perhaps unlikely group of readers—young women and teenage girls. Anne Boleyn has not only become the subject of an enthusiastic online fandom, but her story is now frequently retold in Young Adult (YA) historical fictions. Young Adult Fiction and Anne
A Literacy Landscape Unresolved
Beyond the Boy Crisis and into Superhero Fiction
Michael Kehler and Jacob Cassidy
begin by identifying and interrogating the rhetorical framing of boys as “at risk” and “in need” as literacy learners. In the sections that follow we examine how the integration of comics and superhero fiction potentially reinscribes normative
Torben Grodal
This article analyzes the psychological and neurological underpinnings of crime fiction and discusses the interrelation between cultural and biological-evolutionary determinants of fictions of detection. It argues that although crime fiction is a product of modern life conditions, it is also centrally fueled in the minds of viewers and readers by the mammalian dopamine seeking/wanting system developed for seeking out resources by foraging and hunting and important for focused mental and physical goal-directed activities. The article describes the way the working of the seeking system explains how crime fiction activates strong salience (in some respects similar to the effect of dopamine-drugs like cocaine, Ritalin, and amphetamine) and discusses the role of social intelligence in crime fiction. It further contrasts the unempathic classical detector fictions with two subtypes of crime fiction that blend seeking with other emotions: the hardboiled crime fiction that blends detection with action and hot emotions like anger and bonding, and the moral crime fiction that strongly evokes moral disgust and contempt, often in conjunction with detectors that perform hard to fake signals of moral commitment that make them role models for modern work ethics. The article is part of bio-cultural research that describes how biology and culture interact as argued in Grodal's Embodied Visions.
The International Circulation and Impact of Invasion Fiction
Case Study of William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910 – ‘Not an ordinary “pot-boiler”’
Ailise Bulfin
successful spy fiction that he wrote, Le Queux can be considered the quintessential invasion and spy scare author of the immediate pre-World War I (WWI) period. Of this body of work, The Invasion of 1910 , which imagined (in great detail) the ‘efficient
What Is It Like to Grow Old?
Ageing in Some Recent Women's Fiction
John Mepham
‘“Oh, Nathan, aging”, she cried, as we embraced each other, “aging, aging– it is so very strange.”’ It is difficult for younger people to imagine what it is like to be an ageing person, particularly because, as Hagar Shipley, the protagonist and narrator of Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, says, ‘Things never look the same from the outside as they do from the inside.’ Fiction, which specialises in presenting how things look from the inside, can help us to imagine the many subjective experiences of ageing. Fictions are like thought experiments or hypotheses. They represent the particularised individual person in his or her oddity and complexity. But in doing this, they are, of course, representing imagined and verbally constructed characters, not describing real people. Fictional characters reflect the desires, anxieties and obsessions of their authors as well as representational conventions, which in the novels I discuss here are those of psychological realism. Novels are not social science, of course, so they have no statistical weight and no automatic claims to validity.
In European Journal of Social Quality
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jan 2000
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 67–80
Green Fields and Blue Roads
The Melancholy of the Girl Walker in Irish Women’s Fiction
Maureen O’Connor
were every colour, blue, grey, gold, sandstone and carmine’. 22 Roads in the fiction of O’Brien, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Clare Boylan and Anne Enright are many-coloured and various, all leading to revelations about the dangerous realities of women’s lives
Bryan L. Moore
Early science fiction (SF) is noted for, among other things, its conservatism and lack of interest in ecology. Brian Stableford, a well-known SF writer and critic, writes that "there are very few early stories with ecological themes" (1993, 395). This article shows that, in fact, many early SF works (those written between the Enlightenment and World War II) employ ecological themes, especially as applied to questioning our anthropocentrism. These works suggest that humans are but one species among many, that we are not the end of nature/history, that the natural world may be better off without us, and, in some cases, that humanity is fated to go extinct, the result of its own hubris. Such views are undoubtedly pessimistic, yet these works may also be read as warnings for humans to seek a more humble view of ourselves as members of what Aldo Leopold calls the land community.
Dolling Up History
Fictions of Jewish American Girlhood
Lisa Marcus
The launching of a Jewish American Girl doll in 2009 provides an occasion for exploring the fictions of Jewish American girlhood constructed and consumed in the twenty-first century. Though the Rebecca Rubin doll seemed to herald a progressive version of Jewish American girlhood, Rebecca and the box-set of books that accompany her repackage a nostalgic and triumphalist narrative in which America figures as a benevolent sanctuary and the Holocaust, American anti-Semitism, and the costs of assimilation are elided and smoothed away. This is a narrative we've seen before—most notably in the importing and Americanizing of Anne Frank as an icon of Jewish girlhood, and in Sydney Taylor's beloved All Of A Kind Family series of children's books. These dolled-up versions of history stand in stark contrast to the darker, more complex visions of childhood and history seen in the work of Adrienne Rich, which reminds us to be wary of buying into such nostalgic icons of girlhood.
Travelling Detectives
Twofold Mobility in the Appropriation of Crime Fiction in Interwar Germany
Christian Huck
This article is concerned with travelling detectives in two different but related senses. On the one hand, it considers the relevance of trains and other vehicles of mobility for detective fiction, both as a topic of fiction and a place of consumption. On the other hand, it registers that detective fiction has to “travel“ in a more abstract sense before the reading traveler can enjoy it. German publishers appropriated the genre, originally a nineteenth-century American and British invention, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Based on contemporary observations by German cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the essay examines German crime-fiction dime novels from the interwar period, compares them to their American predecessors, and analyzes their relationship to mobility and cultural transfer. The text argues that the spatial mobility of the fictional detective is only possible in a specific cultural environment to which the moving but corporeally immobile reader has to be transferred imaginatively.
Stacie Friend
experiments that are more likely to shed light on philosophical issues. I want to illustrate this point by considering work on fiction and emotion. Philosophical discussions of fiction and emotion frequently draw upon psychological research. There are two