Showing papers in "DQR studies in literature in 2012"

The short story: an overview of the history and evolution of the genre

Abstract: A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of the story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.1Theory and history of the formAs early as 1937 Elizabeth Bowen claimed, "The short story is a young art ... the child of this century", which developed at the same time as the cinema and photography.2 According to Mary Rohrberger, one of the first theorizers of the genre, "short narrative fiction is as old as the history of literature .... But the short story, as we know it today, is the newest of literary genres."3The origins of the short form go back to myth and biblical verse narratives, medieval sermons and romance, fables, folktales, ballads and the rise of the German Gothic in the eighteenth century. But its mythic origins, filtered through the Romantic influence, had to come to terms with the conventions of mimesis and vraisemblance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realism.4 Charles May observes that "the short story has from its beginning been a hybrid form combining both the metaphoric mode of the old romance and the metonymie mode of the new realism".5Although the short story constitutes a form in its own right, it has suffered a theoretical neglect in comparison with other genres such as poetry, drama, the epic, or the novel. As May argues, "a genre only truly comes into being when the conventions that constitute it are articulated within the larger conceptual context of literature as a whole".6 In the case of the short story this was a long-deferred process. Until half a century ago those who theorized about the genre were not literary critics but practitioners of the form themselves: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Anton Chekhov in the nineteenth century; and Henry James, Flannery O'Connor, Julio Cortazar and Eudora Welty, among others, in the twentieth. But interest in the short story has been growing continuously since the Sixties; critical and theoretical studies of the form have been flourishing since the last decades of the twentieth century.Poe' s critical comments towards the middle of the nineteenth century are responsible for the birth of the short story as a unique genre.7 As the first short story theorist, he brought into discussion issues of form, style, length, design, authorial goals, and reader affect, developing the framework within which the short story is discussed even today. Evaluating the status of the short story as a genre, he ranked it very high in the pantheon of arts, second only to the lyric form. His major contribution was to invest the short story with tension and thus to impregnate it with the defining attributes of poetry. Its compact and unified form, which it shares with the lyric, allows the short story to achieve effects unattainable in the novel. He also observed that its brevity and intensity created a strong "undercurrent of suggestion".8 Poe was the first to consider endings as crucial elements in compositional strategies and defined the short story in terms of reading experience.A traditional view of the short story is that it is a compressed, unified, and plotted form. Theoretical discussions of the genre explore notions such as totality, brevity, intensity, suggestiveness, unity of effect, closure, and design. Attention to the formal structure of the short story is mainly a twentieth-century critical enterprise. The aesthetics of the genre's form attracted the interest of critics and narrative theorists in the Sixties - the period of the international dissemination of Russian Formalist writings of the 1920s (Boris Ejxenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky), the emergence of structuralism (Vladimir Propp) and anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss), and the philosophy of culture (Ernest Cassirer). …

The american short story in the twenty-first century

Abstract: Although the short story, pioneered by Poe in the early nineteenth century, is often said to be a uniquely American invention, few American writers have ever been able to make a decent living from the form. The most obvious fact about the short story in American publishing is that agents and editors are seldom enthusiastic about taking on a collection of short stories - unless the author is a name with a novel to his or her credit, or unless the author is promising and will promise a novel in the near future. Most people would rather not read short stories. As the popularity of "reality" television in America makes clear, most people prefer the real to the fictional. The ratio of nonfiction to fiction in popular periodicals is about 99.9 to 1.If readers do not want to read short stories, publishers certainly will not publish collections of them, and periodicals that have to make a profit will stick to pictures and celebrity-oriented nonfiction. The fairly large-circulation magazines that pay well for short fiction are few: The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy and Harper 's Magazine. Back in the Fifties, the New Yorker published between 100 and 150 stories a year; now it is only about 50. With the other three publishing one story an issue or fewer, the total number of stories in wide-circulation magazines per year in America is less than a hundred. Many hundreds more appear in such reviews and journals as Agni, Cimarron, Cottonwood, Descant, Gulf Stream, High Plains, Kalliope, Nimrod, River Styx, Rosebud, Salmagundi, Thin Air and ZYZZYVA, but their subscription lists are largely limited to university and college libraries, so they often go unread.Most of those who do read fiction would rather read novels than stories. This has always been the case. Readers like to believe that characters have a life of their own, and they have to live with fictional figures for a while in order to believe that. Once you get started with a novel, you become friends, get familiar, take up residence. With a short story, you are no sooner introduced to a character than the story is over, leaving you a bit dazed. With a collection of stories, you have to do this over and over again. Unlike chapters in a novel, which tease you with the illusion of continuity, short stories are always ending. And often those conclusions - one of the form's most important aspects - are frustrating in their inconclusiveness. When readers finish novels, they close the book with a satisfied thump and a sense of a big job well done. Afterward they can talk about their experience with others - at the Xerox machine or at a cocktail party. Readers often finish short stories with a puzzled "Huh?" Few people open a conversation with "Have you read that story in the New Yorker this month?"Occasionally a short story writer will arrive on the scene at just the right time, with just the right voice and vision, to reignite interest in the form. This happened in the late Seventies and early Eighties with the appearance of Raymond Carver, who, along with others such as Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, wrote short stories of such hallucinatory realism that reviewers and critics had to create a name for it - "minimalism" or "hyper-realism"- a critical affectation that marked the end of the trend almost as soon as it had begun. However, for a time there was such a resurgence of interest in the short story that critics claimed that the form had experienced a "renaissance". But after the death of Carver and the denigration of minimalism by critics, the short story once more languished in the shadow of the novel. The following twenty major American short story collections published in the first six years of the twenty-first century, divided into characteristic categories, are fairly representative of the form today. After a brief discussion of new stories by some of those writers who participated in the minimalist boom of the Eighties, I discuss stories by young writers trained in America's burgeoning MFA programs, stories that primarily depend on narrative tricks and games, stories that are linked together novelistically and, finally, stories that, by their individual stylistic and thematic complexity, transcend any such categories. …

Code-switching as a strategy of brevity in Sandra Cisneros' Woman hollering Creek and other stories

Abstract: The increasing interest of linguists in English-Spanish code-switching (language alternation) in the North American Southwest, which can be considered a contact zone,1 coincides with an increase in the publication and study of US Hispanic literatures. Martin Rodriguez2 provides a thorough survey of the evolution of Chicano literature in relation to the use of Spanish. He argues that the choice of one language (or a mixture of the two) reveals aesthetic and ideological positions that in some way can help establish a history of Chicano literature. From his detailed analysis of that evolution, I will select two important moments. The first phase represents the initial impact of the Chicano movement from 1965 until the Seventies, when Chicano writers became very conscious of the use of Spanish in their writings. Spanish became a symbol of resistance, of confrontation with what they experienced as the oppressive American system. Editorial groups like Quinto Sol helped these authors in their bilingual cultural crusade. The Spanish language, which until then had been restricted in the United States to the domestic domain (as Martin Rodriguez explains),3 acquired the prestige that literature confers. Studies of diglossie communities throughout history have revealed that this is a well known and effective means of changing the rigid functional distinction that gives prestige to the high and withholds it from the low.4The second stage Martin Rodriguez presents in this evolution of Chicano literature, which I believe explains why English predominated over Spanish during that period, began in the Eighties, when Chicano editorial firms put more emphasis on reaching a mainstream readership than on linguistic assertion (that is, they emphasized economic rather than cultural or political benefit). The publication of works written in Spanish was displaced either to Mexico or to new publishing houses along the border. Moreover, the fact that Chicano literature began to enjoy widespread attention led to the republication of some representative novels by major publishing houses and even to the translation into English of those written in Spanish, which also underwent a process of transculturation.5 These American publishing firms also began to offer good contracts to wellknown authors such as Sandra Cisneros. In fact, after the editorial success of The House on Mango Street, Random House offered her a contract for Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories,6 making her the first Chicana writer to receive a contract from a major publishing house.Sandra Cisneros and other acclaimed Chicano authors are aware of the need to reach a wide Anglo-American readership, so when they depict their geographical and cultural settings, they choose to become transcultural mediators7 and mainly use the English language for their narrative voice. Is this a betrayal of the original Chicano movement, and of its aims to subvert the associations of the Spanish language with the low-prestige domains of the household and the neighborhood? Or is it a realization that in a society where English is the primary language, using English is a better way to represent Chicano identity and cultural roots as well as Chicanos' battle against discrimination? In order to explain Sandra Cisneros' predominant use of English, I will present an analysis profiting from insights from several studies, ranging from linguistic anthropology to the social psychology of language. These linguistic disciplines show a constructionist view of language: they view language as a way of constituting realities, of constructing and performing the social dimension of identity. Literary-critical insights will be incorporated, too, in order to explore whether a more realistic and down-to-earth use of Spanish in the literary context of a short story is useful or, on the contrary, is just a hindrance, a communication barrier to a monolingual reader.Linguistic anthropologists have shown a deep interest in the dynamics of alternating languages, or code-switching. …

Short narrations in a letter frame: cases of genre hybridity in postcolonial literature in portuguese

Abstract: Questions of definition and genre seem to be crucial elements in a great majority of the studies that deal with short story theory.1 Other essential issues for debate include short stories' experimental and borderline functions within the field of literature and/or their social environment.2 Also central to this point seems to be the subject of orality, which is often considered a predecessor to both traditional and modern short stories, closely linked to their actual development and change. This essay takes these ideas one step further and argues that in certain literary contexts letters may operate as if they were short stories, understood in Vitor Manuel de Aguiar e Suva's terms as a brief narration mainly characterized by a high concentration of time and space.4 Examples have been found in the work of three postcolonial authors from African Portuguese-speaking countries who opt for the conventional format of the letter to recount marginal experiences in an experimental way that is close to orality. These literary writings in letter form are the short story "Rosita ate morrer" (1971) by the Mozambican writer Luis Bernardo Honwana; the poem "Carta de um contratado" (1961) by Antonio Jacinto, from Angola; and a letter within the novel Chiquinho (1947) by Baltasar Lopes, from Cape Verde. I will show that, irrespective of the genre these letters adopt (narrative, lyric, etc.), they share a number of formal and functional conditions which in all the cases analyzed affect the reader in the same way the short story does. My argument supports Perm's claim that "the short story has genres of its own invention",5 as well as the theories of other critics who see no strong boundaries between the short story and other presumably different genres, such as the prose poem, the lyric,6 the essay,7 and the letter.8Postcolonial literature in Portuguese bears many of the characteristics that according to Mary Louise Pratt favor the production of short stories as an experimental form of narration.9 As was generally the case with the literatures produced in the former colonies, postcolonial literature in Portuguese was one of the subversive artistic responses practiced and developed in the hybrid societies of the new evolving nations during the process of decolonization, when authors determinedly used their powerful inherited oral tradition as intellectual weaponry in combination with their acquired written literary practice of Portuguese and Western influence. Hybridity is an important factor in postcolonial literatures, as it results from the capacity of the new emergent cultures to integrate social, political, cultural, ideological, and even idiosyncratic features from the two communities that are in contact. The discourse these societies produce thus reflects the existing tension between the autochthonous and dominant cultures and the need to overcome it. Pratt talks of these dual realities as "contact zones" and sees in them "the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict".10Bhabha interprets the hybrid reality of postcolonial nations as a more autonomous third space where "new sites are always being opened up". He notes that these new sites are independent of the national and colonial cultures even if they draw from them, and says that "if you keep referring those new sites to old principles, then you are not able to participate in them fully and productively and creatively".11 The emphasis Bhabha places on creativity and newness as characteristic of postcolonial hybrid cultures coincides with Pratt's remarks on the fact that in some parts of the world "the short story [is] being used to introduce new regions or groups into an established national literature, or into an emerging national literature in the process of decolonization". …

Anticipating aestheticism: the dynamics of reading and reception in poe

Abstract: "The Oval Portrait" and "The Fall of the House of Usher", two of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known and most paradigmatic short stories, can serve as key case studies helping us both to understand his peculiar vision of aestheticism and also to begin to explore the peculiar dynamics involved in the international transmission and circulation of this aesthetic vision through the nineteenth century.A haunted brotherhood: the reception and transmission of aesthetic visionDespite its surface celebrations of idiosyncrasy, eccentricity, or expressive originality, aestheticism developed as a curiously international phenomenon, re-emerging in strikingly similar form in the works and lives of authors across a wide range of nations, cultures, and historical periods. One of the defining aspects of this international movement, then, involves its focus on the mystery of this pattern of aesthetic influence or transmission. The aesthetic vision seems, in fact, to center less on the production of unique, powerful, compelling works of art than on their reception - where reception is seen as a complex, half-creative, semi-involuntary process by which a preexisting form or voice or mode of expression becomes internalized and repeated across distances of time or space. Not direct or simply passive, this aesthetic mode of absorbed and absorptive reading operates through projection as much as through reception, and through distancing as well as identification. For late-nineteenth-century French Decadents as for writers associated with British Aestheticism, this process is frequently described as one of textual contagion - where the transmission of an aesthetic vision or stance is understood by analogy to the communication of an infectious disease. In the earlier, foundational works of Poe, as in his followers, aesthetic influence is often imagined as a form of haunting - a return of something that had been repressed. And to be powerfully haunted in this way is to accede to a place in the line of a timeless, international aesthetic brotherhood.Examining Poe' s role as a founding figure whose works haunted the leading writers and artists in several successive waves of nineteenth-century aestheticism, this essay is framed by a simple, general recognition of the lines of dissemination by which his influence was transmitted across cultures and periods. But its primary emphasis is on analysis of one specific aspect of this transmitted vision: many of Poe's most influential short stories are about the dynamics of aesthetic reception, playing out in their plots and narrative structure a complex vision of the process of reading, transmission, or influence that would be taken up by a line of later artists and writers. This new look at some key elements in Poe's aesthetic and critical theory highlights the uncanny combination of foreignness and familiarity in what Poe's model offered first to his antebellum American contemporaries (notably Nathaniel Hawthorne); then to later European definers of aestheticism (notably Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysmans in France, and Oscar Wilde in England); and finally to leading figures in the movements of Aestheticism and Decadence that emerged in America at the turn of the twentieth century.In a 1 904 essay, Henry James described aestheticism to Americans as "a queer high-flavored fruit from overseas, grown under another sun than ours, passed round and solemnly partaken of at banquets organized to try it, but not found on the whole really to agree with us".1 As the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells wrote of aestheticism along similar lines - picturing it as a threat to native ways of writing and thinking, taken up only by a "sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris". And this defensive vision quickly coalesced into the standard literary-historical account: Aestheticism and Decadence, related movements that insisted on the autonomy of art, reveling in the bizarre, the artificial, the perverse, and the arcane, came to be viewed as distinctly European phenomena speaking for anxieties of degeneracy very much specific to the cultural moment in fin-de-siecle England and France. …

Introduction: Blurring Boundaries: The Fiction of M.E. Braddon

Abstract: ... there are classes who love the horrible and the grotesque. We do not object particularly to their gratification - provided that those who cater to them are content with their true place in literature, which is not above the basement.1She never pandered to the lower tastes of the age, and the fresh vitality of her thoughts was matched by the purity of her pen.2Why are all the novels of Miss Braddon out of print? Why has nobody got the sense to republish in cheap editions "Lady Audley's Secret," "Aurora Floyd," "Vixen," "The Venetians," "The Trail of the Serpent" - to mention only a few.3As the above quotations illustrate, in the space of around seventy years, Mary Elizabeth Braddon went from controversial purveyor of lowbrow sensation fiction, to respectable Victorian author, to literary obscurity. Interest in Braddon' s work has subsequently revived, and since the 1970s she has become the focus of increasing critical attention. These shifting attitudes towards her work are suggestive of the manner in which her writing blurs the boundaries between respectable and lowbrow literature, and this reflects a broader concern with the blurring of boundaries in the work of Braddon and other Victorian sensation writers. In this Introduction, I consider some of the problems of categorization that emerge from an examination of Braddon' s oeuvre and reflect on some of the various ways in which her work challenges generic and social boundaries - a recurring issue in the essays in this collection.From literary sensation to literary obscuritySince her literary career took off in the early 1860s, Braddon has been viewed primarily as an author of sensation fiction, largely due to the phenomenal success of two of her early novels, Lady Audley 's Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863). Over the course of her career, however (a period splanning more than sixty years), Braddon produced not only sensation fiction, but also worked as an actress, edited a successful magazine, and wrote poetry, plays, pennydreadfuls, ghost stories, realist novels, and historical fiction, as well as the sensation novels for which she is best remembered. This collection seeks to further explore Braddon' s contribution to the sensation genre, through a critical examination of both Lady Audley' s Secret, her most successful work, and a number of her lesser known sensation novels, and to emphasize the diversity of Braddon' s output and continue the process (begun in recent years) of acknowledging a literary contribution that extends beyond the sensation novel. In his bibliography of sensation novels published between 1855 and 1890,4 Andrew Maunder includes forty-one of Braddon' s novels, yet critical attention has focused primarily on only a few of these works (most notably, Lady Audley 's Secret and Aurora Floyd). Amongst the works discussed in this collection are the relatively unexplored sensation novels The Trail of the Serpent (1861) and Charlotte's Inheritance (1868), along with later works containing some of the typical characteristics of sensation fiction, such as His Darling Sin (1899) and A Lost Eden (1904).It is hardly surprising, given the popularity oi Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd - the works with which she initially found fame - that Braddon should be pigeonholed as a sensation writer. The novels provoked much controversy, with critics accusing Braddon of dealing with "revolting topics",5 and labelling her novels "one of the abominations of the age".6 Such assertions, though directed specifically at Braddon, represent a broader response to the genre of sensation fiction as a whole. The cultural anxiety invoked by the emergence of the sensation novel was largely a consequence of the threat the genre was perceived as posing to both class and gender boundaries. These concerns are reflected in a frequently quoted 1 865 article by W.F. Rae, in which Braddon is accused of "making the literature of the kitchen the favourite reading of the drawing room". …

Short-Storyness and Eyewitnessing

Abstract: Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation.1Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.2Is reality amenable to storytelling?Does the short story speak to us about human limitations with regards to comprehension even before we read one? Do readers approach a story with the semiconscious premonition that the writer will show that our relationship with life involves more dumb amazement than understanding? Reading short stories has inscribed this expectation in readers' memory, and a certain amount of familiarity with short story theory makes us aware that the short story's only compromise with readers is to stun us with the impact of a situation whose nature upsets our customary attachment to sequential patterning.3 This situation, which exemplifies a contact or, rather, a clash with reality, does not necessarily rest on a spectacular or out-of-the-ordinary event; instead, the story confronts us, as life occasionally does, with an occurrence against which no system of thought can protect us. The impact derives from our looking at something as if we were still untrained by speech. Our helplessness derives from the gap between a sight and our previous learning, and it metaphorically defines us (the characters, the readers) as witnesses looking at a reality that our eyes unwillingly register and our mind absorbs, but without being able to decode it.Looking into reality would be a more appropriate way of describing our engagement with the novel: we have internalized the novel as a bearer of the comprehensiveness of life, no matter how much it might have swerved from a nineteenth-century canonized model; in the novel, time keeps moving in whatever direction, but in the short story, the writer seems to create an atemporal dimension of time, and once we step aside, the vision gained from within that framed space will remain the main axis of the narrative, however much it might be disturbed by the continuum of life.Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss described a mental state where the individual, by looking at something other than himself, lets this otherness, usually inhospitable, invade his senses.4 As a result of this saturation of the senses, the powers of thought are paralysed. This understanding of reality as shock was explored by Benjamin to explain how modern society has created artistic mechanisms and commodities (phantasmagoria) that protect people from the excessive energies of external stimuli and from the harshness of industrial societies. The creation of cushioned spaces in the professions and in art is further developed by Buck-Morss, who located the threat of bewilderment and pain in the relationship between man and the image. According to her, we possess a synaesthetic system through which the images we store in our memory get connected with external stimuli, creating an internal language that cannot be grasped in conceptual terms.5 This language threatens to betray the language of reason, endangering its philosophic sovereignty. What is absorbed unintentionally resists intellectual comprehension. This idea is strikingly similar to recurrent theorizations of the short story as a genre that baffles notions of knowledge as comprehension and instead confers climactic status on states of bewilderment, focusing on a paradigmatic encounter with strangeness.Critics and writers have often claimed that the short story is a form of fiction that challenges knowledge, a genre which posits that an intelligible explanation of our experience is impossible and perhaps not even desirable.6 But does the short story really address life only as an irresolvable case? My hypothesis here will be that this feeling of impotence may come from our impression that what the genre does is paradoxical: it tries to convey through words an experience for the reader only to see, to look at, without reconciling this experience with the presumed comforts of narrative. …

Intertextuality and collage in Barthelme's short fiction

Abstract: Donald Barthelme belongs to the category of disruptive, innovative American writers who have not only abandoned the mimetic narrative modes, but have also engaged in formal experiments that have revitalized the short story genre. In "The State of the Short Story", Susan Mernit1 lists Barthelme as one of the writers who helped to define the modern short story and suggests that he promoted the popular revival of the genre. In the same vein, Charles May2 has placed Barthelme among the most influential postmodernist short story writers who focus attention on the fiction-making process. His short fictions are also acclaimed for promoting new and inventive approaches and for addressing the problems of the postmodern age. As Miriam Clark aptly remarks, his short fiction, distinguished by its "depthlessness, incoherence and ephemerality", falls under the category of the postmodern because it calls into question "metanarratives of self-knowledge and insight".3 Moreover, Barthelme's stories display all the characteristics that Lauro Zavala4 has attributed to the postmodern short story: they are not only rhizomatic, intertextual and anti-mimetic, but also seem to be under construction, such that their different components can be assembled and reassembled ad infinitum. Furthermore, Barthelme's original experiments with narrative structure seem to corroborate Noel Harold Kaylor's opinion that "the innovations through which postmodernism finally gained its success in the United States were in form and structure rather than content and in the postmodernist's inventive alternative to realist representation of the 'world outside the work'".5Although Barthelme also produced longer fiction, he has been particularly praised for his short stories, which can be described as original collages that explore the textures of postmodern experience. His sense of cultural fragmentation made him resort to the short story genre as the best means of conveying the incoherence of a kaleidoscopic reality. For this reason, his short fiction is representative of the postmodern crisis of perception, the waning of subjectivity, and the shallowness and unreality of postmodern ordinary experience. Furthermore, Barthelme's short fiction is marked by a creative interest in exploring the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations. Disenchantment with conventional narrative forms led him to explore new techniques in order to deconstruct traditional forms of representation; and in challenging the ordinary practices of meaning production, Barthelme's fiction points to the essence of the postmodern mode. He experiments with narrative form in such a way as to emphasize the supremacy of form over content and to make it the very subject of his fiction.Barthelme resorts to collage and intertextuality as powerful techniques that enable him to insist on the story as artifice and also to privilege the artistic process at the expense of the finished work. Carl Malmgren cleverly draws attention to the relationship collage established between the artwork and reality when he points out that collage not only challenges mimetic aesthetics, but also represents an arbitrary, open system with crumbling boundaries.6 This description of collage is linked to Graham Allen's ideas about intertextuality. This critic claims that postmodern fiction resorts to intertextual practices in order to highlight and control the tension between fiction and reality.7 It seems obvious that Barthelme uses both techniques in an attempt to emphasize the notion of literary texts as constructed artifacts pointing to the dynamics of artistic creation. Thus, he conceives his short stories as complex intertextual spaces where collage and intertextuality work on the metafictional paradox between the construction of a fictional reality and the laying bare ofthat illusion.Barthelme has published about eight collections of short stories. This article focuses on several works excerpted from Sixty Stories? …

“drink it up dear; itwill do you good”: crime, toxicology, and the trail of the serpent

Abstract: The Trail of the Serpent (1861), Braddon's first and formative novel, has had a surge of interest in recent years. Academics, in particular, are beginning to notice the text's importance in laying down the longstanding literary interests of its author. In 2003, for instance, Sarah Waters wrote that "The Trail of the Serpent occupies a fascinating place in relation both to Braddon's sensational oeuvre and to the criticism that greeted it".1 Despite being a "lurid, improbable story", she adds, the text "retain[s its] power to unsettle and impress".2 In this essay I agree with Waters' claim that The Trail of the Serpent is an important book. Rather than concentrating on its place within the literary career of its author, or sensation fiction more broadly, however, I aim to show how the text is very useful in studying a Victorian change in attitude regarding crime and its links with science. More specifically, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed a cultural panic over the criminal use of poison. At the time there appeared to be a dramatic increase in murders committed with deadly chemicals. Scientists responded with new ways of detecting and treating the effects of poison and the new science of toxicology became a discipline that Braddon's text, which itself features a number of criminal poisonings, could draw on in telling and fascinating ways.3Poisoning in fiction was nothing new - since the Ancients (and most notably in Shakespeare and new-wave Gothic texts), poison had been a staple part of fictional narratives. As I intend to make clear, what marked the Victorian text out among these was a new attention to detail. In older genres, for instance, poisons were frequently identified simply as "poison" and descriptions of their effects have more to do with melodrama than actual fact. In the panic-stricken climate of the nineteenth century, however, such slights of hand were not longer acceptable. Popular fictional texts worked within a complicated, interdisciplinary web of discourses that identified and discussed a number of deadly poisons. Such discourses emanated from, and entered into, a cultural unease relating to the possibility of being killed by poison.Toxicology and the cult of "secret poisoning"The most important toxicological textbook of the nineteenth century, entitled A General System of Toxicology, was written by M.P. Orfila in 1815 and was quickly followed by more, most notably Robert Christison's Treatise on Poisons in 1829 and Alfred Swaine Taylor's On Poisons in 1848. Both these textbooks underwent a number of reprints and revisions throughout the century and became the foundations upon which modern forensic science was built. As already noted, toxicology proper emerged during the mid- Victorian era because of a perceived rise in criminal poisonings. In 1 848, Alfred Taylor, a man who became renowned for his expertise in chemistry and medico-legal analysis, commented:The crime of poisoning has been of late so fearfully on the increase, that it seems essential for the proper administration of justice and for the security of society, to collect and arrange in a convenient form for reference, those important medical facts in relation to death from poison, which, while they constitute a safe guide to the barrister and medical practitioner, may prevent the condemnation of the innocent, and insure the conviction of the guilty.4Taylor thus intended his book to be a guide for the detection of the major symptoms of poisoning. This, he hoped, would help counteract the "fearful" increase of such crimes.In 1857, the German chemist Dr Otto claimed in his Manual of the Detection of Poison that "the famous trial of Madame Lafarge", in particular, "has given occasion to a careful revision, within the last few years, of all the various methods for the detection of arsenic".5 In 1840, Marie Lafarge was indicted for murdering her husband.; it was alleged by the prosecution that she had poisoned him by baking arsenic into a cake. …

Revising theory: poe’s legacy in short story criticism

Abstract: The "Splintering Frame"In his essay in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, Norman Friedman calls for a critical consensus to ensure the future of short story theory:In discussing short story theory, we have a tendency to talk at crosspurposes. I do not mean simply a tendency to disagree; I mean, rather, an apparent difficulty in agreeing on what it is we are disagreeing about.1For better or for worse, Friedman's plea appeared at a time when literary theory, particularly in the United States, was undergoing a process of fragmentation along the fault lines of modern identity politics, in which the identity categories and identifications of the writer, reader and theorist came to serve as categories that were not only political but also theoretical.2 The ascendancy of identity politics in the wake of the rise of post-structuralist and post-modern theories increasingly demanded what might be called a poetics of identity: it was as though political identity categories necessitated the formulation of corresponding critical theories. Literary scholars were thus compelled to take part in the politics of identity3 and to constitute increasingly circumscribed, politically charged sub-fields of literary research, at the very moment that Friedman was advocating the inverse of this fragmentation - for consensus, agreement and cooperation - in the field of short story theory.In the face of this "splintering frame" of literary studies, short story theory was forced to abandon or at least call into question the unifying, universalizing critical framework defined by the tripartite "author, text, reader" structure that had been introduced and reinforced by short story theorists of the preceding era, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe and his disciple Brander Matthews. The very idea of a determinate textual form that could be defined in terms of intratextual, immanent characteristics and relations had itself become untenable with the decline of formalistic literary methods in the period we now call post-modern, and the rise of methods that admit and refer to the extra-textual (post-structuralism, post-colonialism) or emphasize textual autonomy and indeterminacy (deconstruction). The splintering frame4 of post-modern literary studies questioned whether the "short story as form" was merely an illusion produced by a particular, historical cognitive frame that no longer had any real existence. The historical and literary evidence suggests an affirmative answer to this question, for the differences between the short story and the novel, like the former's purported affinities with the poem, were rather numinous and indefinable. For example, an article by John Gerlach explicitly addressed the indeterminacy of the short story's relationships with poetry and longer prose forms.5 Yet even without having been rigorously and exclusively defined before the advent of post-modernism, the short story had already achieved acceptance as a specific genre of prose fiction. The relationships between the short story, the poem and the novel had proved, to a degree, both ineffable and enduring. The dependence upon these comparisons (as well as the indisputable critical presence of the reader) in the articulation of the short story genre has resulted in a degree of critical stasis: even in the wake of post-modernism, short story theory continues to be defined in relation to these other genres; the genre of the short story continues to resist or elude definition as an independently defined, closed and unique literary form. In other words, the fundamental problematic of short story criticism - that of genre definition - continues to be posed in the same or similar terms to what it has been since Poe. The present article will trace this critical problematic in reverse by demonstrating the continuing endurance and pervasive influence of Poe's seminal contributions to short story theory.The sterile position in Poe's LegacyEven after the processes of fragmentation had run their course in postmodernism, the skeletal framework of a unified genre still remained for the short story: it was still accepted that the short story was neither novel nor poem and that it somehow produced an effect in the reader. …

To the Mad-House Born: The Ethics of Exteriority in Lady Audley's Secret

Abstract: In typical sensation fashion, Mary Braddon's 1862 novel Lady Audley's Secret figures the crossing of revered Victorian borders - those separating upper and lower classes, sanity and madness, and respectable and fallen femininity.1 But the boundary that most cogently defines anti-heroine Lucy Audley's transgressivness is the gilded threshold of the Victorian country house. Lucy Audley ultimately suffers for seeking the beautiful facade that others prize in her, and while Braddon dismantles the false fronts of her two most decorative subjects, Lucy Audley and manor house Audley Court, she also reinforces the notion that femininity and the Victorian house are intricately devised and co-dependent products of commodity culture. Using Lucy Audley as a model of conflicted femininity, and relying upon a literal connection between exteriority and femininity that Braddon's novel invites, we can examine the ways in which the country house defined Victorian womanhood.Lucy Audley's rise to mistress of Audley Court follows a scandalous series of events whereby her acquisition of wealth and position is sought through her various alliances with men - and typified, at each stage, by the material value of the house to which those men admit her. The former Helen Maiden, Lucy first marries George Talboys to escape the drudgery of her childhood. But the match disconnects George from his inheritance, and he leaves for Australia to seek their fortune. Helen abandons their child to start a new life under the name of Lucy Graham, finding first a position as governess, and then winning the heart of Sir Michael Audley. When she learns of George's return to England, she feigns her own death, and soon must avoid the heartbroken George, who is a friend of Robert Audley, Sir Michael's nephew. When George suddenly disappears, last seen at Audley Court, Robert Audley determines to piece together the mysterious past of his new step-aunt. As Robert rightly suspects, Lucy's angelic aspect obscures her criminal past - including her attempt to kill George Talboys and bury, with him, her true identity.Lucy's social experience is impossible to dissociate from her psychological experience, which her relationships to her houses makes literal. If we treat Lucy's alleged psychosis as a reaction to the cultural pressures of the day rather than accept the novel's glib and unconvincing gesture towards inherited madness, we see that the similarities between the domestic home and the domesticated asylum illuminate the identity construction of Lucy Audley as one bound and reflected by the symbol of the Victorian country-house.By uncovering Lucy's material self-interest, Lady Audley 's Secret troubles Victorian norms about women by revealing this materialism at its crudest. Lucy's equation between her social value and the value of her home - punished by the events of the novel but never adequately denied - is mirrored by a more deeply entrenched Victorian equivalence between a woman's beauty and her character. And, while the material is theorized to be only an outward expression of inner, immaterial traits, the events of the novel suggests that exteriors are deterministic, and do shape character - at great cost to the moral status and psychological autonomy of women.House-bound women in Victorian EnglandThe country-house in Victorian England provides a living symbol of an earlier England, a nation unpolluted by the commotion and greed of industrial society, and one organized by the ancient code of the aristocratic order. As country-houses typically are passed from generation to generation, they mark the endurance and supremacy of old families. The longevity of the country house signifies the stability of a past world. For instance, in Ruskin's attempt to preserve the past, he explicitly connects morality with long-lasting architecture, asserting in "The Nature of Gothic" that "It is an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last to one generation only . …

Homeless in the home: invention, instability, and insanity in the domestic spaces of m.e. braddon and l.m. alcott

Abstract: It is not always want, insanity, or sin that drives women to desperate deaths: often it is a dreadful loneliness of heart, a hunger for home and fiends, worse than starvation, a bitter sense of wrong in being denied the tender ties, the pleasant duties, the sweet rewards that can make the humblest life happy; a rebellious protest against God, who, when they cry for bread, seems to offer them a stone. lThe transatlantic scholarship of Winifred Hughes and Christine Doyle provides a basis for comparing the work of British sensationalist Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the thrillers of American writer Louisa May Alcott. Both Hughes and Doyle highlight the sensational aspects of Alcott's writing that stem from the genre's British origin and influence. Inspiring Alcott with visions of women who were both angels and actresses, mothers and murderers, sensationalism unveiled the complex, and frequently contradictory, nineteenth-century social roles for women, and their often deleterious effects on the female psyche. Sensationalism, then, did more for Alcott than excite visceral delights. It more importantly incited social change, hence appealing to Alcott's social consciousness.2Two hypotheses point to why Mary Elizabeth Braddon, specifically, might have influenced Alcott's depiction of a distinctively American3 sensation heroine, Jean Muir of "Behind a Mask". First, Braddon' s popularity peaked around 1863, the year in which Alcott began writing sensational fiction, and three years before her publication of "Behind a Mask". Second, given the transatlantic success of Lady Audley's Secret , which Alcott "likely had read",4 it seems plausible to posit Jean Muir as both an extension and revision of Helen Talboys, the subversive heroine of Braddon's popular novel. Both women are lower-class females who aspire to escape poverty. Both are bewitching actresses and seemingly deferential governesses, who strive to control patriarchy before patriarchy succeeds in controlling them. Throughout their struggles, the women battle various forms of homelessness - ranging from literal dispossession to metaphorical disconnection from the domestic spaces that house them.Both Jean and Helen suffer unstable environments as a result of oppressive patriarchal mores. When fragmented relationships erode the women's domestic space, they are dispossessed, stigmatized and left socially adrift. Rather than submit to their homelessness, both women act their way into new abodes, hiding the marital wreckage they leave behind. Yet it is not clear that their new roles bring relief, or that the replacement spaces provide adequate shelter. Not only are their identities structured on a facade, they are enacted in a space that is not their own - a space they have won through their husbands' misinterpretation and misidentification of their characters.Beleaguered by the breakdown of space and identity, the women suffer a homelessness of the mind that instigates mental illness. It is my suggestion that unstable domestic spaces and their subsequent dissolution produce an ultimate breakdown of the female mind.To understand women's homelessness, it is useful to consider the narratives' cultural contexts as well as the psychology of homelessness. Alarmingly, women's homelessness was, until recently, a largely unrecognized social concern. Barbara Arrighi notes that for centuries (and on both continents), patriarchal authorities propagated the view "that women are cared for by fathers, husbands, brothers, or uncles, and thus should not be in need of housing". Arrighi claims that "even today", women are often perceived as necessarily occupying domestic space - "deeply embedded" in family life.5 For these reasons, homeless women remained unacknowledged for some time. And while government programmes now address problems of women's homelessness, a history of socio-political neglect raises the following question: has women's homelessness remained inconspicuous for the very reason that it has occurred within the home? …

The paratactic structure in the canterbury tales: two antecedents of the modern short story

Abstract: Although the first theories about the short story originate with Poe' s "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), historically the first forms of the genre go back to the emergence of the medieval tale Some scholars acknowledge in passing that the medieval tale lies at the origins of the short story, yet very few critics have explored these connections further As WS Perm aptly remarks:Historically, the earliest genre of the story is the tale The description of the tale as a genre of the story is only a beginning; yet, as long as we are able to describe the genre, structure, enunciative and narrative postures, mode and tropical convention, the beginning is a valid one1This is an old, complex controversy2 whose full elucidation lies beyond the scope of the present study, which takes Penn's affirmation as a point of departure and attempts to demonstrate that the examination of medieval tales offers interesting approximations to the study of the modern short story At present only a few studies have considered the relationship between the short story and the medieval tale, and even then they have done so only briefly3 This study aims to fill the gap in the literature in this fieldEspecially interesting for our purposes are those medieval tales that deliberately fuse the popular oral tradition (in which moral trials and individuals' triumphs over desire are predominant) with the literary tradition (which attempts to capture the world's unique, inexplicable or mysterious aspects) Destined to become one of the most successful and surprising genres of the twentieth century, and predictably one of the predominant artistic forms of the twenty-first, the short narrative underwent several developmental phases before emerging as a new genre in the nineteenth century The short story is indebted to the medieval literary tale, which represents one of the most fruitful phases of its evolutionThis essay argues that some of the Canterbury Tales announce the ulterior evolution of the modern short story It focuses on Chaucer's new narrative techniques, which center on the manipulation of the most important narrative elements, such as time, space, characters, narrators, and endings that prefigure the dynamics of the modern short story and modify the final meaning of the taleCritics have regarded the fourteenth century as the culminating moment of collections of "popular tales",4 which had existed for more than three thousand years Translations and adaptations of collections of oriental and classical stories were popularized by Christian preachers and flourished in the works of authors such as Boccaccio, Chaucer and Gower Scholars commonly agree on the division of these collections into three main groups according to their organizing structure: unframed tales, tales with an introduction and tales with a fully developed frame5The first group consists of unframed tales - loose stories without any kind of organizational criteria Probably the most famous collection of unframed tales is the Gesta Romanorum (towards the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth), a compilation of more than 1 80 stories, all of which end with a moral exemplification There is no link among these stories, and in some cases there even seems to be no correspondence between the story and its moralThe second group comprises tales with an introduction These are collections of unrelated tales preceded by an introduction or a prologue that instructs the reader as to the content and the aims envisaged by their publication Miracles and the lives of saints generally belong to this category A good example is the South English Legendary, compiled during the late thirteenth century, or the Aesopets, a collection of animal fables, compiled during the twelfth and thirteenth centuriesTales with a fully developed frame form the third group Preceded by an introduction, these tales show explicit links to each other that are meant to give an overall meaning to the story …