement in Midnights Children (1981) presents
a further challenge. Urban representations from
the Third World often underscore the uneven
development of urban and rural areas, as in the
city and the veld writings of Doris Lessing from
Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. In Australian literature, Patrick Whites novels interrogate the
polarized relationship between the city and the
outback. Whites indictment of urban culture
depicts Sydney and suburbia as sites of confusion
and danger; his novel The Vivisector (1970)
laments Sydneys evolution from village to city
within a lifetime. David Maloufs Johnno (1975)
and New Zealander Ian Weddes Symmes Hole
(1986) express disaffection for the modern,
uniform metropolis in terms of a resistance to
fragmentation.
However, postcolonial and postmodern celebrations of the city often overlap: the heterogeneous, cosmopolitan, fragmented, and protean
cities that postcolonial writers like Rushdie
brought to the fore are equally central to the
analysis of postmodernity, where the city emblematizes distinctive conditions of contemporary
life. In The Satanic Verses (1988) and subsequent
novels, cities like Bombay, London, and New
THE CITY IN FICTION
York are places where identities constantly

change. Postcolonial Bombay and multicultural
London and New York in Rushdies fiction share
potentially transformative powers created by the
constant contact of different languages and
people; they generate newness through hybrid
combinations, and emerge as sites where authentic traditions or any claims to Western superiority
are destabilized. Bombay serves as a place where
different cultures mix and the divided nation
becomes defined by heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism: in other words, where India meets the
world. In The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), it is
connected to global popular culture.
In urban fiction from around the postcolonial
world, the city is often conceptualized as
a troubled marker of modernity, a space where
discourses of tradition and modernity are negotiated in terms of such dialectics as the home and
the world and spiritualism and secularism. The
former binary is mapped onto representations of
the village in terms of cultural selfhood, and the
city in terms of modernity. This is particularly
evident in early Indian writing in English, particularly Raja Raos work and R. K. Narayans many
novels set in the imaginary South Indian city of
Malgudi, peopled with characters from all walks
of life. The more recent urban portraits of
Anita Desai (Delhi in Clear Light of Day, 1980)
and Amitav Ghosh (Calcutta, Dhaka, and London
in The Shadow Lines, 1988) underscore the contradictions in the promise of modernity; Amit
Chaudhuris fictional Bombay in Freedom Song
(1998), as a symbol of disorienting modernity,
compares unfavorably with Calcutta.
The city may also be rendered as a palimpsest
where history and memory are written into
local and global urban culture. In Rushdies
The Moors Last Sigh (1995), for instance, Bombay
is a city where past successful intercultural exchange is overlaid (and thus covered up) by
contemporary ethnic division. The novel emphasizes Bombays myriad connections in time as well
as culture, drawing a parallel between the contemporary destruction of the secularist ideal in
the communal politics of 1990s Bombay, and the
sixteenth-century Catholic reconquista of Moorish Spain, where conjoined Christian, Jewish, and
Islamic cultures coexisted. More recently, The
Enchantress of Florence (2008) traces the rise and
fall of the Mughal city of Fatehpur Sikri.
1015
Rushdies conceptions of Bombays heterogeneity and articulation of its minority voices are
also defined in relation to his description of
Pakistani cities as monologic and insular in
Midnights Children and Shame (1983). Such
constructions are revisited in Mohsin Hamids
Moth Smoke (2000), a portrait of a fissured, drugfueled subworld of modern Lahore that serves to
challenge conventional representation of the
orthodox Islamic city. Kamila Shamsies novels
City by the Sea (1998) and Broken Verses (2005)
similarly engage with the lived complexities of
Karachi as both lively and dangerous, while emphasizing the way gender, class, and ethnicity
determine lives in the city, drawing on
Anita Desais figuring of the alienation of modern
urban life in gendered terms. Rohinton Mistrys
powerful novel A Fine Balance (1995) foregrounds questions of class and social injustice in
its mapping of the subterranean, labyrinthine
bowels of Bombays slums and its depiction of
urban penury. Aravind Adigas Booker Prizewinning novel The White Tiger (2008) maps
Delhis social inequality in similar terms.
In Africa, John Kiriamitis depiction of transitional Kenyan social and economic urban landscapes in My Life in Crime (1984), Meja Mwangis
record of Nairobi slum life in Kill Me Quick
(1973), and Ben Okris renderings of Lagoss
urban ghettos in The Famished Road (1991) and
Infinite Riches (1999) all show the city to be a site
of social chaos, economic desperation, and postcolonial crisis, but also of resilience. In this way,
they revisit the concerns of Cyprian Ekwensi in
People of the City (1954) and Chinua Achebe in No
Longer at Ease (1960). Both novels focus on urban
experiences in conveying the challenges facing
West African countries on the threshold of independence. The Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera revisits
the 1940s in her depiction of female resistance to
the patriarchal oppression of township life in
Bulawayo in her poetic novel Butterfly Burning
(1998); the city is depicted with love and affection
as a kind of refuge for its black majority, despite
the searing descriptions of violence and squalor.
Fictions of South Africas formerly apartheid
(now aspirant global) cities Johannesburg and
Cape Town foreground the racialization of space
and the black urban (specifically township) experience in terms of dispossession, repression, social
struggle, and protest as in Nadine Gordimers
1016
THE CITY IN FICTION
Burgers Daughter (1979) and My Sons Story

(1990), and Achmat Dangors short story collection From Riverlea to Parkview (1995), tracing his
journey from black township to white suburb. In
this regard they may be compared with the vivid
portrayals of invisible cities as spaces of racial
segregation and social protest in African American novels by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and
Toni Morrison.
Urban black British fiction underscores how
cities in Britain, notably London, were transformed both demographically and imaginatively
by migration, particularly as a consequence of
Britains imperial legacy, since decolonization
began after World War II. Recent studies (Sandhu
2003; Ball 2004; McLeod 2004) explore how black
and Asian writers have represented the negotiation of London as imperial or post-imperial urban
space. London is ambivalently portrayed as
a spiritual home in Trinidadian emigre Sam
Selvons novel The Lonely Londoners (1956). His
characters intimate knowledge of London geographies before they migrate conveys the impact of
the colonial project but also serves as a defiant
rejoinder to claims they do not belong. Selvons
novel is pivotal in its representation of a London
characterized by racism, segregation, and fear,
while simultaneously staking a postcolonial claim
of possession; a similar balance between alienation and belonging is achieved in Ghoshs The
Shadow Lines and Hanif Kureishis The Buddha of
Suburbia (1990). Naipauls mournful narratives
of the profound transformation Britain, particularly London, began undergoing in 1950s is
juxtaposed with his poignant desire to find the
center, the London of his literary dreams. In
different ways, the early London novels of Selvon
and Naipaul register the important shift that
occurred in Londons identity in the 1950s as
received ideas of race, citizenship, and nationality
of London as a white city began to be
dismantled. Indian Kamala Markandayas novel
The Nowhere Man (1972) offers a muted critique
of resurgent neo-imperialism in 1960s London
via the rising tide of racism encountered by
immigrant protagonist Srinivas. Nigerian Buchi
Emechetas novel Second-Class Citizen (1974)
maps black women onto a cityscape of racism
and patriarchy, while the radicalizing of blacks
and Asians in London (and other British cities
like Bradford) is captured in Linton Kwesi

Johnsons poetry (Mi Revalueshanary Fren, 2002).
Rushdies incendiary portrait of Babylondon
in The Satanic Verses (1988), which simultaneously extols a hybridized postcolonial
London, is revisited in Kureishis cartography
of London in Buddha, with its sustained exposure of Londons underbelly of dereliction and
violence, as well as its celebration of the capitals
potential for freedom and self-reinvention for
energizing creativity and multicultural possibilities. Kureishis protagonists escape from the
suburbs to the metropolis is key to their selfdevelopment. These patterns and themes are
revisited by younger writers Zadie Smith (White
Teeth, 2000) and Gautam Malkani (Londonstani,
2006) in their different versions of multicultural
London. Monica Alis Bangladeshi East End
of London is counterpointed with Dhaka and
becomes a world in itself for her protagonist
Nasneen in Brick Lane (2003).
Similar preoccupations emerge in representations of Canadian cities with different patterns of
migration. Mordecai Richlers large oeuvre centers around Montreals Jewish community, while
Michael Ondaatjes In the Skin of the Lion (1987)
focuses on marginalized immigrant communities
in Toronto and southern Ontario during the first
half of the twentieth century. As he imagines the
stories of the immigrants who built the city, the
construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct becomes
a symbol of Torontos optimism and potential. A
similar figuring of cosmopolitan immigrant Toronto can be found in Anne Michaelss Fugitive
Pieces (1996) and some of Bharati Mukherjees
Canadian short stories; M. G. Vassanjis No New
Land (1991) is set among an exiled, dispossessed
community of Tanzanian Asians in Toronto following political upheaval in Africa. Austin Clarke
and Dionne Brand have written notable works on
the racism experienced by West Indian immigrants in Toronto.
The global city is particularly important to
younger diasporic writers such as Hari Kunzru,
Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kiran Desai, whose texts and
lives straddle cities in America, India, and Britain.
Desais The Inheritance of Loss (2006) is particularly concerned with the relationship between
individuals and increasingly global, corporate
capitalist cities, and the spatial interpenetration
CLARKE, AUSTIN
and integration of the First and Third Worlds,

but also with the workings of global capital. The
depiction of illegal immigrant Bijus grueling
exploitation in a subterranean New York Indian
restaurant is contrasted with the different trajectories of the well-heeled Green Card holders,
exposing New Yorks underbelly and the disparity
of Western cities that are perfectly first world on
top, perfectly third-world twenty-two steps
down (23).
As a site of history, culture, and memory, the
city in world fiction bears witness to its past.
Furthermore, as a network of connections the
city remains a compelling metaphor to interrogate the intersection (and the complex hierarchies) of race, class, and gender in contemporary
constructed spaces. In these ways, the relationship
between city and citizen often provides a model
for larger national and transnational identities
and affiliations.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); London
in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and
Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF)

Ball, J. C. (2004). Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction
and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto:
Routledge.
Blunt, A., & Rose, G. (eds.) (1994). Writing Women and
Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New
York: Guilford.
Desai, K. (2006). The Inheritance of Loss. London:
Hamish Hamilton.
Edwards, J. D., & Ivison, D. (eds.) (2005). Downtown
Canada: Writing Canadian Cities. Toronto:
Jacobs, J. M. (1996). Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and
the City. London: Routledge.
Kurtz, J. R. (1998). Urban Obsessions Urban Fears: The
Postcolonial Kenyan Novel. Trenton, NJ:
Africa World Press.
Lindner, C. (ed.) (2006). Urban Spaces and Cityscapes:
Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture.
London: Routledge.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge:
Polity.
1017
McLeod, J. (2004). Post-Colonial London: Re-Writing

the Metropolis. London: Routledge.
Mehta, S. (2004). Maximum City: Bombay Lost and
Found. London: Knopf.
Sandhu, S. (2003). London Calling: How Black and Asian
Writers Imagined a City. London: HarperCollins.
Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Clarke, Austin
STELLA ALGOO-BAKSH
Austin Chesterfield Clarke has been a significant

voice in the rise of Canadian and Caribbean
literature to international prominence. His novels, short stories, and autobiography transcend
the national contexts of their settings, achieving
thematic coherence in their persistent probing of
marginalization, emasculation, and fractured
identity within segments of the African diaspora.
In energetic and often witty prose, though with an
initial predilection for linear narrative, Clarke
targets the inequities and attendant evils of
Barbadian colonial life, but he also penetrates
the calm surface of Canadian society to explore
the social and psychological destitution faced by
black West Indian immigrant groups just beginning the struggle, in defiance of white hegemony,
to articulate a cultural identity.
Born on July 26, 1934 to a working-class family
in Barbados, Clarke acquired the values and
preferences of a society still immersed in British
culture; however, his arrival in Canada in 1955,
initially to study at the University of Toronto,
shortly intensified his self-awareness as a black
man. His association with other black West Indians and his frustrating search for employment
after abandoning his studies in 1956 alerted him
to what he saw as the liabilities of a black skin in
Canada, a racial consciousness sharpened by his
immersion in contemporary black American
writing, by visits to New York to contact black
activists, and, later, by encounters with black
American artists and intellectuals. Driven to
write, he found inspiration in the foregrounding
of peripheral peoples in the work of Samuel
Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and
other Caribbean writers. In time, he became
1018
CLARKE, AUSTIN
a more conspicuous participant in mainstream

Canadian society, engaging, for example, in
newspaper and radio journalism and serving on
the Ontario Board of Censors (19835) and
the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (198893). Nevertheless, he has never abandoned the quest for equity for blacks in Canada,
involving himself in protest marches, publishing
tracts and journalism on race relations in
Canada, and helping to launch Torontos
Caribana Festival to celebrate black West Indian
culture and identity. His activism has complemented his fictions central theme, the victimization of blacks in white-dominated societies.
Clarkes very first novel, The Survivors of the
Crossing (1964), is informed by the us/them
polarity characteristic of postcolonial writing.
The black Barbadian masses trapped at the bottom of a transitional colonial society live in
crippling poverty and despair, with the new
black middle class now enjoying political power
unable to mediate the divergent interests
between the poor and a dominant white elite.
Rufus, a plantation laborer, attempts to organize
a strike against a white planter but fails. The
establishment proves impregnable and the poor
remain disenfranchised. This social system,
Clarke demonstrates, emasculates the black male
by denying him adequate resources to discharge
his role as provider for his family. In this context
Clarke advances the notion of women as potentially strong and valiant beings. Convinced that
black Caribbean and North American writers
have not truly represented black women as full
characters, he paints Stella and Clementina as
courageous figures battling overwhelming odds
to promote the well-being of their families. The
school and the church are shown as complicit in
preserving the status quo by promoting social
passivity and the worship of European culture.
This layering of white culture over a black psyche
induces a divided and denigrated black self and an
acceptance of inferiority. In Amongst Thistles and
Thorns (1965), Clarke again shows how social
institutions produce internally conflicting
identities, though he now hints at a more benign
alternative. The young Milton seeks out his
biological father, who stimulates him through
stories about Harlem. The attribution to this
New York community of the power of black
regeneration is perhaps not surprising since,
as Clarke concedes, he has himself drawn

emotional and psychic energy from Harlem
(Algoo-Baksh 59), and Harlem, in Clarkes
work, repeatedly symbolizes a world of black
possibilities.
Other novels attempt to recapture the social
and psychological realities of colonial life. In The
Polished Hoe (2002), the interaction between
Mary and the constable Percy as she makes
a statement about her murder of Bellfeels,
a white plantation manager, offers insights into
life in a quintessential colonial society in which
blacks are granted little intrinsic value. Mary, for
example, while still a young girl, is claimed by
Bellfeels as a future sexual possession. The recurrent problem of self-location manifests itself in
the son she bears the manager: Wilberforce,
educated as a doctor in England, is brimming
with English culture but proves neither white
nor black. Clarke insists, too, that the imprint of
the colonizing power endures long after constitutional change has begun. The Prime Minister
(1977) depicts the frustrations confronted by
John Moore, who dreams of creating a new
national identity but is thwarted by a morally
bankrupt black government still attached to white
values, while Proud Empires (1986b) demonstrates how the mixed-race Boy, an aspirant to
political leadership, is ill equipped to effect real
reform because of his commitment to European
values and institutions. An insidious legacy of
colonialism, in Clarkes view, is the preponderance of black men in white skins, men who are
incapable of devising measures to foster a distinct
black identity.
From Clarkes perspective, the black experience in Canada has in some respects differed
little from that in colonial Barbados. The Meeting
Point (1967), Storm of Fortune (1973), and The
Bigger Light (1975) which as a trilogy constitute
the first comprehensive treatment in fiction of
black West Indian life in Canada censure the
country for marginalizing and demeaning new
arrivals. Unemployed or locked into low-status
jobs, Clarkes characters inhabit a virtual caste
system which inflicts upon them both overt and
subtle racism. The maid Bernice, for example,
has simply moved from one psychologically
debilitating society to another. Furthermore, the
crippling impact of racism recurs in the lives
of the immigrants children. In More (2008),
CLARKE, AUSTIN
Idora negotiates the hazards of discrimination in

providing for her son, but the latter succumbs
to stereotyping and denial of opportunity, drifting into gangs and crime. As Clarkes trilogy
demonstrates, Canada is no haven for already
deracinated subjectivities, since the process of
self-location is again a challenge. Symbolized by
the admixture of dialect and Standard English in
Clarkes writing, the fractured self reasserts itself:
West Indians must determine how much to
surrender culturally to accommodate a white
society. The complexity of this quest for a satisfying yet serviceable identity is vividly illustrated
in The Bigger Light. Boysie, while a laborer in
Barbados, has a negative self-image, but his
experiences in Canada do little to eliminate
this handicap. Allying himself with the white
community accomplishes nothing since the ambiguous self that results is untenable, driving him
to contemplate life in Harlem as a solution. The
issue of black selfhood resurfaces in Clarkes The
Origin of Waves (1997), in which an extended
conversation between Tim and John depicts
Canada and the United States as alien environments that generate in black immigrants a strong
sense of dislocation, and The Question (1999b),
in which Malcolm marries a white Canadian in
a psychologically frustrating drive to compensate for his blackness.
Clarkes six short story collections further
explore his central concerns. Nine Men Who
Laughed (1986a), for example, suggests that white
racism in Canada, evidenced by its message of
black inferiority and cultural inadequacy implicit
in the label immigrant, has tended to confine
individuals to marginal status. At the same time,
as in When He Was Free and Young and He Used to
Wear Silks (1971), Clarke recognizes the frequent
futility of the immigrants reaction to labeling.
Some, like Henry in Give Us This Day: and
Forgive Us, simply accept their assigned status,
while others, like Jefferson in Four Stations in
His Circle, adopt the tastes and values of the
dominant society to gain acceptance but achieve
only self-hatred and alienation from their peers.
Marginalization, of course, is not always passively
accepted. Through retention of their dialect,
social activity, interracial sexual relationships,
and ventures into new areas of employment, the
immigrants carve out space for themselves and
begin to subvert the entrenched white culture.
1019
Clarke is careful to suggest, too, that it is not only

social forces that erode the black psyche. Several
stories in When Women Rule (1985) and Nine Men
intimate that women may often contribute to
male emasculation. Included here are black women like Alexanders wife in On One Leg and the
protagonists wife in Griff! who humiliate and
destroy men, a portrayal that counterbalances
Clarkes other image of women as noble, nurturing, and self-sacrificing. In The Collector and
The Discipline, white women are shown to
destroy black men. Since they are often symbolic
of Canada in Clarkes work, white women often
reinforce through their actions the theme that
Canada, while alluring to blacks, might ultimately
mutilate them.
In his long writing career, Clarke has not
confined himself to fiction. He has published
Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack
(1980), a scintillating autobiographical account
of his boyhood and adolescent years, A Passage
Back Home: A Personal Reminiscence of Samuel
Selvon (1994), and Pig Tails n Breadfruit: Rituals
of Slave Food: A Barbadian Memoir (1999a),
which embeds Barbadian recipes into a social and
historical context. But his fiction has gained him
the greatest recognition. His work has generally
been well received by critics, who have been
impressed by his sensitivity to the black experience, his skillful rendering of Barbadian dialect,
and the exuberance of his narration and characters. Dissenting voices have pointed to weaknesses
in characterization and plot, particularly in his
early novels. His earlier writing earned him the
Casa de las Americas Literary Prize (1980), the
Toronto Arts Award for a Lifetime Achievement
in Literature (1992), and the W. O. Mitchell
Literary Prize (1999). With time, especially in
The Polished Hoe and More, Clarke has become
an increasingly sophisticated writer more willingly experimenting with dialogue and with complex
narrative structures featuring shifts of time and
place. The resulting enhancement of his stature as
a writer is evident from the success of his Joycean
tome, The Polished Hoe, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize as well as two
prestigious Canadian awards, the Giller Prize
(2002) and the Trillium Book Award (2003). In
recognition of his services to literature and/or the
community, Clarke has also received the Martin
Luther King Junior Award for Excellence in
1020
CLIFF, MICHELLE
Writing (1999), the Barbados National Builder

Award (2001), and four honorary doctorates, and
he has been invested as a Member of the Order of
Canada (1998).
SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City
in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF);
Lamming, George (WF); Migration, Diaspora,
and Exile in Fiction (WF); Naipaul, V. S. (WF);
Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Selvon, Sam
(WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)

Algoo-Baksh, S. (1994). Austin C. Clarke: A Biography.
Toronto: ECW Press; Mona, Jamaica: University of
the West Indies Press.
Brown, L. (1989). El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and
the Caribbean in Austin Clarkes Fiction. London,
ON: University of Western Ontario; Parkersburg:
Caribbean.
Clarke, A. (1964). The Survivors of the Crossing.
Clarke, A. (1965). Amongst Thistles and Thorns.
Clarke, A. (1967). The Meeting Point. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Clarke, A. (1971). When He Was Free and Young and He
Used to Wear Silks, rev. edn. Toronto: Anansi.
Clarke, A. (1973). Storm of Fortune. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Clarke, A. (1975). The Bigger Light. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Clarke, A. (1977). The Prime Minister. Toronto: General
Publishing.
Clarke, A. (1980). Growing Up Stupid under the Union
Jack: A Memoir. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Clarke, A. (1985). When Women Rule. Toronto:
Clarke, A. (1986a). Nine Men Who Laughed. Markham,
ON: Penguin.
Clarke, A. (1986b). Proud Empires. London: Gollancz.
Clarke, A. (1992). In This City. Toronto: Exile.
Clarke, A. (1993). There Are No Elders. Toronto: Exile.
Clarke, A. (1994). A Passage Back Home: A Personal
Remembrance of Samuel Selvon. Toronto: Exile.
Clarke, A. (1997). The Origin of Waves. Toronto:
Clarke, A. (1999a). Pig Tails n Breadfruit: Rituals of
Slave Food: A Barbadian Memoir. Toronto: New
Press. (Also published as Love and Sweet Food.
Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2004.)
Clarke, A. (1999b). The Question. Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart.
Clarke, A. (2002). The Polished Hoe. Toronto: Thomas

Allen.
Clarke, A. (2008). More. Toronto: Thomas Allen.
Cliff, Michelle
CONSTANCE S. RICHARDS
Transnational feminist writer Michelle Cliff engages issues of identity, home/exile, marginality,
and national struggle in her essays, short stories,
novels, and poetry. As a novelist, Cliff is perhaps
best known for her Clare Savage novels, Abeng
(1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987). The
protagonist, light-skinned, mixed-race, Jamaicanborn Clare Savage, is, according to Cliff, somewhat biographical. Like her protagonist, Cliff was
born in Jamaica (on November 2, 1946) but
emigrated to the US at a young age, returning
periodically to Jamaica to attend school. In her
1985 essay If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would
Write This in Fire, Cliff describes how her
separation from her darker-skinned friend Zoe
at a private, all-girls English school in Kingston
reinforced the sort of caste system into which she
was born. Following her 1974 PhD at Warburg
Institute in London, Cliff published a collection
of prose poems entitled Claiming an Identity They
Taught Me to Despise (1980) in which she explores
color prejudice and its effects, a topic that became
a central focus of her novels.
Abeng is a fairly linear narrative that follows
Clare through her girlhood in Jamaica. Clares
friendship with her best friend, Zoe, and their
encounters with adolescent sexism, dramatize
hierarchies of color, race, class, and gender. A
parallel narrative running throughout the novel
traces the history of British colonialism and slave
labor used in the production of sugar, the second
narrative offering an explanation of the first.
Yoked to the narrative of oppression, however,
is a counter-narrative of resistance. Cliff recovers
the story of the Jamaican folk hero Grandy (Granny) Nanny and the Maroon community, who are
credited with furthering the 1834 emancipation of
slaves on the island.
This historical narrative of resistance becomes
a personal challenge to the older Clare Savage of
Cliffs second novel, No Telephone to Heaven. This
non-linear narrative opens near the end of Clares
CLIFF, MICHELLE
life, when she has joined a group of self-styled

revolutionaries who have embraced Maroon tactics in a contemporary Jamaica, suffering under
neocolonialism in the form of American tourism
and popular culture, as well as multinational
capitalism. We encounter Clare at different points
of her development: leaving Jamaica for the US
and a life with her father who encourages her to
pass as white; developing a political consciousness, prompted by racial prejudice and black
resistance in the US and England; and returning
to Jamaica in an attempt to sort out her
identity and its accompanying position of
privilege. Drawing on oral storytelling and
remnants of pre-contact art, Clare attempts to
unlearn the assumptions imposed by her colonialist education.
Assigning Michelle Cliff to any particular community of writers reveals the complexity of the
colonial project and the identities it has created.
At various points, Cliff has claimed African,
English, Creole, and Carib identity. While she
claims Jamaican as her nationality, she also says,
I grew up partly in the United States, I was
educated in London, and I originated in Jamaica,
so I cant limit myself to just one place (Schwartz
597). She has not been back to Jamaica for many
years, in part because, as a lesbian, she would not
be comfortable with the intolerance for sexual
difference. When asked if she considers herself
part of a community of Caribbean writers in exile,
however, Cliff suggests that such a designation is
problematic. A more appealing designation is
political novelist, and as such she counts among
her literary influences Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, Southern
African Bessie Head and African American Jean
Toomer, the last two of whom also address complex racial issues and color consciousness. In
particular, she singles out Toni Morrisons
Beloved as an inspirational work in terms of her
reconstruction and reclamation of a painful history as an act of redemption.
Like Morrisons novel, which was inspired by
a historical account of a fugitive slave woman,
Cliffs third novel, Free Enterprise (1993), introduces readers to a little-known free black woman
who helped to finance abolitionist John Browns
raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Having heard
brief references to Mary Ellen Pleasant, and
having discovered her grave in California wine
1021
country, Cliff, through the same kind of act of

imagination Morrison employs, combined with
historical research, creates a history of resistance
to American slavery for Pleasant and a West
Indian comrade whom she renames Annie
Christmas. Fortunately, both women avoid
Browns fate following the insurrection.
Christmass ongoing relationship with the prisoners provides the occasion for oral storytelling
that situates her own history as a freedom fighter
among other acts of resistance on the part of
others a Jewish woman from Surinam and an
aboriginal man from Hawaii, for example and
continues the transnational concerns of much of
her earlier work.
SEE ALSO: Aidoo, Ama Ata (WF); Feminism
and Fiction (WF); Head, Bessie (WF); Historical
Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in
Fiction (WF); Morrison, Toni (AF); Politics/
Activism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative
Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Toomer, Jean (AF);
Adisa, O. P. (1994). Journey into Speech A Writer
between Two Worlds: An Interview with
Michelle Cliff. African American Review, 28(2),
273281.
Agosto, N. (1999). Michelle Cliffs Novels: Piecing the
Tapestry of Memory and History. New York: Peter
Lang.
Cliff, M. (1980). Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to
Despise. Watertown, MA: Persephone.
Cliff, M. (1984). Abeng. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing.
Cliff, M. (1985). The Land of Look Behind: Prose and
Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand.
Cliff, M. (1987). No Telephone to Heaven. New York:
Dutton.
Cliff, M. (1990). Bodies of Water. New York: Dutton.
Cliff, M. (1993). Free Enterprise. New York: Dutton.
Cliff, M. (1998). The Store of a Million Items. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Gourdine, A. K. M. (2002). The Difference Place Makes:
Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press.
Hornung, A., & Ruhe, E. (eds.) (1998). Postcolonialsim
and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen,
Opal Palmer Adisa. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Gifford, W. T. (2003). Narrative and the Nature of
Worldview in the Clare Savage Novels of Michelle Cliff.
1022
COETZEE, J. M.
Macdonald-Smythe, A. (2001). Making Homes in the

West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the
Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid.
New York: Garland.
Schwartz, M. F. (1993). An Interview with Michelle
Cliff. Contemporary Literature, 34(4), 595619.
Coetzee, J. M.
MICHELLE KELLY
Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is among the most

widely celebrated and studied novelists of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He was
born in South Africa, educated there and in the
United States, and recently became a citizen of
Australia, but Coetzees reach as a writer is global,
even if he is still most closely identified with his
native South Africa.
Coetzee is the author of 11 novels, six of which
were published in the shadow of apartheid South
Africa and, with varying degrees of explicitness,
bear traces of their authors attempts to take on
that history. His fiction and essays explore the
distorting effects of colonialism, of which, in his
reading, apartheid South Africa is a late example,
and consistently pose questions about the nature
of power, authority, and the creative process. He
was the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice,
for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace
(1999), and in 2003 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature. His novels have been translated into 45 languages, and adaptations include an
opera version of Waiting for the Barbarians by
Philip Glass (2007) and a film of Disgrace directed
by Steve Jacobs and starring John Malkovich
(2008). He has translated fiction and poetry from
Dutch and Afrikaans and published numerous
academic essays, collected in Doubling the Point
(1992), which also includes illuminating interviews with David Attwell, White Writing (1988);
essays on South African literature; and Giving
Offense (1996), on censorship. His recent essays
are collected in Stranger Shores (2001) and Inner
Workings (2007b).
Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 into an
English-speaking Afrikaner family. His mother
was a primary school teacher and his father
qualified as an attorney but practiced only intermittently. The familys late-1940s move from
Cape Town to Worcester, a small town in

the western Cape, coincided with the coming to
power of the National Party in South Africa and
the formalization of the system of race-based
segregation known as apartheid. Boyhood
(1997), the first volume of the autobiographical
trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life, conveys the
perceived pressure on those of Afrikaner descent
to conform to nationalist expectations: the young
protagonist is educated in English at the local
school, but fears being exposed as an Afrikaner.
Coetzees graduation from the University of
Cape Town with honors degrees in English and
mathematics coincided with the period of
social unrest following the Sharpeville massacre
in 1960, prompting the aspiring poet to leave
South Africa for London, where he worked as
a computer programmer and completed an MA
thesis on Ford Madox Ford. In 1963 he married
Philippa Jubber (193991); they had two children, Nicolas (196689) and Gisela (b. 1968). He
left England for the United States, where he wrote
a PhD thesis on Samuel Becketts early fiction at
the University of Texas, Austin. He was eventually
forced to leave a teaching position at the State
University of New York, Buffalo in 1971 when an
application for permanent residency was declined. He returned to South Africa and taught
at the University of Cape Town, where he became
distinguished professor of literature until he resigned in 2000. He emigrated to Australia in 2002
where he has an honorary position at the University of Adelaide.
It was in Buffalo that Coetzee embarked on his
first novel, Dusklands, published in South
Africa in 1974. Comprising two novellas, The
Vietnam Project and The Narrative of Jacobus
Coetzee, Dusklands knits together US military
intervention in Vietnam with the excesses of
colonialism in Southern Africa in the eighteenth
century, in parodies of colonial discourse. The
Vietnam Project is structured around the
narrators research into military propaganda in
Vietnam, but culminates in a violent attack on his
son and his resulting institutionalization. The
novella critiques both the rational discourse of
the report that dehumanizes the Vietnamese
enemy, and the hyper-rational discourse of the
narrative itself, in which self-consciousness is no
barrier to cruelty. The Narrative of Jacobus
Coetzee collects accounts of expeditions to the
COETZEE, J. M.
Cape interior by the eighteenth-century hunter

and adventurer Jacobus Coetzee, which see
Jacobus assert his dominance over the native
population in acts of disturbing violence. The
narrative is framed as a translation, putting the
reliability and transmission of the colonial archive
under scrutiny. The use of the name Coetzee for
four different characters across the two novellas is
an assertion of complicity with the colonial history and, together with the novels skepticism
about the hyper-rationality of its own processes,
introduces a unique form of postmodernism to
South Africa.
His second novel, In the Heart of the Country
(1977), sees the tropes of the South African farm
novel filtered through a radically anti-realist narrative consisting of a sequence of 266 numbered
passages, some of which play out alternative versions of the novels central acts: Magda, the female
protagonist, murders her father and is later raped
by a farm laborer. In the absence of her father,
Magda attempts to create a new social order by
inviting the non-white servants to share the farm
house. Her experiment backfires, however, and
she remains an isolated figure on a remote, failed
farm. But the intensity of the desire to transcend
the restrictive social relations of the farm, locked
within the doubting, Beckettian narrative voice,
points to the ethical concerns that would characterize Coetzees future work.
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) is less formally experimental, but nonetheless challenges
the conventions of realist fiction in its unspecific
setting in time and place. The central character,
known only as the Magistrate, is a colonial
administrator in a sleepy frontier town until the
threat of attack from unspecified barbarians
brings the presence of security police and ushers
in a period of emergency in which interrogations,
torture, and imprisonment without trial hold
sway. These emergency powers challenge the
Magistrates liberal values and, after he makes an
expedition to the frontier to allow the barbarian
girl who has become his companion to return to
her people, these powers are turned against him.
Narrated by the Magistrate, the novel nonetheless manages to protect the alterity of the barbarian girl whose injuries excite such fascination in
her benefactor. In its treatment of torture, the
novel is a powerful indictment of state violence,
but it is also an unflinching exploration of the
1023
options available to a man of conscience like the

Magistrate who opposes such violence (Coetzee
1992, 363). Written and published after the death
in police custody of anti-apartheid activist Steve
Biko in 1977, the novel has been described alternately as an allegory of the apartheid state and as
a universally applicable story. The inconsistent
and anachronistic setting reads like a parody of an
Aesopian allegory, drawing attention both to the
pressures of writing under apartheid, with particularly vigilant state censorship in this period,
and what Coetzee has described as [t]he true
challenge . . . how not to play the game by the rules
of the state, how to establish ones own authority,
how to imagine death and torture on ones own
terms (1992, 364).
Life & Times of Michael K is set in a projected
South Africa riven by civil war, but focalized
through the consciousness of a marginal figure
who seeks to avoid being drawn into the conflict.
Hare-lipped gardener Michael K escapes the
turbulence of Cape Town, tenaciously avoiding
the state camps that dot the countryside and
evading the attentions of an apparently benevolent doctor in order to dedicate himself to cultivating pumpkins, an endeavor that ultimately
results in starvation.
Building on the success of his previous novels,
which had attracted international attention and
won awards in South Africa and beyond, Michael
K won the Booker Prize. But the perceived passivity of Michael K drew the ire of Coetzees fellow
South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, who
admonished Coetzee in a review for his avoidance
of political struggle. Gordimers position is not
untypical of the attitude to Coetzee in 1980s
South Africa, where political struggle was considered to have a cultural counterpart in the social
realism that dominated South African literature.
Coetzees style also had ironic implications for his
treatment at the hands of the state censors. Recent
research has shown that In the Heart of the Country, Barbarians, and Michael K were all subject to
the censors attentions, and eventually released, in
some cases with readers reports glossing potentially offensive material obviously critical of the
apartheid state as literary and consequently of
limited appeal and influence (McDonald 2009).
Foe (1986) shifts away from the immediate
South African context to eighteenth-century England and the writing of Daniel Defoe. Coetzee
1024
COETZEE, J. M.
brings together Defoes Robinson Crusoe and

Roxana in the character of Susan Barton,
a female author so eager to publish her castaway
narrative that she enlists the help of one Daniel
Foe, a famous author who ultimately betrays
Susans story. The novel ends on an astonishing
note, however, as the narrative shifts away from
Susan, Cruso, and Foe to the seemingly mute,
former slave Friday, evoking a history of oppression. Foe directly engages the history of the novel,
and in singling out Robinson Crusoe, points to its
coincidence with the history of colonialism.
Following Foe, Age of Iron (1990) represents
a return to the turbulence of the late apartheid
period, but again engages the history of the novel
by adopting an epistolary style: the novel is an
extended letter from Mrs. Curren, a woman dying
of cancer in Cape Town, to her daughter in the
US. As the novel opens, a homeless man, Mr.
Verceuil, enters Mrs. Currens life, initially
seeking shelter but eventually becoming her companion and carer. Mrs. Currens letter documents
the relationship with Verceuil but also the
violence and upheaval in the townships of the
Cape Flats, where Florence, her domestic help,
lives with her family. The novels first-person
narrative brings it closer to a direct confessional
form than any of Coetzees previous works and is
the first of his novels to engage directly with
contemporary events.
The twin concerns of the history of the novel
and the ethics of confession are again in evidence
in The Master of Petersburg (1994). This time
Coetzee engages the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky,
particularly his late novel The Possessed. The
master of the title is the Russian novelist, who
travels to Petersburg to investigate the death of his
stepson, Pavel, who had fallen in with a group of
political radicals. Coetzees novel is concerned
with the writing of The Possessed, supposedly
the work produced by the grieving novelist. But
the creative process in this novel relies more on
betrayal than faithfulness, and the artist Dostoevsky, no longer a radical and grieving for his
dead stepson, is prepared to make deep personal
sacrifices for his art. Published in the same year as
South Africas first democratic elections, The
Master does not reflect the celebratory tone of
the period. Instead, with its emphasis on mourning and implicit concern with censorship, it has an
eye on the immediate past and, published soon
after the death of Coetzees son, takes on

a particularly personal resonance.
Coetzees next novel would continue his
preoccupation with creativity but in an almost
unrecognizable guise, and submerged in
a narrative of such complexity and controversy
that this aspect is frequently overlooked. Disgrace
recounts the fall from grace of a middle-aged
literature professor, David Lurie, dismissed after
having a sexual relationship with a student. He
withdraws from the scandal to his daughters farm
in the eastern Cape, where one day they are
robbed and his daughter is gang-raped by three
men. In the aftermath, Lurie spends his time
helping to dispose of the bodies of dead dogs and
working on a chamber opera based around the life
of Byron. His daughter Lucy, pregnant as a result
of the rape, agrees to fall under the protection of
her neighbor, Petrus, nominally becoming his
wife and tenant in exchange for her land. In
the disciplinary committee Lurie faces early in
the novel there are distinct echoes of the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC), an ambitious attempt to address the injustices of the apartheid period while facilitating
a smooth, non-violent political transition. But the
novels implicit acknowledgment that the history
of injustice in South Africa might manifest itself in
sexual, vengeful, or sacrificial acts complicates the
Christian model of forgiveness championed by
the TRC.
With Disgrace, Coetzee won his second Booker
Prize, but its bleak portrait of post-apartheid
South Africa provoked intense controversy there,
and the novel was cited by the ruling ANC party as
an example of racism in the media. Disgrace has
since become Coetzees most widely read and
widely discussed novel, in part because of the
strong reaction it provoked in South Africa, but
also because it brings animals, and humankinds
ethical relation to animals, into the critical debate.
This debate intensified with the publication of
The Lives of Animals (1999b), a series of short
fictions in which an Australian novelist, Elizabeth
Costello, gives public lectures on the relationship
between humans and animals. These were originally delivered by Coetzee as the Tanner Lectures
at Princeton, and were eventually collected with
fictional lectures in Elizabeth Costello (2003).
The genesis of Elizabeth Costello in invited
lectures suggests that it was an attempt by Coetzee
COETZEE, J. M.
to address the role of public intellectual. But his

subsequent novels have maintained its radically
experimental form and preoccupation with ideas,
without jettisoning the powerful emotional involvement characteristic of his best work. Slow
Man (2005) begins as an ostensibly realist fiction
about an accident victim who has a leg amputated, but the realist frame is interrupted by the
arrival of its author, Elizabeth Costello. In Diary of
a Bad Year (2007a), the reading experience is
interrupted even more dramatically, as the narrative is broken into three distinct strands on each
page: essays by the author-protagonist, JC; JCs
private diary; and the diary of Anya, a young
woman whom he opportunistically invites to be
his secretary. Reading Diary of a Bad Year involves
integrating these seemingly distinct strands, an
exercise to which the reader adapts remarkably
quickly, and with powerful results. It is also
difficult to preserve a distinction between the
author, Coetzee, and the character, JC, author
of, among other things, a novel entitled Waiting
for the Barbarians. Both Slow Man and Diary are
set in Australia, but the world described is frequently that of an immigrant population, and in
Diary in particular, JCs native South
Africa features quite prominently.
Against the background of political transition
and the TRC, post-apartheid South African literature has been characterized by various attempts,
in fiction and non-fiction, to document and
engage with apartheids conflicted history.
Disgrace undoubtedly makes a controversial intervention in this field, but Coetzee has also
contributed an autobiographical trilogy, Scenes
from Provincial Life. Along with the description
of his early life in Cape Town and Worcester that
we find in Boyhood, Youth (2002) describes
university life in Cape Town and his adjustment
to adult life in London, working as a computer
programmer and pursuing his dream of being
a poet. Written in the third person and present
tense, Boyhood and Youth take an unusual form
for autobiographical texts, and, from the biographical information already in the public
domain, represent highly selective accounts of
Coetzees life.
His most recent book, Summertime (2009),
concludes the trilogy. It too stretches the autobiographical form beyond recognition, presenting a series of fictional interviews between the
1025
would-be biographer of the now deceased John

Coetzee and people who knew him when he lived
with his father in Cape Town in the mid-1970s,
including a cousin and former lovers. The book
is funny and moving: the interviewees remember
John Coetzee with bemusement but also fondly,
giving accounts of a caring if reticent man living
an ascetic existence with his father. The volume
opens and closes with the subjects diary fragments from the same period, focusing largely on
his relationship with his father. The biographical
account provided in this entry should be enough
to indicate that the scenario of Summertime is,
to some extent, invented. It is, perhaps, only
when one takes Scenes from Provincial Life in its
entirety that the autobiographical truth begins to
emerge.
SEE ALSO: Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Censorship
and Fiction (WF); Critical Theory and Fiction
(WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative
Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical
English Narratives (WF); Ford, Ford Madox
(BIF); Gordimer, Nadine (WF); Historical
Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);
Southern African Fiction (WF)

Attridge, D. (2004). J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of
Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Attridge, D., & McDonald, P. D. (eds.) (2002). J. M.
Coetzees Disgrace [special issue]. Interventions:
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4(3).
Attwell, D. (1993). J. M. Coetzee and the Politics
of Writing. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (1974). Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan.
Coetzee, J. M. (1977). In the Heart of the Country.
Coetzee, J. M. (1980). Waiting for the Barbarians.
Coetzee, J. M. (1983). Life & Times of Michael K.
Coetzee, J. M. (1986). Foe. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (1988). White Writing: On the Culture of
Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (1990). Age of Iron. London: Secker and
Warburg.
1026
COLLINS, MERLE
Coetzee, J. M. (1992). Doubling the Point: Essays and

Interviews (ed. D. Attwell). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (1994). The Master of Petersburg. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (1996). Giving Offense: Essays on
Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (1997). Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial
Life. London: Secker and Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (1999a). Disgrace. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (1999b). The Lives of Animals (ed. A.
Gutmann). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (2001). Stranger Shores: Essays
19861999. London: Secker and Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (2002). Youth. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (2003). Elizabeth Costello. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (2005). Slow Man. Secker and Warburg.
Coetzee, J. M. (2007a). Diary of a Bad Year. London:
Harvill Secker.
Coetzee, J. M. (2007b). Inner Workings: Essays
20002005. London: Harvill Secker.
Coetzee, J. M. (2009). Summertime. London: Harvill
Secker.
Gordimer, N. (1984). The Idea of Gardening. New York
Review of Books, 3(6), (Feb. 2).
Head, D. (2009). The Cambridge Introduction to
J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Huggan, G., & Watson, S. (eds.) (1996). Critical
Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee. London: Macmillan.
Jacobs, S. (dir.) (2008). Disgrace. Fortissimo Films.
McDonald, P. D. (2009). The Literature Police:
Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003. At http://
Nobelprize.Org/Nobel_Prizes/Literature/Laureates/
2003/Index.Html, accessed Aug. 4, 2009.
Collins, Merle
MARIA HELENA LIMA
Merle Collinss writing affirms the power of an

oral tradition with proverbs, riddles, and
folktales interspersed in the French Creole
and English spoken in Grenada to tease out the
truths behind that countrys post-independence
reality. While living, at different times, between
Grenada and the United States, and Grenada and
England, Collins continues to write about

Grenada, attempting to reimagine the land she
first knew as home. Her poems and narratives
constitute meditations on history, like Tout
Moun ka Plewe (Everybody Bawling), which
follows Grenadians struggles to survive both
hurricanes and revolutions not born in nature.
The questions Collins seeks to answer whether
some kind of colonialism is inevitable and
whether her nations destiny is necessarily one of
dependence are central to the majority of the
worlds peoples.
Born in Aruba on September 29, 1950 and
raised in St. Georges, Grenada, Collins grew up
under the post-independence rule of E. M. Gairy
and joined Maurice Bishops revolutionary
government in 1979, becoming popular as
a performer of her poetry at rallies and meetings
of the Workers Parish Councils. She studied at
the University of the West Indies and at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, returning to
Grenada to serve in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. After the US invasion of 1983, Collins
left for England and taught at the University of
North London. While writing her first novel,
Angel, Collins researched Grenadian political history at the Public Records Office and earned
a PhD in government from the University of
London. Considered the foremost writer of Grenada, she is the author of three collections of
poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks (1985), Rotten
Pomerack (1992), and Lady in a Boat (2003), as
well as a short story collection and three novels
(her third, Invisible Streams, not yet published).
She is currently professor of comparative literature and English at the University of Maryland at
College Park.
As a Caribbean woman writer, Collins tends
to be concerned with all that has gone into the
shaping of Caribbean societies colonization and
its consequences, the effects of slavery and indenture, the meaning or meaninglessness of independence, and the possibility of a nationalism not
gendered male. As she writes about Caribbean
literature in general, her own writing shows
a concern with formation formation of the
society, formation of the individual and with
reclaiming and revoicing (Collins 1996, 8). Her
coming-of-age novel Angel (1987) creates
parallels between Grenadas movement toward
independence and the story of three generations
COUPLAND, DOUGLAS
of women. The novel is unique in bringing together conventionally male and female spheres
public and private, personal and political to
chronicle the history of Grenada through multiple
narrative centers that convey sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting versions of self and
history. Angel also explores the function of education, reading, and writing in nation formation
and decolonization.
In her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting
(1995), Collins blurs the boundaries between
myth and history. While land continues to be the
contested terrain young people fight over, and
Thunder, like Angel, is a representative of his
communitys future, it is the character named
Carib who is the soul of the novel. Collins achieves
a powerful invocation of the regions Amerindian
past through a character who bears the collective
memory of her people, and also with the novels
fictional setting, Paz.
The short stories collected in Rain Darling
(1990) are mostly set in Grenada. The one set in
Brooklyn, NY, Madelene, emphasizes the importance of family, traditions, and a persons
native land. The story is also about storytelling,
for Madelene teaches the next generation about
her family, its traditions, and her native land
through her tales. One of the collections most
anthologized stories, The Walk, depicts the real
world of Caribbean rural poverty and compels
readers to know more about the people and the
place where the story is set.
Collinss work celebrates the beauty and
resilience of the land and people of Grenada by
capturing the nature of the Caribbean colonial
past and individual battles against the weight of
history and a sometimes treacherous natural
world. She has been able to create an imaginary
homeland in the places she has lived, including
Mexico. Her writing has also been central to the
collective project of a black feminism, challenging
empty theoretical labels such as postcolonial,
and generating intense discussions in university
classrooms in the Caribbean, Britain, and the
United States.
Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical
Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile
in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and
1027

Berrian, B. (1994). We Speak Because We Dream:
Conversations with Merle Collins. In C. B. Davies
(ed.), Moving beyond Boundaries, vol. 2: Black
Womens Diasporas. New York: New York University
Press pp. 3142.
Collins, M. (1985). Because the Dawn Breaks: Poems
Dedicated to the Grenadian People. London: Karia.
Collins, M. (1987). Angel. London: Womens Press.
Collins, M. (1990). Rain Darling: Stories. London:
Womens Press.
Collins, M. (1992). Rotten Pomerack. London: Virago.
Collins, M. (1995). The Colour of Forgetting. London:
Virago.
Collins, M. (1996). Framing the Word: Caribbean
Womens Writing. In J. Anim-Addo (ed.), Gender
and Genre in Caribbean Womens Writing. London:
Whiting and Birch, pp. 411.
Collins, M. (1999). Writing Fiction Writing Reality.
In M. Conde & T. Lonsdale (eds.), Caribbean
Women Writers: Fiction in English. New York: St.
Martins Press, pp. 2331.
Collins, M. (2003). Lady in a Boat. London: Peepal Tree.
Collins, M. (2007). Tout Moun Ka Plewe (Everybody
Bawling). Small Axe, 22, 116.
Cooper, C. (1999). Sense Make befoh Book:
Grenadian Popular Culture and the Rhetoric of
Revolution in Merle Collins Angel and The Colour of
Forgetting. In J. L. Lidell & Y. B. Kemp (eds.), Arms
Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary
Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida
pp. 176188.
Duckett, K. Lopez, D., & Plata, M. R. (2002). The
Literary Representation of a Creole: A Linguistic
Analysis of Angel. Torre: Revista de la Universidad de
Puerto Rico, 7(26), 63156.
Lima, M. H. (2006). Merle Collinss Angel of History.
In M. Inghilleri (ed.), Swinging Her Breasts at History:
Language, Body and the Caribbean Womens Text.
London: Mango pp. 4760.
Wilson, B. (1993). An Interview with Merle Collins.
Callaloo, 16(1), 94107.
Coupland, Douglas
BRENNA CLARKE GRAY
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, nonfiction writer, and visual artist who rose to prominence with the publication of the bestselling
Generation X in 1991. Couplands writing and
art focuses primarily on making meaning out of
popular culture and postmodern life, as well as the
1028
COUPLAND, DOUGLAS
corresponding issues of consumerism, religion

and spirituality, and the formation of identity.
He was born on a Canadian Air Force base near
Baden-Baden, Germany on December 30, 1961,
and his family relocated to Vancouver in 1965;
Coupland continues to live and work in this city,
setting many of his novels in and around Greater
Vancouver. Primarily educated in art and design,
Coupland worked in these fields until the publication of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
Culture. This first novel examines the lives of three
friends who, feeling alienated from an economic
system dominated and controlled by baby boomers, decide to opt out and move to the Palm Springs
desert. Removed from contemporary life, the three
learn to form their own conception of family and
identity through the act of storytelling. While his
interest in visual arts never waned, and indeed the
visual experience of his novels has remained an
important facet of his work, Coupland spent
a decade focusing primarily on his writing. In
2001, he once again made visual art a central focus,
beginning with sculptural and photographic installations in the Totem Gallery in New York.
With the publication of Generation X, Coupland
became against his will viewed as the spokesperson for those born just after the postwar baby
boom, who soon became known in common
parlance as Generation Xers. In reality, however,
Coupland is most interested in chronicling not
a specific generation, but rather individual characters in particular historical moments. Microserfs
(1995), for example, examines the lives of people
experiencing the one-point-oh technology
boom of the mid-1990s; similarly, Girlfriend in
a Coma (1998) contrasts teenage life in the
1970s with the protracted adolescence of those
same characters and their inability to mature at
the turn of the century. Couplands prose incorporates popular brand names and relevant cultural
references to construct a representation of what
matters to individual people at a given time. In
JPod (2006), he takes this trope to the extreme: by
saturating the entire novel with corporate brand
names, he satirizes consumer culture and the
ways in which we construct our identity through
the goods we purchase and consume, yet he does so
often without passing judgment. Coupland is more
intrigued by consumer society than opposed to it.
Critically, Coupland often draws interest for
the ways in which his characters deal with the
intersection of spirituality and consumerism. In

Life After God (1994), he forwards the thesis that
those born after the mid-1960s are increasingly
raised without religion and spirituality, and
probes the difficulty of making life meaningful
without the structure of organized faith. This
theme continues through much of his work. Hey
Nostradamus! (2003) examines the dangers of
allowing religion to supersede responsibilities to
community and family; Eleanor Rigby (2004)
asserts that spiritual faith can coexist with contemporary life, symbolized by a character who can
have religious visions anywhere, including on the
side of the Trans-Canada Highway.
Couplands prolific output in non-literary
media is particularly distinctive. As a visual artist,
he has gained recognition for public art projects
such as Monument to the War of 1812 (2008) near
Fort York in Toronto and, in 2009, a clock tower
tribute to postwar Canada Mortgage and Housing
homes located in Don Mills, Ontario; the same
year, he designed a three-hectare downtown park
in Toronto featuring his sculptures. Other important visual art projects from Couplands oeuvre
include a collection of wasp nests made by chewing and resculpting the pages of his own novels
(2004) and The Penguins (2007), a series of
Penguin novel covers defaced with thematic
terms displayed in the style of ransom notes.
Outside the visual arts, in 2006 the feature film
Everythings Gone Green was released based on
Couplands first screenplay, and in 2007 his
popular novel JPod was adapted for television by
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2004,
Coupland performed his own 80-minute oneman show, September 10 2001, for the Royal
Shakespeare Company.
As Couplands career has progressed, his interest in exploring Canadian identity has become
increasingly prominent. While early in his career
he was often mistaken for an American novelist
due to his interest in American popular culture,
Coupland has since become more interested in
Canadian narratives. Though he asserts that he
does not create stereotypical Canadian literature
(which he defines as rural, grim, realist narratives
without space for experimentation), many of
his recent multimedia projects self-consciously
examine what it means to be Canadian: most
overtly, the Souvenir of Canada series, including
two coffee table books (2002 and 2004),
CRITICAL THEORY AND FICTION
a feature-length documentary (2006), and an art

installation at Canada House in London (2004).
Souvenir collects images, essays, objects, and commentary with the intent to suggest that each item is
uniquely and unapologetically Canadian; by
interrogating and celebrating a national relationship to these pieces, Coupland creates a narrative
of Canada. He embarks on a similar journey in
Terry (2005), this time exploring Canadas relationship to cancer victim Terry Fox and his heroic
place in the national memory.
SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City
in Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation
and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor
and Satire (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
Bilton, A. (2003). An Introduction to Contemporary
American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Coupland, D. (1991). Generation X: Tales for an
Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martins.
Coupland, D. (1994). Life After God. New York: Pocket
Books.
Coupland, D. (1995). Microserfs. New York:
HarperCollins.
Coupland, D. (1998). Girlfriend in a Coma. Toronto:
HarperCollins.
Coupland D. (2002, 2004). Souvenir of Canada, 2 vols.
Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre.
Coupland, D. (2003). Hey Nostradamus! New York:
Bloomsbury.
Coupland, D. (2004). Eleanor Rigby. Toronto: Random
House.
Coupland, D. (2006). JPod. Toronto: Random House.
Douglas Couplands website: www.coupland.com.
Forshaw, M. (2000). Douglas Coupland: In and Out of
Ironic Hell. Critical Survey, 12(3), 3958.
Grassian, D. (2003). Hybrid Fictions: American
Literature and Generation X. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Tate, A. (2007). Douglas Coupland. Manchester:
Critical Theory and Fiction

DAVID HUDDART
The wave of decolonization in the two decades

following 1945 ultimately led to fundamental
intellectual shifts. The thinkers commonly
1029
associated with critical theory (often just

theory) were reacting to specific histories like that
of decolonization: for example, Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida
were all influenced by the Algerian War of
Independence. Assumptions common to the
European colonial mindset came under historical and intellectual pressure, and theory was one
result. These influences are sometimes difficult
to pinpoint: they are often indirect, and are felt in
many different intellectual fields. Indeed, theory
is not really a theory of something, but more
a general critical attitude to assumptions about
identity and meaning. Accordingly, the specific
questions theory asks about fiction are part of
a continuum of questioning of the cultural
meanings surrounding us. Theory is therefore
fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing on
fields like anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. This diversity of influences means that it
is not possible to cover all theorys methods;
however, a representative sample gives a sense
of the questions theory asks, and indicates its
influence on the study of fiction.
Theorys questions challenge our unexamined
assumptions: for example, about literatures representation of the world, about the authors
control of its meaning, and about textual autonomy. One assumption theory challenges is that
a novel is structured by an authorial intention,
which our duty as readers is to uncover: this
discovery delivers the meaning of the novel. This
assumption grants authority to the author, but
different theories argue instead that the meaning
of a text is not the property of an author, and is not
single, but instead is something drawn from
diverse, changing contexts. Theory frequently
celebrates plurality and difference: indeed, the
novel itself can be examined for its multiple,
competing voices or discourses, as in the work
of Mikhail Bakhtin, who writes that the novel as
a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style
and variform in speech and voice (1981, 261).
Even in theories that aim to establish meaning,
emphasis will shift from the genius of an
individual writer toward the constraining and
enabling structures of social, political, and
cultural contexts.
One example is structuralism, which has been
influential on theory in general. Structuralism
approaches (in principle) anything in terms of
1030
the meaning of its structure. Many examples are

found in disciplines like anthropology. Claude
Levi-Strauss studies the superficially different
manifestations of cultures in terms of their deeper
similarities: he argues that primitive cultures
are characterized by complexity of structural
meaning, just like advanced cultures. Structuralist anthropology categorizes different cultures
in terms of deeper structures, and structuralist
literary criticism likewise sees superficially
different narratives as based on the same deep
structures. Structuralism is driven by insights
from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussures Course
in General Linguistics (1959). Saussure considers
language as a system of differences without
positive terms, as an alternative to historical
approaches. For him, this approach is necessary
because it is linguistic structure which gives
language what unity it has (11). Saussure studies
language by first suspending our normal sense of
the relation of meaning and reference: he explores
how language works as a system in itself (at the
level of the signifier), rather than exploring its
history or comparing it with reality (the level of
the signified). This is to study language synchronically (structurally) rather than diachronically (historically). The linguistic system works as a system
of differences and deferrals: cat means cat not
because of a literal or necessary connection with
real cats (indeed, the word directs us to a concept
of cat) but because of its difference from words
like bat or mat. Language, Saussure argues, is
unmotivated: this means that it has no natural
relation with reality, although of course it has
a conventional relation with reality.
For some time, Saussures influence on literary
criticism was controversial, with many critics
extending his emphasis on the unmotivated connection between language and reality. Misreadings of the work of poststructuralists like Jacques
Derrida, who discusses Saussure in Of Grammatology (1976), focus on how meaning is never
fixed, and see literary criticism as always in search
of ambiguity and openness. This tendency led
many critics to believe that the meaning of a text
was fundamentally uncertain, and created anxiety
that literary criticism would say just about
anything it liked about the literature it was
interpreting. This was certainly not Derridas
argument, which reintroduced the diachronic
into Saussures synchronic approach to language.
Derrida suggests that interpretation always takes

place within a context that it cannot escape, but
instead of resigning himself to the arbitrary nature
of our reading, he suggests that we must draw the
justifications we can from that context. For Derrida, meaning is context-bound, but context is
boundless: this means that contexts change, and
the diachronic can always complicate the synchronic. He writes about this necessary possibility
as a structure of iterability, which is just what
allows us to read anything in the first place, and so
not something to bemoan.
In literary studies, a more focused approach to
Saussure explores how structuralism rethinks literature as a system. Instead of comparing systems
of representation with reality, it invites us to see
them functioning with meaning in their own
right. For example, we can think of literary fiction
as a system, with its own conventions, traditions,
and expectations, against which innovative
fictional developments take shape. In this way
structuralist approaches to literature are similar
to formalist approaches, which stress the specific
qualities of literary form. Literary fiction might
seem merely one example of the many narratives
permeating our everyday lives, but literature has
specific ways of giving plot to story, and can be
seen as the most complex meditation on what it
means to plot in general: literary fiction is a series
of explorations in narrative form. Certainly, this
emphasis on fiction as a system allows us to
rethink literary fiction throughout history, but it
is particularly pertinent to the postmodern, metafictional, and magic-realist works of the mid to
late twentieth century.
The formalist approach can be seen in Vladimir
Propps work (1968), which analyzes the functional similarities between different folktales,
arguing that entirely different characters, in separate stories, fulfill the same functions. Despite
differences, the structuralist and formalist
approaches share a stress on the patterns that
govern individual examples of a given system.
Using Saussures terms, Gerard Genette (1980)
distinguishes the story (signified), narrative (signifier), and narrating. Focusing on the narrative
as signifier, there have been many narratological
studies of fiction which have explored the nature
of literary plotting as such, rather than focusing
on a works uniqueness. In this way, fiction is
understood as a system with its own rules which
inform our reading of even the most rule-breaking and counter-intuitive experimental novel.
However, such an approach demands that readers
go beyond the literary system as a self-enclosed
space, to think about the wider cultural codes in
which literary fiction takes shape. These codes are
a form of cultural mythology, in the words of
Roland Barthes (1974), a central figure in structuralist analysis of literature. Barthes focuses on
the ways in which literature is informed by broader connotative languages: mythologies. His application and development of the distinction
between denotation and connotation takes us
beyond the analysis of a single text, and draws
us into networks of meaning often characterized
as intertextuality. For Barthes, any given novel, no
matter how original, is a tissue of quotations
drawn from the endless diversity of cultural
meanings: innovation might therefore seem
impossible, but it comes about when these quotations are brought together in new and unexpected
ways, leading readers to produce new connections
and interpretations.
Barthess analysis (1974) of Balzacs Sarrasine
is a classic example of literary structuralism:
it breaks down the narrative into constituent
elements, which are categorized in terms of theme
and form, and then given commentary without
trying to combine everything into a single reading.
Indeed, Barthess text explores how commentary
inevitably takes us beyond Balzacs work and the
appropriate context for its reception, suggesting
that the context we use to read a work of fiction
will always be open to challenge and change,
leading to new readings. Barthes thinks about
this openness in terms of a distinction between
writerly (often experimental) texts and readerly (or
classic) texts. Really, readerly texts can always be
read as writerly and the distinction is only one of
convenience: this is because the readerly depends
on the authority of an author, something Barthes
challenges. As readers we are participants in an
active process, engaging with denotation and
supplying connotation, and so our commentary
cannot be passive: the work of the commentary,
once it is separated from any ideology of totality,
consists precisely in manhandling the text, interrupting it (15). Any novel has meaning derived
from both its participation in networks of literary
allusion (the intentional) and in networks of
intertextual cultural connotation (the unintention-
1031
al). Some of the most obvious of these networks of

connotation are national narratives. In a given
time and place we may operate with assumptions
similar to our fellow readers, and so we are part of
what Stanley Fish (1980) calls interpretive communities. However, these communities are ones that
are imagined and in turn imagine themselves into
being.
A central statement of this argument is Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities (1991
[1983]), which gives historical insight into the
connection between nation and narration, and
provides a theoretical framework for understanding the unfinished, open quality of that narration.
Anderson stresses the relative novelty of the modern concept of the nation, and the changing
technologies that allowed ready and widespread
dissemination of the print narratives that enabled
disparate peoples to imagine themselves as members of a common national community. He
suggests that newspapers and novels were key
elements in the production of the sense of
horizontal comradeship that characterizes the
modern nation (in contrast to the previous
vertical authority). A specialist in the politics
of Indonesia, Anderson explores the worldwide
dissemination of the European concept of the
nation. The disparate cultures and communities
that have come together to make up modern
national identities make up those identities only
by being plotted, the denotative literal meaning
given connotative mythological significance.
Developing Andersons insights, Homi K.
Bhabha (1994) has argued that national narrative
is characterized by two modes: the pedagogical
and the performative. The pedagogical is a
teaching of national identity, which presents it
as fully formed and fixed, with a long history and
inevitable future. This teaching is bound up with
classroom teaching, but extends beyond schools
to the signs, rituals, and narratives of everyday
culture that encourage identification with
national identities: anthems, international
sports, iconic cultural and political figures. The
pedagogical attempts to give stability to the
abstract and fluid bonds that constitute the
nation. By contrast, the performative is
a concept that Bhabha adapts from philosopher
J. L. Austin, who wanted to understand the
sense in which language use is not always
truth-evaluable but instead often an action:
1032
Austin uses the term for any utterance about

which we can say that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action (6). Applied
to the nation, the performative captures how the
nation is more about becoming than being:
national identities are not fixed, because they
require everyday repetition or narration, and
when this repetition happens, the identity may
be transformed. The performative has also been
applied in the context of sexuality and gender,
for example by Judith Butler (1990), to explore
the ways these aspects of identity are defined by
an unstable process. Bhabha describes the performative in terms of the scraps, patches and
rags of daily life (145): it is, then, rather like the
tissue of quotations that Barthes uses to think
about culture as fundamentally intertextual.
The performative is another way of describing
how meanings and identities derive from difference rather than sameness, and so it can be
connected with Saussurean structuralism. However, for many this difference is less an abstract
philosophical point and more an everyday experience: Butler argues that gender and identity can
be productively analyzed for their politics of the
performative, while Bhabha suggests that minority cultures best understand this aspect of national
identities, since they cannot take those identities
for granted. He also argues that literary narrative
is a complex exploration of the interplay between
the pedagogical and the performative. In this,
Bhabha is following a tradition of critics who
have analyzed literatures place within culture in
general, one that gives us access to an ideal of
community. Such analysis is found in the work
of the Victorian poet and school inspector Matthew Arnold (1993 [18678]), who saw culture as
a means of uniting diverse identities through
common cultural investment. Arnold is a founding figure in a tradition that understands English
literary studies as central to a culture that is under
threat. Chris Baldick (1983) analyzes the way
university literary study was conceived as
a response to a crisis of culture: he explores how
traditions of criticism are responses not only to
intellectual change, but also to broader historical
developments. Similarly, Gauri Viswanathan
(1989) considers the colonial origins of English
literary study: literature was conceived as uniting
the anarchistic British identities (as in Arnold)
but was also a key means of producing colonial
mimic men. This analysis draws on the key

postcolonial thinker Edward W. Said, whose
Orientalism (1978) analyzes literature as one form
of representing the Middle Eastern other. Positive
or negative, these representations have tended to
portray an absolute distinction between Orient
and Occident, with the former feminized and
the latter the masculine norm: Western culture
(including canonical fiction) that assumes such
a distinction can be seen to misrepresent nonWestern cultures.
Writers, like critics, have drawn on Saids ideas
about the worldliness of culture. Classic Western
fiction has been rewritten to challenge its limited
and biased representations of non-Western cultures, and to emphasize the role of the reader in
producing contestable meanings. These rewritings assume the political potency of literature, and
theory in general assumes the political significance of genres like the novel. It should be
remembered, therefore, that there are political
approaches that theory both echoes and challenges: most obviously underlying this theoretical
attention to fictions politics is engagement with
Marxist criticism. Marxism has evolved and taken
many forms, but has proven a durable set of basic
assumptions about the politics of literature. In
particular, Antonio Gramscis (1971) category of
hegemony reminds us that governing classes and
controlling interests operate through persuasion
and consensus: hegemony therefore positions
literature and culture in general as key elements
in the struggle of meaning-making, in which
consensus is met by questioning and dissensus.
This concept of culture implies a struggle over
plurality of meaning, but then classical Marxism
itself was never the caricature vulgar Marxism
that read culture as a direct expression of economic and political factors. Indeed, following
Marx and Engels, Louis Althusser (1971) conceptualized superstructure (including literature) as
relatively autonomous from the base (the economy), and so literature could not be the latters
direct expression.
Meanwhile, non-Western Marxists declare that
Marxism has to be adapted to other cultural
contexts, and indeed Marxism has been appropriated and transformed, producing new perspectives on culture and identity. This can be seen
in the analysis of Fredric Jameson (1986), who
argues that Third World literatures can be
read as national allegory: the narratives of

such fiction are open to interpretation as expressions of the development of national cultures.
In response, Aijaz Ahmad (1992) suggests that
this idea reduces the aesthetic complexity of
these literatures. This debate again centers on the
idea of textual autonomy: Ahmad argues
that Western theory denies aesthetic quality to
the non-Western literature it interprets. Despite
the assumption of the relative autonomy of art, it
seems that non-Western art is usually judged in
political terms. One example is the Nobel Prize
citation for the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, an
exiled long-term resident of Paris who has
consistently defended the non-political nature of
his writing (2005). He was presented as speaking
for China, and opening new ground for Chinese
literature. Gao, however, is one of many writers
who have a negative identification with community, and who argue for the apolitical quality of
their writing. Other recent Nobel laureates like
Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and
J. M. Coetzee, have likewise been read from
postcolonial and other political perspectives, but
all maintain a critical sense of community and
insist upon literatures prerogatives. Nonetheless,
the literary world is related to a worldwide
economy of cultural capital, despite the protestations of individuals writers and readers; it is just
that, as Pascale Casanova has insisted, its boundaries, its capitals, its highways, and its forms of
communication do not completely coincide with
those of the political and economic world (2004,
11). Critical theory in its various forms positions
literature within the world, but not straightforwardly or predictably: today, echoing Marxism,
theory analyzes fiction as autonomous, but always
relatively so.
English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF);
Narratives (WF); Globalization and the
Novel (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile
in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and
Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF)
Ahmad, A. (1992). In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literatures. London: Verso.
1033
Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and Philosophy and Other

Essays (trans. B. Brewster). New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism [1983], rev. edn. London:
Verso.
Arnold, M. (1993). Culture and Anarchy [18678],
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to Do Things with Words.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays (trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist). Austin:
Baldick, C. (1983). The Social Mission of English
Criticism 18481932. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z (trans. R. Miller). New York:
Hill and Wang.
Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity. London:
Routledge.
Casanova, P. (2004). The World Republic of Letters
(trans. M. B. Debevoise). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (trans. G. C.
Spivak). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class?: The
Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge,
Gao, X. (2005). Cold Literature: Selected Works by Gao
Xingjian (trans. G. C. F. Fong & M. Lee). Hong Kong:
Chinese University Press.
Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse (trans. J. E.
Lewin). Oxford: Blackwell.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Prison Notebooks. New York:
Jameson, F. (1986). Third-World Literature in the
Era of Multinational Capitalism. Social Text, 15,
6588.
Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the Folk Tale
(trans. L. Scott). Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions
of the Orient. New York: Vintage.
Saussure, F. de (1959). Course in General Linguistics
(trans. W. Baskin). London: Owen.
Sontag, S. (ed.) (1982). A Barthes Reader. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Study and British Rule in India. New York:
D
Dabydeen, David
LYNNE MACEDO
Acclaimed novelist and poet David Dabydeen is a

professor of literary studies at the University of
Warwick, a critic and broadcaster, and an ambassador-at-large for his native Guyana. Aspects of
his multifaceted affiliations and hybrid personality are clearly reflected in his fiction, which
contains discernible traces of his Caribbean background but nonetheless ranges freely across
cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries.
Dabydeen was born on a sugar plantation in
Berbice, Guyana on December 9, 1955 and
moved with his parents to England in 1969. After
attending school in south London he won a
scholarship to read English at Cambridge. An
honors degree in 1978 was followed by a PhD
from University College London in 1982. It was
during his time at Cambridge that Dabydeen
began the poems whose subsequent publication
as Slave Song (1984) would lead to his first literary
awards the Quiller-Couch Prize and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
Slave Song was notable for focusing on the
harsh lifestyle of Guyanese cane cutters and for
using a very distinctive form of Creole. The
deliberately crude rhythms of Dabydeens broken,
monosyllabic, even painful language gave authenticity to the voice of his Indo-Guyanese characters. Coolie Odyssey (1988a), by contrast, is largely
composed in Standard English and explores exile
and alienation from a Caribbean homeland that is
gradually transformed through its rendering in
poetry. Turner (1994) features a title poem writ-
ten in response to the celebrated Slave Ship painting by the artist J. M. W. Turner. Dabydeen gives
voice to the submerged head of the African in
the foreground of Turners painting, whose very
absence from clear visibility highlights the Wests
historical erasure of black life, history, and
culture.
Dabydeens writing has shifted toward prose
fiction since the 1990s, although the language of
his novels is still poetic. The Intended (1991) won
Dabydeen the first of three Guyana Prizes for
Literature in 1992. The life of the unnamed young
narrator bears more than a passing resemblance
to Dabydeens own, as he wistfully contrasts his
idealized boyhood in Guyana with the harsh
realities of schooling in London and studying
English in Cambridge. In Disappearance (1993),
an Afro-Guyanese engineer is sent to England to
help prevent cliffs from crumbling away along the
Hastings coastline. His struggle to find a sense of
identity among a range of eccentric villagers
consciously echoes V. S. Naipauls exploration of
similar themes in The Enigma of Arrival. Both of
Dabydeens first two novels allude to Joseph
Conrads Heart of Darkness in their exploration
of the aftermath of Empire, while the ambiguous
nature of Disappearance also pays homage to
fellow Guyanese author Wilson Harris.
Harriss influence can also be found in Our
Lady of Demerara (2004), recipient of the 2004
Guyana Prize for Literature. Ranging from Coventry to the Guyanese interior, Dabydeens complex tale of illicit sexual relationships and murder
is intertwined with the story of two Irish priests,
teasingly named Father Wilson and Father Harris.

DANGAREMBGA, TSITSI
Their arguments about the nature of sin and

forgiveness frame a narrative in which the identity of individual characters, as in Harriss own
work, is constantly shifting and transitory. The
Guyanese interior features again in Molly and the
Muslim Stick (2008). Here he provocatively
tackles the topical subjects of sexual abuse
and religious fundamentalism through the
unlikely pairing of Molly, an embittered woman
from Lancashire, with Om, a young Guyanese
Amerindian.
The Counting House (1996) and A Harlots
Progress (1999) present a marked stylistic change
as they are both works of historical reclamation.
The Counting House explores the early days of
indentureship through characters that, like
Dabydeens ancestors, migrate from India to the
sugar estates of Guyana. A Harlots Progress
winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature in
2000 has more direct links back to Dabydeens
doctoral work on racial representation in eighteenth-century England. Using Hogarths prints
of A Harlots Progress as a framework, this novel
playfully foregrounds the experiences of a black
servant named Mungo, whose deeply ambiguous
narration deliberately draws attention to the fictional construction of the novel itself. Recent
interviews suggest parallels with Dabydeens own
mischievous personality: Without language, Id
be a beggar or a banker, so writing is a kind of
benediction for me (Mair 52).
The desire to range freely from the local to the
universal can be similarly traced in Dabydeens
academic works. He is author and editor of numerous scholarly books and articles, a well-known
presenter of television and radio programs, and
winner of many awards including the 2004 Raja
Rao Award for Literature and the 2008 Anthony
N. Sabga Award for Literature the largest literary
prize in the Caribbean. Ranging from guidebooks
such as the Handbook for Teaching Caribbean
Literature (1988b) to the more recent, coedited
Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007),
Dabydeens diverse body of work reflects his
wide-ranging and scholarly interests in art, history,
and literature.
The City in Fiction (WF); Harris,
Wilson (WF); Historical Fiction (WF);
1035
Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of

the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF);
Dabydeen, D. (1984). Slave Song. Aarhus: Dangaroo.
Dabydeen, D. (1987). Hogarths Blacks: Images of Blacks
in Eighteenth Century English Art. Manchester.
Dabydeen, D. (1988a). Coolie Odyssey. London: Hansib.
Dabydeen, D. (1988b). Handbook for Teaching
Caribbean Literature. Oxford: Heinemann.
Dabydeen, D. (1991). The Intended. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Dabydeen, D. (1993). Disappearance. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Dabydeen, D. (1994). Turner. London: Jonathan Cape.
Dabydeen, D. (1996). The Counting House. London:
Cape.
Dabydeen, D. (1999). A Harlots Progress. London:
Cape.
Dabydeen, D. (2004). Our Lady of Demerara.
Chichester: Dido.
Dabydeen, D. (presenter) (2005). Painting the People
[documentary]. BBC 4, Sept. 27.
Dabydeen, D. (2008). Molly and the Muslim Stick.
Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean.
Dabydeen, D., Gilmore, J., & Jones, C. (eds.) (2007).
The Oxford Companion to Black British History.
Grant, K. (1997). The Art of David Dabydeen. Leeds:
Peepal Tree.
Guardian (2008). The Loose-Tongued Ambassador, p. 11
(Apr. 1).
Macedo, L., & Karran, K. (eds.) (2007). No Land, No
Mother: Essays on David Dabydeen. Leeds: Peepal
Tree.
Mair, J. (2005). Guyana Don. BWIA Caribbean Beat,
75, 505.
Naipaul, V. S. (1987). The Enigma of Arrival. London:
Deutsch.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi
AMBREEN HAI
Tsitsi Dangarembga was the first black woman

writer from Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) to
publish fiction in English. After several rejections
from publishers in Zimbabwe, her novel Nervous
Conditions was published by the Womens Press
1036
DANGAREMBGA, TSITSI
in London in 1988. It won the African section of

the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989, and
has since become an internationally acclaimed
work, frequently taught in university courses in
various disciplines. It is also the subject of numerous scholarly articles as well as a scholarly
collection (Willey & Treiber 2002). Set in colonial
Rhodesia in the 1960s, the novel focuses on
the lives of five women in a Shona family, and
explores tricky questions such as how issues of
gender intersect with those of race, class, and
colonization, how a colonized subjectivity is
formed, and how a colonial education can both
liberate and entrap. Its long-awaited sequel,
The Book of Not, appeared in 2006. Dangarembga
has also written short stories and three plays, and
produced and directed films.
Dangarembga was born on February 14, 1959 in
Mutoko, Rhodesia. Like Nyasha in Nervous Conditions, she spent her early childhood in Britain,
where her parents had moved for their
higher education. Upon returning to Rhodesia in
1965, Dangarembga studied at a mission school
and then an American convent school, where
she completed her A levels. In 1977 she began
studying medicine at Cambridge University, but
returned to Zimbabwe a few months before independence in 1980. She worked briefly as an advertising copywriter before entering the University of
Harare (then Salisbury) to study psychology. There
she became involved with a drama group and wrote
three plays which were performed locally. After
publishing Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga
studied film directing in Germany. Eager to familiarize her two children with Zimbabwe, however,
she moved back there in 2000, and works as a
scriptwriter, consultant, and film director.
As a fictional autobiography, Nervous Conditions unfolds the coming to awareness of
Tambudzai Sigauke as she struggles against restrictive gender expectations to acquire an English
education, moves from her parents rural homestead to the luxurious urban home of her uncle,
enrolls in a mission school, and begins to understand the implications of becoming culturally
hybrid. But it is also a narrative of community,
of a collectivity of women Tambus mother,
grandmother, aunts, and cousin who provide a
network of support as well as cautionary alternatives, as they either rebel, escape, or are
entrapped by the double yokes of indigenous
patriarchy and exogenous colonialism and racism

(1988, 1). When her feisty cousin Nyasha, torn
between her fathers expectations and her own
English-educated but questioning sensibility,
succumbs to bulimia, Tambu must contemplate
how, as she acquires the education that will bring
material advantages yet distance her from her natal
culture, she may question the interlocking systems
that surround her and still survive.
Dangarembga contests earlier colonial and
postcolonial male narratives by emphasizing that
gender (in addition to other aspects of identity) is
crucial to understanding colonized subjectivities
and experiences. Alluding in her title to Frantz
Fanons famous insight that the condition of a
native is a nervous condition, she elaborates on
the psychic effects of colonization even as she
shows how those conditions depend on different
gender positions. Critics have taken many different approaches to Dangarembgas work, arguing
for instance that anorexia or bulimia, usually
understood as afflicting Western middle-class
women, are appropriate tropes for the colonized
cultural hybrid, or indeed for the self-destructive
struggles of Zimbabwe as a nation.
The Book of Not seems surprisingly different: it
foregrounds the brutal guerilla war that led to
Zimbabwean independence, and focuses almost
exclusively on Tambus subjectivity as she continues her education during the war at an elite
white girls convent school, where she suffers the
constant psychic violence of institutional and
individual racism in 1970s Rhodesia. Yet continuities are apparent: in the subtle, sensitive delineation of the paradoxes of a gendered, racialized,
and colonized sensibility caught between oppositions; in the minute focus on psychic damages
wrought by colonial history; in the continuation
of the narrative of individual and nation into the
years immediately after independence; and in
focusing upon women to address the challenging
questions of Zimbabwes future.
Dangarembgas concern for women and children in the context of Zimbabwean history and
gendered traditions also appears in her plays and
films. She No Longer Weeps (1987), her first published play, boldly depicts an unmarried, educated
woman lawyer who tragically defies social expectations to keep her child. Neria (1993), the highestgrossing film in Zimbabwean history, was based
on a short story by Dangarembga, and depicts a
DAVIES, ROBERTSON
widow battling her in-laws and drawing upon new

legal rights to retain her farm and child. Dangarembga was the first black Zimbabwean woman to
direct a feature film: Everyones Child (1996),
about the predicament of four siblings whose
parents have died of AIDS, calls for communal
action and responsibility in caring for everyones
children. Most recently, she has written and
directed Kare Kare Zvako, or Mothers Day (in
Shona), which won Best Short Film at the 2004
Harare International Film Festival. It retells a
Shona myth about a mother who is butchered by
her husband but revives to nurture her children.
Dangarembga has carved out new directions
for postcolonial, feminist, and African literature,
and her work continues to inspire new African
and Zimbabwean writers, male and female alike.
SEE ALSO: Feminism and Fiction (WF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southern
African Fiction (WF)
Dangarembga, T. (1987). She No Longer Weeps. Harare:
College Press.
Dangarembga, T. (1988). Nervous Conditions. London:
Womens Press.
Dangarembga, T. (dir.) (1996). Everyones Child. Media
for Development Trust.
Dangarembga, T. (dir.) (2005). Kare Kare Zvako (trans.
as Mothers Day). Pangolin Films and Nyerai Films.
Dangarembga, T. (2006). The Book of Not. Banbury:
Ayebia Clarke.
George, R. M., & Scott, H. (1993). An Interview with
Tsitsi Dangarembga. Novel, 26(3), 30919.
Wilkinson, J. (ed.) (1992). Tsitsi Dangarembga. Talking
with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets,
Playwrights and Novelists. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 18998.
Willey, A. E., & Treiber, J. (eds.) (2002). Negotiating the
Postcolonial: Emerging Perspectives on Tsitsi
Dangarembga. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Davies, Robertson
CYNTHIA SUGARS
Robertson Davies stands apart from many other

Canadian writers for setting the world of small-
1037
town central Canada alongside the realm of myth

and magic. Committed to countering strictly
rationalist interpretations of human experience,
Davies explored the links between psychology,
religion, art, and science in a remarkable oeuvre
that spanned more than six decades. As a result,
his works are difficult to categorize, for they are
neither realist nor fabulist. While they contain
withering critiques of social and cultural posturing, they indulge in esoteric, sometimes Gothic,
subject matter and elevated themes. This interest
in the arcane, combined with Daviess eccentric
and witty public persona, earned him a reputation
as a formidable Renaissance man and polymath.
Davies was born on August 28, 1913 in
Thamesville, Ontario. His father was the owner
of the Thamesville Herald and later editor of the
Renfrew Mercury. The family moved to Renfrew
when Davies was 5, and later to Kingston where he
attended high school. He received a BA in literature from the University of Oxford in 1938, after
which he joined Londons Old Vic Theatre. There
he met his future wife, Brenda Mathews, the
companys stage manager. Davies returned to
Canada in 1940 and became literary editor of the
popular Canadian magazine Saturday Night from
1940 to 1942, and again from 1953 to 1959.
During this time, he earned a considerable reputation as a playwright and journalist. He began
writing for the Peterborough Examiner, becoming
editor of the paper in 1942, eventually acquiring
partial ownership in 1946. He wrote a regular
column for the Examiner entitled The Diary of
Samuel Marchbanks (194353), in which he
assumed the persona of an eighteenth-centurystyle wit commenting on Canadian politics and
social life. These pieces were later published in a
series of books, including The Diary of Samuel
Marchbanks (1947) and The Table Talk of Samuel
Marchbanks (1949). The culmination of Daviess
academic career came in 1960 when Vincent
Massey, former Governor General of Canada,
invited him to become the first master of Massey
College at the University of Toronto. Davies
accepted the post in 1961, which he held, alongside his appointment as professor of English and
drama, until his retirement in 1981.
Daviess incisive depictions of Canadian social
life are paired with his compelling treatments of
human psychology, myth, and the subconscious.
This focus characterizes the genre that became
1038
DAVIES, ROBERTSON
known as Southern Ontario Gothic, a term

applied to the writings of Davies, Alice Munro,
and Margaret Atwood, all of whom are fascinated
by the apparent incommensurability of appearance and reality. As Clara Thomas describes
Daviess work, his particular hallmark [is] the
sense of the strange, the spiritual, and the occult
being woven into the fabric of even the most
ordinary-seeming of lives (140). Of central concern in Daviess writing is a coming to terms with
the existence of evil a theme he considers in Fifth
Business (1970a) as well as with the grandeur of
human moral dilemmas. His interest in Jungian
psychology and archetypal patterns overlaps with
the critical views of Northrop Frye, who was his
contemporary at the University of Toronto. Davies is also widely described as a satirist who
mocked conventional Canadian proprieties in the
tradition of Stephen Leacock (about whom he
wrote a critical study in 1970). His insistence on
rejecting conventional attitudes toward such
things as religion, social manners, and sex is part
of his larger endeavor to revel in the mysteries of
the human spirit. In so doing, Davies saw himself
to be criticizing Canadian petty moralities while
revitalizing Canadian society and culture.
Without doubt, Daviess international reputation rests in his fiction. His early trio of satirical
novels, known as The Salterton Trilogy, united
by its setting in the university town of Salterton
(loosely based on Kingston, Ontario), sends up
Canadian provincialism. The first of the trilogy,
Tempest-Tost (1951), tells a humorous story of the
towns production of Shakespeares The Tempest.
Through the contrast between the magical world
of the play and the mundane social hypocrisies and
intrigues of the local townsfolk, a satire of human
foibles and pretentions is staged within the microcosm of a small-town theatre. Leaven of Malice
(1954), awarded the Stephen Leacock Memorial
Medal for Humor in 1955, continues the story of
several characters from the first novel, focusing on
the relationship of two lovers, Solly Bridgetower
and Pearl Vambrace. The fate of this couple is
picked up in the final novel, A Mixture of Frailties
(1958), in which Sollys mother writes her son out
of her will until he produces a son of his own.
Meanwhile, the proceeds from the estate are used
to fund a student to study in England, enabling
Davies to construct a comedy of manners around
English and Canadian cultural and social mores.
In the 1960s, Davies became heavily influenced

by the psychological writings of Carl Jung. This
interest informs all of his subsequent work, including The Deptford Trilogy, which uses unconscious archetypes as an important unifying
theme. The first novel of the trilogy, Fifth Business,
solidified Daviess international reputation and is
heralded as one of the best Canadian novels of the
twentieth century. It tells the story of Dunstan
Ramsay, a retired schoolmaster, who, after narrowly missing being struck by a rock hidden inside
a snowball when he was a child, becomes obsessed
with the fate of the woman who is hit by the
snowball, Mary Dempster. Through his meditations on Mary, who as a result of the accident gives
birth prematurely to a son and is eventually committed to an insane asylum, Dunstan undertakes
research into the history of saints, convinced that
Mary herself is a saint. Marys son, Paul, achieves
success as a world famous magician, performing
under the name Magnus Eisengrim. Ramsays
contact with Paul alerts him to the destiny of the
snowball thrower, Boy Staunton, who is found
floating in Toronto harbor with the stone from the
fateful snowball clenched between his teeth. The
subsequent novel in the trilogy, The Manticore
(1972), includes an extended Jungian analysis of
one of its characters; it won Davies the Canadian
Governor Generals Award. In the third, World of
Wonders (1975), Ramsay is writing the biography
of Eisengrim and thus learns the story of Paul
Dempsters life, from his sexual abuse in a two-bit
carnival to his career as a brilliant master of illusion. The genius of the trilogy is the way its central
characters are indelibly affected by a seemingly
ordinary event; each work circles around the unexpected ramifications, and secrets, that emerge
from the snowball incident.
Daviess lifelong interest in the interconnections between the rational and the invisible, truth
and deception, life and art, achieved its most
extended treatment in The Cornish Trilogy,
which includes The Rebel Angels (1981), Whats
Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus
(1988). The trilogy is set in the fictional town of
Blairlogie, based on Daviess childhood experiences in Renfrew. Like The Deptford Trilogy,
these novels are replete with arcane knowledge
and are concerned with themes of reality and
illusion, particularly in relation to the role of art
and the writing of biography. The Rebel Angels is a
DAVIES, ROBERTSON
satire on university life and its associated intellectual and erotic obsessions, focusing on Simon
Darcourt, an Anglican priest and professor of
Greek, and Maria Theotoky, a graduate student
at the university. The story opens with the unveiling of the will of famous art collector and
forger Francis Cornish, though its focus is the
history and workings of the scholarly profession.
Whats Bred in the Bone, which was nominated for
the Booker Prize, tells the story of Cornish, whose
life is being researched by Darcourt but narrated
by two contending spirits the recording angel
and the daimon who guide Cornishs life. Central
to the novel is Cornishs experience as a restorer
and painter in Nazi Germany and his involvement
in an international plot to hoodwink the Nazis. In
the final novel, The Lyre of Orpheus, three characters from Whats Bred are in charge of dispersing the funds of the Cornish foundation. The plot
revolves around the staging of an opera by E. T. A.
Hoffmann that has been funded by the foundation. As in Tempest-Tost, the story of the opera
sheds light on the lives of the characters, and, like
Whats Bred, the boundary between this world
and the next is transgressed as the ghost of Hoffmann himself presides over the production.
Davies died in 1995 before finishing the third
novel of his last trilogy, which includes Murther
and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man
(1994), both centered on post-World War II
Toronto. In Murther, the dead Connor Gilmartin,
precipitously murdered by his wifes lover, is
forced to attend a film festival and watch movies
about his ancestors. The novel stages Gilmartins
confrontation with the experience and destiny of
his forebears in an elaborately framed story in
which his ghost is haunted by both his august
ancestry and his New World inferiority. By acknowledging how his ancestors have shaped
his identity in multiple contingent ways, Gilmartin is forced into an acceptance of what Judith
Skelton Grant terms reluctant Canadianism
(632). Daviess exploration of the interface between psychology and literature reached its culmination in The Cunning Man (1994). Like many
of his novels, this work is framed as a confessional
retrospective in which the doctor-protagonist,
Jonathan Hullah, tells the story of his medical
career while learning how to treat both the body
and the human spirit, in part through works of
art and literature.
1039
Daviess 1982 collection, High Spirits, gathers

the ghost stories from Massey Colleges annual
Christmas Gaudy Night celebrations, which
Davies wrote and recited each year from 1963 to
1980. The book makes use of the traditional ghost
story genre, but contains humorous send-ups of
pretentious college masters and Canadian historical figures. In many of the stories, Davies toys
with the colonial connection between Canadian
authors and their British predecessors. His perspective on the colonial cultural scene in Canada
is difficult to sum up since he was often contradictory in his views. Although an Anglophile
who loved British literary tradition and elite
ritual, Davies was also vocal in his insistence that
Canadian writers (and readers) had to break free
from the cultural and psychological hold of
Britain and create a distinct and venerable
Canadian literature. In his view, it was a rejection
of parochialism that would accomplish this feat.
His sense that Canadians needed a dose of the
invisible and the supernatural to stave off that
most dreadful of modern ailments, the Rational
Rickets (1982, 2), is evident throughout his
work. Daviess formidable intellectual range and
incisive humor are also present in his essays
and speeches from the 1970s and 1980s, gathered
in One Half of Robertson Davies (1977), The
Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979), and The
Merry Heart (1996).
SEE ALSO: Atwood, Margaret (WF);
Canadian Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to
Canonical English Narratives (WF); Humor
and Satire (WF); Leacock, Stephen (WF);
Munro, Alice (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)

Davies, R. (1947). The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks.
Toronto: Clarke, Irwin.
Davies, R. (1949). The Table Talk of Samuel
Marchbanks. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin.
Davies, R. (1951). Tempest-Tost. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin.
Davies, R. (1954). Leaven of Malice. Toronto: Clarke,
Irwin.
Davies, R. (1958). A Mixture of Frailties. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Davies, R. (1970a). Fifth Business. Toronto: Macmillan.
Davies, R. (1970b). Stephen Leacock. Toronto:
1040
DE LISSER, HERBERT G.
Davies, R. (1972). The Manticore. Toronto: Macmillan.

Davies, R. (1975). World of Wonders. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Davies, R. (1977). One Half of Robertson Davies:
Provocative Pronouncements on a Wide Range of
Topics. Toronto: Macmillan.
Davies, R. (1979). The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies
(ed. Judith Skelton Grant). Toronto: Macmillan.
Davies, R. (1981). The Rebel Angels. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Davies, R. (1982). High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost
Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Davies, R. (1985). Whats Bred in the Bone. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Davies, R. (1988). The Lyre of Orpheus. Toronto:
Macmillan.
Davies, R. (1991). Murther and Walking Spirits.
Davies, R. (1994). The Cunning Man. Toronto:
Davies, R. (1996). The Merry Heart: Selections
19801995. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Davis, J. M. (ed.) (1989). Conversations with Robertson
Davies. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Diamond-Nigh, L. (1997). Robertson Davies: Life, Work,
and Criticism. Toronto: York Press.
Grant, J. Skelton (1994). Robertson Davies: Man of
Myth. New York: Viking.
Thomas, C. (1972). Our Nature Our Voices: A
Guidebook to English-Canadian Literature. Toronto:
New Press.
de Lisser, Herbert G.
LEAH READE ROSENBERG
Herbert G. de Lisser was Jamaicas most prolific

author and powerful journalist in the early twentieth century, a period that saw the decline of
British power, the rise of Jamaican nationalism,
and an expansion of US influence which fundamentally altered Jamaican society. Author of 23
novels, two travel books, and numerous novellas
and short stories, he was the first to make Jamaican literature published in Jamaica a popular and
financial success. His fiction was political and
comprehensive, articulating his vision not only
of contemporary change, but also of Jamaicas
history since European conquest.
De Lisser began life as a member of the brown
middle class. He was born in 1878 in Falmouth to
Morrizana (nee Isaacs) and Herbert de Lisser, a
journalist. His fathers death forced the young de
Lisser to join the workforce at 14. In 1904, after

working as a proofreader and journalist, he became editor of Jamaicas most influential
newspaper, the Gleaner, a position he retained
until 1942. His fiction was published first by the
Gleaner and then in Planters Punch, the annual
Christmas magazine he founded and edited. By
serving for over two decades as director of the
board of governors at the Institute of Jamaica,
Jamaicas most influential cultural institution, and
as secretary of the Jamaica Imperial Association,
which promoted Jamaican business interests in
Britain, de Lisser exerted considerable cultural and
political power on behalf of the Jamaican business
elite. In the process, he joined the white elite and
became a harsh critic of forces that threatened its
power the British colonial government, the
working class, and Afro-Jamaican politicians.
De Lisser wrote travel guides, social and political satire, and romances. His work is often considered imitative, but he profoundly transformed
British genres and tropes to meet his political
objectives: to legitimate the local elite, highlight
the weakness of British colonists, and establish
himself as equal to British men of letters. Travel
writing was a consistently critical component of
his journalism. His first book In Cuba and
Jamaica, with Hints to Tourists (1910) adapted
the dominant Victorian mode of representing the
Caribbean, adopting the narrative technique and
political authority of prominent British authors
such as Charles Kingsley and James Anthony
Froude.
His first novel Jane (1913a), later published as
Janes Career (1914), tells of a peasants migration
to the city in early twentieth-century Jamaica.
Its heroine illustrates the thesis of de Lissers
Twentieth Century Jamaica (1913b): namely that
Jamaica would eventually become a modern,
industrial country as its peasantry became urban,
moral, and upwardly mobile. Even as it expresses
de Lissers early and relatively liberal politics,
the novel ridicules trade unions and the aspirations of the working middle class, thus anticipating his later, more explicitly anti-nationalist
fiction.
Much of de Lissers fiction satirizes the middle
class to which he originally belonged. For instance, The Rivals (1921) and Janes sequel Myrtle
and Money (1941) highlight the petty rivalries
of the middle classes and their obsession with
DESAI, ANITA
class and color ranking. Under the Sun (1935) is a

particularly comprehensive satire of Jamaicas
rigid and many-leveled social hierarchy. Closely
related are de Lissers political satires, such as
Triumphant Squalitone (1916), which lampoons
the prospect of independence, and The Jamaica
Nobility (1925), which ridicules Marcus Garveys
United Negro Improvement Association.
De Lissers fourth novel, Revenge (1919), is the
first of eight historical romances that reduce the
defining events in Jamaican history to love stories
and thereby obscure the history of Afro-Jamaican
rebellion and political organization. Revenge depicts the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) as a tragic
romance in which the daughter of peasant leader
Paul Bogle dies in her quest for an English
planters love. Similar love stories overshadow
subaltern resistance to colonial forces in
Anacanoa (1936), which represents the Spanish
conquest; The White Maroon (1938), depicting
the English conquest of Jamaica; and Morgans
Daughter (1930), which deals with the 1760 slave
uprising known as Tackys rebellion. Most
famously, The White Witch of Rose Hall (1929)
transforms Jamaicas largest slave rebellion, the
Baptist War of 1832, into a romance between a
white voodoo priestess and a weak-willed
English planter. The White Witch was also
the first of de Lissers sensationalist romances,
which often appropriate and sensationalize US
accounts of Haiti from the occupation (191534);
the others include The Crocodiles (1932) and
Poltergeist? (1933).
Scholars have celebrated Jane as the first accurate depiction of the black working class in
Jamaican literature. The White Witch of Rose Hall
has become part of Jamaicas national culture and
its tourist industry. However, the majority of de
Lissers oeuvre remains unknown and unavailable, and he has become a relatively minor figure
in Caribbean literary studies because his conservative politics and aesthetics oppose the nationalist, anti-colonial, and pro-labor politics on
which most Jamaican and Caribbean literary
studies are founded.
Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF);
Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); West Indian
Fiction (WF)
1041

Cobham-Sander, R. (1984). The Literary Side of H. G.
de Lisser (18781944). Jamaica Journal, 17(4), 29.
de Lisser, H. G. (1910). In Cuba and Jamaica, with Hints
to Tourists. Kingston: Gleaner.
de Lisser, H. G. (1913a). Jane. Kingston: Gleaner.
de Lisser, H. G. (1913b). Twentieth Century Jamaica.
Kingston: Jamaica Times Printery.
de Lisser, H. G. (1916). Triumphant Squalitone: A
Tropical Extravaganza. Kingston: Gleaner.
de Lisser, H. G. (1919). Revenge. Kingston: Gleaner.
de Lisser, H. G. (ed.) (192044). Planters Punch.
Kingston: Gleaner.
de Lisser, H. G. (1921). The Rivals. Planters Punch,
1(2).
de Lisser, H. G. (1925). The Jamaica Nobility. Planters
Punch, 1(6).
de Lisser, H. G. (1929). The White Witch of Rosehall.
London: Ernest Benn.
de Lisser, H. G. (1930). Morgans Daughter. Planters
Punch, 2(5).
de Lisser, H. G. (1932). The Crocodiles. Planters Punch,
3(1).
de Lisser, H. G. (1933). Poltergeist? Planters Punch,
3(2).
de Lisser, H. G. (1936). Anacanoa. Planters Punch,
3(5).
de Lisser, H. G. (1938). The White Maroon. Planters
Punch, 4(1).
de Lisser, H. G. (1941). Myrtle and Money. Planters
Punch, 4(4).
Morris, M. (1979). H. G. de Lisser: The First Competent
Caribbean Novelist in English. Carib, 1, 1826.
Ramchand, K. (1970). The West Indian Novel and Its
Background. London: Faber and Faber.
Roberts, W. A. (1952). Six Great Jamaicans. Kingston:
Pioneer.
Desai, Anita
RAJESWARI MOHAN
One of the earliest Indian novelists writing in

English to gain international acclaim, Anita Desai
writes about the circumscribed lives of middleclass protagonists, often focusing on their attempts to negotiate the instability and promise
of social change, family turmoil, travel, immigration, and displacement. Over her prolific career
she has developed a literary aesthetic that has
gradually shifted from the social realism typical
of the first generation of South Asian English
novelists toward a narrative mode better adapted
1042
DESAI, ANITA
to her interest in the complicated emotional lives

of her characters.
Anita Desai was born on June 24, 1937 to a
German mother and a Bengali father, and spent
her childhood in Delhi during the tumultuous
days of the decolonization and partition of India,
events that impressed upon her that people bear
the imprint of history, even if they dont seem
particularly aware of it. While this feature defines
many of her characters, Desai also brings to her
fiction a bi-focal perspective from her family
background, feeling about India as an Indian, but
thinking of it as an outsider (Bliss 522). Unlike
many prominent contemporary South Asian
writers, Desai has spent the majority of her life
in India and has, since 1986, divided her time
between India and the UK initially and then
between India and the US, where she has taught
at several institutions.
Desai has won numerous awards including
Indias foremost literary prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1978, and the national honor, the
Padma Shri, in 1990. Clear Light of Day (1980), In
Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999) were
shortlisted for Britains Booker Prize. Less well
known than her fiction are her compelling book
reviews and piercing cultural commentaries,
which have appeared regularly in prominent magazines in India and abroad.
Desais novels offer finely spun accounts of the
inner lives of ordinary characters trapped in
families whose respectable middle-class lives are
dominated by feckless and authoritarian parents
or husbands. Often structured around protagonists thinking back on their lives, her novels
plumb the wrenching effects of memory and
history on the daily lives of characters who are
invariably overwhelmed by life, unfulfilled in
their relationships, browbeaten by their families,
or marginalized in their societies. Desai explains
that she chooses such characters because they go
against the current (Bliss 522) of social norms,
and she usually wins them the readers sympathy
for their unrecognized, often futile, attempts to
resist the forces curbing them and for their odd
acts of dignity and compassion. More importantly,
their off-center perspectives, when seen in context,
yield insights into the paralyzing tangles of
middle-class existence in India. By situating her
characters struggles against a backdrop of events
or discourses of nationalist significance, Desai
also brings into focus the failure of nationalism

to give all people the true rights of citizenship. In
her non-fiction, she explicitly targets religious
intolerance and moral hypocrisy in Indian
culture.
Unlike writers who vaunt literatures importance in drawing attention to injustice, Desai is
typically reticent to make political claims for
her fiction, suggesting instead that her novels are
a lament, a protest, a statement about human
evil rather than a call to action (Bliss 532). Believing that an author can be a social critic only
unconsciously, she insists that if a writer uncompromisingly represents her characters and their
world the social criticism will inevitably become
evident. So it is that her fine eye for subtle
gradations allows her to convey significant but
often overlooked differences in class and generation that shape the ways different characters
experience and address their social positions as
wives in thankless and difficult marriages, as in
Cry, the Peacock (1963). In novels such as Bye-Bye,
Blackbird (1971), Clear Light of Day, In Custody,
and Baumgartners Bombay (1988), she gently
opens up politically charged categories such
as Indian, European, Muslim, immigrant, foreigner, man, and woman to show their inherent
instability even as they determine peoples lives.
In Bye-Bye, Blackbird, Baumgartners Bombay,
Journey to Ithaca (1995), and Fasting, Feasting,
she complicates and undermines the strict
opposition between the metropolitan, Western
center and the underdeveloped Indian periphery
upon which so much early postcolonial criticism
has turned. These concerns are so integral to
Desais vision that even her childrens novel,
The Village by the Sea (1982), depicts the
disruption of rural life by industrialization, and
the lure and peril of the ensuing migration to
the big city.
All too often Desais characters find that the
choices they make in their bid for personal fulfillment are defined and restricted by patriarchal
family structures. This element in her fiction has
led critics to hail her as a feminist pioneer in
Indian literature (Jussawalla & Dasenbrock 158).
Desai herself has expressed marked ambivalence
about this attribution, asserting that she simply
tries to get at the truth (Robinson 81) and citing
novels such as Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City
(1968), and Where Shall We Go This Summer?
DESAI, ANITA
in which the self-destructive actions of female

characters merely express disappointment and
longing for a different life. Nevertheless, her
novels repeatedly turn on the violence that gravitates toward women in patriarchal society. In Fire
on the Mountain (1977), Clear Light of Day, and
Fasting, Feasting, for instance, she makes visible
not only the enmeshing family structures of
patriarchal opportunism and exploitation that
entrap female characters, but also the attitudes
ensuring their consent to what they sometimes
recognize as oppressive practices and disabling
beliefs. Her later fiction broadens the scope of
these concerns to show how mens potential is
equally stunted by the prejudices and restrictions
of a patriarchal society.
In her non-fiction, Desai takes a more explicit
stand on the difficulties with which women writers
have to contend. In the 1980s she lamented the
absence of a tradition of women writers who questioned and challenged Indian patriarchy (1983, 56).
This lack, she argues, led to a moping style of
writing in her own early years. In a later essay, A
Secret Connivance, she joins the discourse of
Indian feminism, and has since written directly
about the injustices of gender arrangements.
Desai conveys these matters with understated
but cutting irony, orchestrating imagery and
symbolism to build up complexly layered pictures
of her subjects. In the first section of Fasting,
Feasting, for instance, food serves as the organizing motif as the minutiae of daily menus and
relentless demands for refreshments become the
means by which the parents keep their daughter
from having her own life. When another daughter
escapes this routine through marriage, it is only to
be drawn into a life of consumption and status
consciousness that is no less inane. The novels
second section offers a counterpoint by presenting food as a metaphor for the alienation felt by an
Indian immigrant in the US while simultaneously
depicting the neurosis of a suburban American
family, the Pattons, who demonstrate the crippling web of control and resistance that is spun
out around food through the mothers compulsive grocery shopping, the fathers insistence on
grilling steak every evening, and their teenage
daughters eating disorder.
Such moments are balanced by the lyrical grace
of Desais descriptions of landscape, be it the
neighborhoods of Old Delhi, the streets of
1043
Bombay, or the woods of western Massachusetts.

Inspired by Japanese and modern poetrys ability
to convey the essence of a moment of feeling, she
evokes place in palpable detail which hauntingly
represents the psychic terrain of her characters.
At the same time, her vivid sense of place foregrounds the sedimentation of history, both
personal and communal, in any landscape.
Desais fiction typically sustains an attention to
time, memory, and history through a narrative
structure organized around her characters introspective flights, which both confine them in
their solipsistic worlds and give them a space of
unchallenged authority. Claiming as her major
influences Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Henry
James, Marcel Proust, and Yasunari Kawabata,
among others, Desai writes novels that move
between external narration with limited omniscience, interior monologue, and free indirect
discourse usually organized around one or more
centers of consciousness. The resulting complexly
layered narratives keep the focus squarely on her
protagonists apprehension of their lives. The
short stories collected in Games at Twilight and
Other Stories (1978) and Diamond Dust (2000a)
showcase Desais virtuosity in revealing the unappeased longings and defining resentments of
her characters in an epiphanic flash.
An aspect of Desais focus on characters interiority is the absence of resolution in her narratives. While some of her novels end with the
admittedly arbitrary ploy of violent death, they
nevertheless lack closure. In novels after Clear
Light of Day, compromise and resignation serve
as the only resolution to her characters predicaments. Desai is explicit in her rejection of Western
conventions and expectations of closure and resolution, arguing that the only fitting response to
the human condition is to hope for the strength
to endure (Robinson 82). A similar rejoinder
to literary tradition plays out in her numerous
allusions to canonical literary texts and popular
culture, both Western and Indian. Frequently, her
characters immersion in the world of literature
endows them with a delicacy of perception that,
all too often, simultaneously renders them incapable of acting in the world.
Desais attention to the small, telling details
of individual psychology, the contradictions of
a rapidly changing society, and the ironies of
a culture increasing global in its scope have
1044
DESANI, G. V.
combined with her elegant narrative style to give

us compelling novels about the everyday effects of
tradition and history.
(WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF);
Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF);
James, Henry (AF); Migration, Diaspora, and
Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)

Bliss, C. D. (1988). Against the Current: A Conversation
with Anita Desai. Massachusetts Review, 29(3),
52137.
Desai, A. (1963). Cry, the Peacock. London: Peter Owen.
Desai, A. (1968). Voices in the City. London: Peter
Owen.
Desai, A. (1971). Bye-Bye, Blackbird. New Delhi: Hind
Pocket Books.
Desai, A. (1974). The Peacock Garden. Bombay: India
Book House Education Trust.
Desai, A. (1975). Where Shall We Go This Summer?
Delhi: Vikas.
Desai, A. (1976). Cat on a Houseboat. Bombay: Orient
Longman.
Desai, A. (1977). Fire on the Mountain. London:
Heinemann.
Desai, A. (1978). Games at Twilight and Other Stories.
Desai, A. (1980). Clear Light of Day. London: Penguin.
Desai, A. (1982). The Village by the Sea: An Indian
Family Story. London: Heinemann.
Desai, A. (1983). Indian Women Writers. In M.
Butcher (ed.), The Eye of the Beholder: Indian Writing
in English. London: Commonwealth Institute, pp.
548.
Desai, A. (1984). In Custody. London: Heinemann.
Desai, A. (1988). Baumgartners Bombay. New York:
Knopf.
Desai, A. (1990). A Secret Connivance. Times Literary
Supplement, pp. 972, 976 (Sept. 14).
Desai, A. (1991). India: The Seed of Destruction.
New York Review of Books, p. 4 (June 27).
Desai, A. (1995). Journey to Ithaca. London: Heinemann.
Desai, A. (1999). Fasting, Feasting. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Desai, A. (2000a). Diamond Dust. New York:
Houghton.
Desai, A. (2000b). What is Indian Literature? In J. Paine
(ed.), The Poetry of Our World. New York:
HarperCollins, pp. 3936.
Desai, A. (2003). The Rise of (Indian) Modernism. In

K. Heinzelman (ed.), Make It New: The Rise of
Modernism. Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, pp. 1415.
Desai, A. (2004). The Zigzag Way. New York: Houghton
Mifflin.
Jussawalla, F. & Dasenbrock, R. W. (1992). Anita
Desai. In Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial
World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp.
15679.
Kohli, D. & Just, M. M. (2008). Anita Desai: Critical
Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft International.
Pandit, L. (1995). A Sense of Detail and a Sense of
Order: Anita Desai. In P. C. Hogan & L. Pandit
(eds.), Literary India: Comparative Studies in
Aesthetics, Colonialism, and Culture. Albany: SUNY
Press, pp. 15372.
Ram, A. (1983). Interviews with Indian English Writers.
Calcutta: Writers Workshop.
Robinson, A. (1996). Anita Desai. In S. Griffiths (ed.),
Beyond the Glass Ceiling. Manchester: Manchester
Srivastava, R. K. (ed.) (1984). Perspectives on Anita
Desai. Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan.
Yaqin, A. (2005). The Communalization and
Disintegration of Urdu in Anita Desais In Custody.
In P. Morey & A. Tickell (eds.), Alternative Indias:
Writing, Nation and Communalism. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, pp. 89114.
Desani, G. V.
AMARDEEP SINGH
Govind Vishnoodas Desani, who published as

G. V. Desani, is best known as the author of a
highly unusual novel, All about H. Hatterr (1948),
written at the tail end of British colonialism in
India. While it was never a commercial success,
the novel was appreciated by Western critics such
as T. S. Eliot as an example of a virtuosic experimental modernist text by an Indian author.
Born in Kenya in 1909, Desani spent his early
years in northern India. According to his biographer, Molly Ramanujam, he was expelled from
an English-language school as a teenager, and ran
away from home twice. At the age of 16, he
gathered enough money to buy passage to
England for a brief visit. He returned to England
for the second time in 1935 and, despite having no
university-level education, was widely in demand
as a lecturer. In 1936, Desani became a radio
DESANI, G. V.
broadcaster for the BBC, and he remained in

England during the war years, doing freelance
journalism and writing what would become
Hatterr. Two years after the novel appeared,
Desani published Hali, a short devotional prose
poem which might be read as a repudiation of the
anti-religious and anti-serious Hatterr.
To writer and critic Salman Rushdie, Hatterr is
fundamentally a late colonial satire that, in his
phrase, is the first genuine effort to go beyond the
Englishness of the English language (16). Hatterr
is an affectionate parody of Indian English, of the
slightly erratic speaking habits of Englishmedium-educated Indians under the auspices of
British colonialism. The novel also parodies Hindu
religious figures and, more generally, religious
conversion narratives, though in 1978, years after
Hatterrs first publication, Desani published
an essay suggesting that the novel contained a
sincere Hindu religious dimension as well. A third
target of the satire is the Western literary reader,
parodied in the novels preface as Betty
Bloomsbohemia, who approaches the novel with
a particular set of Orientalist expectations for a
novel by an Indian author. This opening parody reemerges periodically in the text through parenthetical second-person asides directed at the
reader.
Conceptually, Hatterr may be read as a powerful early instance of self-conscious literary and
linguistic hybridity, eschewing both overt mimicry of British literary style and nationalist selfassertion. Srinivas Aravamudan has explained the
title of Hatterr as both a metonym of British
colonial authority, alluding as it does to the idea of
the topiwalla and as an obvious reference to
the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland (127).
The novel is an instance of modern picaresque
with an extremely broad range of allusions to
earlier picaresque texts including Apuleius The
Golden Ass and Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn, as
well as parodic allusions to canonical authors and
texts including Shakespeare, William Langland,
Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and the anonymous
Everyman.
Desanis career path is thus radically different
from contemporaries such as Mulk Raj Anand,
Nirad Chaudhuri, and Raja Rao, who also traveled
in the West. He remained completely aloof from
politics, either nationalist or Anglophile, and did
not affiliate himself with any literary circles or
1045
movements. Rather, in 1952, Desani returned to

India and went into total religious seclusion for
more than 10 years, during which time he wrote
nothing at all. Beginning around 1963, he started
publishing new stories in the Illustrated Weekly of
India, the largest English-language weekly magazine in India. Between 1966 and 1967, he wrote an
unsigned weekly column for the same magazine
called Very High and Very Low, often focusing
on religious issues, but the waggish Hatterr voice
also began to re-emerge with polyglossic jokes,
rambling anecdotes, myriad fictive interlocutors,
and a general literary voice and attitude resembling his earlier Hatterr. In 1969, Desani left
India for good and took up a position teaching
philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin.
While Desani published little fully original or
new material after leaving India, he did not stop
writing; rather, he dedicated himself to adding
extensive new sections to his two major literary
works, Hatterr and Hali, as well as to revising the
existing sections. He published a third edition of
All about H. Hatterr in 1970, with a laudatory
preface by Anthony Burgess, as well as a fourth,
final revision of the novel in 1986. Hali and
Collected Stories appeared in 1991, and contained
a further revised version of Hali, as well as reprints
of many of the stories Desani had written for the
Illustrated Weekly in the 1960s. Desani died in
Texas in 2001.
SEE ALSO: Anand, Mulk Raj (WF);
Narratives (WF); Humor and Satire (WF);
Indian Fiction (WF); Joyce, James (BIF);
Postcolonial Fiction of the British South
Asian Diaspora (BIF); Rao, Raja (WF);
Rushdie, Salman (WF)
Aravamudan, S. (2006). Guru English: South Asian
Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language. Princeton:
Desani, G. V. (1948). All about H. Hatterr. London:
Aldor.
Desani, G. V. (1950). Hali. London: Saturn.
Desani, G. V. (1978). Difficulties of Communicating an
Oriental to a Western Audience. In C. D.
Narasimhaiah (ed.), Awakened Conscience: Studies
in Commonwealth Literature. New Delhi: Sterling,
pp. 4018.
1046
DETECTIVE/CRIME FICTION
Desani, G. V. (1986). All about H. Hatterr, 4th edn.

New York: McPherson.
Desani, G. V. (1991). Hali and Collected Stories.
New York: McPherson.
Mandy, C. R. (1964). All about G. V. Desani. Illustrated
Weekly of India, pp. 423 (June 7).
Naik, M. K. (1987). The Method in the Madness: All
about All about H. Hatterr. Studies in Indian English
Literature. New Delhi: Sterling pp. 10418.
Ramanujan, M. (1984). G. V. Desani: The Writer and
His World. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann.
Rushdie, S. (1997). Introduction. In S. Rushdie &
E. West (eds.), Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian
Writing. New York: pp. viixx.
Detective/Crime Fiction
KENNETH STRONGMAN
Crime fiction, also known as detective fiction, is a

major genre of twentieth-century world fiction in
terms of number of titles, sales, and variety,
though some critics view it as a poor cousin of
general fiction. However, during the last 30 or 40
years a large body of critical literature has grown
up around crime fiction, and it has begun to
acquire an academic imprimatur. Perhaps because of sales, critical interest, and forays into
the genre by some writers of literary fiction, the
boundaries between crime and general fiction
have become blurred. In some cases, such blurring
might be better described as a transcending of
boundaries as crime fiction writers consider
things social and cultural as well as criminal.
Crime fiction may also transcend traditional national and cultural boundaries, as, for example, in
A Shadow of Myself (2001) by the black British
novelist Mike Phillips, in which English, German,
and African cultures each play their part in a
multigenerational narrative. Defining crime fiction is therefore no easy matter. Add to this the
problems of defining postcolonial the predominant rubric under which world fiction is
now studied and the difficulties multiply.
These matters are discussed in interesting
detail in The Post-Colonial Detective (2001), edited by Ed Christian, and Postcolonial Postmortems:
Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective
(2006), edited by Christine Matzke and Susanne
M
uhleisen. Also very instructive is Ruth Morses
article Racination and Ratiocination: PostColonial Crime (2005). As Morse points out,
crime fiction necessarily involves imitation (of

other crime writers and of the national and international imperatives of what is being written).
And while postcolonial writing, broadly speaking,
emerges from or represents marginalized groups,
the detectives and criminals featured in crime
fiction also typically come from the margins of
their societies.
Christian locates the postcolonial detective in
relation to four criteria. First, the postcolonial
detective is not always the creation of a postcolonial writer; the British writer H. R. F. Keating, for
example, created his Bombay detective character
Inspector Ghote before he had even visited India.
Second, there are many detective novels set in nonWestern countries that are not postcolonial by any
definition; several of Agatha Christies novels
(such as Death on the Nile) would fall into this
category. Third and more positively, truly postcolonial detectives reside in the countries being
portrayed and are marginalized through having
a style of detection that is influenced both by their
culture and that of the colonizers a style that
might lead others to discourage them from
their investigations. An example of this is Arthur
Upfields Australian part-Aboriginal detective
Napoleon Bonaparte, who typically has to work
with an English legal system while using
traditional Aboriginal methods of detection.
Fourth, the postcolonial detective might be quick
to see contradictions and tensions in the society
(e.g., between the colonizer and the colonized),
thus helping the reader to understand that society.
Walter Mosleys black Los Angeles amateur detective Easy Rawlins exemplifies this perceptiveness
in stories such as Devil in a Blue Dress (1990).
Another way of characterizing the postcolonial
detective is as the ethnic sleuth, to borrow a term
from Matzke and M
uhleisen. In this context,
ethnic has sometimes been equated with
postcolonial and simply means outside the
mainstream. The mainstream is defined largely
by the hard-boiled American tradition (beginning
with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett)
and the English country house tradition
(Agatha Christie, Michael Innes). Frequently, the
ethnic sleuth struggles with the challenges to
life that are found in multicultural societies,
including Western ones, and many examples of
ethnic sleuths can be found in American fiction.
In novels such as Cinnamon Kiss (2005), Walter
DETECTIVE/CRIME FICTION
Mosleys Easy Rawlins exemplifies the postcolonial, ethnic detective as subversive and counter to
the prevailing tradition in his society and even in
his own subgroup. An interesting question is
whether or not Sara Paretskys V. I. Warshawski
fits this category. Although she is not outside the
ethnic mainstream per se, she does belong to a
subordinate group (women), struggles with the
challenge of her gender, and in the role of detective is clearly subversive not only because she
is a woman but also, ironically, because she is
hard-boiled.
A second question that this type of analysis
prompts is whether or not the writer who creates
an ethnic detective has to be ethnic. Keating did
well enough with Inspector Ghote before he visited
India, as did Tony Hillerman with his Navajo
detectives and Upfield with Napoleon Bonaparte.
These writers do not share their ethnicity with
their heroes. However, their characters do not
have the authenticity of Mosleys Easy Rawlins,
or of the Afrikaner lieutenant Tromp Kramer and
the Zulu detective Mickey Zondi in James
McClures South African police procedurals.
Postcolonial crime writers commonly address
the difficulties of detecting in societies that have
been influenced or tainted by the crime and
punishment traditions of the colonizing country,
as Christian notes. The ethnic detective must
therefore negotiate a path between his or her
knowledge and traditional (Western) methods of
detection. Upfields Napoleon Bonaparte struggles with this. The ethnic detective is also frequently shown to be trying to regain power that was lost
through colonization, as Hillermans Navajos do.
Language can be a marker of this struggle, and
many crime novelists from postcolonial countries
write in their indigenous languages. Typically they
fight for acceptance because they are not translated
into English, the predominant language of crime
fiction, and do not sell well unless, ironically, they
are translated into English or French. Crime fiction by postcolonial authors writing in their own
languages is, therefore, itself marginalized, not
unlike early Western crime fiction.
An interesting version of this problem is apparent in the crime novels of black British author
Courttia Newland, beginning with The Scholar
(1997). Newlands fiction is set among young
blacks in contemporary London and uses the
vernacular of its place, time, and social group; to
1047
a reader not belonging to that group, the language

may present a barrier. His work, like most postcolonial crime fiction, takes on a hybrid form. As
Christian notes, postcolonial crime writers must
combine Western conventions and traditions
of crime fiction (without which sales would be
minimal) with the cultural particularities of the
society in which it is set.
Morse makes the cogent point that the discourse of detection is not that of post-colonial
theory (81). Although it can be argued that all
writers of crime fiction have written from and
about the social margins, the early days of crime
writing were abundant with national and racial
stereotypes: of the British (by Ngaio Marsh and
Agatha Christie), of Americans (Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett), and of the French
and Belgians (Maurice LeBlanc and Christie).
Postcolonial theorys emphasis on place (see Ashcroft et al. 811) does, however, intersect with
crime fiction, which represents people and activities within a particular time and place. Indeed,
fictional detectives are often keenly committed
to their places, as Paretskys Warshawski is to
Chicago and Peter Temples Jack Irish is to
Melbourne. More generally, this means that
whether the detective is professional (as in the
police procedural) or amateur (the paid or unpaid
private eye), the style of justice of the society in
which the action takes place has to be seen by the
reader as appropriate and the plots rendering of it
believable. As a result, detection in a science
fiction setting is less than compelling, because it
does not have the context of a real-world system
of justice, law, and ethics; the societal rules can be
whatever the writer determines, the result being
curiously unsatisfying.
As Christian argues, the postcolonial detective
not only occupies the space between two cultures,
the colonizer and the colonized, but indeed might
said to be that space. The postcolonial detective
can oppress others by using traditional police
methods, while simultaneously resisting oppression by asserting the (non-mainstream) mores of
his own culture. In this context, the postcolonial
theorist Homi Bhabha makes the well-observed
comment that the mimicry of the colonizers
by the colonized can become mockery as the
colonized become more sophisticated (see pp.
8592). He sees a strengthening of both peoples
through the process of hybridization. The
1048
DUGGAN, MAURICE
postcolonial detective has to observe both cultures and forge a way through them, a way that
achieves the desired goals within the plot and that
makes sense to and adds to the understanding of
the reader. Thematically, postcolonial crime fiction often centers on an essential ambiguity and
distrust of order in society, as in Amitav Ghoshs
The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), where almost
everything is not as it seems.
To take an obvious example of the marrying of
traditional crime fiction with its postcolonial
variety, postcolonial mean streets can be found
in Peter Temples Melbourne, Peter Corriss Sydney, and Eric Wrights Toronto; traditionally,
such mean streets were walked down by Raymond
Chandlers Philip Marlowe, and later by Ross
Macdonalds Lew Archer, in Los Angeles and San
Francisco. Other examples of postcolonial crime
fiction include Sujata Masseys Japanese American crime novels, the Botswana fiction of Alexander McCall Smith, and Wessell Ebersohns crime
fiction set in the last 15 years of South African
apartheid. In Canada, the part-Cherokee literary
author Thomas King has written crime novels
under the pseudonym Hartley Goodweather, featuring the Native investigator Thumps DreadfulWater. There is also Robert G. Barretts Australian
pulp fiction, with Les Norton as a crude, workingclass private investigator, the whole being replete
with misleading stereotypes, not unlike Agatha
Christies novels.
Postcolonial crime and detective fiction highlights the interplay between the colonized and
colonizing societies that is the lot of the postcolonial detective and demonstrates the ways in
which he or she has to come to terms with this
when considering the means, motives, and opportunities of the criminal. To read such fiction is
necessarily to gain insight into the postcolonial
condition.
SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF);
Noir Fiction (AF); Mystery/Detective/
Crime Fiction (BIF); Postcolonialism
and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTING READINGS
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1989). The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London:

Routledge.
Christian, E. (ed.) (2001). The Post-Colonial Detective.
Matzke, C., & Muhleisen, S. (eds.) (2006). Postcolonial
Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural
Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Morse, R. (2005). Racination and Ratiocination: PostColonial Crime. European Review, 13(1), 7989.
Duggan, Maurice
IAN RICHARDS
Maurice Duggan is famous for his short stories

and for helping introduce Joycean modernist
techniques into New Zealand literature. He ranks
with Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson
among New Zealands greatest literary stylists.
Since novels were only sporadically produced in
mid-twentieth-century New Zealand, the short
story at that time was considered the mainstay of
local fiction.
Duggan was born in Auckland on November
25, 1922. His father was an Irish immigrant who
managed an Auckland department store, and his
mother was New Zealand-born but also of Irish
extraction. Duggan had three sisters and also a
half-brother from his fathers previous marriage.
His mothers sudden death in 1930 and his
fathers third marriage led to tensions within the
family, all of which were explored in Duggans
early fiction. He wrote a series of semiautobiographical stories about the Lenihan family that he
hoped to link together into a novel, as Katherine
Mansfield had hoped to do with her Karori stories. Like Mansfield, he failed in this. Duggan never
succeeded in publishing a novel.
In 1935 Duggans father moved with his family
to rural Paeroa. Duggan returned to Auckland a
year later to attend Sacred Heart College, but his
formal education lasted only nine months. He
worked at odd jobs, but with the amputation of
his left leg because of acute osteomyelitis in 1940,
he discovered a desire to write. The amputation
also prevented Duggan from serving in World
War II. Instead, in early 1944, he made contact
with Sargeson, then New Zealands most famous
writer, at his small house in Auckland. Sargeson
became Duggans mentor and introduced him to
other writers on Aucklands North Shore, notably
Greville Texidor and John Reece Cole. These
DUGGAN, MAURICE
writers, along with Keith Sinclair and Kendrick

Smithyman, helped form an influential group of
literati in New Zealand. Duggan married Barbara
Platts in 1946; they had one child, Nicholas, in
1954. The couple eventually built a house in
Auckland where Duggan lived on and off for the
rest of his life.
With Sargesons support, Duggans writing
almost immediately showed a sophistication that
was to mark his entire oeuvre. His approach
contained an implicit rejection of Sargesons flatly
New Zealand-colloquial, social-realist style,
which had become mainstream and widely imitated. Duggans attention to language made his
work heavily poetic. Six Place Names and a Girl,
a series of short, evocative paragraphs describing
areas near Paeroa and the feelings of a runaway
boy, proved a breakthrough. It was published in
Charles Braschs magazine Landfall in 1949.
Landfalls appearance from 1947 provided an
important incentive for New Zealand writers and
an outlet for their writing. Much of Duggans later
work was first published in its pages.
In 1950 Duggan and Barbara traveled to
England for over two years, and there he wrote
many of the stories eventually published in his first
volume of short fiction, Immanuels Land (1956).
Duggan contracted tuberculosis in late 1952 and
had to return to New Zealand; though he continued writing, he spent much of the remainder of the
decade recuperating. Immanuels Land proved an
auspicious debut. In 1958 Duggan wrote a
childrens book, Falter Tom and the Water Boy,
which was published in Britain and the United
States and has become a minor classic. He also
began, with The Wits of Willie Graves, to move
from semiautobiographical stories to the formally
complex style of his maturity.
In 1960 Duggan received the Burns Fellowship,
established at Otago University in Dunedin to
allow full-time writing for one year. During his
year he wrote the Beckett-influenced novella
Rileys Handbook, and many of the stories in
his next collection. One of these, Along Rideout
Road That Summer, was published in Landfall in
1963 and was widely admired for its comic brio
and mix of high and low language. It describes
a summers dalliance on a Paeroa farm between
a young Pakeha (European) male and his
more sexually experienced and mature Maori
girlfriend. The story is often regarded as
1049
announcing New Zealand literatures final

break with the social-realist tradition. Duggans
second collection, Summer in the Gravel Pit
(1965), was published to acclaim in Britain and
New Zealand.
Returning to Auckland in 1961, Duggan began
a career as an advertising copywriter, which absorbed most of his creative energies. His rise was
meteoric and he became creative director of the
firm J. Inglis Wright by 1966. In 1970 he published
his final collection, OLearys Orchard, consisting
of three novellas. Of these, Rileys Handbook,
the rant of a dying man who escapes into a new,
harsher personality, was well regarded, but
OLearys Orchard, about a man and a young
woman who both seek to expunge earlier relationships through their love affair, displayed a level of
complexity that taxed the reading public. While
working in advertising Duggan gradually succumbed to alcoholism, and though he was appointed to the companys board of directors in
1971, he left 14 months later because of his
drinking.
Duggan spent 1973 in nightmarish conditions
at Oakley Mental Hospital, but managed to give
up alcohol. However, in late 1973 he learned that
he had cancer. In his final year Duggan managed
to write one more story, The Magsman Miscellany, published posthumously in Islands magazine in 1975. With its cryptic references to earlier
stories, The Magsman Miscellany was regarded
as heralding New Zealand literatures shift toward
postmodernism. Duggan died in Auckland on
December 11, 1974.
SEE ALSO: Frame, Janet (WF); Joyce,
James (BIF); Mansfield, Katherine (WF);
New Zealand Fiction (WF); Sargeson, Frank (WF)
Duggan, M. (1956). Immanuels Land. Auckland:
Pilgrim.
Duggan, M. (1958). Falter Tom and the Water Boy.
Hamilton: Pauls Book Arcade.
Duggan, M. (1965). Summer in the Gravel Pit.
Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul.
Duggan, M. (1970). OLearys Orchard. Christchurch:
Caxton.
Duggan, M. (1974). The Fabulous McFanes and Other
Childrens Stories. Queen Charlotte Sound: Cape
Catley.
1050
DUNCAN, SARA JEANNETTE
Duggan, M. (2001). A Voice for the Minotaur: Selected

Poems. Auckland: Holloway.
Richards, I. (1997). To Bed at Noon: The Life and Art of
Maurice Duggan. Auckland: Auckland University
Press.
Stead, C. K. (ed.) (1981). Collected Stories:
Maurice Duggan. Auckland: Auckland University
Press.
Duncan, Sara Jeannette

JANICE FIAMENGO
In the novels, short stories, travel accounts, and

journalism that she published over 30 years, Sara
Jeannette Duncan was predominantly a social
satirist. In her most popular work, the satire is
comic and forgiving; in her mature fiction, which
explored the themes of modern womanhood and
imperial politics, her Horatian perspective is
darkened by mordant irony and an emphasis on
failed ideals. A Canadian-born writer who
adopted an international perspective and did
most of her work while living in India (with
extended visits to London), Duncan produced
a varied output of 22 books united by an interest
in representative national types and in the conflict
between personal desire and social duty.
Duncan was born on December 22, 1861, in
Brantford, Canada West (now Ontario), to a
Scottish father and an Irish mother. Abandoning
her early desire to become a visual artist, she
turned to writing after a brief career as a schoolteacher. In 1885, she made her name when she was
hired as the literary reviewer for the Washington
Post; in the following year, she became the first
woman to work full-time in a Canadian newspaper office, that of the Toronto Globe. Here, as well
as at The Week and the Montreal Star, she established her flair for sketching witty characters and
scenes and making pert observations on social
and political issues. Tiring of journalisms exhausting pace and limited rewards, she left Canada in 1888 to travel the world with a fellow
journalist, Lily Lewis, using the material thus
gained to publish her fictionalized account A
Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went
Round the World by Ourselves (1890). Its vivid
narrative of two ingenues abroad, observing the
cultural peculiarities of foreign lands and exposing their own prejudices and assumptions, made
it a popular and critical success. Attempting to

capitalize on the flexible formula, Duncan published a number of novels, including the sketchbased An American Girl in London (1891), in
which an observant narrator experiences a series
of comic encounters in a foreign setting. She was
particularly successful in mining her experience as
a newlywed in India (having met and married
Everard Cotes, a museum official with the colonial administration) in the deftly humorous
The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893); and
she maintained the formula well into her later
career, using it effectively in her witty tale of
cultural contrasts Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian
Girl in London (1908). A more reflective tone
characterizes On the Other Side of the Latch
(1901), an autobiographical narrative of a summer in Simla, in which Duncan analyzes her life in
British India.
Humor was always a staple of Duncans fiction,
but her major works also drew on pathos and
melodrama. Such is the case with A Daughter of
To-Day (1894), her examination of the freedoms
and perils of modern womanhood. In this novel, a
self-confident and consciously self-creating new
woman, Elfrida Bell, makes her way as a journalist in London, but commits suicide after a series of
devastating miscalculations in love and career. It
is not clear whether the heroines death is intended as a condemnation of her dramatic unconventionality or an outraged illustration of the
killing force of Old World conventions. Ten years
later, Duncan gave her less unconventional heroine, Advena Murchison, a happier ending in The
Imperialist (1904), a novel about political and
romantic idealism. Advenas fidelity to ideals is
rewarded through a comic deus ex machina plot
twist, but the hero, Lorne Murchison, fails almost
as bitterly as Elfrida because of the extravagance of
his political vision, which does not find favor with
the hard-headed electors of Elgin. What begins as
a nostalgically affectionate story of small-town
Ontario becomes a decisively critical portrait of
colonial complacency and parochialism. Failed
ideals are also explored in the subtle stories of The
Pool in the Desert (1903).
Some of Duncans most complex portraits
emerge in the Anglo-Indian novels that followed
The Imperialist. In Set in Authority (1906) and The
Burnt Offering (1909), Duncan concerns herself
with the moral issues surrounding the British
DUNCAN, SARA JEANNETTE
imperial presence. Written during a period of

imperial crisis and increasingly militant Indian
nationalism, the novels focus on racial conflict
and injustice, revealing the failure of governors to
understand the governed and the chasm separating members of the so-called imperial family.
Duncans representations are steeped in late imperial assumptions about the Oriental mind, yet
her consistent exposure of white prejudice and
ignorance reveals her awareness that clear vision is
not available to anyone: all are bound within their
own traditions of thought, walled off from their
fellows by the barriers of race.
Before her death in 1922, Duncan turned
away from serious examinations of empire with
conventional novels in which, as in His Royal
Happiness (1914), she returned to the romance
of contrasting national types. She also wrote some
unsuccessful plays. Best known for The Imperialist, Duncan is a difficult author because of the
ironies and topicality of many of her works;
however, her analyses of social nuance and cultural difference give her writing an enduring
interest.
Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF);
Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF)
1051

Dean, M. (1991). A Different Point of View: Sara
Jeannette Duncan Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press.
Duncan, S. J. (1890). A Social Departure. New York:
Appleton.
Duncan, S. J. (1891). An American Girl in London. New
York: Appleton.
Duncan, S. J. (1893). The Simple Adventures of a
Memsahib. London: Chatto and Windus.
Duncan, S. J. (1894). A Daughter of To-Day. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Duncan, S. J. (1901). On the Other Side of the Latch.
London: Methuen.
Duncan, S. J. (1903). The Pool in the Desert. London:
Methuen.
Duncan, S. J. (1904). The Imperialist. Toronto: Copp
Clark.
Duncan, S. J. (1906). Set in Authority. New York:
Doubleday, Page.
Duncan, S. J. (1908). Cousin Cinderella. London:
Methuen.
Duncan, S. J. (1909). The Burnt Offering. London:
Methuen.
Duncan, S. J. (1914). His Royal Happiness. New York:
Appleton.
Fowler, M. (1983). Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette
Duncan. Toronto: Anansi.
Tausky, T. E. (1980). Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of
Empire. Port Credit, ON: P. D. Meany.
E
East African Fiction
EVAN MWANGI
Critics and historians of African literature use the

term East Africa heuristically to describe a
diverse geopolitical entity that covers Kenya,
Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia, and sometimes
Ethiopia and Eritrea. Fiction from this area is as
diverse as the demographic and linguistic characteristics of each county, encompassing a wide
range of aesthetic and political backgrounds.
Published both by small local firms and by multinational presses at home and abroad, the fiction
appears not only in English but also in indigenous
languages, especially Kiswahili and Amharic.
Even the English-language fiction often assumes
an audience conversant with local languages, with
characters and narrators implicitly speaking in a
particular local language that has been
translated into English.
White writing by settlers and explorers dominated the first third of the century and reached its
height in the 1950s. Male settler writers specialized in pseudo-scientific memoirs that tended to
justify whites occupation of Africa. Authors such
as Charles Wilson, J. F. Lipscomb, William
Baldwin, Ian Henderson, and Frank Kitson
sought to show white settlers contribution to the
development of East Africa and to dismiss
nationalist liberation efforts. American Robert
Ruarks Something of Value (1955) was one of
the most widely read accounts of the Mau Mau
war of independence (19526). Although sympathetic toward Kenyans, the novel not only dwells
on their supposedly backward practices but also
portrays the Mau Mau liberation movement as

misguided, a perspective that would be challenged
by later African writers like Kenyan Ng~
ug~ wa
Thiongo. Ruarks other novel Uhuru (1962) has
a similar theme but bemoans the loss of innocent
pastoral life to encroaching modernity as Kenya
enters the new era of uhuru (Swahili for
independence). Ernest Hemingways short stories based on his journeys to East Africa, especially
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
(1936) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936),
contributed to a romantic image of the region as a
site for adventure especially hunting big game
and flirting with innocent tribal girls. Hemingways fictional memoir True at First Light, published posthumously in 1999, offers a similarly
idealized image.
For their part, women settler writers exposed
the empires masculinist underpinnings but also
sometimes supported colonialism. Like Karen
Blixens famous memoir of Kenya, Out of Africa
(1933), the novels by settler women (such as Joy
Adamson and Elspeth Huxley from Kenya) would
be praised in Western venues for the reasons they
were found to be offensive in Africa. By contrast,
Kenyan Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who arrived as
a missionary in 1954, adroitly uses African culture
and landscape to present the plight of women
under colonialism and neocolonialism and to link
the HIV/AIDS scourge to the neocolonial dilapidation of African institutions. Her most acclaimed
novel is Coming to Birth (1986), about a rural girl
whose life seems to parallel Kenyas political developments. Acutely sensitive to African cultures,
Macgoye so consistently rejected the privileges

EAST AFRICAN FICTION
that went with being white in Kenya that critics

find it hard to classify her as a settler novelist. The
major weakness in her writing is that the white
woman is typically positioned as the savior of black
female victims.
Semiautobiographical and anthropological
treatises by indigenous intellectuals such as Jomo
Kenyattas Facing Mount Kenya (1938), Mugo
Gatherus A Child of Two Worlds (1964), and
Tom Mboyas Freedom and After (1963) were
echoed in postcolonial fiction, especially because
they valorized the local traditions that colonialism
denigrated, capturing the dilemmas caused by
African, Indian, and European interactions. They
sought to correct the colonialist writers, whom
they perceived as condescending and patronizing,
if not outright racist.
Kenyan Ng~
ug~ wa Thiongo and Somali
Nuruddin Farah are the most widely acclaimed
fiction writers from East Africa. Ng~
ug~ published
the first East African novel in English by a black
writer in 1964. Weep Not, Child portrayed from
an adolescent characters perspective the violence and anxieties of the fight for Kenyan independence in the 1950s. His The River Between
(1965) is a realistic portrayal of the conflict
between Africas precolonial traditions and
modernity, covering such themes as alienation,
controversies surrounding female circumcision
in central Kenya in the 1930s, and the centrality
of modern education in the fight for independence. Ng~
ug~s later novels graphically capture
his disillusionment with post-independence
Africa, but they differ in the solutions they offer.
Influenced by Frantz Fanons writings, A Grain of
Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977) present
Ng~
ug~s disappointment with constitutional independence that is not accompanied by
substantive improvement in material human
existence. His subsequent novels were written
in his native G~k~
uy~
u language. Tending toward
anti-realism and magic realism, they borrow
heavily from oral methods of narration to portray the injustices in modern Kenya, including
political corruption, gender violence, and exploitation. His G~k~
uy~
u novels have been translated as Devil on the Cross (1982), Matigari
(1988), and Wizard of the Crow (2007).
Nuruddin Farahs novels, which include three
trilogies, explore the corruption and abuse of
office by the authoritarian military regime of Siad
1053
Barre. Farah reveals parallels between the new

governments and their European colonialist predecessors, and is one of the African male writers
who displays the greatest sensitivity to gender
issues, building the plots of his novels around
strong women characters. His exploration of
gender issues, including the practice of female
circumcision, lacks Ng~
ug~s ambivalence; in
Sardines (1981), the characters discuss female
circumcision with rare candor. Farah is best
known for his sophisticated Maps (1986), a postmodern novel that expresses disillusionment with
Somali nationalism.
Tanzanian Canadian M. G. Vassanji is also
highly acclaimed. Vassanji focuses on the experiences of South Asians in Africa and North
America, exploring the interaction of Africans,
Indians, and European colonialists and the role of
memory in reconstructing the diasporic identity
of immigrant groups. His most well-known work
is his multigenerational debut novel, The Gunny
Sack (1989), which won the regional Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in 1990. Touting
itself on the cover as Africas answer to [Salman
Rushdies] Midnights Children, it examines
themes of identity, displacement, and race relations while trying to preserve and recreate longsilenced oral histories and mythologies. Vassanjis
metafictional The Book of Secrets (1994), which
won Canadas first Giller Prize for fiction, traces
the 75-year history of the people who possessed a
British colonial administrators diary. The
In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), another
Giller Prize-winner, examines the fight for independence in Kenya and the subsequent corruption in the postcolonial nation. Vassanjis work
attempts both to correct Europeans racist images
of Indians and to debunk stereotypes of Indians in
fiction by indigenous African writers.
The novel of post-independence political
disillusionment was accompanied by the urban
popular thriller. With little if any nostalgia for a
lost village life, works in this category were written
as crime and sex potboilers and portrayed the
problems of merging urban centers, including
slum life, prostitution, and rising crime rates.
Kenyan David G. Maillu was particularly prolific,
with his Comb Books publishing pocket-sized
thrillers in the 1970s. Exploiting the coffee boom
and the rising middle class, these novellas were,
to the chagrin of critics, stylistically simplistic,
1054
EAST AFRICAN FICTION
melodramatic, and escapist in their presentation

of relationships. Meja Mwangi, Thomas Akare,
Charles Mangua, Mwangi Gicheru, and Mwangi
Ruheni also produced commercially successful
thrillers about the city. Of the urban writers, Meja
Mwangi is most accomplished in his use of urban
settings to tackle themes of poverty and alienation, especially in Kill Me Quick (1973) and The
Cockroach Dance (1979). His later fiction offers
frequent glimpses into rural life as it portrays the
spread of HIV and interethnic tensions, especially
in The Last Plague (2000) and Big Chiefs (2007)
respectively.
Kenyas John Kiriamiti is the regions leading
crime fiction writer, infusing autobiographical
narrations about his life as a criminal with
humorous descriptions of the city. Monica
Genyas Links of a Chain (1996) seems to be a
feminist response to Kiriamitis popular My Life
in Crime (1984), avoiding the stereotypes of
women that define Kiriamitis fiction. Henry ole
Kulets popular but slow-paced novels portray the
clash between Maasai culture and modernity, at
times unabashedly siding with Western culture
even to the extent of tacitly endorsing the fiction
of the nineteenth-century British writer Henry
Rider Haggard, after whom he names his principal character, Henry, in his semiautobiographical
debut novel Is It Possible? (1971).
If in the 1970s the East African novel about
colonialism and the independence struggle
tended to idealize women by presenting the
African nation as an ahistorical woman to be
regained from rapacious colonialists, the urban
novel by male writers often presented the modern
African woman as a morally degenerate prostitute. Gender became a major theme in the 1980s
with women writers such as Rebeka Njau (Kenya),
Grace Ogot (Kenya), Margaret Ogola (Kenya),
Mary Okurut (Uganda), Goretti Kyemuhendo
(Uganda), Asenath Bole Odaga (Kenya), and
Eliesh Lema (Tanzania) focusing on gender discrimination in post-independence Africa. Rather
than condemn the prostitute as a symbol of urban
decrepitude, womens novels such as Okuruts,
Njaus, and F. M. Genga-Idowus attempted to
recuperate her as a figure of possible feminist
liberation. Their fiction is largely focalized
through modern female characters and focuses
on womens efforts to reclaim their humanity in a
male-dominated society, treating such themes as
predatory romantic relationships and struggles

against poverty and HIV/AIDS. Except for Rebeka
Njau, who explores same-sex relations in Ripples
in the Pool (1975), the feminism of East African
fiction is largely heterosexual, with the most
influential woman writer being Grace Ogot. Ogot
was one of the first black African women to
publish a novel, Promised Land (1966), a tragic
story about the problems modernization has
brought in its wake among the Luo people of the
Lake Victoria region, who are forced to migrate to
Tanzania in search of farmland.
The novel in East Africa is largely realist, but
postmodern narration based on phantasmagorical oral literature and employing magic realism
has emerged since the mid-1980s to help the
writers avoid censorship and to address traumatic
topics such as state-sponsored violence. Military
and civilian dictatorships, grand corruption, and
the civil wars that have plagued some countries
since the 1970s continue to preoccupy writers
such as Farah, Ng~
ug~, and Moses Isegawa. In
Abyssinian Chronicles (2000) and Snakepit
(2005), Isegawa captures in stark prose the horrors of Idi Amins dictatorship in Uganda. Emergent themes by both male and female writers
include the African diaspora and other races
experience in Africa. Writers with remarkable
novels in this category include Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania/UK). Genocide and
ethnic violence have inspired a number of works,
including the Ugandan Goretti Kyomuhendos
Secrets No More (1999), about the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s.
The short story emerges from folk oral literary
tradition, with writers such as Ogot, especially in
her collection Land without Thunder (1968), and
Ng~
ug~, in Secret Lives (1975), tapping from oral
traditions to tackle modern themes. Urban
problems and disillusionment with the postindependence situation are major themes in the
stories of Leonard Kibera and his brother Sam
Kahiga in the acclaimed collection Potent Ash
(1968). In the collection Case of the Socialist
Witchdoctor and Other Stories (1993), Ethiopian
Hama Tuma exploits the rich African folkloric
traditions to satirize dictatorships. Some stories
in Vassanjis When She Was Queen (2005)
borrow from Indian mythology to address gender
concerns among immigrant Indians in East
Africa.
EAST ASIAN FICTION
The short story has remained an important

genre through which upcoming writers reach out
to global audiences. Kenyans Binyavanga
Wainaina and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor won the
Caine Prize for short fiction (in 2002 and 2003
respectively) for stories that treated themes of
identity, migration, and civil war. Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko won the award in 2007 with
Jambula Tree, a story about teenage love and
community. Other women writers such as Doreen
Baingana (Uganda) and Muthoni Garland
(Kenya) have been shortlisted for the award, considered one of the most prestigious in Africa.
Detective/Crime Fiction (WF); Historical
(WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African
Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF);
Southern African Fiction (WF); West African
Fiction (WF)
Gikandi, S. (ed.) (2003). Encyclopedia of African
Literature. New York: Routledge.
Gikandi, S., & Mwangi, E. (2007). The Columbia Guide
to East African Literature in English Since 1945. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Griffiths, G. (2000). African Literatures in English East
and West. Harlow: Longman.
Irele, A. (2004). The Cambridge History of African and
Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Killam, G. D. (ed.) (1984). The Writing of East and
Central Africa. London: Heinemann.
Kurtz, J. R. (1998). Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The
Postcolonial Kenyan Novel. Trenton, NJ: Africa
World Press.
Lihamba, A., Moyo,F. L.,Mulokozi, M.M., Shitemi, N. L.,
& Yahya-Othman, S. (eds.) (2007). Women Writing
Africa: The Eastern Region. New York: Feminist Press.
Owomoyela, O. (ed.) (1993). A History of TwentiethCentury African Literatures. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
East Asian Fiction

PING-HUI LIAO
In recent decades, many East Asian novelists have

made their names in the English-speaking world.
1055
Works by Teresa Cha, Ha Jin, Kazuo Ishiguro,

Timothy Mo, and others are often considered
representative of the previously neglected voices
of Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
Ha Jin, for example, has written extensively on life
within and outside China. His Waiting (1999) and
War Trash (2004) both won the PEN/Faulkner
Award; The Writer as Migrant (2008) offers
revealing accounts of his literary career. Anchee
Min, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution and,
like Ha Jin, an emigrant to the US, has produced
several narratives (Red Azalea, 1994; Becoming
Madame Mao, 2001; and Empress Orchid, 2004)
that raised controversy for their portrayal of
lesbian relationships or their sympathetic treatment of the lives of Jiang Ching and Empress Cixi.
As an expatriate, Ha Jin is more frequently considered Asian American than East Asian, and it is
unfortunate that twentieth-century Asian literature most often catches the attention of Western
readers when written in English, since major
authors in Asian countries tend to write in their
native languages. Indeed, when Eileen Zhang, one
of Chinas leading fiction writers, tried in the
1970s to rewrite her novels in English, they met
with a lukewarm reception. To fully appreciate
fictions from East Asia as part of the emergent
world literature, English-language readers should
read works in translation.
East Asian novelists write in response to the
regions multiple layers of colonialism and modernity as introduced by the Dutch (or Portuguese),
reinforced by the British (or Japanese), and then
incorporatedintothepost-ColdWarpoliticaleconomy by the American empire; these concerns are
complicated by ethnic strife and new modes of
cultural reproduction. As they draw on regional
and local cultural dynamics, East Asian writers also
appropriate techniques and motifs from other expressivetraditions,includingminorityorgayrights,
postcolonial critique, magic realism, Christian humanism, science fiction, travel narrative, and ecofeminism.
Trauma, especially as a result of rapid changes in
the urban landscape and lifestyles, dominates
many literary imaginations. Anyi Wang, who,
along with Yan Mo, Tong Su, and Hua Yu, receives
acclaims internationally, reflects on the postsocialist desire to narrate the dangers and rewards of
living in a city like Shanghai. While Wang is
lyrically nostalgic about the city, particularly in
1056
EAST ASIAN FICTION
her masterpiece Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996),

Pingwa Jias novel of the postrevolutionary urban
literatis dissipated life and loss, Abandoned Capital (1993), renders the city and its future more
gloomily. New social imaginaries perpetuated by
bio-engineering, Internet technology, transnational capital networks, global diaspora, and climate change provide conceptual frameworks and
themes for some contemporary writers; others
explore sexual fantasies and gender identity in
times of difficult transition. Tienwen Zhus Notes
of a Desolate Man (2000) is most remarkable in this
respect.
On the monstrosity of the Revolution and its
use and abuse of history, Chinese novelists living
in China develop rather different interpretive
accounts than do those in exile. The Nobel laureate Xingjian Kao notably reveals the hardship and
absurdity of human conditions under the horrendous purge initiated by Chairman Mao. In Confessions (2007), Zhengguo Kang recounts the
miseries of an innocent man in Communist
China. Younger Chinese writers such as Bai Lin
seem to have moved beyond the trauma and
memory stage; they give sensuous, sensible,
and cynical accounts of the everyday life, teasing
out the warring forces of socialism and capitalism,
hope and fear, decadence and struggle as they
unfold in a not quite post-Communist state that
has nevertheless undergone rapid change and
reform. The Chinese reading public may have
been demoralized by the expanding market economy, but it has also been energized by new forms
and means of expression such as the Internet chat
room, blogging, and text messaging.
Contemporary Taiwan literature is more
diverse, with inputs from Japanese modernism,
American postmodernism, and Chinese nationalism. Writers such as Zhenho Wang, Chunming
Huang, Qao Li, and Shitao Ye are often labeled
as nativists; however, their fictions cut
across ethnicity and history. Nativist literature
raises consciousness of reclaiming local place
identities in reaction to American and Japanese
neocolonialism and helps push Taiwan toward
democratization. First- and second-generation
mainlander Chinese writers are more concerned
with the predicament of national culture: novelists such as Dacun Zhang, Tienxin Zhu, and
Yijun Luo elaborate allegorically on relations
between family and state, constantly drawing on
individual and collective memory. Sexual fictions

by Ang Li, especially Butchers Wife (1995), challenge patriarchal structures of interests, power,
and value. Gay and lesbian writers like Dawei Ji
and Miaojin Qiu subvert heteronormative
traditions.
Japan has produced two Nobel Prize laureates
Yasunari Kawabata (1968) and Kenzaburo Oe
(1994) and has many other worthy candidates.
Works by such prominent and prolific writers as
Natsume Soseki, Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke
Akutagawa, Eiji Yoshikawa, Osamu Dazai, Ango
Sakaguchi, Nubuo Kojima, Kobo Abe, Yukio
Mishima, Kenji Nakagami, and in particular
Haruki Murakami, have been translated into
various languages. These authors write on a rich
diversity of subjects, often noted for nuanced
detail, penetrating insight, nightmarish vision,
gloomy wit, brilliant fantasy, and even obsession
with suicide, as in the case of Mishima. Several of
their works have been adapted for film or animation. Ryu Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto have
won international acclaim for their piercing portraits of disaffected or exhausted Japanese youth,
highlighting their promiscuity, drug use, melancholia, and frustration.
From the beginning, Korean writers have been
preoccupied with national predicaments, people,
and class issues. With the South and North divided
since the Korean War (19503), the national
trauma has produced a lasting impact on the
literary imagination, recoded as agony and discontent in fiction by Won-il Kim (Sunset, 1978)
and Sang-guk Chon (Abes Family, 1980). Farmers, laborers, and people living in the outskirts of
the city are main topics for Korean writers such as
ChSong-jun Yi (Your Heaven, 1976; Cruel City,
1978) and Jong-hui O (Garden of Childhood,
1981). The late Kyung-ni Park, who died at 81 in
2008 and was awarded South Koreas top medal
posthumously, is a major figure. Her epic, 16volume novel The Land (Toji, 196984) is set
against the turbulent history of Korea from the
late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, with
hundreds of characters from across the Korean
peninsula. With its vivid style and heroes struggling to rescue Korean history and dignity from
foreign imperial forces, The Land helped make
Park the most respected writer of her time, with
dozens of novels and three poetry collections.
Other Korean writers are celebrated for portraying
EKWENSI, CYPRIAN
ordinary lives; of these, Young-ung Bang, Sokyong Hwang, Munyol Yi, Heaon-jong Yu, Humyong Yun are the most prolific and influential.
SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); The City
in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF);
Southeast Asian Fiction (WF)
Hong, Z. (2009). A History of Contemporary Chinese
Literature. Leiden: Brill.
Kojin, K. (1993). Origins of Modern Japanese Literature.
Lee, P. H. (2004). A History of Korean Literature.
Wang, D. D., & Rojas, C. (eds.) (2006). Writing Taiwan:
A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Ekwensi, Cyprian
JOSHUA D. PRESCOTT
The Nigerian novelist and short story writer

Cyprian Ekwensi, often called the Nigerian
Defoe, was celebrated for his versatility as a
writer, particularly for his ability to portray contemporary urban life in Nigeria in straightforward
and engaging prose. Ekwensis contribution to
early Nigerian literature is surpassed only by that
of his two contemporaries, Wole Soyinka and
Chinua Achebe.
Born on September 26, 1921 in Minna, northern Nigeria, Ekwensi completed his secondary
education at the Government College in Ibadan,
and then chose to study at Ibadans School of
Forestry, taking a job as a forestry officer in 1945.
While observing the natural surroundings within
which he worked, Ekwensi decided to try writing,
and his earliest stories all take as their setting lush,
natural forestlands. Two years later, he accepted a
teaching position at Igbobi College; he began
broadcasting a short story each week on Radio
Nigeria and his program quickly became popular,
garnering him widespread recognition under the
programs title, Your Favorite Story Teller. He
then made a career change in 1949, studying at
Londons Chelsea School of Pharmacy on a scholarship. After returning to Nigeria, he worked as a
pharmacist, but soon returned to broadcasting,
1057
accepting a position as head of broadcasting

features for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. Ekwensi remained in Nigeria for the rest of
his life, working in broadcasting but also in public
service as Biafran chairman for external publicity
during the Biafran War and later for the East
Central State Library Board.
Ekwensis first collection, Ikolo the Wrestler and
Other Ibo Tales (1947), contains 24 strongly
didactic, thematically driven narratives. Based on
the Igbo story of Ikolo, a hunter and fighter who,
previously unbeaten by any creature or spirit, is
handily defeated by his own spirit, the collection
stresses the need to respect historically erected
boundaries human and animal, human and
spirit and the tension between oral history and
written word. Later story collections include The
Boa Suitor (1949), Rain Maker and Other Stories
(1965), Lokotown and Other Stories (1966), and
Restless City and Christmas Gold (1975).
It was his novel People of the City (1954),
however, published four years before Achebes
Things Fall Apart, that launched Ekwensi onto the
international literary scene. The story of a crime
reporter for a Lagos-based newspaper, the novel
details in picaresque form the realities of urban life
and the pitfalls of the attractive city center
materialism, bribery and corruption, sexual indulgence, and poor business relations. Jagua Nana
(1961b) takes as its setting the streets of Lagos and
focuses on the life of Jagua: as a 40-year-old
prostitute, self-conscious of her aging physical
appeal, Jagua finds comfort in Freddie, a teacher,
and works tirelessly to retain his affection. Ekwensi
once again explores the decadence of the modern
city, but the novels dualistic use of Standard
English and pidgin makes it more successful artistically. The novel remains his most popular and
his most controversial work, having been attacked
by church organizations and womens unions for
its sexually explicit content, as well as being
banned by educational institutions.
Burning Grass (1961a) was inspired by a Fulani
family with whom Ekwensi lived during his forestry days. Leaving the city for the rural plains, the
novel explores the life of Mai Sunsaye, a popular
village chief struck with sokugo, a disease that
constrains its victim to wander without purpose.
His family is forced to adjust to both the consequences of Sunsayes illness and the integration
of a slave girl, Fatimeh, into their family. With
1058
EMECHETA, BUCHI
Beautiful Feathers (1963), however, Ekwensi

returned to questions of political power and the
character of the city. Wilson Iyari, a pharmacist
with political ambitions, and whose children are
named after celebrated anti-colonial leaders,
struggles to reconcile his professional and political
responsibilities with those as a husband and father.
The novel thus explores the Igbo proverb from
which it borrows its title: a man unable to command respect in his home is like a bird beautiful
in appearance but ordinary in character. Critics
have noted that Beautiful Feathers demonstrates
considerable improvement in the quality of
Ekwensis writing, stressing his new-found ability
to balance plot with thematic exploration, and his
skill in effectively integrating narrative components into a single, complete structure. Survive the
Peace (1976) explores Ekwensis personal political
sympathies by detailing the story of James Odugo,
a radio journalist, as he attempts to make sense of
his life following the NigerianBiafran War.
Ekwensi also published a large body of childrens literature, using this medium to disseminate contemporary African writing and thought
to a younger audience. Frustrated by the continued use of British literature as primary educational texts, Ekwensis childrens writing focuses on
the Nigerian child in Nigerian society, acting as a
bridge between contemporary writing and the
world of folklore and folktales. Included among
his childrens books are The Drummer Boy
(1960a), Passport of Mallam Ilia (1960b), Trouble
in Form Six (1966c), and Juju Rock (1966a).
Ekwensi became a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters in 2006. He died in 2007.
SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Childrens
and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in
Fiction (WF); Soyinka, Wole (WF); West
African Fiction (WF)

Ekwensi, C. (1947). Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo
Tales. London: Thomas Nelson.
Ekwensi, C. (1949). The Boa Suitor. London: Thomas
Nelson.
Ekwensi, C. (1954). People of the City. London: Andrew
Dakers.
Ekwensi, C. (1960a). The Drummer Boy. Nairobi: East
African Educational.
Ekwensi, C. (1960b). Passport of Mallam Ilia.

Ekwensi, C. (1961a). Burning Grass. London:
Heinemann.
Ekwensi, C. (1961b). Jagua Nana. London:
Hutchinson.
Ekwensi, C. (1963). Beautiful Feathers. London:
Hutchinson.
Ekwensi, C. (1965). Rain Maker and Other Stories.
Lagos: African Universities Press.
Ekwensi, C. (1966a). Juju Rock. Lagos: African
Universities Press.
Ekwensi, C. (1966b). Lokotown and Other Stories.
London: Heinemann Educational.
Ekwensi, C. (1966c). Trouble in Form Six. Cambridge:
Ekwensi, C. (1975). Restless City and Christmas Gold.
London: Heinemann.
Ekwensi, C. (1976). Survive the Peace. London:
Heinemann.
Emenyonu, E. (1974). Cyprian Ekwensi. London: Evans
Bros.
Okonkwo, J. (1976). Ekwensi and Modern Nigerian
Culture. Ariel, 7(2), 3245.
Emecheta, Buchi
SUSAN ALICE FISCHER
Nigerian British author Buchi Emechetas large

body of work centers on themes related to survival
in the face of abusive power. Examining colonial
indoctrination into the ideology of British
superiority, her novels condemn the legacy of
colonialism in Nigeria and the racism Africans
encounter in Britain. Just as intently, she
questions traditional African practices that devalue and subjugate women.
Emecheta was born Florence Onye Buchi
Emecheta in the village of Yaba, near Lagos,
Nigeria on July 21, 1944 of Igbo parentage. In
her autobiography, Head above Water (1986a),
she describes her mother as a slave girl who freed
herself only to be shackled again by her culture
and Christianity. Her father died when she was
young. Emecheta won a scholarship to the Methodist Girls High School in Lagos, married, had
two children, and began to work. In 1962, she
followed her student husband to Britain, where
they found cramped and run-down lodgings in
north London at a time when many would not
rent to black people. She worked in a library, had
more children and dreamed of becoming a writer.
EMECHETA, BUCHI
Her fierce determination to achieve that end is all

the more striking for the obstacles placed in her
path. Indeed, as Emecheta says in her autobiography, her survival is something of a miracle.
Not only did she deal with the racism that rendered her a second-class citizen, but her husband began to take his own failures out on her,
burning the manuscript of the first novel she
wrote, which she resurrected later as The Bride
Price (1976). Almost 22 and pregnant with her
fifth child, Emecheta left the marriage, which had
become abusive, and found council housing in
north London. As a single parent, she received an
honors degree in sociology from the University of
London and worked as a teacher and a youth
worker. Her first novel was serialized in the New
Statesman before being published as In the Ditch
(1972). In 1980, she returned to Nigeria for the
first time in close to two decades. Also in the early
1980s, she and her son started a small Londonbased publishing company called Ogwugwu Afor,
through which she has published some of her own
work. As Emecheta told New York Times reporter
C. Gerald Fraser in 1990, the impetus came from
finding that her publisher had cut an 86-page
chapter in her novel Destination Biafra (1982a),
on the 196770 Nigerian Civil War, without
discussing it with her. The chapter was largely
based on undercover research she conducted
while working as a cleaner at Sandhurst, Britains
Royal Military Academy. The first book her press
published was Double Yoke (1982b), which did
particularly well, a fact she attributes to her
childrens distribution efforts throughout the
country as well as to favorable reviews internationally (Fraser 1990).
Emechetas prolific writing career emerges
from a relentless will for survival of her chi, or
spirit, as she describes being silenced at various
levels: as an undervalued girl in colonial Nigeria
and as a young woman abused by her husband
and excluded by racism in Britain. Emechetas
body of work parallels not only her struggle to
survive against such odds, but also her evolving
relation to Nigeria and Britain, the two countries
in which she has spent her life. While her early
novels are set in Britain, she then turns to the
African context, focusing on the position of
women in traditional society as well as on the
destructive legacy of colonialism. Her most recent
novels return to the Western context as she
1059
redefines African diasporic identity. Emecheta

has also written essays, childrens fiction, and
television plays.
Chapters of her struggle to survive the move to
Britain, her marriage and single parenthood on a
council estate, as well as her nascent writing
career are chronicled in Head above Water
(1986) and figure prominently in her first novels,
Second-Class Citizen (1974) and its sequel
(though published earlier), In the Ditch. Second-Class Citizen relates Adahs journey from
childhood in Nigeria through her decision to
follow her husband to Britain, where the snowcovered docks she views from the ships deck
symbolize the frigid reception she will receive.
Adahs experience in her marriage parallels her
authors early years in London, and the novel
ends with Adahs decision to leave the marriage.
In the Ditch finds Adah living in Pussy-Cat
Mansions, a dilapidated council estate that houses problem families. Despite appalling conditions, Adah finds a sense of community with
other women on the estate, something she will
miss when they are all separately rehoused, even
as she looks forward to a better life.
Emechetas African novels are diverse in scope,
but generally focus on the themes of womens
inequality and on colonialism and its aftermath,
including the situation in postcolonial Nigeria,
with its government corruption and failing infrastructure. The Bride Price and The Slave Girl
(1977) highlight the injustices that come from
calculating young womens worth in monetary
terms. The ironically titled The Joys of Motherhood
(1979a) relates the struggles of an Ibo woman,
Nnu Ego, mother of nine, and explores family
relations and customs in colonial Nigeria. Nnu
Ego is so successful at overcoming hardship and
putting her children through school that they
ultimately leave for the city or for universities
abroad and forget their mother. The novel foreshadows the changes in Nigeria after British rule,
with Nnu Egos children representing the rising
elite and Nnu Ego wishing she had cultivated
friendships with other women rather than focusing solely on her children. With The Moonlight
Bride (1980a), Emecheta provides young adult
readers with an understanding of traditional
African culture, while Destination Biafra focuses
on the Nigerian Civil War. Double Yoke draws in
part on Emechetas experience of teaching at the
1060
EMECHETA, BUCHI
University of Calabar in 19801. In the framing

narrative, a female lecturer of creative writing, a
been-to (i.e., someone who has been to Britain)
asks her students to write a story, and the main
story is narrated by one of her Nigerian students.
In The Rape of Shavi (1983), Emecheta returns to
war, this time an imagined nuclear blast threatening Europe which leads a group of Europeans to
flee to Africa, where they land in a village untouched by colonialism. The title refers both to
the literal rape of an African woman by a Westerner and to the Wests depredation of Africa.
Emechetas most recent novels return to Britain,
and while continuing to explore the issues that
have dominated her work thus far the legacy of
colonialism and womens inequality in traditional
African culture here she redefines what it means
to be African or black in Britain. With Gwendolen
(1989; published as The Family in the United
States), Emecheta adds a Caribbean dimension to
her work. Gwendolen leaves Jamaica to join her
parents in Britain, where her father preys upon her
sexually. Critics such as Omar Sougou have compared the novel to Joan Rileys The Unbelonging
(1985), also about an incestuous relationship, and
have noted that in distancing the incest plot from
Africa, Emecheta highlights the legacy of devastation wreaked upon family life by the Middle
Passage, slavery, and the diaspora. In Kehinde
(1994), the eponymous protagonist reconciles the
contrary pulls of Nigeria and Britain, particularly
as regards women. Like many other writers of
migration, Emecheta draws upon the trope of the
twin to symbolize this duality. Kehindes feeling
that she must live for her dead twin, Taiwo, partly
influences her decision to leave London for Nigeria. Finding that her husband has taken another
wife, Kehinde rejects traditional expectations in
favor of her own agency. Returning to London, she
feels she is finally home and begins a relationship
with a Jamaican man, suggesting that, though still
Nigerian, she has cast her lot with other black
Britons. In The New Tribe, the black male protagonist, Chester, who has been raised by white
parents in England, journeys to Africa in search
of belonging, only to realize that his vision of
Nigeria is imaginary. Ultimately, he will agree with
his girlfriend that We dont belong in Africa,
were British. Black British maybe, but this is our
home now (2000, 113). He belongs to a new
tribe of black Britons who are part African, part
Western: symbolically, Chesters father turns out

to be African American, and thus marked by the
history of Africans in the West, and Chester ultimately recognizes that the pervasive white English
culture in which he lives has shaped him as well.
While Emecheta (1988) rejects the label of
feminist (because of its Western derivation) in
favor of Afrocentric womanism, her work nonetheless condemns patriarchy as much as it does
racism, classism, and colonialism. Sougou suggests that Emechetas experience of writing from
both an African and a Western perspective means
that her narrative is double-voiced, both castigating and condoning, affiliating itself with yet
dissociating itself from the dominant ideology of
patriarchy and the colonial culture (5960).
Emechetas vast body of work has been well
received, and she is considered one of Africas
major female authors, though she has been criticized for bringing a Westernized sensibility to
African subjects. Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi
suggests she is less popular in Nigeria than in the
West. Her work has been translated widely, and
some of her work has appeared on the BBC. She
has held numerous visiting positions at universities in the United States. Her awards include the
New Statesman Jock Campbell Award for The
Slave Girl and an honorary doctorate from Fairleigh Dickinson University (1992).
The City in Fiction (WF); Feminism and
Fiction (WF); London in Fiction (BIF);
Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora
(BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);
Riley, Joan (WF); West African Fiction (WF)
Chukukere, G. C. (1995). Gender Voices and Choices:
Redefining Women in Contemporary African Fiction.
Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension.
Emecheta, B. (1972). In the Ditch. London: Barrie and
Jenkins.
Allison and Busby.
Emecheta, B. (1976). The Bride Price: A Novel. London:
Allison and Busby.
Emecheta, B. (1977). The Slave Girl. London: Allison
and Busby.
ENGLISH STUDIES, THE ACADEMY, AND FICTION
Emecheta, B. (1979a). The Joys of Motherhood. London:

Allison and Busby.
Emecheta, B. (1979b). Titch the Cat. London: Allison
and Busby.
Emecheta, B. (1980a). The Moonlight Bride. Oxford:
Oxford University Press; Ibadan: Ibadan University
Press.
Emecheta, B. (1980b). Nowhere to Play. London: Allison
and Busby.
Emecheta, B. (1980c). The Wrestling Match. Oxford:
Oxford University Press; Ibadan: Ibadan University
Press.
Emecheta, B. (1982a). Destination Biafra. London:
Allison and Busby.
Emecheta, B. (1982b). Double Yoke. London: Ogwugwu
Afor.
Emecheta, B. (1982c). Naira Power. London: Macmillan.
Emecheta, B. (1983). The Rape of Shavi. London:
Ogwugwu Afor.
Emecheta, B. (1986a). Head above Water: An
Autobiography. London: Ogwugwu Afor.
Emecheta, B. (1986b). A Kind of Marriage. London:
Macmillan.
Emecheta, B. (1988). Feminism with a Small F! In
K. H. Petersen (ed.), Criticism and Ideology: Second
African Writers Conference, Stockholm, 1986,
Seminar Proceedings no. 20. Uppsala: Scandinavian
Institute of African Studies, pp. 17385.
Emecheta, B. (1989). Gwendolen. London: Collins.
Emecheta, B. (1994). Kehinde. London: Heinemann.
Emecheta, B. (2000). The New Tribe. Oxford:
Heinemann Educational.
Fishburn, K. (1995). Reading Buchi Emecheta: CrossCultural Conversations. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Fraser, C. G. (1990). Writer, Her Dream Fulfilled, Seeks
to Link Two Worlds. New York Times (June 2). At
www.nytimes.com, accessed Aug. 31, 2008.
Kohrs-Amissah, E. (2002). Aspects of Feminism and
Gender in the Novels of Three West African Women
Writers (Aidoo, Emecheta, Darko). Heidelberg: Books
on African Studies/Jerry Bedu-Addo.
Murray, M., & Emecheta, B. (1981). Our Own Freedom.
London: Sheba Feminist Press.
Ogunyemi, C. O. (1996). Africa Wo/man Palava: The
Nigerian Novel by Women. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Osa, O. (1995). African Childrens and Youth Literature.
New York: Twayne.
Pichler, S. (2001). Buchi Emechetas London Novels:
An Intercultural Approach. Trier, Germany: WVT,
Wissenschaftlicher.
Sougou, O. (2002). Writing across Cultures: Gender
Politics and Difference in the Fiction of Buchi
Emecheta. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Umeh, M. (ed.) (1996). Emerging Perspectives on Buchi
Emecheta. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
1061
Uraizee, J. (2000). This is No Place for a Woman: Nadine

Gordimer, Buchi Emecheta, Nayantara Saghal, and
the Politics of Gender. Trenton, NJ: Africa World
Press.
English Studies, the

Academy, and Fiction
ARCHANA RAMPURE
English Studies is the broad disciplinary grouping

that encompasses all literary and cultural production in the English language all forms of literature, certainly, but also literary theory and often
even non-literary forms of cultural production
such as film and television. The discipline is
staffed by members of the professoriate who make
up the Academy, a self-regulating group which
also includes noted writers, literary publishers,
and other literary opinion makers such as
reviewers. While there is nothing official about
it (unlike LAcademie francaise, responsible for
ruling on the French language), the uncompromising singularity of the term Academy
acknowledges its power in adjudicating the canon. The canon of texts that comprise the objects of
study in English Studies what is most often read
and taught and studied and written about is
(more or less) selected by the Academy. The
Academy does evolve, if slowly: people retire,
once junior graduate students become faculty
members, and the institutional interests of
departments of English Studies shift (often, at
the behest of academic administrators). Over the
twentieth century, the English canon has changed
dramatically in an attempt to take into account
questions of politics as well as aesthetics. In the
context of World Literature and its subfield
World Fiction, it could be said that the main
project of the introduction of this subject into the
bastion of English Studies has been to remake the
discipline in the light of critical theory especially
of postcolonialism. Where postcolonial theory
provides a framework for what Robert Young
calls a more engaged politics with objectives of
social justice and equality . . . inspired by memories of resistance, World Literature often
provides the literary (and cultural) texts for this
study (166). As grand as postcolonialisms
purpose is and infinite as this literature appears,
1062
there are some limiting parameters. Although

fiction is the most widely read and studied postcolonial genre, World Fiction written in English is
nonetheless an altogether smaller sampling than
all World Literature, which at its broadest
includes other languages and genres. Fiction identified as British, Irish, or American (and thus
more likely to be part of the traditional canon)
may also be exempt because the word World
when used to delimit English-language literature
or fiction connotes texts that do not originate in
the United Kingdom or the United States. In
general, then, and not excluding many exceptions, since the origin of writing is often the
subject of debate, English-language fiction produced in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean (mostly
but not exclusively in nations once colonized by
Britain) and in the former settler colonies of
Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand
may be termed World Fiction in English.
The literary production of settler colonies has
always been the subject of much debate is it
legitimately part of World Literature or should it
be isolated in distinct national categories? Within
Canada, for instance, national(ist) literatures are
taught as distinctive courses, so departments of
English offer classes on topics such as Early
Canadian Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Canadian
Poetry, or Contemporary Canadian Fiction. The
question then becomes whether such writing is
also to be included in classes in World Literature
or Postcolonial Fiction or, indeed, in genre
courses. Further, what of courses taught in India
or Australia or Britain? Where should departments of English Studies in these nations where
classes on Canadian Literature are rare locate
Canadian writing and the writing of other settler
colonies? How should Canadian departments of
English teach Australian literature?
The teaching of national literatures is not
confined only to settler colonies, of course. Historically, English Studies has been an educational project tied to both the imperial project and
the large-scale propagation of imperial and national symbolic capital within the metropole.
Teaching those classes of people who were not
born or equipped to read the classics in their
original languages to read and appreciate good
or moral literature written in the English
language was the goal of English Studies once
it was institutionalized within England; outside
Britain, what began as a project of re-education

aimed at the natives was transformed during
the anti-colonial and postcolonial periods into a
desire to inculcate in their citizens a national
pride. So the historical canon of English literature (the so-called dead-white-male texts) came
to be supplemented and supplanted over the
twentieth century by new writing from the margins, which, together with rediscovered older
narratives, form the basis of many new national
literatures.
English Studies as an academic discipline
developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; literature in English has been a respectable
university subject for barely a century. Andrew
Delbanco notes that the first chair in English at
Harvard was appointed in 1876 and that the
English honors degree was established at Oxford
only in 1894. But Gauri Viswanathan demonstrates that nearly 100 years before English literature was studied at Oxford, it was prescribed as
the ideal medicine for the natives of India. The
academic discipline of English has been complicit
with imperialism from its birth. Indeed, until the
radical changes of the 1950s onward, English
remained a field with a canon designed to teach
first natives, and then British women and the
middle and working classes, how to remake themselves in the mold of the (masculine) British
ruling class.
Changes to the canon are most noticeable in the
immediate aftermath of World War II. Politically,
this era marked the decline in British (and European) colonial power: independence struggles in
colonies in Africa and Asia came to fruition
between the 1940s and 1960s, and new nation
states were born. Culturally, this is the period
when a large numbers of new writers emerged.
These women and men wrote in English and are
often seen by the Academy as representing their
emerging nation states. Writers such as Chinua
Achebe (Nigeria), Anita Desai (India), Nadine
Gordimer (South Africa), and V. S. Naipaul
(Trinidad) all began to carve out their reputations
as purveyors of a new and different kind of fiction
in the 1950s and 1960s. But the alternative history
of writing in English goes much further back than
the twentieth century. As much as English was the
language of British imperialism, and even as
much literature in English continued to justify
imperialism and colonialism, literary and cultural
production in English has also long been a site for

resistance. In 1789, for instance, a former slave
published a fictionalized autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,
in London. The book was an important fillip to
the anti-slavery movement: more importantly, it
is a celebration of resistance in print. A direct line
may be traced from Equianos narrative to more
recent works such as Chinua Achebes Things Fall
Apart (1958) and Arundhati Roys The God of
Small Things (1997).
The material history of publication underlies
the institutionalization of World Fiction. Equiano was exceptional for writing and publishing in
the 1700s; Achebes writings began to appear in
the mid twentieth century, when a new liberalism
in the metropolitan publishing industry made it
possible for writers from newly decolonizing
spaces to find publishers in the West. These
publishers then ensured that their books were
distributed and reviewed in order to maximize
their own investments. Roys novel is very much
the cultural product of a time when literary
production in English is a global phenomenon;
indeed, the establishment of India Ink as a publishing house in India that specializes in unconventional fiction may be traced to her book. The
material-historical process of publication is a
significant narrative of the finding of voice, and
it is through this that the Academy began to
acquaint itself with fiction from outside the
Western canon. Examples of publishings intervention in canon formation include Heinemanns
African Writers Series and Caribbean Writers
Series (established in 1962 and 1970 respectively);
literary publishers such as Andre Deutsch and
Peter Owen also play a part in the process by
which World Fiction becomes a staple of the
Academy (see Low 2002).
Like all histories, though, the imperial teleology
of English Studies till the 1950s is not completely
without contradictions. A. L. McLeod writes that
one crucial event in the development of Commonwealth Literature is the awarding of the
Nobel Prize in Literature to the Indian poet
Rabindranath Tagore in 1913. He suggests that
Tagore had demonstrated, in effect, that there
was a new literature in English, one independent
of British and American (2). McLeod summarizes the transformations this literature goes
through in the first half of the twentieth century:
1063
for a time this new literature was referred to

as Colonial literature; then . . . as Dominion
literature, before becoming Commonwealth
Literature in the 1950s (2).
Commonwealth a problematic term given
the imperial history of English Studies is derived
from the loose grouping of Britains former colonies. The largest subdisciplinary grouping within
English Studies that is devoted to the study of
World Fiction is ACLALS the Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies.
ACLALS has charter groups some nationally
organized, some regionally that again echo this
terminology: in Canada, CACLALS stands for the
Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, while Europe has
EACLALS and the East African organization is
known as EAACLALS. ACLALS began at a conference organized at the University of Leeds in
1964 (with the hangover of Empire still very real).
More interestingly, ACLALS officially accredited
to the Commonwealth in 2005 (ACLALS website). Fifty-three countries, from Antigua to New
Zealand to Zambia all with some colonial
connection to Britain are part of the Commonwealth, which begs the question of writers whose
home nations are not part of this collective.
Where does a work such as Saudi Arabian author
Rajaa Alsaneas Girls of Riyadh (2007) fit, for
instance, given that her homeland is not a part
of the Commonwealth, though it does have a
colonial past? But the alternative term
Postcolonial raises other questions: what of
English-language writing from never-colonized
nations, such as Thailand or Ethiopia?
The fights over nomenclature go to the heart of
the relationship between English Studies and
World Literature. World Literature written in
English is still known by other names within the
field: with the caveats above, Commonwealth
Literature and Postcolonial Literature are still its
two most common variants, with the latter ascendant. (Indeed, prominent journals in this field
include the Journal of Commonwealth Literature
and Postcolonial Text; World Literature Written
in English recently changed its name to the
Journal of Postcolonial Writing.) While the term
Commonwealth has drawn the most disapprobation, many of the criticisms aimed at it might be
applied to the term Postcolonial with equal
justice. Perhaps the most famous of these attacks
1064
is Salman Rushdies 1983 article Commonwealth

Literature Does Not Exist. Rushdie critiques the
notion of the Commonwealth as a link between
widely diverse writers; he defines it thus: a body
of writing created, I think, in the English language,
by persons who are not themselves white Britons,
or Irish, or citizens of the United States of
America. I dont know whether black Americans
are citizens of this bizarre Commonwealth or
not. Probably not (63).
Rushdie puts his finger on the question of the
diasporic writer here: where to locate writers who
reside in or are citizens of the West but who write
about or with the style of where they were born or
where their parents were born. Should Canadian
departments of English teach Rohinton Mistrys
novel Such a Long Journey (1991) as Canadian or
Indian or World fiction? Is Monica Alis Brick
Lane (2003) contemporary British fiction or
Commonwealth fiction or Postcolonial fiction?
It is set in the postcolonial Bengali community
living in the East End of London as a result of
British colonialism in South Asia, but what kind
of a writer does it make her? British? Commonwealth? Postcolonial? What then to make of her
second novel Alentejo Blue, set in rural Europe
and not about the colonial history of England or
the postcolonial history of Bangladesh but the
politics of the twentieth century in Portugal? Does
it come down to Alis Britishness (her citizenship), or birthplace (Dhaka), or parentage
(Bangladeshi father and English mother)? This
kind of search for a writers origin implied in
both the Commonwealth and the Postcolonial
labels are what Rushdie refers to as the folly of
trying to contain writers inside passports (67).
This question of authentically locating writers
somewhere anywhere? has become such a rite
of passage that writers such as the Australian
Mudrooroo deliberately obfuscate their origins
and mock the attempts of academics to pin them
down and categorize them and their work.
The other fear that Rushdie expresses is one
that is, or should be, acknowledged within the
Academy: for him, the use of the term Commonwealth Literature permits academic institutions,
publishers, critics and even readers to dump a
large segment of English literature into a box and
then more or less ignore it. At best, what is called
Commonwealth literature is positioned below
English literature proper or, . . . it places
Eng. Lit. at the centre and the rest of the world

at the periphery (66). Changing the name from
Commonwealth to Postcolonial to World does
not address this literatures marginal status visa-vis the traditional canon in most departments of
English Studies in the world (no matter what they
call themselves or where they are located). Typically, they will have course after course on
important writers from the Western canon and
in genres and periods of British and American
literature, plus some on their own national literatures, but only a token offering on assorted
other literatures. Depending on the location of the
institution and the interests of the faculty, these
classes may be geographical in focus (Caribbean
Literature or South African Writing in English or
New Indian Fiction) or genre-based (the Indian
Novel and Postcolonial Drama), or they may be
broad surveys: World Lit 1 and 2, for instance.
There are institutional consequences to such
marginalization: non-core courses are often not
supported by tenure lines in departments for
specialists in the field. Further, even where there
are tenure lines in World Literature, faculty specializing in contemporary African writing may
well be expected to teach classes on Asian writing
or on settler colonial fiction. So, while a specialist
in Renaissance drama would not be expected to
teach Italian Renaissance poetry, faculty specializing in a writer or a theme or a national genre of
World Literature are expected to be knowledgeable enough about all world literatures as to teach
it at the undergraduate, and often at the graduate,
level. In the end, such conditions of work within
the Academy may make it impossible for its new
incarnation of inclusivity to be a self-sustaining
structure that engages the current historic
moment. As Nelson and Watt warn, when corporate globalization has transformed all literarycultural production into profit-oriented World
Bank literature, there will be no economic or
intellectual space left for todays enriched and
increasingly interdisciplinary literary culture
(93). They call for an examination of the interplay
between neocolonial economics and transnational cultural production, rather than for an easy
celebration of the conversion of the historically
suspect terms Commonwealth and Postcolonial
into the triumphal Transnational and Global
these being the newest names for World
Literature.
At heart, English Studies and the Academy have

an ambivalent relationship with World Fiction,
which is to be expected given the historical association of English with the pain and possibility
of imperialism and colonialism. It is an open
question as to whether the act of broadening
English Studies to include World Fiction is an
act of inclusion or an act of appropriation, whether is it about producing genuine transformation
or just another exercise in the production of the
Other in textual form that imperialist process
whose history has been traced in one of the
foundational texts of postcolonialism, Edward
Saids Orientalism (1978). Academics who are
engaged in this subject may find this ambivalence
challenging: after all, they often are located on
islands of personal and institutional privilege,
reading, teaching, and researching the fiction of
peoples without similar privileges along with their
reactions and resistance to colonialisms, new and
old. Such literary engagements on the part of
academics specializing in World Literature may
bring political advocacy and activism to English
Studies as a discipline, activities that the Academy
in general may understandably be cautious about
but which cannot be avoided, given that the field
of World Fiction raises such profound questions
about historical and contemporary global structures of power.
Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Migration,
Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The
Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)
1065

ACLALS website. At www.aclals.ulg.ac.be/
commonwealth.html, accessed Jan. 2, 2009.
Berube, M. (1997). Employment of English: Theory, Jobs
and the Future of English Studies. New York: New
York University Press.
Delbanco, A. (1999). Decline and Fall of Literature.
New York Review of Books, 47(17), pp. 328.
(Nov. 4).
Equiano, O. (2003). Interesting Narrative and Other
Writings [1789] (ed. V. Caretta). London: Penguin.
Graff, G. (2007). Professing Literature: An Institutional
History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Low, G. (2002). Finding the Center: Publishing
Commonwealth Writing in London The Case of
Anglophone Caribbean Writing 195065. Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, 37(2), 2138.
McLeod, A. L. (2003). Introduction. In A. L. McLeod,
(ed.), The Canon of Commonwealth Literature: Essays
in Criticism. New Delhi: Sterling, pp. 116.
Murray, H. (1996). Working in English: History,
Institution, Resources. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Nelson, C., & Watt, S. (eds.) (2004). Office Hours:
Activism and Change in the Academy. London:
Routledge.
Rushdie, S. (1991). Commonwealth Literature Does Not
Exist [1983]. In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticisms, 19811991. London: Granta, pp. 6170.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western Representations of
the Orient. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Scholes, R. (1998). The Rise and Fall of English:
Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven:
Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Young, R. J. C. (2001). Postcolonialism: An Historical
Introduction. London: Blackwell.
F
Fantasy, Science Fiction,
and Speculative Fiction
JUDITH LEGGATT
The dividing lines between fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction are fluid. One way to
distinguish between them is to say that science
fiction speculates about the future, or scientific
and social progress, or life on other planets, while
fantasy speculates about mythic realms. Speculative fiction is most widely used as a blanket term
that covers not only fantasy and science fiction,
but also alternative histories which speculate
about the repercussions of a single change in our
historical time line and magic realism which
speculates about mythic realms as fantasy does,
but which does not distinguish between fantastic
and realist elements within a single work. While
speculative fiction is usually associated with
England and the United States, works in the genre
were written in the settler colonies of Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand as early as the late
nineteenth century. All three countries, especially
Canada, have continued to make significant contributions to the genre throughout the twentieth
century, and writers from South Asia, the
Caribbean, and, to a lesser extent, Africa added
important voices and new directions to the genre
in the latter part of the century.
Canadian speculative fiction was active
throughout the twentieth century, and many
mainstream literary Canadian writers contributed to the genre, including Sir Charles G. D.
Roberts with In the Morning of Time (1919),
Stephen Leacock with The Iron Man and the Tin

Woman, with Other Such Futurities (1929) and
Afternoons in Utopia (1932), Hugh MacLennan
with Voices in Time (1980), Phyllis Gotlieb with
Sunburst (1964) and Son of the Morning and Other
Stories (1983), Gwendolyn MacEwen with Noman
(1972) and Nomans Land (1985), and most
notably Margaret Atwood with The Handmaids
Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003). Despite
(or perhaps because of) Atwoods own well-publicized objections to the science fiction label, the
former novel has reached the widest audience of
any Canadian speculative fiction. It is a dystopian
feminist novel set in a far future where sudden and
devastating fertility problems have led to repressive and patriarchal societal changes, and where
women are all in thrall to a fundamentalist male
theocracy; it won the 1985 Governor Generals
Literary Award and the inaugural Arthur C.
Clarke Award, showing its appeal to both mainstream and science fiction literary communities.
Important genre-identified contributors include A. E. Van Vogt, who was a mainstay of
space opera in the golden age of science fiction;
William Gibson, whose Neuromancer (1984) trilogy is arguably the definitive cyberpunk text;
feminist science fiction writer Judith Merril, who,
like Gibson, moved to Canada from the United
States in 1968, and who contributed not only as a
writer, but also as an editor and collector; and
Spider Robinson, yet another American expatriate, whose optimism, even in post-apocalyptic
texts such as Telempath (1976), is at odds with the
dark tone of much other Canadian science fiction.
Other significant additions to Canadian science

FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION, AND SPECULATIVE FICTION
fiction include hard science fiction novels by

Robert J. Sawyer and feminist short speculative
stories by Candas Jane Dorsey.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, First
Nations Canadian writers began to experiment
with the genre, often using it in allegorical ways.
Squamish writer Gerry Williams 1994 The Black
Ship, the first science fiction novel by a Native
Canadian, uses a far distant world and two warring
planets to explore the effects of residential schools
through the story of Enid Blue Starbreaks, a Repletion who has been raised in a culture that has
been attacking and subduing her people. Cherokee
African Canadian writer Zainab Amadahys The
Moons of Palmares (1997) demonstrates both the
dangers and potentials of globalization by depicting the multiethnic planet of the title, at risk due to
the mining of its moons by The Consortium,
who sidestep the environmental and social concerns of the people in their quest for energy and
profit. In Thomas Kings How Corporal Colin
Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the
Rest of the World as Well (1993), Native people
are rescued, or abducted, by blue coyotes who
come in spaceships. Haisla writer Eden Robinsons
short story Terminal Avenue (1996) depicts a
dystopian future in which the worst abuses of
Canadas Indian Act, such as the outlawing of
indigenous religious and cultural practices, have
been reinstated.
Ottawa novelist Charles de Lint, a pioneer of
the contemporary fantasy genre, best represents
the genre in Canada. His 1984 debut novel Moonheart set the tone for his more than 60 books by
placing fantasy within a contemporary urban
setting. In the same year, Guy Gavriel Kay published The Summer Tree, the first book in his
Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, which continues with
The Wandering Fire (1986), winner of the Aurora
Award in 1987, and The Darkest Road (1986). The
trilogy depicts five young Canadians who are
transplanted to another dimension by a mage.
Unlike de Lints contemporary urban fantasy,
Kays work is very much in the realm of high
fantasy and is strongly influenced by J. R. R.
Tolkien, whose work he helped edit. More in
keeping with the contemporary fantasy tradition
established by de Lint is Tanya Huff, whose work
includes the Blood Books series, set in Toronto,
which pairs a female private detective with failing
eyesight with a romance-writing vampire.
1067
Much of the early speculative literature of

Australia and New Zealand was utopian in nature;
though most of this was written in the nineteenth
century, it includes in the early twentieth century
Godfrey Swevens Riallaro: The Archipelago of
Exiles (1901) and Limanora: The Island of Progress
(1903) from New Zealand, and in Australia A
Woman of Mars; or, Australias Enfranchised
Woman (1901) by Mrs. H. H. Ling, writing as
Mary Ann Moore-Bentley. On the darker side,
racial fears within early twentieth-century
Australia translated into such dystopian fantasies
as The Coloured Conquest (1904) by Thomas
Roydhouse (writing as Rata), and The Australian Crisis (1909) by C. H. Kirmess, both of which
posit invasions of Australia by Asians a racism
echoed, though ultimately rejected, in Earl Coxs
Out of the Silence (1925). A more thoughtful and
inclusive novel is Archie Wellers Land of the
Golden Clouds (1998), which is set in a far future
post-apocalyptic world where the devastations of
nuclear winter are explained in mythological
terms; people of different tribes and civilizations
must work together to cross an irradiated Australia and defeat a common enemy. Other contributors to Australian science fiction include
J. M. Walsh, who wrote early space operas;
M. Barnard Eldershaw, the collaborative pseudonym of Marjorie Faith Barnard and Flora Sydney
Patricia Eldershaw, whose 1947 political novel
Tomorrow and Tomorrow looks back on early
twentieth-century Australia from the twentyfourth century; A. Bertram Chandler, author of
the Rim World series; Juvenile writer Lee Harding, best known for Displaced Person (1979); and
Jack Wodhams, whose novel Ryn (1982) tells the
story of black Zimbabwean man reborn as a white
baby in a near future Australia. Important new
names include Terry Dowling, Greg Egan, and
Rosaleen Love. The two most important anthologists of Australian science fiction are John Baxter
and Damien Broderick.
New Zealand speculative fiction includes Janet
Frames post-apocalyptic novel Intensive Care
(1970) and fantasy The Carpathians (1988);
C. K. Steads dystopian Smiths Dream (1971);
Colin Gibsons The Pepper Leaf (1971), a nearfuture novel about vegetarian naturists attempt
to prepare for nuclear catastrophe; Hugh Cooks
fantasy series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness;
Phillip Manns several allegorical explorations of
1068
the human condition using speculative fiction

techniques; Cherry Wilders Torin series, which
explore the relationships between human explorers and the marsupial natives of the planet
Torin; and Sandi Halls feminist novels The Godmothers (1982) and Wingwomen of Hera (1987).
While fantastic literature has been part of the
South Asian tradition for several centuries at least,
and science fiction has been produced in the
Indian subcontinent throughout the twentieth
century, little of the latter is available in English.
Uppinder Mehan notes that Since one of the
defining characteristics of science fiction is the
centrality of science or technology, it is usually
characterized as a Western form (54), and the
writing produced in India has received little critical attention outside the subcontinent. The first
English translation of some of that body of work
did not occur until 1993, with It Happened Tomorrow: A Collection of 19 Select Science Fiction
Stories from Various Indian Languages, edited by
Bal Phondke. English-language writing from the
continent has included speculative fiction. Notably, Salman Rushdies first novel, Grimus (1975),
has a science fiction setting, in which there are an
infinite number of different dimensions, and humans can visit different planets and versions of
reality with the aid of a stone rose. Rushdie creates
an alternative history in The Ground beneath Her
Feet (1999), and several of the stories in East, West
(1994) have speculative fiction elements, most
obviously Chekov and Zulu, in which Rushdie
aligns two Sikhs working for the Indian government in London, with two supporting characters
from Star Trek. Several of his books also include
fantasy elements; for example, his young adult
novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) comments on the infamous fatwa through a fantastical
allegory about the poisoning of the source of
stories by Khattam-Shud. Bharati Mukherjees
The Holder of the World (1993), Amitav Ghoshs
The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), and Ruchir
Joshis The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2001) are all
novels set both in past and near-future Indias,
showing the connections between the history and
new directions of India. Many of Ashok Bankers
novels also have either science fiction or fantasy
elements.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Africa was a common setting for speculative
fiction novels such as those by Edgar Rice
Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. Despite these

works by foreign writers, and the fact that African
American writers such as Samuel Delaney have
been working in the genre since the middle of the
twentieth century, it was not until the 1990s and
2000s that speculative fiction from the African
diaspora began to receive significant critical attention. Sheree R. Thomass Dark Matter (2000)
anthologies opened up the area, and gave an idea
of the variety and volume of black contributions
to the genre. Although the anthologies focus on
African Americans, they also included Caribbean
writers such as Nalo Hopkinson and Anthony
Joseph, whose 2006 novel The African Origins of
UFOs was excerpted in the first Dark Matter.
Much of the impetus of Caribbean speculative
fiction has come from the novelist and short story
writer Nalo Hopkinson, who was born in Jamaica
and raised in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Canada; her
1998 debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, combines Caribbean mythic elements with a setting in
post-apocalyptic Toronto. Hopkinsons second
novel, Midnight Robber (2000), is set in the far
future on a distant planet colonized by Caribbean
people. In the first decade of the twenty-first
century, Hopkinson has turned to more fabulist
literature, with fewer science fiction elements, in
her novels The Salt Roads (2003) and The New
Moons Arms (2007). Hopkinson makes a distinction between what she calls the Northern genres
of fantasy and science fiction, which come out of
a rational and skeptical approach to the world
and thus must establish the veracity of the speculative elements within the realm of the text, and
the fabulist fiction she collects in Whispers from
the Cotton Tree Root (2000), which stems from a
Caribbean tradition where the irrational, the
inexplicable, and the mysterious exist side by each
with the daily events of life, and where attempting to recast the irrational in rational terms is
beside the point at best, and dangerous at worst
(pp. xiixiii). The collection is an attempt to
marry the techniques, norms, and priorities of
mainstream speculative fiction and Caribbean
writing. The stories in the collection, which come
from new voices and established Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kinkaid, Olive
Senior, and Kamau Brathwaite, move both traditions in new directions and illustrate the overlaps
that already existed between the two categories of
writing.
While there is a significant body of Arab-language African science fiction, including work by
the Egyptian writers Tawfiq al-Hakim and Mustafa Mahmud, and Libyan writer Yusuf al-Kuwayri, there is as yet little genre fiction written in
English. The childrens novella Journey to Space
(1980) by Flora Nwapa from Nigeria features an
animated elevator that shoots two children into
the sky and keeps them in suspended animation
until two fairies help them to return to earth.
Ghanaian writer J. O. Eshuns The Adventures of
Kapapa (1976) depicts a scientist who invents
anti-gravity. South African writer Claude Nunes
has three books: a short story collection Inherit the
Earth (1966), and novels Recoil (1971, with Rhoda
Nunes) and The Sky Trapeze (1980). Many of Ben
Okris novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road (1991), which is partially
set in a world of those who have died and are
waiting to be reborn, and Astonishing the Gods
(1995), which includes an invisible world and an
enchanted island quest narrative, have fantastical
elements. Although she claims not to write in the
science fiction genre, Henrietta Rose-Inness 2008
Caine Prize-winning story Poison has many
speculative elements. The largest impetus to grow
an African tradition of speculative fiction is the
Science Fiction Club of South Africa (SFSA),
which administers both Probe magazine and an
annual short story competition.
The apparently limited contributions to speculative fiction from Africa are, in part, a result of
limiting definitions that prevent many speculative
texts from around the world from being read
through that lens. In postcolonial literature, many
of the texts that have the characteristics of fantasy
are classified as magic realism. For example, texts
such as Rushdies The Satanic Verses (1988), with
its controversial depiction of figures from Islamic
mythology; Thomas Kings Green Grass, Running
Water (1993), in which Native and Christian
mythological realms coexist with contemporary
Alberta; Patricia Graces Potiki (1986), which
conflates its contemporary story with Maori
mythology; Mudrooroos Master of the Ghost
Dreaming (1991), in which the characters enter
the Dreamtime and effect change in their physical
world; and J. M. Coetzees Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980), which displaces the racial and
cultural tensions of South Africa under apartheid
to an unspecified time and location (to name just
1069
a few representative examples), are not generally

thought of as fantasy texts outside speculative
fiction circles, but they do contain many of the
characteristics of the genre. The deliberate conflation of fantasy and realism is not uncommon in
contemporary fantasy, which often introduces
mythological elements into twentieth-century
reality, and is marked by characters that question
and resist, but are ultimately forced to accept, the
idea that the mythic is real. In postcolonial fantasy,
the simultaneity of the different worlds allows
those worlds to comment on each other in a more
immediate way than does the escapism that characterizes high fantasy. In addition, postcolonial
speculative fiction unsettles Manichaean divisions
between the rational and the superstitious, eliding
the difference between science and religion as ways
of constructing and understanding the world.
Two predominant themes of science fiction are
the exploration of new worlds and the resulting
encounters between different species, which often
stand in for the different races of earth. One of the
precursors of the science fiction genres was early
exploration narratives, both fiction and non-fiction. The space aliens of science fiction have much
in common with the Lilliputians of Swifts
Gullivers Travels (1726) or the strange beings
that were assumed to inhabit any territory not
regularly traveled by Europeans. Similarly, debates over the humanity of aliens, androids, and
robots in science fiction parallel debates over
whether Africans or Native North Americans had
souls. In her introduction to So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, Nalo
Hopkinson argues that one of the most familiar
memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign
countries and colonizing the natives, and ... for
many of us, thats not a thrilling adventure story;
its non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of
the strange-looking ship that appears out of
nowhere (Hopkinson & Mehan 7). Rather
than rejecting the genre as irrevocably colonial,
Hopkinson and other writers of color have used
science fiction to tell the other side of the story.
They take the meme of colonizing the natives
and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique
it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger,
with humour, and also, with love and respect for
the genre of science fiction that makes it possible
to think about new ways of doing things (9).
As the twenty-first century unfolds, postcolonial
1070
FARAH, NURUDDIN
writers from around the globe are taking up the

various genres of speculative fiction, infusing
them with their own cultural perspectives and
making them truly international genres, no longer
mainly British and American ones.
Fiction (WF); Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Indigenous
Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF);
Science Fiction (BIF); Speculative Fiction (AF);
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF);
Attebery, B. (1995). The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy. In
R. A. Latham & R. A. Collins (eds.), Modes of the
Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twelfth
International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 113.
Batty, N., & Markley, R. (eds.) (2002). 2001: A
Postcolonial Odyssey [special issue]. Ariel, 33(1).
Hopkinson, N. (ed.) (2000). Whispers from the Cotton
Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. Montpelier,
VT: Invisible Cities.
Hopkinson, N., & Mehan, U. (eds.) (2004). So Long
Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and
Fantasy. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp.
Leonard, E. (ed.) (1997). Into Darkness Peering: Race and
Color in the Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Mehan, U. (1998). The Domestication of Technology
in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories. Foundation,
74, 5466.
Phondke, B. (ed.) (1993). It Happened Tomorrow: A
Collection of 19 Select Science Fiction Stories from
Various Indian Languages. New Delhi: National Book
Trust.
Robinson, E. (1998). Terminal Avenue. In D. D.
Moses & T. Goldie (eds.), An Anthology of Canadian
Native Literature in English, 2nd edn. Toronto:
Oxford University Press, pp. 46974.
Thomas, S. R. (ed.) (2000). Dark Matter: A Century of
Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New
York: Aspect.
Farah, Nuruddin
R. JOHN WILLIAMS
Nuruddin Farahs career offers a stunning dramatization of how the troubled processes of globalization and postcolonialism coincide with the local
politics of language and tradition. Farahs intimate
knowledge of the cultural and linguistic intricacies

of postcolonial and neocolonial Africa comes by
way of a complex and fascinating personal history.
As a novelist and scholar, he has traveled the world,
spending time in countless international locales
and nearly a dozen African nations. For most of his
career, he has been an author in exile, writing from
afar about the political turmoil and cultural violence of his native Somalia. Farahs approach has
consistently been vividly historical and trenchantly
non-partisan, carefully avoiding the dogmatic orthodoxies of both the Left and the Right. In Farahs
words, The only thing one can do is to be aware
and to struggle harder and harder against repression in whatever form it comes (Moss 1828).
Born on November 24, 1945 in the Italiancontrolled southern half of modern-day Somalia,
Farah was fluent in spoken Somali by the age of 10
and could read four language scripts, including
Amharic, Arabic, Roman (via English and Italian),
and Cusmaniya (the eventual basis for official Somali orthography). At 13, he was reading Western
classics by Dostoevsky and Hugo in English and
Arabic translations. Like many Somalis who experienced the first nine years of Somali independence,
Farah was initially optimistic about Siyad Barres
Soviet-inspired revolutionary takeover in 1969.
After returning from studying in India, Farah was
invited by the Barre regime to write something
favorable about the revolution (Farah 1988, 1596).
The result was his 1969 play A Dagger in Vacuum,
which was immediately denounced by government censors as scandalously unrevolutionary
(Wright 2004, 10). His 1970 novel From a Crooked
Rib (the first ever published by a Somali writer)
detailsthe travailsofEbla,a womanwhoattempts to
escape the tyrannical patriarchy of home life in the
colonial1950s; it was similarlycondemned. In1973,
when he published an extract from a short novel
in his native tongue, his work was declared
seditious, and by 1974 he decided to continue
his work abroad. In 1976 a phone call warned him
that his recently published novel A Naked Needle
(1976), which portrays the zeal and optimism of the
Somali revolution gradually dissolving into dictatorial corruption and bureaucratic messiness, had
been condemned by the Barre dictatorship; returning home would mean risking a lengthy jail sentence. He has remained in exile ever since.
In Italy, Farah began writing the first two
volumes of Variations on the Theme of an
FEMINISM AND FICTION
African Dictatorship, beginning with Sweet and

Sour Milk (1979) and Sardines (1981), with the
final volume, Close Sesame (1983), being completed in Germany. Containing some of Farahs
most vivid and powerful writing, the Dictatorship
trilogy details the corruption of clan-based postcolonial leadership, demonstrating how traditional clan-centered values can become vehicles
for tribal tyranny and corrupt nepotism. It also
continues a recurrent theme in Farahs writing:
the rich and collective voice of the Somali oral
tradition, with oral poets acting at times as the
mouthpiece of the clan (Farah quoted in
Wright 2004, 13) a poetic tradition that can be
used to cut across clan lines, while at other times
reinforcing the reactionary abuses of centralized
clan-based power.
After the Dictatorship trilogy, Farah traveled and
published widely. His Blood in the Sun trilogy
included Maps (1986), written while in Nigeria and
Gambia;Gifts(1992),writteninSudanandUganda;
and Secrets (1998), written in Ethiopia and Nigeria.
Of these, Maps has become the most famous and
critically well received. Written in a strikingly lyrical, shifting voice, it tells the story of Askar, an
orphan whose parents died before he was born (his
mother in childbirth, and his father during the
conflict that separated Somalia and Ethiopia in the
mid-1970s). Many critics have noted the novels
extremely complex and multidimensional weaving
together of voices and multiple mythologies.
In 1998, Farah received the prestigious Neustadt
International Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech, he emphasized his own complicated
colonial and postcolonial upbringing, exploring
the links between his inherited multidimensional
experience with language and his nations troubled
history. In his only non-fiction work, Yesterday,
Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora
(2000), Farah further develops these intimate connections between personal narrative and postcolonial experience, reporting on a series of interviews he conducted with Somali refugees between
1991 and 1998. His recent novels Links (2003) and
Knots (2007) emerge out of the painful revelations
of these interviews, imagining the difficulty of the
exiles return to a homeland forever changed by
corruption and violence.
Critical attention to Farahs work continues to
grow, garnering comparisons to authors such as
Ng~
ug~ wa Thiongo and occasional rumors of a
1071
Nobel Prize nomination. His work, with its shifting and contradictory elements their multivocal
dimensions, their interweaving of the political,
the religious, the gendered, and the domestic has
made important contributions to the larger traditions of international modernism and postcolonial writing. In imaginatively exploring Somalias
turmoil, Farah is as vividly political as Chinua
Achebe and as deft at exploring language and
personal experience as Ng~
ug~.
SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); East African
Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF);
Ng~
ug~ wa Thiongo (WF); Politics/Activism
and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the
African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF)
Farah, N. (1970). From a Crooked Rib. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Farah, N. (1976). A Naked Needle. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Farah, N. (1979). Sweet and Sour Milk. St. Paul, MN:
Graywolf.
Farah, N. (1981). Sardines. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf.
Farah, N. (1983). Close Sesame. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf.
Farah, N. (1986). Maps. New York: Penguin.
Farah, N. (1988). Why I Write. Third World Quarterly,
10(4), 15919.
Farah, N. (1992). Gifts. New York: Arcade.
Farah, N. (1998). Secrets. New York: Arcade.
Farah, N. (2000). Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the
Somali Diaspora. New York: Cassell.
Farah, N. (2002). Celebrating Differences: The 1998
Neustadt Lecture. In Wright (2002), pp. 1524.
Farah, N. (2003). Links. New York: Riverhead.
Farah, N. (2007). Knots. New York: Riverhead.
Moss, R. (1986). Mapping the Psyche. West Africa,
3600, 18278.
Wright, D. (ed.) (2002). Emerging Perspectives on
Nuruddin Farah. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Wright, D. (2004). The Novels of Nuruddin Farah.
Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies.
Feminism and Fiction

KATHERINE MILLER
The ideals of feminism political, economic, and

social equality between men and women have
existed since Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication
1072
of the Rights of Woman (1792). Seeking the

enfranchisement of women in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, first-wave feminists
fought for political equality. In mid-century,
Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex (1949, trans.
1952) questioned the gender distinctions that left
women second-class citizens.
Second-wave feminism rose in the 1960s as
women, inspired by the Civil Rights and anti-war
movements, sought social, legal, and economic
equality. In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty
Friedan challenged womens shackling to gender
roles, and Nancy Chodorows The Reproduction of
Mothering (1978) examined motherdaughter relationships, demonstrating that patriarchal control is reproduced within the space of the family.
Kate Milletts Sexual Politics (1970) was the first
major exploration of the sexual politics of literature (Kolodny 171). Elaine Showalter proposed a separate womens canon in A Literature of
Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte
to Lessing (1977), while presses such as the Feminist Press and Virago were rediscovering and
republishing forgotten texts by women.
In the 30 years since, feminist literary criticism
has evolved into a complex and diverse set of
discourses seeking to problematise the assumptions, not only of gender, but also of race, class
and sexuality (Plain & Sellers 102). Interdisciplinary approaches to feminist criticism often
incorporated psychoanalytical insights. In France,
feminist critics such as Helene Cixous, Luce
Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva proposed a specific
type of female writing: lecriture feminine.
Cixouss call in The Laugh of the Medusa
(1975, trans. 1976) to Write your self. Your body
must be heard (350) inspired non-linear writing
by women writers. American psychoanalytical
feminist criticism includes Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubars The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) and Juliet Mitchell and
Ann Oakleys What is Feminism? (1986).
The rise of third-wave feminism in the 1990s
challenged the hegemonic assumptions of white,
middle-class Western women in defining feminism as a universal concept. For many women, the
terms association with Western imperialism
tarnishes it. Furthermore, the concept of gender
itself has been challenged: working from de Beauvoirs assertion that One is not born but rather
becomes a woman, Judith Butlers Gender

Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(1990) proposes that gender itself is a social
construct and a form of performance. The other
inherent within any identity of race, gender, class,
and sexual orientation problematizes any notions
of a universal feminist theory.
Female roles daughter, wife, mother often
define gendered identity. Early feminist works by
Commonwealth writers focused on womens
struggles to define themselves apart from these
roles. Sybylla, the protagonist in Miles Franklins
My Brilliant Career (1901), rejects marriage as
inimical to her self-identity. Mingling Marxist
ideology with realism, another Australian writer,
Katharine Susannah Prichard, created strong female characters who combine marriage, work,
and political reform in the Goldfields trilogy:
The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948),
and Winged Seeds (1950). In Australian Janette
Turner Hospitals The Ivory Swing (1982), Juliet, a
wife and mother who accompanies her husband
to India, confronts the social and cultural constraints of Indian women, leading her to question
her own choice between career and motherhood.
Canadian writers such as Ethel Wilson,
Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Carol Shields,
and Margaret Atwood also question gender
stereotyping. Challenging the confining role of
wife, Maggie Lloyd, the central character in
Wilsons The Swamp Angel (1954), leaves her
husband. In Laurences The Stone Angel (1964),
Hagar chooses marriage as an escape from her
patriarchal father, but is confined by the expectations of her husband and then her son. Del Jordan,
the protagonist in Munros short story cycle Lives
of Girls and Women (1971), chafes under social and
familial restrictions. The multiplicity of female
identity, as expressed through the roles of daughter, wife, mother, working woman, widow, and
senior citizen, informs the life of Shieldss heroine,
Daisy, in The Stone Diaries (1993). And whereas
South Africas Doris Lessing presents a utopian
vision of sexual roles in the speculative fiction The
Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five
(1970), The Handmaids Tale (1985), Atwoods
dystopian vision of gendered identity, presents a
society in which women are named for their roles:
Aunts, Marthas, Wives, and Handmaids.
The Kunstlerroman, the fictional life of the artist,
finds feminist form in several womens works.
From L. M. Montgomerys young adult novels

about a young writer Emily of New Moon
(1923), Emily Climbs (1925), and Emilys Quest
(1927) to Laurences The Diviners (1974), many
Canadian women writers have depicted a writers
life.Atwood delineates the life ofa femalepainter in
Cats Eye (1988). In Shieldss final novel, Unless
(2002), which chronicles a mothers attempt to
rescue a daughter who has set out on a quest for
goodness, the female writer chastises a male
critic for his list of exclusively male authors, commenting that he makes women serve an apprenticeship in self-denigration (165). Anna Wulf,
Lessings central character in the metafictional The
Golden Notebook (1962), compartmentalizes her
life and work into differently colored notebooks:
an intertextual novel about Ella (yellow); memories of Africa (black); left-wing politics (red); and a
diary (blue). Searching for unity, Anna combines
her narratives in the golden notebook.
Subversion of patriarchal control of female sexuality is another common feminist theme. Using a
stream-of-consciousness technique, the expatriate
New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield explores
female isolation and sexuality in her short story
collections: Bliss and Other Stories (1921) and The
Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). The female
protagonist in Nadine GordimersA Sport of Nature
(1987) transgresses racial sexual taboos in South
Africa; themotherinHospitalsCharades(1988)isa
sexually adventurous woman with 10children by 10
different men. Atwoods The Robber Bride (1993)
questions assumptions about female sexual
power as Zenia, a double-agent in the gender
wars, impacts the lives of three Toronto women.
Canadian Aritha van Herk rewrites the picaresque
in No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1986), a
recounting of the sexual adventures of a traveling
underwear saleswoman.
Revisiting patriarchal history, feminist authors
have rewritten women into the stories where they
were previously marginal. Atwoods Alias Grace
(1995) gives voice to Grace Marks, a nineteenthcentury woman accused of murdering her employer. Australian expatriate Daphne Marlatt also
rewrites women into history in Ana Historic
(1988). Using the technique of lecriture feminine,
Marlatt weaves together three stories: her own
mothers struggle with depression and electroshock therapy in the 1950s; the undocumented
life of Ana Richards, a Vancouver schoolteacher
1073
in the late nineteenth century; and the narrators

own sexual awakening. Similarly, Canadian Jane
Urquhart rewrites the lives of Emily Bronte
and the fictional nineteenth-century balloonist
Arianna in Changing Heaven (1990). In Lilians
Story (1985), Australian Kate Grenville tells the
story of an oversize woman, Lilian Singer, who
resists patriarchal control and social conventions
to create her own life; Dark Places (1994), the
companion novel, analyzes the perspective of
Lilians incestuous father, Albion. Rewriting
Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea
(1966), Dominican-born Jean Rhys tells the story
from the perspective of Antoinette, the Creole
heiress whom Mr. Rochester marries and then
imprisons. Antoinettes fortune, sanity, and
even her identity (signified by a name change to
Bertha) are stolen from her.
Several Caribbean writers mingle postcolonial
themes with feminist issues. Jamaica Kincaids first
novel, Annie John (1983), documents a young
womans progress from childhood to adulthood.
Rejecting both the mother and the motherland
(Antigua), Annie John moves from a Lacanian
identification with the mother into a fully realized
identity. In Lucy (1990) and The Autobiography of
My Mother (1996), Kincaid further explores the
tensions within the motherdaughter relationship.
In Bread Out of Stone (1994), Dionne Brand argues
that Caribbean womens fiction focuses on
motherdaughter relationships while ignoring
womens sexuality. Writing from a multiplicity of
identities, Brand, a black lesbian Canadian of
Trinidadian background, articulates the voice of
the other in her fiction and poetry. Race, sexual
orientation, and gender inform her In Another
Place, Not Here (1996), the love story of two
women, Elizete and Verlia, who battle sexual,
political, and economic repression. Similarly, Jamaican Erna Brodber writes the gendered female
body in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home
(1980) and Myal (1988) as a site of racial and
patriarchal control. Marginalized by race and gender and brutalized by her father within the patriarchal home, the central character in the Trinadian
Canadian Shani Mootoos Cereus Blooms at Night
(1996) reconstructs her identity through a form of
lecriture feminine.
African women writers address issues of motherhood, gender discrimination, and racial and
cultural oppression in their texts. In Flora
1074
FERNANDO, LLOYD
Nwapas Efuru (1966), the title character struggles

to define her identity outside of her childlessness;
in contrast, fellow Nigerian Buchi Emechetas
protagonist in The Joys of Motherhood (1979)
constructs her identity through motherhood.
Socio-economic issues such as arranged marriage
and polygamy inform several African texts, from
Emechetas The Bride Price (1976) to Ghanaian
Ama Ata Aidoos Changes: A Love Story (1991).
South Africas Nadine Gordimer tackles racial
consciousness from the perspective of a white
writer living under (and after) apartheid. In The
Lying Days (1953), Gordimer shows the development of identity and a racial consciousness in a
young woman; Burgers Daughter (1979) examines the political responsibilities of the daughter
of two political activists.
Gendered identities also limit womens lives
in the novels of Indian writers such as Bharati
Mukherjee, Anita Desai, and Arundhati Roy.
Exploring the gender restrictions placed on
women in a patriarchal society, Bharati
Mukherjees first novel, Wife (1975), follows
Dimple, a young Indian woman who, unable to
live up to the idealized image of the Bengali wife,
eventually murders her husband. Characters in
several of Anita Desais novels struggle with the
restrictive role of wife, including Maya in Cry, the
Peacock (1963) and the aptly named Sita in Where
Shall We Go This Summer? (1975). Desai portrays
contrasting approaches to gender roles through
pairs of sisters in Clear Light of Day (1980) and
Fasting, Feasting (1999). The female characters
and children in Roys The God of Small Things
(1997) are imprisoned within homes where they
suffer from patriarchal violence and social and
economic exclusion. Seeking a path beyond similar restrictions, Mukherjee explores the fluidity of
gender identity in Jasmine (1989), in which a
young Indian widow moves through several name
changes and incarnations of identity in her journey from India to the United States.
In Dancing through the Minefield (1980),
Annette Kolodny comments on the difficulty of
all efforts to define feminist literary criticism as
either a coherent system or a unified set of methodologies (171). Many women are unwilling to
self-identify as feminist, given the myriad connotations attached to the word. Yet the term
postfeminism suggests that gendered subjectivity does not exist. Until political, economic, and
social equality exists for all women, not just a

privileged few, feminism and feminist fiction will
continue to point the way toward social
transformation.
SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and
Fiction (WF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Gender
and the Novel (AF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in
Fiction (BIF, WF)
Cixous, H. (1975). The Laugh of the Medusa. In Warhol
& Herndl, pp. 34762.
Women Writers: Fiction in English. New York:
St. Martins.
Ferrier, C. (ed.) (1985). Gender, Politics and Fiction:
Twentieth Century Australian Womens Novels. St.
Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Gupta, R. K. (2002). The Novels of Anita Desai: A
Feminist Perspective. New Delhi: Atlantic.
Kolodny, A. (1980). Dancing through the Minefield:
Some Observations on the Theory, Practices, and
Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism. In Warhol &
Herndl (1997), pp. 17190.
Nfah-Abbenyi, J. M. (1997). Gender in African Womens
Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference.
Plain, G., & Sellers, S. (eds.) (2007). A History of
Feminist Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Shields, C. (2002). Unless. Toronto: Vintage.
Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton:
Sprague, C., & Tiger, V. (1986). Critical Essays on Doris
Lessing. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Stratton, F. (1994). Contemporary African Literature
and the Politics of Gender. New York: Routledge.
Warhol, R. R., & Herndl, D. P. (eds.) (1997). Feminisms:
An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Fernando, Lloyd
M. Y. CHIU
Lloyd Fernando is a pioneering figure in Malaysian literature in English. His work is marked by a
generous, inclusive humanism that transcends
cultural, ethnic, and religious differences. His two
novels and his collection of essays on literature
FERNANDO, LLOYD
and culture, though not conceived as a single

project, explore common themes of tolerance and
mutual accommodation.
Lloyd Fernando spent his early childhood in Sri
Lanka, where he was born on May 31, 1926. At the
age of 12 he emigrated to Singapore, then part of
British Malaya. Fernandos schooling was interrupted by the Japanese Occupation, a period in
which he worked as a building laborer, trishaw
rider, and apprentice mechanic to support himself and his family. After the war he entered the
University of Singapore and graduated with double honors in philosophy and English. In 1964
Fernando obtained a PhD in English literature
from the University of Leeds. He then returned to
Malaysia and accepted a post in the English
Department at the University of Malaya, and later
became professor of English and head of department. During his tenure as head of English,
Fernando actively supported the teaching of English literature and encouraged aspiring writers in
English at a time when English was politically out
of favor in Malaysia. His efforts to put Malaysian
writing in English onto the wider anglophone
literary scene produced a number of pioneering
anthologies of poetry, fiction, and drama. In 1978,
toward the end of a very successful academic
career, Fernando retired from his professorship
to study law at City University, London. On
completion of the diploma in law, he set up a
successful practice in Kuala Lumpur. He died on
February 28, 2008.
Fernandos best-known work is Scorpion Orchid
(1976), an ambitious novel with an idealistic vision
of Singaporean nationhood. The novel employs
modernist techniques of collage and juxtaposition
to synthesize Western and Asian literary genres.
Fernando inserts extracts from venerable Malay
literary texts and other regional chronicles into a
Bildungsroman plot to create a polyphonic narrative with two distinct but interlocking levels of
narration. Set in Singapore in the mid-1950s, the
primary narrative follows the development of four
young men as they negotiate the racial riots that
shatter their naive worldviews, sending each on a
personal quest for an authentic identity. The ethnicities of the four represent the main constituent
cultural groups of Singapore Indian, Malay,
Chinese, and Eurasian and their personal quests
are allegories of the nations search for an indigenous identity. The figurative dimension of the
1075
primary narrative is amplified in the secondary

narrative of vignettes mostly extracted from Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Abdullah, both cultural
and literary landmarks in Malay historiography.
By enacting a dialogue between Western and Asian
literary traditions, Fernando attempts to forge in
fiction an inclusive postcolonial identity that neither denies nor rejects the history of cross-cultural
contacts that constitute the reality of the Malaysian
nation. Scorpion Orchid ends on a note of optimism, suggesting the possibility of a national
identity that can accommodate the diverse culture
and history of a region that was once an important
nexus of several empires.
Green is the Colour (1993), Fernandos second
novel, is set in Malaysia immediately after the
Sino-Malay race riots of May 13, 1969, a defining
moment in the process of Malaysian national
development. The novel explores the reign of
terror of religious fundamentalists through the
ill-fated cross-cultural romances of its four central characters, whose ethnicities (Malay, Chinese,
and Indian) once again correspond to the main
factions involved in the racial politics of Malaysia.
The cross-ethnic pairing of the lovers in the novel
symbolizes the ideal of a liberal, tolerant, multiracial harmony an ideal that is thwarted with the
defeat of the protagonists. Green is the Colour ends
in a grim wave of inquisitions, persecutions, and
torture administered by predacious officials. The
drive for a culturally pure Islamic Malaysia is a
pretext for the cruelest violations of the individual
as the novel revisits the incendiary racial politics
attending the birth of the nation to caution
against extremist dogmatism.
Cultures in Conflict (1986) is a collection of
Fernandos most notable critical essays on literature, language, and culture. The composition
dates of the essays range from 1966 to 1982, with
most dating from the 1970s. Topics range from
James Joyce to the role of English in Asian
literature and education. Fernando is a staunch
defender of English and an advocate of adapting
the language to the task of expressing the rich
cultural heritage of Asia.
SEE ALSO: English Studies, the Academy,
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southeast
Asian Fiction (WF)
1076
FICTIONAL RESPONSES TO CANONICAL ENGLISH NARRATIVES

Bennett, B. (ed.) (1993). Westerly Looks to Asia: A
Selection from Westerly 19561992. Nedlands: Indian
Ocean Centre for Peace Studies/Centre for Studies in
Australian Literature, University of Western
Australia.
Fernando, L. (ed.) (1966a). Malaysian Poetry in English:
A Retrospective Anthology. Kuala Lumpur:
Department of English, University of Malaya.
Fernando, L. (ed.) (1966b). Malaysian Short Stories in
English: A Retrospective Anthology. Kuala Lumpur:
Department of English, University of Malaya.
Fernando, L. (ed.) (1968). Twenty-Two Malaysian
Stories: An Anthology of Writing in English. Singapore:
Heinemann Educational.
Fernando, L. (ed.) (1972). New Drama, 12. Kuala
Lumpur: Oxford University Press.
Fernando, L. (1976). Scorpion Orchid. Singapore:
Times.
Fernando, L. (1977). New Women in the Late Victorian
Novel. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Fernando, L. (ed.) (1981). Malaysian Short Stories.
Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational.
Fernando, L. (1986). Cultures in Conflict: Essays on
Literature and the English Language in South East
Asia. Singapore: Graham Brash.
Fernando, L. (1993). Green is the Colour. Singapore:
Landmark.
Merican, F. (2004). Voices of Many Worlds: Malaysian
Literature in English. Singapore: Times.
Mukherjee, D., Singh, K., & Quayum, M. A. (eds.)
(2002). The Merlion and the Hibiscus: Contemporary
Short Stories from Singapore and Malaysia. New
Delhi: Penguin.
Quayam, M. A., Talif, R., & Omar, N. (eds.) (2003).
Petals of Hibiscus: A Representative Anthology of
Malaysian Literature in English. Petaling Jaya:
Pearson Malaysia.
Fictional Responses to
Canonical English
Narratives
JOHN THIEME
Numerous novels and short stories from around

the globe engage in dialogues with canonical
English narratives. Prominent among these are
responses to texts such as The Tempest, Robinson
Crusoe, Heart of Darkness, and Othello that have
been seen as particularly concerned with colonialism and race. However, the range of canonical
English narratives that have generated such dialogues extends far beyond works that are overtly
about imperialism. Nineteenth-century novelists
such as Jane Austen, the Brontes, and Charles
Dickens have also elicited numerous responses;
early twentieth-century fiction that has prompted
reactions from writers from very different backgrounds includes work by Rudyard Kipling,
Katherine Mansfield, and Daphne du Maurier.
In Roland Barthess words, Any text is a new
tissue of past citations (quoted in Young 39), but
the ways in which such citations operate vary
considerably. In his poetic autobiography, Another Life (1973), the St. Lucian-born Derek Walcott
describes himself as one of Victorias orphans,
who had entered the house of literature as a
houseboy, / filched as the slum child stole, / As the
young slave appropriated / those heirlooms
temptingly left (77). Though these words echo
T. S. Eliots aphorism, Immature poets imitate;
mature poets steal (182), they extend the notion
of writing as theft to indicate the ambivalent
relationship of colonial and postcolonial readers
to the legacy of English cultural imperialism. They
also suggest the extent to which Victorian culture
was a particularly crucial element in the artistic
formation of many colonial writers, even if it left
them orphans, forced to steal the Mother
Countrys heirlooms.
In The World, The Text, and the Critic, Edward
Said uses the family metaphor of filial engenderment to distinguish between two kinds
of literary genealogies: filiative relationships and
affiliative identifications (1984, 117). Filiative
relationships involve an untroubled line of descent from a parent text or tradition; in affiliative
identifications the bloodlines are less straightforward and the parent is either rejected or relocated
in a more extended family. These alternatives
provide a framework for distinguishing the kinds
of interaction that texts written outside Britain
establish with canonical English narratives,
though the division between unquestioning filiation and elective affiliation is seldom clear-cut.
One view of postcolonial rewritings of canonical English narratives has seen them as primarily
oppositional and described them as writing
back (Rushdie 1982; Ashcroft et al. 1989) and
counter-discourse (Tiffin 1987); the term contexts has been used to suggest the twin possibilities of opposition and a broader range of
intertextual reference (Thieme 2001). Helen

Tiffin suggests that counter-discourse is not
simply writing back to an English canonical
text, but to the whole of the discursive field within
which such a text operate[s] in post-colonial
worlds (23). She follows Richard Terdimans view
that, while dominant discourses may be challenged
by counter-discursive practices, counter-discourse
cannot offer genuine revolution (quoted in
Tiffin 33), since the very act of responding to the
hegemonic discourse makes it impossible for the
postcolonial text to separate itself completely from
that discourses conventions. However, the appropriation of canonical English texts outside Britain
does not necessarily involve a counter-discursive
strategy, and responses vary along a continuum
that spans the extremes of imitative homage and
adversarial writing back, though few can be neatly
located at either pole.
In societies where narrative was inextricably
implicated in the work of Empire, the foreignness
of classic English literature contributed to a sense
of culture as happening elsewhere. V. S. Naipaul
(1972) singles out Wordsworths Daffodils as a
metonym for the extent to which English
literature was an alien mythology in the Trinidad of his youth: A pretty little flower, no doubt;
but we had never seen it. Could the poem have any
meaning for us? (23). Lacking the political
animus toward Britain of many of his Caribbean
contemporaries, Naipaul nevertheless foregrounds the disjunction between the world of
English literature and his own environment, explaining how he set about turning Dickenss rain
and drizzle . . . into tropical downpours (24). His
response was, then, to attempt adaptation rather
than adversarial writing back, but his comments
nevertheless interrogate the relevance of English
writing in the Caribbean.
In contrast, the Barbadian novelist George
Lamming may appear to be adopting an adversarial stance when, in his non-fiction study The
Pleasures of Exile (1960), he follows such earlier
commentators on The Tempest as O. Mannoni
(1956 [1950]) and Frantz Fanon (1986 [1952]) in
reading the play as a template for psychological
aspects of the colonial encounter. However,
Lammings discussion ranges beyond viewing
Prospero and Caliban as types of the colonizer
and colonized: he assigns a multiplicity of roles to
Caliban and engages with several characters from
1077
Shakespeares last play. When he revisits archetypes from The Tempest in Water with Berries
(1971), a novel set in Britain just after the end of
Empire, Caliban is again a polymorphous figure,
inhabiting the bodies of three Caribbean artists,
who by virtue of their vocations are also Prosperos.
They remain unable to escape racist construction,
but in the mood of the period assert their unwillingness to continue to play their assigned roles in
the colonial pantomime (Thieme 2001, 138)
and ultimately prove to be as much shape-changing Ariels as Calibans or Prosperos.
Numerous Canadian works, including fiction
by Charles G. D. Roberts, Robertson Davies,
Audrey Thomas, and Margaret Laurence, have
also engaged with The Tempest. In Diana
Brydons (1984) view they characteristically
place more emphasis on Miranda than on Prospero or Caliban. Thus, in Laurences The Diviners (1974) the protagonist writes a novel that
projects elements of her marriage to a patriarchal
husband, who she feels has infantilized her, onto
the MirandaProspero relationship. Robertson
Daviess Tempest-Tost (1951) pokes fun at a
Canadian Little Theatres production of The
Tempest, offering another interestingly skewed
perspective on Shakespeares play by making its
central character, an aging schoolteacher, a
Gonzalo who has developed a late-flowering
crush on Ariel.
While the colonial motifs in The Tempest constitute an imaginative response to the first phase
of European colonization of the Americas,
Defoes Robinson Crusoe can be read as an allegory
of a later phase of mercantile expansionism.
Crusoes desert island is a plantation society in
microcosm, and Crusoe and his one-man labor
force, Man Friday, have, like Prospero and
Caliban, frequently been seen as bywords for
colonizer and colonized. The Trinidadian-born
Sam Selvon playfully reverses these stereotypes in
his London-set novel, Moses Ascending (1975).
The South African J. M. Coetzee offers his most
sustained response to Defoes classic in Foe
(1986), a postmodern novel which has Cruso
die shortly after being rescued and his role as
narrator usurped by a woman, Susan Barton, who
writes her story in London, while seeking the aid
of the fugitive author, Daniel Foe. In addition,
Susan endeavors to emancipate a tongueless Friday, the origins of whose muteness are left unclear
1078
and who is never given a voice. The relativist

narrative mode of Foe also interrogates the type
of realist fiction, based on an illusion of verisimilitude, that Defoe is credited with having introduced into the English novel: numerous stories
compete for authority and the apparent centrality
of the relationship to Robinson Crusoe is destabilized when other Defoe narratives, notably Roxana, intrude into Susans account.
As Walcott has pointed out (see Hamner 1993,
3340), Crusoe is a protean, Adamic figure and
reactions to Defoes novel extend far beyond its
colonial concerns, though these frequently remain a subtext. Nineteenth-century responses
that adapted Crusoes desert island situation to
the predicament of settler communities include
Catherine Parr Traills Canadian Crusoes (1852),
which uses the trope of the castaway for a tale
about childrens survival in the Canadian
wilderness, and one of the early masterpieces
of Australian fiction, Marcus Clarkes His Natural
Life (1874). As John Clement Ball (2005) puts it,
part of the appeal of Crusoes novel has always
been its audacious and optimistic distillation of
colonial relations . . . into the story of a single man
achieving peaceful dominion over a single island
and, until quite late, a single male other (88). Ball
discusses two contemporary Canadian responses
to the Crusoe figure: Yann Martels Life of Pi
(2001), in which the castaway predicament is
transformed into the story of a teenage boys
struggle to survive on a lifeboat crossing the
Pacific with a Royal Bengal tiger as his chief
other; and Douglas Glovers Elle (2003), in
which an indigenous Friday becomes the main
companion of a seventeenth-century Frenchwoman marooned in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Conrads Heart of Darkness forms a triptych
with The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe as works
that have been seen as blueprints for colonial
practices at particular historical moments. Chinua Achebe (1988) has attacked what he sees as
the racism of Conrads novella, and this response
clearly informs a passage in his novel Arrow of God
(1974 [1964]), in which an insomniac English
administrator realizes that the distant throb of
the drums that he feels are ubiquitous in the
African night may be a product of his heatstricken brain (30). However, as in Achebes
earlier Things Fall Apart (1958), the novels main
way of contesting Conrads perceived racism is
the construction of an alternative historiography,

which uses local focalizers to represent Igbo
society.
The range of postcolonial responses to Conrad
has, however, been extremely varied and other
novelists, including Naipaul and Ng~
ug~ wa
Thiongo, have taken a more positive view of his
critique of colonialism, in both Heart of Darkness
and his fiction more generally. Naipaul (1980) has
spoken of Conrad as his most important precursor, suggesting that the Polish writers lack of a
sense of secure belonging and his relativistic
vision made him a particularly acute commentator on the social and psychological turbulence of
emerging modernity. Naipauls The Mimic Men
(1967) can be read as a latter-day Nostromo, while
A Bend in the River (1979) revisits the terrain of
Heart of Darkness. Ng~
ug~ has also acknowledged
his debt to Conrads questioning approach, and
his treatment of issues of heroism and betrayal
during the Mau Mau freedom struggle in Kenya,
in novels such as A Grain of Wheat (1967) and
Petals of Blood (1977), is comparable with Lord
Jim.
Heart of Darkness has also influenced several
novels in which a journey into a physical heartland, or through supposedly prehistoric terrain,
becomes a trope for an inner psychological journey and often for an investigation of national
identity. These include: two Patrick White novels
that fictionalize episodes in nineteenth-century
Australia history, Voss (1957) and A Fringe of
Leaves (1976); Wilson Harriss Palace of the Peacock (1960), in which a crew representing
Guyanas various ethnic groups journeys into the
countrys interior; and two Canadian novels that
explore gender identity along with aspects of
national and regional identity, Margaret
Atwoods Surfacing (1972) and Robert Kroetschs
Badlands (1975). Arun Joshis The Strange Case of
Billy Biswas (1971) relates the narrators quest to
find the eponymous Billy in a tribal area of India
where he has gone missing, a quest that parallels
Marlows journey to find Kurtz. Non-anglophone
African novels that draw on Heart of Darkness
include the Guinean-born Camara Layes The
Radiance of the King (1954; trans. 1956) and the
Sudanese-born Tayeb Salihs Season of Migration
to the North (1966; trans. 1969), which also draws
on Othello, the Shakespeare play which, along
with The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice,
has generated the most responses to his representation of race and alterity. Caryl Phillipss The
Nature of Blood (1997) brings Othello and Shylock, racial outsiders in cosmopolitan Renaissance Venice, together in a novel that links them
with Anne Franks story.
Among nineteenth-century novelists, the
Brontes and Dickens have attracted particular
attention from postcolonial writers. The Dominican-born Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
reclaims Bertha, the madwoman in the attic in
Jane Eyre, from her ghostly role in Charlotte
Brontes novel. Rhys takes Bertha, renamed Antoinette, back to her Caribbean Creole origins, but
avoids simply inverting the cultural binarism of
Jane Eyre by making her Rochester character a
prominent narrator. Brontean intertexts are also
prominent in Naipauls novel Guerrillas (1975),
which also alludes to John Richardsons Clarissa
and Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders. Maryse
Condes Windward Heights (1995; trans. 1998) is
a Guadeloupean Wuthering Heights.
Canadian responses to the Brontes have generally been more filiative. Margaret Atwoods Lady
Oracle (1976) includes parodies of English Romantic fiction, particularly Jane Eyre, in the
Costume Gothics its narrator secretly writes.
In Jane Urquharts Changing Heaven (1990), the
protagonist has a youthful fixation with Emily
Brontes work, which offers a vision of romantic
escape from the more mundane Canadian
landscape.
Great Expectations is the Dickens novel that has
provoked most responses outside England, particularly in Australasia. Peter Careys Jack Maggs
(1997) offers variations on the story of the returned convict Magwitch, whose arrival back in
England not only threatens the lifestyle of the Piplike gentleman he has created, but also leads to a
series of encounters with a writer, who he feels is
stealing his identity. The conclusion of Careys
postmodern novel reverses the cultural pattern
implicit in Great Expectations by stressing the
positive potential of Australia as a working
mans paradise rather than an antipodean hell
(White 1981), a view Dickens embodies in the fate
of David Copperfields Mr. Micawber. In Elizabeth
Jolleys Miss Peabodys Inheritance (1983), an
English spinster who corresponds with an Australian lesbian novelist imagines Australia as a
romantic outdoor environment that offers a com-
1079
plete contrast to her humdrum existence. In an

ironic reversal of canonical presumptions about
where culture is centered, Australia also becomes
the site of literature, and when Miss Peabody
finally journeys there, her Pip-like inheritance
involves assuming the novelists work as a writer.
In New Zealander Lloyd Joness Mister Pip (2006),
Mr. Watts, the last white man on an island in
Papua New Guinea, teaches the islands children
during a political crisis and brings stability into
their lives by reading them daily installments of
Great Expectations. He thereby creates an imaginative universe that allows them to escape to
Victorian England, while characters from Dickens
seem to migrate into their world. Like Jack Maggs,
Mister Pip offers numerous variations on
Dickenss novel, but whereas Careys story finally
has an Australian agenda, Joness tale is primarily
concerned with narratives capacity to convey its
listeners into imaginative worlds; reading Dickens
is complemented by the islanders stories of their
everyday lives.
Caryl Phillips draws on Austens Mansfield
Park, a novel in which the wealth of the English
country house is dependent on Caribbean slavery, in A State of Independence (1986). Laura
Fishs Strange Music (2008), which imagines
episodes from the pre-Browning life of Elizabeth
Barrett, exposes the iniquities of Jamaican plantation society. Responses to canonical twentiethcentury works include the Maori writer Witi
Ihimaeras short story collection Dear Miss
Mansfield (1989), an ironic homage to his New
Zealand-born compatriot Katherine Mansfield,
in which the events of Mansfield stories such as
The Garden Party are seen from very different
viewpoints. Salman Rushdies Midnights Children
(1981) offers a Kim-like encyclopedic vision of
India, while also embracing several other Western
intertexts, including Laurence Sternes Tristram
Shandy and G
unter Grasss Tin Drum. Midnights
Children also alludes to a broad range of other
works, including The Ramayana, The Arabian
Nights, and Gabriel Garca Marquezs One
Hundred Years of Solitude, to a point where its
tissue of past citations makes it futile to attempt
to position the novel in relation to any particular
pre-text or parent tradition.
Much the same is true of the less eclectic
Bengali-born Sunetra Guptas novel A Sin of
Colour (1999). Moving between Oxford and
1080
Calcutta, the novel takes its departure point from

Daphne du Mauriers Rebecca: like the eponymous dead first wife of du Mauriers novel, one of
the main characters appears to have drowned.
This, though, is only one way in which Gupta
appropriates aspects of Rebecca. She also tells the
story of an Englishwoman taken to Bengal by an
Indian husband who is infatuated with his elder
brothers wife the Rebecca figure. Furthermore,
the house in India is called Mandalay, which
suggests du Mauriers Manderley but also
signifies a town geographically nearer Bengal,
again highlighting the oblique relationship
between Rebecca and its supposed derivative.
The elements appropriated from du Mauriers
novels are intertwined with Bengali intertexts,
notably from Tagore, while the title of the novel
is taken from Hard Heart, a play by the English
poet, George Barker. Gupta adopts influences at
will, forming her own mongrelized tradition
with little sense of a need to respect or dispute
Rebecca.
Like many other responses to canonical English
narratives, A Sin of Colour resists easy interpretation through the lens of its relationship to a
supposed parent text. Foe draws on multiple
Defoe narratives; Jack Maggs responds to
Dickenss biography and several of his works
other than Great Expectations; Wide Sargasso Sea
expands beyond the parameters set by its relationship with Jane Eyre, incorporating elements
from Rhyss Dominican compatriot, Phyllis
Allfreys novel The Orchid House (1953) and her
own life. Responses to canonical narratives invariably send their readers back to the English
originals, making them unstable objects that
now demand to be reread through prisms suggested by their contexts.
Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); English
Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF);
Historical Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
Achebe, C. (1974). Arrow of God [1964], 2nd edn.
London: Heinemann.
Achebe, C. (1988). Hopes and Impediments: Selected
Essays, 19651987. London: Heinemann.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1989).

The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Ball, J. C. (2005). Canadian Crusoes from Sea to Sea:
The Oceanic Communities of Douglas Glovers Elle
and Yann Martels Life of Pi. In C. Kanaganayakam
(ed.), Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of
Canadian Literature. Toronto: TSAR, pp. 85103.
Brydon, D. (1984). Re-Writing the Tempest. WLWE
23(1), 7588.
Caminero-Santangelo, B. (2005). African Fiction and
Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Eliot, T. S. (1932). Selected Essays, 19171932. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. C. L.
Markmann). London: Pluto. (Original work
published 1952.)
Farn, R. (2005). Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of
Heart of Darkness: A Century of Dialogue with
Joseph Conrad. Boca Raton, FL: Dissertation.com.
Green, M. (1990). The Robinson Crusoe Story.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Hamner, R. D. (ed.) (1990). Joseph Conrad: Third World
Perspectives. Washington, DC: Three Continents.
Hamner, R. D. (ed.) (1993). Critical Perspectives on
Derek Walcott. Washington, DC: Three Continents.
Lamming, G. (1960). The Pleasures of Exile. London:
Michael Joseph.
Mannoni, O. (1956). Prospero and Caliban: The
Psychology of Colonization (trans. P. Powesland).
London: Methuen. (Original work published 1950.)
Naipaul, V. S. (1972). The Overcrowded Barracoon.
London: Deutsch.
Naipaul, V. S. (1980). The Return of Eva Peron with the
Killings in Trinidad. London: Deutsch.
Rushdie, S. (1982). The Empire Writes Back with a
Vengeance. Times (July 3).
Said, E. (1984). The World, the Text, and the Critic.
Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Stoneman, P. (1996). Bronte Transformations: The
Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Thieme, J. (1987). The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion
in V. S. Naipauls Fiction. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo;
London: Hansib.
Thieme, J. (2001). Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back
to the Canon. London: Continuum.
Tiffin, H. (1987). Post-Colonial Literatures and
Counter-Discourse. Kunapipi, 9(3), 1734.
Walcott, D. (1973). Another Life. London: Jonathan
Cape.
FILM/TELEVISION ADAPTATION AND FICTION
White, R. (1981). Inventing Australia. Sydney: Allen and

Unwin.
Young, R. (ed.) (1981). Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader. Boston: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Film/Television Adaptation
and Fiction
MIGUEL MOTA
Film adaptations of literary texts can be traced

back to the very early days of the commercial
cinema, and countless numbers of twentieth-century works of world fiction in English have found
themselves adapted and reproduced for the visual
medium of film and, later, television. The literary
and film industries have both undoubtedly
benefited from this relationship between media;
yet the affiliation, invested as it is in both aesthetic
and economic considerations, has often also been
highly fraught and contentious. The relationship
has been necessarily symbiotic, and as such has
been marked since its inception by complications
arising from the collision between different ideological, cultural, and economic spaces.
The earliest instance of a film adaptation of an
English-language literary work outside Britain
and the US can be found in Australia, where the
practice can be traced back to the second feature
film produced in that country, Robbery under
Arms (1907; dir. Charles MacMahon), based on
Rolf Boldrewoods 1889 classic colonial novel.
Indeed, during the silent film era, Australian
filmmakers made consistent use of literary
sources, with Robbery under Arms and Marcus
Clarkes 1874 penal novel, For the Term of
His Natural Life, each being adapted several times.
Other notable film adaptations during this early
period included Raymond Longfords film adaptations of Steele Rudds late nineteenth-century
short stories as On Our Selection (1920) and
New Selection (1921); and his classic 1919 silent
film, The Sentimental Bloke, based on C. J.
Denniss 1915 verse narrative, The Songs of a
Sentimental Bloke.
Early silent film producers in other colonial
nations also made strategic use of literary sources,
though perhaps not as prolifically. In Canada,
Ernest Shipman directed a number of film adap-
1081
tations of popular pioneer novels in the early

1920s, the most notable perhaps being the 1919
silent film classic, Back to Gods Country, from a
short story by the popular American writer James
Oliver Curwood. In South Africa, an energetic
silent film industry spearheaded by African Film
Productions made occasional use of literary
sources, as in King Solomons Mines (1918) and
Allan Quatermain (1919), both based on H. Rider
Haggards novels; or adaptations of John
Buchans 1910 novel Prester John (1920), and
Henry de Vere Stacpooles 1908 novel The Blue
Lagoon (1923).
The introduction of sound into film production did little to stem the number of adaptations
of literary sources. In South Africa, the Afrikaner
nationalist movement in the late 1930s sought to
utilize the film industry as a medium of resistance
against colonialism, though literary sources,
when used, were largely Afrikaans. In English,
notable examples include Katrina (1969), based
on Basil Warners 1959 play Try for White. The
1980s witnessed a plethora of films based on
earlier literary texts that were highly critical of
apartheid and traditional representations of
South African history: The Honey Bird (1980; dir.
Alan Nathanson), based on a short story by Stuart
Cloete; Jock of the Bushveld (1986; dir. Gray
Hofmeyr), based on Percy Fitzpatricks 1907
novel; as well as Fielas Child (1987) and Circles
in the Forest (1988), both directed by Regardt van
den Bergh and based on works by Dalene Matthee.
More recently, in 1995, Alan Patons Cry, the
Beloved Country was readapted for the screen by
director Darrell Roodt (a 1951 version had been
directed by Zoltan Korda); and the film adaptation of J. M. Coetzees 1999 novel, Disgrace,
directed by Anna Maria Monticelli, premiered at
the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.
In other British colonies in Africa, early attempts by Britain to establish a film industry
through Colonial Film Units resulted largely in
the production of propaganda films. Since then,
the situation has varied across nations. Ghana, for
example, saw little increase in the production of
feature films even after independence. The creation of television programming in Nigeria, on the
other hand, resulted in a much more active film
industry. Notable films drawn from literary
sources include Francis Oladeles adaptation of
Wole Soyinkas play Kongis Harvest (1967), as
1082
well as his Bullfrog in the Sun (1972), based on

Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (1958). Other
film adaptations of note include Ola Balogums
Cry Freedom (1981), based on Meja Mwangis
1974 novel Carcase for Hounds; and Aiye (1979;
dir. Ola Balogum), based on a play written by
Chief Herbert Ogunde.
In New Zealand, where film production was
almost non-existent prior to the 1970s, film adaptations of literary works were especially prominent in the early days of a late-burgeoning industry in which the cultural capital of literary works
was instrumental in getting films made. The mid1970s saw screen adaptations of short stories by
Katherine Mansfield, John A. Lee, Maurice Duggan, Barry Crump, Maurice Shadbolt, and Witi
Ihimaera produced for the Winners and Losers
series on New Zealand television. And Ian Crosss
1957 novel The God Boy was adapted for television
in 1976. Television adaptations waned with the
decrease in government support beginning in the
1980s, but some exceptions can still be found,
such as, for example, Jane Campions 1990 internationally acclaimed TV adaptation of Janet
Frames autobiography as An Angel at My Table.
Notable film adaptations produced for theatrical
release have included Sleeping Dogs (1977; dir. Ian
Mune and Roger Donaldson), from C. K. Steads
1971 novel Smiths Dream; A State of Siege (1978;
dir. Timothy White and Vincent Ward), based on
Frames 1966 novel; Other Halves (1984; dir. John
Laing), adapted by Sue McCauley from the 1982
novel; and Came a Hot Friday (1985; dir. Ian
Mune) from Ronald Hugh Morriesons 1964
novel. Other more recent examples include Once
Were Warriors (1994; dir. Lee Tamahori), based
on Alan Duffs 1990 novel; and Niki Caros 2002
film Whale Rider, adapted from Witi Ihimaeras
1987 novel of the same name.
In neighboring Australia, the introduction of
sound resulted initially in an increase in original
screenplays and a move away from literary sources.
This trend was relatively short-lived, though, and
the 1950s saw a marked return to literary adaptations. Robbery under Arms was again adapted in
1957 by British director Leslie Norman, who
would also adapt DArcy Nilands The Shiralee
that same year and Ray Lawlers Summer of the
Seventeenth Doll in 1959. Other notable adaptations made during this period include Stanley
Kramers film version of Nevil Shutes On the
Beach (1959; remade for television in 2000); and

Fred Zinnemanns adaptation of Jon Clearys The
Sundowners (1960). Australian fiction would continue to serve as fertile ground for filmmakers in
the 1960s. Michael Powell directed versions of
John OGradys Theyre a Weird Mob (1966) and
Norman Lindsays Age of Consent (1969), and
these would give way to some of the seminal
adaptations made during the Australian film revival of the 1970s and 1980s, including Ted
Kotcheffs 1971 film of Kenneth Cooks 1961 novel
Wake in Fright; Nicolas Roegs 1971 version of
Vance Marshalls 1959 novel Walkabout; and Peter
Weirs Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), based on
Joan Lindsays 1967 novel. Other significant literary works adapted for the screen during this vibrant period include: Thomas Keneallys The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978; dir. Fred Schepisi); Miles Franklins My Brilliant Career (1979;
dir. Gillian Armstrong); A. B. Pattersons The Man
from Snowy River (1982; dir. George Miller); and
Christopher Kochs The Year of Living Dangerously
(1982; dir. David Weir). Peter Careys first and
third novels have also been adapted for film: Bliss
was directed by Ray Lawrence in 1985 and Oscar
and Lucinda by Gillian Armstrong in 1997.
Thomas Keneallys Booker Prize-winning novel
Schindlers Ark was famously adapted in 1993 by
Steven Spielberg into Schindlers List. More recent
notable adaptations include Looking for Alibrandi
(2000; dir. Kate Woods), based on the novel by
Melina Marchetta; Rabbit-Proof Fence, Phillip
Noyces 2002 adaptation of Doris Pilkington
Garimaras Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence; Candy
(2006; dir. Neil Armfield), based on the novel by
Luke Davies; and December Boys (2007; dir. Rod
Hardy), from the novel by Michael Noonan.
In Canada, where the film culture has from its
infancy been subject to competing influences
from the US and Britain, there is nevertheless a
significant history of film adaptations of Canadian literary texts in English, much of it at first
centered around the National Film Board (NFB)
and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
(CBC). When the NFB expanded its previous
focus on documentaries by branching off into
the making of fiction films in the 1960s, it began
by adapting the short stories of such seminal
English Canadian writers as W. O. Mitchell and
Sinclair Ross, a practice that continued until
the late 1990s. At the same time, once CBCs
television drama ceased largely to be broadcast

live from the studio, it too drew on literary
sources for such productions as The Whiteoaks
of Jalna (19712), written for television by novelist Timothy Findley from the novels of Mazo de la
Roche. Similarly, the 1980s saw highly successful
adaptations of L. M. Montgomerys Anne of
Green Gables and other works by director Kevin
Sullivan for the CBC. With the advent of increased
federal government funding for private film production in the late 1960s, adaptations of literary
texts continued to offer for some the best hopes of
commercial success. Literary works adapted for
the screen during this period included Mordecai
Richlers The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
(1974; dir. Ted Kotcheff); Hugh MacLennans
Two Solitudes (1978; dir. Lionel Chetwynd); Margaret Atwoods Surfacing (1981; dir. Claude Jutra); and Timothy Findleys The Wars (1983; dir.
Robin Phillips). The 1980s also saw an often
fruitful integration of theatrical and television
production and distribution that resulted, for
example, in film adaptations of short stories
marketed both for television and for educational
settings. In this context, Toronto-based Atlantis
Films adapted short stories by Callaghan, Richler,
Ross, Hugh Garner, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, and others for the screen. As federal funding
decreased during the 1990s and the NFB returned
to its roots in documentary and animation, and as
more recent cuts in government support threaten
the existence of Canadian television drama, English Canadian literary works nevertheless continue to be broadly adapted, though often produced elsewhere or in co-production with other
countries. Thus, the 1990 film adaptation of
Atwoods The Handmaids Tale is an American
production scripted by Harold Pinter and directed by Volker Schl
ondorff with an international
cast; Rohinton Mistrys 1991 novel Such a Long
Journey was turned in 2000 into a British
Canadian co-production directed by Icelandic
Canadian Sturla Gunnarsson; and Michael
Ondaatjes The English Patient was adapted in
1996 by the British director Anthony Minghella
in a joint UKUSAItaly production. Still, there
are occasional exceptions to the above, as in
Toronto director Bruce McDonalds mock-documentary film adaptation of Vancouver writer
Michael Turners novel Hard Core Logo, an independent Canadian production released in 1996.
1083
Numerous works of Indian English literature

have also been adapted to film, though occasionally, as in the case of R. K. Narayan, the resulting
film has been produced in another language such
as Hindi. Narayans 1949 novel Mr. Sampath, for
example, was adapted into two film versions by
Vijay Anand in 1965, one in Hindi and another in
English, the latter co-scripted by Pearl S. Buck.
Adaptations of works from India or Pakistan
originally written in English are relatively fewer
in number then, though they certainly exist:
Khushwant Singhs 1956 novel Train to Pakistan
was adapted by Pamela Rooks in 1997; and Deepa
Mehtas 1999 film Earth adapts Pakistani writer
Bapsi Sidhwas 1988 novel Ice-Candy-Man (published in the US as Cracking India). Interestingly,
Mehtas later film Water (2005) was adapted into
literary form by Sidhwa as Water: A Novel (2006).
Though not Indian by birth or citizenship, Ruth
Prawer Jhabvala might be included in this discussion on the basis of two of her novels based and
written in India which she adapted to film in
collaboration with the producerdirector team of
Ismail Merchant and James Ivory: The Householder (1963) and Heat and Dust (1983). The
highly prolific and commercially successful
Merchant Ivory Productions would also adapt
Anita Desais 1984 novel In Custody in 1993. More
recent notable adaptations of Indian English literature include Chitralekha Banerjee Divakarunis
1997 novel The Mistress of Spies, adapted by Paul
Mayeda Berges in 2005; and Vikas Swarups 2005
novel Q and A, directed by Danny Boyle and
released in 2008 as the Oscar-winning Slumdog
Millionaire.
English-language writers from the Caribbean
have also seen their works adapted into film,
though perhaps not as often as it might be hoped.
The following are notable examples. Dominican
novelist Phyllis Shand Allfreys The Orchid House
(1953) was successfully produced as a TV miniseries for Britains Channel 4 in 1991. The white
Trinidadian writer Ian McDonald saw his 1969
novel The Humming-Bird Tree adapted for television in a 1992 BBC production. Indo-Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winner V. S. Naipauls 1957
novel The Mystic Masseur was turned into a film
directed by Ismail Merchant and scripted by
British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips in 2001.
Guyanese writer E. R. Braithwaites 1959 novel To
Sir, with Love became the memorable 1967 film
1084
directed by James Clavell and starring Sidney

Poitier. And Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhyss classic
1966 response to Jane Eyre, was adapted twice,
first as a theatrical film (1993; dir. John Duigan)
and then as a television production for the BBC
(2006; dir. Brendan Maher).
The many directors and screenwriters responsible for these and other film and television
adaptations of literary works are essentially translating a story told in one medium into one told in
another, very different one, and various theoretical and cultural issues surround their discursive
practice. The issue of fidelity to the original
text is but one of a number of critical or ideological questions raised by the unique textual and
cultural relationships produced by the act of
adaptation. Significant too, of course, is the culture within which the adaptation is produced,
disseminated, and consumed (an adaptation
made in Hollywood for a mass viewing audience
may function quite differently from one produced
independently for, say, an avant-garde coterie or a
more limited national or regional audience); the
aims and values of the filmmakers (some adaptations may aim uncritically at a faithful representation of the literary text, while others may
make the film a vehicle for a critique either of the
ideological positions or values associated with the
literary work being adapted or of twentiethcentury aesthetics or politics more generally); and
even the cultural and economic capital of individual authors, actors, and/or directors (in which
the cultural status of one or more of these may
impose itself disproportionately on both the
production and reception of the adaptation).
However complex and variable the relationship
between literary text and film adaptation, the
issue of fidelity, the extent to which the film
adaptation is true to the original literary
work, has continued to haunt this area of cultural
production. Though adaptations can potentially
function as fruitful sites of comparative investigation into the discursive practices of both literary
and film cultures, much commentary still remains
mired, either explicitly or implicitly, in considerations of fidelity, thereby deferring ultimately,
much to the consternation of many film scholars,
to the authority, value, and prestige of the literary
text. Of course, the very term adaptation assumes a certain artistic and cultural deference, if
not subjection, of the later film to the earlier
literary work. Was the lukewarm critical response

to Ismail Merchant and Caryl Phillipss film of
Naipauls The Mystic Masseur due to some inherent failing in the film? Or was the adaptation
always doomed to fall at least somewhat short of
the original great literary Work of a great literary
Author? Naipaul, of course, has the advantage of
functioning as a significant cultural and historical
icon across a wide array of discursive spaces.
Recognized by many who may never have read
his actual books, Naipaul, at least in the late
twentieth century, might still have possessed enough cultural capital to outmaneuver Phillips and
even Merchant, a film producer and director with
significant cultural capital of his own.
It should be clear from the above that even
when remaining generally within the realm of
fidelity studies, discussions of adaptation inevitably must grapple with some of the broader
discursive practices raised by the relationships
among the media and discourses in question. As
early as 1984, Christopher Orr, citing Roland
Barthess famous view of the text as a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres
of culture, proposed a view of the film adaptation as Barthess multi-dimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash (146). Such a view, of course,
posits both original text and adaptation as
intertexts, and affords authority or privilege to
neither. In his attempt to transcend the limitations of fidelity studies, Orr draws not only on
Barthes but also on John Ellis, who in 1982 argued
that the film adaptation should draw upon the
memory of the novel, a memory that can derive
from actual reading, or, as is more likely with a
classic of literature, a generally circulated cultural
memory. . . . The successful adaptation is the one
that is able to replace the memory of the novel
(3). By Elliss definition, then, the success of James
Clavells To Sir, with Love, or Volker Schl
ondorffs
The Handmaids Tale, or John Duigans Wide
Sargasso Sea, or Gillian Armstrongs Oscar and
Lucinda will depend on each films ability to
replace in the viewer the cultural memory of
Braithwaites, Atwoods, Rhyss, and Careys novels. Clearly, the issue here becomes not so much
fidelity to an original source as a struggle for a
kind of jurisdiction over cultural memory, a
struggle that is inevitably dependent on and subject to a wide array of cultural, historical,
FINDLEY, TIMOTHY
economic, and political factors, and that seems

particularly relevant in the context of postcolonial
studies.
Narratives (WF); The Film Industry
and Fiction (BIF); Television and Fiction (AF)

Aragay, M. (ed.) (2005). Books in Motion: Adaptation,
Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image,
Music, Text (trans. S. Heath). London: Fontana, pp.
14248.
Ellis, J. (1982). The Literary Adaptation: An
Introduction. Screen, 23(1), 35.
Kranz, D. L., & Mellerski, N. C. (eds.) (2008). In/
Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars.
Leitch, T. (2007). Film Adaptation and Its Discontents:
From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the
Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon.
Naremore, J. (ed.) (2000). Film Adaptation. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Orr, C. (1984). The Discourse on Adaptation: A Review.
Wide Angle, 6(2), 726.
Sanders, J. (2006). Adaptation and Appropriation.
London: Routledge.
Stam, R., & and Raengo, A. (eds.) (2005). Literature and
Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film
Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Welsh, J. M., & Lev, P. (eds.) (2007). The Literature/
Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow.
Findley, Timothy
LORRAINE YORK
When Timothy Findley died in 2002, several

tributes quoted his self-description as a dedicated anti-fascist writer and thinker (Benson 1986).
And though this was clearly true, as evinced by his
fictional portraits of the terrors of Nazi ideology
in novels like The Butterfly Plague (1969) and
Famous Last Words (1981), Findleys label was
accurate in a broader sense. His oeuvre 10
novels, a novella, seven plays, three collections of
stories, three autobiographical collections, and
1085
numerous television and radio scripts was devoted to an exploration of the will to power and its
costs. In a prose style that placed point-blank,
emphatic statement next to passages of flowing,
baroque theatricality, Findley produced a fiction
of dramatic statement that captured many readers. His plays, though slower to win favor with
audiences, culminated in the acclaimed productions of Elizabeth Rex (2003a) in the last two years
of his life.
Born in Torontos affluent Rosedale neighborhood on October 30, 1930, Findley never forgot
the citys Depression aura of declining gentility: its
pressures, hypocrisies, and ruthlessness. It appears
in many of his writings, from the fearful family that
does not live on the right side of Yonge Street in
Stones to the grasping family members jockeying for financial supremacy in Headhunter (1993).
The young Findley felt increasingly alien in this
milieu; though he was aware from childhood that
his primary attraction was to men, his sexuality
became the focus of harsh criticism once he
reached adolescence. He further incurred his
fathers ire by announcing that he wished to
pursue a career in dance a far cry from his
grandfathers position as president of MasseyHarris, the farm implements manufacturer, or
his fathers profession as a stockbroker. At any
rate, a fused disc put an end to those aspirations,
and Findley turned to acting, which he saw as an
alternate means of creating meaningful gesture.
This career, too, came to an end, in spite of
Findleys participation in the Stratford Shakespeare Festivals first season in 1953 and his
touring with Thornton Wilders The Matchmaker
in the United States and Britain the following
year. It was while on tour that, on a friendly
challenge, he showed a short story to the actress
Ruth Gordon, who urged him to pursue a career in
writing.
Findleys long writing career, like those of other
Canadian writers of his generation, formed a
narrative about the nature of publishing in Canada. His first two novels, The Last of the Crazy
People (1967) and The Butterfly Plague, were
rejected by Canadian publishers, and, once published elsewhere, received lukewarm reviews in his
native country. Findley recalled that, at that time,
the publisher Macmillan in Toronto sent mail to
him care of his American publishers, unaware that
he was living with his companion, Bill Whitehead,
1086
FINDLEY, TIMOTHY
in the countryside nearby. All this would change

in 1977, with the publication of The Wars, a novel
about a young Canadian World War I soldiers act
of conscientious disobedience, which brought
Findley the first of his Governor Generals Awards
(Canadas highest literary honor). During the
1970s, Canadians were directing renewed attention to their culture, in the wake of the celebrations marking the centennial of their confederation in 1967, and writers were beginning to reap
the benefits of increased government funding
under the auspices of the Canada Council for the
Arts (founded in 1957). Findley won acclaim
abroad with his novels Famous Last Words and
Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984b) during the
1980s, a decade that saw a dramatic increase in the
exporting of Canadian writing. In the last years of
his life, he and Whitehead spent their summers in
Stratford, Ontario, where Findleys dramatic career had gained a foothold 40 years previously,
and their winters in a small house near the village
of Cotignac in France. It was there that he died of
congestive heart failure in 2002.
Findleys early works were harshly criticized by
Canadian reviewers for being derivative of American Southern Gothic writers such as Tennessee
Williams and Carson McCullers. His first novel,
The Last of the Crazy People, set the stage in this
regard: an oppressive summer, a cursed family,
madness, an explosion of violence. The innocent
child Hooker Winslow is moved, by a sequence of
logical inferences, to commit what most would
deem an unspeakable atrocity: the killing of family members. Reviewers at the time denied that
such epic fatalism could unfold in a Canadian
setting. Now, ironically, Findleys early work is
often credited as an early example of what has
since been hailed as Southern Ontario Gothic in
the work of writers such as Alice Munro, Jane
Urquhart, and Graeme Gibson. Rather than being
slavishly imitative, in The Last of the Crazy People
and other early fictions like Lemonade and
About Effie, Findley self-consciously performs
Southern Gothic as an effort to uncover a language for the concerns that would absorb him for
the rest of his career: the capacity of oppressive
families to stifle natural desires and sacrifice their
children on the altars of propriety; the madness
that is often a form of unrecognized protest
against that oppression; the regulation of
sexualities.
Like The Wars, The Last of the Crazy People

tended toward a fairly spare style of dramatic
statement, often drawing upon the rhetorical
power of short, stabbing sentences to convey the
atrocities of power abused. With The Butterfly
Plague, Findley immersed himself in a more baroque, consciously excessive style that would
characterize his later works, beginning with Famous Last Words, and culminating in novels like
the nightmarish Headhunter in 1993 and Pilgrim
in 1999. In all of these works, Findley interweaves
a large, nearly unwieldy cast of characters, often
intertwining those who are purely fictional with
others who are based, however fictionally, on
historical figures. This mesh often suggests a net
of intrigue, a suffocating fascistic cabal of interests: another murderous family, in effect. In the
case of The Butterfly Plague, we once again have
the oppressive patriarchal family, as captured in
former Hollywood director George Damroschs
denial of the hemophilia and gayness of his son,
Adolphus/Dolly. Nazi Germany and Hollywoods
rage for perfection become intertwined in the
story of this family, through the narrative of
Dollys sister Ruth, a hemophiliac former Olympic swimmer who falls under the spell of her Nazi
trainer.
In this early fiction, too, Findleys characteristic
subversion of sexual regulation is already fully
formed. He plays off Dollys shame at his unacknowledged sexuality against the gleeful disruption of sexual binaries in the figure of Octavius,
whose camp performances as Mother before
his mirror are a welcome source of sexual invention in a world of repressive denial. Clearly this
is the forerunner of Findleys much celebrated
figure Lucy in Not Wanted on the Voyage:
Lucifer performed in binary-bursting sexual
kabuki as a seven-foot-tall, sexually indeterminate angel.
The Wars, Findleys breakthrough novel, for all
its stylistic restraint, retains a fascination with
repressive power mongering and sexual regulation. The wars to which the young Robert Ross
commits himself become the parallel public enactment of repressive domestic orders. And one
source of repression is compulsory heterosexuality; Ross, who shares the name of Oscar Wildes
most faithful friend and former lover, finds himself alienated by the role of male warrior that he is
conscripted into. As in Findleys bravura retelling
FINDLEY, TIMOTHY
of the Noah story in Not Wanted, the rejection of

the heterosexual warrior script is signaled by an
alliance with the animal world; in this respect,
Robert Ross is the forerunner of Findleys sensitive revolutionary Ham in Not Wanted.
When Findleys Famous Last Words appeared
in 1981, the academic community was caught up
in the postmodern querying of monolithic historical narratives, and this novel seemed to partake of the zeitgeist. Once again mixing historical
and fictional characters, Findley has two readers
of Hugh Selwyn Mauberleys journals, Ezra
Pounds poetic creation, debate his conversion
to fascism. Complicating some of his earlier
fictions seeming dualism between the imaginative figure and the fascistic patriarch, Findley asks
what happens when an artist, who should logically
stand with the free-ranging imagination, embraces a fascism that seeks to curb human
diversity.
Findleys later works reveal an intensification of
his interest in the psyche, and in the dynamics of
psychological analysis and madness. Headhunter,
set in a futuristic Toronto, uncovers another
murderous family: a patriarchal cabal of child
abusers, abetted by the director of a prestigious
psychological institute. The abuse of children
parallels the draconian treatment of the institutes
patients. One of those patients, Lilah Kemp, is
an authorial figure: her madness consists in
conjuring characters from literary texts into her
world much as Findley has done in this richly
intertextual novel. (Indeed, in one tongue-incheek sequence, we read the transcript of a therapy
session with a certain Findley, a writer.)
Moving from the future back into history in
The Piano Mans Daughter (1995), Findley returns
to early twentieth-century Toronto, and another
family tested by the challenges of human variability. Lily Kilworth, an unconventional, epileptic
child, is another of Findleys gifted mad seers, only
in this novel the emphasis falls on integration
rather than rejection; Charlie, her grown son,
finally embraces her with pride.
Findleys plays explore much the same territory
as his fiction: the redemptive nature of much of
what is labeled madness, the suppression of diversity, the distorting role of power in public life.
All of these concerns meld effectively in his late
play, Elizabeth Rex (2003a), wherein Elizabeth
and Shakespeares actors confront each others
1087
performative masks. One actor, a man noted for

performing female roles, daringly chides the
monarch for hiding her femininity much as he
hides his masculinity on stage. Set on the night
before Elizabeths lover Essex is to be executed, the
actors use their unparalleled license to speak
truth to power, daring even those who have
power of life and death to practice reconciliation
rather than banishment.
Such was the creative aim of Timothy Findley
himself. As he once reflected of his lifes work,
The subject here is all of us; all of us and
reconciliation; all of us and reconciliation with
who we are the whole of who we are and what
becomes of us when others break us into parts
(Findley 1987).
The City in Fiction (WF); Film/Television
Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction
(WF); Munro, Alice (WF); The Publishing
Industry and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative
Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Urquhart, Jane (WF)

Bailey, A., & Grandy, K. (ed.) (1998). Paying Attention:
Critical Essays on Timothy Findley. Toronto: ECW.
(Reprint of Essays on Canadian Writing, 64.)
Benson, E. (1986). Interview with Timothy Findley.
World Literature Written in English, 26(1), 10715.
Findley, T. (1967). The Last of the Crazy People. London:
Macdonald.
Findley, T. (1969). The Butterfly Plague. New York:
Viking.
Findley, T. (1977a). Can You See Me Yet? Vancouver:
Talonbooks.
Findley, T. (1977b). The Wars. Toronto: Clarke Irwin.
Findley, T. (1981). Famous Last Words. Toronto: Clarke
Irwin.
Findley, T. (1984a). Dinner Along the Amazon.
Markham, ON: Penguin.
Findley, T. (1984b). Not Wanted on the Voyage.
Toronto: Viking.
Findley, T. (1986). The Telling of Lies. Toronto: Penguin.
Findley, T. (1987). My Final Hour: An Address to the
Philosophy Society, Trent University, Monday, 26
Jan., 1987. Journal of Canadian Studies, 22(1), 516.
Findley, T. (1988). Stones. Markham, ON: Penguin.
Findley, T. (1990). Inside Memory: Pages from a Writers
Workbook. Toronto: HarperCollins.
Findley, T. (1993). Headhunter. Toronto:
HarperCollins.
1088
FRAME, JANET
Findley, T. (1994). The Trials of Ezra Pound. Winnipeg:

Blizzard.
Findley, T. (1995). The Piano Mans Daughter. Toronto:
HarperCollins.
Findley, T. (1996). You Went Away. Toronto:
HarperCollins.
Findley, T. (1997). Dust to Dust. Toronto:
HarperCollins.
Findley, T. (1999). Pilgrim. Toronto: HarperColllins.
Findley, T. (2001). Spadework. Toronto: HarperCollins.
Findley, T. (2003a). Elizabeth Rex. Toronto:
HarperCollins.
Findley, T. (2003b). Journeyman: Travels with a Writer
(ed. William Whitehead). Toronto:
HarperFlamingo.
Gabriel, B. (1995). Performing the Bent Text: Fascism
and the Regulation of Sexualities in Timothy
Findleys The Butterfly Plague. English Studies in
Canada, 21(2), 22750.
Grandy, K. (1998). Performed and Performing Selves in
Findleys Drama. Essays on Canadian Writing, 64,
181200.
Pennee, D. (1991). Moral Metafiction: Counterdiscourse
in the Novels of Timothy Findley. Toronto: ECW.
Phillips, R. (dir.) (1983). The Wars. Nielsen-Ferns and
the National Film Board.
Sullivan, K. (dir.) (2003). The Piano Mans Daughter.
Sullivan Entertainment.
Frame, Janet
PATRICK EVANS
Janet Frame is remembered as New Zealands

most idiosyncratic writer, producing novels,
short stories, a childrens book, and poetry that
won numerous awards and, in 2003, a shortlisting
for the Nobel Prize; but she described herself, late
in life, as her countrys greatest unread author. In
the lengthening perspective of her work since her
death in January 2004, she can be seen as a writer
whose life story, fleetingly implicit in her earlier
work but specifically explored in later autobiographical projects, gave at least as significant an
account of her times as did those more infrequent
parts of her art that seemed not to refer to it. In
earlier phases of her career she represented something of her generations determined reaction to
New Zealands insular cultural nationalism. Although she never stopped criticizing this insularity in her work, in later writing she became less
obviously a frustrated provincial modernist and
more nearly (although not completely or only) a
postmodernist writer who enjoyed playing games

in fiction and poetry. In the end, she was her own
brilliant work of art, renaming herself by deed poll
in 1958 Nene Janet Paterson Clutha (after the
Maori warrior Tamati Waka Nene), an artful
construction for Janet Frame to hide behind,
most particularly in her masterly three-volume
An Autobiography (1989).
Frame was born on August 28, 1924 in Dunedin, in New Zealands South Island; her mother
had once served as a maid to Katherine Mansfields maternal grandparents. Her father was a
railway fireman; in 1931 he returned to his hometown of Oamaru, 50 miles up the coast from
Dunedin, with his wife and their five children
(Myrtle, Janet, George, Isabel, and June). Janet
was to stay in Oamaru for 12 formative years; for
the rest of her life, after she left Oamaru for
Dunedin, teachers college, and university early
in 1943, it was to be (after Poe) her Kingdom by
the Sea. This private, magical, unchanging imaginary realm she protected from prying journalists
and literary critics throughout her life, and peopled with characters who were often family members and early acquaintances barely changed beyond their names but disguised by being asserted,
always, as purely fictional.
Her first published story, University Entrance, for example, presents a teenaged girl, as
she herself had recently been, trying to get a small
sum of money out of someone who seems much
like the grumpy, unpredictable father of the later
autobiography. The brief stories of The Lagoon:
Stories (1951) circle around events that, years
later, Michael Kings official biography Wrestling
with the Angel (2000) would confirm as actually
having taken place the loss of her older sister
Myrtle in 1937 and her younger sister Isabel 10
years later, both by drowning; the onset of her
own mental illness and incarceration in psychiatric institutions that began in 1947 and ended only
in early 1955; the fear, brought about by institutionalization, of a loss of identity and particularly
of schizophrenia. Three decades later, she was still
writing close to home: the last novel she published
during her lifetime, The Carpathians (1988), is set
in a town that can be traced on a map of Levin, the
North Island community she lived near while
writing, and has a reclusive writer like herself as
its protagonist; her second posthumous publication, Towards Another Summer (2007), takes the
FRAME, JANET
reader back nearly half a century to a wintry,

furtive visit Frame made to the Manchester home
of the British writer Geoffrey Moorhouse. Never
fully fictional, never fully acknowledged as a
historical figure, Frame is as difficult to get near
in her own writing as she is difficult to get away
from. She always denied she wrote about herself
or her own life at all.
Frames long spell of almost continuous hospitalization over eight years from 1947 was her
central experience. It involved more than 200
bouts of electro-convulsive therapy and a threat
of a pre-frontal lobotomy that she claimed in her
autobiography was avoided only when her winning the Hubert Church Memorial Award for The
Lagoon persuaded the hospitals superintendent
to forbid the operation. Signing herself out in
1955 freed her to flee to Aucklands subtropical
climate, and particularly to the friendship of the
distinguished fiction writer Frank Sargeson, who
for over a year nurtured her and encouraged her
writing. Her first extended prose publication,
Owls Do Cry (1957), was written in five early
months of that stay: neither it nor her next two
publications were novels, as far as she was concerned, but rather explorations of her first 30
years, as it turned out: her relationships within her
family, her time in psychiatric hospitals, and her
first tremulous visit overseas in mid-1956, to
London.
Together, for all her anti-formalist protestations, these three novels look very much like a
trilogy devoted to her own family, fictionalized
under the name of Withers her own Portrait of
the Artist, built around a protagonist who,
throughout its course, changes names but not
essential character. Owls Do Cry turns about the
fact of Daphne Witherss impending lobotomy,
linked back imagistically to a rubbish fire in which
an older sister has died and which is figured as the
means by which a reductive, puritanical, and
unimaginative society imposes its mindlessness
on young children. The Withers family members
are divided into Frames own version of the saved
and the damned, with the inversion that it is
societys least valued members whom she most
values: Daphne, of course, but also her brother
Toby, caught between materialism and insight. It
is the books greatest achievement that, through
the passages of poetry that leaven its prose, the
reader is encouraged to learn how to think figu-
1089
ratively and how the world of the symbolic imagination actually works. Faces in the Water (1961)
is a less flamboyantly imaginative account of a
young womans time in hospital from initial
institutionalization through recovery, setback,
further recovery, and further setback to a clearly
ironic conclusion. Here, Istina Mavet is still obviously Daphne, who in turn is obviously the
author, so to speak; and so is Zoe Bryce, protagonist of The Edge of the Alphabet (1962), last of the
Withers trilogy, which brings back Toby from
Owls Do Cry to duplicate Frames own brother
Georges pursuit of her to London in 1957. Here,
the redemptive power of art seems much more
provisional and fragile, surviving in little more
than an image Zoe makes out of twisted silver
paper from a cigarette packet just before her
death, a prosaic grail of sorts but a grail
nonetheless.
By the time this early trilogy was published,
Frame was coming to the end of six years spent in
London, Ibiza, and Andorra and an alteration of
her perspective of the world that changed the tone
of her subsequent work all acknowledged as
novels now, proper fictions in their own right, and
with appropriately broader themes than her earlier writing shows. Though dissimilar in style and
approach, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963b)
and The Adaptable Man (1965) both show their
authors new interest in the impact of modernity
on the individual, particularly in that distinctive
expression of modernity that hung over the
northern hemisphere at the time: nuclear warfare.
At the end of Scented Gardens, the circle of yellow
flax that surrounds the fatal rubbish fire of Owls
Do Cry, and which later implies the circle of fire in
Daphnes brain under electro-convulsive therapy,
becomes a mushroom cloud. At the end of The
Adaptable Man, it becomes a falling chandelier
that kills or maims several characters seconds after
it has been connected to the electricity that represents the arrival of modernity at a Sussex
village. Intensive Care (1970) moves between
memories of the Great War and the furnace
evoking Auschwitz of a factory in which a main
character works, and concludes with a version of
the Nazis selection of Jews, called Naming Day
and conducted in a New Zealand setting. Daughter Buffalo (1972) focuses on a New York doctor
named Talbot Edelman who specializes in death
studies, which involves collecting the brains of
1090
FRAME, JANET
aborted fetuses and vivisecting his own pet dog till

it dies, all in direct connection to his Jewish
grandfathers experience of suffering and humiliation. Living in the Maniototo (1979) portrays a
similar figure who lives in Baltimore, modeled on
Frames friend John Money, a sexologist at Johns
Hopkins University. In all these works, echoes of
the Nazi era in Europe overwhelm any New
Zealand content.
These novels all demonstrate what became the
distinctive emphasis of Frames approach to the
subject of Western modernity: in effect her addressing of Webers famous argument that modernity disenchanted the world. Increasingly, her
work explored alternative ways of living, thinking,
and writing by which the world around her might
be made bearable or even transformed and redeemed. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of the imagination in bringing such alternatives about. At one level, this involved reimagining the form she worked in, and with which she
was never fully comfortable: hence a growing
interest in metafiction and the game-novel as
early as The Edge of the Alphabet a patterning
author called Thora Pattern keeps intruding past
the more traditional narrative with unexplained
marginal comments. In Scented Gardens she waits
till near its explosive conclusion to reveal that its
three apparent narrators, each of them seeking
some pattern or connection that might explain
their world, have all been imagined by the novels
actual narrator, an aged autistic woman. The
Adaptable Man is, famously, Frames response to
a publisher who naively wanted a best-selling
detective novel out of her: its victim and murderer
are revealed straight away and Frame then goes off
to pursue her real interests, the etymology of Old
and Middle English and the impact of Western
modernity on rural English life. And Daughter
Buffalo is far more than has been portrayed so far,
at one level a word game punning on jewel,
dual, and duel, among other verbal groupings, and with a bizarre episode in which gay
lovers adopt a buffalo at the local zoo. Living in the
Maniototo is her masterwork in this vein, with
characters supposedly dead coming back to life
and others supposedly real turning out to be
imaginary, as well as a character who disappears
entirely from the text while scrubbing his bath
with bleach. In The Carpathians, an astral body
called the Memory Star swings too close to Earth
and sucks speech and memory from the towns

inhabitants. In these novels she seems determined
to be as idiosyncratic and wildly imaginative as
possible in order to counter the numbing rationalism around her.
At another level, Frame sought to re-enchant
her world more directly, with a spiritual if not
necessarily an openly religious emphasis. The title
of An Angel at My Table (1984), the second
volume of her autobiographical trilogy, refers to
Rilkes redeeming Angel, which enters the world
and transforms its everydayness into the kind of
timeless paradise Frames art renders in the first
volume, To the Is-Land (1982). In much of this
autobiographical trilogy she explores aspects of
the creative imagination and the relationship of
the artist to her informing world, at the same time
unfolding a sequence of images of imposture,
ventriloquism, clothing, weaving, and creating
that bind the long project from beginning to end.
Central to this adventure in remembering is the
stunt whereby she ties the re-membering of her
older sister Myrtle (when Myrtles cropped-out
arm is airbrushed back into a posthumous photograph) to the liberating acceptance that all
real memories have an element of the factitious
in them. The more vivid the remembered world
she presents us and the more plausible and delightful it seems, the more we are reminded that it
is a world transformed into an earthly paradise
only by the heavenly magic of the Rilkean Artist
herself.
All Frames writing shows some interest in this
need to re-enchant the world through the imagination. But her whereabouts at the time of writing
always seemed to influence the emphasis and even
the quality of her execution, such that her writing
can be sorted into clear phases. If the Withers
trilogy represents a kind of juvenilia and Scented
Gardens and The Adaptable Man a European
phase, a further phase began when she returned
to New Zealand and Oamaru in 1963 following
the death of her father. She brought with her the
poetic, parabolic stories published as The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (1963a) and Snowman,
Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963c); but the
fiction she wrote in the following three years A
State of Siege (1966), written in Auckland, and The
Rainbirds (1968), written in Dunedin when she
was the 1965 Burns Fellow is diminished, more
personal than her prior writing and most
FRAME, JANET
obviously without the earlier emphasis on the

destructiveness of modernity. In A State of
Siege, a retired art teacher becomes increasingly
isolated in a small island cottage as an unknown
assailant flings stones against her windows. In
The Rainbirds, a man is hit by a car and killed
but comes to life again and is treated as a pariah,
in an obvious parable of her own alienation
from materialistic mid-century New Zealand as
someone who had lived close to death and to
death-in-life.
It was not until Frame began regularly escaping
to North America in 1967 that her writing began to
broaden back toward the larger and more humanitarian themes of her European fiction and enter a
fresh phase, one that was to occupy her for two
decades, in fiction that increasingly featured US
settings and protagonists. Her sole published childrens book, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun
(1969a), belongs to this period as does Intensive
Care; but Daughter Buffalo, Living in the Maniototo, and The Carpathians in effect form a closing
trilogy of novels that reflect her fascination with
North America, where she once described herself
as being closest to the human condition as it has
been lived in the twentieth century: an environment in which the fundamental processes of living
and dying were less euphemized than in her own
country, and in which she seems to have been
more fully able to confront the Conradian question of how to be. It is too facile, given Frames
interest in metafiction as early as The Adaptable
Man, to describe these novels simply as introducing a postmodern mode to her writing. But there is
undoubtedly a new freedom in them, a final
liberation from any sense of obligation to the
reader, and, indeed, a determination born perhaps out of frustration with a too literal-minded
local audience to baffle and confuse them even
more than she had done hitherto.
Frame won a remarkable number of prizes: the
Literary Fund awards for achievement in 1958 and
1970 and its Scholarship-in-Letters in 1964; the
Hubert Church Award for The Lagoon in 1952 and
Daughter Buffalo in 1973; the Watties Book of the
Year Award for the first and last volumes of her
autobiography, in 1983 and 1985; a New Zealand
Book Award for the second volume in 1984, and
for Living in the Maniototo in 1980 and The
Carpathians in 1989; in 1974 she was Katherine
Mansfield Fellow at Menton; in May 1978 she was
1091
awarded an honorary doctorate by Otago University; in 1986 she was made a Commander of the
British Empire, in 1984 the first recipient of the
Turnovsky Prize for Outstanding Achievement
in the Arts, and in 1988 the first Sargeson Fellow;
in 1990 she became a member of the Order of
New Zealand. In 1989 The Carpathians won the
Commonwealth Writers Prize, and her Nobel
shortlisting in 2003 followed annual recommendations by the New Zealand branch of PEN from
1980.
Frames writing has continued to appear after
her death. Towards Another Summer, a novel
probably written in the early 1960s, appeared in
2007, a year after The Goose Bath, a second collection of poems following A Pocket Mirror (1967). In
June 2008, a hitherto unpublished 1964 story, A
Night at the Opera, appeared in the New Yorker.
As her executor continues to comb through her
unpublished work, she will no doubt enhance the
sense that Frame liked to foster, that in some way
her writing was created independently of her, that
she can somehow control the things that happen in
the world even after she has left it.
SEE ALSO: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and
Speculative Fiction (WF); Film/Television
Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Humor and
Satire (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Realism/
Magic Realism (WF); Sargeson, Frank (WF)
Campion, J. (dir.) (1990). An Angel at My Table.
Hibiscus Films.
Evans, P. (1977). Janet Frame. Boston: Twayne.
Frame, J. (1946). University Entrance. Listener, p. 18
(Mar. 22).
Frame, J. (1951). The Lagoon: Stories. Christchurch:
Caxton.
Frame, J. (1957). Owls Do Cry. Christchurch: Pegasus.
Frame, J. (1961). Faces in the Water. Christchurch:
Pegasus.
Frame, J. (1962). The Edge of the Alphabet.
Christchurch: Pegasus.
Frame, J. (1963a). The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches.
New York: George Braziller.
Frame, J. (1963b). Scented Gardens for the Blind.
Christchurch: Pegasus.
Frame, J. (1963c). Snowman Snowman: Fables and
Fantasies. New York: George Braziller.
Frame, J. (1965). The Adaptable Man. Christchurch:
Pegasus.
1092
FRANKLIN, MILES
Frame, J. (1966). A State of Siege. New York: George

Braziller.
Frame, J. (1967). The Pocket Mirror. New York: George
Braziller.
Frame, J. (1968). The Rainbirds. London: W. H. Allen.
Frame, J. (1969a). Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun.
New York: George Braziller.
Frame, J. (1969b). Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean
Room. New York: George Braziller.
Frame, J. (1970). Intensive Care. New York: George
Braziller.
Frame, J. (1972). Daughter Buffalo. New York: George
Braziller.
Frame, J. (1979). Living in the Maniototo. New York:
George Braziller.
Frame, J. (1982). To the Is-Land. New York: George
Braziller.
Frame, J. (1983). You Are Now Entering the Human
Heart. Wellington: Victoria University Press.
Frame, J. (1984). An Angel at My Table. Auckland:
Hutchinson.
Frame, J. (1985). The Envoy from Mirror City. Auckland:
Hutchinson.
Frame, J. (1988). The Carpathians. Auckland: Century
Hutchinson.
Frame, J. (1989). An Autobiography. Auckland: Century
Hutchinson.
Frame, J. (2007). Towards Another Summer. Auckland:
Random House.
Frame, J. (2008). A Night at the Opera. New Yorker,
pp. 647 (June 2).
King, M. (2000). Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet
Frame. Auckland: Penguin.
Oettli-Van Delden, S. (2003). Surfaces of Strangeness:
Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness. Wellington:
Victoria University Press.
Franklin, Miles
SYLVIA MARTIN
Miles Franklin wrote fiction over a vital period in

Australias history, from federation to the mid
twentieth century. Believing fervently in a distinctly Australian literature that would be led by
women, she herself was a paradox: secretive and
enigmatic, prickly and outspoken. Her writer
colleague and first biographer, Marjorie Barnard,
stated that Miles writing is indivisible from Miles
living and that any account of her must present
her life and writing as one organic whole (p. xv).
The woman who wrote under a confusing array of
pseudonyms, some of which were revealed only
through her papers after her death, remains an

intriguing puzzle today.
Born Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin on
October 14, 1879 at Talbingo, rural New South
Wales, Franklin attended a bush school after her
family moved to a property near Goulburn when
she was 10. Like many young women then, she did
not attend secondary school, but nevertheless
completed her first and most famous novel, My
Brilliant Career (1901), at 19. Franklins preoccupation with the dual themes of feminism and
nationalism are established in this lively story of
a young woman growing up in the Australian
bush. The traditional structure of the romance
novel is subverted when the heroine, Sybylla
Melvyn, refuses her eligible and handsome suitor
and vows to become a writer, understanding
marriage and career for a woman of her time to
be mutually exclusive. Rejected by Angus and
Robertson, the novel was eventually published in
Edinburgh by Blackwood with the assistance of
the Australian writer Henry Lawson, who edited
it, deleted the question mark after brilliant that
indicated the authors ironic intent, and revealed
that it was written by a girl. Franklin, who had
sought to pose as a bald-headed seer of the
sterner sex by adopting the name Miles (Webby, p. vii), was devastated; she was also horrified
that the novel was wrongly perceived to be
completely autobiographical, including the depiction of the heroines drunken father. Many
female readers understood Sybyllas predicament,
and My Brilliant Career inspired a later generation
of young women when made into a feature film by
Gillian Armstrong in 1979, starring Judy Davis.
The books sequel, My Career Goes Bung, was
completed in 1902 but remained unpublished
until 1946, and Franklins next novel, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909), achieved little
success.
Armed with an introduction to compatriot
feminist Alice Henry, Franklin sailed for the United States in 1906, working for the Womens Trade
Union League in Chicago and coediting its magazine Life and Labour. She remained an expatriate in
the United States and then London, visiting Australia twice in the 1920s and finally returning home
in 1933. While living in London during the 1920s
Franklin wrote six novels under the pseudonym
Brent of Bin Bin. Starting with the second, Up
the Country (1928), her novels were published
FRANKLIN, MILES
over the following three decades. The saga traces

several generations of pioneering families in the
region where Franklin was born, perpetuating an
idealized view of an egalitarian settler society, albeit
one in which women are portrayed as its underlying strength. It is a white Australia that Franklin
represents, and her analysis of class is confined to
comparing the pioneer stalwarts with the decadent
aristocrats of England. Now posing successfully as
a bald-headed seer, she revealed her identity only
to selected friends such as the expatriate poet Mary
Fullerton, who acted as her agent in London.
Franklins last major novel was another pastoral
work, the prize-winning All That Swagger (1936),
published under her own name. She also wrote
novels satirizing the English upper classes, including Bring the Monkey (1933) and Pioneers on
Parade (1939). Several manuscripts found among
her papers were published posthumously.
Described as contradictory and idiosyncratic
(Modjeska 156), Franklin labeled married women
charwomen, yet she cared for her mother tirelessly in her final years. Sensitive about her country upbringing, she nevertheless extolled the life of
the bush pioneers, and though defensive about
her lack of education, she was active and influential in Australian literary and academic circles.
Franklin was critical of her countrys parochialism yet a fierce nationalist, and she spent decades
of her adult life as an expatriate in the very
countries whose imperialism she deplored.
Perhaps Franklins greatest legacy lies in her
personal writing: her lively and witty correspondence and her diaries. An assiduous archivist not
only of her own correspondence but also of the
letters of a generation of literary figures, her extensive papers in the State Library of New South
Wales are an invaluable resource for researchers
in Australias literary and cultural history. Miles
Franklin died in Sydney on September 19, 1954
and, according to her wishes, her ashes were scattered at her birthplace. Her name lives on through
her bequest of the Miles Franklin Award, which
remains Australias most prestigious literary prize.
Feminism and Fiction (WF); Film/Television
1093
Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Humor and

Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in
Fiction (WF)

Armstrong, G. (dir.) (1979). My Brilliant Career.
Greater Union Organisation.
Barnard, M. (1967). Miles Franklin: The Story of a
Famous Australian. St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press.
Franklin, M. (1901). My Brilliant Career. Edinburgh:
Blackwood.
Franklin, M. (1909). Some Everyday Folk and Dawn.
Franklin, M. (1928). Up the Country. Edinburgh:
Blackwood.
Franklin, M. (1930). Ten Creeks Run. Edinburgh:
Blackwood.
Franklin, M. (1931a). Back to Bool Bool. Edinburgh:
Blackwood.
Franklin, M. (1931b). Old Blastus of Bandicoot. London:
Palmer.
Franklin, M. (1933). Bring the Monkey. Sydney:
Endeavour.
Franklin, M. (1936). All That Swagger. Sydney: Bulletin.
Franklin, M. (with Cusack, D.) (1939). Pioneers on
Parade. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Franklin, M. (1946). My Career Goes Bung. Melbourne:
Georgian House.
Franklin, M. (1950). Prelude to Waking. Sydney: Angus
and Robertson.
Franklin, M. (1954). Cockatoos. Sydney: Angus and
Robertson.
Franklin, M. (1956). Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang.
Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Martin, S. (2001). Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton,
Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin. London:
Onlywomen.
Modjeska, D. (1981). Exiles at Home: Australian
Women Writers 19251945. Sydney: Angus and
Robertson.
Roe, J. (ed.) (1993). My Congenials: Miles Franklin and
Friends in Letters. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Roe, J. (2008). Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography.
Sydney: Fourth Estate.
Webby, E. (1990). Introduction. In M. Franklin, My
Brilliant Career; My Career Goes Bung. Sydney:
Collins/Angus and Robertson, pp. vxviii.
G
Gallant, Mavis
MARTA DVORAK
Recognized internationally as one of the best

short story writers in English, Canadian expatriate
Mavis Gallant is the author of over 100 stories as
well as novels, plays, and essays. She has won
prestigious literary awards (the Governor
Generals Literary Award, the Blue Metropolis
International Literary Grand Prix, the PEN/Nabokov Award, and the Prix Athanase-David) and
is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and
an honorary member of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters. She has a long history of
publishing with the New Yorker, a special relationship that allowed her to write full-time well
before her work received widespread critical attention. Gallants work shows how art can draw
on displaced, double, or plural identities to find
new angles on reality and generate radical reformulations of language, form, and ideas. Reading
her fiction within overlapping aesthetic movements shows that her diverse roots and intercultural practices enable her to usher into Canada the
discordance and de-centering of the modernist
and postmodern movements.
Gallant was born on August 11, 1922 in an
anglophone enclave of Montreal, a divided city
surrounded by the concentric circles of a Frenchspeaking province (Quebec) and an Englishspeaking continent. At age 4 her Protestant parents sent her to a convent boarding school run by
French Canadian Catholic nuns. Her environment was split on multiple levels linguistic,
cultural, religious, and axiological and this
collision of worldviews triggered her writing by
helping fashion her interest in language and its

relations with perception, imagination, and
memory.
After attending high school in New York,
Gallant returned to Canada, eventually joining
the staff of the Montreal Standard as a feature
writer from 1944 to 1950. Her early articles prefigured the essays and reviews collected in Paris
Notebooks (1986), which combine keen observation and razor-sharp wit with extensive knowledge of European and North American history,
institutions, legislation, art, and customs. She
produced a weekly column about radio plays and
published interviews with international thinkers
and artists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul
Hindemith, along with English Canadian and
French Canadian writers from Hugh MacLennan
and W. O. Mitchell to Gabrielle Roy. The three
stories she published in the 1940s focused on the
experiences of refugees, and this concern with
cultural and spatial displacement would become a
hallmark of her writing.
Although she expatriated herself in 1950 and
has resided in Paris ever since, it is the Montreal of
her childhood and youth that Gallant retrieves
and reconfigures in the Linnet Muir stories
collected in Home Truths (1981). These six stories
together form a story cycle, a genre revived by
Gallant and subsequently by fellow Canadians
Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence; they depict
the development of the character and consciousness of Linnet Muir, but also explore the city and
the nation. Operating within the Kunstlerroman
tradition, the reconstruction of a lost city and
way of life is told in the first person. The stories
are split temporally but are linked by certain

GALLANT, MAVIS
protagonists, places, and events reiterated in multiple flashbacks and flash-forwards. Gallant
superimposes the different temporalities of two
subjects that are really one: an older narrating I
and a younger narrated self. Simple retrospection
is replaced by a spatial separation of moments in
historical or existential time.
In these stories, Gallants Montreal becomes a
laboratory of global upheavals and societal mutations. In spite of its fragmented, episodic structure, the cycle is rooted in a realist tradition at the
heart of much cultural production in Canada, a
society fascinated by history and social observation and long renowned for the documentary
aspects of its film, poetry, life writing, and historical or historiographic fiction. Consolidated by
the autobiographical pact and a pretension of
objectivity, the social, historical, and geographical
details give the illusion of representing an identifiable, verifiable world an illusion that lies at the
heart of the realist aesthetic. Gallant focuses on
the demarcation line both ethno-cultural and
economic that split Montreal in two, thus
reconfiguring the English/French rift that Hugh
MacLennan had earlier identified in his novel Two
Solitudes (1945). Yet she also depicts the English/
French and prosperous/poor divide as giving way
to an unprecedented intermixing of ethnicities,
languages, traditions, and values. As a young
woman, Linnet is hired by a wartime agency,
where the handicap of her gender is balanced by
the scarcity of men, and she possesses the trump
card of an Anglo-Saxon surname. Her colleagues
resist social change, which might mean improving people with funny names, letting them get
uppity (Gallant 1995, 247). Diverse linguistic,
religious, and cultural communities collide in
Varieties of Exile, in which Linnet retrospectively describes the flood of wartime refugees,
whom her younger, idealistic self saw as prophets
of a new social order that was to consist of justice,
equality, art, personal relations, courage, generosity (261). Young Linnet loses interest in the
foreigners when they lose their exoticism, and
the shift is conveyed through a homely food trope:
A refugee eating cornflakes was of no further
interest (281).
Gallant, who knew such expatriate modernists
in Paris as Samuel Beckett, subscribes to their
strategies of rupture, multiplicity, and flux, which
trouble causality, point of view, voice, and time.
1095
Her polyphonic novella The Pegnitz Junction

(1973) slides into a magic-realist mode in which
the protagonist, Christine, functions like a radio
receiver capturing the inner voices or thought
waves of fellow passengers, anticipating Salman
Rushdies telepathic Saleem in Midnights Children (1981). The voices and strands of intertext
(allusions to Franz Kafka, notably) interweave in
serialized segments in an uncanny blurring of the
real, the imaginary, and the fictional. The descriptions of myriad characters jostling together
are remarkably precise, and the intersection of
ventriloquized subjectivities has been widely admired. Gallants multiple shifts in time and viewpoint have influenced writers such as Jhumpa
Lahiri, who admits to being deeply indebted to
her work.
The modernist movement, which arrived later
in Canada than elsewhere and evolved almost
imperceptibly into the postmodern, influenced
writers who excelled in representing a recognizable world among them Gallant and Mordecai
Richler. Modernism, preoccupied with time and
subjectivity, collided with realism. The Paris that
Gallant settled in had long been the hub of a
cultural parturition deriving from the epistemological and ontological crises that ushered in
modernity. A remarkable relationship between
the visual arts and literature had generated a
revolution in practices of both production and
reception, arguably triggered by the cubist rupture with traditional figuration and spatial perspective. Gallants earliest stories, such as Jorinda
and Jorindel and Up North, written in the
1940s, are strongly suffused with deliberate blurring and confusion of dream and reality, myth
and memory, experience and fantasy. Her later
stories align themselves closely with the visual
techniques of weighting carried out by modernist
artists, whose departures from familiar realistic
depictions often resulted in a reshaping perceived
as deformation. Such skills of distortion are prerequisites for both visual and verbal caricature,
and, unsurprisingly, Gallant is a remarkable ironist and satirist. Her play What Is To Be Done?
(1983) castigates the dogmatism of both right and
left, portraying the Second Front that harbored
both Nazi sympathizers and idealistic Socialists
during World War II. The dialogues illustrate
Gallants trademark multivocality, in which
an individual utterance houses and refracts the
1096
GALLANT, MAVIS
collective voices of diverse class and interest

groups. Adept at genre blurring, Gallant shifts
gears from narrative to non-narrative modes in
her fiction, veering into thought-provoking essayistic passages. Indeed, her gift for metaphor,
for making abstract ideas palpable, is discernible
in her non-fiction, too. A remarkable essayist and
discourse analyst, Gallant has tirelessly fought
prejudice and sloppy thinking. She deconstructs
manipulative rhetoric and discloses the veiled
ideological biases embedded in apparently innocent structures such as binary juxtapositions. Her
highly rhythmic structures mount and fall in
controlled cadences in which lists end with a
clinching simile, the concrete detail that deflates.
Describing the wife of Nabokovs hapless, hopeless hero of Transparent Things, she writes,
Armande is stupid, conceited, cold-hearted,
and she snores like a bulldog (1986, 201). She
similarly satirizes British expatriates in postwar
Spain in By the Sea, through a list whose
juxtaposed items trivialize the grand through its
contiguity with the trivial, thereby disclosing the
shallowness of the character: Mrs. Parsters . . .
was attached to this English beachhead; here she
had survived a husband, two dogs, and a war
(1996a, 179).
In the 1950s, Gallant lived for months at a time
in Spain, the south of France near Italy, and
Germany, seeking the roots of fascism and determined to discover what made ordinary peoples
behavior display a collective madness. The subsequent German stories were collected in The Pegnitz Junction. Spain was the setting for the semiautobiographical story Senor Pinedo and its portrait of a tranquil fascist functionary, and Gallant
addresses the climate that supported Mussolini in
The Moslem Wife. The Four Seasons also
depicts a community of English expatriates in
northern Italy during the unfurling of fascism
and World War II, focusing on the Unwins and a
young Italian girl they employ but conveniently
forget to remunerate. The story is replete with
structural, dramatic, and cosmic ironies, investigating unbalanced power relations and targeting a
diasporic community sensitive only to its own
interests and blindly bent on perceiving Mussolini
as a peacemaker. The readers attention is directed
to Carmela, the little Italian servant, as an exemplifying symbol of subservience. Gallants figuring
performs several integrated and interacting func-
tions. The narrating voice states, As for the

Unwins, they were as used to Carmela as to the
carpet (Gallant 2006, 55). The equivalence of
Carmela and carpet is buttressed through the
sonorous link of full alliteration, which superimposes a pseudo-identity on highly disparate
objects. These relations are culture-specific and
time-locked, and paradoxically also cross-cultural
and timeless: what Carmela is to the Unwins
becomes what the Italians are to the English, or
what the Jews are to the German Nazis, but also
what the traditional rural community is to the
middle class and the female to the male. By
representing the cross-pollinations and complex
cultural interconnections of modernity in mutation, Gallants work exemplifies how modernist
and postmodern writing has participated in the
politics of moving minds.
Laurence, Margaret (WF); MacLennan,
Hugh (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile
in Fiction (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF);
Munro, Alice (WF); Realism/Magic Realism
(WF); Rushdie, Salman (WF)
Besner, N. (1988). The Light of Imagination: Mavis
Gallants Fiction. Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press.
Canadian Fiction Magazine (1978). Mavis Gallant
[special issue], 28.
C^
ote, N. & Sabor, P. (eds.) (2002). Varieties of
Exile: New Essays on Mavis Gallant. New York: Peter
Lang.
Dvorak, M. (in press). Image and Page: Mavis Gallants
(Post)Modernist Transmutations. In P. R. Gilbert &
M. Santoro (eds.), Transatlantic Passages: Literary
and Cultural Relations between Quebec and
Francophone Europe.
Essays on Canadian Writing (1990). Special Gallant
Issue [special issue], 42.
Gallant, M. (1956). The Other Paris. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Gallant, M. (1959). Green Water, Green Sky. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Gallant, M. (1964). My Heart is Broken: Eight Stories and
a Short Novel. New York: Random House.
Gallant, M. (1970). A Fairly Good Time. New York:
Random House.
Gallant, M. (1973). The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and
Five Short Stories. New York: Random House.
GEE, MAURICE
Gallant, M. (1974). The End of the World and Other

Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Gallant, M. (1979). From the Fifteenth District: A
Novella and Eight Short Stories. Toronto: Macmillan.
Gallant, M. (1981). Home Truths: Selected Canadian
Stories. Toronto: Macmillan.
Gallant, M. (1983). What Is To Be Done? Dunvegan,
ON: Quadrant.
Gallant, M. (1985). Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of
Paris. Toronto: Macmillan.
Gallant, M. (1986). Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews.
Toronto: Macmillan.
Gallant, M. (1988). In Transit. Markham, ON: Viking
Penguin.
Gallant, M. (1993). Across the Bridge. New York:
Random House.
Gallant, M. (1994). The Moslem Wife and Other Stories
(ed. M. Richler). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Gallant, M. (1996a). The Collected Stories of Mavis
Gallant. New York: Random House.
Gallant, M. (1996b). The Selected Stories of Mavis
Gallant. London: Bloomsbury.
Gallant, M. (2002). Paris Stories (ed. M. Ondaatje).
New York: NYRB.
Gallant, M. (2004a). Montreal Stories (ed. R. Banks).
Gallant, M. (2004b). Varieties of Exile. New York:
NYRB.
Gallant, M. (2009a). The Cost of Living (ed. J. Lahiri).
New York: NYRB.
Gallant, M. (2009b). Going Ashore (ed. A. Manguel).
Keefer, J. K. (1989). Reading Mavis Gallant. Toronto:
Gee, Maurice
LAWRENCE JONES
In a prolific career of over 50 years, Maurice Gee

has shown a consistent process of growth and
development within and modification of an established tradition, the critical realism of such
predecessors as Frank Sargeson. His fiction presents a full and insightful picture of New Zealand
social life and individual New Zealanders since
1900, an often dark and violent picture, but
viewed in all its historical, social, psychological,
and ethical complexity from an inclusive humanist perspective, with a developing command of
narrative technique equal to the vision.
Gee was born in Whakatane, New Zealand on
August 22, 1931 but spent most of his youth in
1097
Henderson, west of Auckland. He came from a

writing family: his mother, Lyndahl, wrote fiction
and childrens books, and her father, James Chapple, the radical clergyman who became the model
for George Plumb in Gees best-known novel,
Plumb (1978), published several books. After
graduating from the University of Auckland in
1953, Gee began submitting short stories to literary periodicals and achieved publication by 1955.
Over the next 10 years he served his literary
apprenticeship while working as a teacher and in
various casual jobs. In 195561 he published 11
short stories, only five of which he has collected.
The anthologizing in England and New Zealand
of the most successful of them, The Losers
(1959), led to the publication of his first two
novels in 1962 and 1965. In this early fiction he
worked within the tradition of Sargeson and the
provincial writers, focusing on the constricting
effects of New Zealands secularized puritanism
both the rugbybeersmall-business male culture
he depicted in The Big Season (1962) and the
respectable middle-class puritan family he depicted in A Special Flower (1965).
Dissatisfied both with his first novels and with
aspects of his personal and professional life, Gee
decided to train as a librarian and turn from the
novel back to the short story until he was established. In the seven stories he published between
1966 and 1975 he developed considerably both in
vision and narrative method. In such stories as A
Retired Life (1969) and The Hole in the Window (1971), he focused on individual growth or
the failure to grow in middle-aged or older protagonists attempting to face and deal with both
their puritan past and their present place (or lack
of place) in an increasingly post-puritan society.
In doing so, he moved beyond his negative critique of puritanism to imply a humanist-existentialist ethic of self-knowledge and self-responsibility; at the same time, he developed a retrospective third-person point of view restricted to the
consciousness of the protagonist to present that
vision. In the two novels from this time, In My
Fathers Den (1972) and Games of Choice (1976),
Gee further developed and varied this vision and
method.
By 1976, when he gave up library work to
become a full-time writer, Gee collected his best
short stories in A Glorious Morning, Comrade and
turned to an ambitious project he had postponed
1098
GEE, MAURICE
until he felt ready for it a trilogy based on the

experiences of three generations of his own extended family. In the first novel, Plumb, his
developing ethical and social vision and his narrative technique came together with this rich
subject matter to form the finest New Zealand
realist novel to that time. To tell the story of
Plumbs heroic and sometimes misguided search
for truth through a long life in a changing society,
Gee developed a complex narrative method using
a retrospective first-person point of view and a
double time line: Plumb, an old man in the
narrative present, looks back on his life and writes
about it while interspersing into his narrative his
account of what was happening in the developing
present. This method results in three levels of
awareness: that of Plumb the character in the past,
that of Plumb the narrator developing in the
present, and that of the implied author, a sympathetic yet critical understanding of Plumbs life
implicit in the whole. A fully rounded portrait of
Plumb emerges seen in his socio-historical
context as an idealist with the courage to stand
up for his beliefs and the honesty to modify them
from experience, but also with a tragic blindness
to their effect on his family. In Meg (1981), Gee
used a slightly modified version of that method to
have Plumbs daughter Meg tell her story, achieving a different but equal success in presenting a
developing, fully rounded character in her family
context. In Sole Survivor (1983) he attempted
not with complete success to modify the method
by having Megs son Raymond Sole tell from his
journalists perspective his own story and also,
interwoven with it, the rise and fall of his cousin
Duggie Plumb, a ruthlessly ambitious politician.
When he was writing the Plumb trilogy
(197683), Gee could remain a full-time writer
only by supplementing his income through fiction for younger readers and scripts for television
and film. In 197980 he published two brief
stand-alone fantasies for younger readers and in
19825 his O trilogy of alternative-world fictions for young adults. He also wrote dialogue for
television serials and then complete scripts for a
police drama series and the film that was a spinoff from the series.
In the years since Gee has continued along the
same lines. Between 1986 and 1991 he published
five realist thrillers for young adults (the first two
also television serials), each taking place in a time
of social crisis World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the 1951 Waterfront confrontation, the moral panics of the mid-1950s
while in 20078 he published the first two
volumes of another alternative-world series for
young adults, the Salt trilogy. Between 1986
and 1998 he published three first-person retrospective adult novels on the pattern of the Plumb
novels: Prowlers (1987), a rich account of a
scientists life; Going West (1992), modified from
the model of Sole Survivor, with an archivist
telling of his own life and of that of his best
friend, a poet; and Live Bodies (1998), a Jewish
immigrants account of his life in New Zealand
since 1939. Complementing these full-life historical narratives, Gee developed a multifocus narrative model using a shifting third-person point
of view to present three cross-sections of contemporary New Zealand life: The Burning Boy
(1990), showing three differing but interrelated
groups of people in Nelson undergoing sometimes violent experiences; Crime Story (1994),
focusing on the effects of a violent crime on two
diverse families in Wellington; and Loving Ways
(1996), about the explosive reunion of a deeply
divided family in Golden Bay.
Since 2000, Gee has used variations and combinations of these two primary narrative models.
In Ellie and the Shadow Man (2001) he alternated
omniscient and restricted third-person points of
view to tell of the 50-year development of a
woman painter, while in The Scornful Moon
(2003) he told the story of a complex set of
scandals in Wellington in 1935 through an articulate but naively moralistic first-person narrator
who fails to see what is happening until it blows up
in his face. In Blindsight (2005) a woman scientist
tells of her and her brothers lives in an intentionally misleading way, hiding from the reader
and herself until the end her crucial acts that had
determined those lives.
Since the publication of Plumb, Maurice Gee
has received every award, prize, and honor that his
country can bestow on a writer of fiction, an
appropriate response to a body of work unmatched in New Zealand literature for the depth,
breadth, and craftsmanship of its portraiture.
Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF);
GHOSE, ZULFIKAR

Boyd, B. (19801). Maurice Gee: Ironies of Growth and
Judgement. Islands 8, 26881; 9, 13660.
Boyd, B. (1992). Maurice Gee [interview]. In E. Alley &
M. Williams (eds.), In the Same Room: Conversations
with New Zealand Writers. Auckland: Auckland
Fox, A. (2008). The Ship of Dreams: Masculinity in
Contemporary New Zealand Fiction. Dunedin: Otago
University Press.
Gee, M. (1962). The Big Season. London: Hutchinson.
Gee, M. (1965). A Special Flower. London: Hutchinson.
Gee, M. (1972). In My Fathers Den. London: Faber and
Faber.
Gee, M. (1976). Games of Choice. London: Faber and
Faber.
Gee, M. (1978). Plumb. London: Faber and Faber.
Gee, M. (1981). Meg. London: Faber and Faber.
Gee, M. (1982). The Halfmen of O. Auckland: Oxford
University Press.
Gee, M. (1983). Sole Survivor. London: Faber and Faber.
Gee, M. (1986a). Collected Stories. Auckland: Penguin.
Gee, M. (1986b). The Fire-Raiser. Auckland: Puffin/
Gee, M. (1987). Prowlers. London: Faber and Faber.
Gee, M. (1990). The Burning Boy. Auckland: Viking.
Gee, M. (1992). Going West. London: Faber and Faber.
Gee, M. (1994). Crime Story. Auckland: Viking.
Gee, M. (1996). Loving Ways. Auckland: Penguin.
Gee, M. (1998). Live Bodies. Auckland: Penguin.
Gee, M. (2001). Ellie and the Shadow Man. Auckland:
Penguin.
Gee, M. (2003). The Scornful Moon. Auckland: Penguin.
Gee, M. (2005). Blindsight: A Novel. Auckland: Penguin.
Gee, M. (2007). Salt. Auckland: Puffin.
Jones, L. (1990). Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on
New Zealand Prose, 2nd edn. Dunedin: Otago
University Press.
Manhire, B. (1986). Maurice Gee. Auckland: Oxford
University Press.
Williams, M. (1990). Leaving the Highway: Six
Contemporary New Zealand Novelists. Auckland:
Auckland University Press.
Ghose, Zulfikar
CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM
In his critical work The Art of Creating Fiction

(1991a), Zulfikar Ghose asserts that Post-imperialist guilt is responsible for a lot of bad art that
former imperialists dare not criticize (1545).
Always skeptical about writing that is explicitly
1099
tendentious, Ghose, in his fiction, poetry, and

criticism, has insistently demonstrated the need
for readers to focus on language and form rather
than message. In keeping with his dislike for
flaunting a postcolonial identity, much of
Ghoses fiction does not locate itself in the Indian
subcontinent where he was born and raised, or in
Texas where he has lived for more than three
decades. He remains, however, an intriguing and
significant writer, as important for postcolonial
studies as he is for contemporary literature. While
it is possible to argue that Ghose has always been
preoccupied with issues of identity, belonging,
and migrancy, it is also true that Ghose struggles
equally with language and form.
Born on March 13, 1935 in Bombay in undivided India, Ghose grew up in Sialkot and in
Bombay. His semiautobiographical work Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) provides a valuable
sense of what it meant to grow up in colonial
India. After the partition of India in 1947, his
family moved to Pakistan, and Ghose then left for
England in 1952 to pursue further education.
After studying at Sloane School in Chelsea, he
took a degree in English and philosophy at the
University of Keele. He began his writing career in
1964 with a collection of short stories (together
with the well-known writer B. S. Johnson) titled
Statement against Corpses (1964b), which was
followed by a number of volumes of poetry and
fiction. In addition to being very much a part of
the literary scene in London, he worked as a
correspondent for The Observer. In 1969 Ghose
left for the United States to join the University of
Texas at Austin as a professor of English, and since
then he has lived in Austin with his wife, the
Brazilian artist Helena de la Fontaine.
Ghoses first novel, The Contradictions (1966),
is set in colonial India. His second, The Murder of
Aziz Khan (1967b), is set in Pakistan and is written
very much in the tradition of the realist novel. His
most recent work, The Triple Mirror of the Self
(1992), is partly set in India. While the formal
structure of his recent novel is closer to magic
realism, in terms of subject matter, these three
novels, written over a period of almost 25 years,
are concerned explicitly with postcolonial South
Asia and depict individuals who are marginalized
by class or religion. The novels he wrote in
between, including his trilogy The Incredible Brazilian (1972a, 1975b, 1978b) and his best-known
1100
GHOSH, AMITAV
novels, A New History of Torments (1982) and Don

Bueno (1983), reveal what would become his
characteristic mode of locating his work in South
America and adopting a fluid and experimental
form. At his best, Ghose writes in a manner that
offers the illusion of a realist narrative, but this
realism is often no more than a ploy intended to
draw the reader into the fictive world. Many of his
novels are quest narratives that focus on individuals driven by some inner impulse to undertake
a journey. The journey then becomes a framing
device to explore, in mythical terms, the nature of
displacement, and the struggle for identity. In
Ghoses work we also recognize a desire to create
a language and structure capable of sustaining the
complex and obsessive search for a satisfying
conception of reality. The pervasive self-reflexivity of his writing is a result of this ongoing struggle
with the form itself. A story such as The Marble
Dome in his recent collection Veronica and the
Gongora Passion (1998) is a clear example of the
need to foreground a preoccupation with aesthetics while always being conscious of social and
political context.
Ghoses poetry is crucial to understanding his
concern with language, and his criticism, particularly The Fiction of Reality (1984a), remains the
best guide to his fiction. Whether discussing
Shakespeare or more recent figures such as
D. H. Lawrence, he reiterates the need to move
beyond biography and history to focus on aesthetics and literary tradition. In the process of
distancing himself from popular postcolonial
concerns, he has created a corpus that must be
counted among the best in postcolonial literature.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (WF);
Indian Fiction (WF); Johnson, B. S. (BIF);
Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in
Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF);

Brouillette, S. (2007). Postcolonial Writers in the Global
Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1964a). The Loss of India. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Ghose, Z. (with Johnson, B. S.) (1964b). Statement
against Corpses. London: Constable.
Ghose, Z. (1965). Confessions of a Native-Alien.

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Ghose, Z. (1966). The Contradictions. London:
Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1967a). Jet from Orange. London:
Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1967b). The Murder of Aziz Khan. London:
Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1972a). The Incredible Brazilian: The Native.
London: Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1972b). The Violent West. London:
Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1975a). Crumps Terms. London:
Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1975b). The Incredible Brazilian: The
Beautiful Empire. London: Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1978a). Hamlet, Prufrock and Language.
London: Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1978b). The Incredible Brazilian: A Different
World. London: Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1981). Hulmes Investigations into the Bogart
Script. Austin, TX: Curbstone.
Ghose, Z. (1982). A New History of Torments. London:
Hutchinson.
Ghose, Z. (1983). Don Bueno. London: Hutchinson.
Ghose, Z. (1984a). The Fiction of Reality. London:
Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1984b). A Memory of Asia. Austin, TX:
Curbstone.
Ghose, Z. (1986). Figures of Enchantment. London:
Hutchinson.
Ghose, Z. (1991a). The Art of Creating Fiction. London:
Macmillan.
Ghose, Z. (1991b). Selected Poems. Karachi: Oxford
University Press.
Ghose, Z. (1992). The Triple Mirror of the Self. London:
Bloomsbury.
Ghose, Z. (1993). Shakespeares Mortal Knowledge.
Ghose, Z. (1998). Veronica and the Gongora Passion.
Toronto: TSAR.
Kanaganayakam, C. (1993). Structures of Negation: The
Writings of Zulfikar Ghose. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Ghosh, Amitav
SHAO-PIN LUO
Amitav Ghosh occupies a unique place in international literature: his work spans continents and
historical times as well as genres fiction, travel
writing, and journalism. What Ghosh accomplishes most significantly, whether in his fiction
GHOSH, AMITAV
or non-fiction, are the twin tasks of

provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 3) and
imagining pluralized Asias (Spivak 2). Ghoshs
work shifts the focus on Europe, or even Europe
and its others, to the equal, parallel, and other
narratives of human connections, such as those
between India and Egypt and Mauritius, and
between India and Burma, Malaya, and China.
In examining the travel, trade, and coexistence
among different peoples and the interconnectedness of different traditions in historical, nonEuropean life-worlds (Chakrabarty 20) before
and after the advent of colonialism and imperialism, Ghosh demonstrates an interest in the
complex entanglements of peoples, cultures, and
histories rather than the construction of a monolingual, monolithic account of world history.
Ghosh was born on July 11, 1956, in Calcutta,
India, although his family came from Dhaka, in
East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. He studied in
New Delhi before pursuing a doctorate in social
anthropology at Oxford. He has taught and held
visiting professorships at various universities in
India and in the United States. A versatile writer,
Ghosh has written on the book collections of his
grandfather, the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, the
films of Satyajit Ray, the writing of Rabindranath
Tagore, and on such wide-ranging contemporary
political and cultural issues as the diaspora
in Indian culture, the ethnography of international peacekeeping, and the fundamentalist
challenge. His non-fiction writing, which is
collected in four books Dancing in Cambodia,
At Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999),
The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces (2002),
and Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the
Turmoil of Our Times (2005) bears an intricate
intertextual relationship to his fiction. Some of
his earlier articles, mostly published in ethnological and sociological journals and on topics
ranging from the relations of envy in an Egyptian
village to an Egyptian in Baghdad, provided the
gestation for his work In an Antique Land (1992).
The writing of his novel The Shadow Lines (1988)
was partly triggered by the riots in Delhi in 1984,
described in The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,
an essay first published in the New Yorker; other
essays from the New Yorker such as Burma
and Indias Untold War of Independence
form the historical basis of parts of The Glass
Palace (2000).
1101
Ghoshs work has garnered acclaim around the

world and won many awards, including the Prix
Medicis etranger for The Circle of Reason (1986),
the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda
Purashkar for The Shadow Lines, the Arthur C.
Clarke Award for science fiction for The Calcutta
Chromosome (1995), the Grand Prize for Fiction
for The Glass Palace at the Frankfurt eBook
Awards, and the Hutch Crossword Book Award
for The Hungry Tide (2004). Sea of Poppies
(2008c) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
However, in 2001, Ghosh, already a Eurasia regional winner, declined the nomination of The
Glass Palace for the Commonwealth Writers
Prize, noting in his letter to the Commonwealth
Foundation that the term Commonwealth literature could only be a misnomer, so long as it
excludes the many languages that sustain the
cultural and literary lives of member countries
(Ghosh 2008b). Ghosh has been associated with
the Subaltern Studies Group, and his is an ethical,
humane, and compassionate voice for the marginal and the marginalized, the displaced and
dispossessed.
Ghoshs novels range from the picaresque,
magic-realist The Circle of Reason, to the mystical
science fiction The Calcutta Chromosome, to the
poetic and heart-wrenching portrayal in The
Hungry Tide of the Sundarbans, the immense
archipelago of tiny islands in the Bay of Bengal.
The Circle of Reason, in three parts, follows the
adventures of one Alu, an orphan cum master
weaver with a potato-shaped head, first to the
village in East Bengal of his uncle, Balaram Bose,
who is obsessed with, among other things, Louis
Pasteur and the theories of purity and contamination; then to the Gulf emirate al-Ghazira and its
diasporic group of transient laborers; and finally
to an expatriate Indian community in El Qued on
the northeastern edge of the Algerian Sahara.
Even in this first novel, Ghosh was concerned
with some of the major themes that were to
develop in his later novels: the power of language
and storytelling, the plight and fate of migrant
workers, and the changing rituals and customs of
diasporic communities. In The Calcutta Chromosome, against the story of Ronald Rosss discovery
of the malaria parasite, Ghosh tells a fantastic
counter-science story of fevers and delirium
surrounding an enigmatic subaltern figure Mangala, who, according to one of the characters, had
1102
GHOSH, AMITAV
systematically interfered with Ronald Rosss experiments to push malaria research in certain
directions while leading it away from others
(1995, 36). The novel explores the relationship
between knowledge and transformation and between the discourses of science and the mystical or
the supernatural, and, most crucially, according
to Claire Chambers, allows Ghosh to make the
important point that science, technology, and
medicine were not conveyed to India by the
British in a one-way process of transfer, but were
in fact involved in a complex series of crosscultural exchanges, translations, and mutations
(58). The Hungry Tide follows the twin journeys in
the Sundarbans of a marine biologist Piyali Roy in
search of the Gangetic dolphin and a translator
Kanai Dutt to inherit his uncle Nirmals memoirs.
Through their encounters with a fisherman,
Fokir, and the local community, they both learn
about the mysteries not only of the delicate ecological balance of the region but also of the
precarious and vulnerable lives of the displaced
refugees and inhabitants of the islands. The Circle
of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The
Hungry Tide, though diverse in spatial and temporal framework, all explore Ghoshs interest in
reason and science, faith and folklore, as well as
methods of knowledge and ways of knowing.
A central metaphor in The Circle of Reason is
weaving, which not only conveys the richly layered, criss-crossing way of storytelling that has
become a signature of Ghoshs writing, but also
figures the cloth trade as an important symbol of
interconnections between countries, continents,
and cultures. The loom, he writes, has never
permitted the division of the world because All
through those centuries cloth, in its richness and
variety, bound the Mediterranean to Asia, India
to Africa, the Arab world to Europe, in equal,
bountiful trade (1986, 56). This central theme is
exemplified by The Shadow Lines and In an
Antique Land. The Shadow Lines is a historical
novel about the relations between an English and
an Indian family across time and space. In this
partition novel, about the division of India,
albeit an imagined sundering of links (Wachtel
167), Ghosh explores the constructedness and
arbitrariness of borders and boundaries while
describing the violence and trauma caused by
lines of division. The geographical lines that
intersect Calcutta, Dhaka, and London inter-
weave in the novel with the intricate narrative

lines that move backward and forward both
temporally and spatially. Ghosh emphasizes the
role of memory and imagination in the invention
of stories and search for truth and history, finally
demonstrating a belief in a syncretistic civilization in which distinct cultures and societies
coexist in a world of exchange, accommodation,
and compromise.
This mixed civilization is superbly reflected in
the cosmopolitan world of medieval trade illuminated in Ghoshs ethnographical work In an
Antique Land. Searching through the archives of
the famous but dispersed Geniza of old Cairo for
the almost forgotten story of a slave, Bomma,
Ghosh charts the trade routes and cross-cultural
networks between the ancient lands of Egypt and
India, all the while commenting on the parallel
contemporary realities of migratory labor in the
Gulf. In his more recent works The Glass Palace
and Sea of Poppies, Ghosh explores individual and
familial predicaments against broad, sweeping
historical events. The Glass Palace offers a panoramic view of twentieth-century South and
Southeast Asia, mapping the ports and waterways
that connect the cultures and colonial histories of
Burma, Malaya, and India, through its portrayal
of the intertwining political fates and commercial
fortunes of four generations of two extended
families. Sea of Poppies, the first of a projected
trilogy, is a grand nautical narrative set against the
backdrop of Britains Opium Wars with China in
the nineteenth century. By tracking the trajectory
of the Ibis, a former slave ship that is to be part of a
fleet of opium transports, though first bound for
the Mauritius islands with its cargo of convicts
and indentured laborers, Ghosh portrays a diverse
group of characters of different castes, class, and
cultures whose destiny is closely entwined with
that of the Empire. The novel displays Ghoshs
ability to juggle myriad interconnected stories of
disguises and transformations as well as his linguistic dexterity pidgin, Creole, and seafaring
lingo abound in the novel, collected in The Ibis
Chrestomathy (Ghosh 2008a).
In remarkable detail, Ghoshs writings about
cloth and oil in The Circle of Reason, spices and
sugar in In an Antique Land, timber and rubber in
The Glass Palace, and now opium in Sea of
Poppies, as well as his stories of the Mediterranean
and the Indian Ocean, of Mandalay and Manga-
GIBSON, WILLIAM
lore, of the Ganges and the Irrawaddy, reflect not

only the intertwined and interdependent, and
above all overlapping streams of historical experience (Said 312) among peoples and places, but
also the effects of migration and colonialism on all
levels of society princes and paupers, laborers
and merchants, soldiers and artists, nationalists
and idealists, servants and orphans. These texts
explore most significantly the lived experiences of
ordinary people who heroically adapt and improvise, struggle and survive, refuse to yield to the
nightmare of someone elses imagining
(Ghosh 2000, 469), and form bonds of love,
kinship, and friendship across borders and
boundaries. In bringing forward a plurality of
voices, languages, and narratives as well as a
profusion of cultures, traditions, and geographies
to demonstrate the many diverse ways people
around the world communicate with and understand one another, Ghosh challenges the very
Eurocentric systems of thought that have long
dominated all other forms of knowledge and
languages.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy,
Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF);
Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS:

Amitav Ghosh website: www.amitavghosh.com
Bhatt, I., & Nityanandam, I. (eds.) (2001). The Fiction of
Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Creative.
Bose, B. (ed.) (2003). Amitav Ghosh: Critical
Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft International.
Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
Chambers, C. (2003). Postcolonial Science Fiction:
Amitav Ghoshs The Calcutta Chromosome Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, 38(1), 5772.
Dhawan, R. K. (ed.) (1999). The Novels of Amitav
Ghosh. New Delhi: Prestige.
Ghosh, A. (1986). The Circle of Reason. London:
Hamish Hamilton; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
Ghosh, A. (1988). The Shadow Lines. London:
Bloomsbury; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
Ghosh, A. (1992). In an Antique Land. London:
Granta; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
1103
Ghosh, A. (1995). The Calcutta Chromosome.

London: Picador; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
Ghosh, A. (1998). Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in
Burma. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
Ghosh, A. (1999). Countdown. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
Ghosh, A. (2000). The Glass Palace. London:
HarperCollins; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
Ghosh, A. (2002). The Imam and the Indian: Prose
Pieces. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal/Permanent Black.
Ghosh, A. (2004). The Hungry Tide. London:
HarperCollins; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
Ghosh, A. (2005). Incendiary Circumstances: A
Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Ghosh, A. (2008a). The Ibis Chrestomathy. At www.
amitavghosh.com/latest/ibis_chrestomathy.pdf,
Ghosh, A. (2008b). Letter to the Commonwealth
Foundation. At http://iaclals.8m.com/nl/01jul/
01jul08.htm, accessed Dec. 10, 2008.
Ghosh, A. (2008c). Sea of Poppies. London: John
Murray; New Delhi: Penguin.
Hawley, J. (2005). Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction. New
Delhi: Foundation.
Khair, T. (ed.) (2003). Amitav Ghosh: A Critical
Companion. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
Mondal, A. (2007). Amitav Ghosh. Manchester:
Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York:
Knopf.
Spivak, G. (2008). Other Asias. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tiwari, S. (2003). Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Study.
New Delhi: Atlantic.
Wachtel, E. (1996). Amitav Ghosh. In More Writers
and Company: New Conversations with CBC Radios
Eleanor Wachtel. Toronto: Knopf, pp. 16376.
Gibson, William
BRECKEN ROSE HANCOCK
Since the publication of his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson has been called a
noir prophet, a computer prophet, a visionary,
and the poet of cyberspace. Winning the Nebula,
the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick awards, Neuromancer established Gibson as a major writer of
science fiction, but the novels larger influence on
mainstream perceptions of technology also secured his position among the major fiction writers of the late twentieth century. Tightly written
and eerily predictive of the ubiquitous rise of Web
2.0 culture, this debut novel remains his most
groundbreaking and influential work.
1104
GIBSON, WILLIAM
Born on March 17, 1948 in South Carolina,

Gibson moved to Toronto at age 19, after being
rejected from the Vietnam draft for declaring a
penchant for mind-altering drugs. There he met
his wife and the couple eventually moved to
Vancouver, where he began writing after earning
an English degree at the University of British
Columbia in 1977. Although he retains dual
citizenship, Gibson still lives in Vancouver and
maintains that he has no intention of living in the
United States again. His novels, however, continue to flirt with American identity as they predominantly feature American characters and incorporate American settings such as San Francisco and Oakland. While Gibsons locations range
from global to galactic, Canada has been left out
until his most recent novel, Spook Country (2007),
which ends in Vancouver.
As a founding text of the cyberpunk genre,
Neuromancer exposes readers to the potential
exploitation of technology by societys undesirables. In Gibsons depiction of a computer-savvy
underground, low-life coopts high tech and, beneath a facade of legitimate commerce, his cybercowboys, fences, and muscles-for-hire hustle for
hardware, pharmaceuticals, data exchange, and
body modifications. Manipulated by a self-aware
artificial intelligence, his characters negotiate an
international urban wasteland, shuttling between
the landscape of poverty scuzzy bars and capsule
hotels and the landscape of cushy (always
corrupt) corporate employment Italian-labeled
clothing and high-rise Hiltons. With its panoply
of technological wares, Neuromancer pushes toward a compact but kaleidoscopic aesthetic, using
the fast-paced shorthand of film noir to convey
technologys power to remake society.
Following Neuromancer, Gibsons two other
Sprawl novels, Count Zero (1986b) and Mona
Lisa Overdrive (1988), continue to unpack a world
gripped by technological fervor. Gibsons characters either bypass their monotonous dystopias
by using simstim (a virtual reality version of
reality TV) to access celebrity lives, or they buy
into a complicated web of crime fed by an underground economy starving for cutting-edge novelty. Gibsons near-future cityscapes are claustrophobic places where even the natural world must
filter through technological metaphor: The sky
above the port was the color of television, tuned to
a dead channel (1984, 3). Buzzing static the
clash of invisible data transfer whirrs in the

background of Gibsons worlds, coloring his cities
a noisy, relentless gray.
Despite the similarities between his work and
that of Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, and
Philip K. Dick, Gibson distinguishes himself from
his forerunners via an implicit boredom with the
Apocalypse (Sterling 4). While his novels often
highlight a certain desperate anomie among city
dwellers, his work nonetheless features both the
highs and lows of urbanity. His sentences, loaded
with lyrical description, communicate the filth of
the ubercitys underbelly in exquisite detail. In
Gibsons texts, technology has not ruined humanity; he moralizes neither the rise of artificial
intelligence nor the desire for body augmentation.
Instead, both meat and machine negotiate uncertain terms of meaning and survival. Gibson perhaps most directly but unintentionally engages
such tensions with Agrippa (1992), his autobiographical prose poem, which according to urban
legend was published on a self-destructing
disk, but which actually exists as a ghost text,
appearing on Gibsons official website and also
floating online in pirated and mutated forms
(Jirgens 1999).
Gibsons trademark structure moves disparate
characters toward a common location where their
interrelated subplots climax. His work is also
recognized by its invented street jargon and technospeak, lingo so au courant that readers assume
they have either heard it before or intuited it
themselves. Gibsons language radar has anticipated both small evolutions in dialect (he was the
first writer to use Google as a verb) and gaping
holes in technological terminology evidenced by
the rapid adoption of his coinage cyberspace
into the popular lexicon after his story Burning
Chrome appeared in Omni magazine in 1982.
Both his use of language and his intuition for the
trajectory of technology have allowed his writing
to transcend the boundaries of genre. Specifically,
his most recent books, Pattern Recognition (2003)
and Spook Country, are mainstream bestsellers
that move away from the traditional trappings
of science fiction to take place in an alternative
present. Still reeling from 9/11, this latest Gibson
world is very much like our own, and while
Gibson continues to invent technology and gadgets, he also references an array of relevant consumer products. He participates in the cyberspace
GILROY, BERYL
he once predicted by doing his research online:

Googl[ing] the world of the novel (Wired 2007)
and simultaneously writing that world into being.
SEE ALSO: Burroughs, William (AF); Canadian
Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF);
Dick, Philip K. (AF); Fantasy, Science Fiction,
and Speculative Fiction (WF); Huxley, Aldous
(BIF); Science Fiction (BIF); Speculative
Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS:
Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace.
Gibson, W. (1986a). Burning Chrome. New York: Arbor
House.
Gibson, W. (1986b). Count Zero. New York: Arbor
House.
Gibson, W. (1988). Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York:
Bantam.
Gibson, W. (1992). Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). At
www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/agrippa.asp,
accessed Sept. 2, 2009.
Gibson, W. (1993). Virtual Light. New York: Bantam.
Gibson, W. (1995). Johnny Mnemonic. New York: Ace.
Gibson, W. (1996). Idoru. New York: Putnams Sons.
Gibson, W. (1999). All Tomorrows Parties. New York:
Putnams Sons.
Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern Recognition. New York:
Putnams Sons.
Gibson, W. (2007). Spook Country. New York:
Putnams Sons.
Gibson, W., & Sterling, B. (1991). The Difference Engine.
New York: Bantam.
Jirgens, K. E. (1999). An Eye on Tomorrow: Interview
with William Gibson. Rampike, 11(1), 711.
Sterling, B. (1986). Preface. In Gibson (1986),
pp. 15.
Wired (2007). Q&A: William Gibson Discusses Spook
Country and Interactive Fiction. At www.wired.com/
culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-08/pl_print,
Yoke, C. B., & Robinson, C. L. (eds.) (2007). The
Cultural Influences of William Gibson, the Father of
Cyberpunk Science Fiction Lewiston, NY: Edwin
Mellen.
Gilroy, Beryl
LYNNE MACEDO
A pioneering teacher, psychotherapist, writer,

and novelist, Beryl Agatha Gilroy was born in
British Guiana (now Guyana) on August 30, 1924.
1105
Her creative writing began when she was a child

but, like many Caribbean writers, it was not until
she moved to London in 1951 that her work was
first published. Beginning with a series of groundbreaking textbooks for children and an autobiographical account of her teaching experiences in
Britain, Gilroy went on to write short stories,
poetry, and seven novels, all of which are characterized by her deep compassion for the underprivileged, the weak, and the oppressed.
Gilroy enjoyed a somewhat unusual childhood,
growing up largely under the care of her maternal
grandmother who believed that children should
be given space to develop before entering formal
education. As a result, she did not start full-time
schooling until the age of 12; she went on to train
as a teacher in Georgetown, where she was
awarded a British Guiana Teachers Certificate
with first-class honors in 1945. Arriving in
England six years later, Gilroy found that racism
prevented her from working as a teacher, so she
took on menial jobs while completing a diploma
in child development at the University of London.
She eventually found a teaching post, taught in
several London schools before marrying, and then
spent the next 12 years educating her two children
at home while continuing her own higher education. During this time she also began to write and
publish a series of educational books, firmly
believing that suitable texts can heal and educate
emotions (Anim-Addo 25). In 1965 Gilroy returned to teaching and subsequently became
Londons first black head-teacher in 1969. Her
acute observations of the pervasive nature of
racism and the desperate need for radical changes
in multicultural education are graphically captured in Black Teacher (1976).
Her grandmothers influence and her fond
memories of the emerald-time of youth
(Gilroy 1991a, 25)can be clearly traced throughout
much of Gilroys fictional writing, most obviously
in Sunlight on Sweet Water (1994), a collection of
short stories and reminiscences about her
Caribbean childhood experiences. Her novels
largely deal with the two places that shaped her
own personality London and Guyana and
issues such as the loss of traditional values, exploitation of the weak, and the diasporic experience
that were all close to her heart. Yet, despite being
friends with published writers such as Andrew
Salkey, George Lamming, and E. R. Braithwaite,
1106
GILROY, BERYL
Gilroy struggled initially to get her own fiction

accepted: it was not until 1986 that her novel
Frangipani House first appeared, despite winning
a Greater London Council creative writing prize in
1982.
Both Frangipani House and Boy-Sandwich
(1989) are set in old peoples homes, in Guyana
and London respectively, and the themes of vulnerability, lack of respect for the elderly, and the
breakdown of family values predominate. Like
some of her later novels, Boy-Sandwich is particularly concerned with the therapeutic effect of
returning to the Caribbean, with Tyrones grandparents regaining a sense of identity after leaving a
racist Britain to spend their final days back home.
In Gather the Faces (1996a) and In Praise of Love
and Children (1996b), Gilroy focuses on the
alienation felt by her female protagonists, Marvella Payne and Melda Hayley, as they struggle
with immigrant life in London. Both novels have
strong psychological subtexts that compare their
protagonists emotionally stunted lives in London
with the communal warmth and sense of belonging characteristic of rural Guyana. The posthumously published work The Green Grass Tango
(2001) explores diasporic Caribbean experiences
through the character of Alfred Grayson, who for
fear of discrimination hides his Barbadian origins
throughout his working life as a civil servant in
Britain.
Apart from these five novels, all of which have
contemporary settings, Gilroy also published two
works of historical fiction Stedman and Joanna:
A Love in Bondage (1991b) and Inkle and Yarico
(1996c). In both novels, Gilroy skillfully reinterprets traditional narratives of European men who
entered into relationships and fathered children
by native Caribbean women, yet ultimately
betrayed them when the opportunity to return
to their own kind arose. By reworking these
tales from an alternative perspective, Gilroy not
only shifts the balance of historical misrepresentation but also clearly exposes the falsity of racial
stereotypes that underpinned such imperialistic
thinking and behavior. At the time of her death,
she was working on another historical novel, She
Wore Silk (unpublished), which also had a black
female character as its central protagonist.
In recognition of both her writing and her
outstanding work with immigrant and disadvantaged children, Gilroy was made a fellow of the
Institute of Education. She was also awarded an

honorary doctorate by the University of London
in 2000, shortly before her sudden death of a heart
attack on April 4, 2001.
Childrens and Young Adult Fiction (WF);
The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction
(WF); Lamming, George (WF); Migration,
Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial
Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean
Diaspora (BIF); Salkey, Andrew (WF); West
Indian Fiction (WF)
Anim-Addo, J. (ed.) (1998). Leaves in the Wind:
Collected Writings of Beryl Gilroy. London: Mango.
Women Writers: Fiction in English. London:
Macmillan.
Gilroy, B. (1961). Blue Water Readers. London:
Longman.
Gilroy, B. (1962). Blue Water Readers Teachers Guide.
London: Longman.
Gilroy, B. (1967). Green and Gold Readers. London:
Longman.
Gilroy, B. (1971). Green and Gold Readers for Guyana.
London: Longman.
Gilroy, B. (1976). Black Teacher. London: Bogle
LOuverture.
Gilroy, B. (1978). Yellow Bird Readers. London:
Heinemann.
Gilroy, B. (1980). In for a Penny. London: Cassell.
Gilroy, B. (1986). Frangipani House. London:
Heinemann.
Gilroy, B. (1989). Boy-Sandwich. London: Heinemann.
Gilroy, B. (1991a). Echoes and Voices (Open-Heart
Poetry). New York: Vantage.
Gilroy, B. (1991b). Stedman and Joanna: A Love in
Bondage. New York: Vantage.
Gilroy, B. (1994). Sunlight on Sweet Water. Leeds:
Peepal Tree.
Gilroy, B. (1996a). Gather the Faces. Leeds: Peepal Tree.
Gilroy, B. (1996b). In Praise of Love and Children. Leeds:
Peepal Tree.
Gilroy, B. (1996c). Inkle and Yariko. Leeds: Peepal Tree.
Gilroy, B. (2001). The Green Grass Tango. Leeds: Peepal
Tree.
Gilroy, B. (2002). On Creativity, Autarchy and
Memory. In J. Anim-Addo (ed.), Centre of
Remembrance. London: Mango, pp. 11320.
Mordecai, P., & Wilson, B.(eds.) (1989). Her True-True
Name. Oxford: Heinemann.
GOONERATNE, YASMINE
Gooneratne, Yasmine
HARSHANA RAMBUKWELLA
Yasmine Gooneratnes writing is typified by a

profoundly satiric worldview conveyed in a crisp
and finely crafted style that addresses local and
global themes. Gooneratnes many roles as poet,
novelist, biographer, social historian, and academic generate diverse voices that engage in a
critical dialogue within her creative writing. As a
South Asian writer and academic, Gooneratnes
writing has sought to explore the ideological
tensions of how Asia and its cultures are represented in anglophone writing, while attending to
the politics and poetics of her position as an
English-language writer representing a non-anglophone culture.
Born in 1935 in colonial Ceylon, Gooneratne
attended the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
and became a renowned teacher there before
migrating to Australia in 1972 for an academic
position at Macquarie University. She received a
DLitt from Macquarie and became an emeritus
professor in 1999. Gooneratne was conferred the
Order of Australia in 1990 for her services to
literature. A well-known Jane Austen scholar, she
has also published studies of Alexander Pope and
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, as well as a scholarly
edition of Leonard Woolfs Village in the Jungle.
Gooneratnes early creative work was in poetry
and helped form a distinctly Sri Lankan anglophone literary tradition. In collections such as
Word, Bird, Motif (1971) and The Lizards Cry
(1972), she explores the ironies and contradictions of a decolonizing society. Her poems experiment with form and language, consciously drawing upon local inspiration. The localizing impulse
in Gooneratnes writing is partly reflective of the
marginality felt by English writers of the time and
their need to defend their literary craft, indeed
their anglophone cultural identity, against the
cruder expressions of nativist nationalism. As
Gooneratne notes in her memoir Relative Merits
(1986), her departure to Australia was influenced
by the political and cultural changes taking place
in Sri Lanka at the time.
Gooneratnes first published prose work, A
Change of Skies (1991b), emerges directly from
her experience of migration and explores the
complexities of an exilic consciousness. The text
1107
humorously encapsulates the migrant experience

in a trajectory that moves from a limiting sense of
cultural alienation to a more enabling multicultural imaginary that can accommodate the many
identities of its two main characters as Asians and
Australians. Bharat and Navaranjini MangalaDavasinha metamorphose into Barry and Jean
Mundy under the assimilationist pressures of a
largely Anglo-European Australia struggling to
address its visible ethno-cultural diversity. But
the ending allows the couple to triumph, with
Bharat empowering new immigrants by teaching
them English and Navaranjinis fusion cuisine
making her an Australian culinary icon. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize,
Change reveals migration to be a profoundly
unsettling and educative process, as Bharat and
Navaranjini confront their own class and race
prejudices.
The Pleasures of Conquest (1995) is an allegorical satire that explores the multidimensional nature of neocolonial exploitation, depicting the
unequal power relations that persist between East
and West. It is set in the surreal landscape of
Amnesia, recognizable as postcolonial Sri Lanka
but also representing an Asia increasingly integrated into global capital flows. Connections
within the international publishing industry, the
dominance of the English language, and cultural
exploitation are focalized through celebrity
American author Stella Mallinsons project to
translate and publish little-known Amnesian
authors in the West. The novel suggests, however,
that such exploitation is facilitated by local collaboration. Vacuous politicians and a hospitality
industry eager to cater to Orientalist fantasies
become willing accomplices in a game of profitable mutual seduction (389). Exploitation becomes gendered through acclaimed academic
Phillip Destrys intellectually and sexually exploitative relationship with an Australian Asian graduate student. While Pleasures also includes moments of resistance, overall it portrays an Asia
caught within an overmastering imperial discourse that inhibits its possibilities for selfdetermination.
Gooneratnes scholarly research and creative
writing achieve a notable cross-fertilization. Hazy
moments in the historical record are often
fictionalized and historical figures speculatively
redrawn in her work. Sri Lanka and its troubled
1108
GOONEWARDENE, JAMES
postcolonial history dominate Gooneratnes latest

novel The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006). The irony
that characterizes her social vision is muted in this
text as it confronts the crucial years of Sri Lankas
decolonization. Many characters are based on
historical figures from Relative Merits. The memoirs oblique engagement with the majoritarian
political legacies of Gooneratnes ancestors from
the powerful Dias-Bandaranaike family is replaced
by an openly critical attitude in the fictional text. In
essence a Bildungsroman, Sweet effectively utilizes
the genres potential for socio-political commentary and indicts an oligarchic neocolonial elite that
inherited power in Sri Lanka.
With its abiding concern for Sri Lanka,
Gooneratnes writing engages with global themes
that enlarge the horizons of Sri Lankan anglophone writing while also enriching Australian
literature. Her deep sense of irony makes her
work a critical but undogmatic reflection on the
fragmentary experiences that characterize life in a
globalizing world.
Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF);

Ahrens, R. (1999). Imperial Reflections in Yasmine
Gooneratnes Fiction. In D. Brendon & B.
Gooneratne (eds.), Gladly Wolde She Lerne and
Gladly Teche: Felicitation Volume for Professor
Yasmine Gooneratne AO. D. Litt. London: Argus,
pp. 19.
Gooneratne, Y. (1971). Word, Bird, Motif: 53 Poems.
Kandy: privately published.
Gooneratne, Y. (1972). The Lizards Cry and Other
Poems. Colombo: privately published.
Gooneratne, Y. (1980). Diverse Inheritance: A Personal
Perspective on Commonwealth Literature. Adelaide:
Centre for Research in the New Literatures in
English.
Gooneratne, Y. (1986). Relative Merits: A Personal
Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka.
London: C. Hurst.
Gooneratne, Y. (1991a). Celebrations and Departures:
Selected Poems 19511991. Sydney: Wild and
Woolley.
Gooneratne, Y. (1991b). A Change of Skies. London: Pan

Macmillan.
Gooneratne, Y. (1995). The Pleasures of Conquest. New
Delhi: Penguin.
Gooneratne, Y. (2006). The Sweet and Simple Kind.
Colombo: Perera Hussein.
Khan, A. (1996). Shadows of Imperfection [review of
The Pleasures of Conquest]. Meanjin, 55(2), 35861.
Lokuge, C. (2000). We Must Laugh at One Another, or
Die: Yasmine Gooneratnes A Change of Skies and
South Asian Migrant Identities. In R. Crane & R.
Manoharan (eds.), Shifting Continents, Colliding
Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian
Subcontinent. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 1734.
Goonewardene, James
D. C. R. A. GOONETILLEKE
James Goonewardene is a pioneer writer of Sri

Lankas post-independence era who made a notable contribution through his fiction as a both a
social critic and an idealist. Born in Pannala, Sri
Lanka, on May 15, 1921, he was a schoolteacher
before he made a notable contribution to broadcasting in English, livening up the fare in the 1960s
when English broadcasting was under threat from
the ascendant vernacular languages. He began
writing full-time in 1978 and, having married an
Australian, could have emigrated, but as a staunch
patriot he chose to remain.
Goonewardene
supported
Punyakante
Wijenaike, author of The Third Woman and Other
Stories (1963) and a novel, The Waiting Earth
(1966), by publishing A Quiet Place in 1968;
between them they resuscitated Sri Lankan fiction
in English at a time when none had been published for over a decade. Goonewardenes novels
are structured by an urban/rural dichotomy that
conforms to Raymond Williamss observations
about the city and the country in English
literature the city being a place of learning,
communication, light but also noise and personal ambition, whereas the country offers peace
and virtue but also backwardness, ignorance and
limitation (1). This binary is complicated by
Goonewardenes position as a writer in English
in Sri Lanka at a time when the former colonizers
language was subordinate to vernacular ones. It is
strengthened, however, by common sense: in A
Quiet Place, the hero, Abhaya, a victim of ennui
GOONEWARDENE, JAMES
and disappointed in the love of a respectable

urban woman, seeks peace and contentment in a
village, yet comes to realize that the village no less
than the city [is] full of cant and hypocrisy (38).
Goonewardenes implied intention is to present a
quest for lost innocence and truth, but the urban/
rural opposition in his work can seem simplistic
and verging on the escapist. Indeed, his later
novel, Dream Time River (1985b), deals largely
with childhood experiences that come across as
idyllic. The divisions upon which Goonewardene
structures his work are particularly damaging in
Call of the Kirala (1971), in which his urban hero,
Vijaya, rejects the sensuality of town life but, upon
making love to the rural heroine Menike on the
bare ground in the open, the impression is precisely one of sensuality. Menike, like Nandini in A
Quiet Place, is an idealized stereotype of rural
femininity beautiful and pure.
The short story collection The Awakening of
Doctor Kirthi (1976) is marked by disillusionment. The title story disproves the criticism made
of Sri Lankan writers in English that they have not
produced a sustained exploration of the world
they know best the world of the Englisheducated, English-speaking class from the inside. Kirthi is important not only as a doctor
battling inequities in the health services, but also
as a representative intellectual who strives to
maintain his ideals in the face of uncongenial
conditions. When his son becomes a victim of
inequities in the educational system, the doctor
decides to emigrate, thus contributing to Sri
Lankas brain drain.
In Acid Bomb Explosion (1978) and its revised,
expanded version An Asian Gambit (1985a), Goonewardne addresses the public drama of the Sinhalese youth insurgency of 1971. His political
intention is linked to a characteristic theme and
narrative pattern. Deva Sumanadasa is an artist
who, finding urban society uncongenial and indifferent to culture, seeks peace and refuge in a
small provincial town. When the insurgency
erupts, the insurgents briefly gain control of the
town. However, they are shown as naive, inept,
and without mass support, while the police and
armys suppression of them is shown to be brutal.
Goonewardenes critical portrayal has a measure
of historical truth, but his caricature of Hemapala,
an insurgent leader, suggests both a conservative
prejudice and the limitations of his art.
1109
In An Asian Gambit, Goonewardene takes liberties with history. He introduces a serious international factor that was hardly present at the time
of the insurgency. Attempting some form of
topicality, the epilogue introduces racial tensions
absent during the 1971 insurgency. There was
more than a suspicion that the later Sinhalese
insurgents of the 1980s had links with the Tamil
terrorists and that Tamil terrorism had connections with international terrorism. In presenting
these aspects, Goonewardenes novel reads like a
failed thriller.
One Mad Bid for Freedom (1990) is innovative
in both form (semi-realistic, parable-like) and
language (copious, hard-hitting, satiric). Its
sometimes simplified view of contemporary Sri
Lankan history (particularly the issues involved in
the changing status of English and Sinhalese/
Tamil in 1956) is questionable, but its satire on
the anglicized middle class and neo-nationalistic
authoritarianism, together with the portrayal of
the hero, Korala a nationalist, environmentalist,
and quirky genius whose withdrawal to a remote
beach to escape a vicious system is seen as a
fundamental quest for Truth demonstrate the
strength of Goonewardenes convictions.
His final novel, The Tribal Hangover (1995),
marked a departure in Goonewardenes fiction
(but fit broader trends in Sri Lankan fiction of
the 1990s) in reaching beyond Sri Lanka in its
setting and concerns. Born in Sri Lanka and
adopted by a German couple in Australia,
Harindra is eventually discarded but, overcoming difficulties, he earns a doctorate and a university appointment. A typically idealized hero,
Harindra embarks on the postcolonial search for
roots, identity, and self-discovery in Sri Lanka.
There he finds lost innocence in a beautiful
woman and a legacy awaiting him, ensuring a
happy (albeit contrived) ending.
Goonewardene died in 1997.
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (2005). Sri Lankan English
Literature and the Sri Lankan People 19172003.
Colombo: Vijitha Yapa.
1110
GORDIMER, NADINE
Goonewardene, J. (1968). A Quiet Place. Colombo: K.

V. G. de Silva.
Goonewardene, J. (1971). Call of the Kirala. Colombo:
Hansa.
Goonewardene, J. (1976). The Awakening of Doctor
Kirthi. Colombo: Lake House.
Goonewardene, J. (1978). Acid Bomb Explosion.
Colombo: privately published.
Goonewardene, J. (1985a). An Asian Gambit. New
Delhi: Navrang.
Goonewardene, J. (1985b). Dream Time River.
Colombo: Morris and Vaughton.
Goonewardene, J. (1990). One Mad Bid for Freedom.
New Delhi: Penguin.
Goonewardene, J. (1995). The Tribal Hangover. New
Delhi: Penguin.
Salgado, M. (2006). Writing Sri Lanka. London:
Routledge.
Williams, R. (1993). The Country and the City. London:
Hogarth.
Gordimer, Nadine
ROWLAND SMITH
Nadine Gordimer is a Nobel Prize-winner and a

preeminent intellectual figure in her native South
Africa. Known as a writer of novels and short
stories, she became increasingly important as a
commentator on South African affairs through
internationally published essays and articles during the period of white-controlled rule and the
period of change following the release of Nelson
Mandela and the election of a non-racial
government.
Gordimer was born on November 20, 1923 in
Springs, a town close to Johannesburg. Her parents were Jewish immigrants to South Africa: her
father was a watchmaker from Lithuania and her
mother was born in England. She grew up in the
small-town ethos of a segregated mining town.
When she was 11, Gordimers mother took her
out of school alleging a heart ailment and kept
her at home, as a companion, until she was 16. She
was taken to a private tutor for three hours a day,
and accompanied her mother to tea parties and
motherly gatherings; in the evenings she
frequently accompanied both parents to dinner
parties. Reading and writing became her sources
of pleasure. Before being taken into her mothers
care she had attended a convent school, and she
spent a year in a general program at the University
of the Witwatersrand in 1945. That was the extent

of her formal education. In 1949 Gordimer
married Gerald Gavron, and their daughter
Oriane was born in 1950. The two were divorced
in 1952, and in 1954 Gordimer married Reinhold
Cassirer, an art dealer originally from Germany.
Their son Hugo was born in 1955.
Gordimers writing reflects the tensions of the
life she observed in the apartheid state, during
both its period of accelerated implementation
following the electoral victory of the National
Party in 1948 and the period of its replacement
by an electoral system not limited by the race of
the voter after the release of Nelson Mandela in
1990. Her early stories show the belittling effect on
whites of the racial privileges of the age. The
outwardly benign white protagonists, confronted
with the domestic crises of black servants, the
needs of itinerant black artisans, and even the
desperation of itinerant street robbers, are shown
to be emotional victims of their own set of
privileges, which inhibit genuine response. In her
first novel, The Lying Days (1953), Gordimer
evokes the social-political scene of her own
small-town origins and contact with the liberal
ethos of one group of students at the University of
the Witwatersrand. The protagonist attempts
both to ignore the racial prejudices of the era and
to interact with black contacts. Her sense that
South Africa is a battleground from which she
may want to escape is balanced at the end of the
novel by her assertion she is not running away, but
intent on coming back.
In her fiction of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s,
Gordimer constantly evokes both well-meaning
attempts at interracial mixing in an officially
separate society and their inevitable failure. A
World of Strangers (1958), the short story collection Fridays Footprint and Other Stories (1960),
and Occasion for Loving (1963) all encapsulate the
compromises and one-sidedness of white attempts to ignore both the official, legal rules and
the enormous differences of opportunity and
freedom in the apartheid state. The Sharpeville
massacre of 1960 (in which members of a group of
non-violent black protestors were shot down in
large numbers by white police) was followed by a
declared state of emergency, the arrest without
charge of a large number of political figures, and
an increasingly repressive series of security laws
and rules. The black intellectual renaissance of the
GORDIMER, NADINE
1950s was over, and with it the liberal racial

mixing of that era. Gordimers fiction had shown
the illusory quality of white fair-mindedness in
the 1950s. Much of her subsequent work deals
explicitly with the options for action in an increasingly authoritarian and militarized apartheid state.
In The Late Bourgeois World (1966) the mood is
darker, and the consequences of committed white
action both tragic and ineffectual. The setting is
no longer the world of well-meaning social gestures but one in which violent opposition to the
state is examined through the lives of white
liberals turned ineffectual saboteurs and more
effective black saboteur combatants, personally
elusive yet with real (often financial) demands on
white support. A Guest of Honour (1971 [1970]) is
set outside South Africa but continues the investigation of white action in an African setting. The
English guest returns to the independent
African country in which he had been a helpful
administrator during the colonial era, recalled
from the colony at the insistence of enraged white
settlers. In the newly independent state the president, who has invited him back, becomes involved
in a struggle with a local rival opposed to the new
links to international capital. Once again
Gordimers text investigates the extent to which
white action is helpful in a black context. The
English guest is killed in a random roadside
attack. White political action has been ultimately
unimportant, but the change in the white protagonist is seen as an inevitable part of commitment.
Gordimers international reputation was
clearly growing. In 1961, a year after its release,
her Fridays Footprint and Other Stories won the
W. H. Smith Literary Award in the United Kingdom. A Guest of Honour won the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize in the UK and the Central News
Agency Literary Prize in South Africa. The Conservationist (1974) won the Booker-McConnell
Prize in the United Kingdom and a second Central News Agency Literary Prize.
In The Conservationist she returns to South
Africa, but not to the white, English-speaking
suburbs and their threatened good intentions.
The protagonist, Mehring, is a realist, a city
industrialist who has acquired a farm as a place
to escape the stress of his competitive city life. He
sees himself as one who is attached to his piece of
land but without the qualms and self-righteous-
1111
ness he sees in the liberal delusions of his former

mistress and the political views of his son. But
Mehrings sense of ownership is undermined not
only by the constant presence of black laborers,
but also by the discovery of an unidentifiable
black corpse on the land itself. The white police
bury the corpse in a shallow grave and depart.
Now Mehring has a disturbingly alien presence
actually in his land, as opposed to merely passing
over it like the motley band of indigenous people.
His sense of unease is heightened when the corpse
is washed up by heavy rains and is once again on
his territory. Emotionally uneasy, Mehring goes
abroad to escape the anxieties of his countryestate fears. The aridity of his daily world of
possessions and ownership has constantly been
contrasted in the text with the natural reality of
the land itself and the simple lives of the indigenous people who live on it. When the black
people of the farm re-bury the nameless corpse,
Gordimer conveys a sense of social harmony in
the ceremony for the unknown man.
Burgers Daughter (1979) deals with a new view
of the political struggle. The ineffectual fears and
prejudices of the white characters on the surface of
the land in The Conservationist are replaced by the
presence in the text of both political engagement
and the lingering tensions of inherent white privilege, even among the politically committed. The
central character is the daughter of a well-known
white communist who dies while still serving a life
sentence in prison. After Lionels death, Rosa sets
out to create her own identity beyond the South
African world of political allegiance, commitment, and risk in which she has been willingly
involved; she is sick of the endurance of pain and
fear required by lives like those of her father. The
contradictions between, on the one hand her
inherited world of commitment and endurance,
and on the other the privileged daily circumstances of being white drive her to leave Lionels
world. She acquires a passport and moves to the
south of France, where she lives a pleasant but
relatively aimless private life that is disrupted on a
visit to London when she meets an old childhood
friend, the son of a black activist. In London the
classic divisions of the inherited racial privileges
and disadvantages of their native land reassert
themselves. The black father of the former friend
is now, unlike Lionel, forgotten. Rosas attempts
to re-enter childhood intimacy are seen as
1112
GORDIMER, NADINE
condescending; his angry new status is that of a

form of black consciousness that provokes her
into an attack that further reveals her condescension. His bitterness and her guilt are crude examples of the impossibility of her continuing the
easy, relatively trivial life of her French sojourn.
Rosa returns to South Africa, understanding that
she cannot defect. The novel ends with her in
prison and the country embroiled in the 1976
Soweto uprising begun by black children protesting new apartheid schooling regulations. Addressing her dead father, Rosa thinks of the sublime
qualities in his life, because he like the black
children in revolt knew a form of elation.
Burgers Daughter is realistic, and its settings are
recognizably part of the mood and aura of the era
of composition. In the works written after that
novel Gordimer frequently creates speculative
plots dealing with imagined situations and contexts. There is the same local verisimilitude in
descriptions and settings, but the events themselves, although closely observed, are placed in a
future context. Julys People (1981) is set in an
interregnum: an imagined time of increasing
turmoil as a revolutionary war grips South Africa.
That predicted scene of the collapse of established
apartheid control is used to illustrate the coincident collapse of white moral authority. A white
couple leaves their Johannesburg home as the
urban war reaches their area. With their children
and the black servant, July, they flee to Julys small
black village. In that new context, the children
adapt easily to their restricted circumstances. The
father tries to retain the symbols of his former
white identity, but crucial items like his shotgun
and the family vehicle become increasingly communal. It is the liberal and formerly benign white
mistress who has most difficulty adapting to the
new relationship with July, the faithful house
servant who, she finally realizes, has an identity
quite different from the one she had created for
him. This discovery that Julys evaluation of
himself is independent of her materializes in an
angry exchange when he speaks back to her not in
her language but in his, which she cannot understand. The cultural authority of the old regime
along with the identities it has supported has
collapsed.
In Something Out There, a collection of short
stories published in 1984, Gordimer continues
her trend of examining possibilities for a turbu-
lent South African world, and in the novel A Sport

of Nature (1987) she imagines both a finally
liberated country in the south and the liberating
actions of the white South African protagonist,
married first to an African National Congress
official, who is assassinated, and then to an African general in an imagined African state. The tone
of this later fiction has changed from that of
Gordimers early and middle period. In later
works she constantly suggests the compromising
nature of liberal values in the corrupt world of an
apartheid South Africa ruled by force. For example, in A Sport of Nature the protagonist, Hillela, is
both effective in the public realm and at the same
time self-assured and committed to action at any
cost. This combination is politically successful but
at times unsettling. The tone changes as Gordimer
shifts from an examination of the personal costs
in white liberal reactions to a more detached
representation of the attitudes that make political
change occur.
Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 and
negotiations began to produce a new constitution. In this period of change the personal truths
Gordimer investigated throughout the apartheid
era and the complexity of reactions against white
rule are no longer her main concern. In Jump and
Other Stories (1991), many of the stories are
pointed examples of the current situation; others
depict the stresses of the period of change. In the
novel My Sons Story (1990) the protagonists are
mainly non-white, and the novel explores the
nature of the determined political role of such
political activists. None to Accompany Me (1994)
deals with the effectiveness of the newly political
wife of a long-serving male activist in the Movement. And as the struggle is taken over by newcomers, Vera Stark, a white lawyer working on
resettlement of previously evicted black residents,
decides to leave her former home and live as a
tenant with a black colleague. The explicit symbolism of such a phrase is typical of the emblematic element in Gordimers later work.
Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1991, and that international recognition coincided with the opening up of legitimate negotiation on the form of the new South
African state. Gordimer depicts the problems of
random violence and crime as the new society
throws off the authoritarian aura of the white
regime but inherits the major inequities of the
GORDIMER, NADINE
past. The House Gun (1998) acknowledges the

new regimes inheritance of a violent legacy. A
white couple struggles to accommodate the trial
and conviction of their son, who has shot his
former homosexual lover after the lover slept with
the sons current female partner. The middle-class
parents find themselves in a situation similar to
that of countless black parents with children on
trial and in prison. In Writing and Being (1995),
which collects her 1994 Charles Eliot Norton
Lectures at Harvard, Gordimer points to the need
to understand the era of apartheid in order to
understand the present.
In The Pickup (2001), the racially mixed world
of the trendy young is explicitly part of the new
South Africa. The protagonist, enjoying the social
freedoms denied by the laws of the previous
generation, has her life altered by meeting an
illegal Arab immigrant who after repairing her
car is admitted to her cafe world. She marries
Abdul and is surprised at his positive reaction to
her influential circle of relatives and friends. She
joins him in his deportation to his desert homeland, where she finds a sense of community and
identity that prevents her from joining her husband in his search, ultimately successful, for
immigrant status in the West. She prefers life in
the desert to another round of humiliating, immigrant dirty work for Abdul in the United States.
The Pickup is stark in its use of the liberated white
South African scene as a viewpoint through a
privileged white person on the international
plight of immigrants from the developing world.
Gordimers most recent work takes the history
of the struggle for change in South Africa as a
given and depicts the human complexities in the
new state with a more detached perspective than
that of the texts dealing with the apartheid state.
At the same time the prose is frequently more
condensed than in the classic apartheid texts. Loot
and Other Stories (2003) contains a mixture of
stories set in and outside South Africa, and in Get
a Life (2005) the new, multiracial society is merely
a fact of the South African scene. The issues dealt
with in the novel are environmental. Personal
health threatened by radioactive treatment is the
central issue in the first part of the book, and in the
second the health of the environment, threatened
by development projects of many kinds, becomes
the main concern. Gordimers style is more choric
in this novel than in her previous work as she links
1113
the personal threat of the opening with the environmental threats of the second part of the book.
The latest collection of short stories, Beethoven
was One-Sixteenth Black (2007), has little of the
direct political commentary of Gordimers early
and middle work. The characters in the fiction
deal with personal and emotional issues in recognizable situations but are treated in terms of
conflict, love, and desire. Although intrinsically
part of the scene, the major political changes in
South Africa are not the central feature of her
latest work.
Coetzee, J. M. (WF); Humor and Satire (WF);
The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF);
Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Southern African
Fiction (WF)

Clingman, S. (1992). The Novels of Nadine Gordimer:
History from the Inside. Amherst: University of
Gordimer, N. (1953). The Lying Days. London:
Gollancz.
Gordimer, N. (1958). A World of Strangers. London:
Gollancz.
Gordimer, N. (1960). Fridays Footprint and Other
Gordimer, N. (1963). Occasion for Loving. London:
Gollancz.
Gordimer, N. (1966). The Late Bourgeois World. New
York: Viking.
Gordimer, N. (1971). A Guest of Honour [1970].
Gordimer, N. (1974). The Conservationist. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Gordimer, N. (1979). Burgers Daughter. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Gordimer, N. (1981). Julys People. New York: Viking.
Gordimer, N. (1984). Something Out There. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Gordimer, N. (1987). A Sport of Nature. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Gordimer, N. (1990). My Sons Story. London:
Bloomsbury.
Gordimer, N. (1991). Jump and Other Stories. London:
Bloomsbury.
Gordimer, N. (1994). None to Accompany Me. London:
Bloomsbury.
1114
GRACE, PATRICIA
Gordimer, N. (1995). Writing and Being. Cambridge,

Gordimer, N. (1998). The House Gun. New York:
Gordimer, N. (2001). The Pickup. London:
Bloomsbury.
Gordimer, N. (2003). Loot and Other Stories. London:
Bloomsbury.
Gordimer, N. (2005). Get a Life. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Gordimer, N. (2007). Beethoven was One-Sixteenth
Black and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
King, B. (ed.) (1993). The Later Fiction of Nadine
Gordimer. London: Macmillan.
Smith, R. (ed.) (1990). Critical Essays on Nadine
Gordimer. Boston: Hall.
Temple-Thurston, B. (1999). Nadine Gordimer
Revisited. New York: Twayne.
Wade, M. (1978). Nadine Gordimer. London: Evans.
Grace, Patricia
MICHELLE KEOWN
Patricia Grace (of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa,

and Te Ati Awa tribal descent) is one of Aotearoa/New Zealands best-known and most prolific
Maori writers. Born in Wellington on August 17,
1937 to a Pakeha (European) mother and a
Maori father, Grace was at the forefront of a
new tradition of Maori creative writing in
English that emerged during the 1960s and
1970s, a period when large numbers of Maori
were migrating from rural settlements to the
Pakeha-dominated urban centers in search of
employment and education opportunities. Grace
began to write for publication in her mid-twenties and, along with several other emerging Maori
writers (such as Witi Ihimaera), she began publishing individual pieces of short fiction in periodicals such as the New Zealand Listener and Te
Ao Hou. Her debut short story collection Waiariki (the first book-length work of fiction by a
Maori woman) was published in 1975, and since
then she has produced six novels: Mutuwhenua
(1978b), Potiki (1986), Cousins (1992), Baby NoEyes (1998), Dogside Story (2001), and Tu (2004);
six short story collections: The Dream Sleepers
(1980), Electric City and Other Stories (1987),
Selected Stories (1991), The Sky People (1994b),
Collected Stories (1994a), and Small Holes in the
Silence (2006); several childrens books; and nonfiction publications on Maori mythology and
oratory.
Much of Graces early work engages with issues
explored by other Te Ao Hou authors of the 1950s
and 1960s, referencing (in stories such as
Transition and And So I Go, 1975) the immense social changes brought about by the postwar migration to the cities. Grace was also concerned with the politics of representation as a
means of self-empowerment for Maori. In her
1975 short story Parade, for example, a Maori
elders comment to a young Maori girl that It is
your job . . . [t]o show others who we are becomes a manifesto for Graces role as a Maori
writer, while her novel Mutuwhenua which
focuses upon a young Maori woman who marries
a Pakeha was written in part as a challenge to
romantic and negative stereotypes of Maori produced in Pakeha literature (Grace 1978a, 80).
While there is a clear counter-discursive agenda
in these early works, from the publication of Potiki
Graces work becomes more overtly inflected by
the polemical energies of the Maori Renaissance, a
politico-cultural movement that developed in the
1970s as a result of widespread concerns about the
social pressures faced by urbanized Maori (such as
racial discrimination, socio-political marginalization, and a loss of contact with traditional
cultural practices). Potiki, and later novels such
as Cousins and Baby No-Eyes, engage closely with
two key issues of the Maori Renaissance: the
alienation of Maori land, and the decline and
recent revitalization of the Maori language. All
three novels represent allegorical responses to
high-profile land disputes between Maori and
Pakeha, resonating with earlier short stories such
as Journey (1980) and later novels such as
Dogside Story, which similarly emphasize the importance of land to Maori, not only as a material
source of sustenance, but also as a locus of personal, tribal, and mythopoeic identification (see
Keown 2007, 1423).
Indeed, many of Graces narratives are deeply
rooted in Maori mythology. In Potiki, for example, two of the central characters (Hemi and
Roimata) are modeled upon Ranginui and
Papat
uanuku, the primal sky-father and earthmother, while another character, Toko, is based
partly upon Maui (the demigod and trickster
prominent in Maori and other Polynesian oral
GRENVILLE, KATE
traditions). Grace further explores these and other elemental myths in later stories such as
Suns Marbles (in The Sky People), which recounts Mauis Promethean quest for fire and
sunlight, and Moon Story (in Small Holes),
which retells the legend of a woman who rashly
insults the goddess of the moon.
Graces work is also strongly influenced by the
dynamics of the Maori oral tradition more generally. Several of her novels feature multiple narrators whose collective utterances resemble the
structures of whaikorero (communal speechmaking), and many of her narratives code-switch
strategically between Maori and English, or transfer Maori grammatical patterns into English syntax, in acts of linguistic deterritorialisation (see
Keown 2005). Grace is also skillful in creating
idiolects specific to individuals and generational
groups, and in using language to convey intense
sensory detail, such as the horrors of war (in Tu),
the vibrancy of color (in Baby No-Eyes), and the
spatial novelties of overseas travel (in The Kiss,
from Small Holes).
Although many of Graces narratives engage
with social injustice (particularly against Maori),
they are also marked by a lively humor and an
empathetic engagement with the intricacies of
interpersonal relationships. Her books have won
numerous awards at home and abroad, and in
2008 she was awarded the prestigious Neustadt
International Prize for Literature in recognition
of her lifes work.
SEE ALSO: Fantasy, Science Fiction,
and Speculative Fiction (WF); Ihimaera,
Witi (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF);
New Zealand Fiction (WF); Politics/
Activism and Fiction (WF);
Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF)

Allen, C. (2004). Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in
American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist
Texts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Grace, P. (1975). Waiariki and Other Stories. Auckland:
Longman Paul.
Grace, P. (1978a). The Maori in Literature. In M. King
(ed.), Tihe Mauri Ora: Aspects of Maoritanga.
Hong Kong: Methuen, pp. 803.
1115
Grace, P. (1978b). Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps.

Auckland: Penguin.
Grace, P. (1986). Potiki. Auckland: Penguin.
Grace, P. (1987). Electric City and Other Stories.
Auckland: Penguin.
Grace, P. (1991). Selected Stories. Auckland: Penguin.
Grace, P. (1992). Cousins. Auckland: Penguin.
Grace, P. (1994a). Collected Stories. Auckland: Penguin.
Grace, P. (1994b). The Sky People. Auckland:
Penguin.
Grace, P. (1998). Baby No-Eyes. Auckland: Penguin.
Grace, P. (2001). Dogside Story. Auckland: Penguin.
Grace, P. (2004). Tu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Grace, P. (2006). Small Holes in the Silence. Auckland:
Penguin.
Heim, O. (1993). Writing Along Broken Lines: Violence
and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction.
Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Keown, M. (2005). Postcolonial Pacific Writing:
Representations of the Body. London: Routledge.
Keown, M. (2007). Pacific Islands Writing: The
Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and
Oceania. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McRae, J. (1992). Patricia Grace. In E. Alley and M.
Williams (eds.), In the Same Room: Conversations
with New Zealand Writers. Auckland: Auckland
University Press.
Grenville, Kate
SUE KOSSEW
Kate Grenville has, since her earliest publication

in 1984 (the short story collection Bearded
Ladies), become one of Australias best-known
fiction writers nationally and internationally. She
has published six novels, the two most recent of
which have won major international prizes. After
her first Gothic novella set in Italy, Dreamhouse
(1987), her work has explored an evolving sense of
being Australian. Her novels frequently challenge
the epic ideals of what she has termed the heroic
parched outback, subverting the version of Australian history that has privileged the typically
male hero battling against the odds. This subversion often takes the form of a strong feminist
theme that runs through her novels, in opposition
to Australian masculinist national discourses. As a
teacher of creative writing herself who has written
and co-written books about the writing process,
her novels have been somewhat experimental
1116
GRENVILLE, KATE
in form, often employing satire, irony, and

competing points of view to create multidimensional narratives.
Born in Sydney on October 14, 1950, Grenville
completed a BA Honors degree in English literature in 1972 at Sydney University. After spending time in the 1970s in Europe, she went to the
United States in 1980, undertaking a Masters
degree in creative writing at the University of
Colorado. During her time there, she wrote short
stories later collected as Bearded Ladies and a
novel later published as Dreamhouse. In 1983 she
returned to Sydney (where she still lives) with an
unfinished novel, Lilians Story, her first major
work to receive public acclaim in the form of the
1984 Australian/Vogel National Literary Award
for an unpublished novel by a young writer.
Published in 1985, it was enthusiastically endorsed by Patrick White, who described it as
transforming an Australian myth into a dazzling fiction of universal appeal (cited in Gleeson-White 313). Her next novel, Joan Makes
History (1988), was commissioned by the Australian government as part of the bicentenary of
European settlement. In rewriting key moments
in Australian history from a womans point of
view, Grenville was drawing attention to the way
women are still being written out of our
culture. In putting the women back in, Grenville provided an alternative to the heroic model
of history that glorified only mens deeds:
heroic deeds are actually no more or less heroic
than staying home and washing socks (Baker
127).
This strongly feminist thematic concern with
the lives of women is clearly evoked in Lilians
Story, loosely based on Bea Miles, a notoriously
eccentric bag lady who lived in Sydney from the
1930s to 1970s. A memorably transgressive character, Lilian seems to represent the rebellious and
anti-authoritarian aspect of Australian identity.
The novel can also be read as a postcolonial
representation of the colonial relationship between Australia and England. Dark Places
(1994; titled Albions Story in the US) is the
mirror image sequel to Lilians Story, written
from the perspective of Albion, Lilians authoritarian and abusive father. Read together, the two
novels illuminate the ways gender roles can polarize and make victims of both men and women.
Grenvilles The Idea of Perfection (1999) similarly
engages with the pressure to conform to gender

and national stereotypes. Winner of the Orange
Prize for Fiction in 2001, this more humorous
novel, set in the fictional country town of
Karakarook, is a wry satire of established myths
about the Australian bush and its discourses of
gendered nationalism that lay down strict rules
for how to be Australian.
The main themes of her work, including the
recuperation of womens stories, a redefinition
of the heroic and of national identity, and uncovering silences about the past, have resulted in
a strong engagement with the relationship between fiction and history. This is particularly
apparent in her novel The Secret River (2005),
which grew from her search for her own family
history that coincided with a growing national
rethinking of the relationship between settler and
indigenous culture in contemporary Australia.
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize
and the New South Wales Premiers Literary
Award, as well as appearing on the 2006 Booker
Prize shortlist, The Secret River explores ideas of
colonial contact in the early years of settlement
along the Hawkesbury River in New South
Wales, a narrative that closely mirrors the story
of Grenvilles own convict ancestor, Samuel
Wiseman.
Grenville has written extensively about her own
writing method, in Making Stories: How Ten
Australian Novels Were Written (1993), where she
writes about Lilians Story, and in her writing
memoir, Searching for the Secret River (2006),
which charts the writing process of that novel.
Two other works, The Writing Book: A Workbook
for Fiction Writers (1990) and Writing from Start
to Finish: A Six-Step Guide (2001), provide advice
for writers.
Grenvilles novels have been translated into
numerous languages, and both Lilians Story and
Dreamhouse (as Traps) have been adapted as
films. She is one of Australias most influential
contemporary women writers, one whose finely
crafted, often darkly humorous and readable
novels also address important social and national
issues.
SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Feminism
Humor and Satire (WF); Postcolonialism and
Fiction (WF); White, Patrick (WF)
GROVE, FREDERICK PHILIP

Baker, C. (ed.) (1989). Yacker 3: Australian Writers Talk
about Their Work. Sydney: Picador.
Chan, P. (dir.) (1994). Traps. Filmopolis Pictures.
Domaradzki, J. (dir.) (1995). Lilians Story. Movieco
Australia.
Gleeson-White, J. (2007). Australian Classics: Fifty
Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works. Sydney:
Allen and Unwin.
Grenville, K. (1984). Bearded Ladies. St. Lucia:
Grenville, K. (1985). Lilians Story. Sydney: Allen and
Unwin.
Grenville, K. (1987). Dreamhouse. St. Lucia: University
Grenville, K. (1988). Joan Makes History. St. Lucia:
Grenville, K. (1990). The Writing Book: A Workbook for
Fiction Writers. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Grenville, K. (1994). Dark Places. Sydney: Macmillan.
(Published in US as Albions Story. New York:
Harcourt Brace.)
Grenville, K. (1999). The Idea of Perfection. Melbourne:
Picador.
Grenville, K. (2001). Writing from Start to Finish: A SixStep Guide. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Grenville, K. (2005). The Secret River. Melbourne: Text.
Grenville, K. (2006). Searching for the Secret River.
Melbourne: Text.
Grenville, K., & Woolfe, S. (eds.) (1993). Making Stories:
How Ten Australian Novels Were Written. Sydney:
Allen and Unwin.
Grove, Frederick Philip

LAURA MOSS
Frederick Philip Grove holds a place high in

Canadian letters for the enduring relevance of his
novels about immigrants lives on the prairies and
for the sensational discovery of the fraudulence of
his autobiography.
Born Felix Paul Berthold Friedrich Greve on
February 14, 1879 in Randomno, Prussia to
German parents, Grove immigrated to Canada
in 1912, changed his name (retaining his initials)
and identity (claiming he was the son of a wealthy
Swedish father and a cosmopolitan Scottish
mother), and began writing about his new home.
As with Canadas other famous case of literary
fraud, that of Grey Owl (Archie Belaney), Grove
treated the young country as a blank slate on
1117
which to inscribe his story. It was over 20 years

after his death in 1948 that Queens University
professor and Grove biographer Douglas Spettigue discovered the true identity of this canonical writer. Even though Groves autobiography, In
Search of Myself (1946), won the Governor Generals Award for non-fiction, Spettigue found it to
be largely the fabrication of a man who had staged
his own death in Germany to escape a crushing
debt load and fled to the remote North American
countryside.
Klaus Martens and other literary detectives
further uncovered the facts of Greves life in
Germany. Prior to his arrival in Canada, Greve
was a poet, dramatist, translator, and literary
personality who had been jailed for fraud. Attracted to the turn-of-the-century aestheticist
movement in Europe, Greve translated the works
of Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, H. G. Wells,
and Andre Gide; he also published his own neoromantic writing in German. In 1909, after faking
suicide in Germany, he and his lover Elsa Endell
tried farming in Kentucky but parted company
two years later. Elsa ended up in New York where
she joined the Bohemian writing scene and became the celebrated Dada artist and poet Baroness
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Grove moved to
Manitoba and became an itinerant teacher and
writer.
In sharp contrast to the cosmopolitan spendthrift Greve, Grove was a somber figure who
merged stories of betrayal and failure with beautiful descriptions of the stark prairie landscape.
His first book in English, a selection of nature
sketches and personal anecdotes entitled Over
Prairie Trails (1922), breaks with the aestheticism
of his European work in its realist detailing of
commonplace objects and the geography of rural
Manitoba. Other non-fiction works followed,
including A Search for America (1927), which
critic John Moss describes as the social vision
of a continent where the potential of Western
civilization, released from the suffocating strictures of history, has been realized and found
wanting (151). Finding an appreciative audience
for this early Canadian work, Grove embarked on
three highly successful cross-continental tours
where, speaking as an immigrant, he argued
passionately against assimilation.
Along with Arthur Stringer (The Prairie Wife,
1915), Laura Goodman Salverson (The Viking
1118
GUNESEKERA, ROMESH
Heart, 1923), Martha Ostenso (Wild Geese, 1925),

Robert Stead (Grain, 1926), Sinclair Ross (As for
Me and My House, 1941) and W. O. Mitchell
(Who Has Seen the Wind, 1947), Grove explored
the complexities of pioneer life in the new Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and
Alberta. His farm novels, Settlers of the Marsh
(1925), Our Daily Bread (1928), The Yoke of Life
(1930), and the epic Fruits of the Earth (1933), are
considered classics of Canadian literature.
Groves fiction explores the emotional and psychological impact of migration, settlement, and
subsistence labor on his characters as he repeatedly probes the themes of betrayal and sacrifice,
fate versus free will, human conflicts with nature,
and environmental determinism. Unusual for the
time, Grove places these central modernist concerns in a recognizable Canadian landscape. Tame
by contemporary standards, his most robust
novel, Settlers of the Marsh, was considered upon
publication to be obscene and indecent. With
moral rigidity and misguided dreams of prosperity, Swedish immigrant Niels Lindstedt builds a
profitable farm but, frustrated by unrequited love,
ends up marrying, and later murdering, another
woman. Settlers was followed by several other less
scandalous (but no less moral) works about settling a community, most notably the story of the
promethean farmer Abe Spalding in Fruits of the
Earth. Groves contribution to prairie literature
lies in his placement of psychologically complex
characters, often drawn from archetypes, in precise realistic descriptions of a stark environment.
Although his fiction is considered among the
most significant prairie realism in modern Canadian writing, it has also been criticized as overbearing, dark, and moralistic.
Leaving Manitoba and the farm novel behind in
his later years, Grove moved to Ontario to work
for Graphic Publishers and to write the kinds of
social commentary he had begun in A Search for
America. He ended his career in Simcoe, Ontario,
composing an apocalyptic industrial novel, The
Master of the Mill (1944), and an allegorical satire,
Consider Her Ways (1947), about

Brian W. Shaffer. The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Brian W. Shaffer. The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Editor

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

This edition first published 2011

To Rachel, Hannah, and Ruth

Volume II: Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Volume III: Twentieth-Century World Fiction

Firbank, Ronald 129

Maugham, W. Somerset 246

Richardson, Dorothy 328

Volume II: Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Boyle, Kay 469

Coover, Robert 505

Himes, Chester 624

OConnor, Flannery 753

Spiegelman, Art 844

Volume III: Twentieth-Century World Fiction

Antoni, Robert 958

Awoonor, Kofi 977

Ghose, Zulfikar 1099

Maracle, Lee 1212

Riley, Joan 1316

Preface to The Encyclopedia of

It is no mystery why this shift occurred.

later decline and eventual loss of the

PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION

same boundaries. The Encyclopedia of

place(s) of residence (as practicing writers of fiction). Without this guiding

PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION

also implicitly advance an argument

yond and have been chosen in accordance

a tedious editorial process into a welcome

Notes on Contributors to Volume I

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (2007), and

Literary Encyclopedia. He is currently editing

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

Alison Cullingford is special collections librarian at the University of Bradford, home to

Literature. He co-curated the National Portrait Gallerys exhibition, Wyndham Lewis

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

University Press, Irish Cultural Memory

specializes in modern and contemporary culture and literature, and representations of

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

volume of International Ford Madox Ford

the Humanities Research Centre there. He has

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

Stephen Knight is distinguished research

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

Patrick A. Mccarthy is professor of English

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

Literature (2008) and coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish

Michael Valdez Moses is associate professor

Robert Morace teaches at Daemen College in

Margot Norris is Chancellors Professor at

Merritt Moseley is professor of literature at

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

Thomas OGrady is a professor of English at

of New York. She is the author of Modernism,

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

gender studies, literature and science, and

Most of his writing has been devoted to the

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I

2008); and an edition of a primary text,

Women (1990), Rosamond Lehmann (1992),

Claire Squires is professor of publishing