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• The Written Self in the Age of Reason

  Krisztina Kaló

  Views:

  162

  Book review:

  Baker, John, Marion Leclair, and Allan Ingram, eds. Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019. xiii + 288 pages. ISBN 978-1-5261-2336-7. Hb. £80.00.

• What Makes the Olfactif of Victorian Literature?

  Zsolt Bojti

  Views:

  140

  Book review:

  Maxwell, Catherine. Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. xviii + 361 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-870175-0. Hb. £30.00.

• The “Latina Madwoman” at the Crossroads of Harm and Hope

  Babett Rubóczki

  Views:

  121

  Book review:

  Halperin, Laura. Intersections of Harm: Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. xii + 238 pages. ISBN 978-0-8135-7036-5. Pbk. $29.95.

• Sexual Violence Tells Stories

  Anxhela Filaj

  Views:

  244

  Book review:

  Taylor, Dianna. Sexual Violence and Humiliation: A Foucauldian-Feminist Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. 128 pages. ISBN 9781138581432. Pbk. N.p.

• Geographies of Women

  Zsuzsanna Nagy-Szalóki

  Views:

  138

  Book review:

  Beebe, Kathryne, and Angela Davis, eds. Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn. London: Routledge, 2015. x + 158 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-83049-3. Hb. £110.

• The Curious Case of the British Avant-Garde

  Wojciech Drag

  Views:

  124

  Book review:

  Mitchell, Kaye, and Nonia Williams, eds. British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 272 pages. ISBN 978147443619 9. Hb. £80.00.

• Can Female Resistance Emerge from Vulnerability?

  Babett Rubóczki

  Views:

  172

  Book review:

  Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. x + 336. ISBN 978-0-8223-6290-6. Pbk. $26.95.

• “Literature on the Edge”: Austro-Modernism of the Long War

  Enikő Bollobás

  Views:

  135

  Book review:

  Perloff, Marjorie. Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. 204 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05442-1. Hb. $23.98.

• Reading Rieder by Lamplight

  Vera Benczik

  Views:

  146

  Book review:

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

• The Architecture of the Self

  Zsuzsanna Nagy-Szalóki

  Views:

  123

  Book review:

  Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xiii + 246 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-53681-5. Hb. $90.

• The Truth of Beauty and the Goodness of Chaos: Jim Clarke’s Nietzschean Burgess

  Ákos Farkas

  Views:

  85

  Book review:

  Clarke, Jim. The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess: Fire of Words. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xviii + 303 pages. ISBN 978-3-319-66410-1. Hb. £49.29.

• Shakespeare’s Literary Architecture in King Lear

  Laura Mike

  Views:

  331

  Book review:

  Mudriczki, Judit. Shakespeare’s Art of Poesy in King Lear: An Emblematic Mirror of Governance on the Jacobean Stage. Budapest–Párizs: L’Harmattan, 2020. 126 pages. ISBN 978-2-343-20808-4. Pbk. 1990 HUF.

• Anglo-Saxon and Arab Encounters

  Achraf Idrissi

  Views:

  223

  Book review:

  Stampfl, Tanja. A Century of Encounters: Writing the Other in Arab North Africa. New York: Routledge, 2019. 197 pages. ISBN 9781138363106. Pbk. $155.

• Her Dark Materials: What Makes the Fantastic Dark

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  201

  Book review:

  Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. New York UP, 2020. 240 pages. ISBN 9781479806072. Pbk. $16.95.

• A New Account of Britain’s Economic Development

  György Borus

  Views:

  100

  Book review:

  Broadberry, Stephen, Bruce M. S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen. British Economic Growth, 1270-1870. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. 461 pages. ISBN 978-1-107-67649-7. Pbk. £25.

• Dissolving Boundaries in the Anthropocene

  Zsolt Tóth

  Views:

  161

  Book review:

  Kérchy, Anna, ed. Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies, special issue of AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 13.2 (2017)

  Kérchy, Anna, ed. Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction. AMERICANA eBooks, 2018. 237 pages. ISBN 978-615-5423-46-8. EPUB. Open Access.

• Contemporary and Beyond?

  Éva Szabó

  Views:

  125

  Book review:

  Acheson, James, ed. The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000. Edinburgh UP, 2017. 214 pages. ISBN 978 1 4744 0375 7. epub. £80.00.

• The Most Monstrous Kind of Art: Frankenfictions

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  203

  Book review:

  de Bruin-Molé, Megen. Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. x + 264 pages. ISBN 978-1350103054. Hb. £76.50.

• J. M. Coetzee, the Craftsman

  Ottilia Veres

  Views:

  109

  Book review:

  Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time. New York: Viking, 2015. xxiii + 248 pages. ISBN 978-0-525-42961-6. Pbk. $27.95.

• Hungarian Narrato-Rhetorheme in an American Novel: Harry Houdini in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

  Zoltán Abádi-Nagy

  Views:

  267

  The escape artist of Doctorow’s Ragtime is in close relationship with each transposed and fictitious character through an aspectual transmission system of character-motivation. The variegated and diverging perceptual and cognitive processes of the numerous characters may reveal a centrifugal system of storyworlds, but the multiform manifestations of being shackled and the desire to escape do meet in the anchoring image of the shackled Harry Houdini and his escape bravura. So Doctorow’s Houdini will be studied here as an aspectual coordinate of the novel.

  On the other hand, the mentality emanating from the escape artist’s narrative function of aspectual coordination and the other characters’ positional predicaments and motivational concerns that reflect the same mentality, jointly perform the rhetorical role of suasion. Thus, Ragtime’s Houdini can be subjected to a narrato-rhetorical investigation. I propose that he is a hermeneutically coded cultural narrato-rhetorheme in the novel and the source of further narrato-rhetorhemes of storyworlds that come under his semantic sway. (I introduced the notion of the “cultural narrato-rhetorheme” in a former HJEAS issue [2014/1]). The book’s transposed Houdini is both an overt cultural narrato-rhetorheme (he is present in the narratorial discourse: the narrator actually meets him) and a covert one (embedded in the storyworld). The notions of “repeating,” “factoid,” “contextual,” “assimilative,” and “enthymematic” narrato-rhetorheme will also be introduced as descriptive of Houdini’s manifold narrato-rhetorical roles.

  Ragtime’s epistemological tandem (the narrator[s] and Houdini) makes it unequivocal that the modality of the narratorial domain is epistemic. This also sets the escape artist into the novel’s focus; as does the book’s lead (deontic) modality, through the African American ragtime pianist’s defiance of racist cultural prohibition. (ZAN)

• Editor’s Notes

  Marianna Gula

  Views:

  312

  Editor’s Notes

• After the “Post,” in the Present: New Perspectives on Nationhood

  Judit Szathmári

  Views:

  416

  Review essay:

  Charles, Mark, and Soong-Chan Rah. Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2019. Print.

  Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge Advances in American History 8. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2018. Print.

• Black Flânerie, Non-White Soundscapes, and the Fantastic in Teju Cole’s Open City

  Dorottya Mózes

  Views:

  479

  This essay develops an alternative notion of Black flânerie, one that foregrounds the flâneur’s auditory experiences and practices in the city, explaining how sound patterns work as indexes of historical traumas such as slavery, colonialism, and indigenous dispossession. More specifically, it investigates how sound and space are connected and what these connections may reveal about acoustical and historical conditions of urban sites. Analyses advance readings of spaces as shadowed by sonic traces, echoes, afterlives, and memories, which point to the sedimentation of sound in geographic as well as psychic structures and ruptures and hence show how different soundscapes suggest different forms of relationality: alienation, rupture, intersection, connection, and transformation. Finally, it demonstrates how sound imagery—including music, dialects, noise, voices, and silence—functions to signal fantastic spaces and places, fantastic or speculative linkages in particular, and produces a version of the non-White fantastic. (DKM)

• J. M. Synge’s Images of Society and Social Critique

  Michal Lachman

  Views:

  160

  J. M. Synge’s artistic contribution to the revival of the Irish theatre remains an undeniable fact. However, his consistently developed and dramatized views on the condition of Irish society, on the social and economic problems facing the newly formed state, are issues which seem to have been sidelined by critical emphasis placed on artistic and theatrical issues of his writing. This essay traces the line of Synge’s social thinking and imagery to show its continued effort to critically review the conservative, patriarchal system of values that Irish society had developed in the first decades of the twentieth century. The main part of the article concentrates on presenting the figures of dramatic protagonists who oppose the conservative social order and who simultaneously develop their independent ethical and social consciousness. The article argues that by presenting strong, Nietzschean, individuals who are vehemently rejected by their communities Synge formulates his own critical views of the Victorian and patriarchal normativity of the Irish state. (ML)

• Experimental Dramaturgy, Intellectual and Art-related Subjects in Irish Theatre

  Mária Kurdi

  Views:

  152

  Book review:

  Woodward, Guy, ed. Across the Boundaries: Talking about Thomas Kilroy. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2014. 112 pages. ISBN 978-1-909325-51-7. Pbk. €25.00