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• The Fabulous Adventures of Alice with Fashion, Science, and Pinocchio

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  585

  The three scholarly monographs published between 2017 and 2020 by Laura White, Laura Tosi and Peter Hunt, and Kiera Vaclavik, are recent contributions to Lewis Carroll scholarship. They belong to what Michael Heyman calls “the sense school” of nonsense literary criticism in so far as they attribute a specific agenda, a systematic structure, a decipherable message, and a homogenised reading to the Alice tales (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass). Each re-explores a well-known children’s classic from fresh new perspectives by relying on interdisciplinary methodologies, mingling the literary historical approach with insights of critical fashion studies, evolutionary biology, and comparative cross-cultural analysis (translation studies), respectively. Like adaptations, these critical theoretical interpretations of the Alice books are in a constant dialogue with one another within a Genettian transtextual network of multimodal narratives.

• Creating Nations

  Gabriella T. Espák

  Views:

  196

  Book review:

  Mann, Jatinder. The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s. Interdisciplinary Studies in Diasporas 2. New York: Peter Lang, 2016. 339 pages. ISBN 9781433133695. Hb. $88.24.

• Reading Rieder by Lamplight

  Vera Benczik

  Views:

  171

  Book review:

  Rieder, John. Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2017. 224 pages. ISBN 9780819577160. Pbk. $22.95.

• Theater within the Graphic Novel about Theater: Neil Gaiman’s Concept of the Artist in His “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  296

  In his own version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Neil Gaiman exploits the possibilities in doubling: he presents the Shakespearean comedy as a play within the artistic space of his graphic novel and Such a reading reveals that what is a tool in Shakespeare’s play to visualize that art is capable of mirroring reality becomes a means to express the interchangeability of the realistic and the fantastic realms. Gaiman’s strategy of doubling thus suggests an understanding of life that surpasses the narrow interpretation of historical facts, and thereby it may offer a viable alternative to what we experience as reality.

• Miles Franklin’s Growing Voice: Revisiting My Brilliant Career

  Gabriella T. Espák

  Views:

  351

  Rather than any of her more mature writing, Miles Franklin’s debut romance, My Brilliant Career, has been cemented into the canon of Australian literary nationalism. The novel received ambivalent immediate responses upon its publication in 1901 for its unflattering representation of the author’s kin and society. Subsequent criticism soon accepted Franklin’s oeuvre as part of the dominant male discourse of late nineteenth-century Australia, but after the 1970s her writing came under new scrutiny from a feminist aspect. Recently, she has been placed in a long tradition of female writing and discussed for gendered ventures. Nonetheless, however dedicated a feminist Franklin later became, she did not yet search for women’s greater self-realization in her debut but for her own identity and place in the world as an adolescent. This article argues that although Franklin’s classic has become an icon of both nationalist and feminist literature, the dichotomy of these readings can best be appeased through the adolescent ramps of its protagonist. It is an adolescent novel, in which a growing voice argues with her superiors, peers, and self, thereby exploring her authorial, gendered, and national identity. (GTE)

• Larkin’s Poetics

  Attila Dósa

  Views:

  151

  Book review:

  Rácz, István. Philip Larkin’s Poetics: Theory and Practice of an English Post-War Poet. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi. 2016. 235 pages. ISBN 978-90-04-31106-0. Hb. €76.00.

• Utopian Horizons in Hungary

  Joachim Fischer

  Views:

  194

  Book review:

  Czigányik, Zsolt, ed. Utopian Horizons: Ideology, Politics, Literature. Budapest, New York: Central European UP, 2017. viii + 256 pages. ISBN 978-963-386-181-3. Hb. Npr.

• O joy, O joy, the Hobby-Horse is Remembered

  Veronika Schandl

  Views:

  372

  Book review:

  Pikli, Natália. Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2021. 286 pages. ISBN 9780367514150. Hb. $160.00

• Advancing the Discourse on Travel Writing

  Balázs Venkovits

  Views:

  180

  Book review:

  Kuehn, Julia, and Paul Smethurst, eds. New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 325 pages. ISBN 978 1 137 45757 8. Hb. $90.