Category: Style

To blot it all out: the politics of realism in Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son.’ Damon Marcel DeCoste The strategies of the classic realist text divert the reader from what is contradictory within it to the renewed recognition (misrecognition) of what he or she already “knows,” knows because the myths and signifying systems of the classic […]

Michael Riffaterre: a checklist of writings through 1996 William Nelles Relatively little of Michael Riffaterre’s prodigious output has been collected in book form, and the volumes of the MLA Bibliography list only about half of his articles; my hope is that this listing will help fill in the bibliographical gaps and also constitute a usefully […]

Orlando’s sister, or Sally Potter does Virginia Woolf in a voice of her own Karen Hollinger For decades, the study of film adaptation has been troubled by questions of fidelity. Too often, adaptation studies have merely compared films to their literary sources, a “tiresome” endeavor, as Dudley Andrew points Out, that inevitably privileges the literary […]

The source of “dramatized consciousness”: Richardson, Austen, and stylistic influence – Samuel Richardson Jane Austen – Critical Essay Joe Bray To his observation that Henry James was, like George Eliot, “a great admirer of Jane Austen,” F. R. Leavis adds the following footnote: “He can’t have failed to note with interest that Emma fulfills, by […]

Mimologics. – book reviews Steve Miskinis Tracing the fantasy of a language whose very substance imitates the nature it represents, setting out from Plato’s Cratylus and ending with work in twentieth-century linguistics, Gerard Genette’s Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie is a formidable work. Equally -formidable, no doubt, was the task of translation which, thanks to Thais […]

The imagery of a myth: computer-assisted research on literature Alison M. Finch Doubts have often been expressed about computer-assisted research on literature, but until about seven years ago these doubts were voiced mainly by those who did not themselves practice it.(1) Since 1988, however, real worries have increasingly been expressed by specialists in books and […]

Dickens with Kant and Sade – violence in Charles Dickens’ novels Jeffrey A. Netto As the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius. Thomas De Quincey, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” In effect, the father’s death opens the reign of violence. […]

Metaphor and mind style in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Elena Semino 1. INTRODUCTION Roger Fowler coined the term “mind style” in 1977 to describe the phenomenon in which the language of a text projects a characteristic world view, a particular way of perceiving and making sense of the world. In William […]

The short story: the short of it – The Short Story: Theory and Practice Allan H. Pasco A number of significant changes in our understanding of the short story have occurred since the 1983 publication of two major books: Susan Lohafer’s Coming to Terms with the Short Story and Valerie Shaw’s The Short Story: A […]

Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning – Book Review Gail Green-Anderson Martin Bidney. Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning. Carbondale: Southern illinois University Press, 1997. 235 pp./$34.95 cloth Martin Bidney is ambitious in choosing to write a book about epiphanies in literature–“puzzling but privileged moments, […]