Nostalgia or das Heimweh: Homesickness and the Press-ganged Soldier in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863)

This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) uses nostalgia as a literary aesthetic and historical context to articulate a narrative of disorientating epochal change. Gaskell’s novel draws on nostalgia’s roots as a psychosomatic disease afflicting soldiers displaced by international conflicts to reassert the traumatic roots of a familiar feeling often understood as superficial and insignificant. Nostalgia began as a disease brought on by migration and only later came to be thought of as a type of sentimental memory; first home was far away and then it was long ago. Gaskell’s novel incorporates both, mingling longing for a place with longing for a past. This double distancing articulates an experience of transition within her historical novel. She draws on an eighteenth-century trope used by figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth, repurposed for the demands of prose fiction. The homesick soldier who was the first sufferer with pathological nostalgia is cast as the central protagonist of historical transformation and an emblem of uneasy transitions. Sylvia’s Lovers has received scant critical notice to date and, perhaps for this reason, its explicit allusions to nostalgia, and the role they play in Gaskell’s historical imagination, have been left entirely unremarked.     

Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture,Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction

The novel in nineteenth-century Bengal was formed under European influence, adopting its techniques of representation from bourgeois realist fiction. Both witness to and participant in the making of colonial modernity, it placed particular emphasis upon the social substantiation of persons through the depiction of domestic interiors. The furniture of the bourgeois house became an important ingredient in that representational process. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's examination of the way in which furnished interiors came to compose the universe of private man in the nineteenth century, I argue that in the Bengali novel, there is a constant tension between that mode of self-construction and the suspicion and distrust of European furnishings exhibited in representative novelists of the period. Ultimately, in the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore, this distrust manifests itself in a rejection of the bourgeois interior, as well as a questioning of the very tools of realist representation.     

《弗吉尼亚人》的史学价值

美国著名作家欧文.威斯特的成名作《弗吉尼亚人—平原骑手》与19世纪末20世纪初美国的社会和文化主题挂钩,表达了镀金时代的美国梦精神,反映了西部牧业开发中东西部矛盾与冲突的走向,展现了怀俄明牧牛业的社会、经济及政治发展状况,不仅是一部影响深远的牛仔小说,而且具有较高的史学价值。同时,受时代和作者阶级立场的局限,《弗吉尼亚人—平原骑手》偏袒大牧场主,带有取悦统治阶级的阶级倾向性,小说中塑造的牛仔形象对西部小说的程式化产生了重要影响。     

Act and idea in the Nazi Genocide

The opening reference to masturbation in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) provides evidence of not only an embedded cultural commentary on the masturbatory tendencies of modernity but also specific contempt for the novel as a masturbatory literary form. The same point is made elsewhere in Swift’s poetry and his parody of the erotic scene of female masturbation that continued to be a staple of amatory fiction. Yet the same body of writing reveals Swift’s recognition that he too was guilty of producing literary fuel for masturbation, as were the Ancients themselves whose works continued to invite a sexualized response from readers. As such, Swift reveals an ironic point of agreement with female authors of amatory fiction such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, who represent instances of the poetry of the Ancients being put precisely to this use, providing tacit excuse for their own erotically charged writing. In his later notorious diagnosis of Swift as a chronic masturbator literary physician Thomas Beddoes is arguably responding at least in part to Swift’s own sense of entrapment within masturbatory modernity.     

Reading Margaret Oliphant

Margaret Oliphant's fiction has been steadily undergoing critical reassessment since the 1990s. The advent of the Selected Works from Pickering & Chatto testifies to the growing significance of this great novelist within the scholarly community. The inquiries of several researchers, especially Elisabeth Jay and Joanne Shattock, have transformed our understanding of this prolific author's achievements. Yet the larger proportion of Oliphant's novels await the critical attention they deserve. The present discussion focuses on the main reasons why her seemingly minor works of prose fiction possess a psychological understanding that is as great as that which we find in her more famous narratives, such as Miss Marjoribanks (1866). The recognition of divided minds, of the games the mind plays, and her dramatization of them, is part of what gives her novels power that general critiques of her work often miss. This point becomes clear when we broaden our perspective on Oliphant's novels beyond the six fictions that comprise her Chronicles of Carlingford (1862–76). Here the analysis concentrates on The Ladies Lindores (1883) and, more expansively, the little-known For Love and Life (1874).     

Andrea's Baggage: Reading (in) Laforet's Nada

One overlooked feature of Andrea's arrival in Barcelona at the beginning of Nada is the old and battered suitcase that she drags with her to her relatives’ apartment. It is filled almost entirely with books, books that—we may assume—she has read and plans to read again. Reading, it is clear, has played a large part in her intellectual and psychological formation as a teenager, but one of the strands of her overall maturation process during the forthcoming year will involve achieving a greater understanding of the distortions involved in how people (including her) see life through the optic of literature and literature through the optic of life. Gradually disabused of her overly literary adolescent imaginings, then, she eventually becomes a writer—of the text that is Nada—who is well aware of the traps that reading and writing hold.     

浅谈苏轼诗序

苏轼是宋诗大家,苏轼诗序同样也具有丰富的文学及文化价值。本文主要从三个方面对苏轼诗序进行探讨:其一是诗序中的互见手法和诗序之美,二是诗序中写人记事所带有的史笔和小说笔法,三是苏轼诗序的思想内涵。     

Max Pulver’s Himmelpfortgasse: Fictionalizing the 1920s Cocaine Craze in German-Speaking Europe

Abstract

In the years following the end of the First World War, cocaine achieved unprecedented popularity in Europe, a development reflected in the number of novels dealing with cocaine use by writers from across the Continent. One such is Max Pulver’s Himmelpfortgasse, first published in 1927, which tells of a Munich-based intellectual torn between his respectable bourgeois existence and his cocaine-fuelled passion for a young Viennese painter. After a brief interlude in Berlin, the protagonist follows his new love to Vienna, but their relationship soon deteriorates. The plot of the novel is unremarkable, but its depiction of three separate cocaine-using cliques, each based in a different city and each with a distinct social position and political orientation, vividly illustrates the extent to which recreational use of cocaine spread across geographical, socio-economic, and ideological divides in the period in question. Moreover, the narrator’s essayistic reflections on the function, effects, and social practice of cocaine use allow for productive cross-reading with contemporary toxicological sources. Pulver’s novel also occupies a curious position in literary history. As well as being one of several European cocaine novels of the inter-war period, it shows substantial thematic and stylistic links to the treatment of cocaine in the writings of Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn dating to the previous decade. Himmelpfortgasse’s Expressionist elements add to its distinctiveness, but have probably also contributed to the novel’s relative lack of commercial and critical success.     

美国新现实主义与后现代小说中的道德意识

本文以“道德”这一角度入手,对美国近年来出现的“新现实主义小说”中的道德意识进行深入挖掘,结合新现实主义小说家的具体作品进行分析,并和与之毗邻的后现代派小说进行比较,得出新现实主义小说中蕴藏着一股强大的道德重建意识的结论。有利于我们更好地把握当代美国文学发展趋势,使读者对文学与道德之间的关系进行更深一步的思考。