Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English fiction English literature Suspense in literature. Realism in literature'

Suspense and surprise, as common and crucial elements of interest realised in literary fiction, are analysed closely in a sample of short stories, so as to develop a detailed explanation of how these forms of interest are created in literary texts, and to propose models for them. Creating suspense involves more conditions, necessary and optional, and more complication than surprise: the several optional conditions mainly serve to intensify the feeling of suspense the reader experiences. Surprise requires two necessary and sufficient conditions, with only a couple of optional conditions to maintain or ensure coherence in the text. The differences are considered attributable to a more fundamental difference between suspense and surprise as emotions. Suspense can be regarded as a progressive emotion, whereas surprise is a perfective emotion. As such, suspense as an interest is considered as a process-oriented interest, while surprise is an effect-oriented one. Suspense is mostly experienced while reading and has the reader involved with the story. Surprise drives the reader to reassess the story in the new light it throws on events and to look for some further message; this is often a main aim of the literary fiction which ends in surprise.

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.

This thesis aims to broaden the scope of magical realism by examining contemporary fiction in Asia and Australasia, regions which have been largely neglected in critical discussion of the narrative mode. My research seeks to modify and expand our collective conception of magical realism through key texts that challenge not only how we read the narrative mode, but also our expectations of it. My analysis involves a dual intervention in the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I supplement existing scholarship of magical realism with new paradigms of critical thought, such as epistemology, mythopoeia, ecocriticism, intertextuality and discourse on human rights. Each of the key authors - Indigenous Australian Alexis Wright, New Zealand Maoris Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera, Indian-born cosmopolitans Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, and Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan - subjects the narrative mode to differing intellectual, socio-cultural and historical frameworks, and in the process reinvents magical realism to serve their own artistic purposes. The authors' key texts demonstrate the need to recalibrate theory on magical realism in contexts such as Alexis Wright's depiction of ongoing colonisation of Australia's first inhabitants in a supposedly postcolonial country, and Mo Yan's critique of post-communist China. I argue that magical realism has porous borders, not only geographically and culturally, but also in the sense that the narrative mode frequently spills over into other, different generic kinds such that the distinctions between them are often blurred. In addition, magical realism's constant state of transformation makes it particularly difficult to define. Therefore, I propose a minimalist definition of the narrative mode and a flexible approach. However, underlying cultural elements and individual artistic expression in a text may sometimes limit magical realism's utility as a tool for literary analysis. Finally, I explore the notion of a genealogy of magical realism based on polygenesis, emerging in different cultures at different times.

Critics of the English novel, arguing that it is underpinned by liberalism, frequently claim that the crisis of realism disclosed in the work of many contemporary writers derives from a concomitant crisis of liberalism. Liberalism's dissolution is thus seen to prefigure the death of the novel. This dissertation contends that realism cannot be equated with liberalism and that the contemporary crisis of representation signals a broader crisis of metanarratives.
Focussing on selected novels of five post-war English novelists--B. S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Iris Murdoch, and Angus Wilson--I argue that their different responses to the crisis of representation show that it is not a crisis of liberalism alone. Johnson rejects realism for epistemological reasons; Lessing and Berger question it on political grounds; Murdoch and Wilson combine its strengths with a self-reflexive awareness of its weaknesses. I suggest that Murdoch's and Wilson's novels, which argue that fiction does not reflect reality but endows it with meaning and which are at once representational and metafictional, offer the most fruitful ways of acknowledging the crisis of representation while refusing to be paralyzed by it.

This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle. Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin, Ouida responds to the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Victorian need to compartmentalise and define women’s sexuality in terms of opposing binaries was paralleled by the vague idea that the period’s French and British literatures were at odds with one another. Elucidating the deep connections between, and common concerns shared by, French Naturalist and Realist and British New Woman authors, this thesis shatters the dichotomies that attempted to structure and define women’s sexuality in the mid- to late- nineteenth century. The thesis focusses on novels and short stories by French authors Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and New Woman authors Sarah Grand, Ménie Muriel Dowie and Vernon Lee. In a time during which the feminist movement was gaining momentum, and female sexuality was placed at the heart of a range of discourses, and scrutinised from a number of different angles – not only in literature, but in medicine, psychology, sexology, criminology – the consideration of the female sexual self and her subjectivity brings together the work of authors whose oeuvres have been largely considered as antithetical. Previous work has indeed shown the centrality of female sexuality to both literatures, yet never compared them. This thesis rediscovers the significance of both literatures’ investment in a discourse revolving around female sexuality by contrasting the French male authors with the British female writers, and uncovering unexpected parallels in their claims about the contemporary situation of women. Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe’s feminist philosophy frames the thesis’s comparative analysis, questioning and re-examining these authors’ representations of female sexuality. The ideas of sensuality and rationality, motherhood, reproduction, marriage, and prostitution thus become recurring concerns throughout it. The thesis’s first chapter considers the female as sexual subject and/or object of the male gaze, in a range of New Woman and French literature. The second and third chapters are organised around the themes of marriage and prostitution, and the final chapter considers issues of female sexuality within the fantastic short story.

This study is about British postwar fiction and its canonical reception according to a special categorisation of the novelists who were publishing in Britain during the two decades after the end of the Second World War. The study emphasises that mainstream literary criticism of 1950s and &rsquo
60s Britain tended to catalogue the novelists of this period according to a well-established dichotomy between tradition and innovation in which the traditional realist novels, the neorealist works of C. P. Snow, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis, were privileged over any other fictional work having modernist innovative characteristics. Therefore, the first published novels of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles, novelists belonging to today&rsquo
s postmodern canon, were first critically recognised as social realist works in Britain. One of the objects of this study is to demonstrate the shortcomings of this classification. Moreover, the main argument of the study is that none of these three novelists should have been classified as a traditional realist novelist. All of these three British postwar novelists were reconceptualising traditional realism by self-reflexively including the problem of representation as part of their conventional subject matters in their formal realist novels.

Shouting Distance is a collection of ten short stories written by Gary Thomas Smith. Most of the stories take place in Appalachia and rural Kentucky, and the stories set outside of the region still feature characters whose identities are intricately bound to it. The characters' relationships to Appalachia are complex as some embrace the mountains and their culture, while others feel oppressed by that environment. The stories are driven by characters' relationships with family and friends, with their futures and their pasts, or with cultural expectations. The collection explores themes such as poverty, violence, substance abuse, and loss. The natural world is pervasive throughout these stories, and many of them illustrate the effects of human interaction with the environment. While the seeming decline of rural life is at the foreground of this collection, it does not dismiss the beauty of this life. Rather, it suggests that there is promise for the future in spite of loss, hate, and fear.

This thesis is a collection of nine short stories about real people dealing with unreal problems. In one story, a small-town man answers a knock at his door, only to find three wisemen, who have followed a star and proclaimed him as their new messiah. In another, a reporter travels across the snowy length of Canada looking to interview people who have witnessed the Virgin Mary materialize above Toronto. Deranged Egyptologists, vampires with diseased blood, wacky witches, and unhappy mediums all inhabit tales whose landscapes span the distance between Chattanooga, Tennessee and the afterlife.

This dissertation is a collection of four long short stories about contemporary Americans written in the mode of psychological realism. “Bare Knuckles” depicts the struggles of a young man trying to “make it” in the world of illegal boxing. “ZOSO” focuses on the breakdown of an upper-middleclass family forced to move from the rustbelt to the “New South.” In “Dusted,” a man ill-equipped to navigate through the adult world turns to substance abuse and violence as a “way out.” “Sugar Skulls” explores the fascination with death in the punk rock world.

This dissertation examines how Philippine (or Filipino) authors emphasise the need for articulating or “re/membering” cultural identity. The researcher mainly draws from the theory of Caribbean critic, Stuart Hall, who views cultural identity as an articulation which allows “the fragmented, decentred human agent” to be considered as one who is both “subject-ed” by power but/and one who is capable of acting against those powers (Grossberg 1996 [1986]: 157, emphasis mine). Applied to the Philippine context, this writer argues that, instead of viewing an apparent fragmented Filipino identity as a hindrance to “defining” cultural identity, she views the “damaged” (Fallows 1987) Filipino history as a the material itself which allows articulation of identity. Instead of reducing the cultural identity of a people to what-they-could-have-been-had-history-not-intervened, she puts forward a vision of identity which attempts to transfigure these “damages” through the efforts of coming-to-terms with history. While this point of view has already been shared by other critics (such as Feria 1991 or Dalisay 1998:145), the author’s contribution lies in presenting re/membering to describe a specific type of articulation which neither permits one to deny wounds of the past nor stagnate in them. Moreover, re/membering allows one to understand continuous re-articulations of “new” identities (due to current migration), while putting an “arbitrary closure” (Hall) to simplistic re-articulations which may only further the “lines of tendential forces” (such as black or brown skin bias) or hegemonic practices.

Written as such (with a slash),“re/membering” encapsulates the following three-fold meaning: (1) a “re-membering”, to indicate “a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (Bhabha 1994:63); as (2) a “re-membering” or a re-integration into a group and; as (3) “remembering” which implies possessing “memory or … set [ting] off in search of a memory” (Ricoeur 2004:4). As a morphological unit, “re/membering” designates, the ways in which Filipino authors try to articulate cultural identity through the routes of colonisation, migration and dictatorship.

The authors studied in this thesis include: Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Frank Sionil José, Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, and Merlinda Bobis. Sixty-years separate Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (1943) from Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2003). Analysis of these works reveals how articulation is both difficult and hopeful. On the one hand, authors criticize the lack of efforts and seriousness towards articulation of cultural identity as re/membering (coming to terms with the past, fostering belonging and cultivating memory). Not only is re/membering challenged by double-consciousness (Du Bois 1994), dismemberment and forgetting, moreover, its necessity is likewise hard to recognize because of pain, trauma, phenomena of splitting, escapist attitudes and preferences for a “comfortable captivity”.

On the other hand, re/membering can also be described as hopeful by the way authors themselves make use of literature to articulate identity through research, dialogue, time, reconciliation and re-creation. Although painstaking and difficult, re/membering is important and necessary because what is at stake is an articulated Philippine cultural identity. However, who would be prepared to make the effort?

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Cette thèse démontre que, pour les auteurs philippins, l’articulation ou « re/membering » l'identité culturelle, est nécessaire. Le chercheur s'appuie principalement sur la théorie de Stuart Hall, qui perçoit l'identité culturelle comme une articulation qui permet de considérer l’homme assujetti capable aussi d'agir contre des pouvoirs (cf. Grossberg 1996 [1986]: 157). Appliquée au contexte philippin, cet auteur soutient que, au lieu de la visualisation d'une identité fragmentée apparente comme un obstacle à une « définition » de l'identité culturelle, elle regarde l’histoire philippine «abîmée» (Fallows 1987) comme le matériel même qui permet l'articulation d’identité. Au lieu de réduire l'identité culturelle d'un peuple à ce qu’ ils auraint pû être avant les interventions de l’histoire, elle met en avant une vision de l'identité qui cherche à transfigurer ces "dommages" par un travail d’acceptation avec l'histoire.

Bien que ce point de vue a déjà été partagé par d'autres critiques (tels que Feria 1991 ou Dalisay 1998:145), la contribution de l'auteur réside dans la présentation de « re/membering » pour décrire un type d'articulation sans refouler les plaies du passé, mais sans stagner en elles non plus. De plus, « re/membering » permet de comprendre de futures articulations de « nouvelles » identités culturelles (en raison de la migration en cours), tout en mettant une «fermeture arbitraire» (Hall) aux ré-articulations simplistes qui ne font que promouvoir des “lines of tendential forces” (Hall) (tels que des préjugés sur la couleur brune ou noire de peau) ou des pratiques hégémoniques.

Rédigé en tant que telle (avec /), « re/membering » comporte une triple signification: (1) une «re-membering », pour indiquer une mise ensemble d’un passé fragmenté pour donner un sens au traumatisme du présent (cf. Bhabha, 1994:63); (2) une «re-membering» ou une ré-intégration dans un groupe et finalement, comme (3)"remembering", qui suppose la possession de mémoire ou une recherche d'une mémoire »(Ricoeur 2004:4). Comme unité morphologique, « re/membering » désigne la manière dont les auteurs philippins tentent d'articuler l'identité culturelle à travers les routes de la colonisation, les migrations et la dictature.

Les auteurs inclus dans cette thèse sont: Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, NVM Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Frank Sionil José, Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, et Merlinda Bobis. Soixante ans séparent America is in the Heart (1943) du Bulosan et le Dream Jungle (2003) du Hagedorn. L'analyse de ces œuvres révèle la façon dont l'articulation est à la fois difficile et pleine d'espoir. D'une part, les auteurs critiquent le manque d'efforts envers l'articulation en tant que « re/membering » (confrontation avec le passé, reconnaissance de l'appartenance et cultivation de la mémoire). Non seulement est « re/membering » heurté par le double conscience (Du Bois 1994), le démembrement et l'oubli, en outre, sa nécessité est également difficile à reconnaître en raison de la douleur, les traumatismes, les phénomènes de scission, les attitudes et les préférences d'évasion pour une captivité "confortable" .

En même temps, « re/membering » peut également être décrit comme plein d'espoir par la façon dont les auteurs eux-mêmes utilisent la littérature pour articuler l'identité à travers la recherche, le dialogue, la durée, la réconciliation et la re-création. Bien que laborieux et difficile, « re/membering » est important et nécessaire car ce qui est en jeu, c'est une identité culturelle articulée des Philippines. Mais qui serait prêt à l'effort?

Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis investigates the way that moral and aesthetic concerns about the relationship between fiction and reality are manifested in the work of particular novelists writing at different periods in the nineteenth century, Chapter One examines an early-century subgenre of the novel that features deluded female readers who fail to differentiate between fantasy and reality, and who consequently attempt to live their lives according to foolish precepts learned from novels. The second chapter deals with the realist aesthetic of W. M. Thackeray; focusing on the techniques by which his fiction marks its own relationship both to less realistic fiction and to reality itself. The final chapter discusses Oscar Wilde's critical stance that art is meaningful and intellectually satisfying, while reality and realism are aesthetically worthless: it then goes on the explore how these ideas play out in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
iv, 120 leaves ; 28 cm.

Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.

This thesis sets out to examine social realism in Alex La Guma's longer fiction by using Georg Lukacs's Marxist theory as a point of departure. Tracing the development in La Guma's novels in terms of a shift from critical realism to gestures towards socialist realism I argue that this shift is informed by Lenin's "spontaneity/consciousness dialectic" in terms of which workers begin by engaging in spontaneous actions before they are ultimately guided by a developed political consciousness. I am quite aware that linking La Guma's work to socialist realism might raise some eyebrows in some circles but I am nonetheless quite emphatic about the fact that socialist realism in La Guma's fiction is not in any way tantamount to the Stalin-Zhdanovite version of what Lukacs calls "illustrative literature". Rejecting Lukacs's conception that socialist realism is a prerogative of writers in the socialist countries, I argue that gestures towards socialist realism made in La Guma's last novels are rooted in South African social reality. One of the claims being made in this study is that La Guma's novels render visible his attempt to create a South African proletarian literature. For this reason I make a case for Russian precedents of La Guma's writing by attempting to identify some intertextual connection between La Guma's novels and Gorky's work. Where realism is concerned I argue that although La Guma seems to draw extensively on Maxim Gorky in redefining his aesthetics of realism, Lukacs's theory of realism is useful in contextualising his fiction. The first chapter is largely biographical, examining La Guma's father's influence in shaping his political ideology and his literary tastes. Chapter two focuses on La Guma's aesthetics of realism. In chapter three I examine La Guma's journalism as having provided him with the subjects of his fiction and argue that there is a carry-over in terms of La Guma's style from journalism to fiction. Accordingly, I provide evidence of this carry-over in the next chapter on A Walk in the Night in which I argue that while La Guma's style is naturalist the novel is critical realist in perspective. Chapter five contextualizes the shift from And A Threefold Cord, to The Stone • Country as providing evidence of La Guma's use of "the spontaneity/consciousness dialectic". In chapter six I read In the Fog of the Seasons' End in relation to Gorky's Mother as its intertext in terms of its gestures towards socialist realism as seen for example in its "positive heroes", Beukes and Tekwane. There are further elements of socialist realism in Time of the Butcherbird which are nevertheless brought into question by some ideological contradictions within the text this is the central thrust of my argument in chapter seven. I conclude this study with a brief discussion of La Guma's craftsmanship.
Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements of Doctor of Philosophy, Johannesburg, 2016.
This thesis is concerned with the meeting point between theatre and religion in the mid-Victorian consciousness, and the paradoxical responses that this engendered particularly in the novels and thought of Dickens, Newman and Charlotte Brontë. It contributes to the still growing body of critical literature that attempts to tease out the complex religious influences on Dickens and Brontë and how this manifests in their fiction. Newman is a religious writer whose fictional treatment of spiritual questions in Callista (1859) is used as a foil to the two novelists. There are two dimensions to this study: on the one hand it is concerned with the broader cultural anti-Catholic mood of the period under consideration and the various ways in which this connects with anti-theatricality. I argue that in the search for a legitimate means of expressing religious sentiments, writers react paradoxically to the latent possibilities of the conventions of religious ceremony, which is felt to be artificial, mystical, transcendent and threatening, inspiring the same contradictory responses as the theatre itself. The second dimension of this study is concerned with the way in which these sentiments manifest themselves stylistically in the novels under consideration: through a close reading of Barnaby Rudge (1841), Pictures From Italy (1846), and Villette (1852), I argue that in the interstices of a wariness of Catholicism and theatricality there is a heightening of language, which takes on a ritual dimension, evoking the paradoxical suggestions of transcendent meaning and artificiality associated with performance. Newman’s Callista (1859) acts as a counterpoint to these novels, enacting a more direct and persuasive argument for the spiritual value of ritual. This throws some light on the realist impulse in the fiction of Brontë and Dickens, which can be thought of as a struggle between a language that seeks to distance and explain, and a language that seeks to perform, involve, and inspire. In my discussion of Barnaby Rudge (1841) I argue that the ritual patterns in the narrative, still hauntingly reminiscent of a religious past, never become fully embodied. This is because the novel is written in a style that could be dubbed “melodramatic” because it both gestures towards transcendent presences and patterns and threatens to make nonsense of the spiritual echoes that it invokes. This sense of a gesture deferred is also present in the travelogue, Pictures from Italy (1846). Here I argue that Dickens struggles to maintain an objective journalistic voice in relation to a sacramental culture that is defined by an intrusive theatricality: he experiences Catholic practices and symbolism as simultaneously vital, chaotic and elusive, impossible to define or to dismiss. In Villette (1852) I suggest that Charlotte Brontë presents a disjuncture between Lucy’s ardour and the commonplace bourgeoisie world that she inhabits. This has the paradoxical effect of revitalising the images of the Catholic religion, which, despite Lucy’s antipathy, achieves a ghostly presence in the novel. In Callista (1859), I suggest that Newman concerns himself with the ritual possibilities and limitations of fiction, poetry and theatre. These dramatic and literary categories invoke and are ultimately subsumed in Christian ritual, which Newman considers the most refined form of language – the point at which detached description gives way to communion and participation. Keywords: Victorian literature, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, John Henry Newman, ritual, religion, realism, theatricality, anti-Catholicism

Abstract The period of South Africa’s political transition in the late 1980s and 1990s also saw a number of interesting developments in the field of cultural production, especially within the province of literature. A number of literary scholars, critics of all realms, writers, some enthusiasts and adventurers all showed interest in the direction of literature after the repressive years of apartheid. The dominant academic question at the time centred on the possible transition in the thematic and formalistic dimension of the literature of the new South Africa. Scholars and cultural commentators that include Es’kia Mphahlele, Njabulo Ndebele, Albie Sachs, Guy Butler, Elleke Boehmer, Michael Chapman, Mbulelo Mzamane, Andries Walter Oliphant, amongst others, all contributed immensely in the debates that attempted to define the possible direction of the literature after apartheid. This research is concerned with the developments in the Post-Apartheid South African Novels of English expression. Its focus is on how temporal mobility has impacted on cultural production especially as witnessed in the many transformations in the field of literature, particularly the novel as a genre. Using the tropes of memory, violence, and otherness, it examines the novels of writers as varying as André Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, Zoë Wicomb, and Jo-Anne Richards. At the level of form, the fantastical and the confessional modes of narration are discussed as significant manifestations of the post-apartheid narratives using the novels of André Brink and Jo-Anne Richards respectively. It suggests that, among other things, the post-apartheid novels of English expression are marked by some interesting thematic blocs that include the fascination with land, the artistic display of remorse through the confessional mode, the rekindling of memory and its representation in narrative, the peculiar interest in violence and alterity, the continuing reportage of the urban space and the implications of urbanity on the ordinary citizenry, the recourse to gangsterism, miscegenation and the dilemma of a humankind confined to the psychological spaces of the interstices. Efforts were made in this research to avoid the ‘intellectual apartheid’ often associated with the hermeneutic engagements of the literati previously devoted to South Africa’s literary scholarship. It is for this reason that a more elaborate introductory chapter highlights aspects of the contributions of novelists and scholars that include Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Wally Serote, Lewis Nkosi, Njabulo Ndebele, and the ‘emergent’ ones such as Phaswane Mpe, K. Sello Duiker, Pamela Jooste, among others. An important dimension to this study is that it situates the Post-Apartheid narratives not only within relevant historical contexts, but also develops its argument by drawing immensely from the intellectual culture dominant in South Africa before, during, and after the notorious era of racial separatism. It concludes on the suggestive note that South African writers and literary scholars should attempt to demonstrate a more rigorous interest in locating the creative points of convergence between the aesthetic and social ideals.

Niagara is a work of magical realism, incorporating elements of historical and experimental fiction. The novel is inhabited by the problematic moguls and politicians who shaped American settlement, the burgeoning subculture of freight train hoppers that post their travels on the internet, and an author turned ghost who can no longer remember his past work.