The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008)
BOOK REVIEWS
Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl, eds. Landscape and Englishness Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography, Literature 1 Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. ISBN 90-420-2102-0. 266 pp. Jopi Nyman (Joensuu, Finland) The aim of this new Rodopi series is to contribute to period’s debates about modernisation and emerging the study of cultural meanings embedded in places tourism. The rest of the essays deal with such topics and spaces, with particular reference to the as the changing questioning of identity in the English maintenance and deconstruction of national and novel (Patrick Parrinder), the ambiguous role of the regional myths. To achieve this goal, Landscape and sea in British imperial discourse (Bernhard Klein), Englishness, the first volume in the series, seeks to and the symbolic role of Stonehenge as sacred provide interdisciplinary perspectives on the geography in British fiction from Frances Burney to relationship between the two in order to construct Peter Ackroyd (Silvia Mergenthal). “a new interdisciplinary cultural history,” as The third section consists of two essays on suggested by Robert Burden in his Introduction. canonical writers and two on different aspects of What the individual case analyses in the volume travel writing. Robert Burden’s essay on D.H. reveal is a multi-faceted understanding of the Lawrence’s is a contribution to the recent re- nationed use(s) of rural landscape in a variety of evaluation of his travel writing and shows its links cultural texts, ranging from Cobbett and Froude to with colonial discourse. Christine Berberich examines interwar travel writing and contemporary the role of nostalgia in English narratives of the photography. This timely volume enhances our countryside, linking the persistent use of the trope understanding of the construction of Englishness in popular and literary texts with myths of hope and as an idealized and invented form of national identity. harmony: whereas Orwell and Sassoon are examples The roots of the volume are in the ESSE Zaragoza of an elegiac attitude towards the rural, the works of Conference of 2004. Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro do no longer Organized into four sections (Theory; 19th Century showcase the countryside but warn against its and Before; 20th Century; Contemporary), the volume commodification and the dangers of the heritage seeks to understand landscape historically and in industry. The two essays on travel writing between an interdisciplinary manner. Yet it is this notion of the wars, by Ben Knights and Stephan Kohl, explore interdisciplinarity emphasised in the description of the ideologies embedded in these mapping-of- the project that is both the strength and weakness England narratives. Both authors present interesting of the volume. For example, while most of the essays materials (Kohl reads 1930s motoring guidebooks, in the volume draw from the vocabularies of and Knights writes on H.V. Morton and J.B. Priestley) contemporary social and cultural theory (e.g., and speculations about the role that such texts Foucault, Lefebvre), the two essays, by Chris played. While Knights links his travellers’ narratives Thurgar-Davis and Christoph Schubert, in the with Urry’s notion of the romantic gaze, discourses “Theory” section centre upon questions of meta- of degeneration and utopianism, Kohl argues that phor, cognitive linguistics and spatial semantics. the rural England explored by motorists links their While showing expertise in their respective fields, modernity with the nation’s history – the landscape these rather formalist essays resonate very little with is invented for contemporary use or uses as a site the rest of the book and its explicit attention to histor- for experiencing the nation and its allegedly ical and cultural issues, discourses and ideologies. authentic and shared character. The other sections of the book tackle a variety of The final two essays bring the book up to the 21st canonical and non-canonical texts and genres and century. In her analysis of Martin Parr’s photographs present a number of interesting issues about the of the English beach, Merle Tönnies claims that Parr’s role of the landscape in the making of national representations of the seaside resist dominant touristic identity. The second section consists of four essays. and commercial images of the beach, and aim at It opens with Ralph Pordzik’s noteworthy recontext- producing an ironic understanding of the past forms ualiation of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides in the of Englishness. In a similar vein, Ruth Helyer examines
70 the alternatives of Englishness and English spaces in to separate from each other. the works of Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, where In sum, the volume manages to show convinc- Englishness may be stripped of its place-relatedness ingly that the construction of national identity is and performed in India and Bangladesh. Reading such intricately linked with place, space and myths mutations of national and cultural identity through organizing them. It can be recommended to any- the tropes of doubles and twins, Helyer suggests body working with the narrative construction of that “the looker and the looked-at” may not be easy modern Englishness.
Michèle Lurdos & Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds. Transport(s) in the British Empire and the Commonwealth. Les Carnets du Cerpac. no. 4, Montpellier: Publications de l’Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III, 2007. Anne Holden Rønning (Bergen, Norway)
The word ‘transport’ has a variety of meanings and interesting comments on the role of the railway, for the editors have chosen to interpret this in its widest example, whether from a political history point of sense, and, by adding an ‘s’, open “a few more view as in Bruce Smith’s description of the avenues” as they state in the introduction. This construction of the New Zealand railways and the provides an interesting mix of topics – the political issues involved, which he terms “political picaresque, the slave memoir, the history of railways, football.” The struggle between the unions and the the role of the travel writer as a voyeur, the forced politicians for power and control was key to the way transportation of people from one place to another, the railways developed in New Zealand. This essay as well as the emotional state of being carried away would have been enriched by a few more details or a by joy. However, at times the interpretation of the map of where the railways ran for those unfamiliar word is stretched a little too far, as in some of the with the New Zealand scene. The role of the articles in the final section: Crossing Borders. The immigrants in building the railways is also not book would have benefited by being reduced. At mentioned, especially when we think of the Foxton five hundred pages the complexity of the nature of line in the North Island, and the Greymouth line in the word ‘transport’ becomes too evident, and a the South. shorter and more strictly focused version would The contrast between the Irish railway system and have been preferable. This book is a collection of that of Australia, as discussed by Stephen Little and essays from a conference held in Montpellier in Julian Hine, and their differing gauges is a salient November 2005 on transport in the British Empire comment on colonialism and the power it had to and Commonwealth. Neither is the division of the influence even technological matters. The role of book into four sections always positive, as the railways in the creation of national identity as well essays in some of the sections are too disparate. In as in opening up a country is reflected clearly in the this review I shall therefore not stick to the division size of the two countries. Whereas the car is a of the editors, but group the essays somewhat satisfactory means of transport for shorter distances differently. in Ireland, in Australia the railway is less superfluous. In his keynote address Wolfgang Binder poses However, again the number of days needed to cross the question as to whether ‘transport’ is not one of Australia, and both distance and time would have the fundamental features of transculturation. The been useful and appropriate to include. movement from one culture to another inevitably But the railway is more than a means of transport; leads to a transfer of culture both ways. He illustrates it is a meeting of peoples. As such it is used as a this with drawings and detailed comment on two leitmotif in literature, whether as symbolic of Caribbean narratives Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her national identity or as a kind of hell. Louise Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 and Harrington’s essay “‘The Train Nation’: The Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor Railway as Leitmotif in South Asian Literature” Kept During a Residence n the Island of Jamaica takes up the railway as a reflection of an imagined (1834). This sets the pattern for about half of the nation and of national identity. With a starting point articles, which deal with literature. in Gandhi’s attack on the railways because “[t]hey The most common meaning of the word ‘transport’ accentuate the evil nature of man” (although he is, of course, as a means of moving from one place did use them extensively in his campaigns), she to another. Several of the essays here open up for refers to literature from India that underscores the 71 The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008) construct of nation. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, ation and Travelling the Southern Backcountry: St. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), and David’s Parish, South Carolina in Eighteenth Century Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) all in some British America” how travel and trade contributed way or other express the social and cultural, even to development in this area of the US by linking the political, effects of the railways in India. She also backcountry to Charleston merchants and the presents an interesting view on the role of the outside world. The practical difficulties of travelling railway as a symbol of freedom and yet entrapment, in India in 1820s are described in Florence D’souza’s and even as a way to die. “The Transports of James Tod in Rajasthan.” And But railways also run underground, and, like Nelly Gillet’s analysis of “Patricia Ledyard’s ‘Ferry Orpheus, we descend to an underworld in several Tales’: Transports around the Tongan Islands” takes senses. John McLeod’s portrayal of the up the parallel between voyages on boats which consequences of post-war II migrants’ work on the can be “compared to contemplative pauses in life” underground figures the city’s betrayal of illusions (278). Through the relation of her own life and tales for those from abroad. “Orphia in the Underground: of others’ lives in the Polynesian islands, the ferry Postcolonial London Transport” describes the becomes symbolic of a threshold to a new life (279), London underground as “a way of rewriting London a rite-of-passage, a place of re-birth. in the light of diasporic experience and possibility” Since the book deals with the British Empire and (392), particularly as a kind of Hades in the writings the Commonwealth, the forced transport of con- of Lord Kitchener, Hanif Kureishi and Salman quered or occupied peoples is a salient topic. Rushdie. With its comments on and links to the Benaouda Lebdai’s essay on the early slave narrative London bombings this essay brings us into the of Olaudah Equiano relates the fascinating tale of a present, and discusses how the literature of the slave who not only comments on conditions for underground survives as an expression of sub- those taken into slavery (he was only a child) but version and creativity that continues to engage also parallels this with a search for spirituality after writers imaginatively. To put it under the section he becomes a free man. Unlike many slaves, he Crossing Borders, in my opinion, seems somewhat worked on a ship and crossed the Atlantic many out of place since, although the migrants have times in addition to visiting other places. The author literally crossed borders, McLeod’s point is the underlines this, but the essay lacks a critical stance. creation of a new underground world. Patricia Krus’s essay on rewritings of the Middle Since a train combines escape and enclosure, Passage as seen in George Lamming’s Natives of my especially in the ladies compartment, stories narrated Person and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven during a railway journey are used, suggests Evelyne demonstrates a fine contrast between texts that deal Hanquart-Turner, in ‘The Kanyakumari Tales’ to with very contemporary issues of retracing the reveal male-female relationships in a manner not middle passage, violence, and the effects of the unlike that of Chaucer and Boccaccio. Anita Nair’s original slave journeys. Both these writers engage Ladies Coupé is about the condition of women in with the dissension in Caribbean society, and as the late 20th century. Whether a woman can live such. Krus suggests, demonstrate the failure of the alone is the key question, which the tales will answer. discourse of colonial power. Olivette Otele provides Using a train coupé is advantageous as it brings an alternative picture of the transatlantic slave trade. together different age groups and classes which all She tells the story of the seamen lured to serve on help Akhila to determine her future life and answer slave ships from Bristol, either in order to pay off the question. A general comment on the intimacy of pub debts or through press-ganging. These sailors train journeys would have added a further dimension were in many ways treated not much better than the to this essay. slaves by the Merchant Venturers. Their stories, An article on South African minibus taxis by which tell of abuse and the suffering of a forgotten Barbara Helly “AZIKWELWA! (We will not Ride!)” group, have been largely ignored. gives a highly critical comment on the historical and But it was not only in the Caribbean that people political reasons for the minibus taxi system, and were forcibly transported. Australia’s treatment of shows the effects on the black population of the the Aborigines and the unwillingness to proposed introduction of capitalist and business acknowledge historical fact is the focus of Susan criteria. This is a very apt and timely discussion that Barrett’s article. To illustrate this she discusses the deserves more prominence. journals of George Augustus Robinson in Robert Other articles take up other consequences of Drewe’s The Savage Crows (1976), Mudrooroo’s travelling. Lloyd Johnson discusses in “Transport- Doctor Woodreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the 72 Ending of the World (1983) and Matthew Kneale’s travel illustrates cultural gaps between that left English Passengers (2000). Transport here is behind and the destination. In a symbolic approach understood as both physical and cultural, travelling becomes a metaphor for life. Ships, too, transporting the reader back in time, as well as evolve thoughts about one’s presence in the emotional transport in the way the text affects the universe and one’s identity in the boundless ocean, reader. Barrett posits that Drewe invites readers to but are also “the epitome of transience” (371). share in the protagonist’s guilt about what happened One little known form for border crossing is the to the Tasmanian Aborigines, and thus feel guilty underground railroad along which many American themselves. By contrast her critique of Mudrooroo’s slaves fled to freedom in Canada between the 1830s text takes up many salient points such as for and 1865. Using Harriet’s Daughter Isabel Alonso- Aborigines the alien concept of writing history, and Breto discusses the role of Harriet Tubman, a the issue of language, of writing in English, which runaway slave who became one of the best-known she also comments on Kneale’s novel. This most guides, through the eyes of a teenager who interesting topic is however, never really discussed. experiences what it means to be the child of Colonial treatment of the ‘other’ was also the case Caribbean parents, a black girl in cold Canada. This in the twentieth century as is evident in the narratives essay is not really about travelling or transport rather about the forced evacuation and internment of an analysis of social and cultural issues for the next Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War. generation, but is characteristic of postcolonial The reactions of the groups ranged from quiet to writing illustrating second-generation phenomena. angry protest, since those born in Canada and those The book concludes with a section entitled who immigrated responded differently to the forced “Crossing Borders”. The essays in this section deal imprisonment after Pearl Harbour. Teresa Gibert mainly with literary texts, with several topics referring examines these as examples of travel writing, but we to Salman Rushdie. Matt Kimmich’s “Lost and can ask whether travel to an internment or relocation Found in Translation: Crossing Borders in the Novels camp really is travelling. Admittedly a train journey, of Salman Rushdie” is enlightening: Rushdie but the narratives are more concerned with the understands migration as translation – decontext- personal reaction to relocation than the journey ualized and recontexutualized. Through a detailed itself. Like Lebdai, Krus and Barrett, Gibert is really comment on some novels Kimmich demonstrates writing about a transportation experience. This is how in the latest US based novels Rushdie has one example where the editors have stretched the moved away from myths as important ties, and to a meaning of transport, so it becomes ambiguous. view that origins are not based on roots but freedom. Others were transported voluntarily, like the Indian He quotes Rushdie as saying that “not to be a women who came to the Caribbean in ships and about migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human whom Rita Christian writes. These women were not being free of the shackles of nationalism” (339). In necessarily abducted, but were in search of a new her essay Cécile Leonard shows the prevalence of life of independence for themselves – a conscious travel westward in Rushdie’s work, seeing The choice made by, among others, widows. Indentured Ground beneath her Feet as a rewriting of the positions in the Caribbean offered them a chance of Orpheus myth. The plane journey becomes a rite of freedom from caste and class, and the opportunity passage to the west and a form of transformation, of to create a space for themselves, even a matriarchal border crossing through travel symbolism to find one in some cases. Christian writes of the oneself. But this finding of oneself in the latest construction of a new identity as well as the Rushdie texts, Leonard suggest, can only take place establishment of a collective amnesia common in by a final return eastwards to India, as her essay such groups, as also described in some of V. S. title denotes: “‘To be Born again, first you have to Naipaul’s work. die.’” This same notion is touched on in Guillaume Another contributor who takes up travel in Cingel’s essay on the translator-narrator, and the Naipaul’s work is Florence Labaune-Demeule with road novel. “Travel is also a way of evading the her article subtitled “The symbolic meaning of world” (347), a notion examined in relation to transport in V. S. Naipaul’s later fiction”, where she Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns. examines interrelated topics ranging from the bus in Armchair travel was common also in the eighteenth A House for Mr Biswas to writing as the artist’s century as essays by Melissa Adams and Candace journey through life. The Enigma of Arrival, with its Ward inform us. Transculturation takes place in the actual journeys as well as its mental ones, is an mind of the reader. Adams discusses travels in the excellent choice for this discussion, since plane imagination in texts that explore “emotional travel, 73 The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008) or transport, through the medium of the printed text.” this essay to ‘transport’, apart from the fact that the (422). Her examples are Addison’s Spectator, Mary protagonists are slaves. Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and With its vast spread of topics and different Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Mary approaches this book provides an overview of ways Jemison’s A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary in which we can interpret the concept of transport, Jemison (426-7). To Adams these texts open “new but that is also its weakness. Though the individual avenues for exploring the various contexts for essays in themselves often throw new light on transport in the British Empire” (440). But we can known or little-known texts, a clearer division also ask, is kidnapping a form for transport? Ward between literary and non-literary texts would have turns to Aphra Behn and William Earle as examples been useful. The bibliography is incomplete and of the problematics of texts of sensibility in relation there is no index. That said, this volume of essays is to the slave as protagonist. Again, while this is a a useful addition to any library in any institution of most interesting essay, I fail to see the relevance of higher education.
Terry Eagleton. How to Read a Poem, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Dieter Fuchs (Vienna, Austria)
Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem is an In addition to New Critical close reading and the introduction to poetry addressed to “students and Marxist context, the theoretical framework includes general readers” (vii). One of the book’s chief a variety of other approaches such as Russian and purposes is to save the tradition of close reading Prague Formalism, Structuralism, Performative from oblivion. As formal analysis has become Criticism, Reader Response Theory, and so on. strikingly marginalized in the world of contemporary Radically non-essentialist reading methods such as academia, Eagleton attempts to weld practical literary deconstruction and the Foucauldian approach to criticism to the current vogue for more theory-based power, however, are strikingly absent from Eagleton’s approaches to literature and culture. He does so book. One reason for this omission is the fact that mainly by combining the elitist school of New Marxist alienation theory applied to the poetic genre Criticism with the egalitarian political commitment only functions against a background of the myth of of Marxist theory. Although Eagleton argues that a unified self held together by the continuity of both movements can be traced back to the humanist tradition and experience. Another cause is to be tradition of ancient Greece and Rome – to the art of found in the ‘ethical turn’ of contemporary culture – rhetoric as a combination of text-based literary the post-9/11 tendency to restore politically- criticism and a context-based theory of republican committed criticism and to hold in check the political persuasion – it remains subject to doubt deconstructive ‘anything goes’ of slippery speech. whether New Critics such as F. R. Leavis would have Far from presenting these theoretical contexts in been very happy with that kind of archaeology. an isolated manner, the book applies all the aspects When Eagleton states that “Leavis’s focus on the mentioned so far to the practical analysis of sensuous detail of a poem reflected […] the passages from poems taken from 16th-20th century opposition to an industrial order which was literature and demonstrates the immediate relevance governed […] by abstraction and utility” (9), he as of critical theory for the reading process of scholarly a representative of left-wing Leavisism presents the analysis. As in his previous works, Eagleton famous New Critic as a spoiled Marxist who, like demonstrates an ingenious ability to bridge the gap Adorno, regards art as a means to compensate for between theoretical abstraction and down-to-earth the alienation of the individual in a world dominated accessibility. His practical application of literary by late-capitalist mass production. Sophistically theory includes various approaches to the definition brilliant as this logical twist may be, one must not of poetry, the question of the ‘poeticity’ of poetic forget the inherent irony that – in contrast to current language, the work of conflicting semiotic systems approaches to literary and cultural representation – within a poem, the structural interrelation of form this kind of Marxist nostalgia preaches to the people and content, and the pragmatics of how poetic the consolatory function of the opium of art. language “shapes up verbally” (3). What follows As can be seen from these remarks, How to Read then is a detailed chapter on textual analysis that a Poem is an ‘Apology for Poetry’ that deals at least includes practically illustrated discussions of as much with critical theory as with formal analysis. aspects such as “Meaning and Subjectivity,” “Tone
74 Mode and Pitch,” “Syntax, Grammar and Punc- by Shakespeare is broken up into two incoherent tuation,” “Ambiguity,” “Rhythm and Metre,” halves of seven lines on one page and seven lines “Imagery,” and so on. Before the work draws the on the following page as a result of the reprinting conclusion that literary form shows the imprint of process (126-27). To disregard the structural dominant ideologies of its socio-cultural context, it subdivision of the poetic genre of the sonnet into adds a structurally rather isolated and incoherent an octave and a sestet, or three quatrains and a chapter on “Four Nature Poems.” couplet, within the scope of an introduction to the Should one want to try to find weaknesses within study of poetry may be considered a serious the overall scope of Eagleton’s cleverly written editorial blunder. Marx – whose work is so relevant book, one has to mention that a bibliography, or at for How to Read a Poem – would have been least a further reading list, would have been extremely amused to find his theory of desirable in an introductory work published by one fragmentation confirmed by an Oxford-based of the most renowned scholarly presses. A more publishing house’s misrepresentation of a text severe fault may be attributed to the editorial policy written by an author whose work is of overall of that company which seems to prefer the economy importance for English and Western identity; Leavis of page breaks to the “material reality” (164), or – the guardian of ‘The Great Tradition’ of the structural unity, of poetic form. As in Eagleton’s English canon, whose belief in the unity of the analysis of the ‘late capitalist’ fragmentation of the artistic text is of equal importance to Eagleton’s human self, the ‘organic unity’ of a sonnet written book – probably not.
Peter Childs, Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Rob Spence (Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK)
How many critical works would manage to generated websites such as Wikipedia is considered encompass references to, amongst many others, as a manifestation of globalization. Other texts such a diverse list of figures as Brigitte Bardot, Harold considered in this eclectic volume include a speech Bloom, Princess Diana, Eminem, Freud, Saddam by Margaret Thatcher, the poster for the film Alien, Hussein, Michael Jackson, Jayne Mansfield, Iain and Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Will Not Take Sinclair, Margaret Thatcher, Oprah Winfrey and Place,” using approaches ranging from ecocriticism Slavoj •i•ek? The prolific Peter Childs manages to to hyperreality. The breadth of enquiry demonstrated do so in this volume, where his interpretation of the here is indisputable. Even so, Childs is at pains to word that supplies his title is (provocatively, some point out in his introduction that “the sixteen texts might say) very broad. In each of the sixteen shortish and sixteen approaches in the book could be chapters, a single representative example of a differently aligned with one another, providing 256 particular type of text is examined. The texts are not permutations or potential different readings.” limited to artefacts on paper, disc or celluloid, though The project of the book is, then, to read mainly those are all covered. Childs broadens his scope to non-literary texts through using the toolkit of include the discussion of buildings, the cult of contemporary critical theory. The names of Rorty, celebrity, and even what he terms a “world media Foucault, and Barthes are frequently invoked, but event,” in this case the turn of the millennium. Childs goes far beyond the usual suspects in a The method adopted by Childs is one familiar from sometimes intimidating display of erudition, with student textbooks on critical theory – and it is worth some short chapters generating as many as thirty noting here that the publisher describes this book and forty footnotes. This density of scholarship, as a student guide. Each text is considered from a whilst obviously impressive, makes one wonder particular theoretical position. Thus, the photo- whether this volume is really suitable as the student graphs of Cindy Sherman are approached via primer the publisher’s blurb suggests it is. At one feminism, a short story by John Bartheleme is point, for example, in his examination of the Harry illuminated by Deleuzian theory, and an Eminem lyric Potter novels, Childs writes: is juxtaposed with Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” in a display Transformations of the self and the world are of psychoanalytical reading. The film The Matrix is fundamental to a new reality of spells and potions examined through what Childs terms “cyber- that employs magic as the primary signifier of philosophy,” and the phenomenon of user- otherness, or re-presenting objects and people in 75 The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008) other guises, as in excess of the ontologies and of modern theory – indeed, one chapter is devoted epistemologies thought to contain them in advance. to Alan Sokal’s hoax article. This is knotty and complex, both in construction I would suggest that the reader whose aim is to and content – and there’s nothing wrong with that, understand at a basic level something of the diversity of course, but perhaps this kind of discourse would of contemporary critical approaches might be better prove, at least initially, quite daunting to “anyone directed to Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory. This is who ever wanted to know how to analyse a text,” for not to belittle Childs. This book is remarkable, in whom, according to the publisher, this book is many ways a tour-de-force in its demonstration of “essential reading.” Having said that, there is much the protean nature of postmodern critical discourse. to admire here. Childs’s selection of texts is as bold At the beginning, Childs quotes Edward Said’s as his definition of them, and his analyses are original assertion that “no text is ever finished,” and his book and thought-provoking. The book is unrepent-antly goes on to exemplify that statement. It is fitting, then, theoretical in its scope, and does not shy away from that his text ends with Baudrillard’s declaration that confronting some of the issues raised by the critics “it’s never the end.” Anke Bartels and Dirk Wiemann, eds., Global Fragments: (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order. Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi, 2007. Eric A. Anchimbe (University of Bayreuth, Germany) Globalisation – whatever it means to researchers in the construction of subjectivities in the interplay of various fields – has had a tremendous impact on, migration and localisation (xii). and triggered redefinitions of, notions such as the The first paper in this part, Russell West-Pavlov’s nation state, identity, culture, consumption and “Contemporary Asian-Australian Identities: Hsu- economy. It has, through the processes generally Ming Teo’s Love and Vertigo,” begins with an attributed to it, produced what this volume of essays “unashamedly auto-bio-graphical note” (3) that – evidenced in its title – calls global fragments and illustrates how the British-tinged Melbourne “with (dis)orientations. However, fragments makes sense [its] strong Italian and Greek migrant touch” (3) that in this case if we accept that “[t]he fragment can be West-Pavlov grew up in has now changed so a fragment only when the idea of a ‘whole’ is not dramatically that for him “[h]ome has become entirely abandoned” (xi). intriguingly foreign … transformed …[ and] This collection contains 23 papers grouped into increasingly less European” (3-4). Adopting the six thematic parts. The papers were presented at the stance of the bricoleur in the Levi-Strauss sense of ASNEL international conference on “Global the term, and influenced by Foucault’s notion that Fragments: Dis-Orientations in the New World there is no ‘outside of power’, this paper traces the Order,” held at the University of Magdeburg in May process of Asianization of Anglo-Australian society 2003. The conference aimed at exploring the relations in the last quarter of a century. This process, the between globalisation and the new literatures in author insists, has created “turbulences within the English, wide as this may be. The individual papers given patterns of Anglo identity-formation, provide alternatives to “banal globalism” through triggering a sense of ‘uncanniness’”. Focusing on studies of literary, theoretical, and filmic texts from Asian-Australian versions of Australia rather than the postcolonial world (xi). The main aim of this on Anglo-Australian versions, as was the case in enterprise, the editors explain in the introduction, is the recent past, West-Pavlov traces the construction to “articulate the global with the local from a of Asian-Australia identities in Hsu-Ming Teo’s Love perspective of immersion in the actual diversity of and Vertigo. The characters in the novel, just like lifeworlds, focusing on such issues as consumption, many Asian-Australians, are involved in what Hsu- identity politics, or modes of affiliation” (xi). This Ming Teo herself describes as “Challenging places the new literatures within the process of histories” about where they come from and where cultural globalisation “by which they are they are going to. continuously being informed, but of which they are Anja Schwarz’s contribution entitled “Mapping also, in part, themselves productive” (xi). (un-)Australian identities: Territorial disputes in The first part of the book is entitled “Glocal Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded,” further expands on Identities” and contains four thematically related access to, and refusal of, Australian identity to papers, which, from a general perspective, deal with particular groups of people – immigrants. The essay
76 brings the “‘spatial logic’ exhibited in the […] increasingly experienced in transnational and treatment of refugees by the Australian state into transcultural contexts” (56). conjunction with the vital role of the spatial Part Two, “Consuming Globality”, deals with experiences in Christos Tsiolkas’ 1995 novel Loaded” patterns through which global cultural flows are (3). The author mediates between two starkly appropriated locally. The four papers assembled here different levels of discourse: state-sanctioned debunk the idea of a homogeneous global consumer political dis-course, and private, subjective and culture and instead illustrate the diversity and fictionalised interaction, as fruitful avenues for productivity of consumption (xii). explicating identity-related issues of inclusion and The issue taken up by Mita Banerjee in the paper exclusion in both contemporary Australian literature “Indian diaspora meets Indo-chic: Fragmentation, and life. fashion, and resistance in Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Mala Pandurang’s paper, “Understanding Ha Ha Hee Hee,” revolves around certain conver- departure: A study of selected pre-migration Indian gences, e.g. the appropriation of Indian cultural female subjectivities” adopts Paul White’s emblems (tattoos and dresses) in global consumer conceptualisation of migration as “an outcome of markets, that cannot be neatly reconciled. Using tensions between the individual’s desires and Madonna and characters in Syal’s novel, the author opportunities – as a reflection of past circumstances presents Indo-chic as a postmodern puzzle working and of expectations for the future” to evaluate the through decontextualisation and recontextualisation. subjectivities of Indian women (in Mumbai) caught Hence, this could be interpreted, though ironically, in the contemporary processes of globalisation and as a means through which a diasporic community the electronic technological revolution. Situated uncertain of its roots tries to “recover its origin within literary and cultural theory, the paper through a Western fantasy of India” (71). The contributes to discourse on the “shifting subject- irreconcilable mix of Indo-chic and designer ‘ghetto positions of migrants as a consequence of the fashion’, which in a sense represents the politics of phenomenon of geo-cultural displacement and exoticism, borders on what Graham Huggan calls concomitant reformulations of identity” (29). It ‘true’ ethnicity, being as it is comprised of hybrid posits that, even though it is true that potential Indian ethnicity and pseudo-ethnicity. The point in Syal’s women emigrants would constantly negotiate narrative, Banerjee concludes, is that the question identities within complex and shifting situations, “the of true ethnicity is unanswerable. degree of violence of adjustment to changes in Christine Vogt-William’s “Bhangra babes: ‘Masala’ circumstances could be dependent on the level of music and questions of identity and integration in socialisation prior to departure” (33). This position South Asian-British women’s writing” is a reading is illustrated using data from a questionnaire of two novels from the perspective of British-Asian administered by the author, as well as television fusion music. She illustrates how most South Asian- serials, films, relatives, and the Internet. British youth “go through fear, guilt, desire and anger In “Black, Asian and Other British: Transcultural while growing up, which signifies their ‘in- literature and the discreet charm of ethnicity,” betweenness’” (87). The two novels Hari-jan (1992), Frank Schulze-Engler takes the discussion from by Ravinder Randhawa, and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha identity construction to ethnicity, illustrating how Hee Hee (2000), by Meera Syal, pay attention to its many faces have been at the “heart of violent Bhangra music and British-Asian fusion music conflicts fuelled by deadly hatred” (48). The (Masala music, as Syal calls it). This fusion is author focuses on certain influential concepts of significant in forging the self-identi-fication process ethnicity, the demise of political blackness in of British-Asian youths, which as the author explains, contemporary Britain, the constitutive role played “evinces a more assertive stamp in the articulation by concepts of “Black British” and “Asian British” of a vital hybrid identification-process […] in their literature, and how ethnicity is negotiated in negotiations with their parent’s cultures and those literary texts general-ly categorised under “Black” of their British home environment” (74). or “Asian” British literature. After examining the Moving away from Britain and discourses of discreet charm of ethnicity especially as a identity above, Ulrike Kistner takes us southwards springboard for the critique of modernity, the to South Africa in her contribution “AIDS, paper con-cludes on the note that, ethnicity, as pornography, and conspicuous consumption: exposed in Black and Asian British literature Media strategies of an HIV/AIDS prevention “contributes to the emergence of different modes campaign in South Africa”. The use of billboard of being modern in a world where modernity is messages such as “Everyone he has slept with, is 77 The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008) sleeping with you” and “Sex is sex: show me the discourse, which seems to have left no one money” by the LoveLife consortium break the indifferent, has taken place in Maori films, three of cultural taboos of sex in a bid to demystify cultural which the author uses to illustrate “the political and myths and take the AIDS educational campaign aesthetic handling of the notion of tûrangawaewae, closer to the public sphere. This paper therefore of home and nation” (138). The three feature films describes LoveLife campaign strategies, successes are Once were Warriors (1994), Whale-Rider (2002) and criticisms addressed at them, showing how, and Te Tangata Whai Rawa Weniti – The Mâori though critics’ arguments have been neutralised, Merchant of Venice (2001). Enacted in a zone of “any attempt to reconstruct the AIDS prevention contestation, these films recapture the Maori’s campaign is unlikely to touch its core” (89). attempt to define their identity on the lines of “The global bidding for Dorothy Gale’s magical intervening issues as immigration and place (land, shoes: Salman Rushdie’s ‘At the auction of the ruby claims on territory). For the Maori, the author insists, slippers’ as a (self-)reflection of the post-frontier “it is a contested place, a location where different predicament” by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak shows cultures and/or different ideologies encounter and the impact of the Oz cult or Oz myth derived from oppose each other” (140). Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its In “Teaming multitudes: Lagaan and the nation unquestionable relevance to American socio- of globality”, Dirk Wiemann explains how the overtly political milieux. The author, musing on Dorothy’s national Bollywood film Lagaan (land tax) adopts idolised magical shoes, construes them through the more general tendency of post-liberalisation Rushdie’s short story as the “most universally Bollywood productions that entails reaching out to revered embodiments of emancipation, indivi- target groups both at home and abroad, rather than dualism, democracy, and the much-coveted trans- following the “strictly national frame of reference gression of an absurd and hostile reality” (105). within which Indian popular cinema used to be Rushdie’s story could be read as an alternative of placed” (153). Although Lagaan still embodies Oz functioning as an updated commentary on our Bollywood features such as song-and-dance, times and the “urgent social, cultural and political melodrama, and lengthy running time (3hrs 47mins), themes of the present” (111). the English subtitle of the film, i.e. “Once upon a The five papers in Part Three, “Imagining Com- time in India,” “encodes, and symbolically performs, munities,” discuss problems of identification and a particular strategy of inserting the national into affiliation in the wake of globalisation, emphasising the global by way of substituting ‘India’ for the the flexibility in “Subverting Global Media Politics ‘West’” (155). Interestingly, this makes it possible in the Local Media,” in which she examines how the for ‘India’ to “occupy the very place formerly American-dominated mediaspace (American film and reserved for the West” (155), thus confirming Partha television products, newsmedia and internet) is Chatterjee’s advice to postcolonial societies faced subverted by local media – represented in this case with globalisation to the effect that, to “fashion the by Victor Masayesva’s film Imagining Indians. This forms of our own modernity, we need to have the semi-documentary moves away drastically from courage at times to reject the modernities established Hollywood’s presentation of Indians in stereotypical by others.” Although India replaces the West, dichotomies such as, the ‘noble savage’ vs. the Wiemann reminds us that this would remain only in ‘bloodthirsty red devil’, and the docile, submissive the realm of film and fairy tales … i.e. “Once upon a ready-to-cooperate Indian vs. the fierce, hostage- time…” taking killer Indian. As Knopf explains, this film is a Kistern Raupach returns to slavery and slave “subversive media product” that dismantles clichés rebellion in the chapter ‘“Blanched Bones, constructed in mainstream media in their Mouldering Graves and Potent Spells’: White commercialisation of Indigenous cultures hence Constructions of Black Diasporic Rituals in Slave becoming “an answering, anticolonial discourse” Cultures.” She challenges white perceptions of (136) that ushers the subaltern local media “into “black religious belief-systems as powerful, exotic dialogue with the colonial global media” (136). and ultimately ‘other’ and […] unintelligible and Still on films, Dieter Riemenschneider carries the threatening to the established order” (171). Using debate to Maori films in his paper “Of Warriors, a colonial and slavery texts and literature she shows Whalerider, and Venetians: Contemporary Maori how Christianity was used as a softening tool for Films.” Here he presents the open and ongoing public slaves since it promised them a life of no more trouble debate in New Zealand on national identity – hereafter. This aside, the texts studied expose clearly especially Pakeha-Maori relations. This public how black diaspora thinking, rituals of remembrance, 78 social bonding, worship of African gods, and dependency on virtuality and heightened complexity, thought of return to the homeland effectively chal- given that now “non-graspable factors determine a lenged constructions of white superiority – consider considerably-sized proportion of human life” (216). especially Obeah worship, which served as a With other problems such as the blurred interfaces representation of slave voices. between fact and fiction, and reality and virtuality, “Scotland as a Multifractured Postcolonial Lay calls for ways of simplifying these complexities. Go-between: Ambiguous Interfaces between ‘New’ enlightenment is, therefore, an “urge to resist (post)Celticism, Gaelicness, Scottishness and Post- over-whelm-ing hegemony” in the form of what colonialism,” by Silke Stroh revisits the simplistic Viviane Forrester calls the “terror of economy”. binarisms ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’ and their “Networks of the Media: Media Cultures, multiple layers of ambivalence and hybridity when Connectivity and Globalisation”, by Andreas Hepp, used on British and non-European cultures and their also focuses on globalisation, explaining how it has “internal cultural and discursive fragmentations changed media cultures, thus forcing us to theorise within the British Isles themselves” (181). Fitting them in a new and different way. This entails, as he Scotland into the postcolonial debate – which, suggests, the adoption of a transcultural perspective although it already exists, is less expansive than that “makes it possible to discuss national media Ireland’s – Stroh identifies the complexity of the cultures as a specific kind of translocal media Scottish scene that makes it difficult for it to be cultures” (227). The strength of this stance lies in classified either as (post)colonial or as belonging to the fact that globalisation has caused deterritorial- the ‘Celtic’ fringe category. This makes a post- isation. The network theory of the media proposed colonial approach controversial but still fruitful as in this chapter becomes necessary, therefore, for long as the complexities are taken into account. “linking questions of globalisation with an historical Part Four, “Constructing Common Ground”, is view of change in media cultures” (238). concerned with the production of global inter- Also concerned with the intersection of global connectedness, and investigates shared common- and local issues, Emer O’Sullivan’s paper “At the alities that create links between the manifold global periphery of the periphery: Children’s literature, particularities. In “Universal Matters; Universals global and local” illustrates how the realm of Matter,” Tabish Khair identifies the word ‘universal’ children’s literature is among the few domains in as the four-letter word of postcolonial studies. which the “utopia of internationalisation has Tracing the use of the word and accompanying prospered” (241). Though part of a global market- concepts (relational universality, universal human place, children’s literature, the author maintains, is being, materialist universality, idealist universality, not directly associated with the ideals of inter- etc.) from Plato to Marx, the author opines that, in nationalism. O’Sullivan thus attempts to unify the spite of the fact that the word ‘universal’ establishes diversity of international children’s literature by some sort of a universe that could become an “agent showing that, although there is no universality in of conscription,” it is nevertheless relevant to childhood – see e.g. the Universal Republic of consider the universe of material activities in which Childhood – there is nevertheless some sort of a we find ourselves understandable through and universality (or internationality) in children’s regulated by, “the conceptualisation of certain literature. He proves this with a review of the north- universals’” (212). While it is true that these west European model, the black African model, and universals are not necessarily valid for all times, Khair the Irish model of children’s literature. cautions, they are at least “valid for as long as the Part Five of the book is the only part that deals material universe that called them dialectically into directly with linguistics: “Local colour in global being lasts” (212). English”, but is still linked to the others through its Frank Lay’s chapter “Local Knowledge – Global focus on local adaptations of (global) English in Resistance: Policies of a New Technological specific contexts. Consisting of two papers, it deals ‘Enlightenment’” evaluates the emergence of a ‘new’ with patterns of communication in South Africa and enlightenment – not related to, nor a linear successor Cameroon. In “Dialect Representations versus of, ‘old’ enlightenment. This New Enlightenment, as Linguistic Stereotypes in Literature: Three Examples proposed by Norman Livergood, exists in the same from Indian South African English” Rajend Mesthrie category as ‘anti-globalisationism’ and is designed proposes a framework for the “analysis of to provide the non-expert world citizen with solutions representations of second-language varieties of to problems created by new media opportunities at English in colonial and postcolonial literature” (261). the centre the internet – which has increased He focuses on the use of the single grammatical 79 The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008) unit, the verb suffix –ing as it is used in Indian South as an introduction to theories such as post- African English. The data used comes from three colonialism, alterity, and ‘othering’. Although the sources: the satirical radio series Applesammy and novel is written by a British Briton rather than by Naidoo, the play The Lahnee’s pleasure by Ronnie someone from a postcolony, it still fits into the Govender, and the postmodernist novel The ‘purity’ of postcolonial writing, since, as he puts it, Wedding, by Imraan Coovadia. This data is “Britain itself as the former imperial centre is very complemented by actual speech data collected using much part of the postcolonial world and has the ‘Labovian interview’ model, and are used to increasingly developed into a multi-ethnic society assess the choices that writers and speakers make due to the massive influx of populations from the with different aims. These choices and their former colonies” (313). interpretations range from racist stereotyping to self- Claudia Duppé and Manfred Gantner take the assertion through the adoption of specific linguistic discussion further to the teaching of New Zealand identities. poetry still in the German school (sixth form) curricula Anne Schröder discusses from a sociolinguistic in their contribution “Read the text and let them perspective, Camfranglais – “a complex hybrid speak, too: Teaching New Zealand poetry in the sixth language incorporating features from many of the form.” Often listed as a separate teaching unit, the languages spoken in Cameroon” (282) – in her authors propose that it would be better if the chapter “Camfranglais: A Language with Several teaching of poetry were included in cultural learning. (Sur)faces and Important Sociolinguistic Functions.” This back-door approach would help circumvent the After presenting its syntax and establishing the notorious boredom that often affects students when salience of its linguistic functions, Schröder settles poetry is mentioned, given especially that emphasis on the conclusion that this language for wider would be on “not teaching poetry as a genre but on communication is not an “ephemeral linguistic teaching a foreign culture that speaks through the phenomenon” (296) since it has existed since the texts” (328). They present a successful experiment 1970s and is the preferred code for many youths based on PowerPoint presentations and how the especially in urban centres, where it fills the cultural learning-based approached encouraged communicative gap left open by the official English students to “work with a poetic text and engage and French languages. with it creatively” (338). Part Six, “Teaching new English literatures and The last contribution in this final Part of the cultures”, is made up of four papers that propose volume is Gisela Feurla’s “Teaching the new South methods and examples of how new English Africa: The cartoon strip Madam & Eve.” Feurla literatures texts could be successfully integrated into uses her experience of teaching English through the school curricula – especially in German secondary popular cartoon strip Madam & Eve to explain why schools – and what teaching strategies could be and how it could be used productively in teaching developed. English in (German) secondary schools and cultural What Liesel Hermes proposes in “Henry Lawson’s studies at university. She provides worksheets that ‘The Drover’s wife’ and the Australian short story” plot a clear teaching scheme that takes into account is a framework for teaching the “The Drover’s Wife” the didactic context. The satirical messages in the in “any unit/module about Australia” (310). She strip come through easily in the graphic dimension arrives at this decision only after tracing the life of of the cartoons: the caricaturing of representative Henry Lawson, the context in which he wrote, the social identities in particular. Australian cultural concepts: ‘bush’ and ‘mateship’, The notions globalisation and postcolonialism and explaining how the story has “acquired the have been viewed from divergent (and comple- status of the classic Australian short story” (310). mentary and supplementary rather than contra- Her framework contains a sample list of reading tasks dictory) perspectives in the new English and the main issues to pay close attention to. literatures. This volume of well-written and acces- In his reading of Are you experienced?, Laurenz sible papers shows how globalisation, rather than Volkmann, in the chapter “West meets East/East creating some sort of global (consumer) culture, meets West: Teaching William Sutcliffe’s cult novel has instead resulted in global fragments that are Are you experienced? (1997)”, presents the unified only by commonalities that reach between numerous themes and cross-cultural encounters them. The book comes at the right moment, when embedded in the novel and how students’ globalisation still continues to be a fluid-like understanding of the novel could be facilitated if catchphrase whose exact impact and extent remain these are explained adequately. It is therefore suited blurred by definitions and redefinitions of the 80 concepts of culture, identity and consumption. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing Although the papers have been written by experts the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001). from different disciplines and educational institutions Lévis-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. trans. John (university, German Gymnasium), and clearly display Weightmann and Doreen Weightmann (La Pensée a touch of heterogeneity and plurality, they are Sauvage, 1962; Chicago: University of Chicago strongly intertwined and held together by common Press, 1966). concerns founded on (post)colonialism, the new Randhawa, Ravinder. Hari-jan (London: Mantra, literatures, and globalisation. Like the fragments in 1992). the title of the volume, they form a collective whole, Syal, Meera. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (London: though with salient themes of their own. The essays, Doubleday, 2000). from their different perspectives, consider dominant Teo, Hsu-Ming. “Future fusions and a taste for the current and past representations of the global past: Literature, history and the imagination of problematic and therefore call for their revision in Australianness”, in Challenging Histories: ways that confirm our belonging within the “New Reflections on Australian History, ed. Kate World Order.” Darian-Smith (special issue of Australian Historical Studies, 118, 2002): 127-139. References White, Paul. “Geography, literature and migration”, Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: in Writing across Worlds, ed. Russell King, John Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Delhi: Connell and Paul White (London: Routledge, Oxford University Press, 1993). 1995): 1-19.
Angelica Duran, ed., A Concise Companion to Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Larisa Kočić-Zámbó (Szeged,Hungary)
Blackwell’s Concise Companion to Milton, edited their education in view of Milton’s companion by Angelica Duran, is meant to complement its award poems, “L’Allegro” and “Il Pensero”, his Latin winning predecessor, the 29-chapter Companion to epistola “Ad Patrem” and his educational tract Of Milton (2001, 2003), edited by Thomas N. Corns. Education. In a chapter on “Milton’s Heroic For while Corn’s edition is used for advanced study, Sonnets” Annabel Patterson shows how Milton this volume’s twelve “purposefully brief” chapters brings to effect themes traditionally reserved for “are written with a minimum of scholarly jargon” in genres quite different from the sonnet, demon- order to be easily read “alongside weekly primary strating how easily the reader may be misled if readings” as “the one companion text to Milton’s bringing “to the term ‘sonnet’ expectations derived collected works required for undergraduate and exclusively from Petrarch, or Sidney, or Spenser, or graduate Milton courses” (1, 2). Shakespeare” (93). In the following chapter, Paul The book is divided into three parts. The first part, Alpers encourages the reader to “think of pastoral “Surveys”, addresses the question of “why Milton not as a form of lyrical wish fulfillment, but as a matters” and, following the pattern established in specific mode of representation” when approaching Milton Studies (2005), where the question was Milton’s Lycidas. Katsuhiro Engetsu engages answered by three distinguished veterans of Milton Milton’s occasional piece, A Mask, as a historical scholarship (Stanley Fish, Barbara Lewalski, and and cultural collaboration demonstrating how Joseph Wittreich), here, too, the answers are penned Milton’s collaboration and friendship with the by no lesser names than Robert Thomas Fallon (“A Royalist musician Henry Lawes undermines any Reading of His ‘left hand’: Milton’s Prose”), John T. attempt to fit Milton into “modern generalizations Showcross (“Shedding sweet influence”: The about any univocal ideology and aesthetic of Legacy of John Milton’s Works”), and Roy literature” (125). The subsequent three chapters (8, Flannagan (“’The world all before [us]’: More Than 9, 10) tackle issues relevant to Paradise Lost. Achsah Three Hundred Years of Criticism”). Guibbory, in “The Bible, Religion, and Spirituality in The chapters of the second part, “Textual Sites”, Paradise Lost”, shows how Milton’s epic of man- follow Milton’s works primarily in chronological kind’s fall, and the war in heaven is not merely a order, addressing issues relevant to contemporary poetic account of the narrative recorded in the Bible society as they emerge in specific texts or sets of but an attempt to “incorporate the whole sweep of texts, or being peculiar of those texts. Thus, Angelica human history and culture as it was known in Duran addresses the relationship of individuals and Milton’s day” (128). The fact that one of Guibbory’s 81 The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008) examples revolves around the creation of Eve drama of Samson (chapter 12, “The Nightmare of provides the reader with a sense of continuity, since History: Samson Agonistes”, by Louis Schwartz). Karen L. Edwards’ following chapter on “Gender, The third part of the book, as its title suggests, Sex, and Marriage in Paradise Lost” ventures into provides readers with a number of useful reference the subject, with Adam retelling Raphael “his own points. Edward Jones’s compilation of a selected and Eve’s first moment of life and their subsequent chronology informs the reader of dates pertaining union” (145). Given that the prelapsarian locus of to Milton’s life and work in the first column, while the first marriage provides another copulative link the second column lists events in the larger context between subsequent chapters, Juliet Lucy Cummins of Milton’s time. The “Selected Bibliography”, in “The Ecology of Paradise Lost” shows Milton compiled by J. Martin Evans, attends to topics and entering into the early modern debate on proper texts not covered in the volume and complements relationship between human beings and the natural another helpful feature of the book, the Reference world “in his vision of unfallen life” (161). The last and Further Reading sections at the end of each two chapters are devoted to Milton’s Paradise chapter. Regained and Samson Agonistes, published in the Introductory, without being cursory, A Concise same volume in 1671. Again, the reader is encouraged Companion to Milton will be valued by all who teach to compare the two works and engage in the debate Milton courses at undergraduate level, its references on heroism as represented by Jesus’s resistance to and open venues appreciated at graduate level, and temptation – including the temptation to violence the lucidity of its argument embraced by those (chapter 11, “The Messianic Vision of Paradise venturing for the first time into the depths of Milton’s Regained”, by David Gay) – and by the unsettling unfettered mind. Heather Leach and Robert Graham, Everything You Need to Know about Creative Writing. London: Continuum, 2007. Peter Lawson (Tampere, Finland)
Creative Writing is a strange sort of academic Perhaps only James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939) disipline, especially in Europe where work in univer- and George Perec’s La Vie mode de l’emploi (1978) sities tends to be classified as science. How can the have similar creative goals. Of course, those novels talent, encouragement and motivation which come parody encyclopaedic rather than creative ambitions. together in writing groups be anatomised, taxoni- Leach and Graham are aware that their enterprise mised and displayed to teachers and students alike? is a bit of a lark (1). The book’s tone of ‘lightness To be sure, students can write creatively in the and humour’ (1) is intentional. For example, under classroom. This, however, is quite different from the useful theoretical heading ‘Death of the Author, theorizing such a process. The’, we are told that ‘if you observe what actually In Everything You Need to Know About Creative happens when you are writing and reading, you will Writing, Heather Leach and Robert Graham seem find that Barthes wasn’t as daft as his theory sounds’ well aware that prescription for creative writing may (36). This is basic and accessible, addressed to appear ridiculous. Their aim is to disarm the sceptical people who may never have heard of Roland Barthes. or recalcitrant reader with a ‘tongue-in-cheek’ (1) Maybe it will make the young smile. However, I doubt style. As with many guides to creative writing, the very much whether amusing news of the author’s theory aims to emulate the practice. So, Leach and death will encourage budding Prousts to become Graham tell us that their guide for ‘writers and writing authors themselves. teachers’ aims to be ‘practical, creative and thought- Hoping to jettison theoretical advice, I turned to a provoking’ (2). ‘Creative’ style seems as important seemingly empirical entry: ‘desk’. Dr Johnson might as information in this Continuum textbook. have blanched to learn that ‘desks can become Without the stylised contributions from seven fetishistic’ (40), and would surely have slapped one practitioners of the discipline -- Leach, Graham, robustly to prove otherwise. Still, every writer needs Gareth Creer, Ursula Hurley, Helen Newall, Jenny a desk, so the entry is not a waste of space. A cross Newman and Harriet Tarlo - Everything You Need to reference to ‘room’ brings the reader to remarks on Know About Creative Writing might run the risk of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and parodying creativity. It is organised along the lines the need for ‘quiet and privacy...in order to develop of an encyclopaedia, an A-Z with the ambition to be the creative state of mind’ (151). Disagreeing with ‘as comprehensive as possible’ (1) in this field. E.M. Forster, perhaps, Anne Dillard is quoted as 82 recommending ‘a room with no view, so imagination disappointed: there is, in fact, no such entry. The can meet memory in the dark’ (151). We trust that editors only imagined including it. Dillard is careful that she does not bump into her The final pages of Everything You Need to Know ‘fetishised’ desk while groping around in this ‘dark’ About Creative Writing features an extended ‘further space. Yes, Everything You Need to Know About reading’ list with such worthwhile titles as Linda Creative Writing is fun. Anderson’s Creative Writing: A Workbook with The question remains as to whether it is useful. Readings (2005) and John Whitworth’s Writing This is a reference book, which is not intended to be Poetry (2001). There is also a helpful ‘alternative read from cover to cover. Nor is it a scholarly guide routes’ section, which enables the potential writer to for lecturers like, for instance, The Cambridge access a series of related entries (assuming the editors Introduction to Creative Writing (2007). Indeed, have checked that they exist). These headings are: Everything You Need to Know About Creative Attitudes; Beginning; Blocks; Characters, narrators Writing is markedly non-academic both in its and viewpoints; Design and layout; Editing and informality and likely readership. Young people alone revision; Experimental writing; Fiction; Form and with their word processors or participating in writing genre; Grammar and punctuation; Ideas and groups outside the university may well be the true movements; IT; Plot; Poetry; Publishing; Reading and beneficiaries of this unintimidating and superficially research; Scriptwriting; Self, mind and consciousness; user-friendly guide. Skills; Structure; Workshops and groups, and Writing Many of the entries come complete with cross- life. Under the last of these, for example, we are directed references. Most end with a ‘further reading’ list. to our old favourites ‘room’ and ‘desk’, as well as For example, in the ‘romance plot’ entry the reader is ‘being a writer’, ‘eavesdropping’, ‘garrets’, ‘genius’, recommended to read The Complete Novels of Jane ‘gestation’, ‘journey’, ‘learning’, ‘notebooks’, ‘skills’ Austen, French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays and ‘zeitgeist’. of Marie de France and the Mills and Boon website Turning to ‘zeitgeist’, the final entry in this guide, at
Bernard J. Muir, The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. The Exeter DVD. Software Nick Kennedy. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006. ISBN 0 85989 631 5. Erik Kooper (Utrecht, The Netherlands) Few readers of this review with a degree in English surviving collection of vernacular poetry from will never have read a poem from the so-called Exeter Anglo-Saxon England.” The manuscript has been Book, even though they may not recall what exactly part of Exeter Cathedral Library since at least the the Exeter Book is. Poems like The Wanderer, The time of Bishop Leofric (d. 1072) and was written Seafarer, Widsith, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The c. 965-975. But, as is well known, many of the poems Ruin, and of course the riddles are part of many are con-siderably older than their written versions; English departments’ set programme, and they have most notably, this is true for texts like Widsith, usually been included in practically every anthology of dated to the late seventh century. English literature since time memorial. The codex in It goes almost without saying that a collection which they are found is formally known as Exeter like the Exeter Book, which in Muir’s list of contents Cathedral, Dean and Chapter Library MS 3501. It is, contains 49 items plus the collection of 94 riddles, is as the blurb on the DVD’s cover says, “the largest invaluable for the history of English literature, but and arguably the earliest and most important no less so for such disciplines as paleography,
83 The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008) history of the language, theology (many of the poems everyday departmental life by a knock on my door. are religious works), and cultural studies. Numerous Bernard Muir and Nick Kennedy have given us a editions and studies of one or more poems testify to user-friendly, esthetically attractive, and all- the importance of this manuscript, including a encompassing facsimile-cum-edition of the text. Apart facsimile edition (1933; its introduction has been from necessary and obvious categories like an included in the present DVD), and an edition of all extensive introduction, with a discussion of the the texts in the manuscript (1936, as vol. III of Krapp various aspects of the manuscript, and an exhaustive and Dobbie’s Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records). In 1994 bibliography, the DVD provides crystal clear images Bernard Muir’s 2-volume edition of the Exeter of every page of the manuscript, side by side with the Anthology (as he prefers to call it) was published, text. On the manuscript pages, words, or passages on followed by a revised second edition in 2000. It which comments have been provided are marked, and seemed as if we had here the definitive edition of these can be enlarged so that e.g. scribal corrections this corpus of poems, but the appearance of the can clearly be seen. The printed texts are equally Exeter Anthology DVD has proved us wrong. supported by both textual and explanatory notes, With regard to electronic aids and devices Anglo- which can be made to appear at the bottom of the Saxon studies have been fortunate in that at a very printed text. In addition, a number of poems can be early state the Beowulf manuscript was used to listened to in recordings in the original Old English or experiment with HTML-supported texts (see Kevan in Modern English renderings. Kiernan, The Electronic Beowulf, 2 CD-ROMs, 1999). Unfortunately this enviable toy comes with a price The new electronic edition of the Exeter Book shows attached to it that will move it solidly out of reach of to what hights these developments have led, and to most individual users, for few will be able or willing what extent a combined textual and visual to pay £ 275 or $ 425 for it. But libraries ought to buy representation of the manuscript has surplus value it, and with modern beamer teaching possibilities it when compared to ‘traditional’ text or facsimile should be possible to employ it in classroom editions. To put it in plain terms: once I had started situations. And it would be a shame to miss the the DVD I was lost. Completely unaware of my opportunity to make students acquainted with the surroundings, I spent three hours without noticing manuscript culture that underlies all-time favourites that time had passed only to awake to the reality of like The Wanderer or The Wife’s Lament. Pape, Walter, ed., A View in the Rear-Mirror: Romantic Aesthetics, Culture, and Science Seen from Today. Studien zur Englischen Romantik (new series), volume 3. Trier: WVT, 2006. Xiii + 265 pages. Marco de Waard (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) This collection, a Festschrift compiled for Frederick bably more accurate to say that in his hands, Burwick “on the occasion of his seventieth birthday,” Romantic scholarship continued to maintain the reflects Burwick’s scholarly interests as well as the close ties with intellectual history and the history of impact he has had as a Professor of English and philosophy which characterised it before the ascent Comparative Literature at UCLA between 1986 and of poststructuralist approaches in the 1970s and 2004. As the author of The Damnation of Newton: 1980s. That this intellectual-historical strand in Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception Romantic studies continues to be viable is success- (1986), The Haunted Eye: Perception and the fully borne out by this Festschrift, which is Grotesque in English and German Romanticism particularly interesting on Coleridge, Romantic (1987), and Poetic Madness and the Romantic science, and the cultural afterlife of Romanticism in Imagination (1996), Burwick has long crossed modern Europe. boundaries between Romantic aesthetics, science, To start with Coleridge: the most important philosophy, and psychology, producing challenging contribution to Coleridge studies in this collection interdisciplinary work on theories and cultural is Elinor Shaffer’s polemically pitched but very constructions of perception, the imagination, and sensible critique of a recent scholarly edition of (self-)consciousness between ca. 1780-1830. Indeed, Coleridge’s hitherto unpublished Opus Maximum. Burwick, whose first articles and edited volumes Legendary during its author’s lifetime, who often appeared in the mid-1960s, may have “practiced a referred to it as his “Great Work”, but who never Cultural Studies approach to literature long before it completed what amounts to 550 pages of manuscript, became en vogue to do so” (x), although it is pro- the Opus Maximum saw the light of day in 2002 as
84 volume 15 of the Collected Works (Princeton UP). German debates over “sport,” originally imported Unfortunately, however, what Shaffer calls a practice from the Anglo-Saxon world, to show how it of “tendentious editing” and “significant omission functioned as a site for the production of a new in a plethora of annotation” (166) now jeopardises model of subjectivity: a model that both differed from what should have been a rescue operation. Shaffer the rationalised, industrialised human subject that argues persuasively that the editor’s “Prolegomena” was presupposed by German Körperkultur, and from obfuscate Coleridge’s sympathetic engagement with the model of subjectivity that found embodiment in German Naturphilosophie and “Higher Criticism” the Anglo-Saxon, sport-loving gentleman. The Sach- of the Bible to the extent that the Opus Maximum lichkeit discourse of sport – taking its cue from can be cast – as in fact its editor does – as a piece of Schiller, among others – transcended both models religiously motivated, “proleptic” anti-Darwinism. as it envisaged subjects who produced a new relation What is more, Shaffer shows that in the case of a to their social world in the very moment of sporting, fragmentary manuscript that poses a range of turning sport into a highly individual process of editorial problems (concerning the relations between aesthetic Tathandlungen or creative acts. In this and dating of its composite parts, the role of specific meaning, “sport” in Weimar Germany could collaborators, its place in the author’s “system”), – surprisingly – form a conduit for the “passage of such a contestable and anachronistic reading easily Romantic theory into mass cultural practice” (251). enchroaches upon the presentation of the text itself, Coleridge, Romantic science, and “Romantic making it vulnerable to further misconstruals. aftermaths” put apart, other essays in this Shaffer’s critique has urgency, and deserves to be collection deal with English poetry and German answered. aesthetic theory. They include an essay by Peter Coleridge is also touched upon in a section that Wagner on William Blake’s “iconotexts” which gauges Romantic science from a present-day signals that Blake scholarship is moving into a vantage point, in line with the “rear-mirror” metaphor promising new phase as recent theories of of this Festschrift’s title. Matthew Schneider’s “Cutis intermediality help it restore Blake’s complex word- anserina: Spine Tingles, Functional Magnetic image mediations to a central place in the study of Resonance Imaging, and the New Science of Literary the “illuminated” verse, redressing an imbalance Response” revisits Romantic “brain science” and in Blake studies that has often been noticed but its bearings on contemporary aesthetic theory to rarely met head-on. Special mention is also due to show how recent advances in neuroscientific Paul Douglass’s entertaining essay on the young technology validate Romantic intuitions about “the Caroline Lamb. Drawing extensively on intersections of mind and brain.” It turns out that unpublished letters in several British archives, Romantic literature, with its exploration of liminal Douglass revisits Lamb’s life and writings before forms of mental functioning, and of the interface her much publicised affair with Lord Byron. He between perception, illusion, and delusion, “still has presents a budding authoress and proto-feminist the power to identify the key issues in defining the social critic who was developing a literary voice all human” (177). Two other essays join in this her own before the male poets and lovers of her revaluation of Romantic science, likewise later life would put her down for her peers and for emphasising the resonances between present-day posterity – and very effectively so – as a psychology and neurobiology and Romantic troublemaker and a “monstrous” mother. Douglass insights into the “deep interchangeability of matter convinces us that a proper assessment of Caroline and spirit.” Lamb’s work – indeed, a critical “unsilencing” – The “rear-mirror” metaphor also informs the has long been overdue. concluding section to this collection, entitled All things considered, A View in the Rear-Mirror “Romantic Aftermath.” In what is the most ambitious makes a welcome collection. Although the quality essay in this Festschrift, devoted to “Sport and the of the sixteen contributions is uneven (some essays Discourse of Mass Modernity in Weimar Germany,” left unmentioned here read like unedited conference Andrew Hewitt argues that early twentieth-century papers, while others are carefully polished and Germany saw a remarkable fusion between a substantially annotated), the net result is an Romantic language of subjectivity and the hyper- inspiriting view of the state of the art in Romantic rationalism of Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetics that was scholarship at present. The Festschrift ends, apparently antagonistic to it. In an astute demon- usefully, with an 8-page bibliography of Frederick stration of discourse analysis, Hewitt focuses on Burwick’s publications and with an index.
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Line Henriksen, Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Derek Walcott’s Omeros as Twentieth-Century Epics. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán (London, UK)
In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” Jorge Luis it is possible to trace an epic heritage, a recognizable Borges proposed a ficción of a twentieth-century line that runs from Homer, through Virgil, and on to French writer who set himself the arduous task of Ovid, Dante, and Milton. Thus, writers such as rewriting Cervantes’s masterpiece. The humorous, Joyce, Pound, and Walcott emulated this canonical tongue-in-cheek tone of Borges’s exercise is heritage and inscribed their modern “epics” as the underlined in the paradoxical title of the piece, which successors of a long-standing Western tradition. teasingly shifts the authorship of the greatest work But writing in the wake of the grand masters of the in the Spanish language to the fictitious Frenchman classical epic model is no small feat, and this Menard. In effect, Menard’s ambitious enterprise was enterprise, Henriksen claims, has been differently to produce a few pages of Don Quixote that coincided undertaken by Pound and Walcott. This is clearly word-for-word and line-for-line with the original. In a stated in the “Introduction”, typical Borgesian irony, Menard’s Quixote becomes, The Cantos and Omeros share a generic heritage ultimately, richer and/or more subtle than Cervantes’s through which the two twentieth-century texts are owing to the inescapable fact that language has associated with what are canonically and evolved within the four hundred years of history conventionally the most important poems of the separating the two Quixotes, and generations of Western literary tradition: the Homeric poems, readers have added new interpretations to the text. Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Commedia and (in the What must be stated here, above all, is the crucial English tradition) Milton’s Paradise Lost. The two fact that if Cervantes’s Quixote became the subject poems represent two stances within twentieth- of Borges’s fiction, James Joyce’s Ulysses was at the century poetics and two approaches to the epic forefront of Borges’s meditation on reading, genre: one apparently a semi-failure, the other a translation, and rewriting. Indeed, the very title, success. (p.xiii) “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, may be read Henriksen, an accomplished linguist and assistant as a veiled analogue of “James Joyce, Author of professor at Copenhagen School, structured her Ulysses”, wherein literary chronologies are dismantled book according to the curvilinear pattern of the epic and the reader is therefore enticed to approach the trajectory, thus tracing the grand epic arch from Quixote as if it was written by Pierre Menard (or Homer to Walcott through interrelated and Borges), and Homer’s Odyssey as if it was written by progressive chapters. Predictably, the book opens Joyce. On a wider scale, Borges’s parable may be with an insightful and critically informed invest- read in parallel with Reed Way Dasenbrock’s igation of “Homer and Genre”, in which she impress- suggestion in Imitating the Italians (Baltimore and ively tackles the generic issue that anticipates the London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) larger question that echoes throughout the book – that a whole generation of Anglophone modernist What is an epic? And, more specifically in relation writers aspired to rewrite Dante’s Commedia in the to Pound’s Cantos and Walcott’s Omeros – is it an twentieth century. The ambitious desire to shift the epic? Henriksen offers a number of answers to these epic legacy of Dante (and Homer) across language, questions which are neither unidirectional nor culture and history, became the literary quest of an straightforward, and, ultimately, she recognizes the impressive gallery of modernist and present-day complexity, fluidity, and indeterminacy of the epic writers: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Derek as a literary category, particularly as she compares Walcott. The scale and enormity of this type of the vibrant tapestry of the classical epic with the creative endeavour, the obvious risks and difficulties wider, more versatile canvas of the novel. Thus, the involved, the composition process employed, and, transmutation of epic and novelistic elements results finally, the success, semi-failure or total failure of the in the richer form of what she refers to as “novelised transpositions are at the heart of Line Henriksen’s modern epic”, which owes a great deal to Mikhail impressive and wide ranging study Ambition and Bakhtin’s influential concepts of polyglossia, Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Derek Walcott’s dialogism, and carnival that Henriksen employs to Omeros as Twentieth-Century Epics. describe Pound’s and Walcott’s projects. Yet the The principal conceit of Henriksen’s thesis is that circuits or pathways that led Pound and Walcott
86 along the epic journey are still the subject of much Actaeon” and studies it alongside its gradual disagreement among critics. Worth mentioning here, transformation through several fascinating drafts of for example, is Pound’s unbending remark that Canto 4, which underline Pound’s interweaving of Dante’s Commedia did not constitute an epic but Ovid’s Metamorphosis with other French and Italian rather “a cycle of mystery plays” (107) and, traditions, and his lacing of several levels of furthermore, his refusal to brand the Cantos an epic, narration. Equally fascinating is her survey of “it ain’t an epic” (105). Equally significant is the fact Walcott’s construction of metaphors by means of that Walcott denied the epic quality of Omeros, in a her access to the drafts of Omeros which are held in conscious attempt to distance himself from the the University of West Indies, St. Augustine. imperialistic legacy of the genre and, moreover, to Through her perusal of the evolutionary growth of disassociate his work from the more alarming fascist a fragment from chapter 2, she underlines the battleground inaugurated by Pound’s anti-Semitic formulaic aspect of the book and Walcott’s reliance Cantos. In spite of Pound’s and Walcott’s denial on metaphor as his principal literary trope, chiefly in that their works conform to the criteria of the epic, contrast to what she views as Pound’s metonymic whether justifiable or not, Henriksen remains resolute poetic, both concepts grounded on Roman in her endeavour to reinvent them as novelised epics, Jakobson’s notions of metonymy and metaphor. a hybrid model of a much reinvigorated canon which Yet behind the ambition to write a twentieth- equally applies to the Joycean project. What emerges, century Quixote, Iliad, Odyssey, or Commedia lies above all, is a dialectic in which she constructs the deeper, inescapable anxiety concerning the Pound’s and Walcott’s dialogue with the epic as a success or failure of the enterprise. Hence, the gesture that reveals two opposite impulses. On the fundamental question is, at any rate – How one hand, she situates them within the epic ancestry (un)successful is it? Here we find ourselves on much integrated by the blind rhapsode and the ensuing more uncertain terrain, particularly since Henriksen lineage of Virgil, Dante, et al. On the other, Henriksen had to take into account previous not-so-con- is keen to challenge strict definitions of the epic, and gratulatory verdicts of Pound’s rewriting of Dante’s to foster a reading of the Cantos and Omeros as the imperialism vis-à-vis his flirtation with Fascism. composite site of a complex interweaving of genres, While she admits Pound’s admiration for the larger- including the epic. Further, she provides a focal point than-life figure of Mussolini and his concern with through which the looming shadows of the grand the complex economical forces of history, she praises epic poets continue to haunt their successors, and the lyrical artistry of Pound’s writing as the their restless spectres creep up in their works; Dante redeeming side of his much-criticized Cantos. Her is to Pound and Walcott what Homer was to Virgil overall estimation thus stands midway, neither and what the father-figure of Virgil was to Dante. success nor total failure, but semi-failure. Contrarily, Consequently, Henriksen argues that Walcott and the success of Walcott’s Omeros speaks for itself, Pound emulated their predecessors by incorporating yet her insightful analysis of his “Caribbean, into their ambitious enterprises the defining Metaphoric Epic” remains an outstanding characteristics of the epic, namely formulaic writing, contribution to scholarship. I would have liked, use of epithets, recurrence of the sea metaphor, as nonetheless, to see an informed conclusion that well as the assimilation of the English Homeric addressed the generic issues raised in the intro- heritage, from Chapman to Pope and, in Walcott’s duction, and the development of the epic as a whole. case, the more recent, accomplished translations of Where do these epic crossroads take us, we may Robert Fitzgerald and Richmond Lattimore. The post- ask, not only during the twentieth century but even Homeric poet, then, will emulate a series of formulae more so at the beginning of the twenty-first century? and devices which constitute the most salient feature Nevertheless, this lack of a far-reaching conclusion, of the work of his predecessor(s), thus explaining Line Henriksen’s Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra the conflictual impulses of “ambition” and “anxiety” Pound’s Cantos and Derek Walcott’s Omeros as (non-Bloomian). Twentieth-Century Epics is an accomplished, well- One of the most remarkable aspects of Henriksen’s written, and critically informed study that will prove study is her careful and detailed examination of an invaluable resource to students and scholars of holograph pages from the Cantos and Omeros in an a wide range of subject areas: classical studies, attempt to reinforce their indebtedness to the epic linguistics, postcolonialism, and English, Italian and tradition. She patiently traces the evolution of French literature. It remains, first and foremost, Pound’s early Imagist poem “The Coming of War: Comparative Literature at its best.
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Fiona Tolan. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Natasa Bakić-Mirić (Niš, Serbia) Too many books have perhaps been written about imminent extinction. In Chapter V, Tolan focuses Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s most famous on Bodily Harm, in which Atwood tries to distance women writers, a feminist icon (although the herself from the feminist novel but advances into comparison may not please her), a writer so areas still in their infancy, such as the politics of revered at this point in her literary career that she the gaze, which would later be extended into could write a shopping list and someone would discussions about the colonial gaze and power slap an award on it. However, Fiona Tolan’s new politics. Chapter VI deals with The Handmaid’s contribution to the field is valuable, giving an Tale and points to Atwood’s decision to advocate overview of the eleven novels in which the author caution and defend liberty before ideology, while seeks to establish links between Atwood’s fiction, in Chapter VII Cat’s Eye serves as a mode of feminist politics, change in gender communication understanding the articulation of the body, and cultural dialogue. In many ways, it feels like a refusing to reduce it to its cultural expression. literary scrapbook examining the novels of Chapter VII deals with The Robber Bride, where Margaret Atwood in conjunction with the Atwood re-examines essentialist identities in racial development of second-wave feminism in an and post-colonial terms, confronting implicit racial attempt to demonstrate the existence of a dynamic prejudices, and where she begins to look at the relationship between her fiction and feminist position of the “other woman” and otherness. In theory. Although Atwood’s work has been Alias Grace, which Tolan re-examines in Chapter regarded as a barometer of feminist thought IX, Atwood explores the themes of identity by whose protagonists are often a kind of “every- constructing and deconstructing the self and its woman” or weaker members of society, several of ontology. Chapter X deals with Atwood’s brilliant Atwood’s novels can also be classified as science The Blind Assassin, which won her the 2000 fiction, even though her writing is superior to the Booker Prize, a novel concerned with the manner normal formulae of the genre. in which events are lived, encoded in myth and Each of the eleven chapters deals with one of legend, and passed down to each new generation Atwood’s novels, as Tolan interprets Atwood from in a search to find new freedoms within old the perspective of second- and third-wave patterns. In the final chapter we then come to grips feminism, and charts many of the aspects of change with Atwood’s (by 2003) latest novel, Oryx and that her work has brought to the world. The first Crake, depicting a Huxleyan postmodernist three chapters analyse The Edible Woman, dystopia which, for many, represents a post- Surfacing, and Lady Oracle, highlighting Atwood’s feminist future in which questions of genetic contributions to early second-wave feminist predisposition and cultural experience are thought such as feminist identity, hysteria, explicitly examined, while feminist discourse gynocriticism, ecofeminism, demystification of the proves once again to be a valuable and con- body, and mothering. Chapter IV analyses Life structive backdrop to Atwood’s writing. before Man, the novel where the reader encounters Fiona Tolan’s Margaret Atwood: Feminism and the nihilistic despair of the two main characters, Fiction will undoubtedly find its place with Elizabeth and Nate – a married couple struggling readers who appreciate everything Atwood has to preserve their decaying marriage – and the futility written so far, since it effectively demonstrates of their efforts to do so. In this novel Atwood also the fictional and theoretical modern feminist reveals the strata of humor and pathos that make thought and theory in a contemporary linking of up modern familial and romantic love, all the while fictional and theoretical discourses that do not reminding her readers of the constant threat of simply coexist but are mutually intertwined.
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