Maria Beville

Bio: Maria Beville is an academic researcher from University of Limerick. The author has contributed to research in topics: Cloud atlas & Post-postmodernism. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 4 citations.

Getting Past the ‘Post-’: History and Time in the Fiction of David Mitchell

Abstract: This paper examines David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), with a particular focus on history and narrative time. It seeks to offer an alternative perspective on the multiple and intertwined fictional narratives of Mitchell’s oeuvre as these evidence a move past the "post-" of postmodernism.

Time and Narrative

Abstract: In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Reanimating the English Historical Novel in the Twenty-First Century – The Case of David Mitchell’s the Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Abstract: Abstract This article argues that David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) represents a new variation of the genre of historical fiction. The historical novel in Britain has risen to prominence since the 1980s and in the twenty-first century this strong interest in the past continues. Placing David Mitchell’s book in the context of recent historical fiction, the article takes account of Joseph Brooker’s hypothesis that, together with Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet may be indicative of an emergent trend in the contemporary English historical novel. The purpose of the article is to identify and explore Mitchell’s key strategies of writing about history. It is argued that, departing from the prevalent mode of historiographic metafiction, Mitchell’s book adheres to some of the traditional tenets of the genre while achieving the Scottian aim of animating the past in innovative ways. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the use of the present tense, the subjective perspectives, and the exclusion of foreknowledge lend the novel dramatic qualities.

Time Is/Time Was/Time Is Not: David Mitchell and the Resonant Interval

Abstract: Seven weeks before the release of his novel, Slade House (2015), David Mitchell began tweeting as a character, “Bombadil”, from the forthcoming text. The tweets appeared on an account, @I_Bombadil (2015), set up by Mitchell, with the platform affording the author the opportunity to extend the character’s narrative arc beyond the pages of the print-published novel and into Twitter’s digital environs. For Mitchell, the boundaries separating literary works are never absolute and the process of repeatedly returning to and referencing prior works, methodically expanding and stretching his corpus by thematically and structurally folding each new work into an extant literary universe, is the central characteristic of his literary practice. What was notable in the case of @I_Bombadil and Slade House, however, was that the connections across and between the works were also connections across and between distinct media environments. This article examines the ways in which the temporal-spatial entanglements between @I_Bombadil and Slade House, characteristic of Mitchell’s retrospective and recursive literary practice, were intensified and complicated as they were further tangled up with the temporal–spatial dynamics of digital and print media respectively. By utilising Marshall McLuhan’s media studies, and particularly his concept of the “resonant interval”—the borderline between “acoustic” and “visual” space produced in the dialogue between electronic (digital) and print media—as a means of articulating the dialogic double-space in between @I_Bombadil and Slade House, this article addresses the works as a symbiotic product of both literary technique and materialist media operability, adopting a nuanced, media-oriented perspective that fully engages with the temporal affordances of the Twitter platform as an inextricable aspect of the fundamentally temporal-spatial dynamics of Mitchell’s “resonant” literary practice.

Storytelling in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: Archiving the Future-to-Come

Abstract: Cloud Atlas, published in 2004 (London: Sceptre), is British author David Mitchell’s third and arguably best-known novel, one that has attracted significant critical attention. At the heart of such...

An ‘Intra’textual Reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Abstract: Introduction: Like intertextuality, intratextuality is an important notion in textual analysis and narratological studies. It does not deny functional and conceptual similarities with intertextuality, which is a more familiar narratological term. While intertextuality seeks interconnectedness among 1. Associate Professor, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran An ‘Intra’textual Reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas Vol.19, NO. 28, Spring and Summer 2022 Critical Language & Literary Studies 240 hypertexts and hypotexts, intratextuality sets about to discover and deci� pher it within the structural totality of a single work. In other words, the emphasis is laid on self�reflexivity rather than other�reflexivity in that the objective is to unveil the connectivity that in�text narratives, sub�narratives and frame stories maintain through sustained allusions and dialogues. The major questions of the research include: What is intratextuality and what are its characteristic features? Are they discernible in the narrative fabric of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas? What structural and thematic roles, if any, do they play? Background Studies: Bakhtine’s Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), Kristeva’s Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1969), Barthes’ Image�Music�Text (1977), and Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982) are among important sources on intertextual� ity and its principal categorisations. In his article “Moonlight Bright as a UFO Abduction: Science Fiction, Present�Future Alienation and Cognitive Mapping” (2011), William Stephenson claims that Michell’s sci�fi novel is highly polyphonic and multifaceted. In his article, “Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas,” Nicholas Dun� lop argues that Mitchell’s postmodern novel harmoniously mixes differ� ent and heterogeneous narrative styles as well as typical aspects of sci�fi and fantasy novels. George Gessert’s 2005 article, “Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell,” predominantly deals with plot�development, characterisation, and story�telling techniques, beside such themes as inhumanity, slavery, and apocalypse. In Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2020), Mar� tin Paul Eve uses computer�assisted charts to analyse lexical and grammati� cal distributions in the novel to prove the unity and harmony of narrativity despite all apparent heterogeneities. لچیم دیوید رثا سلطا ربا زا »ینتم نورد«یشناوخ یـجراـخ تایـبدا و ناـبز دـقـن 1401 ناتسبات و راهب ، 28هراــمـش ،مهدزون هرود 241 Materials and Methods: To answer the stated questions, this narratological study first offers a brief digest of the term intratextuality, which recognises and endeavours to locate intertextual relations and echoes inside the nar� rative structure of the same work, and then probes its applicability to the Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Genette’s well�known hypertext and hypotext as well as his five�partite categorisation of transtextuality, comprising inter� textuality, metatextuality, paratextuality, hypotextuality, and archetextuality are also contextualised in the novel. In addition, notions such as organic narration, self�reflexivity, self�allusiveness, symmetricality, and in�text re� lations are deemed pivotal throughout the mainstream discussions Results and Discussion: This research shows that identical characters and incidents, one way or another, keep reappearing in all of the six nested stories of the novel, thereby constructing a tightly�knit network of recip� rocal references and allusions within its narrative structure. Furthermore, the sustained recurrence of such motifs as reincarnation, dominance, quest for truth, death and symbols and images associated with them in all nar� ratives creates an intratextuality of self�reflexive themes, which reaffirm themselves in every new intratextual dialogue. Transtextual relations are also discernible in the novel, predominantly in the repeated titles of the six narratives in two halves of the novel, protagonists’ comments on characters and incidents in a previous narrative, and in recurring themes and motifs which expand and modify in every new appearance.