The Gothic and Grotesque in Barbara Gowdy’s Mister Sandman

The fiction of Barbara Gowdy is peopled with physically or spiritually aberrant characters that can trigger shock and disgust in readers. Her novel Mister Sandman (1995), however, calls for a more nuanced response to "the unusual," one triggered by Gowdy's parodic use of the gothic and grotesque as well as by instances of humour, comic relief, and a light-hearted tone. Such a combination of literary modes arouses sympathy for the novel's "monstrous" characters, making Mister Sandman representative of what Catherine Spooner calls the "Gothic-Carnivalesque." The novel's parodic rewriting of E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story "Der Sandmann" (1816), and Gowdy's use of grotesque imagery to produce humour rather than horror, are emblamatic of what Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik call "the comic turn" in contemporary gothic fiction, and complicate the traditional concepts of the grotesque articulated by Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin

VSX J003909.7+611233: a new slowly pulsating B (SPB) star in Cassiopeia?

We report the discovery of a new 13th magnitude variable star in Cassiopeia close to the variable KP Cas.Analysis of six days of intensive photometry shows a regular, near sinusoidal modulation with an amplitude of 0.024 mag and a period of 0.43815(31)d.Although its colour indicates a spectral type around F0 the star probably suffers up to 2−2.5 magnitudes of extinction, so could be an Aor B-type star. Given the period, the low amplitude, the shape of the lightcurve and the probable spectral type we consider it most likely to be a slowly pulsating B-type (SPB) star.The variable has been registered in the International Variable Star Index with the identifier VSX J003909.7+611233

SMEs entry mode decision making process: Rational or cybernetic?

Entry mode choice is a critical decision when a firm expends its business to foreign markets. By applying rational and cybernetic strategies to international strategic decision-making process, this paper investigates how small and medium sized firms (SMEs) decision makers decide their entry mode choices. By focusing on the entry decision making process, this research distinguishes the prior entry mode studies that emphasize the relationship between influencing factors and their impacts on entry mode choices. The results of this study show that SME managers normally adapt a combination of rational and cybernetic strategies in their international entry decision making process. This highlights that SMEs’ international entry decision making process is dynamic and complex