Afterword: Modernism, Formalism, and the “Edwardian Bypass”

Au cours des deux dernières décennies, les « nouvelles études modernistes » ont transformé notre compréhension de la littérature du début du XXe siècle. En dépit de cela, la nouvelle continue d'être envisagée en des termes largement formalistes, à travers des concepts critiques qui, dans certains cas, remontent aux années 1970 et 1980. Les descriptions contextuelles et historiques du genre restent rares, à l'instar des explications qui reflètent les tendances récentes de la théorie critique et culturelle. Cet article envisage un avenir alternatif à la critique de la nouvelle. En s'inspirant du récit de Fredric Jameson, « Romance », au tournant du XXe siècle, il plaide pour un élargissement chronologique et conceptuel de notre compréhension de la nouvelle au cours de cette période, et montre comment une « nouvelle façon d'étudier la nouvelle » pourrait commencer à s'écarter du formalisme

Hobsbaum and His Legacy

Recounts and assesses the impact of the poet and critic Philip Hobsbaum (1932-2005) on the development and role of creative writing within university English departments, both at Queern\u27s University, Belfast, but more especially after he moved to the University of Glasgow

Taking Possession: Alice Munro’s "A Wilderness Station" and James Hogg’s Justified Sinner

Alice Munro's purpose in recasting James Hogg's A Justified Sinner as she does is to be found in the way Munro's historical narrative endeavours to exempt its central character from the controlling impositions of narrative history. It is this staged aversion to any form of narrative “capture” that lies at the heart of her meditation upon Hogg; it is a key element in Munro's mature fictional aesthetic. “A Wilderness Station” does not so much restage the religious drama of Justified Sinner as offer an exposition in imitative form of the moral and artistic values that convolve within it. Much like Hogg, Munro works backward from assumed knowledge toward contradiction and uncertainty. Both authors write historical fictions that attempt to accommodate within their narrative praxis the inevitability of resistance to, and qualification of, the stories they tell – stories that refuse to take possession of their subjects

"Complete with missing parts": modernist short fiction as interrogative text

This thesis examines modernist short fiction in English from the 1890s to the 1980s, with particular reference to works by James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett and Donald Barthelme. The term 'interrogative' is evolved in the course of the study to describe the relationship of the reader and of interpretative discourse to the form. It is argued that the modernist story is marked by indeterminacy and a resistance to teleological structuration as a result of its narrative strategies of ellipsis, reticence and interdiction. Unlike those existing theories which emphasize 'unity' or 'ambiguity' in the short story, the interrogative approach takes as its starting point a post-Saussurean definition of language as differential and plurisignificant and uses this to demonstrate the form's constitutional resistance to determine critical exegesis

Afterword: Modernism, Formalism, and the “Edwardian Bypass”

Au cours des deux dernières décennies, les « nouvelles études modernistes » ont transformé notre compréhension de la littérature du début du XXe siècle. En dépit de cela, la nouvelle continue d'être envisagée en des termes largement formalistes, à travers des concepts critiques qui, dans certains cas, remontent aux années 1970 et 1980. Les descriptions contextuelles et historiques du genre restent rares, à l'instar des explications qui reflètent les tendances récentes de la théorie critique et culturelle. Cet article envisage un avenir alternatif à la critique de la nouvelle. En s'inspirant du récit de Fredric Jameson, « Romance », au tournant du XXe siècle, il plaide pour un élargissement chronologique et conceptuel de notre compréhension de la nouvelle au cours de cette période, et montre comment une « nouvelle façon d'étudier la nouvelle » pourrait commencer à s'écarter du formalisme

Kipling's Captains Courageous and the Anglo-Indian in America

First paragraph: Writing in 1926, Thomas Beer argued that the "thread of imperial thinking" in Rudyard Kipling's work had in large measure supplied the moral and intellectual justification for the Spanish-American War. Later commentators have not shied away from Beer’s extravagance. According to Christopher Hitchens, Kipling acted as "John the Baptist" to the age of American imperialism, persuading his fellow Anglo-Saxons of their racial birthright by "inculcat[ing] the idea of empire in the American mind." More recently, Patrick Brantlinger has turned to Kipling in an effort to parse the deep grammar of America’s "Second Expeditionary Era," which is to say its recent and ongoing military interventions in the Middle East. Surveying the uses and abuses of "The White Man's Burden" over more than a century of U.S. foreign policy, Brantlinger hears its echo after 2001 in the battle-cries of Republican hawks and among neoconservative apologists for "America's new global empire." Judith Plotz, meanwhile, argues that if Kipling’s purpose a century ago was to convince the U.S. of its "world-historical destiny," the function of his writing a hundred years later has been "relegitimizing imperialism" for the post-9/11 era

Comments on the ophiuroid family Protasteridae and description of a new genus from the Lower Devonian of the Fox Bay Formation, Falkland Islands

Asterozoan fossils are comparatively rare in Gondwana compared with Laurentia, especially in the Devonian. We examined the only fossil ophiuroid yet known from the Falkland Islands and assess its significance for the evolution of the clade. This ophiuroid, herein distinguished as a new genus and species, Darwinaster coleenbiggsae, belongs to the same suprageneric group as Protaster, which was established on a series of Middle–Upper Ordovician taxa and persisted into the late Palaeozoic remarkably little changed in morphology. This single example is part of a much wider fauna that includes fossils from the Bokkeveld Group, South Africa and the Precordillera of Argentina. Existing palaeobiogeographic reconstructions confirm that these faunas once existed on contiguous terranes and characterized a distinct suite of similar palaeoenvironments within the Malvinokaffric Realm. This study reviews the existing record of Devonian asterozoans and revises Protasteridae