Journal articles on the topic 'King, Stephen, Riddles in literature'

Abstract This essay examines Stephen King’s career in relation to the evolving literary status of genre fiction. Following the financialization of the publishing industry, genre fiction became one of its most profitable forms. As a result, agents and houses sought to invest in brand-name authors who could attract a mass-market readership based on reputation alone. While this development helped turn King into one of the most successful novelists of the late twentieth century, it also provided an opportunity to engage with questions about authorial autonomy, the demands of the market, and the mediating force of publishers in his own work. Novels like Misery (1984) and the “Dark Tower” series (1982–2004)—explicitly centered on the writing of genre fiction—articulate a model of authorial professionalism built upon the metaphor of the corporation. Understanding genre as a corporate form need not be grounds for critical dismissal, but can instead serve a critical purpose. Genre fiction, this essay argues, functions as a mechanism for confronting the economic conditions and expectations of the contemporary publishing industry and its impact on literary production.

Resumen: El objetivo del presente estudio es llevar a cabo un análisis de los culturemas que aparecen en la literatura de Stephen King y de los procedimientos de traducción utilizados por los traductores de sus obras al francés y al español para traducir esos elementos culturales. Debido a la gran cantidad de obras que ha escrito King, nos hemos visto obligados a reducir nuestro corpus de estudio a tres novelas: It, The Shining y Pet Sematary.Para llevar a cabo el análisis del corpus, hemos recopilado, clasificado y estudiado un total de trescientos culturemas: cien de It, cien de The Shining y cien de Pet Sematary. Antes de elaborar dicho análisis, hemos recordado la clasificación de culturemas propuesta por Newmark (1992) y, partiendo de esa base, hemos seleccionado dos categorías específicas para poder darle un enfoque más concreto a nuestro trabajo: «Cultura material» y «Organizaciones, costumbres, actividades, procedimientos y conceptos». De esta manera, dentro de cada obra, hemos seleccionado cincuenta culturemas para cada una de las categorías.Finalmente, hemos realizado un estudio cuantitativo de los procedimientos de traducción que más se han utilizado en francés y en español dentro de cada una de las categorías mencionadas anteriormente. Este análisis nos ha permitido presentar de forma gráfica el porcentaje de uso de cada procedimiento y llegar así a una serie de conclusiones. Abstract: The aim of this paper is to carry out an analysis of the different cultural terms that appear in the works of Stephen King and to study which are the most common translation procedures used when translating cultural terms into two different languages: Spanish and French, since the source language is English. Due to the huge amount of works written by King, we had to select only three novels: It, The Shining and Pet Sematary.In order to carry out the analysis of our corpus, we have compiled, classified and studied a total of three hundred cultural terms: one hundred from It, one hundred from The Shining and one hundred from Pet Sematary. In this regard, it is important to outline that, in the theoretical framework, we explained the classification of cultural terms proposed by Newmark (1992) and, on this basis, we have selected two specific categories in order to give a more concrete approach to our work: “Material culture” and “Organizations, customs, activities, procedures and concepts”. Thus, within each work we have selected fifty cultural terms for each category.Finally, we also wanted to carry out a quantitative study of the translation procedures most commonly used in French and Spanish within each of the categories mentioned in the previous paragraph. This analysis has allowed us to graphically present the percentage of use of each procedure and thus establish a series of conclusions.

Among the principal successors to Alexander the Great, Lysimachus is probably the one that has suffered most by neglect in the scanty literary sources at our disposal. His wars with the Getae and their king Dromichaetes are among the few events in his long career which have received more than a casual notice in the historical tradition; no wonder that they have been examined repeatedly both in the context of Lysimachus' political biography and of the history of the region and its Thracian population, the Getae. However, many aspects of the circumstances remain obscure and dubious, and their discussion has more than once ended with the expression of hope that one day new archaeological finds might permit the solution of some of the associated riddles. The recent archaeological discoveries near Sveshtari in north-eastern Bulgaria seem now to warrant a re-examination of these problems.

…sed pro his praeoptare me fateor uno chartario calamo me reficere poemata omnigenus apta uirgae, lyrae, socco, coturno, item satiras ac griphos, item historias uarias rerum nec non orationes laudatas disertis nec non dialogos laudatos philosophis atque haec et alia eiusdem modi tarn Graece quam Latine, gemino uoto, pari studio, simili stilo.ApuleiusFlorida9…but in place of these I confess that I prefer to employ one single reed to bring to life on papyrus poems of all kinds, ones attuned to the rod, the lyre, the slipper, the buskin, likewise satires and riddles, likewise various accounts of things, and of course speeches that win plaudits from experts, and again dialogues that win plaudits from philosophers—and these and other things of the same kind in both Greek and Latin: double offering, equal application, similar style.non respondeo tibi, Aemiliane, quem colam βασιλέα; quin si ipse proconsul in-terroget, quid sit deus meus, taceo.ApuleiusApology65I am not telling you, Aemilianus, who I worship as my king; nay, even if the proconsul himself should question me as to what my god is, my lips are sealed.‘immo uero,’ inquam, ‘impertite sermone non quidem curiosum, sed qui uelim scire uel cuncta, uel certe plurima.’ApuleiusMetamorphoses1.2

Critical evaluation of Stephen King’s work is far from unanimous, with a handful of scholars producing monographs devoted to his fiction, while others dismiss him as a peddler of poorly written popular narratives motivated only by commercial success. King himself acknowledges that he is as much a brand name as an author, and that he might be considered “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonalds.” Anxieties related to the aesthetic value of prolifically produced popular fiction appear to be validated by King’s novel, The Institute (2019), which treads the familiar terrain of the King brand by utilizing the genre of speculative fiction and focusing on a child with paranormal powers. Nevertheless, although The Institute repeats many of King’s abiding concerns and tropes, it represents a significant development in his work. Less a reiteration of King’s earlier speculative fiction depicting children with telekinetic, telepathic, and pyrokinetic powers, The Institute demonstrates significant complexity and nuance in its representation of power, good and evil, and the ethics underpinning American life in the twenty-first century. In addition to critiquing corrupt social structures, The Institute interrogates the assumed powerlessness of children and condemns the commodification of the human subject by late capitalist society and its militarized forms of order. In his novel, King proves his detractors wrong by not simply reproducing his particular brand of fiction but revising its previous representations in order to meaningfully engage with a rapidly changing world.

New evidence often complicates as much as it clarifies. That truth is well illustrated by Stephen Tracy's recent and brilliant discovery that a tiny unpublished fragment of an Attic inscription belongs to a known decree (IG ii. 402). The decree has hitherto been recognised as an enactment of the oligarchy imposed by Antipater in 322. Its proposer, Archedicus of Lamptrae, was a leading member of the new regime and held the most influential office of state, that of anagrapheus, in 320/19.2 Appropriately enough the decree confers honours upon members of the Macedonian court, but as the stone now reveals, it is phrased in a remarkable and anomalous manner: ‘in order that as many as possible of the friends of the king and of Antipater may be honoured by the Athenian people and confer benefactions upon the city’. There is no question about the meaning. The decree refers to friends of an unknown king, who are also friends of Antipater. But after Alexander's death there was a dual kingship. Philip III Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV reigned jointly and are generally termed ‘the kings’. How can the singular singular be explained?

In this essay Adrienne Scullion explores the representation of war – and in particular of the Second World War – in contemporary theatre for children, considering how the narrative and performative conventions of drama communicate ideas about the conflict to young audiences. She argues that a taxonomy identified in relation to juvenile war literature – discourses of testimony and documentary, propaganda and escapism, myth and metaphor – resonates just as significantly in drama. This proposition is investigated in readings of three recent plays – Stephen Greenhorn's King Matt (TAG, 2001), David Greig's Dr Korczak's Example (TAG, 2001), and Nicola McCartney's Lifeboat (Catherine Wheels, 2002). She proposes that all three plays make different use of the conventions of telling war stories and those of theatrical performance to represent and describe war and, thereby, to explore contemporary values and expressions of citizenship – a declared goal of public policy-making in the UK. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow.

The present study aims to analyze the manifestation of fear in the fantastic narrative It, in both literature and cinema. Supernatural themes are a constant in fictional prose, providing an increase in studies on the relationship between fear and fantastic narratives. As theoretical su- pport, we build on the literary scholarship of Yi-Fu Tuan (2005), Stephen King (2013), David Roas (2014), Marcel Martin (2003) and Jacques Aumont (2013). As for methodology, a con- tent analysis model is adopted in a bibliographic, exploratory and qualitative approach. It, A novel, as a fantastic narrative, destabilizes our sources of security by questioning the validity of the systems and beliefs created by and imposed upon on humanity. The results illustrate how the fantastic genre has been characterized as presenting us phenomena and situations that signal a transgression of our reality. This rupture with the real is, therefore, a fundamen- tal effect of fantastic narratives which have also been explored in cinematic narratives.

The 1980’s saw the emergence of New Historicist criticism, particularly through Stephen Greenblatt’s work. Its legacy remains influential, particularly on Shakespearean Studies. I wish to outline New Historicist methodological insights, comment on some of its criticisms and provide analytical comments on the changing approach to historical plays, asking “What has New Historicism brought into our understanding of historical plays and the way(s) of designing kingly power?” Examining Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, I will review Greenblatt’s contention that these plays largely focus on kingly power and its relationship to “subversion” and “containment”. I intend to focus on aspects of the plays that I believe have not received enough attention through New Historicism; particularly the design of the kingly figures.

Most translation theorists agree that source text fidelity results in a translation that aptly transmits the foreign cultural values and meaning embedded within the source language to a target culture. While the preservation of foreignness might be beneficial for the propagation of international artistic diversity, when translating works of popular fiction, domestication is key to a novel’s successful incorporation into the target literary system. In popular fiction translation, the goal is accessibility rather than artistic influence or cultural exchange, yet the necessary domestication can be problematic. This article examines the reception of the English-to-French translation of an epic fantasy novel by Clive Barker. Online reviews written by the French-speaking readership describe the translated text as aberrant of Barker’s oeuvre and incomprehensible. While it may be easy to dismiss this translation as yet another example of poor translation practices, knowing that the translator, Jean-Daniel Brèque, is an award-winning translator and that he has translated many works by other popular artists such as Stephen King and Dan Simmons points the blame elsewhere. An analysis of Jean-Daniel Brèque’s translation of Weaveworld reveals the detrimental effect that strict adherence to the source text can have on the reception of popular literature in translation and affirms that domestication is necessary to transform the source text into a version digestible and understandable by the target audience.

ABSTRACTPenelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) have proposed that power (P), distance (D), and the ranked extremity (R) of a face-threatening act are the universal determinants of politeness levels in dyadic discourse. This claim is tested here for Shakespeare's use of Early Modern English in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. The tragedies are used because: (1) dramatic texts provide the best information on colloquial speech of the period; (2) the psychological soliloquies in the tragedies provide the access to inner life that is necessary for a proper test of politeness theory; and (3) the tragedies represent the full range of society in a period of high relevance to politeness theory. The four plays are systematically searched for pairs of minimally contrasting dyads where the dimensions of contrast are power (P), distance (D), and intrinsic extremity (R). Whenever such a pair is found, there are two speeches to be scored for politeness and a prediction from theory as to which should be more polite. The results for P and for R are those predicted by theory, but the results for D are not. The two components of D, interactive closeness and affect, are not closely associated in the plays. Affect strongly influences politeness (increased liking increases politeness and decreased liking decreases politeness); interactive closeness has little or no effect on politeness. The uses of politeness for the delineation of character in the tragedies are illustrated. (Politeness theory, speech act theory, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, theory of literature, Shakespeare studies)

The casket of St Simeon the God-Receiver is the most representative work in the applied arts of the Croatian Trecento and, at the same time, one which displays great iconographic complexity. Although it was the subject of two monographs and a large number of individual articles, a whole set of questions remains open and awaits plausible interpretations. Particularly great problems are connected to the interpretation of a number of scenes which were understood differently by different scholars. At the same time, it can be noted that the discussion about the casket’s complex iconographic programme lacks a study which would address it as a unique a coherent whole in which every single scene is viewed as its irreplaceable constituent part. This article aims to demonstrate that the casket’s iconographic programme, especially that of the eight panels on its main body, was selected and arranged according to a carefully developed programme the creators of which were five noblemen of Zadar to whom Queen Elizabeth, the wife of the powerful King Louis I the Great of Hungary (1342-1382), entrusted not only the silver for the making of the casket but other important details connected to the commission such as the choice of the artist and, even more importantly, the selection of the scenes through which the casket communicated with its spectators. There is no doubt that the queen had her own demands with regard to what was depicted as can be seen in the opulent dedicatory inscription which records that she was the patron of the casket but also in the donation scene where she appears together with her daughters. It can also be said with certainty that she gave instructions for the somewhat unusual panel which depicts her standing by the catafalque of her father, Ban Stephen of Bosnia (+1354) who is being sent off to the next world by St Simeon the Righteous. It should mentioned that Ban Stephen was considered a heretic – a Bogomil – which means that being a Catholic queen, his daughter attempted to rectify the past with this panel. All these scenes are at the back of the casket. The queen undoubtedly also had a say in the selection of scenes which were depicted on the front. Those relate to the life of St Simeon which, considering that we know of only one event in his life, was done in a very skilful way: the central panel shows the saint receiving the Christ Child in the scene of the Presentation in the Temple while the panels to its left and right depict the translation of the saint’s relics which have not been identified as such in the scholarly literature. The translation consists of three scenes which are always present in the cases of translation: the finding of the body (inventio corporis), the transport of the body to a new place (translatio corporis) and, finally, the placing of the body to a new site where it would remain in the future (colocatio corporis). These three scenes were interpreted by the noblemen of Zadar in an idiosyncratic way in order to affirm the medieval Zadar and its nobility on the casket itself. The scene of the inventio corporis depicts the rectors of Zadar intervening at the last moment before a group of monks from the outskirts of town get hold of the body and place it in their monastery. In the scene of the colocatio corporis, the body of St Simeon is being carried into the Church of St Mary Major in the presence of King Louis and the grateful citizens who are led by the Bishop Nicholas Matafar. This scene depicts the return of the saint’s body from Venice where, according to the author of this article, it had been taken during the local uprising against the Venetian rule (1346-1358). At the same time, the visual message of the two scenes which flank the central one was to show that the exclusive ownership of the relics belonged to the citizens of Zadar. The conflict with the monks which erupted on a local level is being resolved by the local authorities, that is, the rectors of Zadar. When the problem becomes ‘bilateral’, that is, when it involves Venice, the dispute is settled (to the benefit of the citizens of Zadar) by their sovereign, the king of Hungary and Croatia.The visual interpretation of the translation depicted on the casket relies greatly on the scenes from the cycle of the translation of the body of St Mark from the façade of St Mark’s basilica at Venice (the discovery and exhumation of the body, the transport of the body on a ship, the placing of the body in a new shrine). The author of the article, therefore, frequently compares the scenes on the Zadar casket to those from Venice.

Michele Stephen; Desire, divine and demonic; Balinese mysticism in the paintings of I Ketut Budiana and I Gusti Nyoman Mirdiana (Andrea Acri) John Lynch (ed.); Issues in Austronesian historical phonology (Alexander Adelaar) Alfred W. McCoy; The politics of heroin; CIA complicity in the global drug trade (Greg Bankoff) Anthony Reid; An Indonesian frontier; Acehnese and other histories of Sumatra (Timothy P. Barnard) John G. Butcher; The closing of the frontier; A history of the maritime fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 1850-2000 (Peter Boomgaard) Francis Loh Kok Wah, Joakim Öjendal (eds); Southeast Asian responses to globalization; Restructuring governance and deepening democracy (Alexander Claver) I Wayan Arka; Balinese morpho-syntax: a lexical-functional approach (Adrian Clynes) Zaharani Ahmad; The phonology-morphology interface in Malay; An optimality theoretic account (Abigail C. Cohn) Michael C. Ewing; Grammar and inference in conversation; Identifying clause structure in spoken Javanese (Aone van Engelenhoven) Helen Creese; Women of the kakawin world; Marriage and sexuality in the Indic courts of Java and Bali (Amrit Gomperts) Ming Govaars; Dutch colonial education; The Chinese experience in Indonesia, 1900-1942 (Kees Groeneboer) Ernst van Veen, Leonard Blussé (eds); Rivalry and conflict; European traders and Asian trading networks in the 16th and 17th centuries (Hans Hägerdal) Holger Jebens; Pathways to heaven; Contesting mainline and fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea (Menno Hekker) Ota Atsushi; Changes of regime and social dynamics in West Java; Society, state and the outer world of Banten, 1750-1830 (Mason C. Hoadley) Richard McMillan; The British occupation of Indonesia 1945-1946; Britain, the Netherlands and the Indonesian Revolution (Russell Jones) H.Th. Bussemaker; Bersiap! Opstand in het paradijs; De Bersiapperiode op Java en Sumatra 1945-1946 (Russell Jones) Michael Heppell; Limbang anak Melaka and Enyan anak Usen, Iban art; Sexual selection and severed heads: weaving, sculpture, tattooing and other arts of the Iban of Borneo (Viktor T. King) John Roosa; Pretext for mass murder; The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s coup d’état in Indonesia (Gerry van Klinken) Vladimir Braginsky; The heritage of traditional Malay literature; A historical survey of genres, writings and literary views (Dick van der Meij) Joel Robbins, Holly Wardlow (eds); The making of global and local modernities in Melanesia; Humiliation, transformation and the nature of cultural change (Toon van Meijl) Kwee Hui Kian; The political economy of Java’s northeast coast c. 1740-1800; Elite synergy (Luc Nagtegaal) Charles A. Coppel (ed.); Violent conflicts in Indonesia; Analysis, representation, resolution (Gerben Nooteboom) Tom Therik; Wehali: the female land; Traditions of a Timorese ritual centre (Dianne van Oosterhout) Patricio N. Abinales, Donna J. Amoroso; State and society in the Philippines (Portia L. Reyes) Han ten Brummelhuis; King of the waters; Homan van der Heide and the origin of modern irrigation in Siam (Jeroen Rikkerink) Hotze Lont; Juggling money; Financial self-help organizations and social security in Yogyakarta (Dirk Steinwand) Henk Maier; We are playing relatives; A survey of Malay writing (Maya Sutedja-Liem) Hjorleifur Jonsson; Mien relations; Mountain people and state control in Thailand (Nicholas Tapp) Lee Hock Guan (ed.); Civil society in Southeast Asia (Bryan S. Turner) Jan Mrázek; Phenomenology of a puppet theatre; Contemplations on the art of Javanese wayang kulit (Sarah Weiss) Janet Steele; Wars within; The story of Tempo, an independent magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia (Robert Wessing) REVIEW ESSAY Sean Turnell; Burma today Kyaw Yin Hlaing, Robert Taylor, Tin Maung Maung Than (eds); Myanmar; Beyond politics to societal imperatives Monique Skidmore (ed.); Burma at the turn of the 21st century Mya Than; Myanmar in ASEAN In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde no. 163 (2007) no: 1, Leiden

-Alan L. Karras, Lauren A. Benton, Law and colonial cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 285 pp.-Sidney W. Mintz, Douglass Sullivan-González ,The South and the Caribbean. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. xii + 208 pp., Charles Reagan Wilson (eds)-John Collins, Peter Redfield, Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xiii + 345 pp.-Vincent Brown, Keith Q. Warner, On location: Cinema and film in the Anglophone Caribbean. Oxford: Macmillan, 2000. xii + 194 pp.-Ann Marie Stock, Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-century art of Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. 416 pp.-Ineke Phaf, J.J. Oversteegen, Herscheppingen: De wereld van José Maria Capricorne. Emmastad, Curacao: Uitgeverij ICS Nederland/Curacao, 1999. 168 pp.-Halbert Barton, Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, latin popular music, and Puerto Rican cultures. Hanover NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. xxi + 290 pp.-Pedro Pérez Sarduy, John M. Kirk ,Culture and the Cuban revolution: Conversations in Havana. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xxvi + 188 pp., Leonardo Padura Fuentes (eds)-Luis Martínez-Fernández, Damián J. Fernández, Cuba and the politics of passion. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. 192 pp.-Eli Bartra, María de Los Reyes Castillo Bueno, Reyita: The life of a black Cuban woman in the twentieth century. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 182 pp.-María del Carmen Baerga, Felix V. Matos Rodríguez, Women and urban change in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820-1868. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. xii + 180 pp. [Reissued in 2001 as: Women in San Juan, 1820-1868. Princeton NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers.]-Kevin A. Yelvington, Winston James, Holding aloft the banner of Ethiopa: Caribbean radicalism in early twentieth-century America. New York: Verso, 1998. x + 406 pp.-Jerome Teelucksingh, O. Nigel Bolland, The politics of labour in the British Caribbean: The social origins of authoritarianism and democracy in the labour movement. Kingston: Ian Randle; Princeton NJ: Marcus Weiner, 2001. xxii + 720 pp.-Jay R. Mandle, Randolph B. Persaud, Counter-Hegemony and foreign policy: The dialectics of marginalized and global forces in Jamaica. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xviii + 248 pp.-Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military occupation and the culture of U.S. imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvi + 414 pp.-James W. St. G. Walker, Maureen G. Elgersman, Unyielding spirits: Black women and slavery in early Canada and Jamaica. New York: Garland, 1999. xvii + 188 pp.-Madhavi Kale, David Hollett, Passage from India to El Dorado: Guyana and the great migration. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. 325 pp.-Karen S. Dhanda, Linda Peake ,Gender, ethnicity and place: Women and identities in Guyana. London: Routledge, 1999. xii + 228 pp., D. Alissa Trotz (eds)-Karen S. Dhanda, Moses Nagamootoo, Hendree's cure: Scenes from Madrasi life in a new world. Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2000. 149 pp.-Stephen D. Glazier, Hemchand Gossai ,Religion, culture, and tradition in the Caribbean., Nathaniel Samuel Murrell (eds)-Michiel van Kempen, A. James Arnold, A history of literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch- speaking regions. (Vera M. Kuzinski & Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, sub-eds.).Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. ix + 672 pp.-Frank Birbalsingh, Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ix + 714 pp.-Frank Birbalsingh, Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xiii + 380 pp.-Jeanne Garane, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Karukéra: Présence littéraire de la Guadeloupe. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. x + 197 pp.-Jeanne Garane, Marie-Christine Rochmann, L'esclave fugitif dans la littérature antillaise: Sur la déclive du morne. Paris: Karthala, 2000. 408 pp.-Alasdair Pettinger, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert ,Women at sea: Travel writing and the margins of Caribbean discourse. New York: Palgrave, 2001. x + 301 pp., Ivette Romero-Cesareo (eds)

In the course of my research in archives – in search of documents about the history of the Art Foundation of the People’s Republic (from 1968 Art Fund) – while leafing through the sea of files in the National Archives of Hungary (MNL OL) year after year, I came across so-far unknown documents on the life and fate of Béla Kondor which had been overlooked by the special literature so far.Some reflected the character of the period from summer of 1956 to spring 1957, more precisely to the opening of the Spring Exhibition. In that spring, after relieving Rákosi of his office, the HWP (Hungarian Workers’ Party, Hun. MDP) cared less for “providing guidance for the arts”, as they were preoccupied with other, more troublesome problems. In the winter/spring after the revolution started on 23 October and crushed on 4 November the echelon of the HSWP (Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, Hun. MSzMP) had not decided yet whether to strike a league with extreme leftist artistic groups or to pay heed to Memos Makris (Hun. Makrisz Agamemnon), the ministerial commissioner designing the reform of the artists’ association and organizing the Spring Exhibition and to leave the artists – so-far forced into the strait-jacket of socialist realism – alone. I found some documents which shed bright light on the narrow-mindedness of the dogmatic artistic policy trying to bend the artists toward its goals now with the whip, now with milk cake.I start the series of recovered documents with a ministerial file dated summer 1956 on the decision to purchase Kondor’s diploma work (the Dózsa cycle). The next piece of good news is a record of the committee meeting in February 1957 awarding Kondor a Derkovits scholarship. This is followed by ministerial letters – mirrors of the new artistic policy – by a changed, truly partyist scholarship committee which apparently revel in lecturing talented Kondor who was not willing to give up his sovereignty, so his works were often refused to be bought on state funds for museums.In addition to whip-lashing documents, I also present a few which offered some milk cake: a letter inviting him to a book illustrating competition called by the Petőfi Literary Museum and one commissioning him to make the sheets on the Heves county part of a “liberation album”.Next, I put forth a group of illumining documents – long known but never published in details: the files revealing the story of the large panels designed for the walls of the “Uranium city” kindergarten in Pécs and those revealing the preparations for the exhibition in Fényes Adolf gallery in 1960 and the causes of the concurrent tensions – including texts on decisions to hinder the publication of Lajos Németh’s catalogue introduction.The last group includes futile efforts by architects to get Kondor commissions for murals. They give information on three possible works. Another for Pécs again (this time with Tibor Csernus), for works for a “men’s hostel” and on the failure of the possibility. The other is about works for Kecskemét’s Aranyhomok Hotel, another failure. The third is about a glass window competition for a new modern hotel to be built in Salgótarján, to which Kondor was also invited, but the jury did not find his work satisfactory in spite of the fact that the officials representing the city’s “party and council” organs, and the powerful head of the county and town, the president of the county committee of the HSWP all were in favour of commissioning him.Mind you, the architects’ efforts to provide the handful of modern artists with orders for “abstract” works caused headache for the masterminds of controlled art policy, too. On the one hand, they also tried to get rid of the rigidity of the ideologically dogmatic period in line with “who is not against us, is with us”, the motto spreading with political détente, and to give room to these genres qualified as “decoration”. On the other hand, they did not want to give up the figurative works of socialist contents, which the architects wanted to keep away from their modern buildings. A compromise was born: Cultural Affairs and the Art Fund remained supporters of figurative works, and the “decorative” modern murals, mosaics and sculptures were allowed inside the buildings at the cost of the builders.Apart from architects, naturally there were other spokesmen in favour of Kondor (and Csernus and the rest of the shelved artists). In an essay in Új Irás in summer 1961 Lajos Németh simply branded it a waste to deprive Kondor of all channels except book illustration, while anonymous colleagues of the National Gallery guided an American curator to him who organized an exhibition of Kondor’s graphic works he had packed into his suitcase in the Museum of Modern Art in Miami.From the early 1963 – as the rest of the explored documents reveal – better times began in Hungarian internal and cultural politics, hence in Béla Kondor’s life, too. The beginning is marked by a – still “exclusive” – exhibition he could hold in the Young Artists’ Studio in January, followed by a long propitiatory article urging for publicity for Kondor by a young journalist of Magyar Nemzet, Attila Kristóf. Then, in December Kondor became the Grand Prix winner of the second Graphic Biennial of Miskolc.From then on, the documents are no longer about incomprehensible prohibitions or at time self-satisfying wickedness, but about exhibitions (the first in King Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvár), prizes (including the Munkácsy Prize in April 1965), purchases, the marvellous panel for the Grand Hotel on Margaret Island, the preparations for the Venice Biennale of 1968, the exhibition in Art Hall/Műcsarnok in 1970 and its success, and Kondor’s second Munkácsy Prize.Finally, I chanced upon a group of startling and sofar wholly unknown notes which reveals that Béla Kondor was being among the nominees for the 1973 Kossuth Prize. News of his death on 12 December 1972, documents about the museum deposition of his posthumous works and the above group of files close the account of his life.I wrote a detailed study to accompany the documents. My intention was not to explain them – as they speak for themselves – but to insert them in the life-story of Kondor, trying to find out which and how, to what extent contributed to the veering of his life-course and to possibilities of publicity for his works. I obviously included several further facts, partly in the main body of the text, and partly in footnotes. Without presenting them here, let me just pick one or two.Events around the 1960 exhibition kindled the attention not only of the deputy minister of culture György Aczél, but also of the Ministry of the Interior: as Anikó B. Nagy dug out, they asked for an agent’s report on who Kondor was, what role he was playing among young writers, architects, artists, the circle around Vigilia and the intellectuals in general. Also: what role did human cowardice play in banning the panels for the Pécs kindergarten, and how wicked it was – with regulations cited – to ask back the advance money from an artist already hardly making a living with the termination of the Der ko vits scholarship. Again: what turn did modern Hungarian architecture undergo in the early sixties to dare and challenge the still prevalent culture political red tape? It was also a special experience to track down and describe the preparations for the Hungarian exhibition of the Venice Biennial of 1968 and to see how much caution and manoeuvring was needed even in those milder years to get permission for Béla Kondor (in the company of Tibor Vilt and Ignác Kokas) to feature in the pavilion. Finally, it was informative to follow the routes of Kondor’s estate as state acquisitions and museum deposits after his death which foiled his Kossuth Prize.

The windigo is a Native American spirit belonging to the Algonquian tribes of North America and Canada. Although well-documented in Western literature, the windigo spirit of stories like Pet Sematary by Stephen King and “The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood are stripped of their original context and are mere stereotypes of the cultures they originate from. By looking at the depictions of windigo in these specific Western stories and in Native American beliefs, it is possible to see how stripping spirits of their original contexts is harmful to Native communities. Western appropriation has long-lasting effects on the perceptions of Native American cultures by the average consumer and even scientific communities. In this paper, I document the depictions of windigo in Native American mythology, those of Western literature, and the effects of appropriation and misrepresentation on Native communities. I analyze the way the windigo are represented in Western literature and argue that Native American spirits should belong to the cultures they originate from.

Building on the foundational concepts of transformative learning theory, I argue that horror fiction strongly encourages perspective transformation by challenging student assumptions about both genre writing and educational experience. I informally describe a specific creative writing class period focusing on the motif of the scream in diverse horror texts, and I illustrate how students learn to transform what they already bring to the classroom by employing a variety of particular in-class writing exercises and literary discussions. Among these, transformative writing exercises—such as the revision of an existing text by Stephen King—are highlighted as instructional techniques. As cautionary literature, horror especially dramatizes strategies of fight versus flight. I reveal how students can learn by transforming their knowledge through disorientation that is particular to reading and writing in the horror genre.

Category: 1.01 Original scientific paper Language: Original in Slovene (Abstract in Slovene and English, Summary in English) Key words: Prekmurje, 1458–1741, historical outline, public administration, property relations, population, religion, language Abstract: This paper presents a historical outline of the almost three hundred years of development of the region known today as Prekmurje. The covered period begins with the reign of King Matthias Corvinus (from 1458, but crowned with the Crown of Saint Stephen in 1464) and ends with the coronation of Queen Maria Theresa in 1741. The three-hundred-year period did little good for the region; on the contrary, it subjected it to a great deal of misery. As a result, the period is referred to as the period of profound turning points. A brief description of the sources and literature is given initially, followed by the following chapters: I. Public administration; II. Markers of the Age – a historical outline of the period with significant events that impacted Prekmurje, and of the changes in property relations; III. Population, language, religion – population, social relations, language, and an outline of the religious conditions and ecclesiastic administration.

Gammell, Stephen. Mudkin. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 2011. Print.Kids love mud. Of this there is no doubt. There is nothing like an afternoon spent knee-deep in ooze to undo the adult tyranny of cleanliness and crown a child king— or queen, as in the case of Mudkin. In this latest offering by Caldecott-winning illustrator Stephen Gammell, an imaginative young girl teams up with a playful sprite whose onion-shaped head and squat, gnomelike body are comprised, it would seem, entirely of mud. Mud-made too are the robe and crown he offers the girl, who gladly accepts her newfound role as monarch of muck. Together, the two of them caper and romp through a backyard mud-kingdom, until the rainclouds gather and wash Mudkin and his mud-realm away. The story’s premise – a child conjuring a magical playmate out of the elements – seems familiar, echoing as it does an illustrated masterwork of an earlier generation: Raymond Briggs’s wordless classic, The Snowman. Yet while Briggs’s story ends in a minor key (the snowman, wondrously alive for a single night, melts away in the morning sun), Mudkin’s watery fate carries no sadness; nor does it offer, as The Snowman does, a tacit elegy on the transience of childhood. Gammell’s riotous watercolours (so ecstatically fluid they erupt like geysers on the page) affirm this distinction: mud, unlike snow, is chaotic and unsentimental. Not a medium for reflection, it is the stuff of pure play. As a result, Mudkin is nothing more and nothing less than a bit of good – if not entirely clean – fun. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars.Reviewer: Sarah Mead-WillisSarah is the Rare Book Cataloguer at the University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. She holds a BA and an MLIS from the University of Alberta and an MA in English Literature from the University of Victoria.

Thirty-nine participants listened to 28 neutral and horror excerpts of Stephen King short stories while constantly tracking their emotional arousal. Pupil size was measured with an Eyelink 1000+, and participants rated valence and transportation after each story. In addition to computing mean pupil size across 1-sec intervals, we extracted blink count and used detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to obtain the scaling exponents of long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs) in pupil size time-series. Pupil size was expected to be sensitive also to emotional arousal, whereas blink count and LRTC’s were expected to reflect cognitive engagement. The results showed that self-reported arousal increased, pupil size was overall greater, and the decreasing slope of pupil size was flatter for horror than for neutral stories. Horror stories induced higher transportation than neutral stories. High transportation was associated with a steeper increase in self-reported arousal across time, stronger LRTCs in pupil size fluctuations, and lower blink count. These results indicate that pupil size reflects emotional arousal induced by the text content, while LRTCs and blink count are sensitive to cognitive engagement associated with transportation, irrespective of the text type. The study demonstrates the utility of pupillometric measures and blink count to study literature reception.

Imagining Sydney’s Sexual Geography through the Gay/Lesbian Media As a cultural geographer I am interested in how the identities of places are imagined in popular culture. Places do not exist a priori, but are constructed through social and cultural processes (Anderson and Gale). This does not simply refer to how built environments are materialized through planning and building, but rather elicits the way places are represented through maps, film, literature, art, and, of crucial importance in contemporary society, a range of media sources, including newspapers, websites and television (Cosgrove and Daniels; Duncan and Ley; May). These representations are what give different localities their identities, and consequently places cannot be experienced and interpreted apart from their circulated images (Shurmer-Smith; da Costa). In this brief paper I explore how Sydney’s King Street precinct is imagined as a gay/lesbian place in the gay/lesbian media – an approach which follows the examples of Forest and Miller, who respectively examine how West Hollywood, Los Angeles, and Davie Street, Vancouver, are defined and constructed in the gay/lesbian media as ‘gay places’. At the same time, I also seek to I extend this approach by exploring how different ostensibly gay/lesbian places are infused with different gay/lesbian identities by the gay/lesbian media. Sydney makes an interesting case study here. The city possesses two notable gay/lesbian precincts: the iconic Oxford Street precinct, located in the ‘inner east’, comprising Darlinghurst, Paddington and Surry Hills; and the King Street precinct, located in the ‘inner west’, encompassing Newtown, Erskineville and Enmore. While there is some research on Oxford Street as gay/lesbian space (Wotherspoon; Faro and Wotherspoon; Murphy and Watson), academic literature is silent on the particular position of King Street in Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography. McInnes, Hodge, and Costello and Hodge, for instance, bypass King Street, and instead examine the binary between ‘inner Sydney’ and the ‘western suburbs’ generated by the gay/lesbian media. While this work is important in demonstrating how Sydney’s gay/lesbian media imagines the city’s sexual geography – a ‘queer’ inner-city and ‘straight’ suburbia – these authors omit any consideration of differences within the inner-city, and instead focus on the similarities between the various gay/lesbian spaces of inner Sydney. For example, McInnes simply states: Sydney’s two gay spaces are considered to be the area[s] centred on Oxford Street Darlinghurst … and … King Street Newtown. These two places are gay spaces largely because of the presence of gay business … and because a large number of gay men and lesbians live in these two areas. (167) However, it is also possible to examine the differences between how these two discrete spaces are imagined in the gay/lesbian media. This is one of my aims in this paper. Through examining media representations of King Street specifically, rather than the inner-city generally, I seek to advance present understandings of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography. Interpreting Media Images of King Street The commentaries analysed are taken from several gay/lesbian media sources widely circulated in Sydney – Sydney Star Observer (SSO), SX, Gay Australia Guide (GAG) and lesbian.com.au. They have been drawn from between 2003 and 2005. 2003 was selected as a suitable start date because of the closure of several gay/lesbian venues on and around Oxford Street during that year, prompting the publication of a number of articles in SSO (12 Dec. 2002, 20 Mar. 2003, 6 Nov. 2003) and SX (16 Oct. 2003, 15 July 2004) raising fears over the ‘de-gaying’ of Oxford Street. These reports signify heightened concern for the integrity of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography by the gay/lesbian media and a concomitant anxiety over the place-identities of gay/lesbian precincts. These commentaries were then subject to various textual analyses (Hannam; Shurmer-Smith). Manifest and latent content analyses were used to extract key themes about the media constructions of King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity. Here, I looked for the descriptors applied to King Street to elicit particular representations. Diverse words, like ‘alternative’ and ‘centre’, recurred over and over again. Since there seemed to be multiple – and somewhat competing – images of King Street in these media commentaries, I then turned to discourse analysis to try to understand how such divergent representations might arise, and what they signify about King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity and the precinct’s place in the gay/lesbian media’s imaginative sexual geography of Sydney (Waitt; Miller). Here I paid close attention to the interpretive context of commentaries concerned with King Street, and the places (and identities) with which King Street was juxtaposed. This closer discursive analysis suggested that where King Street is considered in the gay/lesbian media, it is often juxtaposed with Oxford Street. In other words, the gay/lesbian media seems to have constructed a binary relationship between Oxford and King Streets, so that King Street is typically identified, defined and imagined in relation to Oxford Street. However, the contours of this binary relationship are unstable and shifting, differing across the commentaries. Sometimes Oxford Street is seen as the ‘hub’ of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography, the symbolic ‘heart’ of the gay/lesbian spatial imaginary, while King Street is perceived as its ‘alternative’. But at other times, Oxford Street is described as ‘old’, and King Street is presented as its ‘successor’, the ‘new centre’ of gay/lesbian Sydney. Either way, what is significant is the way King Street is often made to rely on the image of Oxford Street for its own definition and identity. In the following discussion, I examine each of these imagined place-identities in turn, citing selected examples from the gay/lesbian media. Only the most explicit examples are presented and discussed, but the gay/lesbian media includes various other references juxtaposing and comparing the two street-precincts. King Street as the ‘Alternative’ A number of commentaries represent Oxford Street as the ‘centre’ or ‘heart’ of gay/lesbian Sydney, while King Street is presented as its ‘alternative’ (eg. SX 29 Jan. 2004). Take, for instance, the way they are juxtaposed in the following: Darlinghurst. Welcome to the hub of Sydney’s gay and lesbian community. Darlinghurst is home for some of Sydney’s hottest gay and lesbian clubs, cafes, and bars, and it’s where many community groups are based. The main strip, Oxford Street, is queer central. … Newtown. The edgier alternative to Darlinghurst. … The buzz here is on King Street, home to Sydney’s alternative and grunge crowd. (GAG’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Visitors’ Guide, 2005, 6, 15) The heart of gay Sydney is Oxford Street. … It’s loud, proud and colourful. … Want something a little more edgier and cosmopolitan? Rock into Newtown. Sydney’s most colourful characters gather around King Street and Enmore Road. (http://www.lesbian.com.au/lesbiansydney.htm) In both commentaries, King Street is imagined in relation to Oxford Street. Oxford Street is presented first: the precinct can stand alone as ‘queer central’, ‘the heart of gay Sydney’, drawing on no other places for its definition as the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney. Oxford Street simply is gay/lesbian Sydney. Meanwhile, King Street is ‘second choice’ it seems. In both reports, descriptions of King Street appear immediately after Oxford Street, and are drawn in comparison, with King Street identified as Oxford Street’s ‘edger alternative’. Since it is depicted as the ‘hub’ of gay/lesbian Sydney, Oxford Street is also imagined as Sydney’s ‘gay ghetto’, a uniformly gay/lesbian residential-and-commercial space. This is another representation against which King Street is defined in the gay/lesbian media: Since moving from Taylor Square [Oxford Street] to the Newtown/St.Peters border [King Street] … I’ve celebrated being part of a mixed community. … Don’t get me wrong. I love living gay. … But a couple of years spent drowning in the ghetto has made me appreciate the simple things about not being a part of it. (SSO 20 Jan. 2005) Newtown is a culturally diverse suburb and fortunately it is gay-friendly, not a gay ghetto. People can be themselves in Newtown without fear of persecution. (SSO 27 Jan. 2005) I do not believe that Newtown [King Street] is a ‘gay ghetto’ … Granted, it is one of the few places where I can walk hand in and with my (male) partner and feel relatively safe. However, there is a wide diversity of people here, and the LGBT community is only a part of it. (SSO 21 Jan. 2005) Although these commentators are clearly happy to represent King Street as a ‘gay-friendly’ locality rather than a ‘gay ghetto’, this identity is only attained in contrast with Oxford Street, the gay ghetto. Again King Street is depicted as Oxford Street’s alternative, its particular ‘gay-friendly’ place-identity bound to a comparative relationship with Oxford Street. King Street as the ‘New Centre’ But this centre/alternative binary is unstable. In other commentaries, King Street is not presented as the ‘alternative’, but as the ‘successor’ to Oxford Street, the ‘new centre’ of gay/lesbian Sydney. Take the following commentary from GAG (Summer 2003), which now promotes King Street the ‘best gay street in Australia’: King Street, Newtown, is now the best GLBTI street in Sydney and, inevitably, in Oz – no argument. It’s book-ended by Victoria Park at its city end – site of the annual Mardi Gras fair day and poolside pashing all year round – and Sydney Park at its southern end – queer dog off-leash heaven. Without any of Oxford Street’s tackiness, here you’ll find the kissingest, handholdingest fags and dykes, along with hets who aren’t out to hoon or hurt. … Why? Because 24/7 it’s a lived-in street, not an after-hours entertainment strip for the desperate and dateless. King Street’s claim to be the ‘best gay street in Australia’, however, is tellingly made in direct comparison with Oxford Street (and interestingly, not with ‘gay streets’ in other Australian cities): while Oxford Street is a ‘tacky entertainment strip’, King Street is ‘lived-in’. Oxford Street continues to haunt the place-identity of King Street: even in being imagined as the ‘top’ gay precinct, King Street is defined against and through Oxford Street. In a similar vein, another article from SSO (21 Oct. 2004) asserts that ‘Newtown’s King Street is set to overtake Darlinghurst’s Oxford Street as the epicentre of gay Sydney’. The report outlines evidence for the elevation of King Street to the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney, in terms of residential visibility and the number of gay/lesbian organisations moving to the area, which include the New Mardi Gras, Twenty10 (a gay/lesbian youth service), the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service, the Gender Centre and the Metropolitan Community Church. Yet even as King Street succeeds Oxford Street as the ‘epicentre of gay Sydney’, the precinct is imagined through Oxford Street: the article is entitled ‘King Street the new Darlo’. Here, King Street is not acknowledged as the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney in its own terms, by virtue of its own identity as a gay/lesbian place, but through replacing Oxford Street. Literally re-placing: King Street is not the ‘new centre’: it is the ‘new Darlo’. It is as if Oxford Street is inherently and synonymously ‘central’, and King Street can only be seen as central through being imagined as Oxford Street. In doing this, rather than asserting King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity, Oxford Street’s identity as the symbolic ‘heart’ of Sydney’s gay/lesbian spatial imaginary is confirmed. It is not Oxford Street that has been dis-placed by King Street’s growing gay/lesbian community and identity. Rather, King Street’s identity has been dis-placed by the continued representation of Oxford Street as ‘queer central’. Conclusion The identities of different places are not ‘natural’, but constructed through social and cultural representations. In contemporary western society, the media – print, television, web-based – is a key producer and disseminator of place images and identities. This paper has sought to add to our understanding of this phenomenon. Specifically, I have sought to explore how the gay/lesbian media can influence the gay/lesbian identities of certain places. Moreover, by exploring how King Street has been represented in and through the gay/lesbian media vis-à-vis Oxford Street, I have attempted to understand how different gay/lesbian places are imbued with different and multiple gay/lesbian identities in the gay/lesbian media. Consequently, this discussion also augments our understanding of Sydney’s particular gay/lesbian geography, providing a more nuanced understanding of the imaginative sexual identities of different places collectively imagined as gay/lesbian. Several specific conclusions can be drawn here. First, King and Oxford Streets are imagined differently by the gay/lesbian media. Second, King Street is imagined in relation to Oxford Street. Third, these relational depictions shift between alternative to, and a successor of, Oxford Street. Finally, either way, King Street is often made to rely upon Oxford Street for its place-identity, infrequently imagined apart from Oxford Street. Yet, since place-identities are fluid and unstable, this may change in the future, especially as King Street continues to develop as a locality of gay/lesbian community and identity. And in looking to the future, I hope the claims made here stimulate further enquiry into the nuanced relationship between Sydney’s gay/lesbian precincts. More work remains to be done – not just of media representations – but in-depth interviews and participant observations to understand the experiences of King Street’s residents, and what this particular place means to them and their identities. References Anderson, Kay, and Fay Gale, eds. Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography. Melbourne: Longman Chesire, 1992. Anon. “Oxford Hotel in Receivership.” Sydney Star Observer 6 Nov. 2003. Benzie, Tim. “Bye Bye Beresford.” Sydney Star Observer 12 Dec. 2002. ———. “Barracks Down.” Sydney Star Observer 20 Mar. 2003. Cosgrove, Daniel and Stephen Daniels. Eds. The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Costello, Lauren, and Stephen Hodge. “Queer/Clear/Here: Destabilising Sexualities and Space.” Australian Cultural Geographies. Ed. Elaine Stratford. South Melbourne: Oxford, 1999. 131-152. Da Costa, Maria Helena. “Cinematic Cities: Researching Films as Geographical Texts.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 191-201. Duncan, James, and David Ley, eds. Place/Culture/Representation. London: Routledge, 1993. Farrar, Stacy. “I See Gay People.” Sydney Star Observer 21 Jan. 2005. Faro, Clive, with Garry Wotherspoon. Street Seen: A History of Oxford Street. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000. Fishlock, Gary. “And Then There Were Nine.” SX 16 Oct. 2003. ———. “Oxford Street, Darlinghurst.” SX 29 Jan. 2004. ———. “A Call to Arms.” SX 15 July 2004. Forest, Benjamin. “West Hollywood as Symbol: The Significance of Place in the Construction of a Gay Identity.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13.2 (1995): 133-157. Hannam, Kevin. “Coping with Archival and Textual Data.” Doing Cultural Geography. Ed. Pamela Shurmer-Smith. London: Sage, 2002. 189-197. Hodge, Stephen. “No Fags Out There: Gay Men, Identity and Suburbia.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 1.1 (1995): 41-48. Lesbian Sydney. 28 Nov. 2005 http://www.lesbian.com.au/lesbiansydney.htm>. May, Jon. “The View from the Streets: Geographies of Homelessness in the British Newspaper Press.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 23-36. McInnes, David. “Inside the Outside: Politics and Gay and Lesbian Spaces in Sydney.” Queer City: Gay and Lesbian Politics in Sydney. Eds. Craig Johnston and Paul van Reyk. Pluto Press: Annandale, 2001. 164-178. Miller, Vincent. “Intertextuality, the Referential Illusion and the Production of a Gay Ghetto.” Social and Cultural Geography 6.1 (2005): 61-80. Murphy, Peter and Sophie Watson. “Gay Sites and the Pink Dollar.” Written with Iain Bruce. Chapter 4 of Surface City: Sydney at the Millenium. Pluto: Annandale, 1997. O’Grady, Dominic, ed. Gay Australia Guide’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Visitors’ Guide. Blackheath: Gay Travel Guides, 2005. Reader views. Sydney Star Observer 27 Jan. 2005. Shurmer-Smith, Pamela. “Reading Texts.” Doing Cultural Geography. Ed. Pamela Shurmer-Smith. London: Sage, 2002. 123-136. Van Reyk, Paul. “Best Gay Street – King Street Newtown, Sydney.” Gay Australia Guide 9 (Summer 2003): 11. Waitt, Gordon. “Doing Discourse Analysis.” Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography. Ed. Iain Hay. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005. 163-191. Wearring, Myles. “King Street the New Darlo.” Sydney Star Observer 21 Oct. 2004. Wotherspoon, Garry. City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-Culture. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gorman-Murray, Andrew. "Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/04-gorman-murray.php>. APA Style Gorman-Murray, A. (Jul. 2006) "Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/04-gorman-murray.php>.

Autumn is not only a gloriously colourful time of the year, it is a time when a plethora of children’s book related events and awards take place. Just see what is happening in the next few months:IBBY: “Silent Books: Final Destination Lampedusa” travelling exhibit In response to the international refugee crisis that began last year, the Italian arm of the International Board on Books for Young People has launched a travelling picture-book exhibit to support the first children’s library on the island of Lampedusa, Italy where many African and Middle Eastern refugees are landing. After stops in Italy, Mexico, and Austria, the exhibit is currently touring Canada. It premiered in Edmonton at the Stanley A. Milner Library in August. Next are three Vancouver locations: UBC Irving Barber Learning Centre (Oct. 1 to 23), Vancouver Public Library central branch (Oct. 8 to 18), and the Italian Cultural Centre (Oct. 10 to 22). Then the North York Central Library in Toronto from Nov. 2 to Dec 11. Recognizing Lampedusa island’s cultural diversity, the exhibit comprises exclusively wordless picture books from 23 countries, including three from Canada:“Hocus Pocus” by Sylvie Desrosiers & Rémy Simard’s (Kids Can Press), “Ben’s Big Dig” by Daniel Wakeman and Dirk van Stralen’s(Orca Book Publishers)“Ben’s Bunny Trouble” also by Wakeman and van Stralen (Orca Book Publishers). Other books are drawn from an honour list selected by a jury of experts from the 2015 Bologna Children’s Book Fair including Ajubel’s “Robinson Crusoe” (Spain), Ara Jo’s “The Rocket Boy”(Korea), and Madalena Matoso’s “Todos Fazemos Tudo” (Switzerland), among others. The full catalogue can be viewed online.TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.Next year’s TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will take place from May 7-14, 2016. Thirty Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and storytellers will be touring across Canada visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres. Visit the TD Book Week site (www.bookweek.ca) to find out who will be touring in your area and the types of readings and workshops they will be giving. If your school or library is interested in hosting a Book Week visitor, you can apply online starting in mid-October.Shakespeare Selfie CBC Books will once again be running the Shakespeare Selfie writing challenge in April 2016. Shakespeare took selfies all the time but instead of a camera, he used a quill. And instead of calling them "selfies," they were called "soliloquies."The challenge: Write a modern-day soliloquy or monologue by a Shakespearean character based on a prominent news, pop culture or current affairs event from the last year (April 2015-April 2016). It can be in iambic pentameter or modern syntax with a word count from 200 to 400 words. There are two age categories: Grades 7-9 and 10-12. Details at: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/10/the-2016-shakespeare-selfie-writing-challenge-for-students.html Awards:The winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, celebrating Jewish literature and culture in Canada, have been announced. Amongst the nine awards is one for Youth Literature which was awarded to Suri Rosen for “Playing with Matches” (ECW Press). See all the award winners here: http://www.cjlawards.ca/.The Canadian Children's Book Centre administers several awards including the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. This year’s winners will be announced on November 18, 2015. http://www.bookcentre.ca/awardThe Fitzhenry Family Foundation has revealed the winners of its Lane Anderson Awards for the best Canadian science books published in the previous year. Selections are made based on a title’s pertinence to science in today’s world and the author’s ability to relate scientific issues to everyday life. Prolific Halifax kids’ science writer L.E. Carmichael was awarded the YA prize for “Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild” (Ashby-BP Publishing), about using forensic science to fight crimes against animals. Uxbridge, Ontario–based environmental journalist Stephen Leahy received the adult prize for “Your Water Footprint” (Firefly Books), which examines human usage of the valuable natural resource. http://laneandersonaward.ca/The Edmonton Public Library has named Sigmund Brouwer (author and Rock & Roll Literacy Show host) as the winner (by public vote) of Alberta Reader’s Choice Award. Sigmund’s “Thief of Glory” (WaterBrook Press) is about a young boy trying to take care of his family in the aftermath of the 1942 Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. The prize awards $10,000 to an Alberta-based author of a work of excellent fiction or narrative non-fiction. http://www.epl.ca/alberta-readers-choiceHarperCollins Canada, the Cooke Agency, and the University of British Columbia have announced the shortlist of the annual HarperCollins Publishers/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction awarded to students and alumni of UBC’s creative writing program, and offers the winner literary representation by the Cooke Agency and a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada.“Between the Wind and Us” by Iranian-Canadian writer Nazanine Hozar, the story of a young abandoned girl set during the political unrest of 1953–1979 Iran.“Learning to Breathe” by B.C.-based Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel about a Caribbean teenager’s struggle to establish herself in a new city and home life.“At The Top of the Wall, Alight” by Sudbury, Ontario, author Natalie Morrill, which follows a Viennese Jew separated from his family during the Second World War. An early version of this novel was previously nominated for the award.Novelist and University of Guelph writing professor, Thomas King, and L.A.-based author, graphic novelist, and musician, Cecil Castellucci, have been named winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for excellence in Canadian literature of the fantastic. Castellucci won in the YA category for “Tin Star” (Roaring Brook/Raincoast), the first novel in a planned series about a teenager who struggles to survive parent-less in a space station where she is the only human, and which played scene to a brutal assault that haunts her memory. King won in the adult category for his novel “The Back of the Turtle” (HarperCollins Canada), for which he also received a Copper Cylinder Award from the Sunburst Society last week. The book follows a First Nations scientist who finds himself torn after he’s sent to clean up the ecological mess his company has left on the reserve his family grew up on.Be sure to save October 28th on your calendar for the GG book awards announcement. Of course, “GG” stands for Governor-General. The short lists can be viewed here:http://ggbooks.ca/books/. There are categories in both English and French for both children’s text and illustration books.Online ResourcesPodcast: Yegs and Bacon: Episode 22: the full audio from our recent Indigenous Representation in Popular Culture panel. In the audio, you’ll be hearing from (in order of first vocal appearance) Brandon, who introduces the panelists, James Leask, Richard Van Camp, Kelly Mellings, and Patti Laboucane-Benson. Recorded on Monday, September 28th, 2015. http://variantedmonton.com/category/yegs-and-bacon/European Picture Book Collection: The EPBC was designed to help pupils to find out more about their European neighbours through reading the visual narratives of carefully chosen picture books. Here you can find out about how the project began, the theoretical papers that have been presented on European children's literature, and how the materials were initially used in schools. http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/EN/index.aspMore next time around,Yours in stories, Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

AWARDSSome major international children’s literature awards have just been announced as I compile the news for this issue. Several of these have Canadian connections.2016 ALSC (Association for Library Service to Children) Book & Media Award WinnersJohn Newbery Medal"Last Stop on Market Street,” written by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Christian Robinson and published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA) LLC Newbery Honor Books"The War that Saved My Life," written by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley and published by Dial Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA) LLC“Roller Girl,” written and illustrated by Victoria Jamieson and published by Dial Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA) LLC“Echo,” written by Pam Muñoz Ryan and published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.Randolph Caldecott Medal"Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear," illustrated by Sophie Blackall, written by Lindsay Mattick and published by Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.Caldecott Honor Books"Trombone Shorty," illustrated by Bryan Collier, written by Troy Andrews and published by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS“Waiting,” illustrated and written by Kevin Henkes, published by Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers“Voice of Freedom Fannie Lou Hamer Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement,” illustrated by Ekua Holmes, written by Carole Boston Weatherford and published by Candlewick Press“Last Stop on Market Street,” illustrated by Christian Robinson, written by Matt de le Peña and published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA) LLC Laura Ingalls Wilder AwardJerry Pinkney -- His award-winning works include “The Lion and the Mouse,” recipient of the Caldecott Award in 2010. In addition, Pinkney has received five Caldecott Honor Awards, five Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards, and four Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honors. 2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture AwardJacqueline Woodson will deliver the 2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture. Woodson is the 2014 National Book Award winner for her New York Times bestselling memoir, “Brown Girl Dreaming.” Mildred L. Batchelder Award“The Wonderful Fluffy Little Squishy,” published by Enchanted Lion Books, written and illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna, and translated from the French by Claudia Zoe BedrickBatchelder Honor Books“Adam and Thomas,” published by Seven Stories Press, written by Aharon Appelfeld, iIllustrated by Philippe Dumas and translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green“Grandma Lives in a Perfume Village,” published by NorthSouth Books, an imprint of Nordsüd Verlag AG, written by Fang Suzhen, iIllustrated by Sonja Danowski and translated from the Chinese by Huang Xiumin“Written and Drawn by Henrietta,” published by TOON Books, an imprint of RAW Junior, LLC and written, illustrated, and translated from the Spanish by Liniers.Pura Belpre (Author) Award“Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir," written by Margarita Engle and published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing DivisionBelpre (Author) Honor Books"The Smoking Mirror," written by David Bowles and published by IFWG Publishing, Inc."Mango, Abuela, and Me," written by Meg Medina, illustrated by Angela Dominguez and published by Candlewick PressPura Belpre (Illustrator) Award"The Drum Dream Girl," illustrated by Rafael López, written by Margarita Engle and published by Houghton Mifflin HarcourtBelpre (Illustrator) Honor Books"My Tata’s Remedies = Los remedios de mi tata,” iIllustrated by Antonio Castro L., written by Roni Capin Rivera-Ashford and published by Cinco Puntos Press“Mango, Abuela, and Me,” illustrated by Angela Dominguez, written by Meg Medina and published by Candlewick Press“Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras,” illustrated and written by Duncan Tonatiuh and published by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMSAndrew Carnegie Medal "That Is NOT a Good Idea," produced by Weston Woods Studios, Inc.Theodor Seuss Geisel Award"Don’t Throw It to Mo!" written by David A. Adler, illustrated by Sam Ricks and published by Penguin Young Readers, and imprint of Penguin Group (USA), LLCGeisel Honor Books "A Pig, a Fox, and a Box," written and illustrated by Jonathan Fenske and published by Penguin Young Readers, an Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC"Supertruck," written and illustrated by Stephen Savage and published by A Neal Porter Book published by Roaring Brook Press, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership"Waiting," written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes and published by Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.Odyssey Award"The War that Saved My Life," produced by Listening Library, an imprint of the Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group, written by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley and narrated by Jayne EntwistleOdyssey Honor Audiobook"Echo," produced by Scholastic Audio / Paul R. Gagne, written by Pam Munoz Ryan and narrated by Mark Bramhall, David De Vries, MacLeod Andrews and Rebecca SolerRobert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal"Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras,” written and illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh and published by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMSSibert Honor Books"Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans," written and illustrated by Don Brown and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt"The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club," by Phillip Hoose and published by Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers"Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March," written by Lynda Blackmon Lowery as told to Elspeth Leacock and Susan Buckley, illustrated by PJ Loughran and published by Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC"Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement," written by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Ekua Holmes and published by Candlewick PressCONFERENCES & EVENTSThis 2016 is shaping up to be a busy year for those of us involved with Canadian children’s literature. To tantalize your appetite (and encourage you to get involved) here are some highlights:January:Vancouver Children’s Literature Roundtable event: A Celebration of BC’s Award Children’s Authors and Illustrators with special guests Rachel Hartman and the Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada 2015 Information Book Award winners Margriet Ruurs & Katherine Gibson, January 27, 2016, 7 – 9 pm. Creekside Community Centre, 1 Athletes Way, Vancouver. Free to members and students.April:Wordpower programs from the Young Alberta Book Society feature teams of Albertan children’s literary artists touring to schools in rural areas. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Cenovus Energy, schools unable to book artist visits due to prohibitive travel costs are able to participate.April 4-8: Wordpower South will send 8 artist teams to communities roughly between Drumheller and Medicine Hat. Artists include Karen Bass, Lorna Shultz-Nicholson, Bethany Ellis, Marty Chan, Mary Hays, Sigmund Brouwer, Carolyn Fisher, Natasha DeenApril 25-29: Wordpower North will have a team of 8 artists traveling among communities in north-eastern Alberta such as Fort MacKay, Conklin, Wabasca, Lac La Biche, Cold Lake, and Bonnyville. The artists include Kathy Jessup, Lois Donovan, Deborah Miller, David Poulsen, Gail de Vos, Karen Spafford-Fitz, Hazel Hutchins, Georgia Graham May: COMICS AND CONTEMPORARY LITERACY: May 2, 2016; 8:30am - 4:30pm at the Rozsa Centre, University of Calgary. This is a one day conference featuring presentations and a workshop by leading authors, scholars, and illustrators from the world of comics and graphic novels. This conference is the 5th in the annual 'Linguistic Diversity and Language Policy' series sponsored by the Chair, English as an Additional Language, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. Tom Ricento is the current Chair-holder. The conference is free and lunch is provided. Seating is limited, so register early. The four presenters are:Jillian Tamaki, illustrator for This One Summer, and winner of the Governor General's Award for children's illustration.Richard van Camp, best-selling author of The Lesser Blessed and Three Feathers, and member of the Dogrib Nation.Dr. Nick Sousanis, post-doctoral scholar, teacher and creator of the philosophical comic Unflattening.Dr. Bart Beaty, University of Calgary professor, acclaimed comics scholar and author of Comics vs. Art TD Canadian Children’s Book Week 2016. In 2016, the Canadian Children's Book Centre celebrates 40 years of bringing great Canadian children's books to young readers across the country and the annual TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will be occurring this May across Canada. The theme this year is the celebration of these 40 years of great books written, illustrated and published in Canada as well as stories that have been told over the years. The 2016 tour of storytellers, authors and illustrators and their area of travel are as follows:Alberta: Bob Graham, storyteller; Kate Jaimet, authorBritish Columbia (Interior region) Lisa Dalrymple, author; (Lower Mainland region) Graham Ross, illustrator; (Vancouver Island region) Wesley King, author; (Northern region, Rebecca Bender, author & illustrator.Manitoba: Angela Misri, author; Allison Van Diepen, authorNew Brunswick: Mary Ann Lippiatt, storytellerNewfoundland: Maureen Fergus, authorLabrador: Sharon Jennings, authorNorthwest Territories: Geneviève Després, illustratorNova Scotia: Judith Graves, authorNunavut: Gabrielle Grimard, illustratorOntario: Karen Autio, author; Marty Chan, author; Danika Dinsmore, author; Kallie George, author; Doretta Groenendyk, author & illustrator; Alison Hughes, author; Margriet Ruurs, author.Prince Edward Island: Wallace Edwards, author & illustratorQuebec (English-language tour): LM Falcone, author; Simon Rose, author; Kean Soo, author & illustrator; Robin Stevenson, author; and Tiffany Stone, author/poet.Saskatchewan: (Saskatoon and northern area) Donna Dudinsky, storyteller; (Moose Jaw/Regina and southern area) Sarah Ellis, authorYukon: Vicki Grant, author-----Gail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

Like any genre or mode, the Gothic is malleable, changing according to time and place. This is particularly apparent when what is considered Gothic in one era is compared with that of another. The giant helmet that falls from the sky in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) is a very different threat to the ravenous vampires that stalk the novels of Anne Rice, just as Ann Radcliffe’s animated portraits may not inspire anxiety for a contemporary reader of Stephen King. The mutability of Gothic is also apparent across various versions of national Gothic that have emerged, with the specificities of place lending Gothic narratives from countries such as Ireland, Scotland and Australia a distinctive flavour. In New Zealand, the Gothic is most commonly associated with Pakeha artists exploring extreme psychological states, isolation and violence. Instead of the haunted castles, ruined abbeys and supernatural occurrences of classic Gothics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as those produced by writers as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown, Matthew Lewis, Edgar Allen Poe, Radcliffe, Bram Stoker and Walpole, New Zealand Gothic fiction tends to focus on psychological horror, taking its cue, according to Jenny Lawn, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which ushered in a tendency in the Gothic novel to explore the idea of a divided consciousness. Lawn observes that in New Zealand “Our monsters tend to be interior: they are experiences of intense psychological states, often with sexual undertones within isolated nuclear families” (“Kiwi Gothic”). Kirsty Gunn’s novella Rain (1994), which focuses on a dysfunctional family holidaying in an isolated lakeside community, exemplifies the tendency of New Zealand Gothic to omit the supernatural in favour of the psychological, with its spectres being sexual predation, parental neglect and the death of an innocent. Bronwyn Bannister’s Haunt (2000) is set primarily in a psychiatric hospital, detailing various forms of psychiatric disorder, as well as the acts that spring from them, such as one protagonist’s concealment for several years of her baby in a shed, while Noel Virtue’s The Redemption of Elsdon Bird (1987) is another example, with a young character’s decision to shoot his two younger siblings in the head as they sleep in an attempt to protect them from the religious beliefs of his fundamentalist parents amply illustrating the intense psychological states that characterise New Zealand Gothic. Although there is no reason why Gothic literature ought to include the supernatural, its omission in New Zealand Gothic does point to a confusion that Timothy Jones foregrounds in his suggestion that “In the absence of the trappings of established Gothic traditions – castles populated by fiendish aristocrats, swamps draped with Spanish moss and possessed by terrible spirits” New Zealand is “uncertain how and where it ought to perform its own Gothic” (203). The anxiety that Jones notes is perhaps less to do with where the New Zealand Gothic should occur, since there is an established tradition of Gothic events occurring in the bush and on the beach, while David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) uses a derelict slaughterhouse as a version of a haunted castle and Maurice Gee successfully uses a decrepit farmhouse as a Gothic edifice in The Fire-Raiser (1986), but more to do with available ghosts. New Zealand Gothic literature produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries certainly tends to focus on the psychological rather than the supernatural, but earlier writing that utilises the Gothic mode is far more focused on spooky events and ghostly presences. There is a tradition of supernatural Gothic in New Zealand, but its representations of Maori ghosts complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. The stories in D. W. O. Fagen’s collection Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand (1952) illustrate the tendency in colonial New Zealand literature to represent Maori in supernatural terms expressive both of anxieties surrounding Maori agency and indigeneity, as well as Western assumptions regarding Maori culture. In much colonial Gothic, Maori ghosts, burial grounds and the notion of tapu express settler anxieties while also working to contain those anxieties by suggesting the superstitious and hence backward nature of indigenous culture. In Fagan’s story “Tapu”, which first appeared in the Bulletin in 1912, the narrator stumbles into a Maori burial ground where he is confronted by the terrible sight of “two fleshless skeletons” that grin and appear “ghastly in the dim light” (37). The narrator’s desecration of land deemed tapu fills him with “a sort of nameless terror at nothing, a horror of some unknown impending fate against which it was useless to struggle and from which there was no escape” (39). This expresses a sense of the authenticity of Maori culture, but the narrator’s thought “Was there any truth in heathen devilry after all?” is quickly superseded by the relegation of Maori culture as “ancient superstitions” (40). When the narrator is approached by a tohunga following his breach of tapu, his reaction is outrage: "Here was I – a fairly decent Englishman, reared in the Anglican faith and living in the nineteenth century – hindered from going about my business, outcast, excommunicated, shunned as a leper, my servant dying, all on account of some fiendish diablerie of heathen fetish. The affair was preposterous, incredible, ludicrous" (40). Fagan’s story establishes a clear opposition between Western rationalism and “decency”, and the “heathen fetishes” associated with Maori culture, which it uses to infuse the story with the thrills appropriate to Gothic fiction and which it ultimately casts as superstitious and uncivilised. F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863) includes an episode of Maori women grieving that is represented in terms that would not be out of place in horror. A group of women are described as screaming, wailing, and quivering their hands about in a most extraordinary manner, and cutting themselves dreadfully with sharp flints and shells. One old woman, in the centre of the group, was one clot of blood from head to feet, and large clots of coagulated blood lay on the ground where she stood. The sight was absolutely horrible, I thought at the time. She was singing or howling a dirge-like wail. In her right hand she held a piece of tuhua, or volcanic glass, as sharp as a razor: this she placed deliberately to her left wrist, drawing it slowly upwards to her left shoulder, the spouting blood following as it went; then from the left shoulder downwards, across the breast to the short ribs on the right side; then the rude but keen knife was shifted from the right hand to the left, placed to the right wrist, drawn upwards to the right shoulder, and so down across the breast to the left side, thus making a bloody cross on the breast; and so the operation went on all the time I was there, the old creature all the time howling in time and measure, and keeping time also with the knife, which at every cut was shifted from one hand to the other, as I have described. She had scored her forehead and cheeks before I came; her face and body was a mere clot of blood, and a little stream was dropping from every finger – a more hideous object could scarcely be conceived. (Maning 120–21) The gory quality of this episode positions Maori as barbaric, but Patrick Evans notes that there is an incident in Old New Zealand that grants authenticity to indigenous culture. After being discovered handling human remains, the narrator of Maning’s text is made tapu and rendered untouchable. Although Maning represents the narrator’s adherence to his abjection from Maori society as merely a way to placate a local population, when a tohunga appears to perform cleansing rituals, the narrator’s indulgence of perceived superstition is accompanied by “a curious sensation […] like what I fancied a man must feel who has just sold himself, body and bones, to the devil. For a moment I asked myself the question whether I was not actually being then and there handed over to the powers of darkness” (qtd. in Evans 85). Evans points out that Maning may represent the ritual as solely performative, “but the result is portrayed as real” (85). Maning’s narrator may assert his lack of belief in the tohunga’s power, but he nevertheless experiences that power. Such moments of unease occur throughout colonial writing when assertions of European dominance and rational understanding are undercut or threatened. Evans cites the examples of the painter G. F. Angus whose travels through the native forest of Waikato in the 1840s saw him haunted by the “peculiar odour” of rotting vegetation and Edward Shortland whose efforts to remain skeptical during a sacred Maori ceremony were disturbed by the manifestation of atua rustling in the thatch of the hut in which it was occurring (Evans 85). Even though the mysterious power attributed to Maori in colonial Gothic is frequently represented as threatening, there is also an element of desire at play, which Lydia Wevers highlights in her observation that colonial ghost stories involve a desire to assimilate or be assimilated by what is “other.” Wevers singles out for discussion the story “The Disappearance of Letham Crouch”, which appeared in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in 1901. The narrative recounts the experiences of an overzealous missionary who is received by Maori as a new tohunga. In order to learn more about Maori religion (so as to successfully replace it with Christianity), Crouch inhabits a hut that is tapu, resulting in madness and fanaticism. He eventually disappears, only to reappear in the guise of a Maori “stripped for dancing” (qtd. in Wevers 206). Crouch is effectively “turned heathen” (qtd. in Wevers 206), a transformation that is clearly threatening for a Christian European, but there is also an element of desirability in such a transformation for a settler seeking an authentic New Zealand identity. Colonial Gothic frequently figures mysterious experiences with indigenous culture as a way for the European settler to essentially become indigenous by experiencing something perceived as authentically New Zealand. Colonial Gothic frequently includes the supernatural in ways that are complicit in the processes of colonisation that problematizes them as models for contemporary writers. For New Zealanders attempting to produce a Gothic narrative, the most immediately available tropes for a haunting past are Maori, but to use those tropes brings texts uncomfortably close to nineteenth-century obsessions with Maori skeletal remains and a Gothicised New Zealand landscape, which Edmund G. C. King notes is a way of expressing “the sense of bodily and mental displacement that often accompanied the colonial experience” (36). R. H. Chapman’s Mihawhenua (1888) provides an example of tropes particularly Gothic that remain a part of colonial discourse not easily transferable into a bicultural context. Chapman’s band of explorers discover a cave strewn with bones which they interpret to be the remains of gory cannibalistic feasts: Here, we might well imagine, the clear waters of the little stream at our feet had sometime run red with the blood of victims of some horrid carnival, and the pale walls of the cavern had grown more pale in sympathy with the shrieks of the doomed ere a period was put to their tortures. Perchance the owners of some of the bones that lay scattered in careless profusion on the floor, had, when strong with life and being, struggled long and bravely in many a bloody battle, and, being at last overcome, their bodies were brought here to whet the appetites and appease the awful hunger of their victors. (qtd. in King) The assumptions regarding the primitive nature of indigenous culture expressed by reference to the “horrid carnival” of cannibalism complicate the processes through which contemporary writers could meaningfully draw on a tradition of New Zealand Gothic utilising the supernatural. One answer to this dilemma is to use supernatural elements not specifically associated with New Zealand. In Stephen Cain’s anthology Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side (1996) there are several instances of this, such as in the story “Never Go Tramping Alone” by Alyson Cresswell-Moorcock, which features a creature called a Gravett. As Timothy Jones’s discussion of this anthology demonstrates, there are two problems arising from this unprecedented monster: firstly, the story does not seem to be a “New Zealand Gothic”, which a review in The Evening Post highlights by observing that “there is a distinct ‘Kiwi’ feel to only a few of the stories” (Rendle 5); while secondly, the Gravatt’s appearance in the New Zealand landscape is unconvincing. Jones argues that "When we encounter the wendigo, a not dissimilar spirit to the Gravatt, in Ann Tracy’s Winter Hunger or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, we have a vague sense that such beings ‘exist’ and belong in the American or Canadian landscapes in which they are located. A Gravatt, however, has no such precedent, no such sense of belonging, and thus loses its authority" (251). Something of this problem is registered in Elizabeth Knox’s vampire novel Daylight (2003), which avoids the problem of making a vampire “fit” with a New Zealand landscape devoid of ancient architecture by setting all the action in Europe. One of the more successful stories in Cain’s collection demonstrates a way of engaging with a specifically New Zealand tradition of supernatural Gothic, while also illustrating some of the potential pitfalls in utilising colonial Gothic tropes of menacing bush, Maori burial caves and skeletal remains. Oliver Nicks’s “The House” focuses on a writer who takes up residence in an isolated “little old colonial cottage in the bush” (8). The strange “odd-angled walls”, floors that seem to slope downwards and the “subterranean silence” of the cottage provokes anxiety in the first-person narrator who admits his thoughts “grew increasingly dark and chaotic” (8). The strangeness of the house is only intensified by the isolation of its surroundings, which are fertile but nevertheless completely uninhabited. Alone and unnerved by the oddness of the house, the narrator listens to the same “inexplicable night screeches and rustlings of the bush” (9) that furnish so much New Zealand Gothic. Yet it is not fear inspired by the menacing bush that troubles the narrator as much as the sense that there was more in this darkness, something from which I felt a greater need to be insulated than the mild horror of mingling with a few wetas, spiders, bats, and other assorted creepy-crawlies. Something was subtlely wrong here – it was not just the oddness of the dimensions and angles. Everything seemed slightly off, not to add up somehow. I could not quite put my finger on whatever it was. (10) When the narrator escapes the claustrophobic house for a walk in the bush, the natural environment is rendered in spectral terms. The narrator is engulfed by the “bare bones of long-dead forest giants” (11) and “crowding tree-corpses”, but the path he follows in order to escape the “Tree-ghosts” is no more comforting since it winds through “a strange grey world with its shrouds of hanging moss, and mist” (12). In the midst of this Gothicised environment the narrator is “transfixed by the intersection of two overpowering irrational forces” when something looms up out of the mist and experiences “irresistible curiosity, balanced by an equal and opposite urge to turn and run like hell” (12). The narrator’s experience of being deep in the threatening bush continues a tradition of colonial writing that renders the natural environment in Gothic terms, such as H. B. Marriot Watson’s The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure (1891), which includes an episode that sees the protagonist Palliser become lost in the forest of Te Tauru and suffer a similar demoralization as Nicks’s narrator: “the horror of the place had gnawed into his soul, and lurked there, mordant. He now saw how it had come to be regarded as the home of the Taniwha, the place of death” (77). Philip Steer points out that it is the Maoriness of Palliser’s surroundings that inspire his existential dread, suggesting a certain amount of settler alienation, but “Palliser’s survival and eventual triumph overwrites this uncertainty with the relegation of Maori to the past” (128). Nicks’s story, although utilising similar tropes to colonial fiction, attempts to puts them to different ends. What strikes such fear in Nicks’s narrator is a mysterious object that inspires the particular dread known as the uncanny: I gave myself a stern talking to and advanced on the shadow. It was about my height, angular, bony and black. It stood as it now stands, as it has stood for centuries, on the edge of a swamp deep in the heart of an ancient forest high in this remote range of hills forming a part of the Southern Alps. As I think of it I cannot help but shudder; it fills me even now with inexplicable awe. It snaked up out of the ground like some malign fern-frond, curving back on itself and curling into a circle at about head height. Extending upwards from the circle were three odd-angled and bent protuberances of unequal length. A strange force flowed from it. It looked alien somehow, but it was man-made. Its power lay, not in its strangeness, but in its unaccountable familiarity; why did I know – have I always known? – how to fear this… thing? (12) This terrible “thing” represents a return of the repressed associated with the crimes of colonisation. After almost being devoured by the malevolent tree-like object the narrator discovers a track leading to a cave decorated with ancient rock paintings that contains a hideous wooden creature that is, in fact, a burial chest. Realising that he has discovered a burial cave, the narrator is shocked to find more chests that have been broken open and bones scattered over the floor. With the discovery of the desecrated burial cave, the hidden crimes of colonisation are brought to light. Unlike colonial Gothic that tends to represent Maori culture as threatening, Nicks’s story represents the forces contained in the cave as a catalyst for a beneficial transformative experience: I do remember the cyclone of malign energy from the abyss gibbering and leering; a flame of terror burning in every cell of my body; a deluge of shrieking unreason threatening to wash away the bare shred that was left of my mind. Yet even as each hellish new dimension yawned before me, defying the limits even of imagination, the fragments of my shattered sanity were being drawn together somehow, and reassembled in novel configurations. To each proposition of demonic impossibility there was a surging, answering wave of kaleidoscopic truth. (19) Although the story replicates colonial writing’s tendency to represent indigenous culture in terms of the irrational and demonic, the authenticity and power of the narrator’s experience is stressed. When he comes to consciousness following an enlightenment that sees him acknowledging that the truth of existence is a limitless space “filled with deep coruscations of beauty and joy” (20) he knows what he must do. Returning to the cottage, the narrator takes several days to search the house and finally finds what he is looking for: a steel box that contains “stolen skulls” (20). The narrator concludes that the “Trophies” (20) buried in the collapsed outhouse are the cause for the “Dark, inexplicable moods, nightmares, hallucinations – spirits, ghosts, demons” that “would have plagued anyone who attempted to remain in this strange, cursed region” (20). Once the narrator returns the remains to the burial cave, the inexplicable events cease and the once-strange house becomes an ideal home for a writer seeking peace in which to work. The colonial Gothic mode in New Zealand utilises the Gothic’s concern with a haunting past in order to associate that past with the primitive and barbaric. By rendering Maori culture in Gothic terms, such as in Maning’s blood-splattered scene of grieving or through the spooky discoveries of bone-strewn caves, colonial writing compares an “uncivilised” indigenous culture with the “civilised” culture of European settlement. For a contemporary writer wishing to produce a New Zealand supernatural horror, the colonial Gothic is a problematic tradition to work from, but Nicks’s story succeeds in utilising tropes associated with colonial writing in order to reverse its ideologies. “The House” represents European settlement in terms of barbarity by representing a brutal desecration of sacred ground, while indigenous culture is represented in positive, if frightening, terms of truth and power. Colonial Gothic’s tendency to associate indigenous culture with violence, barbarism and superstition is certainly replicated in Nicks’s story through the frightening object that attempts to devour the narrator and the macabre burial chests shaped like monsters, but ultimately it is colonial violence that is most overtly condemned, with the power inhabiting the burial cave being represented as ultimately benign, at least towards an intruder who means no harm. More significantly, there is no attempt in the story to explain events that seem outside the understanding of Western rationality. The story accepts as true what the narrator experiences. Nevertheless, in spite of the explicit engagement with the return of repressed crimes associated with colonisation, Nicks’s engagement with the mode of colonial Gothic means there is a replication of some of its underlying notions relating to settlement and belonging. The narrator of Nicks’s story is a contemporary New Zealander who is placed in the position of rectifying colonial crimes in order to take up residence in a site effectively cleansed of the sins of the past. Nicks’s narrator cannot happily inhabit the colonial cottage until the stolen remains are returned to their rightful place and it seems not to occur to him that a greater theft might underlie the smaller one. Returning the stolen skulls is represented as a reasonable action in “The House”, and it is a way for the narrator to establish what Linda Hardy refers to as “natural occupancy,” but the notion of returning a house and land that might also be termed stolen is never entertained, although the story’s final sentence does imply the need for the continuing placation of the powerful indigenous forces that inhabit the land: “To make sure that things stay [peaceful] I think I may just keep this story to myself” (20). The fact that the narrator has not kept the story to himself suggests that his untroubled occupation of the colonial cottage is far more tenuous than he might have hoped. References Ballantyne, David. Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Melbourne: Text, 2010. Bannister, Bronwyn. Haunt. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000. Calder, Alex. “F. E. Maning 1811–1883.” Kotare 7. 2 (2008): 5–18. Chapman, R. H. Mihawhenua: The Adventures of a Party of Tourists Amongst a Tribe of Maoris Discovered in Western Otago. Dunedin: J. Wilkie, 1888. Cresswell-Moorcock, Alyson. “Never Go Tramping Along.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 63-71. Evans, Patrick. The Long Forgetting: Postcolonial Literary Culture in New Zealand. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007. Fagan, D. W. O. Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1952. Gee, Maurice. The Fire-Raiser. Auckland: Penguin, 1986. Gunn, Kirsty. Rain. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Hardy, Linda. “Natural Occupancy.” Meridian 14.2 (October 1995): 213-25. Jones, Timothy. The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic. PhD thesis. Wellington: Victoria University, 2010. King, Edmund G. C. “Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century Zealand Writing,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 28.2 (2010): 35-57. “Kiwi Gothic.” Massey (Nov. 2001). 8 Mar. 2014 ‹http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/magazine/2001_Nov/stories/gothic.html›. Maning, F. E. Old New Zealand and Other Writings. Ed. Alex Calder. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. Marriott Watson, H. B. The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure. London: Hutchinson, 1891. Nicks, Oliver. “The House.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 8-20. Rendle, Steve. “Entertaining Trip to the Dark Side.” Rev. of Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side, ed. Stephen Cain. The Evening Post. 17 Jan. 1997: 5. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Patrick Nobes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Steer, Philip. “History (Never) Repeats: Pakeha Identity, Novels and the New Zealand Wars.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 25 (2007): 114-37. Virtue, Noel. The Redemption of Elsdon Bird. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: Penguin, 2010. Wevers, Lydia. “The Short Story.” The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. Ed. Terry Sturm. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991: 203–70.

From the sensuous scenes of culinary delectation and preparatory foreplay in Eat Drink Man Woman to the current crop of texts infused with metaphors of consumption as assimilation, writers and filmmakers have signified diasporic Asian bodies by merging cultural and racial markers. This is an introduction to the issues involved in representing the Asian body in diaspora and the politically fraught issues for racial minority populations in majority 'white' nations. Examples in this piece skim from Japanese-Canadian literature and metaphors of ingestion to racial minority identity politics in the United States. In Chorus of Mushrooms, a novel by Japanese-Canadian Hiromi Goto, one of the foci for the Tonkatsus' cultural change-over from the Japanese to the Canadian side of the hyphen is a determined alteration in eating habits. 'Western' food is the only type provided and the grandmother, Naoe, comments that her daughter has "converted from rice and daikon to weiners and beans" (13). In many ways, Keiko tries to force her family to eat their way into a new Canadian skin. Ostensibly, through the absorption of Western-style Canadian food, the Tonkatsus would achieve the goal of becoming one of 'them'. Using metaphors of cultural miscegenation, Keiko's daughter Muriel, as well as Obasan's Naomi and Stephen Nakane, could be described as 'banana'-yellow on the outside, white on the inside (Brydon 104). In the Asian-Australian literature and politics Webpages, The Banana Schtick, this term is reclaimed deliberately and defines specific issues for Asian-Australian writers and academic work which bypass the usual 'area studies' presumptions. This customarily derogatory metaphor is used by those within and without racial minority communities, across most class groups, barring the embedded invisibility of whiteness. Similar metaphors which denote the clashing (or possible melding) of races or cultures include the use of the term 'oreos' for African-Americans who take on what are deemed white, middle-class characteristics, or who do not act 'like a negro should' (Dyson 222). The term 'apples' has referred to Native Americans and 'coconuts' to individuals of South-East Asian or West Indian origin. The plethora of food metaphors link these models of hybrid identities with notions of cultural consumption and ingestion. Yau Ching, while examining Ang Lee's film Eat Drink Man Woman, observes: "those close-ups of the kungfu of chopping and stir-frying constitute a postmodern version of the West's Chinoiserie. I felt like I was stripteasing, selling something that I didn't have" (31). Yau's positioning as a part of the 'striptease' offered by the highly detailed shots of food preparation evokes discomfort. The scenes are meant to be evocatively 'Chinese' and operated as cultural shorthand: "food thus serves as an index of the imaginary 'heritage' passed on, the racial symbolism, the alimentary sign of Chineseness" (31). This obsession with the minutiae of process and material becomes a part of what Shu-Mei Shih calls a "porno-culinary genre" (1), another way for 'chinese-ness' to be observed, assessed, and ultimately consumed. A site that reacts explicitly to this commodification of Asian-ness, and particularly Asian women, is Mimi Nguyen's Exoticise This! It provides an excellent listing of Asian feminist and Third World women's resources, zines, and creative work. Notably, it is one of the few critically engaged, non-pornographic sites that will appear during a search for "Asian women" using Web search engines or directories. As pointers of racial/cultural doubling, the food markers mentioned above assume a constant social or mental bearing as 'towards white': white as the centre, as the most desired once again. The community or familial censure that this 'doubling' encounters could be read as a start in eroding the assumed attractive power of being 'white,' except that the judgments are based on essentialist ideas of what white/non-white means (in behaviour, talk, etc.) and their incompatability. This mode of reasoning maintains that a subject must be one side of the hyphenated identity or the other. For the most part, the terms used to describe the 'whitened' Others are analogous with various versions of raw produce and organic perishables. Conversely, "whiteness [is] often signified ... by commodities and brands: Wonder Bread, Kleenex, Heinz 57. In this identification, whiteness [comes] to be seen as spoiled by capitalism, and as being linked with capitalism in a way other cultures are not" (Frankenberg 199). The condition of whiteness as embodying capitalism inflect various constructions of western 'modernity', as well as the assumption that this kind of modernity is the logical state to which all nations and communities aspire. The growing area of 'whiteness' studies, and publications like Race Traitor, challenge this notion of a neutral flesh colour. The tokenistic acceptance of racial minority communities promotes divisiveness by allowing only a narrow range of representation for 'coloured' peoples. This perpetuates the masking of white privilege in that it remains the always-present and never-questioned. David Palumbo-Liu, an Asian-American race theorist, presents the symbiotic relationship between Korean-Americans and Anglo-Americans in the 1990s as an example of this creation of self-destructive alienation. He uses the incidents surrounding the 1992 Los Angeles riots, post-Rodney King trial, to emphasise how "Korean-Americans were represented as the frontline forces of the white bourgeoisie" (371), protecting their goods and property, being part of the capitalist programme which enabled them to become asset-rich 'Americans'. In most images and reports, the presence of white Americans (in downtown south-central Los Angeles) was elided while that of black Americans was amplified. Ruth Frankenberg suggests that "racist discourse ... frequently accords hypervisibility to African Americans and a relative invisibility to Asian Americans and Native Americans" (12). Palumbo-Liu states more specifically: the locating, real and figurative, of Asians in between the dominant and minor is made less tenuous and even rationalized by a particular element which situates Asians within the dominant ideology, and frees them of the burden of their ethnicity and race while retaining (for obvious ideological purposes) the signifier of racial difference: the notion of self-affirmative action. (371) The basic desire to be accepted/assimilated into majority white societies has meant that, in some instances, Asian citizens are complicit with the promulgation of certain stereotypes of themselves. Bypassing the expectations and approvals of white society altogether are increasing numbers of Asian-Canadian and Asian-American texts, whether in the form of novels, magazines (such as Giant Robot), or films, which do not assume a white audience but, instead, one that recognises the stereotypes and amalgamations of being part of diasporic Asian communities in North America and elsewhere. References Brydon, Diana. "Discovering 'Ethnicity': Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Mena Abdullah's Time of the Peacock." Australian/Canadian Literatures in English: Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Russell McDougall and Gillian Whitlock. Melbourne: Methuen, 1987. 94-110. Ching, Yau. "Can I Have MSG, an Egg Roll To Suck on and Asian American Media on the Side?" Fuse 20.1 (1997): 27-34. Dyson, Michael Eric. "Essentialism and the Complexities of Racial Identity." Multiculturalism: A Reader. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1994. 218-29. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. London: Routledge, 1993. Goto, Hiromi. Chorus of Mushrooms. Edmonton: NeWest P, 1994. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Markham: Penguin, 1981. Lee, Ang, dir. Eat Drink Man Woman. Samuel Goldwyn, 1994. Palumbo-Liu, David. "Los Angeles, Asians, and Perverse Ventriloquisms: On the Function of Asian America in the Recent American Imaginary." Public Culture 6 (1994): 365-81. Shih, Shu-mei. "Globalization, Minoritization, and Ang Lee's Films." Paper given at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies, 23-28 June 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tseen Khoo. "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, Porno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php>. Chicago style: Tseen Khoo, "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, Porno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tseen Khoo. (1999) Fetishising flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian representation, porno-culinary genres, and the racially marked body. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.

This paper argues that illegitimacy is a concept that relates to almost all of the fundamental ways in which Western society has traditionally organised itself. Sex, family and marriage, and the power of the church and state, are all implicated in the various ways in which society reproduces itself from generation to generation. All employ the concepts of legitimacy and illegitimacy to define what is and what is not permissible. Further, the creation of the illegitimate can occur in more or less legitimate ways; for example, through acts of consent, on the one hand; and force, on the other. This paper uses the study of an English Renaissance text, Shakespeare’s Henry V, to argue that these concepts remain potent ones, regularly invoked as a means of identifying and denouncing perceived threats to the good ordering of the social fabric. In western societies, many of which may be constructed as post-marriage, illegitimate is often applied as a descriptor to unlicensed migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In countries subject to war and conflict, rape as a war crime is increasingly used by armies to create fractures within the subject community and to undermine the paternity of a cohort of children. In societies where extramarital sex is prohibited, or where rape has been used as a weapon of war, the bastard acts as physical evidence that an unsanctioned act has been committed and the laws of society broken, a “failure in social control” (Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, 5). This paper explores these themes, using past conceptions of the illegitimate and bastardy as an explanatory concept for problematic aspects of legitimacy in contemporary culture.Bastardy was a particularly important issue in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe when an individual’s genealogy was a major determining factor of social status, property and identity (MacFarlane). Further, illegitimacy was not necessarily an aspect of a person’s birth. It could become a status into which they were thrust through the use of divorce, for example, as when Henry VIII illegitimised his daughter Mary after annulling his marriage to Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon. Alison Findlay’s study of illegitimacy in Renaissance literature lists over 70 portrayals of illegitimacy, or characters threatened with illegitimacy, between 1588 and 1652 (253–257). In addition to illegitimacy at an individual level however, discussions around what constitutes the “illegitimate” figure in terms of its relationship with the family and the wider community, are also applicable to broader concerns over national identity. In work such as Stages of History, Phyllis Rackin dissected images of masculine community present in Shakespeare’s history plays to expose underlying tensions over gender, power and identity. As the study of Henry V indicates in the following discussion, illegitimacy was also a metaphor brought to bear on issues of national as well as personal identity in the early modern era. The image of the nation as a “family” to denote unity and security, both then and now, is rendered complex and problematic by introducing the “illegitimate” into that nation-family image. The rhetoric used in the recent debate over the Scottish independence referendum, and in Australia’s ongoing controversy over “illegitimate” migration, both indicate that the concept of a “national bastard”, an amorphous figure that resists precise definition, remains a potent rhetorical force. Before turning to the detail of Henry V, it is useful to review the use of “illegitimate” in the early modern context. Lacking an established position within a family, a bastard was in danger of being marginalised and deprived of any but the most basic social identity. If acknowledged by a family, the bastard might become a drain on that family’s economic resources, drawing money away from legitimate children and resented accordingly. Such resentment may be reciprocated. In his essay “On Envy” the scientist, author, lawyer and eventually Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon explained the destructive impulse of bastardy as follows: “Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious. For he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.” Thus, bastardy becomes a plot device which can be used to explain and to rationalise evil. In early modern English literature, as today, bastardy as a defect of birth is only one meaning for the word. What does “in everything illegitimate” (quoting Shakespeare’s character Thersites in Troilus and Cressida [V.viii.8]) mean for our understanding of both our own society and that of the late sixteenth century? Bastardy is an important ideologeme, in that it is a “unit of meaning through which the ‘social space’ constructs the ideological values of its signs” (Schleiner, 195). In other words, bastardy has an ideological significance that stretches far beyond a question of parental marital status, extending to become a metaphor for national as well as personal loss of identity. Anti-Catholic polemicists of the early sixteenth century accused priests of begetting a generation of bastards that would overthrow English society (Fish, 7). The historian Polydore Vergil was accused of suborning and bastardising English history by plagiarism and book destruction: “making himself father to other men’s works” (Hay, 159). Why is illegitimacy so important and so universal a metaphor? The term “bastard” in its sense of mixture or mongrel has been applied to language, to weaponry, to almost anything that is a distorted but recognisable version of something else. As such, the concept of bastardy lends itself readily to the rhetorical figure of metaphor which, as the sixteenth century writer George Puttenham puts it, is “a kind of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or coueniencie with it” (Puttenham, 178). Later on in The Art of English Poesie, Puttenham uses the word “bastard” to describe something that can best be recognised as being an imperfect version of something else: “This figure [oval] taketh his name of an egge […] and is as it were a bastard or imperfect rounde declining toward a longitude.” (101). “Bastard” as a descriptive term in this context has meaning because it connects the subject of discussion with its original. Michael Neill takes an anthropological approach to the question of why the bastard in early modern drama is almost invariably depicted as monstrous or evil. In “In everything illegitimate: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama,” Neill argues that bastards are “filthy”, using the term as it is construed by Mary Douglas in her work Purity and Danger. Douglas argues that dirt is defined by being where it should not be, it is “matter in the wrong place, belonging to ‘a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications,’ a source of fundamental pollution” (134). In this argument the figure of the bastard aligns strongly with the concept of the Other (Said). Arguably, however, the anthropologist Edmund Leach provides a more useful model to understand the associations of hybridity, monstrosity and bastardy. In “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, Leach asserts that our perceptions of the world around us are largely based on binary distinctions; that an object is one thing, and is not another. If an object combines attributes of itself with those of another, the interlapping area will be suppressed so that there may be no hesitation in discerning between them. This repressed area, the area which is neither one thing nor another but “liminal” (40), becomes the object of fear and of fascination: – taboo. It is this liminality that creates anxiety surrounding bastards, as they occupy the repressed, “taboo” area between family and outsiders. In that it is born out of wedlock, the bastard child has no place within the family structure; yet as the child of a family member it cannot be completely relegated to the external world. Michael Neill rightly points out the extent to which the topos of illegitimacy is associated with the disintegration of boundaries and a consequent loss of coherence and identity, arguing that the bastard is “a by-product of the attempt to define and preserve a certain kind of social order” (147). The concept of the liminal figure, however, recognises that while a by-product can be identified and eliminated, a bastard can neither be contained nor excluded. Consequently, the bastard challenges the established order; to be illegitimate, it must retain its connection with the legitimate figure from which it diverges. Thus the illegitimate stands as a permanent threat to the legitimate, a reminder of what the legitimate can become. Bastardy is used by Shakespeare to indicate the fear of loss of national as well as personal identity. Although noted for its triumphalist construction of a hero-king, Henry V is also shot through with uncertainties and fears, fears which are frequently expressed using illegitimacy as a metaphor. Notwithstanding its battle scenes and militarism, it is the lawyers, genealogists and historians who initiate and drive forward the narrative in Henry V (McAlindon, 435). The reward of the battle for Henry is not so much the crown of France as the assurance of his own legitimacy as monarch. The lengthy and legalistic recital of genealogies with which the Archbishop of Canterbury proves to general English satisfaction that their English king Henry holds a better lineal right to the French throne than its current occupant may not be quite as “clear as is the summer sun” (Henry V 1.2.83), but Henry’s question about whether he may “with right and conscience” make his claim to the French throne elicits a succinct response. The churchmen tell Henry that, in order to demonstrate that he is truly the descendant of his royal forefathers, Henry will need to validate that claim. In other words, the legitimacy of Henry’s identity, based on his connection with the past, is predicated on his current behaviour:Gracious lord,Stand for your own; unwind your bloody flag;Look back into your mighty ancestors:Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb,From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit…Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,And with your puissant arm renew their feats:You are their heir, you sit upon their throne,The blood and courage that renowned themRuns in your veins….Your brother kings and monarchs of the earthDo all expect that you should rouse yourselfAs did the former lions of your blood. (Henry V 1.2.122 – 124)These exhortations to Henry are one instance of the importance of genealogy and its immediate connection to personal and national identity. The subject recurs throughout the play as French and English characters both invoke a discourse of legitimacy and illegitimacy to articulate fears of invasion, defeat, and loss of personal and national identity. One particular example of this is the brief scene in which the French royalty allow themselves to contemplate the prospect of defeat at the hands of the English:Fr. King. ‘Tis certain, he hath pass’d the river Somme.Constable. And if he be not fought withal, my lord,Let us not live in France; let us quit all,And give our vineyards to a barbarous people.Dauphin. O Dieu vivant! shall a few sprays of us,The emptying of our fathers’ luxury,Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds,And overlook their grafters?Bourbon. Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!...Dauphin. By faith and honour,Our madams mock at us, and plainly sayOur mettle is bred out; and they will giveTheir bodies to the lust of English youthTo new-store France with bastard warriors. (Henry V 3.5.1 – 31).Rape and sexual violence pervade the language of Henry V. France itself is constructed as a sexually vulnerable female with “womby vaultages” and a “mistress-court” (2.4.131, 140). In one of his most famous speeches Henry graphically describes the rape and slaughter that accompanies military defeat (3.3). Reading Henry V solely in terms of its association of military conquest with sexual violence, however, runs the risk of overlooking the image of bastards themselves as both the threat and the outcome of national defeat. The lines quoted above exemplify the extent to which illegitimacy was a vital metaphor within early modern discourses of national as well as personal identity. Although the lines are divided between various speakers – the French King, Constable (representing the law), Dauphin (the Crown Prince) and Bourbon (representing the aristocracy) – the images develop smoothly and consistently to express English dominance and French subordination, articulated through images of illegitimacy.The dialogue begins with the most immediate consequence of invasion and of illegitimacy: the loss of property. Legitimacy, illegitimacy and property were so closely associated that a case of bastardy brought to the ecclesiastical court that did not include a civil law suit about land was referred to as a case of “bastardy speciall”, and the association between illegitimacy and property is present in this speech (Cowell, 14). The use of the word “vine” is simultaneously a metonym for France and a metaphor for the family, as in the “family tree”, conflating the themes of family identity and national identity that are both threatened by the virile English forces.As the dialogue develops, the rhetoric becomes more elaborate. The vines which for the Constable (from a legal perspective) represented both France and French families become instead an attempt to depict the English as being of a subordinate breed. The Dauphin’s brief narrative of the English origins refers to the illegitimate William the Conqueror, bastard son of the Duke of Normandy and by designating the English as being descendants of a bastard Frenchman the Dauphin attempts to depict the English nation as originating from a superabundance of French virility; wild offshoots from a true stock. Yet “grafting” one plant to another can create a stronger plant, which is what has happened here. The Dauphin’s metaphors, designed to construct the English as an unruly and illegitimate offshoot of French society, a product of the overflowing French virility, evolve instead into an emblem of a younger, stronger branch which has overtaken its enfeebled origins.In creating this scene, Shakespeare constructs the Frenchmen as being unable to contain the English figuratively, still less literally. The attempts to reduce the English threat by imagining them as “a few sprays”, a product of casual sexual excess, collapses into Bourbon’s incoherent ejaculation: “Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!” and the Norman bastard dominates the conclusion of the scene. Instead of containing and marginalising the bastard, the metaphoric language creates and acknowledges a threat which cannot be marginalised. The “emptying of luxury” has engendered an uncontrollable illegitimate who will destroy the French nation beyond any hope of recovery, overrunning France with bastards.The scene is fascinating for its use of illegitimacy as a means of articulating fears not only for the past and present but also for the future. The Dauphin’s vision is one of irreversible national and familial disintegration, irreversible because, unlike rape, the French women’s imagined rejection of their French families and embrace of the English conquerors implies a total abandonment of family origins and the willing creation of a new, illegitimate dynasty. Immediately prior to this scene the audience has seen the Dauphin’s fear in action: the French princess Katherine is shown learning to speak English as part of her preparation for giving her body to a “bastard Norman”, a prospect which she anticipates with a frisson of pleasure and humour, as well as fear. This scene, between Katherine and her women, evokes a range of powerful anxieties which appear repeatedly in the drama and texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: anxieties over personal and national identity, over female chastity and masculine authority, and over continuity between generations. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost – Further Explored points out that “the engendering of children on a scale which might threaten the social structure was never, or almost never, a present possibility” (154) at this stage of European history. This being granted, the Dauphin’s depiction of such a “wave” of illegitimates, while it might have no roots in reality, functioned as a powerful image of disorder. Illegitimacy as a threat and as a strategy is not limited to the renaissance, although a study of renaissance texts offers a useful guidebook to the use of illegitimacy as a means of polarising and excluding. Although as previously discussed, for many Western countries, the marital status of one’s parents is probably the least meaningful definition associated with the word “illegitimate”, the concept of the nation as a family remains current in modern political discourse, and illegitimate continues to be a powerful metaphor. During the recent independence referendum in Scotland, David Cameron besought the Scottish people not to “break up the national family”; at the same time, the Scottish Nationalists have been constructed as “ungrateful bastards” for wishing to turn their backs on the national family. As Klocker and Dunne, and later O’Brien and Rowe, have demonstrated, the emotive use of words such as “illegitimate” and “illegal” in Australian political rhetoric concerning migration is of long standing. Given current tensions, it might be timely to call for a further and more detailed study of the way in which the term “illegitimate” continues to be used by politicians and the media to define, demonise and exclude certain types of would-be Australian immigrants from the collective Australian “national family”. Suggestions that persons suspected of engaging with terrorist organisations overseas should be stripped of their Australian passports imply the creation of national bastards in an attempt to distance the Australian community from such threats. But the strategy can never be completely successful. Constructing figures as bastard or the illegitimate remains a method by which the legitimate seeks to define itself, but it also means that the bastard or illegitimate can never be wholly separated or cast out. In one form or another, the bastard is here to stay.ReferencesBeardon, Elizabeth. “Sidney's ‘Mongrell Tragicomedy’ and Anglo-Spanish Exchange in the New Arcadia.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010): 29 - 51.Davis, Kingsley. “Illegitimacy and the Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939).John Cowell. The Interpreter. Cambridge: John Legate, 1607.Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Findlay, Alison. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.Hay, Denys. Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost - Further Explored. London: Methuen, 1983.Laslett, P., K. Oosterveen, and R. M. Smith, eds. Bastardy and Its Comparative History. London: Edward Arnold, 1980.Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” E. H. Lennenberg, ed. New Directives in the Study of Language. MIT Press, 1964. 23-63. MacFarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.Mclaren, Ann. “Monogamy, Polygamy and the True State: James I’s Rhetoric of Empire.” History of Political Thought 24 (2004): 446 – 480.McAlindon, T. “Testing the New Historicism: “Invisible Bullets” Reconsidered.” Studies in Philology 92 (1995):411 – 438.Neill, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on English Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.Reekie, Gail. Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rowe, Elizabeth, and Erin O’Brien. “Constructions of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Political Discourse”. In Kelly Richards and Juan Marcellus Tauri, eds., Crime Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2013.Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.Shakespeare, William. Henry V in The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J.E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York and London: Norton, 2008.

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

Who Are Carers? A carer is any individual who provides unpaid care and support to a family member or friend who has a disability, mental illness, drug and/or alcohol dependency, chronic condition, terminal illness or who is frail. Carers come from all walks of life, cultural backgrounds and age groups. For many, caring is a 24 hour-a-day job with emotional, physical and financial impacts, with implications for their participation in employment, education and community activities. Carers exist in all communities, including amongst Aboriginal communities, those of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, amongst Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex communities, and throughout metropolitan, regional and rural areas (Carers NSW). These broad characteristics mean that caring occurs across a wide variety of situations and care responsibilities can impact an even wider group of people. The ubiquitous nature of informal care warrants its consideration as a major social issue, as well as the potential impacts that these roles can have on carers in both short and long term contexts. Caring for a loved one is often an unseen component of people’s domestic lives. As will be outlined below, the potentially burdensome nature of care can have negative influences on carers’ wellbeing. As such, factors that can enhance the resilience of carers in the face of such adversity have been widely investigated. This being said, individual differences exist in carers’ responses to their caring responsibilities. The caring experience can therefore be argued to exist on a continuum, from the adversity in relation to stressful challenges through to prosperity in light of their caring responsibilities. By considering the experience of care as existing along this continuum, the place of resilience within people’s domestic spaces can be viewed as a mechanism towards identifying and developing supportive practices. Negative Impacts of Care A significant body of research has identified potential negative impacts of caring. Many of the most commonly cited outcomes relate to negative effects on mental health and/or psychological functioning, including stress, anxiety and depression (e.g. Baker et al.; Barlow, Cullen-Powell and Cheshire; Cheshire, Barlow and Powell; Dunn et al.; Gallagher et al.; Hastings et al.; Lach et al.; Singer; Sörensen et al.; Vitaliano, Zhang and Scanlan; Whittingham et al.; Yamada et al.). These feelings can be exacerbated when caring responsibilities become relentlessly time consuming, as demonstrated by this comment from a carer of a person with dementia: “I can’t get away from it” (O'Dwyer, Moyle and van Wyk 758). Similarly, emotional responses such as sorrow, grief, anger, frustration, and guilt can result from caring for a loved one (Heiman; Whittingham et al.). Negative emotional responses are not necessarily a direct result of caring responsibilities as such, but an understanding of the challenges faced by the person requiring their care. The following quote from the carer of a child with autism exemplifies the experience of sorrow: “It was actually the worst day of our lives, that was the day we came to terms with the fact that we had this problem” (Midence and O’Neill 280). Alongside these psychological and emotional outcomes, physical health may also be negatively impacted due to certain demands of the caring role (Lach et al.; Sörensen et al.; Vitaliano, Zhang and Scanlan). Outcomes such as these are likely to vary across individual caring circumstances, dictated by variables such as the specific tasks required of the carer, and individual personality characteristics of both the carer and the person for whom they care. Nevertheless, an awareness of these potential outcomes is particularly important when considering the place of resilience in the domestic space of individuals caring for a loved one. This conceptualisation of caring as being a burdensome task reflects many publicly held perceptions. If caring is widely viewed as compromising carers’ wellbeing, then there is likely to be an increased likelihood of carers viewing themselves as victims. This is particularly true amongst children and adolescents with caring responsibilities, since young people are most susceptible to having their personal identities shaped by others’ perceptions (Andreouli, Skovdal and Campbell). Resilience in Caring Adversity Despite the widely acknowledged potential for caring to have negative consequences for carers, it must be noted that the occurrence of these outcomes are not inevitable. In fact, much of the research that has identified increased stress amongst carers also finds that the majority cope well with the demands of their role (Barnett et al.). These carers have been considered by many researchers to demonstrate resilience (e.g. Barnett et al.; O'Dwyer, Moyle and van Wyk). The ability to respond positively despite exposure to risk or adversity is a key feature of most definitions of resilience (Luthar, Cicchetti and Becker; Masten and Obradović; Zauszniewski, Bekhet and Suresky). Resilience in this context can thus be defined as a psychological process that facilitates healthy functioning in response to intense life stressors (Johnson et al.). Since caring experiences are likely to continue for an extended period of time, resilience is likely to be necessary on an ongoing basis, rather than in response to a single traumatic event. A resilient carer is therefore one who is able to effectively and adaptively cope with extenuating pressures of caring for a loved one. This involves the presence of personal, social, familial, or institutional protective factors that enable carers to resist stress (Kaplan et al.). For example, support from health professionals, family, or community has been found to effectively support carers in coping with their role (Bekhet, Johnson and Zauszniewski; Gardiner and Iarocci; Heiman; Whittingham et al.). The benefit of support networks in assisting carers to cope in their role is widely reported in the associated research, reinforced by many examples such as the following from a carer of a person with dementia: “It’s a social thing, like, I’ve got friends on there… I find that is my escape” (O'Dwyer, Moyle and van Wyk 758). At an individual level, those who demonstrate resilient in the face of adversity demonstrate optimistic or hopeful outlooks (Ekas, Lickenbrock and Whitman; Lloyd and Hastings; Whittingham et al.), while simultaneously holding realistic expectations of the future (Rasmussen et al.; Wrosch, Miller, et al.; Wrosch, Scheier, et al.). Such attitudes are particularly significant amongst people caring for family members or friends with disabilities or illnesses. The following attitude held by a carer of a child with cerebral palsy exemplifies this optimistic outlook: “I look at the glass half full and say that “well, it’s only his walking, everything else is fine”. “So, get over [it] and deal with it” (Whittingham et al. 1451). Those who cognitively process information, rather than reacting in a highly emotion way have also been found to cope better (Bekhet, Johnson and Zauszniewski; Heiman; Monin et al.; Pennebaker, Mayne and Francis), as have those with a greater sense of self-efficacy or an internal locus of control (Bekhet, Johnson and Zauszniewski; Kuhn and Carter). However effective these coping strategies prove to be, this is unlikely to provide the full picture of caring experiences, or the place of resilience within that space. Associating resilience with adversity presumes a consensus on what constitutes adversity. Taking the typical approach to investigating resilience amongst carers risks making undue assumptions of the nature of individual carers’ experiences – namely, that caring equates to adversity. The following paragraphs will outline how this is not necessarily the case. And furthermore, that the concept of resilience still has a place in considering informal caring, regardless of whether adversity is considered to be present. Benefits of Care While a great deal of evidence suggests that caring for a loved one can be a stressful experience, research has also demonstrated the existence of positive impacts of care. In many instances, carers not only cope, but also thrive in their caring roles (Turnbull et al.). Elements such as positive relationships within caring relationships can both challenge and strengthen individuals – factors that only exist due to the specific nature of the individual caring role (Bayat; Heiman). Such positive elements of the caring experience have been reflected in the literature, illustrated by quotes such as: “In some sense, this makes our family closer” (Bayat 709). Rather than viewing carers from a perspective of victimisation (which is particularly prominent in relation to children and young people with caring responsibilities), recognising the prevalence of positive wellbeing within this population provides a more nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of all carers (Aldridge). Reported benefits of caring tend to revolve around personal relationships, particularly in reference to parents caring for their children with special needs. Reflective of the parental relationship, carers of children with disabilities or chronic illnesses generally report feelings of love, joy, optimism, strength, enjoyment, and satisfaction with their role (Barnett et al.; Heiman). The views of such carers do not reflect an attitude of coping with adversity, but rather a perspective that considers their children to be positive contributors to carers’ quality of life and the wellbeing of the wider family (King et al.). This point of view suggests an additional dimension to resilience; in particular, that resilience in the relative absence of risk factors, can cause carers to flourish within their caring role and relationships. In addition to benefits in relationships, carers may also prosper through their own personal growth and development in the course of their caring (Knight). This includes factors such as the development of life skills, maturity, purpose, social skills, a sense of responsibility, and recognition – particularly amongst young people in caring roles (Earley, Cushway and Cassidy; Early, Cushway and Cassidy; Jurkovic, Thirkield and Morrell; Skovdal and Andreouli; Stein, Rotheram-Borus and Lester; Tompkins). Recognition of the potential personal benefits of caring for a loved one is not intended to suggest that the view of carers coping with adversity is universally applicable. While it is likely that individual caring situations will have an impact on the extent to which a carer faces adversity (e.g. intensity of caring responsibilities, severity of loved one’s impairment, etc.), it is important to recognise the benefits that carers can experience alongside any challenges they may face. Circumstances that appear adversarial may not be thought of as such by those within that context. Defining resilience as an ability to cope with adversity therefore will not apply to such contexts. Rather, the concept of resilience needs to incorporate those who not only cope, but also prosper. Carers who do not perceive their role as burdensome, but identify positive outcomes, can therefore be said to demonstrate resilience though contextually different from those coping with adversity. This is not to suggest that resilience is the sole contributing factor in terms of prospering in the caring role. We must also consider individual circumstances and nuances differ between carers, those they care for, interpersonal relationships, and wider caring situations. Continuum of Care Awareness of the range of impacts that caring can have on carers leads to a recognition of the broad spectrum of experience that this role entails. Not only do caring experiences exhibit large variations in terms of practical issues (such as functional capacities, or type and severity of illness, disability, or condition), they include carers’ diverse personal responses to caring responsibilities. These responses can reflect either positive or negative dimensions, or a combination of both (Faso, Neal-Beevers and Carlson). In this way, caring experiences can be conceptualised as existing along a continuum. At one end of the spectrum, experiences align with the traditional view of caring as a struggle with and over adversity. More specifically, carers experience burdens as a result of their additional caring responsibilities, with negative outcomes likely to occur. At the other end of the spectrum, however, carers prosper in the role, experiencing significant personal benefits that would not have been possible without the caring role. This continuum makes a case for an expanded approach to stress and coping models of resilience to include positive concepts and a benefit-orientated perspective (Cassidy and Giles). In contrast to research that has argued for a progression from stress and coping models to strengths-based approaches (e.g. Glidden, Billings and Jobe; Knight), the continuum of care acknowledges the benefits of each of these theoretical positions, and thus may prove more comprehensive in attempting to understand the everyday lived experiences of carers. The framework provided by a representation of a continuum allows for the individual differences in caring situations and carers’ personal responses to be acknowledged, as well as accounting for any changes in these circumstances. Further, the experience and benefits of resilience in different contextual spheres can be identified. The flexibility afforded by such an approach is particularly important in light of individual differences in the ways carers respond to their situations, their changing caring contexts, and their subsequent individual needs (Monin et al.; Walsh; Whittingham et al.). As the caring experience can be dynamic and fluctuate in both directions along the continuum, resilience may be seen as the mechanism by which such movement occurs. In line with stress and coping models, resilience can assist carers to cope with adversarial circumstances at that end of the continuum. Similarly, it may be argued that those who prosper in their caring role exhibit characteristics of resilience. In other words, it is resilience that enables carers to cope with adversity at one end of the continuum and also to prosper at the other. Furthermore, by supporting the development of resilient characteristics, carers may be assisted in shifting their experiences along the continuum, from adversity to prosperity. This view extends upon traditional approaches reported in the stress and coping literature by contending that caring experiences may progress beyond positions of coping with adversity, to a position where caring is not understood in terms of adversity at all, but rather in terms of benefits. The individual circumstances of any carer must be taken into consideration with this framework of resilience and the continuum of care. It is unrealistic to assume that all caring situations will allow for the possibility of reaching the end point of this continuum. Carers with particularly high demands in terms of time, resources, effort, or energy may not reach a stage where they no longer consider their caring role to involve any personal burden. However, the combination of a coping and strengths-based approach suggests that there is always the possibility of moving away from perceptions of adversity and further towards an attitude of prosperity. Implications for Supportive Practice From the perspective of this continuum of care, the protective factors and coping strategies identified in previous literature provide a valuable starting point for the facilitation of resilience amongst carers. Enhancing factors such as these can assist carers to move from situations of adversity towards experiences of prosperity (Benzies and Mychasiuk). Research has suggested that carers who are less analytical in their thinking and less optimistic about their personal situations may find particular benefit from support systems that assist them in redirecting their attention towards positive aspects of their daily lives, such as the benefits of caring outlined earlier (Monin et al.). The principle of focusing on positive experiences and reframing negative thoughts is thought to benefit carers across all levels of functioning and adaptive experience (Monin et al.). While those entrenched in more burdensome mindsets are likely to experience the greatest benefit from supportive interventions, there is still merit in providing similar supports to carers who do not appear to experience the similar experiences of burden, or demonstrate greater resilience or adaptation to their situation. The dynamic view of caring situations and resilience suggested by a continuum of care incorporates benefits of stress and coping models as well as strengths-based approaches. This has implications for supportive practice in that the focus is not on determining whether or not a carer is resilient, but identifying the ways in which they already are resilient (Simon, Murphy and Smith). For carers who experience their role through a lens of adversity, resilience may need to be purposefully fostered in order to better enable them to cope and develop through the ongoing stresses of their role. For carers at the other end of the spectrum, resilience is likely to take on a substantially different meaning. Under these circumstances, caring for a loved one is not considered a burdensome task; rather, the positive impact of the role is pre-eminent. This point of view suggests that carers are resilient, not only in terms of an ability to thrive despite adversity, but in prospering to the extent that adversity is not considered to exist. The attitudes and approaches of services, support networks, and governments towards carers should remain flexible enough to acknowledge the wide variety of caring circumstances that exist. The continuum of care provides a framework through which certain aspects of caring and variations in resilience can be interpreted, as well as the type of support required by individual carers. Furthermore, it must be noted that caring circumstances can change – either gradually or suddenly – with the extent to which carers experience adversity, coping or prosperity also changing. Any attempts to provide support to carers or acknowledge their resilience should demonstrate an awareness of the potential for such fluctuation. 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