English and Modern Languages

Critical attention to the Victorian supernatural has flourished over the last twenty-five years. Whether it is spiritualism or Theosophy, mesmerism or the occult, the dozens of book-length studies and hundreds of articles that have appeared recently reflect the avid scholarly discussion of Victorian mystical practices. Designed both for those new to the field and for experts, this volume is organized into sections covering the relationship between Victorian spiritualism and science, the occult and politics, and the culture of mystical practices. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult brings together some of the most prominent scholars working in the field to introduce current approaches to the study of nineteenth-century mysticism and to define new areas for research.

Much literature in translation studies focuses on translations produced relatively recently. Many of the translation theories that enjoy most attention in the discipline were formulated similarly recently. This paper observes some of the issues that may arise when translations from the distant past are analysed through the lens of contemporary theories and practices.

Postmodern culture, with its fetishization of the mash-up, the pastiche, and the recombinant, mirrors a contemporary vision of subjectivity as performative and protean, and the current  emphasis on being oneself—in an environment where to be oneself is often to be an imitation of others—produces a bewildering double-think that achieves exactly the opposite of the expressivist ideal associated with authenticity.  Given the uncoupling of self-understanding from the validating structures of religious discipline and social collectivism, how one goes about locating an authentic hub and testing that against any model other than a subjective pathos, is philosophically problematic. And yet, a generation after the Linguistic Turn, the lure of the authentic as an absolute mode of being has not
only not diminished, but has reasserted itself as an insistent trope of contemporary lived and aesthetic practice. Taking British fiction since 2000 as its focus, this essay will explore the prevalence and diversity of this theme and, through the examination specifically of Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, argues that the current anxiety of authenticity stems from the unresolved tension between the expressivist ethic and the horizon
of the postdeconstructive subject.

Attempting to convey the experience of the present in all its seeming confusion and disorderliness is a challenge that pushes realist fiction to its limits. Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday (2008) is an ambitious attempt to concertina the space/time between event and representation by portraying the news items of the summer of 2007 with an immediacy rare in narrative fiction. Melding the structure of rapid, associative shifts common to 24-hour news presentation with the docu-realism of the nonfiction
novel, Burn articulates the complex symbolic interactions that
inform an aesthetic and cultural snapshot of the early twenty-first century. This essay explores the novel’s portrayal of the mass mediatisation of contemporary British society and its blurring of the lines between fact and fiction. By comparing the quasi-celebrity attributed to the parents of the abducted child, Madeleine McCann, with the manipulation of the media
employed during the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown exchange of power, the essay argues that the dominant logic of specular commoditisation goes hand in hand with the novel’s focus on narratives of loss, abandonment, and emptiness.

For Alain Badiou the twentieth-century was characterized by a ‘passion of the real’, a hunt for the unadulterated that found its apotheosis not in the technological advances of modernity, but in the violence of war that that technology enabled. As we move into the twenty-first century, technology, and in particular the technology of representation, seems to be moving us ever further from the experience of the real, but as this article argues through an examination of the fiction of Tom McCarthy and Steven Hall, the relationship between inscription, hermeneutics and
the real remains aesthetically and culturally productive. Taking as its theoretical grounding Friedrich Kittler’s work on discourse networks and the Lacanian dialogue between the symbolic and the real, this article explores the deeper unconscious cultural resonances that are at once inside and beyond the interpretational paradigms of modernity. Kittler’s post-hermeneutic dehumanisation of the discourse system
finds expression in McCarthy and Hall’s disarticulation of language from subjectivity and their reliance on flights of memory and processes of reproduction for an engagement with a sense of authentic agency.

This essay explores the intertextual debt to Hamlet in Graham Swift's Ever After. Employing Jacques Lacan's reading of desire in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," the author argues that Bill Unwin's paralysis of subjective agency encourages his identification with Hamlet so as to fix himself within the symbolic order. Unlike Hamlet, however, Unwin faces not only the crisis of the father's law, but postmodernity's collapse of symbolic authority.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This essay considers considers two pamphlets from the early career of John Taylor the Water Poet, The Pennyles Pilgrimage (1618) and The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620), and explores Taylor’s description of writing as a branch of domestic industry whose virtues reside in plainness rather than fineness. Most early modern theorists of poetry privileged ingenium or natural wit, arguing that literary excellence originated in the smooth, spontaneous workings of the imagination. Drawing resourcefully from contemporary theories of authorship, including Ben Jonson’s, Taylor proposed instead that literary value depended upon exercitatio, the intellectual and physical labour involved in writing. It is argued that the familiar contemporary figure of the pot-poet enabled Taylor to contribute in important ways to contemporary debates about literary worth. Although pot-poetry was associated with both social roughness and aesthetic worthlessness, this category of literature nevertheless provided Taylor with a vocabulary to describe and enact new strategies of professionalism in print.

This paper focuses on the ambiguous status of the half-chapter in Julian Barnes’ novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). “Parenthesis” stands in contradistinction to the other ten chapters in that it offers a concerted riposte to the provisionality of postmodern history by installing love as a structuring logic by which the terrifying randomness of the past can be negotiated. Much of the distinctiveness of “Parenthesis” derives from the intrusion of an authorial-narratorial figuration of Julian Barnes which, it is argued, lends the half-chapter a degree of authorial privilege and narrative stability that is not evident elsewhere. By reading the ‘honesty’ of Barnes’ discourse on love as a postmodern strategy of seduction, it is claimed that the redemptive potential of love as a way of making meaning from chaos is compromised. To recognise this is to face the prospect that Barnes lulls his reader into believing that “Parenthesis” offers an escape from the scepticism of postmodernism only to confront them with their own naïve desire for order in narrative as in history.

J.G. Farrell’s novel, Troubles, presents the collision between public and private histories and dramatises the moment when historical action impacts upon the individual consciousness of those undergoing that action. This paper argues that Troubles displays an epistemological structure based around the search for reliable information, which parallels the concomitant quest for knowledge about the Troubles experienced by the characters. This hiatus in information is passed onto the reader, who is required to interpret the text with unreliable and unstable resources, a situation exemplified in the fragmented chronology of the first paragraphs, which this paper examines in depth.

Analytical studies of book production in dramatic metaphors most commonly make reference to printing technologies and book replication and dissemination. This essay reconsiders the new bibliography by extending its scope to include bookbinding, with especial attention paid to Richard Brome's 1638 play The Love-Sick Court. In act 4, Doris the maid rejects Geron's advances: 'We are not yet one volume, both bound up / And clasped together'. I consider this claim in the light of courtship and marriage with particular analysis of the process of bookbinding (from personal practical experience) in relation to the sacrament of marriage. The essay pays additional attention to the close synergies between paper and clothing, and the trope of book/woman. Act 4, scene 1 of The Love-Sick Court (1638) develops the common early modern trope of book/woman by peppering the pedant Geron's wooing of Doris with pedagogical and bibliographical references. 1 Other literary instances link metaphorically the opening of a book and a woman's legs, perhaps in an attempt to theorize in gendered terms the relatively recent introduction of printing technologies. This example from Richard Brome extends the trope by likening marriage -often referred to in marriage tracts as 'binding'to the process of bookbinding. Amongst other marital binding metaphors, the Brome example is rare: Sid Ray's study discusses various forms, including glue, knots, grafting, yoking, fetters, and knitting, but not bookbinding. 2 Thus Brome's usage is doubly important in imaginatively exploring two tropes: marriage/binding and woman/book. With specific examination of The Love-Sick Court, I explore figurative use of the book and its significance in relation to gender and marriage through the practical labour of bookbinding, and the implied presentation of women as objects of consumption and products of the male attitude towards ownership in marriage.

Contemporary culture is caught in a representational bind:  fascinated by - and yet tired of - its tendency towards artifice and involution, whilst simultaneously attracted to - and yet sceptical of - the idea of the authentic. The hermeneutical confusion brought about by this self-identity crisis has given rise to a semiotic indistinction around artificiality and authenticity, leaving the observer trapped not by their bipolarity, but caught within their layers as they interleave. This essay explores the ramifications of this through an examination of the relationship between Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002). Identifying the imitative intent of Self’s rewrite as problematic, the essay situates the twentieth-century’s shift towards an ethic of private authenticity over sincerity as indicative of a significant change in self and social understanding. However the demands and desires of late-capitalism have made it increasingly difficult to isolate what that authenticity might mean, and what credibility can be attached to it. By examining Self’s portrayal of Princess Diana’s life and death, it is argued that for all its importance as a signifier of value, contemporary authenticity is hopelessly caught within the representational order of the artificial.