‘How to handle eternity’: infinity and the theories of J.W. Dunne in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman

This essay examines the importance of the notion of infinity to the work of Flann O'Brien and Jorge Luis Borges. Using as a starting point their shared interest in the Irish-born popular scientist J.W. Dunne's highly eccentric theories about the ‘multidimensional’ nature of time, the essay goes on, through a close analysis of a number of Borges' stories and of O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman, to call attention to a fundamental affinity between these two ostensibly quite different authors. A case is ultimately made for a consideration of Borges and O'Brien as writers with remarkably similar views on fiction and the universe.     

St. Leon and the culture of the heart

This essay reads Godwin's second novel, St. Leon (1799), as an attempt to counter the asperity he expresses towards the domestic affections in his political philosophy of the 1790s. In St. Leon, Godwin seeks to square his newfound interest in the affections as a topic for fiction with his commitment to an anti-establishment political agenda. Though it is presented as a ‘eulogium’ to ‘the affections and charities of private life’, the narrative persistently undercuts the potential for the affections to stimulate readerly curiosity. The focus of the novel constantly shies away from the domestic scene, and instead propels the momentum forwards to the alchemical adventures that precipitate the disintegration of the very affections the novel purports to eulogise. The novel thus plays out Godwin's complicated desire to embrace, and yet simultaneously to deny, the importance of private emotions in the pursuit of political justice.     

IMAGINING SAFE URBAN SPACE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF DETECTIVE FICTION TO RADICAL GEOGRAPHY

Radical geographers often discuss how contemporary urban space is becoming increasingly violent and dangerous. They pay much less attention to the question of how to make this space safe. In contrast, detective fiction focuses precisely on how to take danger out of the city. It therefore provides radical geographers with imaginative models of how different levels of space are linked through forms of violence. Detective fiction challenges accounts of the urban spatialization of power that over-simplify relations between city inhabitants as a clash between “oppressor” and “oppressed.” By suggesting how a subject can simultaneously oppress through and be oppressed by volence, detective fiction shows the contradictory multiplicity of people's spatial identifications.     

El policial palimpséstico en “Marta Odera,monja” de Marisa Grinstein

This article investigates the emergence of detective fiction and film from 1994 to the present. The corpus appears during the government of Carlos Menem and its intent to insert Argentina into a globalized economy. Poverty, insecurity, and violence prevail in Argentine society, and many detective novels, based on real-life murders, appear in 1994. Moreover, this type of literature continues to proliferate in the twenty-first century. In this essay, I explore one of the many stories written by Marisa Grinstein. I begin with the newspaper article and trace its transformation into short fiction and television series. The articles about the homicide follow the tendencies of the sensationalist yellow press. The author and the film director of “Marta Odera, monja,” however, transform the events, following and also subverting the characteristics of the classic detective fiction and the hard-boiled. In doing so, these recreations of this particular murder case denounce the domestic violence that exists in Argentine society.     

Death at St Bernard's: Anti-vivisection,Medicine and the Gothic

Displaying a Gothic fascination with the misapplication of science, Edward Berdoe's St Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) was one of a number of novels in the 1880s that repackaged the horrors of vivisection for public consumption. Although the novel can be dismissed as derivative, it departed from standard themes found in other anti-vivisection texts. Through the device of a hero struggling with the moral implications of science and the reckless treatment of patients, St Bernard's challenged the legitimacy of the teaching hospital. The present article moves debate about the Gothic, literature and science beyond well-known texts by Stevenson and Wells to examine how St Bernard's combined ‘the methods of science with the methods of romance’ and shifted the anti-vivisection narrative into the hospital. In locating the novel within anti-vivisectionist uses of fiction and late-Victorian anxieties about experimental medicine and the teaching hospital, the article explores the novel's relationship with other anti-vivisection texts and Gothic fiction, and examines what it says about scientific practices and mentalities. St Bernard's fashioned a very different hospital from existing representations to warn readers of how brutish students and cruel doctors tortured patients. In doing so, the novel recast the teaching hospital as an uncanny and dangerous place.     

BALANCED TRUTH: STEVEN SPIELBERG'S SCHINDLER'S LIST AMONG HISTORY,MEMORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE1

Looking at the public reaction to it, one might say that Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is undoubtedly the most successful film about the Holocaust. The film's success in the U.S. and other Western countries can be traced back mainly to the fact that it creates the impression of telling a true, apparently authentic, story. This essay investigates how this impression of historical truth and authenticity emerges in a fiction film. For this purpose the essay reverts to a concept developed by Jörn Rüsen, which distinguishes among three dimensions of historical culture, namely political, aesthetic, and cognitive. In addition to the historical context that serves as a specific precondition for the film's success, the essay primarily investigates the strategies of authentication Spielberg applied at both the visual and narrative levels. The investigation concludes that the impression of evidence produced by the movie is significantly a result of the sophisticated balancing of the three dimensions mentioned above. The film utilizes artifacts of an existing and increasingly transnational (visual) memory for the benefit of a closed, archetypical narrative. It follows the aesthetic and artistic rules of popular narrative cinema, and largely recurs to conventions of representation that were common in film and television programs of the 1990s. Although these forms condense the historical course of events, the film manages to stay close to insights gained by historiography. The hybrid amalgamation of history and memory, and of the imaginary and the real, as well as the combination of dramaturgies of popular culture with an instinct for what can (not) be shown—all of these factors have helped Schindler's List to render a representation of the founding Holocaust myth in Western societies that can be sensually experienced while being emotionally impressive at the same time.     

De Manuel Zeno Gandía a Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón: Exploraciones en torno al género negro en Puerto Rico

This article proposes an analysis of Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón's seventh noir novel (novela negra), Las dos muertes de Catalino Ríos (2012), and a comparison of its poetics with that of Manuel Zeno Gandía's La charca (1894). The article questions the naturalist label often applied to Zeno Gandía's novel and instead views it as a nascent hardcore detective novel (proto novela negra). In comparing the two novels, it validates both Mattos Cintrón and Zeno Gandía as initiators of the noir thriller in Puerto Rico.     

Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure,Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

This essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar's Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe's novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne's and Frazar's adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system.     

Mansfield Park and Political Theology

ABSTRACT

This essay examines Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in the light of classical understandings of political theology. It does so by placing the novel in its Anglican and Erastian contexts as well as by showing that it belongs to a lineage of English prose fiction, whose famous names are Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, which also had theopolitical interests.     

In search of lost selves: Aidan Higgins' Scenes from a Receding Past

This essay makes the case for a fresh evaluation of Aidan Higgins' long-neglected autobiographical novel Scenes from a Receding Past. It argues that it is most fruitfully understood as a contribution to the phenomenology of personal identity and that many of its formal idiosyncrasies, especially its deviations from the standard formula for Künstlerroman, are a direct result of its preoccupation with general concepts of selfhood rather than a concern with society, or with the artist's role. I trace the genealogy of Higgins' innovative and unique form of realism in this work, and in the novel to which it forms a prequel, Balcony of Europe, to his attempts to escape the influence of James Joyce; and using the work of, amongst others, Paul Ricoeur, demonstrate how his fiction contributes to a new understanding of the relations between narrative, memory, imagination, and consciousness.     

Ghost hands,hands of glory,and manumission in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu

This essay corrects a critical blindspot in the study of Anglo-Irish literature through contextualising meanings of the hand as they appeared in the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73). From stylised fetish object in ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’ (1863), to symbol of the author's presence in the text in Wylder's Hand (1864), to centrepiece of a dizzying referential system in ‘The Haunted Baronet’ (1870), Le Fanu's fiction demonstrates significant indebtedness to the legend of the ‘hand of glory’. Le Fanu used this rich reference point to express the terminal insecurity of the social masters who are not free, who are in fact themselves enslaved and stupefied for reasons beyond their control. With the spectre of Catholic resurgence in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, the impossibility of manumission from the hands that haunt functioned as a reminder of the weight of the past in Le Fanu's literary imagination.     

Oscar Wilde,Music, and the ‘Opium-Tainted Cigarette’: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play

This article shows how the musical references in Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray are important to the identity of the dandy, especially in relation to the literary-critical work of Matthew Arnold, whose guiding presence in Wilde's oeuvre has traditionally been somewhat underestimated. Wilde's male characters, although famously fond of music, reveal ‘disinterestedness’ in earnest musical pursuits, similar to the ‘Indian virtue of detachment’ outlined by Arnold in his exploration of ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864, in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 26–51). Furthermore, the critical attitude of the dandy–aesthete intersects with the implications that we can read into the posture of the lounging opium smoker. Extensive scholarship has already established the relationship between the East and opium in fictional works by Thomas de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Music is an essential ingredient to this literature, too, both in terms of its narrative presence and because it is a key element in an ongoing, nineteenth-century British exploration of how stylistic innovations could be represented as ‘music’. After disclosing the close connections between dandyism and those nineteenth-century composers whose lives and works were often represented as dandyish (Berlioz, Chopin and Schumann), the essay builds from the tradition of opium-inspired fiction. It suggests Wilde's debt to Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), while also showing Wilde's innovations in making shifts in character and narrative voice into indicators of narcotic consumption.     

The Unusual Case of ‘Mrs Sherlock’. Memoir,Identity and the ‘Real’ Woman Private Detective in Twentieth–Century Britain

Despite a huge popular and literary interest in detective fiction and an extensive academic literature on the history of policing, there have been very few studies of the history of private detectives/investigators. The work of women investigators has proved to be even more marginal. Histories of women and work have tended, for obvious reasons, to concentrate on mainstream industries, occupations and professions rather than the unusual or the unique. Focusing on the memoirs of Annette Kerner, published in the early 1950s, this article examines the range of opportunities that investigation created in the first half of the twentieth century, analysing the interaction of professional, gender and class identities. It highlights, firstly, women's ‘professional’ commitment to an exciting and challenging area of work, exploring their relationships with other occupational groups including women police. Second, it considers how disguise and masquerade presented opportunities for urban exploration and the crossing of traditional boundaries of gender and class. Investigative work developed, historically, at the same time as detective fiction and it has been deeply affected by fictional portrayals. The cultural mantle of ‘the female Sherlock Holmes’ was a hard inheritance to shake off and it suffused women's public presentations of themselves.     

Estranging Ireland: The underground self of the Irish free state in Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England

Land Under England is an out of print, rarely-cited Irish science fiction novel by the author Joseph O’Neill. Written at a time of crisis in Irish society in the 1930s, the novel has been relatively ignored in studies of the literature of the period. Although critics of science fiction tend to situate the novel as a purely anti-fascist work, taking its cues from events happening in Europe, this article places the novel firmly within its postcolonial Irish context, opening up the text to alternative readings based on the writings of Irish historians, as well as Marxist, cultural materialist and postcolonial critics. The article also utilises documents such as work written by O’Neill in his capacity as a civil servant, letters to the author from the controversial author Francis Stuart, and reviews contemporary to the publication of the novel.     

ISOLATING CONNECTIONS – CONNECTING ISOLATIONS

The varied and distinct ways we connect can facilitate or impose isolation, our own or someone else's. Different forms of isolation are themselves interconnected and sometimes enrich our connecting. The relation between isolation and connection, we argue, is one of complementarity, like Calvino's ‘two inseparable and complementary functions of life …syntony, or participation in the world around us … [and] focalization or constructive concentration.’ Solitude sought can enhance connections. Imposed isolation weakens connections in ways both obvious and subtle. This contrast between sought and imposed underscores the influence of hierarchy and socially produced inequities, excesses of which fragment the social ties that could constrain or diminish these same inequities. Deep inequity degrades the quality of both connections and isolation, at significant costs to our health, ecology, economy, cultural diversity, and political vitality. From this vantage point, we cull ways to improve our syntony and our focalization, fulfilling by expressing those shared egalitarian moral sentiments that motivate connections of solidarity partly in the interest of being “left alone”.     

Rebellious Tigers,a Patriotic Elephant and an Urdu-Speaking Cockatoo: Animals in ‘Mutiny’ Fiction

British fictional representations of the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’ are consistently drawn to tigers. These charismatic animals function as an aspect of a romanticized colonial exotic and perform a symbolic role as embodiments of the limits of imperial power. Tigers often featured as a metaphor for Indian revolutionary activities so that the suppression of the rebellion becomes encoded as a hunt. Taking tiger symbolism as a starting point, this essay explores the relationship of images of animals to imperial authority in late nineteenth-century ‘Mutiny’ fiction. Following a discussion of tigers in G.A. Henty's militaristic accounts of the ‘Mutiny’, I examine G.M. Fenn's tale of an elephant's loyalty to the crown, Begumbagh (1879) and Flora Annie Steel's magnum opus On the Face of the Waters (1896). While Henty and Fenn endeavour to encode a narrative of British superiority in representations of authority over animals, Steel's novel by contrast displays a more ambivalent approach to the nonhuman, evoked most strikingly in the figure of an Urdu-speaking cockatoo that consistently evades the allocation of an over-determined imperial symbolism of power. Tensions between the animal and the human and between the wild and the domestic emerge centrally, therefore, to the key question of political authority in imaginings of this historical crux.     

TIME,NARRATIVE, AND FICTION: THE UNEASY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RICOEUR AND A HETEROGENEOUS TEMPORALITY

In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur confirms the relationship between time experience and how it is epitomized in a narrative by investigating historiography and fiction. Regarding fiction, he explores temporality in three “novels of time” [Zeitromane]: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Ricoeur perceives the temporalities as homogeneous; however, in my view, the novels contain at least three different temporalities. Mann seeks a new temporality by ironizing a romantic time of rise and fall and Woolf configures a time we can call the simultaneity of the dissimultaneous. In his analysis of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Ricoeur explicitly dismisses a Bergsonian approach to temporality. In my opinion, Bergson defends a heterogeneous time that is apparent in Proust's novel.     

Prophetic Perfectionism: The Afterlives of Nat Turner and John Brown

ABSTRACT

Recent fiction, film, art, and scholarship on nineteenth-century American abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown shed light on the politics of their prophetic religion. Both men led violent rebellions against slavery for which they were executed. Prophetic perfectionism drove Turner and Brown but tended to fade in works about them. Exceptions to this pattern of reception include Jacob Lawrence's John Brown series (1941), Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation (2016), and Ted Smith's book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (2014). This essay situates Turner's and Brown's prophetic perfectionism and their reception in the context of contemporary political theologies and aesthetics of religion and race.     

Contesting the capital of culture in Antonio Muñoz Molina's Los misterios de Madrid

This essay examines Antonio Muñoz Molina´s use of the Gothic mode and the misterio genre to destabilize Madrid's image as a politicized symbol of cultural modernity in his 1992 novel Los misterios de Madrid. The novel was a return to the form and function of the nineteenth-century urban mystery novel. The year 1992 was one of celebrations throughout Spain, and Madrid was designated the 1992 European Capital of Culture (ECOC). The ECOC title was meant to signal Spain's graduation to democratic modernity and its new identity as a European capital. Madrid of Muñoz Molina contests this politicization of Madrid´s identity by gothicizing the capital. This Madrid is enigmatic and threatening, and it is the home of the conspiracies that undermine the capital's new image. In a year that celebrated Madrid's entree into European modernity, Muñoz Molina uses nineteenth-century literary modes to question Madrid's success story.     

Habsburg Italy in the age of reform

This essay surveys the main reforms carried out by the Habsburg governments in Lombardy and Tuscany from the 1730s to around 1790 in the light of recent historical literature. Venturi's biographical approach to the theme is discussed in the first part of the essay, which then sets out to compare reforming activities in the two states in the fields of the administration of justice, ecclesiastical policy, and public finance. The drive towards centralization and uniformity is identified as the main aspect of the Milan reform movement, to the liberal and humanitarian tendencies of Peter Leopold's government in Tuscany.