The Letters in the Story

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

The fugue - music as a euphemism in the works of Carson McCullers and Emiliya Dvoriyanova

In Women in the House of Fiction Lorna Sage writes: "…the novels too treated the domain of character and representation as the place where the 'others' lived, playing their parts and acting out their roles…" (Sage 1992: viii). Sage investigates the impact women writers have had on post-war fiction employing that every novelist tries to probe the boundaries of fiction, to "voice" their views and positions through the language of literature. Using Henry James's metaphor of fiction as a house, however, Sage is indebted to one of the writers she read and wrote about – Angela Carter. It was Sage, as the first-ever critic to discuss Carter's works thoroughly, who noticed that houses are unable to endure holding the woman and her transgressive power at bay. All houses, castles, buildings, every entity that stands for patriarchal power, are eventually destroyed. Sage reads this as an attack from women novelists against their literary inheritance (Sage 1992: ix). Womanhood is a topic widely outspoken and deeply problematic. Each text takes on different ways to construct, deconstruct, explain and see the woman, her body, her role: in society, history, culture. I argue that women writers project a certain amount of personal experience into the fictional worlds they create - an approach Ellen Moers had in Literary Women and her reading of Frankenstein as Merry Shelly's personified trauma of giving birth. My paper outlines cultural contexts as relevant to the works of different writers. It traces how intentional or non-intentional intertextuality connects texts and motifs; my article seeks to answer how different cultural contexts brought about similar problems. To complete the outlined goals, I rely on close reading of particular texts.

“An Indigenous Sovereignty of the Imagination”: Reenvisioning the Great Australian Novel in Alexis Wright's Carpenteria

Alexis Wright's second novel, Carpentaria, received critical acclaim upon its publication by Giramondo in 2006. As the recipient of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007, Carpentaria cemented Wright's position as the country's foremost Indigenous novelist. This article places Carpentaria within contemporary discussions of “big, ambitious novels” by contemporary women novelists by examining the ways the novel simultaneously invites and resists its inclusion into an established canon of “great Australian novels” (GANs). While critics have been quick to celebrate the formal innovations of Carpentaria as what makes it worthy of GAN status, the novel nevertheless opposes the integrationist and homogenizing myths that accompany canonization. Therefore, the article finds that Wright's vision of a future Australia involves moments of antagonism and mutual understanding between white settler and Indigenous communities. This article uses the work of Homi Bhabha to argue that Carpentaria demonstrates the emergence of a third space wherein negotiation between these two cultures produces knowledge that is “new, neither the one nor the other.” In so doing, Wright shows the resilience of Indigenous knowledge even as it is subject to transformation upon contact with contradictory ideological and epistemological frameworks.

Romancierele: traducerile de romane scrise de femei în cultura română (1841-1918)

This article uses the data from the Chronological Dictionary of Novels Translated in Romania from its Origins to 1989 in order to chart the presence of foreign women novelists and their works in Romanian translation between 1841 (the year of the first translation of a novel originally written by a woman author, Sophie Cottin) and 1918 (the year marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the unification of Romanian provinces). The study separates two main periods, starting from the domination of the French novel: 1841-1890 and 1890-1918. The former period comprises more French novel translations, from authors such as Sophie Cottin, Stephanie-Felicité Genlis, George Sand, Countess Dash, M-me Charles Reybaud, and Mie D’Aghonne. The latter comprises Italian and American authors, such as Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Anna Katherine Green, Frances Elisa Hodgen Burnett, and even northern authors such as Clara Tschudi.

Concept of ‘New Woman’ and Indian Women Fiction Writers

Literature is one of human creativity that has universal meaning as one of the way to communicate each other about the emotional , spiritual and intellectual experiences that needed to build up intellectual and moral knowledge of mankind . A creative writer has the perception and the analytical mind of a sociologist who provides an exact record of human life, society, and social system. Fiction , being the most powerful form of literary expression today, has acquired a prestigious position in Indian literature. Indian women novelists in English and in other vernaculars try their best to deal with , apart from many other things , the pathetic plight of forsaken women who are fated to suffer from birth to death.

Framtidens kvinnor. Mognad och medborgarskap i svenska flickböcker 1832–1921

The future woman – what would she be like? And what would be her place in society? These questions were explored through stories about girls’ upbringing and education in nineteenth and early twentieth century literature for girls. About the time of the breakthrough of women novelists in the 1830s, books for girls started to be published. They depict everyday games and exhilarating adventures, student life and vocational dreams. By addressing girls directly, these books aimed at both discussing and influencing future female citizens. In Future Women, Maria Andersson shows how Swedish literature for girls and its depiction of young women was a part of the nineteenth century debate on women’s civil and political rights. The genre gathered authors of different political convictions but they were all united by the fact that young women became the focal point of contemporary social changes in their works. Housewifely girls, manly women students and shopping coquettes illustrated different paths to adulthood and modern life. In the girl book genre, the young woman was simultaneously a vehicle of nostalgic memories from a lost world and the promise of a more equal, peaceful future.