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Archive Stories
Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History
Antoinette Burton, ed.
Duke University Press, 2005
Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them—about the effect that the researcher’s race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are “found” there.

Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan’s newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on the analysis of particular archives. A contributor tells of researching the 1976 Soweto riots in the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, just as apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. A number of the essays question what counts as an archive—and what counts as history—as they consider oral histories, cyberspace, fiction, and plans for streets and buildings that were never built, for histories that never materialized.

Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Peter Fritzsche, Durba Ghosh, Laura Mayhall, Jennifer S. Milligan, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, John Randolph, Craig Robertson, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Jeff Sahadeo, Reneé Sentilles

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California And The Fictions Of Capital
George Henderson
Temple University Press, 2003
In part a tour of California as a virtual laboratory for refining the circulation of capital, and in part an investigation of how the state's literati, with rare exception, reconceived economy in the name of class, gender, and racial privilege, this study will appeal to all students and scholars of California's—and the American West's—economic, environmental, and cultural past.
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Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership
Erica R. Edwards
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership—this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, Erica R. Edwards tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition.

By considering leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama as both historical personages and narrative inventions of contemporary American culture, Edwards brings to the study of black politics the tools of intertextual narrative analysis as well as deconstruction and close reading. Examining a number of literary restagings of black leadership in African American fiction by W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison, Edwards demonstrates how African American literature has contested charisma as a structuring fiction of modern black politics.

Though recent scholarship has challenged top-down accounts of historical change, the presumption that history is made by gifted men continues to hold sway in American letters and life. This may be, Edwards shows us, because while charisma is a transformative historical phenomenon, it carries an even stronger seductive narrative power that obscures the people and methods that have created social and political shifts.

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Coyote Country
Fictions of the Canadian West
Arnold E. Davidson
Duke University Press, 1994
For most North Americans—Canadians as well as Americans—the term "Western" evokes images of the frontier, brave sheriffs and ruthless outlaws, good cowboys and bad Indians. As Arnold E. Davidson shows in this groundbreaking study, a number of Canada’s most interesting and experimental Western writers parody, reverse, or otherwise defuse the paraphernalia of the classic U.S. Western. Lacking both a real and imagined frontier—Canadian settlers rode trains into the new territory, already policed by Mounties—the writers of Canadian Westerns were set a different task from their American counterparts and were subsequently freed to create some of the most complex and engrossing fiction yet produced in Canada.
Davidson details the evolution of the U.S. and Canadian Western forms, tracing the divergence between the two as Canadian writers responded to their unique historical circumstances by reinventing the West as well as the Western and establishing a new literary landscape where author and reader could work out new possibilities of being. Surveying a range of texts by Canada’s most innovative writers, with special attention to women writers and Native stories of Coyote, he provides close readings of novels by Howard O’Hagan, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, Aritha van Herk, Anne Cameron, Peter Such, W. O. Mitchell, Beatrice Culleton, and Thomas King. A unique study, Coyote Country offers at one and the same time a theory of Canadian Western fiction, a history of crosscultural paradigms of the West as manifested in novels, and an intensive reading of some of Canada’s best literature.
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Double Visions, Double Fictions
The Doppelgänger in Japanese Film and Literature
Baryon Tensor Posadas
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A fresh take on the dopplegänger and its place in Japanese film and literature—past and present

Since its earliest known use in German Romanticism in the late 1700s, the word Doppelgänger (double-walker) can be found throughout a vast array of literature, culture, and media. This motif of doubling can also be seen traversing historical and cultural boundaries. Double Visions, Double Fictions analyzes the myriad manifestations of the doppelgänger in Japanese literary and cinematic texts at two historical junctures: the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s and the present day.

According to author Baryon Tensor Posadas, the doppelgänger marks the intersection of the historical impact of psychoanalytic theory, the genre of detective fiction in Japan, early Japanese cinema, and the cultural production of Japanese colonialism. He examines the doppelgänger’s appearance in the works of Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, as well as the films of Tsukamoto Shin’ya and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, not only as a recurrent motif but also as a critical practice of concepts. Following these explorations, Posadas asks: What were the social, political, and material conditions that mobilized the desire for the doppelgänger? And how does the dopplegänger capture social transformations taking place at these historical moments?

Double Visions, Double Fictions ultimately reveals how the doppelgänger motif provides a fascinating new backdrop for understanding the enmeshment of past and present. 

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Dream Nation
Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence
Acosta Cruz, María
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Over the past fifty years, Puerto Rican voters have roundly rejected any calls for national independence. Yet the rhetoric and iconography of independence have been defining features of Puerto Rican literature and culture. In the provocative new book Dream Nation, María Acosta Cruz investigates the roots and effects of this profound disconnect between cultural fantasy and political reality.

Bringing together texts from Puerto Rican literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how imaginings of national independence have served many competing purposes. They have given authority to the island’s literary and artistic establishment but have also been a badge of countercultural cool. These ideas have been fueled both by nostalgia for an imagined past and by yearning for a better future. They have fostered local communities on the island, and still helped define Puerto Rican identity within U.S. Latino culture.

In clear, accessible prose, Acosta Cruz takes us on a journey from the 1898 annexation of Puerto Rico to the elections of 2012, stopping at many cultural touchstones along the way, from the canonical literature of the Generación del 30 to the rap music of Tego Calderón. Dream Nation thus serves both as a testament to how stories, symbols, and heroes of independence have inspired the Puerto Rican imagination and as an urgent warning about how this culture has become detached from the everyday concerns of the island’s people.

A volume in the American Literature Initiatives series
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Fictions of Affliction
Physical Disability in Victorian Culture
Martha Stoddard Holmes
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Tiny Tim, Clym Yeobright, Long John Silver---what underlies nineteenth-century British literature's fixation with disability? Melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels by Dickens, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves. Drawing on extensive primary research, Martha Stoddard Holmes introduces readers to popular literary and dramatic works that explored culturally risky questions like "can disabled men work?" and "should disabled women have babies?" and makes connections between literary plots and medical, social, and educational debates of the day. The first book of its kind, Fictions of Affliction contributes a new emphasis to Victorian literary and cultural studies and offers new readings of works by canonic and becoming-canonic writers like Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and others.
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Fictions of Certitude
Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning, 1840–1920
John S. Haller Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2020
The search for belief and meaning among nineteenth-century intellectuals
 
The nineteenth century’s explosion of scientific theories and new technologies undermined many deep-seated beliefs that had long formed the basis of Western society, making it impossible for many to retain the unconditional faith of their forebears. A myriad of discoveries—including Faraday’s electromagnetic induction, Joule’s law of conservation of energy, Pasteur’s germ theory, Darwin’s and Wallace’s theories of evolution by natural selection, and Planck’s work on quantum theory—shattered conventional understandings of the world that had been dictated by traditional religious teachings and philosophical systems for centuries.

Fictions of Certitude: Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning, 1840–1920 investigates the fin de siècle search for truth and meaning in a world that had been radically transformed. John S. Haller Jr. examines the moral and philosophical journeys of nine European and American intellectuals who sought deeper understanding amid such paradigmatic upheaval. Auguste Comte, John Henry Newman, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Fiske, William James, Lester Frank Ward, and Paul Carus all belonged to an age in which one world was passing while another world that was both astounding and threatening was rising to take its place.

For Haller, what makes the work of these nine thinkers worthy of examination is how they strove in different ways to find certitude and belief in the face of an epochal sea change. Some found ways to reconceptualize a world in which God and nature coexist. For others, the challenge was to discern meaning in a world in which no higher power or purpose can be found. As explained by D. H. Meyer, “The later Victo­rians were perhaps the last generation among English-speaking intellectuals able to believe that man was capable of understanding his universe, just as they were the first generation collectively to suspect that he never would.”
 
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Fictions of Consciousness
Mill, Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose
Jonathan Loesberg
Rutgers University Press, 1986
Mill, Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose
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Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque
Architectural Space and Prostitution in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Emily Kuffner
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner’s analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later manifestations, she demonstrates that even as societal attitudes towards prostitution shifted dramatically, a countervailing tendency to view prostitution as an essential part of the social fabric undergirds many representations of literary prostitutes. Kuffner’s analysis reveals that the semblance of domestic enclosure figures as a primary eroticstrategy in female picaresque fiction, allowing readers to assess the variety of strategies used by authors to comment on the relationship between unruly female sexuality and social order.
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Fictions of Evidence
Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages
Jamie K. Taylor
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Throughout the Middle Ages, witnessing was a crucial way religious and legal “truths” were understood and produced. Religious and secular officials alike harnessed the power of testimony to assert doctrinal, political, or legal responsibilities. Swearing an oath, testifying in court, and signing a deposition were common ways to shape and discipline both devotional and legal communities. In Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages, Jamie K. Taylor traces depictions of witnessing in a wide range of late medieval texts and shows how witnessing practices formed and reformed, policed and challenged medieval communities.
 
Through close study of texts like the Man of Law’s Tale and Piers Plowman alongside sermon exempla, common law statutes, and pastoral treatises, Fictions of Evidence argues that vernacular literature was a vital site of criticism and dissent. It shows that devotional and legal witnessing practices offered medieval writers a distinct vocabulary they could use to expose how the ethical and legal obligations to one’s community were constructed. And since vernacular writers often challenged the ways ecclesiastical or secular authorities asserted community bonds, they found they could use those same witnessing practices and language to imagine extra-legal or extra-ecclesiastical communities that followed different ethical codes.
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Fictions Of Feminist Ethnography
Kamala Visweswaran
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Although feminist ethnography is an emerging genre, the question of what the term means remains open. Recent texts that fall under this rubric rely on unexamined notions of "sisterhood" and the recovery of "lost" voices. Writing about her work with women in Southern India, Kamala Visweswaran addresses such troubled questions in the essays that make up Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Blurring distinctions between ethnographic and literary genres, the author employs the narrative strategies of history, fiction, autobiography and biography, deconstruction, and postcolonial discourse to reveal the fictions of ethnography and the ethnography in fiction. In the process of reflecting on the nature of anthropology itself Visweswaran devises an experimental approach to writing feminist ethnography.

What sets this work apart from other self-reflexive feminist ethnographies is its rigorous engagement with the concrete inequalities, refusals, and misunderstandings between the author and the women she worked with in India. In each essay, she takes up the specific ellipses of power differentials in her field research and works out their epistemological consequences. The result is a series of contextualizations of the politics of identity in the field, at "home," and within the lives of women who particpated in the Indian nationalist movement. We learn in lucid detail about the partiality of knowledge and the inevitable difficulties and violations involved in representing the lives of women, both inside and outside the United States. Clearly and forcefully written, this book should be of interest not only to anthropologists but also to cultural theorists and critics, feminist scholars and writers, and other social scientists who grapple with epistemological and political issues in their fields.
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Fictions of Land and Flesh
Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation
Mark Rifkin
Duke University Press, 2019
In Fictions of Land and Flesh Mark Rifkin explores the impasses that arise in seeking to connect Black and Indigenous movements, turning to speculative fiction to understand those difficulties and envision productive ways of addressing them. Against efforts to subsume varied forms of resistance into a single framework in the name of solidarity, Rifkin argues that Black and Indigenous political struggles are oriented in distinct ways, following their own lines of development and contestation. Rifkin suggests how movement between the two can be approached as something of a speculative leap in which the terms and dynamics of one are disoriented in the encounter with the other. Futurist fiction provides a compelling site for exploring such disjunctions. Through analyses of works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, and others, the book illustrates how ideas about fungibility, fugitivity, carcerality, marronage, sovereignty, placemaking, and governance shape the ways Black and Indigenous intellectuals narrate the past, present, and future. In turning to speculative fiction, Rifkin illustrates how speculation as a process provides conceptual and ethical resources for recognizing difference while engaging across it.
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Fictions of Migration
Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia
Lorena Cuya Gavilano
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Lorena Cuya Gavilano’s Fictions of Migration: Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia is an aesthetic and cultural analysis of how political and economic trends have impacted narratives about migration in Peru and Bolivia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Going beyond representations of migrants as subjects of crisis, Fictions of Migration approaches the migrant as a subject of knowledge, examining how narratives of migrancy in the Andes have become affective epistemological tools to learn about migrants’ experiences, cultural roots, and the mishaps of modernity that caused their displacement in the first place. Through the examination of films and novels—by such writers and filmmakers as José María Arguedas, Blanca Wiethüchter, Daniel Alarcón, Claudia Llosa, Jorge Sanjinés, Juan Carlos Valdivia, Jesús Urzagasti, and Paolo Agazzi, among others–Cuya Gavilano looks at the intersection of crisis, knowledge, and affect in order to piece together seemingly incompatible images of migrancy. She explores how dissimilar images of migration in two countries with a common ethnic and cultural history are the result of differentiated emotional and social responses to the adoption and adaptation of neoliberal economic agendas. Fictions of Migration thereby shows Andean stories of displacement can serve as distinctive models to understand multiethnic national spaces globally.
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Fictions of Modesty
Women and Courtship in the English Novel
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
University of Chicago Press, 1991
From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, no figure was more central to debates in England about the relations between the sexes than that of the modest woman. Drawing on a wide range of narratives from the period, Ruth Bernard Yeazell analyzes the multiple and conflicting wishes that were covered by talk of "modesty" and explores some of the most striking uses of a modest heroine.

Combining evidence from conduct books and ladies' magazines with the arguments of influential theorists like Hume, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft, this book begins by asking why writers were devoted to the anxious remaking of women's "nature" and to codifying rules for their porper behavior. Fictions of Modesty shows how the culture at once tried to regulate young women's desires and effectively opened up new possibilities of subjectivity and individual choice.

Yeazell goes on to demonstrate that modest delaying actions inform a central tradition of English narrative. On the Continent, the English believed, the jeune fille went from the artificial innocence of the convent to an arranged marriage and adultery; the natural modesty of the Englishwoman, however, enabled her to choose her own mate and to marry both prudently and with affection. Rather than taking its narrative impetus from adultery, then, English fiction concentrated on courtship and the consciousness of the young woman choosing. After paired studies of Richardson's Pamela and Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (even Fanny Hill, Yeazell argues, is a modest English heroine at heart), Yeazell investigates what women novelists made of the virtues of modesty in works by Burney, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Gaskell.

A speculative postscript briefly addresses the discourse of late nineteenth-century science in order to show how Darwin's theory of sexual selection and Havelock Ellis's psychology of sex replicate fictions of female modesty. While those who sought to codify modest behavior in previous centuries often appealed to Nature for support, our modern understanding of the natural, Yeazell suggests, owes something to the work of the novelists.

Sharply reasoned and witty, Fictions of Modesty will appeal to all those interested in women's studies, the English novel, and the continuing history of relations between the sexes.
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Fictions of Pleasure
The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France
Alistaire Tallent
University of Delaware Press, 2024
Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, domestic sphere. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use the desire they arouse, the professional skills they develop, and the network of female friends they create to exploit, humiliate, and financially ruin wealthy and powerful men. In pursuing their desires, the putains challenge contemporary notions of womanhood and expose the injustices of ancien-régime France. Until the French Revolution spelled the end of the genre, these novels proposed not only an appealing libertine utopia in which libertine women enjoy the same benefits as their male counterparts but also entirely new ways of looking at systems of power, gender, and sexuality.
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Fictions of Romantic Irony
Lilian R. Furst
Harvard University Press, 1984

What is meant by "romantic irony"? What is specifically romantic about this kind of irony? How does it relate to--and differ from--ordinary, traditional irony? Is it a variant of traditional irony, or an independent phenomenon? Are its lines of demarcation primarily historical or modal? How does it become manifest in a text? What is its impact on the art of narration?

These are the questions that Fictions of Romantic Irony addresses. It makes a new approach to romantic irony by envisaging it in a broad European context in relation both to earlier concepts of irony and to traditional uses of irony in narration. Fictions of Romantic Irony shows how irony was transformed in the hands of Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Through an analysis of six major European narratives of the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century it illustrates the reciprocal interplay of theory and practice, and the complex and central role that irony assumes as a shaping aesthetic factor. Using a wide perspective and an original synchronic disposition of texts within its historical framework, it identifies the distinctive philosophical and literary features of romantic irony.

Fictions of Romantic Irony presents an important theory of romantic irony, distinguishing it from traditional irony in the handling of fictional illusion and in the dynamics of the tripartite relationship between narrator, narrative and reader. It dispels many common, limiting fictions about romantic irony, and offers a robust understanding of its workings in narrative and its significance for modern fiction.

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Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937
Joan DeJean
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.
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Fictions of the Bad Life
The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010
Claire Thora Solomon
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
The first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of the prostitute in Latin American literature, Claire Thora Solomon’s book The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 shows the gender, ethnic, and racial identities that emerge in the literary figure of the prostitute during the consolidation of modern Latin American states in the late nineteenth century in the literary genre of Naturalism. Solomon first examines how legal, medical, and philosophical thought converged in Naturalist literature of prostitution. She then traces the persistence of these styles, themes, and stereotypes about women, sex, ethnicity, and race in the twentieth and twenty-first century literature with a particular emphasis on the historical fiction of prostitution and its selective reconstruction of the past.
 
Fictions of the Bad Life illustrates how at very different moments—the turn of the twentieth century, the 1920s–30s, and finally the turn of the twenty-first century—the past is rewritten to accommodate contemporary desires for historical belonging and national identity, even as these efforts inevitably re-inscribe the repressed colonial history they wish to change.
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Fictions of the Cosmos
Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century
Frédérique Aït-Touati
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In today’s academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected, one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so distinct. Just as the natural philosophers of the era were discovering in and adopting from literature new strategies and techniques for their discourse, so too were poets and storytellers finding inspiration in natural philosophy, particularly in astronomy.
           
A work that speaks to the history of science and literary studies, Fictions of the Cosmos explores the evolving relationship that ensued between fiction and astronomical authority. By examining writings of Kepler, Godwin, Hooke, Cyrano, Cavendish, Fontenelle, and others, Frédérique Aït-Touati shows that it was through the telling of stories—such as through accounts of celestial journeys—that the Copernican hypothesis, for example, found an ontological weight that its geometric models did not provide. Aït-Touati draws from both cosmological treatises and fictions of travel and knowledge, as well as personal correspondences, drawings, and instruments, to emphasize the multiple borrowings between scientific and literary discourses. This volume sheds new light on the practices of scientific invention, experimentation, and hypothesis formation by situating them according to their fictional or factual tendencies.
 
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Four for a Quarter
Fictions
Michael Martone
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Four is the magic number in Michael Martone’s Four for a Quarter.  In subject—four fifth Beatles, four tie knots, four retellings of the first Xerox, even the sex lives of the Fantastic Four—and in structure—the book is separated into four sections, with each section further divided into four chapterettes—Four for a Quarter returns again and again to its originating number, making chaos comprehensible and mystery out of the most ordinary. 
 
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How to Make Your Mother Cry
Fictions
Sejal Shah
West Virginia University Press, 2024
From the author of This Is One Way to Dance, linked genre-queer short stories braided with images and ephemera explore the experiences of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman searching for home.
 
In the eleven linked short stories of How to Make Your Mother Cry, Sejal Shah builds a shrine gleaming with memory and myth. Keys, rocks, photographs, fairy tales, fables, and relics all add texture and meaning to an exploration of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman in a culture that excuses the behavior of men. Throughout, girls and women contend with the expectations, limitations, and challenges of becoming the heroine of one’s own life.
 
How to Make Your Mother Cry—Shah’s follow-up to her award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance—continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. By braiding stories and images with fictional letters to a beloved English teacher, the collection defies traditional autofiction, epistolary, and short story conventions. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.
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Hydroplane
Fictions
Susan Steinberg
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Hydroplane is a story collection filled with the urgency of erotic obsession. Its breathless voices, palpable in their desire, are propelled by monomania, rushing from one preoccupation into another: a garage, a painting class, a basketball game, boys. Their words take on kinetic force, an almost headlong momentum, as though, while reading, one were picking up speed, veering out of control. The past returns. Rumination are continuous. A stranger at a bus stop is indistinguishable from the narrator's deceased grandfather; party guests turn ghoulish, festivities merge with nightmares.
 

Each of Steinberg's stories builds as if telegraphed. Each sentence glissades into the next as though in perpetual motion, as characters, crippled by loss, rummage through their recollections looking for buffers to an indistinct future.

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Long Stories Cut Short
Fictions from the Borderlands
Frederick Luis Aldama; Foreword by Ana María Shua
University of Arizona Press, 2017

Xbox videogamer cholo cyberpunks. Infants who read before they talk. Vatos locos, romancing abuelos, border crossers and border smugglers, drug kingpins, Latina motorbike riders, philosophically musing tweens, and so much more.

The stories in this dynamic bilingual prose-art collection touch on the universals of romance, family, migration and expulsion, and everyday life in all its zany configurations. Each glimpse into lives at every stage—from newborns and children to teens, young adults, and the elderly—further submerges readers in psychological ups and downs. In a world filled with racism, police brutality, poverty, and tensions between haves and have-nots, these flashes of fictional insight bring gleaming clarity to life lived where all sorts of borders meet and shift.

Frederick Luis Aldama and graphic artists from Mapache Studios give shape to ugly truths in the most honest way, creating new perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about life in the borderlands of the Américas. Each bilingual prose-art fictional snapshot offers an unsentimentally complex glimpse into what it means to exist at the margins of society today. These unflinching and often brutal fictions crisscross spiritual, emotional, and physical borders as they give voice to all those whom society chooses not to see.

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The Male Malady
Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel
Waller, Margaret
Rutgers University Press, 1992
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Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World
Michelle Karnes
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A cross-cultural study of magical phenomena in the Middle Ages.
 
Marvels like enchanted rings and sorcerers’ stones were topics of fascination in the Middle Ages, not only in romance and travel literature but also in the period’s philosophical writing. Rather than constructions of belief accepted only by simple-minded people, Michelle Karnes shows that these spectacular wonders were near impossibilities that demanded scrutiny and investigation.
 
This is the first book to analyze a diverse set of writings on such wonders, comparing texts from the Latin West—including those written in English, French, Italian, and Castilian Spanish —with those written in Arabic as it works toward a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Karnes tells a story about the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that experiences of the strange and the unfamiliar travel across a range of genres, spanning geographical and conceptual space and offering an ideal vantage point from which to understand intercultural exchange. Karnes traverses this diverse archive, showing how imagination imbues marvels with their character and power, making them at once enigmatic, creative, and resonant. Skirting the distinction between the real and unreal, these marvels challenge readers to discover the highest capabilities of both nature and the human intellect. Karnes offers a rare comparative perspective and a new methodology to study a topic long recognized as central to medieval culture.
 
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Michael Martone
Fictions
Michael Martone
University of Alabama Press, 2005
A giddy exploration of the parts of books nobody ever reads
 
Michael Martone, by Michael Martone, continues the author's giddy exploration of the parts of books nobody ever reads. Michael Martone is its own appendix, comprising fifty “contributors notes,” each of which identifies in exorbitant biographical detail the author of the other forty-nine. Full of fanciful anecdotes and preposterous reminiscences, Martone’s self-inventions include the multiple deaths of himself and all his family members, his Kafkaesque rebirth as a giant insect, and his stints as circus performer, assembly-line worker, photographer, and movie extra.

Expect no autobiographical consistency here. A note revealing Martone's mother as the ghost-writer of all his books precedes the note beginning, “Michael Martone, an orphan . . . “ We learn of Martone’s university career and sketchy formal education, his misguided caretaking of his teacher John Barth’s lawn, and his impersonation of a poor African republic in political science class, where Martone's population is allowed to starve as his more fortunate fellow republics fight over development and natural resource trading-cards.

The author of Michael Martone, whose other names include Missy, Dolly, Peanut, Bug, Gigi-tone, Tony's boy, Patty's boy, Junior's, Mickey, Monk, Mr. Martone, and “the contributor named in this note," proves as Protean as fiction itself, continuously transforming the past with every new attribution but never identifying himself by name. It is this missing personage who, from first note to last, constitutes the unformed subject of Michael Martone.
 
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Missionary Enchantment in South Asia, 16th-18th Centuries
Catholic Histories and Fictions
Ines Zupanov
Amsterdam University Press

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The Moon over Wapakoneta
Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond
Michael Martone
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Lyric fictions by a master fabulist of America’s Midwest

The Moon over Wapakoneta is vintage Michael Martone, the visionary oracle of the American Midwest with the gift for discovering the marvelous in the mundane. In these stories Martone shows us how traveling across time zones from Ohio to Indiana is a form of time travel; how a beer bottle can serve as a kind of telescope, how Amish might power their spaceships with windmills as they travel through space and time. These stories capture the paradox of feeling that one is in the heart of the country while at the same time in the middle of nowhere, of natives who find themselves strangers in their once familiar, but now strange, lands.

On display is a love of obsolete technologies, small-town whimsy, home movies of proms and birthday parties, steam engines and baseball games. If Italo Calvino lived in Indiana rather than Italy, these are the fictions he might have made.
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Out of Russia
Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora
Adrian Wanner
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Out of Russia is the first scholarly work to focus on a group of writers who, over the past decade, have formed a distinct phenomenon: immigrants with cultural and linguistic roots in Russia who have chosen to write in the language of their adopted countries. The best known among these are Andreï Makine, who writes in French, Wladimir Kaminer, who writes in German, and Gary Shteyngart, who writes in English. Wanner also addresses the work of emerging immigrant writers active in North America, Germany, and Israel. He argues that it is in part by writing in a language other than their native Russian that these writers have made something of a commodity of their “Russianness.” That many of them also happen to be Jewish adds still another layer to the questions of identity raised by their work. In situating these writers within broader contexts, Wanner explores such topics as migration, cultural hybrids, and the construction and perception of ethnicity.
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Passing and the Fictions of Identity
Elaine K. Ginsberg
Duke University Press, 1996
Passing refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation adopts the guise of another. Historically, this has often involved black slaves passing as white in order to gain their freedom. More generally, it has served as a way for women and people of color to access male or white privilege. In their examination of this practice of crossing boundaries, the contributors to this volume offer a unique perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.
These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries. Through discussions of such literary works as Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Hidden Hand, Black Like Me, and Giovanni’s Room, the authors examine issues of power and privilege and ways in which passing might challenge the often rigid structures of identity politics. Their interrogation of the semiotics of behavior, dress, language, and the body itself contributes significantly to an understanding of national, racial, gender, and sexual identity in American literature and culture.
Contextualizing and building on the theoretical work of such scholars as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Passing and the Fictions of Identity will be of value to students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as U.S. history and literature.

Contributors. Martha Cutter, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Samira Kawash, Adrian Piper, Valerie Rohy, Marion Rust, Julia Stern, Gayle Wald, Ellen M. Weinauer, Elizabeth Young

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Past Is Not Dead
Facts, Fictions, and Enduring Racial Stereotypes
Allan Pred
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

A study of the genealogy and perpetuation of stereotyping

Through one figure—Badin, an eighteenth-century Afro-Caribbean slave given to the Swedish royal court—Allan Pred shows how stereotypes endure through the repeated confusion of facts and fiction, providing a highly original perspective on the perpetuation of racializing stereotypes in the West.

In the first of two interlocking montages inspired by Walter Benjamin, the book focuses on Badin, who died in Stockholm in 1822, and representations of his life that appeared from the 1840s through the 1990s. In the second montage, Pred brings the late nineteenth century and the present into play, shifting to urban sites where racialized stereotyping is on public display, including a museum that has exhibited the bodily remains of the African male.Intriguing for its insight into the workings of race and immigration on the national imagination of a European nation—but with implications and ramifications far beyond that specific example—The Past Is Not Dead is a bold inquiry into both the collective memory and the amnesia of those who stereotype versus the personal remembering and forgetting of the stereotyped.
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Pirate Novels
Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America
Nina Gerassi-Navarro
Duke University Press, 1999
In Pirate Novels Nina Gerassi-Navarro examines an overlooked genre to reveal how history and fiction blend to address important isuses of nation building in nineteenth-century Spanish America. In the figure of the pirate, bold and heroic to some, cruel and criminal to others, she reveals an almost ideal character that came to embody the spirit of emerging nationhood and the violence associated with the struggle to attain it.
Beginning with an overview of the history of piracy, Gerassi-Navarro traces the historical icon of the pirate through colonial-era chronicles before exploring a group of nineteenth-century Mexican, Colombian, and Argentine novels. She argues that the authors of these novels, in their reconstructions of the past, were less interested in accurate representations than in using their narratives to discuss the future of their own countries. In reading these pirate narratives as metaphors for the process of nation building in Spanish America, Gerassi-Navarro exposes the conflicting strains of a complex culture attempting to shape that future. She shows how these pirate stories reflect the on-going debates that marked the consolidation of nationhood, as well as the extent to which the narratives of national identity in Spanish America are structured in relation to European cultures, and the ways in which questions of race and gender were addressed.
Providing new readings of the cultural and political paradigms that marked the literary production of nineteenth-century Spanish America, Pirate Novels uniquely expands the range of texts usually examined in the study of nation-building. It will interest literary scholars generally as well as those engaged in Latin American, colonial, and postcolonial studies.
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The Play of Fictions
Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2
A. M. Keith
University of Michigan Press, 1992
A lucid analysis of the characterization of Ovidian narrative
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Playing Dolly
Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction
Kaplan, E. Ann
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Reproductive technology spans techniques ranging from cloning, surrogate motherhood, egg donation, and prenatal testing. In the early nineties, when public debate about this topic was new, the discourse focused on the moral and ethical issues that these new technologies evoked. Less than a decade later, the editors in Playing Dolly state, ethical questions seem less urgent. Enormous changes have taken place in the way that reproduction is represented, understood, and discussed.

The pieces, which range from the biomedical to the sociocultural and include even fiction, reflect the shift in public perception of these complex topics. They testify to the increasing acceptance of reproductive technology, and the resulting reduction in concern over the ethical issues raised by technological intervention.

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Playing in the Shadows
Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
William Bridges
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Playing in the Shadows considers the literature engendered by postwar Japanese authors’ robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African American literature. The Allied Occupation brought an influx of African American soldiers and culture to Japan, which catalyzed the writing of black characters into postwar Japanese literature. This same influx fostered the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This rich milieu sparked Japanese authors’—Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two notable examples—interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing, and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to literary works that are “black” not by virtue of their representations of black characters, but due to their investment in the possibility of technically and intertextually black Japanese literature. Will Bridges argues that these “fictions of race” provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.
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Postcolonial Paris
Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light
Laila Amine
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
In the global imagination, Paris is the city's glamorous center, ignoring the Muslim residents in its outskirts except in moments of spectacular crisis such as terrorist attacks or riots. But colonial immigrants and their French offspring have been a significant presence in the Parisian landscape since the 1940s. Expanding the narrow script of what and who is Paris, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art of Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans in the City of Light, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.

Spanning the decades from the post–World War II era to the present day, Amine demonstrates that the postcolonial other is both peripheral to and intimately entangled with all the ideals so famously evoked by the French capital—romance, modernity, equality, and liberty. In their work, postcolonial writers and artists have juxtaposed these ideals with colonial tropes of intimacy (the interracial couple, the harem, the Arab queer) to expose their hidden violence. Amine highlights the intrusion of race in everyday life in a nation where, officially, it does not exist.
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Reclaiming the Author
Figures and Fictions from Spanish America
Lucille Kerr
Duke University Press, 1992
The recent fiction of Spanish America has been widely acclaimed for its experimental and revolutionary qualities. In Reclaiming the Author, Lucille Kerr studies the sources of power of this newly emergent literature in her detailed examination of the critical concept of "the author." Kerr considers how Spanish American narratives raise questions about authorial identity and activity through the different figures of the author they propose. These author-figures, she maintains, both complement and contradict notions of authority that exist outside of the world of fiction.
By focusing on works by well-known Spanish American authors—Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Puig, and Vargas Llosa—Kerr shows how the Spanish Americans have formed a radical poetics of the author. Her readings demonstrate how exemplary Spanish American texts, such as Rayuela, Terra nostra, and El hablador, call into question the author as a unitary or uniform, and therefore unproblematical, figure. Individually and together, Kerr's readings reclaim "the author" as a complex critical concept encompassing diverse, conflicting, even competitive roles.
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Stories of Nation
Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience
Christopher Hebert
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

Throughout American history there has been an oddly close relationship between the seductive appeals of narrative fiction and those of political rhetoric and advocacy. The aim of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience is to explore what political narratives and the cultural poetics behind them reveal about the way our personal and intimate lives are deeply connected with the public arena and the political process.

The first section of the book, “The Politics of Fictions,” contains essays focused on works of fiction consciously dramatizing the political realm. The second group of contributions, “The Fictions of Politics,” explores structures and motifs from the narrative arts in discourses of American political life, and the interactions of public institutions and policy with forms of fictional representation, from novels to popular music and TV drama.

The essays presented here broaden the conversation in American literary studies about what constitutes “the political” in literature and culture by reintroducing the dimension of institutional or representative politics. Likewise, Stories of Nation aims to repair the lines of communication between the idea that all fiction is political, and the view that political speech is a subgenre of literature all the more in need of examination in a highly polarized society.

The range of perspectives in Stories of Nation will engage students of literature, popular culture, and politics alike.

MARTIN GRIFFIN is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900 (2009) and co-author, with Constance DeVereaux, of Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (2013).

CHRISTOPHER HEBERT is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee and is former senior acquisitions editor at the University of Michigan Press. He is the author of the novels Angels of Detroit (2016) and The Boiling Season (2012).

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Training for Catastrophe
Fictions of National Security after 9/11
Lindsay Thomas
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A timely, politically savvy examination of how impossible disasters shape the very real possibilities of our world

Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.

Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others.

Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters.

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Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis
Elizabeth Abel
University of Chicago Press, 1989
"A stunning, brilliant, absolutely compelling reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf's novels and essays. In addition to transforming our understanding of Woolf, this book radically expands our understanding of the historicity and contingent construction of psychoanalytic theory and our vision of the potential of psychoanalytic feminism."—Nancy J. Chodorow, University of California at Berkeley

"Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis brings Woolf's extraordinary craftsmanship back into view; the book combines powerful claims about sexual politics and intellectual history with the sort of meticulous, imaginative close reading that leaves us, simply, seeing much more in Woolf's words than we did before. It is the most exciting book on Woolf to come along in some time."—Lisa Ruddick, Modern Philology
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The Voyage In
Fictions of Female Development
Edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland
Dartmouth College Press, 1983
Questions of female development shape women’s studies in many fields as women seek to define those forces which mold their experiences. Surprisingly, this is the first book to study systematically and from a comparative perspective the female novel of development, or Bildungsroman. Prevailing definitions of the Bildungsroman derive from the conceptions of development based on male experience. The book offers an expanded generic model that incorporates the distinctively female patterns of realization and failed realization which emerge from the limited social opportunities depicted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel and from the particular features of women’s maturation as revealed by recent feminist psychoanalytic research.
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What Begins with Bird
Fictions
Flournoy Holland
University of Alabama Press, 2005
What Begins with Bird, by Noy Holland, is both an investigation of family relationships and a sophisticated study of language and rhythm. Holland creates an exhilarating tension between the satisfactions of meaning and the attenuated beauty of lyric, making her fiction felt as deeply as it is understood. An unstable sister whose misconceived pregnancy replays the endless nightmare of childhood siblings and a wrecked marriage occasioning the misery of a horse: these are the frozen events around which Holland's words congeal. The poetry of her images, powerful but immediately absorbed, can bring consciousness to a standstill: "By then I've reached her: Sister spluttering, spitting out the plug of snow. Her mouth is bleeding. Her face is the grotesque of a face, a soul in flames, some rung of hell, and she is sobbing, spit puddling under her tongue." The Faulknerian echoes of Holland's prose invoke a dreamscape, a panorama enclosing barns and men and guns and Mother, as she trudges the cold hills in her nightgown. This writing is exquisite, a gorgeousness as unforgettable as a stabbing pain or the after-image of a howl in the pitch of night.
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William Faulkner, Letters & Fictions
By James G. Watson
University of Texas Press, 1989

Besides the groundbreaking novels and stories that brought him fame, William Faulkner throughout his life wrote letters—to his publisher, his lovers, his family, and his friends. In this first major study of epistolarity in Faulkner's work, James G. Watson examines Faulkner's personal correspondence as a unique second canon of writing, separate from his literary canon with its many fictional letters but developing along parallel lines. By describing the similarity of forms and conventions in Faulkner's personal and fictional correspondence, Watson clearly demonstrates that Faulkner's personal experience as a writer of letters significantly shaped his imaginative work early and late.

Letters are always about themselves; they re-create a world between the sender and the receiver. In this illuminating study, Faulkner's personal letters are treated as a form of reflexive writing: first-person narratives in which Sender self-consciously portrays Self to a specific Receiver, likewise portrayed in the letter-text. This duality of actual experience and imaginative re-creation measures the personal distances between the life of the writer and the written self-image. It reveals that letters are at once fragments of autobiography and fictions of self.

Such "laws of letters" apply equally to the letters that appear throughout Faulkner's novels and stories. The twenty-one letters and telegrams in The Sound and the Fury, for example, portray character, propel plot, and convey important themes of failed communication and broken identity. From Soldiers' Pay to his last work, Faulkner's carefully lettered canon of fiction is dramatic evidence of his understanding of epistolarity and of the extent to which he adapted letters, including some of his own, to shape his fictional world.

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