Academic literature on the topic 'Bronze age, fiction'

AbstractWas late Troy VI a large Anatolian palatial city, a hub for trade, a commercial metropolis or even the centre of a Bronze Age federation of cities (hanse), as the present excavator of Hisarlik, M. Korfmann, has claimed in numerous publications? Several German archaeologists and historians have maintained the opposite and declared Korfmann's view of Troy as unfounded and a fiction. In a recent article in Anatolian Studies (2002: 75–109) D.F. Easton, J.D. Hawkins, and A.G. and E.S. Sherratt state that they share the opinion of the excavator. In reality, they do not defend the above mentioned views, but offer a more restrained description of the role of Troy VI in the Late Bronze Age. Their arguments, though, can be shown to be untenable due to insufficient evidence. Thus, a thorough criticism of Korfmann's statements remains fully justified.

The article deals with the issue of the spiritual development of mankind as an orientalist-literary critic, and the subject is covered on the basis of new approaches that have not been seen in the scientific literature to date. For example, the history of the ancient world was divided into 3 stages - 1) primitive society, 2) city-states, 3) great kingdoms (empires), coordinated by archaeologists as "Stone Age", "Bronze Age", "Iron Age". These new interpretations have been proven based on the views of oriental thinkers. It has been proved, based on the research of world scientists, that the spiritual development of this period developed on the basis of mythical thinking. The history of the Middle Ages is considered within the framework of the Muslim cultural region, and the spiritual development of the peoples of the region is considered as a development of monotheistic thinking and its 4 stages - 1) Sunnah, 2) Muslim enlightenment, 3) Sufi teachings and irfan, 4) “Majoz tariqi” - are briefly explained. In the works of the great poets of the East, Amir Khusrav Dehlavi and Alisher Navoi, the stage of the "Majoz tariqi", which is theoretically substantiated as an independent spiritual essence of fiction, is in fact has been proved in detail by the author that the development of monotheistic thinking is the highest stage in the spiritual development of not only the peoples of the region, but of all mankind. The theoretical considerations summarized in the article are the author's books: "Stages of perfection of our national spirituality", "Fundamentals of our national spirituality", "Introduction to Navoi studies" and a number of scientific articles which are published in different years. They are reflected in one form or another, and in this text they are enriched to some extent with new interpretations

Plato, who lived in the 4th century B.C., wrote the dialogue Timaeos and Critias when he was 52 years old. In this he describes a catastrophe in Athens from an earthquake in the presence of excessive rain. He also describes several details, not visible in his century, in the Acropolis of Athens. These details are a spring and architectural details of buildings in which the warriors used to live. In Critias he mentions that the destruction of the spring was caused by an earthquake. The time of the catastrophe of Atlantis was not defined by him but it is implied that it occurred after the assault of the Atlantes in the Mediterranean. Archaeological excavations confirmed the existence of the spring which was about 25 m deep with respect to the present day walking level. Archaeologically dated ceramics, found at its bottom, denote the last function of the spring was in very early 12th century B.C. Plato describes the warriors’ settlements which were found outside of the fortification wall in the North East of the Acropolis. The philosopher, who was not a historian, describes a general catastrophe in Greece from which the Greek language survived till his century. Archaeological studies have offered a variety of tablets of Linear B writings which turn out to be the non-alphabetic type of writing of the Greeks up to the 12th century B.C. before the dark ages commence. Modern geoarchaeological and palaeoseismological studies prove that seismic storms occurred in the East Mediterranean between 1225 and 1175 B.C. The result of a fifty-year period of earthquakes was the catastrophe of many late Bronze Age palaces or settlements. For some analysts both Athens and Atlantis presented in Timaeos and Critias are imaginary entities. They maintained that the imaginary conflict between Athens and Atlantis served Plato to produce the first world’s “science fiction” and gave the Athenians an anti-imperialistic lesson through his fabricated myth. However, a part of this “science fiction”, Athens of Critias, is proved a reality of the 12th century B.C., described only by Plato and not by historians, such as Herodotus, Thucydides and others. Analysts of the past have mixed Plato’s fabricated Athens presented in his dialogue Republic with the non-fabricated Athens of his dialogue Critias. This serious error has deflected researchers from their target to interpret Plato’s text efficiently.

During the Early Iron Age, Knossos was one of the most important cities of the Aegean. In addition to objects from elsewhere in the Aegean, a wide range of Cypriot, Phoenician and North Syrian imports has been discovered in the Early Iron Age Knossian cemeteries. In certain cases, these grave goods predate their funerary context by a century. This paper examines the stylistic and contextual dating of these imports, in an attempt to associate, from a contextual point of view, these items with the funerary practices of the Knossians. Grave goods deposited in the same cemeteriesalso included Early Iron Age local imitations of Late Bronze Age Near Eastern imports. It is suggested that members of the Early Iron Age Knossian elite treated certain contemporary objects, which belonged stylistically either to the Late Bronze Age Cypriot, Phoenician or North Syrian traditions, on the one hand, or to the local Minoan tradition, on the other hand, as if they were antiques and/or heirlooms. In this way, that is, by appropriating the ancestral past of the community, the elite could establish and maintain their authority. For this reason, “fake” keimelia and heirlooms had to acquire new complex “biographies”.

Each year, The Economist magazine’s “Economist Intelligence Unit” ranks cities based on “healthcare, education, stability, culture, environment and infrastructure”, giving the highest-ranking locale the title of most ‘liveable’ (Wright). For the past six years, The Economist has named Melbourne “the world’s most liveable city” (Carmody et al.). A curious portmanteau, the concept of liveability is problematic: what may feel stable and safe to some members of the community may marginalise others due to several factors such as gender, disability, ethnicity or class.The subjective nature of this term is referred to in the Australian Government’s 2013 State of Cities report, in the chapter titled ‘Liveability’:In the same way that the Cronulla riots are the poster story for cultural conflict, the attack on Jillian Meagher in Melbourne’s Brunswick has resonated strongly with Australians in many capital cities. It seemed to be emblematic of their concern about violent crime. Some women in our research reported responding to this fear by arming themselves. (274)Twenty-nine-year-old Jill Meagher’s abduction, rape, and murder in the inner northern suburb of Brunswick in 2012 disturbs the perception of Melbourne’s liveability. As news of the crime disseminated, it revived dormant cultural narratives that reinforce a gendered public/private binary, suggesting women are more vulnerable to attack than men in public spaces and consequently hindering their mobility. I investigate here how texts written by women writers based in Melbourne’s inner north can latently serve as counter narratives to this discourse, demonstrating how urban public space can be benign, even joyful, rather than foreboding for women. Cultural narratives that promote the vulnerability of women oppress urban freedoms; this paper will use these narratives solely as a catalyst to explore literary texts by women that enact contrary narratives that map a city not by vicarious trauma, but instead by the rich complexity of women’s lives in their twenties and thirties.I examine two memoirs set primarily in Melbourne’s inner north: Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (2013) and Lorelai Vashti’s Dress, Memory: A memoir of my twenties in dresses (2014). In these texts, the inner north serves as ‘true north’, a magnetic destination for this stage of life, an opening into an experiential, exciting adult world, rather than a place haunted. Indeed, while Lee and Vashti occupy the same geographical space that Meagher did, these texts do not speak to the crime.The connection is made by me, as I am interested in the affective shift that follows a signal crime such as the Meagher case, and how we can employ literary texts to gauge a psychic landscape, refuting the discourse of fear that is circulated by the media following the event. I wish to look at Melbourne’s inner north as a female literary milieu, a site of boldness despite the public breaking that was Meagher’s murder: a site of female self-determination rather than community trauma.I borrow the terms “boldness”, “bold walk” and “breaking” from Finnish geographer Hille Koskela (and note the thematic resonances in scholarship from a city as far north as Helsinki). Her paper “Bold Walks and Breakings: Women’s spatial confidence versus fear of violence” challenges the idea that “fearfulness is an essentially female quality”, rather advocating for “boldness”, seeking to “emphasise the emancipatory content of … [women’s] stories” (302). Koskela uses the term “breaking” in her research (primarily focussed on experiences of Helsinki women) to describe “situations … that had transformed … attitudes towards their environment”, referring to the “spatial consequences” that were the result of violent crimes, or threats thereof. While Melbourne women obviously did not experience the Meagher case personally, it nevertheless resulted in what Koskela has dubbed elsewhere as “increased feelings of vulnerability” (“Gendered Exclusions” 111).After the Meagher case, media reportage suggested that Melbourne had been irreversibly changed, made vulnerable, and a site of trauma. As a signal crime, the attack and murder was vicariously experienced and mediated. Like many crimes committed against women in public space, Meagher’s death was transformed into a cautionary tale, and this storying was more pronounced due to the way the case played out episodically in the media, particularly online, allowing the public to follow the case as it unfolded. The coverage was visually hyperintensive, and particular attention was paid to Sydney Road, where Meagher had last been seen and where she had met her assailant, Adrian Bayley, who was subsequently convicted of her murder.Articles from media outlets were frequently accompanied by cartographic images that superimposed details of the case onto images of the local area—the mind map and the physical locality both marred by the crime. Yet Koskela writes, “the map of everyday experiences is in sharp contrast to the maps of the media. If a picture of a place is made by one’s own experiences it is more likely to be perceived as a safe ordinary place” (“Bold Walks” 309). How might this picture—this map—be made through genre? I am interested in how memoir might facilitate space for narratives that contest those from the media. Here I prefer the word memoir rather than use the term life-writing due to the former’s etymological adherence to memory. In Vashti and Lee’s texts, memory is closely linked to place and space, and for each of them, Melbourne is a destination, a city that they have come to alone from elsewhere. Lee came to the city after growing up in Canberra, and Vashti from Brisbane. In Dress, Memory, Vashti writes that the move to Melbourne “… makes you feel like a pioneer, one of those dusty and determined characters out of an American history novel trudging west to seek a land of gold and dreams” (83).Deeply engaging with Melbourne, the text eschews the ‘taken for granted’ backdrop idea of the city that scholar Jane Darke observes in fiction. She writes thatmodern women novelists virtually take the city as backdrop for granted as a place where a central female figure can be or becomes self-determining, with like-minded female friends as indispensable support and undependable men in walk-on roles. (97)Instead, Vashti uses memoir to self-consciously examine her relationship with her city, elaborating on the notion of moving from elsewhere as an act of self-determination, building the self through geographical relocation:You’re told you can find treasure – the secret bars hidden down the alleyways, the tiny shops filled with precious curios, the art openings overflowing onto the street. But the true gold that paves Melbourne’s footpaths is the promise that you can be a writer, an artist, a musician, a performer there. People who move there want to be discovered, they want to make a mark. (84)The paths are important here, as Vashti embeds herself on the street, walking through the text, generating an affective cartography as her life is played out in what is depicted as a benign, yet vibrant, urban space. She writes of “walking, following the grid of the city, taking in its grey blocks” (100), engendering a sense of what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls ‘topophilia’: “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (4). There is a deep bond between Vashti and Melbourne that is evident in her work that is demonstrated in her discussion of public space. Like her, friends from Brisbane trickle down South, and she lives with them in a series of share houses in the inner North—first Fitzroy, then Carlton, then North Melbourne, where she lives with two female friends and together they “roamed the streets during the day in a pack” (129).Vashti’s boldness not only lies in her willingness to take bodily to the streets, without fear, but also in her fastidious attention to her physical appearance. Her memoir is framed sartorially: chronologically arranged, from age twenty to thirty, each chapter featuring equally detailed reports of the events of that year as well as the corresponding outfits worn. A dress, transformative, is spotlighted in each of these chapters, and the author is photographed in each of these ‘feature’ dresses in a glossy section in the middle of the book. Koskela writes that, “if women dress up to be part of the urban spectacle, like 19th-century flâneurs, and also to mediate their confidence, they oppose their erasure and reclaim urban space”. For Koskela, the appearance of the body in public is an act of boldness:dressing can be seen as a means of reproducing power relations; in Foucaultian terms, it is a way of being one’s own overseer, and regulating even the most intimate spheres … on the other hand, interpreted in another way, dressing up can be seen as a form of resistance against the male gaze, as an opposition to the visual mastery over women, achieved by not being invisible or absent, but by dressing up proudly. (“Bold Walks” 309)Koskela’s affirmation that clothing can enact urban boldness contradicts reportage on the Meagher case that suggested otherwise. Some news outlets focussed on the high heels Meagher was wearing the night she was raped and murdered, as if to imply that she may have been able to elude her fate had she donned flats. The Age quotes witnesses who saw her on Sydney Road the night she was killed; one says she was “a little unsteady on her feet but not too bad”, another that she “seemed to be struggling to walk up the hill in her high heels” (Russell). But Vashti is well aware of the spatial confidence that the right clothing provides. In the chapter “Twenty-three”, she writes of being housebound by heartbreak, that “just leaving the house seemed like an epic undertaking”, so she “picked a dress a dress that would make me feel good … the woman in me emerged when I slid it on. In it, I instantly had shape, form. A purpose” (99). She and her friends don vocational costumes to outplay the competitive inner Melbourne rental market, eventually netting their North Melbourne terrace house by dressing like “young professionals”: “dressed up in smart op-shop blouses and pencil skirts to walk to the real estate office” (129).Michele Lee’s text Banana Girl also delves into the relationship between personal aesthetics and urban space, describing Melbourne as “a town of costumes, after all” (117), but her own style as “indifferently hip to the outside world without being slavish about it” (6). Lee’s world is East Brunswick for much of the book, and she establishes this connection early, introducing herself in the first chapter, as one of the “subversive and ironic people living in the hipster boroughs of the inner North of Melbourne” (6). She describes the women in her local area – “Brunswick Girls”, she dubs them: “no one wears visible make up, or if they do it’s not lathered on in visible layers; the haircuts are feminine without being too stylish, the clothing too; there’s an overall practical appearance” (89).Lee displays more of a knowingness than Vashti regarding the inner North’s reputation as the more progressive and creative side of the Yarra, confirmed by the Sydney Morning Herald:The ‘northside’ comprises North Melbourne, Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Abbotsford, Thornbury, Brunswick and Coburg. Bell Street is the boundary for northsiders. It stands for artists, warehouse parties, bicycles, underground music, lightless terrace houses, postmodernity and ‘awareness’. (Craig)As evidenced in late scholar John Maclaren’s book Melbourne: City of Words, the area has long enjoyed this reputation: “After the war, these neighbourhoods were colonized by migrants from Europe, and in the 1960s by the artists, musicians, writers, actors, junkies and layabouts whose stories Helen Garner was to tell” (146). As a young playwright, Lee sees herself reflected in this milieu, writing that she’s “an imaginative person, I’m university educated, I vote the way you’d expect me to vote and I’m a member of the CPSU. On principle I remain a union member” (7), toeing that line of “awareness” pithily mentioned by the SMH.Like Vashti, there are constant references to Lee’s exact geographical location in Melbourne. She ‘drops pins’ throughout, cultivating a connection to place that blurs home and the street, fostering a sense of belonging beyond one’s birthplace, belonging to a place chosen rather than raised in. She plants herself in this local geography. Returning to the first chapter, she includes “jogger by the Merri Creek” in her introduction (7), and later jokingly likens a friendship with an ex as “no longer on stage at the Telstra Dome but still on tour” (15), employing Melbourne landmarks as explanatory shorthand. She refers to places by name: one could physically tour inner North and CBD hotspots based on Lee’s text, as it is littered with mentions of bars, restaurants, galleries and theatre venues. She frequents the Alderman in East Brunswick and Troika in the city, as well as a bar that Jill Meagher spent time in on the night she went missing – the Brunswick Green.While offering the text a topographical authenticity, this can sometimes prove distracting: rather than simply stating that she goes to the library, she writes that she visits “the City of Melbourne library” (128), and rather than just going to a pizza parlour, they visit “Bimbo’s” (129) or “Pizza Meine Liebe” (101). Yet when Lee visits family in Canberra, or Laos on an arts grant, business names are forsaken. One could argue that the cultural capital offered by namedropping trendy Melburnian bars, restaurants and nightclubs translates awkwardly on the page, and risks dating the text considerably, but elevates the spatiality of Lee’s work. And these landmarks are important within the text, as Lee’s world is divided spatially. She refers to “Theatre Land” when discussing her work in the arts, and her share house not as ‘home’ but consistently as “Albert Street”. She partitions her life into these zones: zones of emotion, zones of intellect/career, zones of family/heritage – the text offers close insight into Lee’s personal cartography, with her traversing the map “stubbornly on foot, still resisting becoming part of Melbourne’s bike culture” (88).While not always walking alone – often accompanied by an ex-boyfriend she nicknames “Husband” – Lee is independently-minded, stating, “I operate solo, I pay my own way” (34), meeting up with various romantic and sexual interests through the text for daytime trysts in empty office buildings or late nights out in the CBD. She is adventurous, yet reminds that she was not always so. She recalls a time when she was still residing in Canberra and visited a boyfriend who was living in Melbourne and felt intimidated by the “alien city”, standing in stark contrast to the familiarity she demonstrates otherwise.Lee and Vashti’s texts both chronicle women who freely occupy public space, comfortable in their surroundings, not engaging on the page with cultural narratives and media reportage that suggest they would be safer off the streets. Both demonstrate what Koskela calls the “pleasure to be able to take possession of space” (“Bold Walks” 308) – yet it could be argued that the writer’s possession of space is so routine, so unremarkable that it transcends pleasure: it is comfortable. They walk the streets alone and catch public transport alone without incident. They contravene advice such as that given by Victorian Police Homicide Squad chief Mick Hughes’s comments that women shouldn’t be “alone in parks” following the fatal stabbing of teenager Masa Vukotic in a Doncaster park in 2015.Like Meagher’s death, Vukotic’s murder was also mobilised by the media – and one could argue, by authorities – to contain women, to further a narrative that reinforces the public/private gender binary. However, as Koskela reminds, the fact that some women are bold and confident shows that women are not only passively experiencing space but actively take part in producing it. They reclaim space for themselves, not only through single occasions such as ‘take back the night’ marches, but through everyday practices and routinized uses of space. (“Bold Walks” 316)These memoirs act as resistance, actively producing space through representation: to assert the right to the city, one must be bold, and reclaim space that is so often overlaid with stories of violence against women. As Koskela emphasises, this is only done through use of the space, “a way of de-mystifying it. If one does not use the space, … ‘the mental map’ of the place is filled with indirect descriptions, the image of it is constructed through media and the stories heard” (“Bold Walks” 308). Memoir can take back this image through stories told, demonstrating the personal connection to public space. Koskela writes that, “walking on the street can be seen as a political act: women ‘write themselves onto the street’” (“Urban Space in Plural” 263). ReferencesAustralian Government. Department of Infrastructure and Transport. State of Australian Cities 2013. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2013. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/files/2013_00_infra1782_mcu_soac_full_web_fa.pdf>.Carmody, Broede, and Aisha Dow. “Top of the World: Melbourne Crowned World's Most Liveable City, Again.” The Age, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://theage.com.au/victoria/top-of-the-world-melbourne-crowned-worlds-most-liveable-city-again-20160817-gqv893.html>.Craig, Natalie. “A City Divided.” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Feb. 2012. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/about-town/a-city-divided-20120202-1quub.html>.Darke, Jane. “The Man-Shaped City.” Changing Places: Women's Lives in the City. Eds. Chris Booth, Jane Darke, and Susan Yeadle. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1996. 88-99.Koskela, Hille. “'Bold Walk and Breakings’: Women's Spatial Confidence versus Fear of Violence.” Gender, Place and Culture 4.3 (1997): 301-20.———. “‘Gendered Exclusions’: Women's Fear of Violence and Changing Relations to Space.” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, 81.2 (1999). 111–124.———. “Urban Space in Plural: Elastic, Tamed, Suppressed.” A Companion to Feminist Geography. Eds. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager. Blackwell, 2005. 257-270.Lee, Michele. Banana Girl. Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2013.MacLaren, John. Melbourne: City of Words. Arcadia, 2013.Russell, Mark. ‘Happy, Witty Jill Was the Glue That Held It All Together.’ The Age, 19 June 2013. 30 Jan. 2017 <http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/happy-witty-jill-was-the-glue-that-held-it-all-together-20130618-2ohox.html>Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1974.Wright, Patrick, “Melbourne Ranked World’s Most Liveable City for Sixth Consecutive Year by EIU.” ABC News, 18 Aug. 2016. 17 Jan. 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-18/melbourne-ranked-worlds-most-liveable-city-for-sixth-year/7761642>.

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in British society, and how women’s rights changed during the 19th century highlight how aging affected women and how they were treated throughout the century. Victorian fiction illustrates the ways women achieved different roles in society and how age and the perception of age affected their ability to do so. Understanding how aging was experienced, understood, and ascribed to Victorian women who fought in various ways for new terms of citizenship and mobility helps us begin to trace how we treat and respond to aging in women today. The first chapter outlines the social status of unmarried women and spinsters, considering how age affected women’s ability to lead professional lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). The second chapter, on George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, explores older motherhood through Mrs Transome and illustrates how the novel seeks to teach younger women of the pitfalls of unequal marriages. The third chapter builds a cultural understanding of how aging was linked to progressive, anti-domestic womanhood and racial impurity through the New Woman and in H.R. Haggard’s She.

This introductory chapter discusses how the novel, the ascendant imaginative form in nineteenth-century Europe, did more than broadcast the anthropological turn of secular knowledge: it helped steer it and—under the license of fiction—it pressed it to its limits. As the history of man broke up among competing disciplinary claims on scientific authority after 1800, the novel took over as its universal discourse, modeling the new developmental conception of human nature as a relation between the history of individual persons and the history of the species. The novel's supposed aesthetic disability, its lack of form, now marked its fitness to model the changing form of man. Novels could offer a comprehensive representation of human life—a Human Comedy—in a general writing accessible to all readers, mediated not by specialist knowledge or technical language but by the shared sensibilities that constitute “our common nature.” Thus, novels became active instruments in the ongoing scientific revolution, advancing its experimental postulates that human nature may not be one but many, that humans share their nature with other creatures, that humans have no nature, that the human form is variable, fluid, fleeting—as well as developing a technical practice, realism, to defend humanity's place at the center of nature and at the end of history.

This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.

This chapter explores the reasons for the Brontës’ longstanding connection with haunting and the supernatural, and how this has been intertwined with processes of fictionalisation. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë in particular, it traces her connection with the supernatural back to Elizabeth Gaskell’s seminal biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Within Gaskell’s biography are embedded a series of macabre ghost stories that have the effect of supernaturalising and semi-fictionalising the life of its subject. This chapter demonstrates that Gaskell’s influence can be seen both in the commemorative ghost poetry of the nineteenth century, which we might think of as proto-fictional biography, and in the works of fictional biography that featured the Brontës as ghosts throughout the inter-war period. It follows the trajectory of Brontë’s fictionalisation by charting nineteenth-century commemorative poetry’s gradual approach to fictional biography in terms of its ghosts’ increasing communicativeness and vocalisation.

Abstract The most influential depictions of libraries in fiction are those of Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel and of Cervantes in Don Quixote. These works and their reception in English-language literature are discussed. Stretching from the Middle Ages to the present, this chapter ranges across English and some American literature. Particular attention is paid to the notion of the library as a site of tension between order and subversive disorder, and to the library as a place associated with madness, especially the madness of scholars. Among the authors discussed are John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, writers about women and eighteenth-century circulating libraries, Gothic novelists, and James Joyce. Though many novels are considered, more detailed consideration is given to Walter Scott’s Waverley, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and G. K. Chesterton’s The Return of Don Quixote.

This chapter explores a further set of palimpsestic texts, E. Nesbit’s fantasy The Enchanted Castle (1907) and five historical novels: Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Theras and His Town (1924), The Forgotten Daughter (1933), and The White Isle (1940); Elizabeth George Speare’s The Bronze Bow (1961); and Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth (1954). It is argued that these texts emphasize family as a mechanism for representing both disparate experiences between parents and children and continuity over time, in keeping with the topological resources of the palimpsest figure. Palimpsestic texts are fundamentally about a maturing or an aging that the child has not yet experienced, and that maturation is sometimes represented as a kind of inevitable damage or loss to both place and person. Indeed, a dominant facet of this set of palimpsestic texts is an analogy between damage to the landscape that the characters inhabit and damage to the human body. Methodologically, these works are examined with the aid of critics who consider the representation and cultivation of empathy in fiction.

The ongoing interest in Jane Eyre and its various adaptations, appropriations, mash-ups and sequels are indicative of the fact that the story and the main character have loosened themselves from literary forms and have become transmedia phenomena. Taking into consideration the independent web series The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, and the media discussion it generated among online communities, this chapter argues that in contrast to popular screen adaptations of the novel, the web series disentangles the heroine from the romantic plot and re-positions her within a network of relationships that encourage her growth. In this way, the series bypasses gender critiques levelled at Charlotte Brontë’s text and the majority of its mainstream adaptations. The web series’ media format and exploration of authorship enables its viewers to treat it both as an adaptation and a fictional vlog, highlighting the complex ways in which this classic of Victorian literature continues to matter today.

This chapter shows how the narrative form and obsessive focus on objects of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s early fiction—his chosisme—was adopted in three novels published in Britain in the 1960s. In Brian W. Aldiss’s Report on Probability A (1968), Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964), and Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation (1968), Robbe-Grillet’s literary innovations become a means of reflecting on the end of empire. First, Robbe-Grillet’s broader reception within the context of the end of empire is surveyed. Then the three novels in question are analysed in turn. The chapter concludes by considering how new literary forms and new world-historical forms might line up in the work of Aldiss, Brooke-Rose, and Williams.

A shared interest in the practice of colonization as a form of predation and capture provides a surprising link between Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s writings about systematic colonization and Charlotte Brontë’s whimsical juvenile writings. Both present their ideas in fictional form, and their colonies as imaginative constructs. Wakefield’s theory, which was influential in shaping British colonial policy, involved transporting working-class families to Australia to establish a labour force within new settlements. To reinforce the difference between his scheme and that of chattel slavery, he emphasized the freedom of his workers. Yet his scheme entailed significant restraints of their personal liberties: their freedom of movement, association, and right to own property, as well as the requirement to marry and have children. Similar preoccupations are evident in an earlier episode in Wakefield’s biography, in which he kidnapped a young woman in order to marry her for her family’s wealth and prestige. Brontë, who was roughly the same age as Wakefield’s young victim, explores these themes explicitly in her own teenage accounts of a colony in Africa, Glass Town. Co-authored with her siblings, this intricate saga of conquest and settlement by a group of European explorers presents a juvenile commentary on contemporary colonial practices. It reveals the coercive violence within the colony, as well as the submerged erotic elements within it. It also shows the ways this same violence underpins fictional narratives, especially the marriage plots that Brontë develops in her mature works.