Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

Nikos Gatsos' Amorgos,topography and the poetics of modernism

Abstract

Nikos Gatsos' Amorgos is approached here as a polyphonic poem that synthesizes elements of the Greek literary tradition into an intertextual palimpsest of fragments, in the vein of the modernist 'long poem'. The surrealist poet maintains a fine balance between tradition and radical innovation, shaping Amorgos as a place where poetry is created as an interaction of opposing tendencies. The topical character of the poem is underscored by its title: the sea-and-land imagery evokes the island as a literary topos of seclusion and self-sufficiency that lends its characteristics to the composition itself: a 'compendium' of poetic writing and avant-garde aesthetics.     

Exile and return in John Mauropous,Poem 47

Abstract

The author reads an epigram by John Mauropous as an engagement with epic and biblical traditions. Critical studies of exile and return from different eras of the Greek literary tradition by Émile Benveniste, Gregory Nagy and Nancy Sultan are used to provide a theoretical approach to the tradition with which Mauropous engages. It is suggested that Mauropous' wanderings in the territory of the xenos and return to the familiar world of the philos, and especially his personification of his home as a trophos (nurse), allude to Homer, and that epic language and motifs strengthen the poet's assertion of selfhood and make ancient literary themes relevant to Mauropous' life as a scholar and churchman.     

Liberation and literature: Naples 1944

The arrival of Anglo‐American forces in Naples on 1 October 1943 precipitated the structural crisis which had beset the capital of the south since its integration into the Italian nation‐state in 1860. This crisis had been masked by the reassuringly engaging ethos of napoletanità, encoded in the urban dialect and crystallized in its literary culture from Matilde Serao and Salvatore Di Giacomo onwards. The myth of napoletanità had been frozen under Fascism, but was shattered by the experience of the war years and after, and only factitiously restored under the political hegemony of the monarchist ship owner Achille Lauro during the 1950s. Young literary Americans such as John Home Burns and William Weaver, who found themselves in Naples with the occupying Allied forces, fell under its spell, while the equally young British military intelligence officer Norman Lewis maintained a detached, but sympathetic, objectivity. The older Tuscan writer, Curzio Malaparte, so provocatively transformed the image of Naples as to earn furious rejection by the city's dominant postwar political circles and by Italy's literary circles. Yet, despite brilliant attempts at restoration by the departed Neapolitan, Giuseppe Marotta, and the much‐loved actor‐playwright Eduardo De Filippo, napoletanità was systematically undermined and demolished by younger Neapolitan writers from Domenico Rea and Anna Maria Ortese to Raffaele La Capria as the city's urban fabric was transformed by appallingly irresponsible property speculators. This article focuses on the literary anthropology of Naples in the 1940s. It explores literary texts and contexts, and the way they problematize Naples as a unified subject or object. It addresses the paradoxical issue of the city's need for liberation from itself, and the time scale of a liberation that perhaps has always been and always will be in fieri.     

Translations at the Court of Hákon Hákonarson: a well planned and highly selective programme

This article deals with the translations of Old French works completed at the court of Hákon Hákonarson, king of Norway. The first one was probably completed in 1226 and some 40 followed: translations of epic poems, courtly romances and lais, adventure romances and a fabliau. In all cases, we ought to speak of adaptations and not of word-for-word translations.

Together, these literary works form an outstanding corpus, elaborated mainly for didactical purposes and in order to support Hákon Hákonarson's project to build a monarchy à l'européenne. For that, some literary works were selected and – in their adaptations – some ethical and social values promoted while some others were not; and some great literary works were intentionally ignored and remained untranslated.     

History of European ideas

This essay explores one of the potential implications of the cross-displinary work implied in the idea of a literary instrument of enlightenment through a consideration of the relationship between James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1761–1763) and their most immediate social-political context, Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1769). It notes that revisionism of Macpherson that has tended to minimise the disruptive elements in Ossian in favour of a reading in terms of cultural wishfulfilment. The essay argues however that while Macpherson's prose theorising seeks to transcend the anxieties about progress and corruption articulated in the Essay, the peoms themselves offer eloquent testimony to the force of those anxieties, and rather than solving them restates them in pressing terms. This, the essay concludes by suggesting, is a measure of their literariness, and it not to be elided in the otherwise entirely appropriate reading of Ossian as a literary instrument of enlightenment.     

Traumatic echoes of memories in child survivors' narratives of the Holocaust: the Polish experiences of Michał Głowiński and Henryk Grynberg

Drawing upon the important contribution brought by literary testimonies to humanitarian work delineated by Susan Rubin Suleiman (2002) and Leigh Gilmore (2011), this paper analyses two Polish Jewish authors' autobiographical narratives, Micha? G?owiński's The Black Seasons (1999) and Henryk Grynberg's The Jewish War (1965) and Victory (1993), as instances of literary child-witnessing the Holocaust. The two authors' narratives represent two different cases of child survivors' testimonies given their situation during the Second World War: G?owiński being encamped in the Warsaw Ghetto, Grynberg living in hiding. The author argues that their narratives present the case of child survivors whose Holocaust experiences and aftermath memories in Communist Poland spring from their primarily scattered and painful memories foregrounding the importance of vulnerable lenses. In light of this, the main question the author addresses is: to what degree do these children's war memories take specific stances as a function of the age they were during the Holocaust and their location (either being encamped or living in hiding)? The main contention of the paper is that Second World War children's literary testimonies contribute to present-day scholarship by their complex understanding of the multi-faceted character of humans whose specific bulwarks are the simultaneous exposing and acknowledgement of individual occlusions, ambivalences, limitations or randomness.     

The Poeta Saxo at Paderborn: episcopal authority and Carolingian rule in late ninth‐century Saxony

This paper argues that the Poeta Saxo's epic poem about Charlemagne was composed at the bishopric of Paderborn as part of a wider literary programme that included both the Translatio sancti Liborii and the Vita sancti Liborii. Near the close of the ninth century, when Paderborn's renown and resources were at their lowest ebb, these three works articulated an image of episcopal authority, touted the pre‐eminence of Paderborn, and made a bid for royal patronage.     

The First Circle and the Last Man: Solzhenitsyn's Political Science

The author examines David Hume's History of England to elucidate his thoughts on the subject of education. He argues that education's ability to improve moral judgments drives Hume's interest. With this in mind, the idiosyncratic review of English literature scattered throughout Hume's History can be seen in its proper light. Finally, the author suggests History represents Hume's best effort to develop a literary style capable of improving morals.     

Clowning and tragic clowning: Miguel de Unamuno as a funny writer

ABSTRACT

The present study considers the role and function that humor has in Unamuno's intellectual and literary universe. It traces Unamuno's attitude toward humor to his reading of the Spanish character in En torno al casticismo (1895) and to his dialogue with the figure of Don Quixote, as found in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905) and Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912). Finally, it looks at the theory of humor offered in the novel Niebla (1914) and also at the role that humor played in Unamuno's later political writings, especially those of exile (1924–1930).     

Literary geography: setting and narrative space

This paper explores some of the ways in which analytical strategies developed within narrative theory might be combined with recent developments in literary geography in the study of setting and narrative space. It suggests that despite narrative theory's urge toward categorization and its associated tendency to conceive of space as relatively stable and fixed, the technical vocabulary developed within the discipline has much to offer the literary geographer. The first section of the paper reviews some of the areas of potential collaboration in this cross-disciplinary overlap, while the second section offers three brief case study readings designed to suggest the potential of a combination of the analytical specificity of narrative studies with the imaginative stretch of spatial theory. The case studies look at setting and narrative space as they emerge in relation to narrative voices and multiple audiences in three case study texts: P.K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), J.A. Mitchell's The Last American (1889), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).     

Challenging the Quimera (Sirena) Negra: Unamuno Reads Pardo Bazán

This article examines the literary relationship of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Miguel de Unamuno by analyzing Unamuno's 1905 review of La Quimera, as well as his tribute to Pardo Bazán on the occasion of her death in 1921. These two critical pieces, together with Unamuno's Dos madres and La tía Tula, reveal that while Unamuno dismisses Pardo Bazán's realism in his discussion of her works, he develops in his own fiction alter egos who struggle with dominant female figures, just as he competes with Pardo Bazán's model of authorship.     

Letter-writing and literary culture in Merovingian Gaul

This essay discusses Gregory of Tours' claim that literary culture was in decline in light of the considerable quantity of poetry and letters composed by Merovingian authors. Scholars have come to appreciate the importance of letter-writing for historical inquiry, yet the contrast between Gregory's assessment and aristocratic literary activity remains under-explored. This essay discusses fifth-century precedents and examines the continuity and discontinuity that occurred in the literary transition from late Antique to early-medieval Gaul. It examines the place of literary culture within Merovingian elite friendship networks, focusing on the interconnected writings of three Merovingian authors. Venantius Fortunatus was an Italian-born poet who spent most of his career writing for Merovingian elites. The royal officials Dynamius and Gogo composed letters found in a compilation of sixth-century letters called the Epistolae Austrasicae. Using the letters and poetry of these three writers, this essay argues that literary skill facilitated the creation and maintenance of connections across distance and was a necessary part of elite identity. It shows that Gregory of Tours' dramatic rhetorical claim did not reflect the true state of literature in Gaul.     

Nietzsche's Political Critique of Modern Science

Abstract

Contrary to the claims that The Brothers Karamazov is a polyphonic novel, in which the author's own views are irrelevant to its interpretation, and that Dostoevsky himself was unable to furnish an adequate defense of Christianity after Book V, the author shows how Zossima's doctrines of active love and responsibility for all are the interpretive keys to the novel. This so-called “unity in diversity” in Bakhtin's literary criticism thereby provide a compelling alternative vision of community from the Grand Inquisitor's.     

Books received

This article examines the remarkable ‘changes and transpositions’ of form found in Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle, an important Anglo-Norman estoire recounting the rebellion against Henry II in 1173–74. By reading these literary changes as accommodations of circumstances and persons, they can be used to locate the Chronicle in very specific historical and social contexts. Jordan, clerk of the bishop of Winchester and master of the city's grammar schools, places himself, both socially and discursively, within a community of administrative barons, who are very carefully remembered in the Chronicle as a coherent social affinity, or foedus amicitiae, both alienated from and seeking solidarity with the king. These conditions explain the Chronicle's central rhetorical impulses: to chastise the king, sometimes bitterly, and to persuade him to ‘love, cherish … and reward’ these specific barons. To achieve these rhetorical desires, Jordan draws upon the resources of contemporary literary education to imagine and perform persuasion. The Chronicle is thus a powerful illustration of John Baldwin's account of the ‘interpenetration’ of studium et regnum, institutional learning and political administration, in twelfth-century England. Because the Chronicle has in the past been understood as a panegyric, or even propaganda, for a royalist cause, this baronial reading represents a major re-assessment of its sociabilities and purposes.     

Book Reviews and Short Notices

The question of community, and specifically Algerian female communities, informs a number of Assia Djebar's texts, as well as constituting an underlying concern in much criticism of her work. Yet, in many cases, such analyses do not align Djebar's communitarian representations with wider thinking on forms of community in philosophical and sociohistorical terms. An exception is found in the work of Jane Hiddleston, who fruitfully places Djebar's literary project within the context of a contemporary consideration of community, drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's conceptions of operative and inoperative communities. Hiddleston's comprehensive account of Djebar's literary work does not include the author's only feature length film, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978), which will be my subject here. This article presents an examination of La Nouba in terms of community and communitarian narratives, turning to Judith Butler to consider whether a different model of shared humanity might shed further light on the issues of unity and difference in the film .     

Rites of passage: migrancy and liminality in Colum McCann's Songdogs and This Side of Brightness

This article deals with two novels by the Irish writer Colum McCann: Songdogs and This Side of Brightness. Reading the narratives of both texts through the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, the essay reveals how McCann's characters undergo processes of liminal experience, which occasion structural changes in their familial relationships and in their individual identity. Turner's work primarily focused on the ritual behaviours of tribal groups and how liminality was used as a physical means toward spiritual ends; I diagnose similar dynamics in McCann's two literary fictions.     

Papadiamandis and Homer: A Note

Abstract

Meaningful allusion to the classics in Papadiamandis's work is not a matter of the text's being stuffed with overt classical references. In his early novels we find a large number of, as it were, classical one-liners: essentially undigested – or at best opportunistic – allusions. The technique is a less focused form of Roidis's in Pope Joan; perhaps a closer comparison is Kalligas's Thanos Vlekas, which is replete with Homeric allusions and puns, none of them integral to the narrative. Similarly, we find in early Papadiamandis a disorderly collection of allusions: Byron, Milton, Aesop, Sophocles, Juvenal, Homer et al.; and sometimes we see his allusiveness to be a mere tic of style rather than fully purposive. In other words, .it is as true here as elsewhere in Greek literary tradition that we need to sift meaningful from more or less chance allusion.