scholarly journals Rózsa Ignácz’s Torockói gyász [‘Torockó Mourning’]: Identity Beyond the Borders of Time and Space

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 28-42
Author(s):  
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Rózsa Ignácz’s historical novel Torockói gyász [‘Torockó Mourning’] (1958) deals with the staggering tragedy of Transylvanian Torockó in 1702. But the referential pattern that emerges from the dramatic plot clearly points beyond eighteenth-century time and space in partly overt and mostly covert ways: to the early twentieth-century post-Trianon fate of the Hungarians in Transylvania, and beyond, to the destructive post-1945 totalitarian communist regime in Hungary, as well as to the backlash of the 1956 anticommunist and anti-Soviet revolution and war of independence. The narrative techniques of expanding early eighteenth-century time and space will be examined through the ways in which thematic threads of collective identity are woven in the novel in general, and the customs, habits, and the religious affiliation of the community are handled in particular. Theories of Jan Assmann, Michael Bamberg, David Herman, Erving Goffman, Fritz Heider and Anselm L. Strauss as well as observations of Ignácz researchers such as Lajos Kántor, Gabriella F. Komáromi, and Erzsébet Dani will be used.

Narrative Direction

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Character Development ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sense Of Purpose ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Narrative Techniques

This essay approaches Goethe’s novel from the perspective of historical shifts and new poetic models in the late eighteenth century, which took the form of a feeling of increased contingency or randomness in an individual’s life. It argues that Goethe uses narrative techniques to create a balance between the episodic and the developmental, the parts of the novel and its trajectory as a whole. Wilhelm’s character development and these formal characteristics combine to solicit imaginative engagement on the part of readers of the novel, who, in thinking about these things, may come to a better understanding of the contingency in their own lives. The essay argues that Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship offers not only a detailed depiction of contingency in human life but also a suggestion that aesthetic experience might hold out the possibility of acknowledging and managing that contingency to create a sense of purpose and meaning.

scholarly journals Post-revisionism: Conflict (Ir)resolution and the Limits of Ambivalence in Kevin McCarthy’s Peeler

Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Michael McAteer
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
British Rule

This essay considers a historical novel of recent times in revisionist terms, Kevin McCarthy’s debut novel of 2010, Peeler. In doing so, I also address the limitations that the novel exposes within Irish revisionism. I propose that McCarthy’s novel should be regarded more properly as a post-revisionist work of literature. A piece of detective fiction that is set during the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, Peeler challenges the romantic nationalist understanding of the War as one of heroic struggle by focusing its attention on a Catholic member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. In considering the circumstances in which Sergeant Seán O’Keefe finds himself as a policeman serving a community within which support for the IRA campaign against British rule is strong, the novel sheds sympathetic light on the experience of Catholic men who were members of the Royal Irish Constabulary until the force was eventually disbanded in 1922. At the same time, it demonstrates that the ambivalence in Sergeant O’Keefe’s attitudes ultimately proves unsustainable, thereby challenging the value that Irish revisionism has laid upon the ambivalent nature of political and cultural circumstances in Ireland with regard to Irish-British relations. In the process, I draw attention to important connections that McCarthy’s Peeler carries to Elizabeth Bowen’s celebrated novel of life in Anglo-Irish society in County Cork during the period of the Irish War of Independence: The Last September of 1929.

Spectral Histories: The Queer Temporalities of Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Mulvany
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Logic ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Teenage Girl ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Temporal Aspects ◽  
Queer Temporality

Set in mid-eighteenth century London, Emma Donoghue's first historical novel, Slammerkin reconstructs the life of a teenage girl hanged in 1764 for the murder of her mistress and, in doing so, attempts to position the girl's murderous outburst as a reaction to the psychical traumas suffered throughout the course of her short and brutal life. This essay attends to the temporal aspects of Slammerkin in order to examine how the novel offers a subtle queering of both temporal normativity and the sequential temporal logic that heteronormative culture is contingent upon. Moreover, it explores how Donoghue's ventriloquization of the central character, Mary Saunders, speaks not only to the spectralization of women in history but also to the social ghosting of those whose lives appear to be out-of-joint with normative modes of time. By reading Donoghue's reparative gesture through recent articulations of spectrality and queer temporality, I present the novel as a form of narrative crypt that provides a phantasmal space for the spectral return of those who have been abjected from history, not only as a consequence of their gender, race, and class, but also because of their inability or refusal to comply with the normative temporal rhythms of the society in which they live.

Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Dyer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The French Revolution

The satirical fiction of the period 1770–1832 continues earlier trends, though the development of other modes of fiction and the fiction-marketing apparatus meant that satirical narratives were less central than they had been earlier in the eighteenth century. Satirical novels ran contrary to the tendency towards more plausible, more ‘novelistic’ fiction. Many novels used parody as a technique, often to attack literary trends, often to attack contemporary doctrines. Much satire was inspired, directly or indirectly, by the debates in Britain that followed the French Revolution. The most significant author of satirical novels, Thomas Love Peacock, used methods that were unlike those used by almost any other novelist. His fiction displays both memorable wit and a range of complex narrative techniques.

scholarly journals A Bakhtinian Approach to the Study of Eighteenth-Century English Gothic Novels

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. p42
Author(s):  
Shuping Chen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Space Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Space Coordinate ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mysteries Of Udolpho ◽  
First Time

M. M. Bakhtin in the third essay of The Dialogic Imagination coined the term “chronotope” to denote the interaction and integration of time and space in novelistic narratives. Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope emphasizes that time and space coordinate with each other rather than insist on their individualities in narratives. The major chronotope of the novel usually determines its generic characteristics. The current study attempts to utilize Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to anatomize the time-space structure of major Gothic novels in the eighteenth century, namely, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for the purpose of detecting and summarizing the common features of the Gothic genre. Manifold approaches and theories had been applied in this area, but it is the first time that Bakhtin’s chronotope was employed in the stylistic study of eighteenth-century Gothic novels written by Walpole and Radcliffe.

“By Degrees”

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-293
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Local Realism ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Geographical Distance ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Initial Analysis ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

Paul Giles, “‘By Degrees’: Jane Austen’s Chronometric Style of World Literature” (pp. 265–293) This essay considers how Jane Austen’s work relates to “World Literature” by internalizing a chronometric style. Examining the emergence of the chronometer in the eighteenth century, it suggests how Austen drew on nautical frames of reference to combine disparate trajectories of local realism, geographical distance, and historical time. The essay thus argues that Austen’s fiction is interwoven with a reflexive mode of cartographic mapping, one that draws aesthetically on nautical instruments to remap time and space. This style involves charting various fluctuations of perspective that reorder history, memory, and genealogy, while also recalibrating Britain’s position in relation to the wider world. Moving on from an initial analysis of Austen’s juvenilia and early novels, the essay proceeds in its second part to discuss Mansfield Park (1814) in relation to Pacific exploration and trade. In its third part, it considers Emma (1815) in the context of comic distortions and the misreadings that arise from temporal and spatial compressions in the narrative, a form heightened by the novel’s reflexive wordplay. Hence the essay argues that Austen’s particular style of World Literature integrates chronometric cartography with domestic circumstances, an elusive idiom that also manifests itself in relation to the gender dynamics of Persuasion (1817) and the unfinished “Sanditon,” as discussed in the essay’s concluding pages. This is correlated finally with the way Austen’s novels are calibrated, either directly or indirectly, in relation to a global orbit.

A Compact Embodiment of Pluralities and Denial of Origins: Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Why Questions ◽  
Near Future

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.

Drawing the Written Woman

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-63
Author(s):  
Sonia Lagerwall
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Dynamic Adaptation ◽  
Adaptation Process ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Training

This article deals with Philippe Druillet's three-volume comic adaptation (1980–1985) of Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert's historical novel from 1862, set three centuries BC. Flaubert was famous for not wanting his texts illustrated: he argued that the preciseness of images would undo the poetic vagueness of his written words. The article examines how Druillet tackles the challenge of graphically representing Flaubert's canonical work without reducing the priestess Salammbô into a given type. The analysis shows a dynamic adaptation process in which Druillet gives a kaleidoscopic form to Flaubert's text. His variation on the Salammbô character foregrounds photography, a medium historically relevant to the novel but also to Druillet's own artistic training. Featuring his character Lone Sloane in the role of Mathô, the adaptation proves to be a highly personal appropriation of the novel, where Druillet enhances an autobiographical dimension of his work previously hinted at in La Nuit and Gaïl.

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