S

Science Fiction/Fantasy

Phillip E. Wegner

Darko Suvin defines science fiction as a genre whose “necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment” (1979, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 7–8). Science fiction estranges or denaturalizes the world that currently exists, showing its apparently immutable foundations to be contingent and changeable. If high modernist fiction accomplishes this through formal experimentation (see FORMALISM, MODERNISM), science fiction does so through the portrayal of “other” worlds: the future, different planets, or a version of our own world into which has been introduced a novum or new element in the form of an event, alien, or technology. (Each of these worlds corresponds to one of Mark Rose's four coordinates of the genre: time, space, monster, and machine; 1981, Alien Encounters.) However, unlike both older fantastic literatures and modern fantasy, science fiction portrays worlds bound by the scientific, historical, or “cognitive” laws of our own.

Although significant precursors are to be found in the gothic novel, nineteenth-century utopias and dystopias, and Jules Verne's “voyages extraordinaires,” it is the great “scientific romances” of H. G. Wells—in particular The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898)—that establish the genre. Wells's work also demonstrates science fiction's critical potential, as The Time Machine uses its allegorical capacity to attack Great Britain's contemporary social inequities, while The War of the Worlds unveils the brutalities of European colonialism.

Thus, science fiction, as an original narrative form, is as modernist as film, the two coming together early on in Georges Méliès's (1861–1938) pioneering Voyage dans la lune (1902, A Trip to the Moon). There is also an interesting parallel between the two forms, as both have two distinct modernist moments. The first occurs for science fiction in the early twentieth century, in the work of writers who acknowledge their debt to Wells while also expanding the genre's possibilities. Significant figures from this first modernist efflorescence include the Russian and Soviet writers Alexander Bogdanov, Aleksey Tolstoy, Evgeny Zamyatin, and Andrei Platonov; the Czech novelist and dramatist Karel apek, whose play R.U.R. (1920) introduced the term robot; and the British authors E. M. Forster, Olaf Stapledon, and C. S. Lewis.

This first wave was interrupted in the late 1920s by the Soviet Union's growing intolerance for artistic experimentation and the rise in the U.S. of popular “pulp” magazine fiction. Examples of the latter include the “space operas” of E. E. “Doc” Smith and Philip Francis Nowlan (the creator of Buck Rogers), and the fantasy of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan and John Carter of Mars) and Robert E. Howard (Conan). These works presented tales set in intergalactic space, exotic worlds, or the imagined past, and offered their readers simplistic moral visions, with the critical estrangements of earlier modernist science fiction kept to a minimum. The heyday of pulp science fiction occurred under the editorships of Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, the latter, in the 1930s, inaugurating science fiction's “Golden Age.” Writers Campbell brought to prominence—among them Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and A. E. Van Vogt—remain some of the genre's best known. Campbell demanded a more rigorous grounding of science fiction in contemporary scientific knowledge—and thus created the basis for the subgenre of “hard” science fiction exemplified by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and Hal Clement in the 1950s and today by Gregory Benford and Kim Stanley Robinson—as well as a more careful exploration of the implications of their estranging hypotheses. Moreover, most of these writers expressed a deep faith in the possibilities of science, rationality, and technology, values shared by much of the genre's early audience.

The conclusion of WWII saw the emergence of a new generation of writers—among them Alfred Bester, James Blish, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Walter Miller, Jr., and Cordwainer Smith—whose confidence in science and technology was far less sure. Following the 1949 publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the early Cold War period also witnessed the resurgence of the sociopolitical subgenre of dystopia, exemplified by Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (both 1953). Meanwhile, the genre's attention increasingly turned to the social and psychological impact of modernity and to the development of complex character psychology, giving rise to “soft” science fiction. The single most important writer to emerge from this context was Philip K. Dick, whose rich visions of near future worlds, especially in the series of novels that begins with Time Out of Joint (1959) and culminates with Ubik (1969), would influence both the subsequent development of the genre and popular culture as a whole.

This was also the moment of the development of modern “heroic” fantasy, a subgenre that rejected science fiction's rationalism and can be characterized by a nostalgic longing for the distant past, the binary ethical imaginaries of older romance, and the presence of “noncognitive” wish-fulfillment devices such as magic. In this way, modern fantasy participated in a larger cultural reaction to the horrors of world war. The form's central practitioner was J. R. R. Tolkien, and his work encouraged later writers—such as Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and, later, Gene Wolfe, Philip Pullman, and China Miéville—to further develop the genre. Moreover, the contemporary dominance of popular fantasy is evidenced by the bestselling novelist J. K. Rowling.

The work of Bester, Dick, and these others set the stage for science fiction's second “modernist” moment, a period often referred to as the New Wave. These works reflected the political upheavals of the time, and often offered critiques of state and corporate bureaucracies, consumerism, the Vietnam War, environmental despoilage, and gender and racial inequality (see RACE). New Wave writers in the U.S. would include Harlan Ellison, who also edited the landmark Dangerous Visions anthologies (1967, 1972); Frank Herbert, whose most celebrated novel, Dune (1965), placed ecological concerns centrally within the genre; Thomas Disch, author of the acclaimed dystopias Camp Concentration (1968) and 334 (1972); and the prolific Robert Silverberg. Science-fictional elements also began to be more prominent in “literary” fictions by writers such as William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. The British magazine New Worlds, especially under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, showcased new works, including the experimental fictions of J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss. Meanwhile, John Brunner emerged as an important author of contemporary dystopian fiction. Major science fiction would again appear from the Soviet bloc, most prominently in the work of Stanislaw Lem (Poland) and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (USSR).

Finally, this period would see an increasing diversity among the genre's authors. Although a handful of women—including Leigh Brackett, Carol Emshwiller, Judith Merril, C. L. Moore, and James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)—did publish memorable fiction in the 1940s and 1950s, it would not be until the later 1960s that women writers would take up a new prominence in the genre, often explicitly thematizing gender and sexuality. Some of the best known of these writers are Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Suzy McKee Charnas, McCaffrey, Vonda McIntyre, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, and, most significantly Le Guin, whose masterpieces include The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a tale of an alien race whose sexual biology and gender identities are radically different from our own, and The Dispossessed (1974), a work that heralded a full-scale revival of the literary utopia. Delany was another path-breaking figure, as one of the first african american and, later, openly gay writers in the field (see QUEER). Delany would be followed by other major African American science-fiction authors, such as Octavia Butler, whose Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–89) and Parable novels (1993, 1998) became some of the genre's most discussed, and more recently by the Canadian Caribbean novelist Naola Hopkinson.

By the end of the 1970s, the energies of the New Wave had been exhausted, and the subsequent conservative counter-assault created an environment less hospitable to science-fiction experimentation and dangerous visions. A significant change in the genre was signaled by the emergence of “cyberpunk” in the early 1980s. Although Bruce Sterling took on the role of the movement's spokesperson, it was William Gibson who emerged as its leading practitioner. Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984) rejected both the optimism of the Gernsback–Campbell era and the radicalism of the previous generation. Moreover, in its celebration of new information technologies, its suspicion of Fordist welfare state policies, and its poaching from and pastiche of different genres, including noir fiction, cyberpunk was seen as exemplary of postmodern sensibilities. Other prominent writers associated with the movement include Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and Neal Stephenson.

Many of the science-fiction writers who rose to prominence in the late 1980s and 1990s—including Iain M. Banks, Terry Bisson, Butler, Orson Scott Card, Hopkinson, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod, Miéville, Robinson, Stephenson, and Sheri Tepper—signal a further eclecticism in the genre as they draw upon the resources of hard science fiction, utopias and dystopias, cyberpunk, and heroic fantasy. There has also been a resurgence among these writers of the critical political energies that were in abeyance in the heyday of postmodern cyberpunk, signaling another turn in the genre's rich history.

Bibliography

Aldiss, B. (1986), Trillion Year Spree.
Attebery, B. (1992), Strategies of Fantasy.
Barr, M. (1993), Lost in Space.
Broderick, D. (1995), Reading by Starlight.
Clute, J. and J. Grant, eds. (1999), Encyclopedia of Fantasy.
Clute, J. and P. Nicholls, eds. (1995), Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Freedman, C. (2000), Critical Theory and Science Fiction.
Jameson, F. (2005), Archaeologies of the Future.
Moylan, T. (2001), Scraps of the Untainted Sky.
Seed, D. (2000), “ Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction,’”, Extrapolation 43(3): 209–47.
Seed, D., ed. (2005), Companion to Science Fiction.
Wegner, P. (2002), Imaginary Communities.
Yaszek, L. (2008), Galactic Suburbia.

Self-Reflexivity see Narration

Sensation Novel see British Isles (19th Century); Melodrama

Sentimental Novel see British Isles (18th Century); Domestic Novel

Serialization

Patricia Okker and , Nancy West ,

For many, the idea of a “novel” conjures up associations with an individual book, an individual reader, an individual pleasure. Neatly contained within its bindings, the novel affords a book lover both private and personal pleasures. She can carry an entire novel wherever she goes, and the very neatness of its containment ensures that she decides when to take a break or when to read voraciously through the night, perhaps with a flashlight in hand to avoid detection.

While this link between novel and book can seem immutable, millions of readers, especially in the nineteenth century, have enjoyed consuming their fiction through serialized installments apportioned over weeks, months, and sometimes years. Novels were issued in parts or numbers, each wrapped separately for distribution and purchase, or in monthly, weekly, or daily periodicals. Regardless of which type, part-issue or periodical publication, the serialized novel requires a prolonged reading experience, which brings different delights than the bound novel. A commentator in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Dec. 1855) compared the serial reader to a gourmand slowly digesting a multi-course meal: “Readers who complain of serials have not learned the first wish of an epicure—a long, long throat. It is the serial which lengthens the throat so that the feast lasts a year or two years. You taste it all the way down” (128).

Although a global history remains to be written, serialized fiction has long been an international phenomenon, exhibiting striking similarities across nations. The rise of the serial novel corresponded with specific technological developments, the advent of a consumer culture, urbanization, increased literacy rates, and increased leisure. The basic narrative of the genre's evolution remains constant whether one considers Japanese newspapers during the 1800s, British periodicals in the 1840s and 1850s, or Shanghai magazines during the early 1900s. Publishers experimented with serialization to reduce initial expenses and disperse the prohibitive cost of books to consumers over time. As reading became measured by the clock and calendar of the workweek, the serial novel provided an ideal way to spend leisure time.

Given its extraordinary popularity, range, and longevity, serialization has generated a rich body of scholarship, especially within the field of British literature. Early criticism was largely devoted to recovering the history of serial publication by major authors such as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. By the late 1980s, critics began turning their attention to social and cultural issues, with an increasing emphasis on both theoretical concerns and the community of readers created by serialization. Some scholars, such as Jennifer Hayward, have addressed the commercial strategies of serialization. Richard Hagedorn, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, and Laurie Langbauer have taken a more philosophical and theoretical look at serialization, examining its relation to capitalism, nineteenth-century conceptions of time, and the meaning of the “ordinary.” Recent critics have devoted considerable effort toward uncovering the less prominent authors and more marginalized audiences of serial novels. Other critics are now looking at serialization within the context of specific magazines. This latter group of scholars—Susan Belasco Smith, Deborah Wynne, and Patricia Okker, among others—draw attention to the materiality of the periodicals in which the novels appeared and highlight the juxtaposition of serial installments with magazine features, including cartoons and advertisements. Yet, despite this breadth of scholarship, much work on the serial novel remains to be done.

Serialization in England and the U.S.: Beginnings through the 1870s

Often associated with the nineteenth century, serialization originated much earlier. In England, books of all sorts (including the Bible, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and A Compleat History of Executions) were serialized as early as the seventeenth century. Initial attempts at serializing fiction in separate parts or in periodicals emphasized short texts and/or reprinted texts. Samuel Johnson's slender novel Rasselas, for example, was reissued in various forms in four separate magazines—the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, the Grand Magazine of Universal Intelligence, the London Magazine, and the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure—during 1759. Serializing original long fiction emerged with Tobias Smollett's The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves in the illustrated British Magazine between 1760 and 1761 and then in the U.S. with Jeremy Belknap's The Foresters in the Columbian Magazine between 1787 and 1788.

Despite these occasional examples, however, the serial novel did not begin to flourish until the mid-nineteenth century. Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (published in twenty monthly parts, 1836–37) and Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris, published serially in Journal des débats, 1842–43) are credited with galvanizing the spread of serialization in the 1840s and 1850s in the U.S. and Europe. The French roman feuilleton, or serial story, inspired this international phenomenon, its influence still apparent in the Swedish term for serial, följetonger. Serialization's tremendous popularity in America forced more than one commentator to recant earlier defamations of the genre. A Ladies' Magazine editor who proclaimed in 1828 that there was not “so dull a phrase in the English language, as ... ‘to be continued’” was serializing novels by the 1840s (Jan. 1828, 45). A decade later, serial novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (serialized 1851–52) became national bestsellers. Most fiction appeared in newspapers or magazines, although Dickens is a good reminder that independent monthly publications remained an option from the 1840s through the 1870s, especially in England. But the serial novel made its most significant advance in periodicals, including elite literary monthlies, middle-class family papers, and inexpensive weeklies for working-class readers that sometimes boasted circulations as high as a quarter-million. Because of this range of periodicals, the serial novel extended to readers of virtually every social class.

Early scholarship on serialization focused on its deployment by writers, many of whom were quite attentive to installment structure during the composition process. Anthony Trollope crafted parts of the same length, and Dickens specialized in cliffhanger endings that almost always corresponded with an installment break. Authors who favored the popular double- and sometimes triple-plot novel could extend readers' suspense by alternating between plots. Extended digressions from the protagonists sometimes prompted authorial apologies. After shifting the plot of The Hidden Hand (serialized 1859) away from the heroine Capitola for two straight weeks, E.D.E.N. Southworth commiserated with readers: “How glad I am to get back to my little Cap; for I know very well, reader, just as well as if you had told me, that you have been grumbling for two weeks for the want of Cap. But I could not help it, for, to tell the truth, I was pining after her myself” (chap. 60). Other writers fashioned installments as accompaniments to upcoming news articles and features. Readers of All the Year Round would have noticed a close correspondence between developments in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (serialized 1859–60) and the journal's coverage of various murder cases.

Scholars have demonstrated that the form of the installment as well as its content was not always an authorial choice. Editors frequently dictated a serial novel's appearance in a magazine or newspaper. Some editors favored the kind of craftsmanship Trollope developed, but others inserted breaks in the middle of chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and even words. In these cases, the installment unit had nothing to do with the writer's intentions; it was a matter of available columns. Other problems faced novelists publishing in periodicals. Writing in parts, especially for weekly magazines, also subjected an author to intense pressure to meet deadlines or even to an editor's presumptuous rewriting. Much to her frustration, Elizabeth Gaskell complied with Dickens's wholesale revisions to North and South (1854–55) when the novel was serialized in his Household Words.

Yet whatever assaults were waged on artistic integrity, the serial novel attracted many a literary luminary, including Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Stowe, Collins, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy. Many of these novels became sensations, as in the legendary case of Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (serialized 1840–41). So gripped were its readers that when the heroine fell sick, in the penultimate installment, thousands of fans dashed off letters to the novelist and implored him not to let Little Nell die. Upon learning that Dickens had killed her off, many were thunderstruck. Even Thomas Carlyle, who made a point of pooh-poohing Dickens's sentimentalism whenever he could, admitted to being overcome with grief at Little Nell's demise. Legend also has it that one famous Parliamentarian, having read the last chapter on the train, burst into tears and threw the book out the window, exclaiming, “He should not have killed her!” (E. Johnson, 1952, Charles Dickens, 1:303–4).

The Serial Reader

The audience's often intense engagement with serialized fiction has prompted scholars to consider the ways that readers serve as collaborators in serialization. Countless tales exist of authors changing course based on audience responses and actual sales. Dickens penned additional scenes for the inimitable Mrs. Gamp, in Martin Chuzzlewit (serialized 1843–44), when she proved a favorite among readers. Trollope exterminated a character in The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire (1866–67) because of a conversation overheard at the Athenaeum Club. Lamenting Trollope's penchant for recycling characters, two male readers expressed their worry that Mrs. Proudie, with whom they had “fallen afoul,” would return in another book. Finding the conversation unbearable, Trollope walked up to the two men, introduced himself as the “culprit,” and promised to “go home and kill her before the week is over” (Autobiography, chap. 15). And so he did. When enthusiasm and promising sales greeted Yusheng Sun's Chinese novel Haishang fanhua meng (1898–1903, Dreams of Shanghai Splendor), he expanded his initial plan for thirty chapters to sixty, and still later to a whopping one hundred (A. Des Forges, 2003, “Building Shanghai, One Page at a Time,” Journal of Asian Studies 62: 783, 802).

Capturing the experience of these readers remains an elusive goal, but scholars have successfully characterized the readership of serial fiction. Some have documented the fact that serial reading was not limited to women, as many early critics of the form assumed. Critics working on British serials have likewise determined the changing demographics and practices of serial readers. In the 1840s and 1850s, middle-class readers tended to borrow books from circulating libraries or to buy them in monthly parts. Working-class readers, on the other hand, consumed novels in cheap magazines. Changes in newspaper and paper tax laws in 1859 and 1860 led to the creation of family magazines that appealed to the middle class, such as All the Year Round, Macmillan's Magazine, and Cornhill. For other periodicals, more detailed analysis of their readers is needed. Indeed, the demographics of serial readers varied considerably across different periodicals, based on class, gender, region, race and ethnicity, religion, and even profession.

The serial reader tended to imagine the novelist as far less remote than writers today are thought to be. In “A Box of Novels,” Thackeray observed that installment publishing fostered a “communion between the writer and the public ... something continual, confidential, something like personal affection” (Fraser's Magazine, Feb. 1844, 167). When the American novelist Ann Stephens embarked on a European trip, her “state-room was filled with bouquets ... some from individuals to whom she was known only by her writings” (Peterson's Magazine, June 1850, 270). For many Victorians, the serial novel was woven into the ordinary and extraordinary moments of life. A single woman beginning Dickens's Bleak House in March 1852 might have been watching her first baby crawl by the time she finished the last number in August 1853. Serialized novels helped readers assuage loneliness, depression, even physical suffering. For example, the editor of Macmillan's Magazine recounts the apocryphal story of an old woman who, suffering from a fatal illness, “took much delight” in reading Collins's No Name (serialized 1862–63) during her final days. Though she was “content enough to die when the appointed time came,” she whispered on her deathbed, “I am afraid, after all, I shall die without ever knowing what becomes of Magdalen Vanstone” (Dec. 1865, 156). Interweaving one's personal life with the serial's plot took place on the other side of the divide as well. At the beginning of chap. 10 of Palaces and Prisons, Stephens announced to her readers that “between this chapter and the last” her brother had died. She continued her narrative, explaining that, “like his young life,” her work “must not be broken off in the middle” (Peterson's, Oct. 1849).

In addition to reinforcing the bond between reader and author, serial fiction encouraged a sense of community among readers. Unlike readers of bound novels, who proceed at different paces, readers of serial fiction must experience the narrative together, reading installments and anticipating subsequent ones as a group. The common practice of reading installments aloud among family or neighbors also bolstered the sense of reading within a community (see READING). Howells, for instance, recalled reading Uncle Tom's Cabin “as it came out week after week,” and remarked, “I broke my heart over Uncle Tom's Cabin, as every one else did” (My Literary Passions, chap. 11).

Initial scholarship on serialization focused on literary lions such as Dickens and elite venues like Harper's Monthly, but the form was widespread and varied. Lesser-known novelists, such as Scottish writer David Pae and American author Southworth, dominated the field. Some authors produced more than fifty novels. Serial novels appeared in every conceivable kind of periodical: general newspapers, illustrated weeklies, women's magazines, political papers, children's periodicals, and of course literary journals. The “story papers” in America consisted almost entirely of serialized fiction and sometimes included as many as eight different serials at a time. Even more astonishing are the so-called mammoth papers, like Brother Jonathan and the New World, which offered Americans original and pirated serials in a cheap, gargantuan format, with pages upward of four feet long.

Because one could launch a periodical with relatively few resources in comparison to starting a book-publishing firm, serialization was crucial in the African American press. Martin R. Delany's Blake: Or, the Huts of America debuted in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, though was not completed. It was reissued to completion in the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861–62. Written for African American readers and published in African American-owned periodicals, Delany's Blake opposed slavery vociferously, making it one of the most radical novels of its day. While white abolitionists like Stowe preferred childlike African American characters, Delany's protagonist leads an insurrection and is willing to kill those who oppose his missions. The fact that Delany's novel was not published in book form until 1970 is hardly accidental; indeed, were it not for the African American press it is hard to imagine that Blake would ever have been published.

1880s and 1890s

Near the end of the century, serialization began to change, owing to the rise of newspaper syndicates in the U.S. and U.K., and in some circumstances to wane. Some magazines began to include entire novels in single issues. Others, like Munsey's in the U.S., pronounced the short story, not the serial novel, the “one form of literary work of which the public never has enough” (July 1893, 466). The same was true in England. In the 1880s and 1890s, new magazines like The Strand and Tit-Bits boasted of “short fiction, easily read on train or omnibus” (Strand, July 1891, 1). One explanation for this shift was that serialized novels became more difficult to publish when mass-market periodicals, like Ladies' Home Journal, began to flood the magazine industry and eclipse publications with smaller circulation rates but steadier readerships, like the Atlantic Monthly. The form that had attracted readers only decades before was now a liability. Editors could no longer be sure that audiences were reading their periodicals month by month. Some magazines navigated this new terrain by offering a creative hybrid of sorts. The Strand was lucky enough to get Arthur Conan Doyle, who, through his Sherlock Holmes stories, realigned serialization with the short story. In his autobiography, Doyle explained how he came upon the idea: “Considering these various journals with their disconnected stories, it had struck me that a single character running through a series ...would bind that reader to that particular magazine” (1924, Memories and Adventures, 95). His hunch was a prophesy. After the first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” appeared in the July 1891 issue of The Strand, circulation skyrocketed. When Doyle had the audacity to kill his detective two years later, many readers, some wearing black armbands, refused to read the magazine—until Holmes made his miraculous return in 1901.

1900–1970

The advent of mass-market publications cannot fully explain the serial novel's declivity in the early twentieth century. The form helped insure the success of the German periodical Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, which boasted a readership of close to two million in the late 1920s and whose circulation increased by 200,000 because of a single novel, Stud. Chem.: Helene Willfüer, by bestselling author Vicki Baum (serialized 1928–29; L. J. King, 1988, Best-Sellers By Design, 12). Possible explanations for the decline of the serial novel in the U.K. and U.S. include competition from other media, like motion pictures (invented in the mid-1890s), and innovations in the novel itself. Rather than sprawling and social, early twentieth-century novels tended to be telescoped and introspective. Violent and sexual content was judged unsuitable for magazines designed mainly for family reading. Some writers, like James, found that the pursuit of psychological subtlety in their fiction made it less marketable. In 1900 the business manager of the Atlantic, which had serialized several of James's stories, begged Perry Bliss, the editor, “with actual tears in his eyes, not to print another ‘sinker’ by James lest the Atlantic be thought a ‘high-brow’ periodical” (P. Bliss, 1935, And Gladly Teach, 178). The poet Evan Shipman declared serialization to be “an unnatural kind of publication for anyone with an idea of form” (L. J. Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators, 90). Many modern novelists bristled at the idea of catering to what they perceived as the crass commercialism of the magazine industry.

A fascinating example of the apparent incompatibility between serialization and the modernist novel (see MODERNIS) is the magazine publication of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in 1929. By all accounts, Hemingway was ambivalent about serialization. He knew that it would give him greater visibility, but he feared that it might compromise his status as a writer and siphon off dollars from clothbound sales. This latter concern was less pronounced in the nineteenth century, since the extravagant cost of bound volumes made serialization the best means of attracting a wide audience. Because Scribner's was known for its “intelligent readers” and subdued use of advertising (all advertisements appeared in the back pages), Hemingway agreed to serialize the novel. He reasoned that even if his artistic integrity suffered, passages of his book would at least not jostle alongside Kotex advertisements (Leff, chap. 3). Unbeknownst to him, Scribner's editor censored the first installment (see CENSORSHIP). Hemingway persuaded him to use a gentler hand on the second installment, but as soon as it reached newsstands in June, the Boston superintendent of police, horrified by such words as “balls” and “cocksucker,” banned Scribner's that month. And yet, despite these seeming incongruities between modernist fiction and serialization, the list of major novels first appearing in serial form is quite long. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim appeared in Blackwood's (1899, 1899–1900); Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1904–1905) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934) both appeared in Scribner's; and most surprising of all, James Joyce's Ulysses was published in the Little Review (1918–20). This list tells us that serialization did not die in the early twentieth century, but it was no longer the polestar of years past. Once the best insurance for gaining a wide readership, serialization now became a supplement to book sales. Given the much shorter length of modernist novels, serial runs spanned a few months instead of years. Authors like Dickens once valued the opportunity serialization gave them to amend their novels to better please their audiences, but writers like Hemingway objected to such give-and-take, preferring a more detached relationship with the reader.

While serialization held lukewarm appeal for the twentieth century's most “literary” wordsmiths, it remained a mainstay for popular novelists. Romances and adventure novels appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and crime novelists, including the influential Dashiell Hammett, published in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective. Pitched at working-class male readers, who were among the publishing industry's most elusive audience, pulp magazines capitalized on crime fiction's use of suspense to sustain their readers' attention over a long serial run (see DETECTIVE). During the 1920s and 1930s, popular novelists serialized their work in tabloid papers whose literary quality was astonishingly good, like the New York Daily News and the New York Daily Mirror. These tabloids relied heavily on serial fiction. Editors commissioned guest authors to write novellas of criminal cases that the papers were currently covering. Thus Russell J. Birdwell's Ruth Snyder's Tragedy: The Greatest True Story Ever Written was published weekly in the Daily Mirror between April and September 1927 as Snyder and her corset-salesman lover were being tried for the murder of her husband. (They both got the electric chair.)

Meanwhile the serial novel was flourishing in periodicals for the U.S.'s many immigrant populations. Serialization had been an essential part of the German, French, and Spanish press in the U.S. throughout the 1800s, but in the early twentieth century the range of languages and circulation broadened. During this period Swedish American periodicals published close to seventy serials each week, reaching nearly half a million readers. Because of the diasporic nature of immigrant populations, high circulations were possible even when the papers were published in small towns. A Norwegian-language newspaper from Decorah, Iowa, which featured a popular trilogy between 1919 and 1922, reached an estimated forty-five thousand readers by 1925, even though the town's population was only four thousand (see J. B. Wist, 2005, Rise of Jonas Olsen, trans. Øverland). And while Scandinavian periodicals declined in the later half of the twentieth century, during the 1960s the popularity of serial fiction in Jewish, Chinese, and other immigrant communities rivaled that of its nineteenth-century counterpart.

The Post-1970 Era

Since the 1970s, the serial novel has undergone a revival. Relaxed restrictions on newspaper and magazine content inspired writers to offer frank, fictionalized treatments of contemporary social problems, as Armistead Maupin did with Tales of the City, first serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle before moving to the San Francisco Examiner between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s. Inspired by Honoré de Balzac and Dickens, Maupin used San Francisco as a backdrop to explore a wide range of current events and social problems, including homophobia and drug addiction. The Tales were adapted for television and serialized in 1993, 1998, and 2001 (see ADAPTATION). Another celebrated example is Tom Wolfe's version of Bonfire of the Vanities for Rolling Stone (serialized 1984–85). Multiple plotlines, diverse characters, and a harsh look at New York's class divide made the novel ideal for serialization. Wolfe later admitted that its original publication in Rolling Stone provided him with the opportunity to write “a first draft in public. I have a feeling I never would have written Bonfire without it” (K. Pryor, 1990, “Serials: Making a Comeback,” Entertainment Weekly, 16 Mar.). In the mid-1990s, New York Newsday hired crime novelist and reporter Soledad Santiago to write a serialized novel in order to increase the newspaper's Latino readership. The result was a sixty-four-part serial entitled Streets of Fire (1994), which explored the life of a Puerto Rican female cop in New York. Readers, especially women, loved the novel, and the newspaper had to create a special telephone line to handle inquiries and provide recorded plot summaries of past issues.

Within the past few years, more and more writers and editors have experimented with the serial novel. Professional and amateur novelists alike are serializing novels online via email lists. At the same time, some newspapers have turned to installment fiction as a way of boosting circulation. One editor remarked, “Many newspapers have become ... almost staccato in their effect, with more news items and shorter stories. I think people quite like something more substantial to get their teeth into” (S. Ohler, 2006, “The Life and Times of the Serial Novel,” Edmonton Journal, 8 Sept.). Between Dec. 2008 and Feb. 2009 the Daily Telegraph published installments of Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions daily, providing free email delivery in both its written form and as audio chapters. In one of the most fascinating of these experiments, the Los Angeles Times published Money Walks over the course of twenty-eight days in Apr. 2009, with each installment written by a different author. This experiment echoes an earlier one, when in 1907–8, Harper's Bazaar published The Whole Family in twelve monthly installments, written collaboratively by twelve authors, including Howells, James, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Readers were invited to guess the authorship of the individual chapters.

The history of serialization, including its downslides and permutations, tells us that the serial novel has tremendous resilience. While many reasons account for its indefatigability, perhaps the most important is that serialization allows for social binding; serial readers—despite whatever geographical and cultural differences separate them—are encouraged to feel that they are part of a community. As experiments in serialization keep evolving via television, the internet, and new media, serialization retains its power to create readerly communities even in a culture where the act of sustained reading, of devoting oneself to a single piece of literature and staying with it until the end, is becoming more and more of a rarity.

One place where we can still see serialization's power to create communities is in the BBC's production of classic Victorian serials in televised installments. When an adaptation of Dickens's Bleak House aired in the U.K. over Oct. and Nov. 2005, nearly five million television viewers, or 27 percent of the available TV audience, tuned in every Thursday and Friday night. According to Amazon.UK, sales of Dickens's Bleak House went up by 290 percent that October. When the show aired over a five-week period in the U.S. a few months later, audiences were equally rapturous. Stephanie Zacharek, a critic for Salon, commented: “For these next four Sundays, I'll be turning the pages, figuratively speaking, with many other viewers, and on Feb. 26, I'll close the cover at last. And then, instead of feeling confident that I already know the story backward and forward, I anticipate reading the novel for real—alone, as we always are with a book, and yet not alone at all” (2006, “Refuge in Bleak House,” Salon.com, 4 Feb.). With a notable air of gratitude and wistfulness, Zacharek describes how the BBC series, an abbreviated approximation of the Victorian serialized novel, has reawakened in her the desire for a prolonged, absorbing interest in a story. The serialized novel may thus not be what it once was in 1852–53, when Dickens's Bleak House was first released to audiences in installments. But in this instance, as in others, we can see how the dream of it, if not always the actuality, still survives.

Bibliography

Brake, L. (2001), Print in Transition, 1850–1910.
Brantlinger, P. (1998), Reading Lesson.
Denning, M. (1987), Mechanic Accents.
Feltes, N.N. (1986), Modes of Production of Victorian Novels.
Hagedorn, R. (1988), “ Technology and Economic Exploitation,” Wide Angle 10(4): 4–12.
Hayward, J. (1997), Consuming Pleasures.
Hughes, L.K. and M. Lund (1991), Victorian Serial.
James, L. (1963), Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850.
Johanningsmeier, C. (1997), Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace.
Langbauer, L. (1999), Novels of Everyday Life.
Law, G. (2000), Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press.
Lund, M. (1993), America's Continuing Story.
Martin, C.A. (1994), George Eliot's Serial Fiction.
Mayo, R.D. (1962), English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815.
Okker, P. (2003), Social Stories.
Payne, D. (2005), Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction.
Price, K.M. and S.B. Smith (1995), Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America.
Queffélec, L. (1989), Le Roman-feuilleton français au XIXe siècle.
Wiles, R.M. (1957), Serial Publication in England before 1750.
Wynne, D. (2001), Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine.

Sexuality

Dale M. Bauer

Sexuality in novels can refer either to the history of sex (as action or being) appearing in novels or, as literary narratology has proposed, a style of sexuality displayed in novels. Characters either are sexual or act sexually, but one can also argue that plots are charged with sexuality. The difficulty in tracing sexuality in novels depends on whether one considers “sexuality” as a history (the amount of sexuality in novels) or as a theory (the possibilities of sexuality as a political praxis, of repression, or of liberation). For some theorists, sexuality is more of a discipline than a form of liberation. For others, literary sex marks a moment of confusion of normative behavior more than a reaction or rebellion (see Dollimore). Often, sexual battles are played out in novels, such as in the domain of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), where Isabel Archer debates with herself about conventional marriage and liberal affect.

Michel Foucault inspired an examination of the modes by which novels would produce a new kind of sexual norm. His History of Sexuality included analyses of how sexuality became a source of biopower, and he offered a rejection of the “repressive hypothesis,” which contended that humans had repressed their sexual desires in favor of knowledge and power. He argued, rather, that the nineteenth century introduced a new hegemony of sexuality, including one that named the self as a kind of sexual being. Foucault called “bodies and pleasures” as representative of genderless moments of resistance from the reigning power of sex-desire. This claim for the counter-discursive function of resistant pleasures may allow particular queer sexual acts to be considered oppositional practices (see Berlant and Warner). Psychoanalysis, too, influenced a literary theory that analyzed what Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan (among others) suggested was the symbolic nature of sexuality (see PSYCHOANALYTIC).

Histories of sexuality in novels were originally published as topical histories, like Tony Tanner's monumental study of adultery. Following Tanner, many critics charted sexual pleasure as a subversion of patriarchy or capitalism. With the rise of feminist theory and queer studies, theorists saw the novel as a great democratic form that opened up questions about sexuality. For example, D. A. Miller and Eve Sedgwick argued that novels represent homosexuality through various modes as “between men,” a theory of the novel about male homosocial relations that begins to mark the territory of erotic homosexuality. Most recently, the social critic Bruce Burgett has argued that in the nineteenth century the creation of categories such as “heterosexual” and “homosexual”—along with “Sapphist,” “sexual invert,” “intermediate sex,” and “homogenic”—urged writers to use the terms as part of a policing of pleasure. In this light, some novels were infused with “sexology”: a judgment about the “normalcy” of sexual relations and powers. As Burgett writes, “Here and elsewhere, the pressing historical question is not how ‘sex’ and ‘race’ have intersected in various historical conjunctures, but how, to what ends, and in what contexts we have come to think of the ‘two’ as separable in the first place” (2005, 94). Arguments such as Burgett's have led to the examination of the confluence of these categories—along with class and ethnicity (see Berlant; Haag; Horowitz).

Other critics of sexuality in the novel include Judith Roof, who argues that lesbianism was figured in “coming-out narratives” as conservative modes of queer visibility that actually reinforced the heteronormative mode of the novel. Another major critic of sexuality, Joseph Boone, incisively details how male sexualities informed narratives. Since the late 1990s, the advances of feminist and queer theory have opened up topics such as bisexuality and queer erotics, as well as public sex.

Histories of Sexuality in the Novel

Some of the earliest novels about sexuality concerned the use of personal desire as pleasure. “Fallen woman” fiction—like Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791) and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797)—included women who acted upon their sexuality only to be cast as fallen creatures who must be spiritually saved or literally killed as lessons about female desire. In Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Maggie dies by the end of this narrative, either having taken her own life or been killed by some attacker. In any case, Crane is careful not to take sides against Maggie, since his naturalistic tone suggests that the environment in which she lives and works may be responsible for her choices and her drift toward prostitution (see NATURALISM). By the 1920s, more and more middle-class novels, like Viña Delmar's Bad Girl (1928), would position female sexuality as blasé, addressing premarital sex as a way to domestic—and marital—bliss.

The representation of male sexuality in eighteenth-century novels might be said to start with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719–22), in which homo economicus curbs his appetites in order to structure his own material world. Samuel Richardson's Loveless in Clarissa (1747–48) represents the rake as a figure of pure appetite. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) gives us a happier medium of male sexuality in the service of conviviality and honor.

In American fiction, Charles Brockden Brown made an early contribution to the discussion of men's and women's equality with his Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798). James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41) document Natty Bumpo's ascetism and his polite, even diffident, relations to women. More appetitive males appear in the Southwestern tradition as witnessed in the works of William Gilmore Simms and Robert Montgomery Bird. Nathaniel Hawthorne follows the divided male self in configuring pairs like Chillingworth and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter (1850) or Hollingsworth and Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance (1852). Even Holgrave in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) has a dual sexual identity that needs to be resolved before he takes his place in the heterosexual concluding fantasy. Herman Melville's men often follow the twists of this mainstream divided logic. That division was famously codified in Leslie Fiedler's study of homoeroticism in the American novel in which he argued that pairings such as Bumpo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, and Huck and Jim reveal a dominant pattern in American culture where white males identify their erotics in their close relations with men of color (see Chap. 94 of Moby-Dick). In realism, we begin to see U.S. authors presenting men in their masculine fullness in Bartley Hubbard (William Dean Howells, 1885, The Rise of Silas Lapham) and Basil Ransom (Henry James, 1886, The Bostonians).

One could trace such a debate about gender roles even further back to Jane Austen's sentimental fictions. Pride and Prejudice (1813) argues that class-based marriage and sexuality controlled by the “invisible hand” of markets conflict with an image of marriage as companionship, transcending the rules of class and status. Austen's Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy stage this debate in code-embedded rules of dancing, walking, and card playing, since these events have social rules that define how they are played, like lovemaking itself. Yet Elizabeth's blushing is an involuntary reaction, one that gives the lie to the social codes and expresses her sexual desire. By the same token, Darcy's confessions of love to Elizabeth reveal his sense of violating the market-driven pairing of his social class. A novel like Austen's poses questions to its audience about what counts as sexuality: conscious or unconscious motives, playing by social rules or giving up on all sexual rules entirely.

Popular Fictions about Sexuality: From Middlebrow to Middle-Class Desire

The novel corresponded with the political and cultural arenas of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sexuality in the novel also coincided with capitalist growth and the rise of the reading public. Sexuality in both normative and non-normative forms illustrated the relationship between public and private spheres, as well as between colonies and empires. As Nancy Armstrong has argued, the function of the novel was to form the discursive power of sexuality, particularly for the middle-class woman whose domesticity made her a powerful female subject, especially in sex relations. Armstrong contends that gendered power—particularly in domestic novels—earned women power through their represented subjectivity. For Armstrong, the female was constituted as the modern individual, a subject ready to consent to sexuality. That is, modern women gain power through their gender and class as consensual subjects. For instance, among the sixty works of nineteenth-century U.S. novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth, several, such as The Discarded Daughter (1852), are chronicles of domestic abuse, and Self-Raised (1876) illustrates what happens when one mistress denies her would-be lover sexual intercourse until after his divorce.

By the mid- to late nineteenth century, novels did not play by these rules so much as offer stories that broke those rules. Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862), for example, documents love that exceeds social rules and norms. The two women whose lives are at the central of the novel, Cassandra and Veronica, must get past dangerous health issues to consummate their marriages. Cassandra loves one brother, who must be absent from her for two years to prove he can overcome his passions, especially inebriation. Veronica's lover dies from drinking, but not before they marry and reproduce. In this way, so much about sexuality concerned what biological or biosocial issues might impair a marriage or a reproductive couple. In “social gospel” novels such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871), minor characters might find sex pleasurable, but the two main characters eschew their sexual possibilities to remain spinsters and thus to serve as social guides.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were a number of fictions published on both sides of the sexuality question, in one of the first “sex battles” of the modern era. Intellectual critics like Charlotte Perkins Gilman—called a feminist humanist in her day—wrote social-reform novels about the dangers of sexuality as pleasure, arguing instead that sexuality as reproduction was women's major contribution to sexual selection. At the same time, hundreds of New Woman novelists, in both Britain and the U.S., advocated sexual pleasure. For example, Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) developed ideas about free love, New Womanhood, and eugenic offspring as a result of independent and unmarried women giving birth.

Historically, the idea of sexuality as a form of a person's identity—and later as a kind of expression—took hold in modern culture. The beginning of the twentieth century inaugurated a new range of terms for sexuality, devoted to detailing a person's choice of sexual activity. By 1922, James Joyce's novel Ulysses opened up greater space for discussions of homosexuality or, in Molly Bloom's “yes I said yes,” of sexual consent. In fact, the 1920s ushered in a Marxist-inspired debate about “sex expression” as a way out of the bourgeois restriction of sexuality. This influence of “sex expression” in literature, espoused by V. F. Calverton, made bourgeois sex regulation outdated, and instead celebrated the liberation of sexuality.

In premodern and modern texts, stories of “inversion,” where one sex expressed the other gender's “qualities,” were suggestive of alternative sexualities. In her exploration of inversion in The Well of Loneliness (1928), Radclyffe Hall contended for a new social recognition of lesbianism. As Laura Doan argues, this novel and its “insistent demand for social tolerance” was “the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian subculture” (xii, xiii). In Gale Wilhelm's lesbian fictions of the American 1930s, We Still Are Drifting (1935) and Torchlight to Valhalla (1938), the heroines in the first novel admit to each other's love, but they cannot deny the younger girl's parents, who want her to go on vacation with her betrothed and the mothers of the lovers. By the end, the older lover, an artist, has to say goodbye to her lover and express her sense of a “drifting” sexual life. This notion of sexual “drifting” was earlier represented in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911), signaling “women adrift” in culture, their sexuality unconnected to domestic rites. By the 1940s, Mary McCarthy explored female sexuality in such works as The Company She Keeps (1942) and, twenty years later, her famous novel The Group. The first book is a collection of linked stories about a divorcee-in-waiting and her sexual play in a train to Nevada. The latter explores the sexual lives of six college graduates, with a focus on their gradual opening up to sexual adventures.

Nineteenth-century gay male novelists, such as Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Oscar Wilde, challenged conventional narratives of sexuality by introducing those that illustrate what Jonathan Dollimore calls the “terrifying mutability of desire” (56). By the turn of the century, masculinity enjoyed the cult of strenuousness, as espoused by President Teddy Roosevelt. His fear of “race suicide” influenced a number of American realists to write about a middle-class masculinity and reproductivity. An élan vital about masculinity was soon to be compromised by the experience of WWI, most notably in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). Indeed, through the 1930s beleaguered American males seldom found vital expression, and were often seen as diminished by historical circumstances. Examples of such men are Charley Anderson in John Dos Passos's U.S.A. (1930–36) and Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

It remained for Richard Wright to imagine Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940), whose full-fledged racialized sexuality demanded punishment. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1947) narrates Truman Blood's rape of his daughter to signify the fear of black male sexuality. Through the 1950s and 1960s, in works like Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road (1961), men have to find accommodation in a corporate world, where exertions of will are usually squashed. Perhaps the three most influential U.S. novelists in the post-WWII era—Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Philip Roth—have put the assertion of male sexuality and its complexities at the very center of their career-long projects.

Sexuality as Identity

Eventually, sexuality became part of the multivalent ways of identifying one's self. Other interstices of human identity—such as race, ethnicity, class, religion, and disability—helped to sharpen the notion of the privilege of one's sexuality or its alternative debility in a culture that promoted an essential heterosexuality. Second-wave feminists argued for sexual liberation, and their novels did the same: Pat Barker's Blow Your House Down (1984) details the sexuality of England's prostitutes, a sexual emotion that often leaves them feeling more for each other than for any heteronormative arrangement. Barker's language is key to her commitment to sexuality as a crucial marker of identity: her heroines are lodged in sexual capitalism, but they find themselves more in their female communities and lesbianism than in making money through sex. Later, queer fiction would become legion. In this context, the role of the Naiad Press's commitment to the lesbian novel from the 1970s to the 1990s cannot be underestimated. Twentieth-century gay male fiction, such as John Rechy's City of Night (1963) and Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004), glorified the new visibility of gay sexuality and the revisions of history about queer passions.

Thus, the history of sexuality in novels can be traced from early versions of eighteenth-century seduction novels to twentieth-century challenging fictions like Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School (1984). Graphic novels treat sexuality across the spectrum of responses: Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), by Howard Cruse, is a coming-out narrative/memoir about the civil rights movement in the South; Potential (1999), written by Ariel Schrag when she was in high school, is about queer sexuality and educational institutions; Blankets (2003), by Craig Thompson, is a straight romance that addresses teen sexuality, religion, disability, and childhood sexual abuse.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (2006), a graphic novel/memoir, has a rich historical dimension. A girl's father is closeted after WWII. His repression is a palpable vestige in the girl's life, especially after he walks in front of a truck and is killed. This death occurs right after the girl has confessed to her parents that she came out in college. Bechdel, the cartoonist of Dykes to Watch Out For (1986), took seven years to write and draw Fun Home because of the care she took in illustrating the historical difference between her father's gay identity and her own.

One might say that any narrative that changes the “Reader, I married him” plot (this from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, 1847) has its own sexuality—it resists the normative marriage plot. Plots that suggest a narrative challenge to normative sexuality might be called resisting fictions. In the twenty-first century, critics have addressed sexuality in novels through episodes, moments where sex, race, or class have worked together to change ideas of sexuality, such as during abolition and emancipation in the U.S., or in the “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Bibliography

Armstrong, N. (1987), Desire and Domestic Fiction.
Bechdel, A. (2006), Fun Home.
Berlant, L. and M. Warner (1998), “ Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24(2): 547–66.
Boone, J. (1998), Libidinal Currents.
Burgett, B. (2005), “ On the Mormon Question,” American Quarterly 57: 75–102.
Burgett, B. (2007), “ Sex,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies.
Doan, L. (2001), Fashioning Sapphism.
Dollimore, J. (2001), Sex, Literature and Censorship.
Fielder, L. (1960), Love and Death in the American Novel.
Foucault, M. (1990), History of Sexuality.
Haag, P. (1999), Consent.
Horowitz, H.L. (2003), Rereading Sex.
Miller, D.A. (1988), The Novel and the Police.
Sedgwick, E.K. (1985), Between Men.
Sedgwick, E.K. (1990), Epistemology of the Closet.
Tanner, T. (1981), Adultery in the Novel.

Shsetsu see Japan

Simile see Figurative Language and Cognition

Siuzhet see Formalism; Narrative Structure

Socialist Realist Novel see Russia (20th Century)

Sosl see Korea

South Asia

Chelva Kanaganayakam

As a category within the larger corpus of postcolonial literature, the South Asian novel has become increasingly significant in the past few decades, particularly in the West. In general terms, the corpus refers to fiction written by all writers whose origins can be traced to South Asia. It would, for instance, include writers from the Caribbean, the Fiji Islands, South Africa, Malaysia, and Singapore who were part of the Indian and Sri Lankan diaspora from the eighteenth to the early part of the twentieth century. Writers such as V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad) and K. S. Maniam (Malaysia), for example, would be considered part of this larger corpus. Apart from the fact that such a classification becomes too unwieldy for critical analysis, it is hardly possible to arrive at anything resembling a conceptual frame while dealing with such multiplicity. For the purpose of the present entry, the term “South Asian” refers to novels written by authors who either live in South Asia or are a part of the recent diaspora from South Asia. While there is a significant body of fiction written in various South Asian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and so forth, the present entry focuses specifically on novels written in English.

The South Asian novel, then, brings together the work of authors who are often identified nationally rather than regionally (see NATIONAL). Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi authors, for example, make up the majority of this body. Some of them left their countries after independence, and are now part of the diaspora. Referring to them as a composite group has both advantages and obvious problems. In historical terms, India and Sri Lanka have had a long colonial history. Their literary traditions in English go back to the nineteenth century, if not earlier. Pakistan came into existence in 1947 with the partition of India. Bangladesh is of more recent origin in that it was created when East Pakistan broke away from West Pakistan in 1971. Diasporic authors from South Asia now live in various metropolitan cities, such as London, New York, and Toronto, and while they are often identified in relation to their hyphenated status, they too are very much a part of this corpus. Their novels have, for the most part, insistently located themselves in their ancestral lands, and that alone brings them within the fold of South Asian literature. The frame that encloses all these authors is a common Indian origin, although Sri Lankan migration goes back too far to be a natural fit. The divisions are often based on religion, ethnicity, and national history. South Asian novels do have a family resemblance, but even while one asserts commonalities, one should be aware of striking differences. Religion and secularism are useful markers to establish intersections, although any generalization tends to quickly become a simplification.

Unlike writing from the Caribbean, these various literatures have no clear originary moment or historical context to connect them. Apart from the chronological disjunctures that separate one nation from another, the novels produced by these authors are far too diverse in relation to thematic focus to fit easily in any mold. At some level it might be more meaningful to trace their literary histories nationally rather than regionally (see REGIONAL). A South Asian literary history remains a daunting task. Diasporic writing, one might argue, functions within its own discursive framework, although these texts too tend to fall naturally into national models. It is possible to assert that the experience of exile forms a common thread in all South Asian diasporic novels, but that does not completely overshadow national or hyphenated affiliations.

That said, it might be possible to claim that the South Asian novel in English has not been, for the most part, anticolonial in its orientation. Even the novels that were written in the decades immediately before or after independence do not concern themselves with colonialism or with the struggle for freedom. A case in point is G. V. Desani's groundbreaking novel All About H. Hatterr (1948), which, despite its date of publication, has very little to do with anticolonial struggle in India. To say this is not to deny that novels written during this time do not entirely eschew nationalist concerns. Raja Rao's famous work Kanthapura (1938) is about a village transformed by Mahatma Gandhi's (1869–1948) nonviolent struggle against the British. The politics of colonialism is not totally absent from South Asian fiction, but it remains marginal to the overall body of literature.

The reasons for this lacuna are not entirely clear, since anticolonial struggle in India and Sri Lanka has a long and illustrious history. The reluctance among authors writing in English to focus on this struggle could well have something to do with the particular trajectory of colonial history in South Asia. Although English was introduced to India long before the nineteenth century, it was really in the first half of the nineteenth century that English came to be foregrounded as the language of governance, and an elaborate system of education in English was created by the East India Company. The famous Minute of Thomas Macaulay (1800–59) produced a class of people whose nationalist aspirations were combined with a commitment to the values of modernity. Although acts of resistance against the British gathered momentum in the twentieth century, there was also a measure of accommodation that made anticolonial sentiments less intense than in other parts of the world. This particular ambivalence, together with other factors, may have shaped literary history in ways that were not especially anticolonial. When South Asian authors began to write in the 1930s, the end of colonialism was already in sight and modernity had blunted the force of anticolonial sentiment.

While modernity is a central element in the South Asian novel, it is also true that any conceptual framework for understanding this corpus needs to acknowledge the presence of an ontology that has been shaped by religion. If there is one element that distinguishes the South Asian novel as a whole, that would be its religiosity. The South Asian novel is not overtly religious, however, in that gods and temples do not figure prominently in fiction. Apart from Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope (1960) and a few other novels, one might be hard pressed to find texts that are overtly concerned with religion. But the majority of novels are framed by a religious sensibility in that a religious ontology forms a subtext in this writing. The social and cultural dimension of religion is quite central to the South Asian novel. The precolonial world in South Asia was shaped by religion in that the temple, in the medieval period, became a node for organizing social and economic structures. Relations among people at the level of family and community were determined by the presence of the temple and its conventions of purity and pollution. All aspects of human life were organized in relation to the temple, although the social connections were not always apparent or fully acknowledged. A temple-based culture is very different from a culture that is fundamentally religious. It is the former that remains a strong presence in shaping the ethos of the South Asian novel. Religiosity takes different forms, depending on context and national or diasporic affiliation, but it continues to exert a powerful influence. Contrary to the assumptions of Orientalist thought, what is central to South Asia and its literature is not institutionalized religion but a particular way of life that is framed by religion. Although Hinduism may have triggered this particular kind of religiosity, the presence of religion can be traced to the novel in Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well.

Colonialism brought with it ideas of modernity, secularism, democracy, liberalism, and so forth. While these were central to South Asian society, the precolonial ontology was never entirely erased. The precolonial survived and coexisted with modernity. It is the combination of these two that one encounters most often in the South Asian novel. Depending on circumstances, the emphasis could fall on different events and historical conditions, but often the texture of the novels accommodates a combination of the precolonial religious ontology and the British secular worldview. The phrase “tradition and modernity” has often been used to define much postcolonial fiction, but in South Asia it takes on a complex role. That said, each nation evolved its own literary history, with India being the dominant player in South Asian fiction.

India

Serious writing in English in India began in the 1930s, although it is possible to claim that Rajmohan's Wife, written in 1864, was the first novel. The novels of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth were often imitative, and while they are of historical interest, they do not come across as significant writing. The one exception might be the novella Sultana's Dream, which appeared in 1905. Closer to a short story than a novel in its length, it demonstrates a control over form and a preoccupation with gender that are remarkable for the time.

After this the actual originary moment in the Indian novel was in the 1930s with the work of Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, and Mulk Raj Anand. The three authors represent three different strands in the Indian novel, with Rao expressing the mystical, religious dimension, Narayan the fusion of the religious and the secular, and Anand the downtrodden and the subaltern. All three authors' first novels appeared in the 1930s—Rao's Kanthapura in 1938, Narayan's Swami and Friends: A Novel of Malgudi in 1935, and Anand's Untouchable in 1933. All three continued to write novels for the next five decades, and they remained the pioneers of the Indian novel. Rao's frame of reference is deeply religious and mystical, and his major work, The Serpent and the Rope (1960), demonstrates a deep engagement with what it means to be a Hindu. Although the novel concerns itself with exile and hybridity, the major thrust is to establish the idea of Indianness as fundamentally religious and mystical. Of particular interest is the preface that Rao wrote for Kanthapura, which remains a precise statement about the distinctiveness of South Asian writing and the role of authors in expressing a different sensibility. Narayan, in most of his novels, focused on his imagined town called Malgudi, a place where the secular world of colonialism coexisted and sometimes collided with religion. His vision was benign, and he paved the way for a whole group of writers who molded his style to suit their own purposes. A more recent novel such as Kiran Desai's Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard (1998) is a direct descendant of the Narayan mode of social comedy. Anand was more insistently a social critic, and his novels are often a strong indictment of caste and class in Indian society. He too has been deeply influential in shaping a particular strand of the Indian novel. Many of the recent novels that focus on marginalized groups can be considered direct descendants of the Anand mode.

The next phase in the Indian novel begins with the Partition of India, an event that involved violence on an unimaginable scale. On the eve of independence, the animosity between Hindus and Muslims became increasingly pronounced, resulting in widespread violence and the displacement of millions of people. Among the novels that were written about this moment, the best known is Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), a short but powerful work about the polarization of a once-peaceful village along religious lines. The conflict itself has continued to preoccupy novelists, and even a more recent novel such as the Pakistani writer Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India (1991), first published under the title Ice-Candy Man in 1988, is concerned with the complexity and violence of the Partition.

The one anomaly in a chronology of the Indian novel is the 1948 publication of G. V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, a wonderfully irreverent and comic text that deals with the life of an Anglo-Indian who decides to “go native.” The style of the book is decidedly modernist, and his work is probably closer than that of any other Indian novelist to the spirit of James Joyce (see MODERNIS). Written very much along the lines of a PICARESQUE work, this novel remained almost unnoticed until the 1980s. Arguably a major work, it had no followers until Salman Rushdie picked up Desani's style in 1980.

The three decades that followed the Partition were a period of exciting activity, with a number of writers carving out their own areas of interest but mainly concerned with issues of social dislocation, personal identity, political instability, and so forth. The worlds they created are largely secular and ostensibly modernist, but a religious sensibility informs their work. The best-known writer of this period is possibly Anita Desai, whose novels combine an awareness of social and political conditions with a deep understanding of psychological concerns. Her Clear Light of Day (1980), for instance, is at once about the breakup of a family and about class, religion, and the role of mythology in personal and collective lives (see DOMESTIC). Kamala Markandaya is equally important, and her more overt realism in novels such as Nectar in a Sieve (1954) deals with the collapse of traditional ways of life and the gradual migration of people to the cities. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust (1975) won the Booker Prize and remains a major work that deals with issues of identity and exile that are germane to Indian writing. A quest novel of sorts, it embraces the colonial and postcolonial in remarkable ways.

The watershed moment in the South Asian novel occurred in 1981 with the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. A diasporic author, he produced with this novel a very different mode of literary representation. Not only is he overtly political and quite radical in his novel, he produced a work that was far more self-conscious and skeptical about grand narratives than anything written before. Rushdie has been a shaping influence for many writers, and even those who choose not to adopt his experimental style are much more sensitive to the difficulty of asserting absolute truths about nations or groups. With Rushdie, the South Asian novel became much more cosmopolitan, political, and experimental. In the post-1980 phase there is a much greater preoccupation with “public” events.

The period from Rushdie to the publication of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) forms another distinctive phase in the Indian novel. This period saw the rise of the international novel, with Indian authors being published and receiving recognition in the West. The more significant writers of this period include Allan Sealy, Amit Chaudhuri, Upamanyu Chatterjee, and Vikram Seth (see PUBLISHING). All these writers have their own styles, from the picaresque mode of Sealy to the Victorian triple-decker mode of Seth. Sealy's The Trotter-Nama (1990) is probably the first major novel after All About H. Hatterr to focus its narrative on the history of Indo-Anglians. Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993) goes back to the mode of nineteenth-century realism but shapes it to capture to multiplicity of India in the 1950s. Chaudhuri is among the finest of contemporary writers, and his Afternoon Raag (1993) has a lyrical and subtle texture that is distinctive. This was one of the most productive periods for Indian authors, both local and diasporic, and the work they produced is as impressive for its range as it is for its depth and complexity.

Roy's The God of Small Things is clearly a product of the Rushdie phase, but the novel goes a step further in that it combines irreverence and comedy with a real concern for exploring alternative social and cultural structures. If Rushdie's intention is to take things apart, Roy is more concerned with picking up the fragments and putting them back together in a different way. Many of the recent writers, again local and diasporic, have demonstrated a similar stance.

The burgeoning of the Indian novel is now best seen in the West, where a number of major authors live and write. Among the best-known authors, Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Manil Suri, Anita Desai, Rohinton Mistry, Shashi Tharoor, David Davidar, Suniti Namjoshi, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Bharathi Mukherjee have been prolific. All are important in their own right, and the novels they produce do not conform easily to any model. It is possible to argue that their distance, spatially and temporally, from India has given them a particular perspective. In general—and this can be seen very clearly in Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2005) and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006)—there is skepticism about grand narratives and a desire to look at historical forces from the perspective of the downtrodden and the marginalized. The Hungry Tide is a fine example of the kind of work that shows a deep commitment to understanding the lives of the downtrodden while moving beyond tendentious writing. Particularly among diasporic Indian authors, the quest novel has become increasingly common. There is clearly a distinction between the conventional realism of Mistry and the overt experiment of Namjoshi, but in general the thrust has been to create complex structures that would enable a depiction of “home” and belonging from a diasporic perspective. Namjoshi occupies a unique niche in having chosen a fabulist mode that is deceptively simple. Her Conversations of Cow (1992) is a short but impressive novel that reads like a children's story but deals with complex issues of sexuality, migration, and religion.

Contrary to expectations, second-generation novelists who were born in the West or grew up there have chosen, for the most part, to write about an imagined India rather than the world that is most familiar to them. While the reasons for this decision may well be complex, the fact is that they gravitate naturally to the world that they have heard about rather than the one they have experienced. Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) is not entirely set in India, but its preoccupations remain very Indian. Padma Viswanathan's The Toss of a Lemon (2008) is a more typical case in point; Viswanathan goes back to the history of a family of Brahmins in South India. The sensibility that informs these authors' work is subtly different from that of the first-generation authors, but they too insist on seeing the old world from a new perspective.

Sri Lanka

Compared to Indian writing, the Sri Lankan novel is smaller in scope. The beginning of this corpus can be traced to the 1930s, but it really came into its own in the 1960s with the work of James Goonewardene, Punyakante Wijenaike, and Rajah Proctor. The first two have been particularly prolific, and novels such as Goonewardene's A Quiet Place (1968) and Wijenaike's The Waiting Earth (1966) continue to be read. In retrospect, however, the novels of the 1960s appear to be essentialist in their constant recourse to the rural world as a source of strength and beauty. The novels of this period are competent, but they do not convey a sense of authenticity. It was after the Insurgency of 1971 that the Sri Lankan novel came into its own, with several authors finding a new niche for their novels. The ethnic conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese which intensified in the 1980s added a further dimension of uncertainty and urgency to literature, with the consequence that several authors now produced a number of complex novels. Rajiva Wijesinha, Carl Muller, and Tissa Abeysekara are probably the best-known novelists who wrote from Sri Lanka. Wijesinha is easily the most experimental of the three, but all of them have written with a strong sense of a changing era. The majority of Sri Lankan novelists are part of the diaspora.

Among diasporic authors, the best known are Romesh Gunesekera and A. Sivanandan (England), Michael Ondaatje and Shyam Selvadurai (Canada), and Chandani Lokuge (Australia). Gunesekera's Heaven's Edge (2002), one of his finest works, not only explores the mindless violence in Sri Lanka but also demonstrates the difficulties of writing about this world with objectivity and accuracy. Equally political, Selvadurai's Funny Boy (1994) was acclaimed in the West for its frank and valuable treatment of both politics and sexuality. Predominantly a realist, Lokuge, in novels such as Turtle Nest (2003), writes about the experience of exile and the emotional consequences of return. Sivanandan's single novel, When Memory Dies (1997), brings together several generations to explore the complex path that led to the conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.

The best-known Sri Lankan novelist is Michael Ondaatje, whose The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992. In Anil's Ghost (2000) he locates the narrative in a turbulent period of recent Sri Lankan history. A remarkable narrative about mindless violence and repression in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje's novel, despite all its pessimism, is framed by a commitment to a Buddhist vision. Like the Indian diasporic novel, Sri Lankan fiction continues to be preoccupied with politics, although notions of belonging and dislocation figure prominently. If some form of Hindu thought and ontology shapes much of Indian fiction, it is equally true that Buddhism frames much of Sri Lankan literature. In that sense, many of the recent novels that are ostensibly about politics are shaped by a sense of religion.

Pakistan

The notion of Pakistani writing is not easy to chart, particularly because some of the early writers lived in India before moving to Pakistan after the Partition. That said, among the early works Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi (1940) is significant for its range and depth. It is the first novel to deal with Muslim life in colonial India with real sensitivity. Adam Zameenzad is another writer whose works combine formal experiment (see FORMALISM) with a real concern for the conditions in Pakistan. During its first three decades, however, Pakistan did not produce much fiction in English. This could well be a consequence of a national policy that established Urdu as the sole official language. In addition, Pakistan's political history has been very different from India's, and that might well explain the relative paucity of literary production specifically in the novel in English. While writing from Pakistan has begun to flourish in recent years, the majority of Anglophone novels by Pakistani writers are written in the diaspora.

The most accomplished writer from the earlier phase is Zulfikar Ghose, whose The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) is set in Pakistan during the early days of independence. Many of his subsequent novels have been set in South America, although the subject matter appears to suggest that the reality of Pakistan is not far from his mind. Bapsi Sidhwa's novels are more centrally concerned with Pakistan, although she tends to look at this world from the perspective of the Parsi community. She is best known for her novel Ice-Candy Man, a powerful novel about the violence of the Partition, told through the perspective of a young Parsi girl. Another writer of note is Tariq Ali (England), whose Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992) is a moving evocation of Muslim Spain, told through the intersecting lives of several characters.

In the last two decades the novel from Pakistan has experienced a growth spurt, and now there is a substantial corpus that can be considered significant. Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) provides a sensitive and sometimes disturbing depiction of the South Asian experience in England. More recently, several diasporic authors from Pakistan have published notable works, each one distinctive in its own way, but all concerned with issues of nationalism, belonging, marginality, and the representation of Pakistan. Politics continues to play a dominant role in Pakistani writing, although it is woven into the lives of a broad spectrum of characters. Kamila Shamsie's Kartography (2002), Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) provide a good sampling of contemporary Pakistani fiction. Many of these have been controversial, but all of them are significant works that attempt to grapple with the local conditions and international profile of Pakistan.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh has been relatively slow in its literary output. The only author to gain international recognition is Monica Ali, whose Brick Lane (2003) created considerable controversy over its depiction of Bangladeshis in London.

As a corpus, the South Asian novel in English has now become increasingly visible in South Asia and in the West. The increase in readership has resulted in greater sophistication and range among authors, and there is a much greater acceptance of this body of writing in South Asia than ever before. Within the broad framework of contemporary or postcolonial fiction, the South Asian novel remains distinctive in its evocation of a particular ontology.

Bibliography

Gopal, P. (2009), Indian English Novel.
Kanaganayakam, C. (2002), Counterrealism in Indo-Anglian Fiction.
Mukherjee, M. (1971), Twice Born Fiction.
Paranjape, M. (2000), Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel.
Rahman, T. (1991), History of Pakistani Literature in English.
Salgado, M. (2007), Writing Sri Lanka.

Southeast Asian Archipelago

Razif Bahari

The Southeast Asian novel has come to be regarded as a problematic category, and justifiably so. Questions of critically representing and talking about the Southeast Asian novel have to ineluctably negotiate a series of issues relating to insider/outsider binaries of space, perspective, voice, and representation that trouble the languages of literary creation and criticism. What constitutes a Southeast Asian novel: one written about or set in Southeast Asia, or one written by a Southeast Asian (with all the complexities that that appellation entails)? If we agree on the former, then works such as C. J. Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), Anthony Burgess's The Malayan Trilogy (1972), and Noel Barber's Tanamera: A Novel of Singapore (1981) would fall under the Southeast Asian category. It is unlikely that any one formulation will do justice to the longstanding concern about who and what should be regarded as Southeast Asian; therefore, when from time to time reference is made to the Southeast Asian novel, this is simply by way of shorthand to mark off writing by Southeast Asians—specifically from the maritime Southeast Asian nations of Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as Malaysia—from that by non-Southeast Asians. Two other nation-states in the region, Brunei and Timor-Leste, are not discussed in this entry as they do not have autonomous traditions in the novel.

Although a Western form, the novel in the Southeast Asian archipelago is by no means a direct and unmitigated borrowing from the West but is the product of a long and varied ancestry. The genesis of the novel in the archipelago has been traced to traditional literary forms that have existed in both local and regional literatures of the area. The history of the novel in Indonesia traces the moment of its birth to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and identifies the Javanese pakem or prose summaries of shadow-play stories, travelogues, and novelistic literature in Dutch, Chinese, and Malay languages as its literary progenitors (Quinn). In Malaysia, the novel is regarded as an extension and transformation of the hikayat (a traditional form of Malay epic written in prose and verse) that has existed since the early seventeenth century (Wahab Ali), while in the Philippines it is said to have developed from the nineteenth-century metrical romance known as the awit and corrido, moral tracts written in narrative form, and beyond these, the pasyon, or religious epic depicting the passion of Jesus Christ, in the eighteenth century as well as folk narrative traditions going back to pre-Spanish times (Kintanar).

The critical move toward local adaptation, cultural re-creation, and indigenized use of the novelistic genre cannot be ignored in any account of the genesis of the novel in Southeast Asia. Though European in origin, the novel, even early on, has shown its own practice of appropriation with recognizably “postcolonial” textual tactics of hybridized performance: the fusion of native orature and primordial mythology with the stylistic protocols of a new Western discursive genre. Indeed, the novel was shaped by the material and ideational changes associated with the rise of print technology, secular education, and contact with European sources, as much as it was, as Wahab Ali contends, a manifestation of “local response to these phenomena and how they were understood and imitated” (261).

Responding to Modernity

The idea of the modern, as contrasting or interacting with the traditional, is firmly embedded in the Southeast Asian novel. This is evidenced by early novels addressing the culture clash during the colonial period, e.g., Indonesian writers Merari Siregar's Azab dan Sengsara (1920, Torment and Misery) and Marah Roesli's Sitti Noerbaja; Malaysia's Ahmad Rashid Talu's Iakah Salmah? (1929, Is It Salmah?); and Filipino nationalist José Rizal's Noli Me Tangere (1887, Touch Me Not) and its sequel, El Filibusterismo (1891, The Filibustering). In these works, the collision of Western values with traditional ones is depicted through tracing the development and experiences of particular individual characters who personify the polarities of cultural authenticity and the rejection of traditional communalism. Extraordinary individuals set the tone of some early novels, and it is possible to see the significance and the pivotal position of the individual as a signifier of the core of ideas relating to modernity (see MODERNIS). This affirmation of individuality—in the form of exceptional individuals who stood apart from the masses and had a clearer vision: the nationalist revolutionary, the iconoclast, the educated reformer who gave voice to the hopes of those who were unable to articulate a different political future—both reflects and facilitates the transformation of other values relating to, for example, authority and community, national consciousness, and freedom of the individual.

The emphasis on characterization is thus expressive of the novelist's general orientation to the extent to which the traditional has been permeated by the modern. It must be said, of course, that the novel is hardly a neutral medium in this regard. As a Western literary form, the novel was shaped by the material and ideational changes associated with the rise of capitalism and Western form of education which privileged the individual over society. Yet in the hands of pioneering Southeast Asian novelists such as Rizal, Merari, and Ahmad, it proved adaptable enough to the needs of presenting a different consciousness. The tendency to acclaim characters that are pulled both ways—seen as representative of the masses, adhering in large part to traditional ideas and values and often rooted in village life or at least retaining rural ties, on the one hand; on the other, as fierce critics of their indigenous culture and defiant of tradition, cosmopolitan and unconventional, whose outlook is shaped by being brought up in the capital cities of Europe and being given a privileged education—became a stock-in-trade for these early novels. The elevation of the individual, however, need not involve any wholesale rejection of tradition-bound social practices and customary law or a continued communal consciousness. Though the rise of individualism in Southeast Asia seems to suggest an openness to modernity, the novelistic response to other forms of modernity has been more divided and has involved considerable hesitancy and ambivalence (Teeuw).

The city is a symbol of the modern, counterpoised to the village with its old-established rhythms and customs, and the dichotomy between the two is evident, for example, in Singaporeans Lim Boon Keng's Tragedies of Eastern Life (1927), Goh Poh Seng's If We Dream Too Long (1972), Filipino F. Sionil Jose's My Brother, My Executioner (1973), Indonesian Toha Mohtar's Pulang (1958, Homeward), and Malaysians A. Samad Said's Salina (1961, Salina) and Shahnon Ahmad's Rentong (1965, Rope of Ash). In these novels, the city is represented as the zone of contact between the old Southeast Asia and the world outside, as the hub of those processes of change concerned with revolution, commodity, and cultural exchange, or as the primary site of infection of the barren, exploitative, and depersonalized nature of modern life. Rural enclaves, on the other hand, remain a storehouse of indigenous spiritual sensibilities and traditional communalism. Recognition of the city as a fact of contemporary Southeast Asian life does not necessarily involve an emotional acceptance; in fact many of the narratives are resistant. Time and time again, as in the novels of Jose and Shahnon, we find a preference for the individual who has clung to his or her cultural roots, who is at home or yearns to be at home in the village, and whose strength is derived from connectedness with the past. If there is some duality in a character's makeup—elements of the traditional and elements of the modern, of the simple and the sophisticated, of the country and the city—invariably it is the former that are privileged.

The question of Southeast Asia's response to modernity, of how and in what ways a merger could be negotiated between the traditional and the modern, though incidental to the novels' main themes, continues to play out in East Kalimantan author Korrie Layun Rampan's Api, Awan, Asap (1998, Fire, Cloud, Smoke), Filipino Bienvenido Santos's The Praying Man (1982), Malaysian Abdul Talib Mohd Hassan's Saga (1976, Saga), and Singaporean Isa Kamari's Memeluk Gerhana (2007, Embrace the Eclipse). The picture that emerges from these novels is not so much a portrait of development as a collage of the conditions of urban life, deracination, displacement, breakdown of traditional values and social units, the human dislocation of structural change. Yet their more enduring value lies in their implicit endorsement of a modern future while at the same time insisting that the past must not be discarded, forced out by the juggernaut of modern technology and processes. The traditional and the modern are not seen as binary opposites but as shading into each other, even organically linked. Nor are they seen as separated in time but as existing contemporaneously. The clash between the indigenous and the foreign worlds is present, but so is the idea that modernization does not mean Westernization, nor should it take place under the tutelage of the West.

The literary response to modernity in Southeast Asian novels is arguably historically and culturally conditioned, though history and culture themselves are not separate and self-contained worlds. Clearly, over time socioeconomic developments intersect with culture. The emergence of the novel in Southeast Asia was, after all, itself the result of developments in education and technology and changing social relationships. It is certainly true that the evolution of the novel in Southeast Asia was responsive to the processes of social and economic change that had taken root. As a result of, e.g., the spread of globalization, the movement of people across national boundaries, and the wider circulation of ideas about modernity and development, the Southeast Asian novel has come increasingly to reckon with the individual grappling with this phenomenon. Instead of characters being the embodiment of their societies, we see them moving between different social worlds, usually struggling to arrive at some accommodation between them. The diasporic writings of Tash Aw, Shirley Lim, Fiona Cheong, Dewi Anggraeni, and Bienvenido Santos, for example, are representative of this dilemma, which brings to our attention individuals situated in the crossfire of cultural exchange, and hence emplaces debates about the negotiation of difference.

Making Sense of the Past

The Southeast Asian novel's characteristic concern with the past must be contextualized against the history of colonialism in the archipelago. For a century or more Southeast Asians had played little part in shaping the dominant ideas about themselves and the archipelago. Colonial evaluations had deeply permeated Asian consciousness—European literature, historical accounts, and political thought of the time rendered the natives as peoples without significant intellectual or cultural attainment. They were told they had no history. Given this imposed heritage, the Southeast Asian novel became an instrument of correction and a means of self-affirmation (Hooker; Martinez-Sicat). From its earliest days, the novel has been seen as a way of recovering a sense of self, expressing the hopes of decolonization, and imagining alternative futures. For reasons both of personal emancipation and social responsibility, Southeast Asian writers took upon themselves the task of undermining European representations of their respective peoples and establishing new ones. Led by writers such as Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Mochtar Lubis in Indonesia; Lazaro Francisco, F. Sionil Jose, and Nick Joaquin in the Philippines; Ishak Haji Muhammad, Lee Kok Liang, and Lloyd Fernando in Malaysia; and Harun Aminurrashid in Singapore, the novelists became historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, as well as fabulists, in order to reclaim a national identity.

The nub of the novel's engagement with the past lies in the novelist's presentation of history as a space within which to search for meaning, open up new ways of seeing and patterning, and posit suggestive connections between then and now. This may be done by revisiting the past in the form of conventional realistic fiction—as is the case in Utuy Tatang Sontani's Tambera (1949), Harun Aminurrashid's Panglima Awang (1958, Commander Awang), Abdul Kadir Adabi's Acuman Mahkota (1988, Lure of the Crown), and Edilberto K. Tiempo's More than Conquerors (1964). Alternatively, it may take the form of presenting the past through symbols, cultural fragments, or personal remembrances conveyed as metafiction, pastiche, parody, irony, and other such characteristics associated with the postmodern—as in Y. B. Mangunwijaya's Durga/Umayi (1991), Eka Kurniawan's Cantik itu Luka (2002, Beauty Is a Wound), Faisal Tehrani's 1515 (2003), and Eric Gamalinda's Empire of Memory (1992) (see PARODY).

Characteristically, there is a felt need among some Southeast Asian novelists to draw on the past and show how it infuses the present, certain in their belief that narrative could propose an alternative social world to those which had existed or which now exist. On a postcolonial account, the process of retelling the colonial encounter from a counter-hegemonic standpoint undermines the constructs of Western universalism and creates a space within which previously subordinate peoples of the archipelago can take control of their own destinies (Razif). The reinterpretation of the past is crucial to Pramoedya Ananta Toer's purposes in his novels Bumi Manusia (1980, This earth of mankind), Anak Semua Bangsa (1980, Child of all nations), Jejak Langkah (1985, Footsteps), and Rumah Kaca (1988, House of glass), collectively known as the Buru Tetralogy. Pramoedya depicts the past both directly through authorial commentary and by means of the remembrances and reflection of his characters. In Bumi Manusia, for example, Minke's narration is interspersed with accounts (in the form of retelling, letters, and court testimony) by other characters modeled after figures from fin- de-siècle East Indies history, which gives a kind of interconnected fragments of narration within narrations of Indonesia's colonial history, much of it sharpened by recollections of his own involvement in the struggle both against Dutch colonialism and Javanese feudalism. Pramoedya's narrative starkly depicts the dangers of representing the past in the kind of essentialized terms that could be appropriated by a new imperium as bad as the old. His twin targets are feudalism and colonialism, and the one tends to reinforce the other. He is also concerned with highlighting elements of Indonesian culture received through history which he believes must be swept away if Indonesians are ever to be free. More than any other Indonesian writer, he sees the past as a mixed inheritance that can be deployed in very different ways. In this respect, Pramoedya's tetralogy is revelatory.

The Issue of Language

There has been some debate about how far Southeast Asian novels in English are representative of the totality of Southeast Asian fiction, and also about whether they are less “authentic” than novels written in Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Tagalog, or other indigenous languages. A fundamental site of contention concerns the nature and politics of language as resistance. The case for writing in the vernacular is framed in terms of resistance to the outside, commonality on the inside. By embracing a sense of relatedness, recognizing some elements of a shared past, and espousing values taken to be characteristically autochthonous—which writing in the indigenous language is perceived as epitomizing—the vernacular novel serves as a renewed instrument of affirmation against an imposed imperialist tradition and the colonial language that is its medium. In part this draws on the belief that the liberation from colonial domination presupposes liberation from the colonial language. There is also the stigma attached to the English language in the post-independence era as a neo-imperialist global language and that it is the language of a Western educated elite (see NATIONAL, REGIONAL).

The problematic status of English in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore can be traced to their respective colonial legacies. Indonesia, which, as Benedict Anderson observes, was the only major exception in the overall imposition of the colonial language as the language of state in the colonial empires, never had a native modern literature in Dutch. The Dutch did not institutionalize the language of the metropole in its colony. On the contrary, Dutch colonial language policy has been one of racist segregation. The natives of the East Indies were forbidden to use the Dutch language for fear that—to use the words of a Dutch teacher of the time—Dutch education was “likely to increase the misdeeds of the natives. They will be less obedient because they are more acquainted with the norms and the way of life of the white man” (Ahmat, 76). Instead, Malay (the lingua franca of traders throughout the archipelago since as early as the seventh century) was adopted by the natives as the new national language and later, in 1928, named Bahasa Indonesia, or “the language of Indonesia.” It was this language that was developed and became the primary literary medium in Indonesia.

The English language occupies an ambivalent place in Malaysia. Introduced by British colonial presence at the turn of the nineteenth century, English represented, for a long time, the language of the ex-colonizer, and is even now regarded as the language of Western capitalism. Though it is seen in its omnipresence as the international language of modernity, it was subsumed by the Malay language (nationalistically renamed Bahasa Malaysia, or “Malaysian language”) which was, and still is, privileged by the state narratives as a key element in constituting Malaysian-ness in the postcolonial era (after 1957). One line of thinking that promotes the ideal of a postcolonial Malaysian consciousness derives primarily from a kind of reverse discrimination in the literary sphere, broadly coterminous with policies in the political and sociocultural domains. This is the demand that Malaysian writing should have a Malaysian (read: Malay) content, a Malay(sian) form, and be judged by distinctively Malay(sian) criteria. In addition, it is sometimes argued that for a work to come within the canon of Malaysian literature it must be written by a Malay, be committed to a political vision—even a particular ethnocentric vision—of Malaysia's future, and be written in the Malay language. This privileging of Bahasa Malaysia creates, as Quayum intimates, a “prevailing cleavage between Malaysia's national literature, written in the national language of Bahasa Malaysia, and those dubbed as ‘sectional literatures,’ written in its minority languages such as Chinese, Tamil and English” (1960, 2). It is emblematic of this cleavage that the recipients of the Anugerah Sasterawan Negara (National Literary Laureate award), conferred by the Malaysian government since 1981, have all been Malays writing in the Malay language. The hostile political attitude toward English, regarded as an “alien” language, “rooted neither in the soul nor in the soil” (Quayum, xii), bore serious implications for Malaysian writers like K. S. Maniam, Lloyd Fernando, and Lee Kok Liang, whose choice of English as their medium of expression meant, ipso facto, that their work would never be admitted into the Malaysian literary canon. Such views, although extreme, suggest a tendency in Malay(sian) texts to cultivate the distinctively Malay-(sian) and insulate the Malay(sian) experience from its intra- and inter-national milieus.

In the Philippines, English became the medium of instruction in schools and communication among the populace when the Philippine Commonwealth became an American colony (1901–41). It subsumed Filipino, the national language (based on Tagalog, a dialect spoken by those who live in the capital city, Manila, and its immediate surrounds), in terms of prevalence. Though there is a strong tradition of novels written in the major vernaculars such as Tagalog, Hiligaynon, Cebuano, and Illocano—e.g., the early Tagalog novels of Lope K. Santos, such as Banaag at Sikat (1901, From Early Dawn to First Light), hailed as a milestone in the development of the socially conscious Tagalog novel, and Faustino Aguilar's broadside of the clergy's hypocrisy in Busabos ng Palad (1909, Slaves of Circumstance), Tagalog itself is often seen as a hegemonic construct of the nation-state, privileging those who reside in the seat of economic and political power in the capital. Consequently, as Philip Holden argues, “English remained, partly because speakers of regional languages in the Philippines preferred the neutrality of English to what they perceived as the hegemony of Tagalog-based Filipino” (161). There has been some debate about how far this body of literature in English is representative of the totality of Filipino fiction, and also about whether it is less “authentic” than novels written in Tagalog, Illocano, or other indigenous languages. While these issues cannot be pursued here, it is useful to note that fiction written in the regional languages exceeds that in English in the Philippines. Novelists whose writings in English have been awarded the Magsaysay Award—Asia's equivalent of the Nobel Prize—for literature, include Nick Joaquin, F. Sionil Jose, and Bienvenido Lumbera. Works by a younger generation of novelists writing in English who have achieved prominence, such as Charlson Ong, Krip Yuson, Jose Dalisay, Vicente Groyon, and Dean Francis Alfar, also deserve a mention here.

The existence of important novelists writing in the ethnic vernacular languages in Singapore—the likes of Isa Kamari, Suratman Markasan, Rohani Din, and Peter Augustine Goh (Malay); Soon Ai-Ling, Yeng Pway Ngon, Huai Ying, and Wong Meng Voon (Mandarin); and Ma Elangkannan, Rama Kannabiran, Mu Su Kurusamy, and S. S. Sharma (Tamil)—seems to dislodge the notion that Singaporean writing is dominated by fiction in English, and in fact fosters an appreciation of the nation's vibrant, multiple cultural constitution. Despite ethnic literature's unique status as a repository for the otherwise forgotten and neglected realms of inwardness, sensuousness, cultural mooring, historicity, memory, and ethnic solidarity, there are valid concerns expressed by the writers themselves of the difficulties they faced in achieving recognition locally and at large, winning readerships and wider publication, and funding their own labors. Indeed, the fractured community of its writers is exemplary of the general experience of neglect, prejudice, lack of sustainable audience, and the short shrift given to them by international publishers experienced by writers writing in the local vernaculars. In part, this can be attributed to the language situation in Singapore, where English has become an entrenched lingua franca used by its multiethnic society of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and other communities. This is due to the colonial policy pertaining to the use of English, first adopted by the East India Company and later direct British colonial rule, as well as the post-independence government's introduction of English-medium education since the 1980s. Though English is officially promoted as “a language facilitating trade and technological development,” and invested with a sense of social prestige—an attitude that stems from the fact that, historically, the English language (with its colonial origin) has functioned as a tool of power, domination, and elitist identity—it is not considered a language of “cultural belonging” (Holden, 161). In fact, an early generation of English-language writers struggled with their elite status. On the one hand, they were “identified with a colonialist heritage,” being seen and indeed seeing themselves at times as “working in a second tongue, alien from Asian identity,” and yet they also strove, through English, to connect with Asian literary traditions (Lim, 2002, 48). A policy of bilingualism introduced in schools from the 1960s—which privileges English as the “first language,” and the study of Chinese (Mandarin), Malay, or Tamil, now termed mother tongues, and deemed crucial to the preservation of “traditional values,” as a “second language”—has produced a new crop of writers more proficient in English than their own mother tongues. The works of contemporary Singapore writers such as Catherine Lim, Suchen Christine Lim, Philip Jeyaretnam, and Hwee Hwee Tan, while exposing the dead ends and the circularities of this postcolonial condition, and touching so profoundly upon many of the salient contemporary artistic and political issues—issues of identity and indifference, self and other, alterity and conformity, public and private—is thus best described as a kind of “postmodern realism” of present-day Singapore.

Bibliography

Adam, A.B. (1995), The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of Modern Indonesian Consciousness.
Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities.
Foulcher, K., and T. Day, eds. (2002), Clearing a Space.
Hau, C.S. (2000), Necessary Fictions.
Holden, P. (2008), “ Colonialism's Goblins,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44: 159–70.
Hooker, V.M. (2000), Writing a New Society.
Kintanar, T.B. (1990), “ Tracing the Rizal Tradition in the Filipino Novel,” Tenggara 25: 80–91.
Lim, S. (1991), “ Malaysia and Singapore,” in Commonwealth Novel since 1960, ed. B. King.
Lim, S. (2002), “The English-Language Writer in Singapore,” in Singapore Literature in English, ed. M. A. Quayum and P. Wicks.
Martinez-Sicat, M.T. (1994), Imagining the Nation in Four Philippine Novels.
Quayum, M.A. (2006), “ On a Journey Homeward,” Postcolonial Text 2(4):13.
Quinn, G. (1992), Novel in Javanese.
Razif Bahari (2007), “Piecing the Past,” in Pramoedya Postcolonially.
Singh, K., ed. (1998), Interlogue: Vol. 1: Fiction.
Teeuw, A. (1967), Modern Indonesian Literature.
Wahab Ali, A. (1991), Emergence of the Novel in Modern Indonesian and Malaysian Literature.

Southeast Asian Mainland

David Smyth

Mainland Southeast Asia refers to the countries of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The national language of each is written in its own distinctive script, and with the exception of Thai and Lao, which are closely related, they are mutually unintelligible. In the past these countries have often been at war with one another and, even today, many citizens of the region have grown up with attitudes of indifference, suspicion, or hostility toward the countries which border their own. translations of novels from one Southeast Asian language to another are almost nonexistent; the novel has developed separately in each of the five countries, responding to literary influences from outside the region more than from within.

There are, however, some similarities to be observed across the region, especially in the patterns of literary production, distribution, and consumption. Before the twentieth century the literature of most of mainland Southeast Asia was generally composed in verse, recorded by hand on palm-leaf manuscripts, and transmitted by oral recitation. The huge technological and social advances that took place in Europe during the nineteenth century spread quickly to the countries of mainland Southeast Asia and helped to create the environment in which the novel emerged. The capital cities grew rapidly, trade increased, and internal communication routes improved; the arrival of printing technology paved the way for the birth of journalism and print capitalism (see PAPER AND PRINT); educational expansion created a reading public and a new middle class with the money and leisure to be able to afford newspapers, magazines, and books; and foreign novels, read by an elite minority in the original language, were then translated or adapted into the local language. When daily newspapers began to appear in the early decades of the twentieth century, a significant number of pages each day were devoted to serialized novels, and the majority of readers bought newspapers to find out what was happening in the more immediate fictional world rather than in the distant real world. The serialization of novels in newspapers and magazines remains widespread in the twenty-first century, sometimes followed by publication in book format (see PUBLISHING).

The demand for new fiction in the early years of the newspaper created opportunities for aspiring writers. When newspapers became less reliant on fiction, many writers switched from fiction to journalism, political commentary, and editing. Making a living exclusively from writing fiction has always been difficult. Today, the financial rewards tend to lie in writing serialized novels for bestselling women's magazines, or film and television scripts. The market for “serious” fiction remains small and confined largely to the national capitals. Print runs, even for an established writer, are typically between two and three thousand copies, and with publishers often unwilling to risk reprinting, many books disappear after the first edition (see REPRINTS). Even the works of nationally recognized authors can be unobtainable for years before a publisher feels that a reissue might be financially viable, and with few public libraries in the region, can become almost impossible to track down. Some enterprising writers publish and distribute their own works, both to keep them in print and to maximize their own financial gain.

Thailand (formerly Siam) is the only country in mainland Southeast Asia to have escaped colonial rule by a European power. Nevertheless, the early history of the novel in Thailand reflects a strong British influence. In the 1890s Thai aristocrats who had recently returned from their studies in England founded the first literary magazines. It was in the pages of one of these magazines, in 1901, that Thais were introduced to the novel genre through Khwam phayabat, a serialized translation of Marie Corelli's Vendetta (1886). During the first two decades of the century translations and adaptations of the works of Western writers, including those by Alexander Dumas, H. Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope, A. Conan Doyle, and Sax Rohmer, were popular. The first original Thai novel was Khwam mai phayabat (Non-vendetta), a lengthy work of more than seven hundred pages, written by “Nai Samran” (Luang Wilat Pariwat) in 1915.

In the early 1920s silent foreign serial films had an impact on the novel. Writers were hired by cinema owners to write “film books” which explained the plots of the weekly episodes to cinemagoers and provided translations of the onscreen inter-title dialogues (see ADAPTATION). Producing these cheap paperbacks provided authors with experience in writing for a commercial market, but also awakened them to the possibilities of creative writing, unconstrained by the limitations of events unfolding on screen. Many went on to make a name for themselves among the first generation of Thai novelists. The film books also encouraged the public in the habit of buying and reading books.

By the late 1920s popular taste in reading had shifted away from translations and adaptations of Western fiction to original Thai stories. Most popular were romantic tales with a realistic, contemporary setting, where the hero and heroine faced some obstacle to their love, be it disapproving parents, prearranged marriage to another person, or a difference in social status (see ROMANCE, REALISM). Such themes recur throughout mainland Southeast Asian fiction. In the next decade novels that commented on wider social issues appeared. Siburapha used the correspondence between the hero and the heroine in the epistolary novel Songkhram chiwit (1932, The war of life) to portray social injustice, religious hypocrisy, corruption, and inadequate health care. Ko' Surangkhanang's Ying khon chua (1937, The Prostitute) dealt with a controversial subject for a female author. Her sympathetic portrayal of the plight of prostitutes and her criticism of polite society's double standards created a considerable stir.

During the liberal climate of the early post-WWII years, a small number of writers, of whom Siburapha was the most famous, wrote Marxist-influenced “literature for life” which aimed to highlight injustice and point the way forward to a fairer society. Their efforts were short-lived, and several were imprisoned in 1952 in a government purge of suspected communists. One of Thailand's most famous and popular novels, Si phaen din (1953, Four Reigns), appeared in the wake of this clampdown on progressive intellectuals. The author, M. R. Khukrit Pramoj, was a staunch royalist and drew on his own personal familiarity with palace life to provide a nostalgic portrayal of traditional court culture.

The 1970s were a turbulent period in the country's history. At the beginning of the decade the radical fiction of the 1950s was rediscovered and played a part in politicizing the student movement which toppled the military dictatorship in 1973. A violent military backlash in 1976 followed and heralded a brief dark age for writers and publishers. But by the 1980s, “literature for life” had had its day: society had become more complex, the political climate less oppressive, and the reading public more demanding. The country's most acclaimed contemporary writer, Chart Korbjitti, made his debut at this time, and while in works such as Chon trok (1980, No Way Out) and Kham phiphaksa (1981, The Judgment) he movingly portrays the plight of the disadvantaged and socially excluded, he does not preach an overt political message.

Burma, to the west of Thailand, was under British colonial rule from 1886 to 1948. The first important Burmese novelist was U Lat, whose novels Sabe-bin (1912, Jasmine) and Shwei-pyi-zo (1914, Ruler of the Golden City) deal with the preservation of traditional Burmese values. They are written in an ornate, traditional style of language and represent a transition stage in the development of Burmese fiction. P. Monin adopted a more natural, economical style in Bi-ei Maung Tint-hnin Ka-gyei-the Me Myint (1915, Maung Tint B.A. and the Dancer Me Myint), which is regarded as the first “modern” Burmese novel. In the 1930s, as writers began to focus more on social issues, Thein Pe Myint created an outrage with his novel Tet Hpon-gyi (1937, The Modern Monk), which highlighted the sexual activities of monks.

In 1962 General Ne Win (1911–2002) staged the military coup that set the country on its isolationist “Burmese Path to Socialism.” Writers were expected to play their part in the socialist revolution by producing works that glorified the triumph of peasants and workers over various hardships. Literary prizes were the potential reward for those who produced works of “socialist realism,” imprisonment the potential fate of those who did not. Ma Ma Lay, author of Mon-ywei mahu (1955, Not Out of Hate) and modern Burma's most important female writer, was one of the many writers imprisoned by the regime. In 1988, massive rioting against the military regime, in which thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators died, led to Ne Win's resignation. But the military quickly reasserted its authority and has since maintained strict control over all forms of printed media, including literature.

To the east of Thailand lie Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, once collectively known in the West as French Indochina. Vietnam was invaded by the French in 1858 and became a French protectorate in 1884. The French colonial regime replaced the traditional character-based writing system with quc ng', a romanized system of writing devised by Catholic missionaries in the seventeenth century. It was promoted in schools and newspapers, and because it was much easier to learn, it quickly became accepted. The new script, and a new generation of readers and writers who had passed through the French colonial education system and been exposed to French literature, were important factors in the process of literary modernization that began in the early years of the twentieth century. The first modern Vietnamese novels appeared in the South in 1910.

The polarization in Vietnam caused by thirty years of war (1945–75) and more than twenty years of partition (1954–75) is reflected in the country's literature. In the U.S.-supported South, writers enjoyed a degree of freedom to express their opinions, be they anticommunist sentiments, criticisms of the government, or portrayals of social upheavals brought by the intensifying war and the presence of large numbers of American soldiers in the country. In the Chinese/Soviet-supported North, the Communist Party required writers to spread the government's vision of a socialist future, which included the defeat of the foreign aggressors and the reunification of the country. For many writers who had wholeheartedly written stories glorifying the wartime struggle and sacrifices, peace brought with it a sense of disillusionment at the compromises that officially sanctioned literature demanded. But in 1986, in the wake of the liberalizing glasnost policy in the Soviet Union, the government introduced the (renovation) program of political, economic, and cultural reforms that heralded a more liberal era. Established writers such as Lê Minh Khuê and Duong Thu Huong were able to broaden the scope of their work, while the freer climate saw the emergence of writers such as Nguyn Huy Thip, H Anh Thái-, and Phm Th Hoài-, whose works often reflect a disappointment with a postwar society that falls short of its heroic self-image. But even under liberalization, there are unwritten boundaries beyond which a writer should not venture. Duong Thu Huong, author of (1991, Novel without a Name), has paid a heavy price for challenging those boundaries: her work is now banned in her native country, and she has been harassed, arrested, and subjected to travel restrictions.

Cambodia, once the center of an empire whose influence spread over much of mainland South East Asia from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, was a French protectorate from 1863 until 1953. The first Cambodian novel, Sophat (1941, Sophat), by Rim Kin, appeared at a time when Cambodian printed material of any kind was very limited. Nou Hach is the most highly regarded of early Cambodian novelists for his novels Phk srabon (1949, The Faded Flower), which attacks the convention of arranged marriages, and Mluo citt (1972, The Garland of the Heart), which portrays Cambodian society during WWII. He is assumed to be one of more than a million Cambodian citizens who died during the murderous Pol Pot period (1975–78). Kong Boun Chhoeun, whose works first appeared in the late 1950s, is one of very few Cambodian writers to have survived the Pol Pot years. Following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the establishment of a new Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government, he and other writers produced state-published novels which portrayed the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian—Vietnamese solidarity. Following the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops in 1989 and the move to a market economy, writers began to enjoy greater individual freedom.

From 1883 until 1953 Laos was a French colony. In 1963 the communist Pathet Lao movement launched an armed struggle against the constitutional monarchy, plunging the country into a decade of civil war and partition. Lao prose fiction dates back only as far as the 1960s. Some writers aimed simply to entertain, while others were influenced by the spread of socially conscious literature in neighboring Thailand, and used fiction to criticize the corruption and moral decadence of the government. In areas of the country that were under the control of the Pathet Lao, revolutionary literature that celebrated the people's struggle against the Americans who heavily bombed the country—and the American-backed regime in Vientiane, was written under Party guidelines. After the Pathet Lao emerged victorious in 1975, Lao writers, like those in Vietnam, were expected to glorify the successful revolutionary struggle. In the late 1980s Laos, like Vietnam, saw the introduction of a liberalizing policy, the “New Imagination,” which—within unwritten limits— permitted Lao writers to make constructive criticisms of government policy.

Bibliography

Kratz, E.U., ed. (1996), Southeast Asian Languages and Literatures.
Lafont, P.-B. and D. Lombard, eds. (1974), Littératures contemporaines de l'Asie du sud-est.
Smyth, D., ed. (2000), Canon in Southeast Asian Literatures.
Smyth, D., ed. (2009), Southeast Asian Writers.
Tham Seong Chee, ed. (1981), Literature and Society in Southeast Asia.

Southeastern Europe

Tatjana Aleksi

Southeastern Europe is better known as the Balkans, although this name has historically been problematized and often acquired negative connotations. Maria Todorova's seminal study on the Balkans, Imagining the Balkans (1997), has, for example, analyzed both the category itself and the various negative connotations assigned to the region. The region is imagined as a more or less compact entity due to historical developments that marked it, primarily the Ottoman colonization, but also the many episodes of turbulent history since the formation of modern nation-states. Cultural development in the region that has, for the most part, been a polygon of conflicts for the world powers, has suffered a certain dose of “belatedness” relative to European mainstream influences, as Gregory Jusdanis controversially claims about modern Greek culture in Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture (1991). Most importantly, culture in the Balkans has rarely had the luxury of avoiding the grip of history and evolving with independent aesthetic attributes. The few periods of relatively unhindered literary and cultural developments created a sense of time compression that sometimes prevented literary styles that had almost run parallel courses from maturing to their full distinction.

With many nation-states comprising the region, the number of which has multiplied since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, an attempt to give a general overview of the development of the novel seems an almost impossible task. There have been many arguments for and against the Serbo-Croatian linguistic designation, as well as attempts by nationalist linguists to emphasize the differences between Serbian and Croatian languages (see NATIONAL, REGIONAL). This entry will not emphasize the question of language, but will instead focus on both Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures. In terms of its temporal arc, this discussion will be delineated by the appearance of the first modernist and avant-garde novels. The overview begins with the innovations in the field of poetics, language, and the subject of the novel, followed by early attempts to dismantle the genre altogether. Geographically, it is concerned with what for most of the twentieth century existed as the Yugoslav cultural space, Greece, and to a certain extent Bulgaria. Finally, this typology follows certain historical frameworks.

First Modernist Novels

Symbolism that spills over from the nineteenth century transfers to prose some of the key tenets of modernism, primarily the interest in the individual psyche and its subjective vision of the world. One of its important representatives in Greek fiction is Konstandinos Hatzopoulos, with O pyrgos tou akropotamou (1909, The Manor by the Riverside). Milutin Cihlar Nehajev introduces the character novel Bijeg (1909, Escape) to the Croatian public, the text not generated by external events but entirely situated within the psyche of the main protagonist. The year 1910 marks the appearance of the first truly modern Serbian novel, Neistakrv (Bad Blood) by Borisav Stankovi, which breaks with the mimetic prose of the nineteenth century and instead introduces the symbolic style in which local folklore and tradition become a background for passionate love dramas and family tragedies.

The contrast between the city and the country emerges in the work of some writers in the form of folkloric realism or idealization of the country, its people, and their morals, while with others it leads to the creation of the first urban novels. Milutin Uskokovi's edomir Ili (1914) makes a statement on the alienation and psychological decay in the emerging Serbian bourgeois culture that became decadent even before fully maturing. His Došljaci (1909, Newcomers) explores the common subject of the time in the Balkans—the difficulties and moral qualms of the peasants newly arrived in the fledgling city. But the text also uncovers many poetic aspects of the new urban environment, presenting Belgrade as the true capital of Serbian culture of the time. Rapidly mutating social setting is the subject of Konstandinos Theotokis's novel Oi sklavoi sta desma tous (1922, Slaves in Their Chains), while others include Andreas Karkavitsas, Grigorios Xenopoulos, and Ioannis Kondylakis. However, perhaps the most radical representation of this schizophrenic condition on the societal level is Janko Poli Kamov's Isušena kaljuža (1909, pub. 1957, Dried Swamp). In this novel, social critique takes the form of exposing a whole spectrum of immorality, perversions, and absurdity—a veritable bestiary of the repressed psyche of the Croatian bourgeoisie. Ksaver Šandor alski establishes the tradition of the Croatian political novel with U noi (1913, In the Night). The champion of Slovenian independence, Ivan Cankar, published his social novels Na klancu (On the Hill) and Hiša Marije Pomonice (The Ward of Our Lady of Mercy) in 1902 and 1904, respectively. In Bulgaria, the authors scathingly critical of the Sofya urban environment are Anton Strashimirov, with Esenni dni (1902, Autumn Days), and Georgi Stamatov.

The Interwar Novel: War, Social Realism, and Psychoanalysis

The end of the Balkan Wars (1912–13 and 1913, respectively) and WWI saw the collapse of the two former empires occupying most of the peninsula and the emergence of new independent states. Croatia gained independence from Austro-Hungarian dominance and joined the Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs in 1918, the precursor of Yugoslavia. However, while the period 1941–91 in the cultures of Serbs and Croats is generally treated as the period of Yugoslav literary production, the two literatures still figure as separate entities in the interwar period. Since the breakup of the country, revisionist literary history tends to separate the authors on the basis of their nationality. This approach creates difficulty due to the fact that the majority of authors disregarded ethnic boundaries and many authors are appropriated by two, or even three, national traditions (e.g., Ivo Andri is claimed by the Bosnian as well as the Serbian and Croatian traditions). A pivotal event in Greek history of the period was the 1922 collapse of the Megali Idea (the Great Idea) of the “liberation” of former Byzantine territories occupied by the Ottomans since 1453, resulting in the war and “population exchange” of over a million Orthodox and Muslim refugees between Greece and Turkey.

Writing in the interwar period is influenced by European modernism, and the themes that dominate the novel are those of the “lost generation” of modernists everywhere. The dissatisfaction with the order of the world is transferred onto the subjective sphere, which in the language of fiction translates into experimentation with the genre and language, as well as genuine attempts to deconstruct the novel.

Isidora Sekuli is one of very few Serbian women writers of the period whose work is considered to inhabit the space outside “trivial literature,” with her akon Bogorodiine crkve (1919, The Novice of Notre Dame). Influenced by Zenithism, the only authentic avant-garde movement in the Balkans, new voices in Serbian prose attempted to deconstruct or completely annihilate the genre of the novel with their “anti-novels”: 77 samoubica (1923, 77 Suicides) by Ve Poljanski and Koren vida (1928, The Root of Vision) and Bez mere (1928, Without Measure) by the surrealists Aleksandar Vuo and Marko Risti, respectively.

The experience of war lies at the core of the interwar novel. Dnevnik o arnojeviu (1921, The Diary about arnojevi), by Miloš Crnjanski, and Dan šesti (1932, Day Six), by Rastko Petrovi, are considered the greatest achievements of Serbian interwar novelistic prose, written in innovative technique and grounded in the new philosophical and psychological trends, where the war represents the background for individual interrogations. Best known for the first part of his historical saga Seobe (1929, Migrations), it is in Dnevnik that Crnjanski achieves his highest lyrical expression in the form of fragmentary meditations. In Dan šesti Petrovi depicts the unimaginable moral deterioration of human character in wartime that he witnessed firsthand. In Bulgaria the effects of war are covered in Yordan Yovkov's masterpiece, Zemlyatsi (1915, Countrymen), and in Greece in Stratis Myrivilis's gripping and meditative I zoi en tafo (1924, Life in the Tomb). Ilias Venezis, in To noumero 31328 (1924, Number 31328), like Stratis Doukas in Istoria enos aihmalotou (1929, A Prisoner of War's Story), presents a semibiographical account of the situation of Anatolian Greeks in the months following the 1922 Disaster. Croatian literature of the period offers few direct reactions to the war, possibly because the Croatian nation's experience of WWI differed so much from that of the other Balkan states. Instead, we should note a few pieces of prose expressionism: the existential-psychological drama Sablasti (1917, Ghosts), by Ulderiko Donadini, and the visually rich dream-fantasy Lunar (1921), by Josip Kulundži.

The interwar period in Greece is most emphatically marked by the “generation of the 1930s,” or the true Greek avant-garde. Although Yorgos Theotokas called for a break with the past and the creation of a new type of fiction in his “manifesto” Elefthero pnevma (1929, Free Spirit), the “generation of the 30s” is much better known for its poetry than prose. Three distinctive thematic divisions are recognizable: the “Aeolian School” of the writers concerned with the war, the new “urban realism,” and “School of Thessaloniki” antirealist modernism (Beaton, 1988). Kosmas Politis's Lemonodasos (1930, Lemon Grove) and Angelos Terzakis's Desmotes (1932, Prisoners) belong to the urban category. Most of their texts deal with the deprivations of the proletarian classes and the immorality of the bourgeoisie, as well as the burgeoning leftist sentiment.

Social thematic, or “social realism,” on the Serbo-Croatian scene produces a new type of literary hero, a member of the deprived Croatian social classes, in the novels of Vjekoslav Majer, or in the texts of leftist inclination, such as August Cesarec's Careva kraljevina (1925, Emperor's Kingdom). Ivan Donevi and the rare woman novelist Fedy Martini also belong to this circle. Krv majke zemlje (1935, Mother Earth's Blood) by Antun Bonifai is of interest as the first Croatian novel employing metafictional documentation. Among Serbian novels of the urban/social thematic the three dominant ones are Anelko Krsti's Trajan (1932), Branimir osi's Pokošeno polje (1933, Reaped Field), and the joint work of Dušan Mati and Aleksandar Vuo, Gluho doba (1940, Deaf Times).

The writing of the antirealist modernists is primarily concerned with the psychological reflection of the dysfunctional world perceived as a spectrum of disorders, hallucinations, and nightmares. In Greece the most successful modernist experiments are Yannis Skarimbas's To solo tou Figaro (1938, Figaro's Solo), Politis's Eroica (1937), Nikos Gavrii Pentzikis's O pethamenos kai i anastasi (1938, The Dead Man and the Resurrection), and Melpo Axioti's Thelete na horepsoume Maria? (1940, Would You Like to Dance, Maria?). Miroslav Krleža, one of the foremost Croatian writers and an advocate of nonideological literature, produced his psychological masterpiece, Povratak Filipa Latinovia (The Return of Filip Latinovitz), in 1932, his sociopsychological drama Na rubu pameti (On the Edge of Reason) in 1938, and his Banket u Blitvi (Banquet in Blitva), tackling anarchism and terrorism, in 1939. španski zid (1930, Spanish Wall), by Rade Drainac, and Grozdanin kikot (1927, Grozdana's giggle), by Hamza Humo, belong to this category of Serbian prewar literature. Strashimirov's Robi (1930, Slaves) is a Bulgarian work of this kind.

The Postwar Novel:(Socialist) Realism

The fifteen years after WWII are characterized by a recurrence of realist fiction, even produced by writers of radically different positions in the previous decade. However, the first novels published in both Yugoslavia and Greece are historical: Ivo Andri's Na Drini uprija (1945, The Bridge on the Drina), which won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961, and Nikos Kazantzakis's Vios Kai Politeia Tou Alexi Zorba (1946, The Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas). Their early prose carries a distinct epic quality with a local flavor, as Andri writes about Bosnia in his other historical piece, Travnika hronika (1945, The Bosnian Chronicle), and Kazantzakis praises the untameable Cretan spirit in O kapetan Mihalis (1950, Freedom or Death). Kazantzakis departs from historical existentialism and metaphysics with the controversial O teleftaios peirasmos (1951, The Last Temptation of Christ), a novel that led to his excommunication from the Orthodox Church, while Martin Scorsese's 1988 film based on the novel was banned in cinemas around the world. Bulgarian novelists of the period likewise show a strong interest in historical subjects. The most notable are Stoian Zagorchinov, with Praznik v Boiana (1950, Feast in Boiana), and Dimitr Talev, whose tetralogy Samuil (1952–66) fictionalizes the Bulgarian struggle for independence from the Ottomans, and then from Greeks and Serbs in the Balkan Wars.

The postwar communist regimes of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria promoted “socialist realism” as the official cultural politics, a monumental genre devoid of aesthetic and literary values that insisted on concrete issues, a collective spirit, and the self-sacrifice of the individual for the creation of a socialist utopia. In the period immediately after WWII its main conceptual opponent was modernism, emphatically condemned by the cultural establishment as self-indulgent, antisocial, and morbid. Censorship was rife and undermined “suspicious” literary activity at its roots. Bulgarian Dimitr Dimov created his best work, Osdeni dushi (1945, Damned Souls), about the Spanish Civil War, but had to rewrite Tiutiun (1951, 1954, Tobacco) in order to get it published. Dobrica osi, president of the fragmented Yugoslavia in 1992–93, wrote Daleko je sunce (1951, Distant Is the Sun) in the socialist-realist style, while in subsequent voluminous sagas he records a history of Serbia after WWI. Mihajlo Lali depicts the psychological effects of war on people in his partisan story Lelejska gora (1957, The Wailing Mountain), while Vitomil Zupan departs from socialist-realist dogmatism in his vision of WWII, Menuet za kitaro (1957, Minuet for the Guitar). Notable novels not written in the socialist idiom are Vjekoslav Kaleb's social critique Ponižene ulice (1950, Humiliated Streets) and Vladan Desnica's stream-of-consciousness Proljea Ivana Galeba (1957, The Springs of Ivan Galeb).

Recurrence of realism in Greece was brought about by the civil war between pro-communist and right-wing forces in 1946–49 and the reemergence of censorship. Some of the finest novels of the period avoid the bleak political present through escapism into the 1930s: Contre-Temps (1947) by Mimika Kranaki, O kitrinos fakelos (1956, The Yellow File) by Mitia Karagatsis, and Terzakis's Dihos theo (1951, Without a God).

A coming-to-terms with the wars and the split in the Greek society was attempted through the renewal of folkloric realism and a historical novel that looks into the more distant past: Dido Sotiriou's Matomena homata (Farewell Anatolia), Politis's Stou Hatzifrangou (In the Hatzifrangou Quarter), and Kostas Tachtsis's To trito stefani (The Third Wedding Wreath), all published in 1962, return to the events of the 1922 Anatolian disaster. A certain amount of experimentation was again possible in the 1960s, before Greece lapsed into yet another episode of totalitarianism, with the dictatorship of the Colonels in 1967–74. Tatiana Gritsi-Milliex's Kai idou ippos hloros (1963, Behold a Pale Horse) and Stratis Tsirkas's trilogy Akyvernites politeies (1962–65, Drifting Cities) are good examples of such writing.

Toward the Postmodern

In the 1960s and 1970s Yugoslavia underwent a significant period of liberalization. Meša Selimovi created the existentialist Derviš i smrt (1966, The Dervish and the Death), Bora osi his subversive Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji (1969, The Role of My Family in the World Revolution), and Ranko Marinkovi the intertextual antiwar Kiklop (1966, Cyclops). Crnjanski, returning from exile in London, wrote his most important novels Druga knjiga Seoba (1962, The Second Book of Migrations) and Roman o Londonu (1972, A Novel about London). However, a new wave of realist prose brought to the surface a brutal metropolitan reality and socially undesirable phenomena: urban poverty, criminal underground activity, emigration, prostitution, alcoholism, and other social ills, as well as the subject of marginal groups that otherwise would remain off the radar for the majority of the population. Dragoslav Mihailovi's Kad su cvetale tikve (1968, When Pumpkins Blossomed)—criticized for a contextual mention of the Goli Otok labor camp, where the author had been detained—Vitomil Zupan's Leviathan (1982), and Živojin Pavlovi's Zadah tela (1982, Body Stench). Simultaneously, a different faction of realism directed its interests toward the taboo topic of crimes committed during WWII, the writing that became possible only in the next decade, such as Miodrag Bulatovi's Ljudi sa etiri prsta (1975, People with Four Fingers).

Yet arguably the most influential fiction of the period was produced by the group whose writing anticipates postmodernist methods in Yugoslav literature, exerting an indelible influence on future generations of writers. The group includes Borislav Peki, whose novels include Kako upokojiti vampira (1977, How to Quiet a Vampire), in which he traces the path of Western rationalism that leads to Nazism, and the 1981 science-fiction trilogy Besnilo (Rabies), Atlantida (Atlantis), and 1999. To this group also belong Danilo Kiš, with his “Family Circus” trilogy, especially Pešanik (1972, Hourglass), and Mirko Kova. Kiš's take on Stalinist totalitarianism, Grobnica za Borisa Davidovia (1976, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich), is the best-known victim of the renewed process of regime control of the artistic freedoms in Yugoslavia following the 1971 Croatian nationalist revival movement, forcing the author into self-imposed exile. The local variant of the so-called “jeans prose” deserves a mention as a generational, if not exactly anti-establishment, revolt during the 1970s: Alojz Majeti with angi off gotoff (1970) and Zvonimir Majdak in Kužiš, stari moj (1970, Got It, Old Man).

In contrast to the isolation of postmodern literature since its introduction by Kiš and Peki, the mid-1980s witnessed its enthusiastic embrace by cultural elites and broad audiences. The tremendous rise in popularity of postmodern literature following Milorad Pavi's international success with Hazarski renik (1984, Dictionary of the Khazars) manifests the postmodern paradox in the fragmenting Yugoslavia: the appropriation of the postmodern by writers whose orientation had a distinctly populist dimension as well as those whose writing resisted the prevalent nationalist mono-narrative. While the former approached history in a constructive manner, the efforts of the latter were directed at its subversion or parody: Svetislav Basara's Fama o biciklistima (1987, The Cyclist Conspiracy), Dragan Veliki's Astragan (1991), Radoslav Petkovi's Sudbina i komentari (1993, Destiny and Comments), Dubravka Ugreši's Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (1996, Museum of Unconditional Surrender), David Albahari's Mamac (1996, Bait), Judita Šalgo's Put u Birobidžan (posthumous, 1996, Trip to Birobidzhan), and Mirjana Novakovi's Strah i njegov sluga (2005, Fear and Its Servant).

The break with realism in Greek fiction, starting in the early 1960s, continued with a series of narratives that parody the mounting political tensions by transferring the Greek situation to a fantastic location. The Aesopian language of these novels only vaguely conceals the irony pervading Vassilis Vassilikos's 1961 trilogy, or Andonis Samarakis's prophetic To Lathos (1965, The Flaw), a text that anticipates the seizing of power by the junta. Yorgos Heimonas goes even further in Oi htistes (1979, The Builders), which dispenses altogether with a familiar Western setting or the language itself. Similar displacement is present in the Bulgarian Yordan Radichkov, who combines folkloric fantasy, parody, and the grotesque: Vsichki i nikoi (1975, All and Nobody) and Noev kovcheg (1988, Noah's Ark).

Rather than rendering the past through fictional testimonies like previous generations of writers, Greek post-dictatorship narratives catalyze the events through the protagonists who then interpret them (Beaton, 1994, 283–95). Aris Alexandrou writes about the civil war in To kivotio (1974, The Box), while I arhaia skouria (1979, Fool's Gold) by Maro Douka and I Kassandra kai o lykos (1977, Cassandra and the Wolf) by Margarita Karapanou portray the Athens University massacre that preceded the fall of the dictatorship. The tendency throughout the 1980s was still the genre's deep involvement with history, as in Alki Zei's I arravoniastikia tou Ahillea (1987, Achilles Fiancée), and identity, both interrogated in relation to Greece's European present, as in Eugenia Fakinou's To evdomo rouho (1983, The Seventh Garment) or Rhea Galanaki's O vios tou Ismail Ferik Pasha (1989, The Life of Ismail Ferik-Pasha). Other writers employing metafictional documentation are Thanassis Valtinos, Thomas Skassis, and Pavlina Pampoudi.

The New Millennium International Novel

Greece is increasingly seen as a safe haven from economic problems or political oppression, while Greeks themselves are now free to travel and explore the world. This two-way cultural exchange is frequently reflected in the new pattern of “centrifugal” literature that depicts the contact of the Greeks with the Other, both in and out of Greece (Tziovas, in Mackridge and Yannakakis). Sotiris Dimitriou's N'akouo kalat'onoma sou (1993, May Your Name Be Blessed) re-creates the oral mode of storytelling and plays out the tensions between Greeks and Albanian workers, while in Amanda Michalopoulou's Oses fores antexeis (1998, As Many Times as You Can Stand It) a Greek goes on a love quest to Prague. Travel adventures and international themes abound in texts by Alexis Panselinos, Theodoros Grigoriadis, Alexis Stamatis, and Ioanna Karystiani.

A very similar tendency is visible in the post-Yugoslav novel, where after the crippling wars the newly independent states reinvented their former cultural affinities. Many new names in post-Yugoslav fiction still deal with the recent events, although the general tendency is extrovert, explorative, and unashamed of taboo subjects. Of particular interest are U potpalublju (1996, In the Hold) by Vladimir Arsenijevi, and Zimski dnevnik (1995, Winter Journal), the novel by Sran Valjarevi that holds cult status in Serbia, as well as a novel on Belgrade nightlife by Barbi Markovi. Zoran Živkovi belongs to a separate category with his much-translated science-fiction novels, as does the Bulgarian Evgeni Kuzmanov. Georgi Gospodinov was likewise internationally successful with Estestven roman (Natural Novel), while Teodora Dimova registers the post-socialist moral collapse in Maikite (Mothers), both 2005. On the Bosnian, Slovenian, and Croatian scene new texts continue to arrive from Ivanica eri, Aleksandar Hemon, Miljenko Jergovi, Drago Janar, Boris Dežulovi, and the ever-controversial Vedrana Rudan.

Bibliography

Beaton, R., ed. (1988), Greek Novel AD 1–1985.
Beaton, R. (1994), Introduction to Modern Greek Literature.
Cooper, H.R., ed. (2003), Bilingual Anthology of Slovene Literature.
Kora, S. (1974), Hrvatski roman izmeu dva rata.
Kora, S. (1982), Srpski roman izmeu dva rata.
Mackridge, P. and E. Yannakakis, eds. (2004), Contemporary Greek Fiction in a United Europe.
Nemec, K. (1998), Povijest hrvatskog romana.
Palavestra, P. (1986), Istorija moderne srpske književnosti.
Petkovi, N. (1995), History of Serbian Culture.
Šicel, M. (1982), Hrvatska književnost.
Tonnet, H. (1996), Histoire du roman grec.

Southern Africa

Andrew van der Vlies

The concerns and form of the novel in southern Africa have been determined largely by the region's cultural and social politics: for autochthonous communities as for settlers (mostly from Europe), writing served to mediate experiences of modernity, alienation, and ideological interpellation. Permanent European settlement began with the establishment by the Dutch East India Company of a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652; the diary of the settlement's first commander, Jan van Riebeeck, is often cited as the progenitor of an Afrikaans literary tradition in South Africa. Little creative writing was produced until the early nineteenth century, by which time the erstwhile Dutch settlement had expanded and come under British control (1795–1802, and from 1806): South Africa achieved measures of independence in 1910 and 1930, and became a white minority-ruled republic in 1961 and a multiracial democracy in 1994. Elsewhere in the region, British, Portuguese, and German colonial expansion ensured that the whole of southern Africa was directly or indirectly ruled by European powers, or by self-governing minorities of European descent, by the early twentieth century.

During the nineteenth century, southern Africa attracted ethnographers, scientists, and missionaries. The latter may be credited with the spread of printing and literacy and the development of orthographies for several African languages. Mission education altered belief systems and patterns of behavior amongst indigenous communities but also facilitated access to print technologies and networks of distribution, encouraging the growth of African elites who would spur the activities of anticolonial liberation movements in the twentieth century. Furthermore, literary genres encouraged by mission presses—including narratives of conversion or self-improvement—provided the basis for early black literary prose. Inevitably, however, the model for the novel in southern Africa has been a European one.

The novel, with its investments in post-Enlightenment conceptions of interiority and progress and its assumptions about leisure and the value of reading, offered diverging opportunities for authors to stake claims on local and global identifications, involving negotiations of European and African identities—invariably against the backdrop of actual dispossession for autochthonous communities. In relation to South Africa, Rita Barnard suggests that contests over physical and imaginary geographies continue to structure psychological and social experience in a country whose history is marked by successive attempts to regulate access to space on the basis of race and ethnicity. J. M. Coetzee's seminal White Writing dissected the legacies of European metaphysics and epistemologies in South Africa's culture of letters; Barnard cites atopia, utopia, dystopia, and the pastoral as among the most enduring imagined tropes still haunting its literary imagination. A similar argument might be made for the whole of southern Africa. Critics (including Van der Vlies) draw attention to the transnational nature of the region's literary cultures: authors looked to European and North American models of the novel, and construed metropolitan publication as cultural validation. Many also found most of their readers abroad until the end of the twentieth century. Conflicting expectations of the novel—as high art or popular entertainment, as realistic representation of social conditions or contribution to a global literary field—continue to mark novelistic output from southern Africa in content, form, and in relation to the sites of publication and reception. Recent history, and unsettled narratives of cultural identity in the present, pose problems for literary historiography.

The Novel in South Africa

Anglophone Novels

Most white English-speaking residents of the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century read whatever arrived on the latest ship from England. By the 1870s, however, colonial romances and adventure narratives appeared as the number of settlers increased after the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1886) in the interior. The imperial romance, Laura Chrisman argues, both articulates and works through the “socioeconomic contradictions brought on” by the ensuing capitalization of southern Africa (6). The expansion of capitalism and its attendant class tensions, migrations to the interior, and the displacement of black communities provided fit material for novelistic treatment, although most writing traded in stereotype and cliché: faithful native retainers and pets, as in J. Percy FitzPatrick's Jock of the Bushveld (1907); wise white masters; Western medicine triumphing over local superstition; the discovery of fertile land represented as having been misused by the natives. Plots often relied on accident, inheritance, and fortuitous discovery. The Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) provided a backdrop for much adventure writing, like Ernest Glanville's The Despatch Rider (1901). Glanville, author of twenty novels, and Bertram Mitford, who wrote forty-five, were among the most prolific authors of imperial romance.

More critically interesting writing evidences a late nineteenth-century imperial discourse fusing a rhetoric of utilitarianism and belief in the value of modernization, with that of mysticism, chivalry, and romantic primitivism. Such impulses are especially evident in Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), which draw on quest and rite-of-passage narratives, mystical motifs, and social Darwinism. Some critics trace to this strain of colonial adventure the writing of currently popular novelists like Zambian-born Wilbur Smith, author of international bestsellers like When the Lion Feeds (1964), whose work Michael Chapman (2003) characterizes as offering “endless safaris and seductions, big game, game women, an Africa where the approved politics are thoroughly conservative” (131).

It was against this widespread mode of adventure writing that what is arguably the region's first significant novel, written by a governess of German and English missionary parentage, was conceived. Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm was published in London in two volumes by Chapman & Hall in Jan. 1883. Schreiner used the pseudonym “Ralph Iron,” gesturing toward the influence of transcendentalist writing on her (characters in the novel are named Waldo and Em) and her desire not to have her work read as a simpering colonial romance for female patrons of the circulating libraries. With its “New Woman” character, Lyndall, Schreiner's novel was controversial; it remains a key reference point for Anglophone South African writing, particularly for its engagement with the pastoral, its generic inventiveness, and its negotiation of the twin demands of verisimilitude and the imagination. This negotiation, of demands that might be termed those of history and of the aesthetic, prefigures the agenda for the novel in South Africa in the ensuing century. Other novels by Schreiner are the parable-like Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) and two published posthumously: From Man to Man (1926) and Undine (1929).

Douglas Blackburn, a British immigrant on the Witwatersrand when gold mining was transforming the proto-Afrikaner Transvaal republic into a site of contestation in the new capitalist economy, also produced important early novels, including A Burgher Quixote (1903), in which a principled narrator comments on corruption in a deadpan manner, and Leaven (1908), perhaps the first important depiction of the effects of urbanization on rural black African society. This “Jim-comes-to-the-city” (specifically Johannesburg) trope would be explored most famously in English in Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy (1946) and Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948).

Land and language rights, cultural autonomy, race, and citizenship in a modern state (after 1910) within the British Empire—but with multiple cultures and traditions—form the overwhelming concerns of the early twentieth-century novel in South Africa. Mhudi, subtitled an “epic of South African native life a hundred years ago,” by Solomon T. Plaatje, a mission-educated man of letters, newspaper proprietor, and politician, uses the story of a young Barolong couple in the 1830s to explore the roots of the post-Union dispossession of black South Africans by the Natives Land Act (1913), which reserved less than ten percent of the country for black ownership, in the incursions of the proto-Afrikaner Voortrekkers (migrant farmers) into central South Africa, and the contemporaneous migration of black African communities, known as the mfecane (occasioned by the expansion of the Zulu kingdom under Chaka).

The issue of race, whether in the form of tensions between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites or the so-called “question” of the “native” population's rights, dominated much literary production. Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Step-children (1924), an indictment of miscegenation that plays on the “black peril” trope, became internationally known; it remains a point of reference for novels revisiting the hybrid nature of South African national identity. William Plomer, who left South Africa permanently in 1929, offered a scathing response to such conservative racialist discourse in his first—and only expressly South African—novel, Turbott Wolfe (1926), a first-person account by the dying eponymous narrator of his experiences in a thinly disguised Zululand.

Notable liberal realist novels in English, interrogating this dilemma to greater or lesser effect, include Laurens van der Post's In a Province (1934) and Jack Cope's The Road to Ysterberg (1959), although the most famous is undoubtedly Paton's internationally successful Cry, the Beloved Country. Imbued with a belief in humane cooperation and gradual amelioration (which struck critics as outdated paternalism), Paton's novel was received as a parable seeking to awaken South Africa's white population to their complicity in injustice, but also as a universal narrative of courage in adversity; its nonrevolutionary message resonated with white Cold War-era American readers. Its publication coincided, too, with the election victory of an Afrikaner nationalist party, which, under Prime Ministers D. F. Malan and H. F. Verwoerd, implemented the policy of apartheid (literally, separateness). The message of Paton's novel thus seemed immediately dated to many black readers. With the recognition of the hollowness of much white liberal rhetoric, the English novel in South Africa persisted in something of a crisis. Simon Gikandi suggests that Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World (1966) is perhaps “the exemplary work of the liberal dilemma,” its “rhetoric of failure” exposing a “failure of the liberal project that the novel, nevertheless, espouses” (in S. Gikandi, ed., 2003, Encyclopedia of African Literature, 515). Gordimer, South Africa's first Nobel laureate for literature (in 1991), established herself as the apartheid era's most important—and most sophisticated— novelistic chronicler, with an impressive catalogue also including A World of Strangers (1958), The Conservationist (1974, joint winner of the Booker Prize), Burger's Daughter (1979), and July's People (1981). She refused to exile herself and believed it was, as she put it in a 1984 essay, “The Essential Gesture,” “the white writer's task as ‘cultural worker’...to raise the consciousness of white people, who, unlike himself, have not woken up” (in S. Clingman, ed., 1988, The Essential Gesture, 293–94). Gordimer offered a sustained response to the country's politics through a blend of lukÁcsian critical realism and elements of late modernist narration (often with implicated first-person narrators, and fractured, free-indirect discourse). She has continued to explore the complicated texture of post-apartheid life in recent work, including The House Gun (1998) and The Pickup (2001).

Black writers also experimented with critical realism. Most significant is Alex La Guma, whose novels appeared from publishers abroad and were banned inside South Africa. And a Threefold Cord (1964) is exemplary of his method: evoking a studied naturalism, it offers detailed descriptions of deprivation in a Cape Town shantytown, inviting readers to perceive the injustices suffered by characters who themselves only gradually identify their plight as political. Other novels include The Stone Country (1968) and In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1972). La Guma was one of the few novelists whom critic Lewis Nkosi was prepared to exclude from a charge—in his essay “Fiction by Black South Africans” (1966)—that the subservience of aesthetic form to the protest message had too often resulted in “journalistic fact parading outrageously as imaginative literature” (in U. Beier, ed., 1967, Introduction to African Literature, 212). Another might well, in due course, have been Bessie Head, whose complex work, including the novels Maru (1971) and A Question of Power (1973), has become more closely associated with Botswana, where she lived in exile from South Africa. Later “protest” writing included Miriam Tlali's Amandla! (1981), Mongane Wally Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood (1981), and Sipho Sepamla's A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981), which deal with the aftermath of the Soweto uprising of 1976. Tlali's semiautobiographical Muriel at Metropolitan (1975) is concerned with the everyday, exemplifying critic and novelist Njabulo Ndebele's suggestion that the “insensitivity, insincerity and delusion” of much protest writing should be superseded by a “rediscovery of the ordinary” (50) in which apartheid's spectacular narratives were eschewed and its effective authorship of every narrative of life in the country refused.

In an address at a book fair in Cape Town (1988, “The Novel Today,” Upstream 6(1)), Coetzee spoke to a similar concern, arguing against what he called his historical moment's “powerful tendency...to subsume the novel under history.” History, Coetzee countered, was “not reality,” but “a kind of discourse”; the novel did not need to answer to the dominant historical narrative. He had faced charges that his novels engaged insufficiently with the realities of his historical moment: his first, Dusklands (1974), offered twin narratives set in contemporary California and eighteenth-century South Africa; his second, In the Heart of the Country (1977), is a highly unreliable narrative by a woman in an apparently colonial-era setting. But his body of work is regarded by many as unparalleled in its ethical seriousness (Attwell). Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), a sophisticated allegory pushing the limits of the form, responds to questions of torture and complicity in the South African context. Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won Coetzee his first Booker Prize; the second followed for Disgrace (1999), a controversial narrative set in post-apartheid South Africa. Foe (1986) offered a rewriting of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719–22) and Roxana (1724), addressing issues of authority and the canon; The Master of Petersburg (1994) returned to similar issues. Age of Iron (1990) offered a self-reflexive and highly mediated meditation on ethics, writing, and the humanities in a time of political crisis. Coetzee has published three fictionalized memoirs: Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009). Each, and especially the last, tests expectations of truth and fiction in autobiography, and they are sold in some markets as novels. Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature.

The work of several Anglophone novelists bridges the transition to democracy in South Africa. Damon Galgut's The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991, rev. 2005) was well received, and The Good Doctor (2003) and The Imposter (2008) shortlisted for international and local prizes. Mike Nicol, known locally for novels like The Powers That Be (1989), expanded his audience with The Ibis Tapestry (1998), a postmodern thriller set in late apartheid South Africa. He has followed this success with detective fiction, including Payback (2008), the first of a contracted trilogy signaling his likely international success in a lucrative popular field. Lawyer Andrew Brown's Coldsleep Lullaby (2005) and academic Jane Taylor's Of Wild Dogs are examples of other recently successful—but more literary—detective novels, a genre that seems likely to grow given the obsession shared by many South Africans with popular discourse about criminality, corruption, and violence in the postcolonial state.

Some writers whose work long reflected a felt obligation to represent the emergency in apartheid-era South Africa—like Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni (Zakes) Mda, who established a reputation as an activist playwright during periods of exile—began publishing more inventive, less socially realistic work after 1994. Mda published She Plays with the Darkness and Ways of Dying in 1995, shortly after his return to the country, following with The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), Cion (2007), and Black Diamond (2010). Mda's novels explore the claims of tradition and modernity in narratives that employ realism, magical realism, and satire. Anne Landsman also explored the potential of magical realism in The Devil's Chimney (1997).

Zoë Wicomb had only published short fiction until David's Story (2000), which challenges nationalist—Afrikaner and black South African—myths of gender and ethnic identity, established her as one of the most accomplished post-apartheid novelists. Playing in the Light (2006) is similarly concerned with race, language, memory, and writing. Wicomb's writing, in its concern with trauma and acts of witnessing, engaged with the one of the legacies of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): the heightened profile of narrative, and a complex understanding of narrative “truth” (as opposed to forensic, or verifiable, truth). Other novels to respond to the potentialities suggested formally and thematically by the TRC include Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2001), Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed (2006), and Njabulo Ndebele's formally experimental and politically provocative The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003).

Ivan Vladislavi has produced adventurous and nuanced examinations of the late and post-apartheid urban landscape with a keen eye for the absurd, particularly in The Folly (1993), in The Restless Supermarket (2001), and in short fiction that aspires to the novelistic, especially The Exploded View (2004). Other “urban” fiction, grappling with the deprivations of street children, conditions of drug abuse and prostitution, and the devastation wrought by HIV/AIDS, include the small but powerful work of Phaswane Mpe (2001, Welcome to Our Hillbrow) and K. Sello Duiker (2000, Thirteen Cents; 2001, The Quiet Violence of Dreams). Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006) examines the textures of everyday life in urban South Africa, particularly for young black men; The Book of the Dead (2009) confronts issues of sexual behavior and social responsibility—and gives a voice (literally) to HIV/AIDS. Murhandziwa Nicholas (Niq) Mhlongo also explores urban life, in Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007).

African-language Novels

There is a relatively long and robust novelistic tradition in South Africa's African languages. The publication of Tiyo Soga's isiXhosa translation of part of Pilgrim's Progress (as uHambo Lomhambi) in 1866 is often cited as a seminal moment in the development of a vernacular South African literature. It also bespeaks the significance of mission presses (particularly the Morija Press in Maseru, Marianhill in KwaZulu-Natal, and Lovedale in Alice in the Eastern Cape) which vetted writing for compliance with Christian orthodoxy by fostering a black southern African culture of letters (Attwell). Morija published Thomas Mofolo's 1907 Bunyanesque Sesotho-language Moeti oa Bochabela (also Moeti wa Botjhabela, The Traveller to the East) and his masterful historical work Chaka (1925). The former revisits the hero-quest form and an allegory that tests as it examines the impact of Christianity on Basotho culture; Chapman suggests that Chaka might equally be regarded as epic and as romance (212). Mofolo's work features in early debates about whether the written word should be used to advance African nationalism, or serve the goal of Western—for which read Christian—modernity, and whether these goals are mutually exclusive.

A seminal debate about the use of English in developing a black national identity raged in print throughout the 1930s between isiZulu poet and critic Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo (1903–56) and the novelist, poet, and academic Benedict Wallet Vilakazi. The latter's Nje nempela (1933, Really and truly) is among the first isiZulu novels to deal with contemporary life rather than historical subjects. John Langibalele Dube, writer, educator, and politician, wrote the first novel in isiZulu with U-Jege: Insila kaShaka (ca. 1930, Jeqe, the Bodyservant of King Shaka). Rolfes Reginald Raymond Dhlomo contributed a series of historical novels, including on kings Dingane (1936, UDingane), Chaka (1937, UShaka), and Ceteswayo (1952, UCetshwayo). He also authored the 1946 “Jim-comes-to-Jo'burg”-themed Indlela yababi (1946, Path of the Wicked). Also in this genre are Jordan Kush Ngubane's Uvalo lwezinhlonzi (1956, Fear of Authority) and James Nduna Gumbi's Baba, Ngixolele (1966, Father, Forgive Me) and Wayesezofika ekhaya (1967, He Was About To Go Home), novels tracing the implications for traditional community and family structures of the apartheid South African state's industrialization and urbanization.

The theme of the return of the prodigal son is treated in Deuteronomy Bhekinkosi Zeblon Ntuli's Ubheka (1962, The Watcher) and the prolific Kenneth Bhengu's Baba Ngonile (1971, Father, I Have Sinned). Each of these novels draws on oral traditions of storytelling, and on allegory and the structure of the morality tale—the latter showing the imbrication of Christian and older codes of ethics and morality. In Cyril Lincoln Sibusiso Nyembezi's Inkinsela yaseMgungundlovu (1961, The Rich Man of Pietermaritzburg), an urban trickster hoodwinks rural folk. Christian Themba Msimang has published a number of novels, including Akuyiwe emhlahlweni (1973, Let Us Consult the Diviner) and Buzani kuMkabayi (1982, Ask Mkabayi), as well as a 1983 monograph, Folktale Influence on the Zulu Novel. According to the 2001 census, isiZulu was the home language of 23.8 percent of the South African population; it is thus the most-spoken home language. Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi is regarded as having written the first novel, U-Samson (1907), in isiXhosa, home language of the second-largest proportion of South Africans (17.6 percent, according to the 2001 census). Mqhayi also authored a utopian fiction, U-Don Jadu (1929). Guybon Bundlwana Sinxo, an important translator of European literature into isiXhosa, himself wrote UNomsa (1922), Umfundisi wase-Mthuqwasi (1927, The priest of Mthuqwasi), and Umzali Wolahleko (1933, The prodigal parent), tackling issues such as the education of children, family structure, and the politics of race as it continues to affect even black Christian converts. James Ranisi Jolobe, chiefly known as a poet, wrote several novels—including UZagula (1923), dealing with witchcraft, and Elundini loThukela (1958, On the Tugela Hills). Victoria Nombulelo Mermaid Swaartbooi was a pioneering feminist writer whose 1934 novel, U-Mandisa, follows the career of a woman who seeks employment over marriage.

The flowering of isiXhosa prose fiction came with Archibald Campbell Jordan's celebrated Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (1940, The Wrath of the Ancestors), but the effect of so-called “Bantu” education, a policy of the apartheid government that, after 1953, deliberately impoverished the standard of education for black South Africans (who, it was held, should be raised only to work as laborers), had a deleterious effect on literary culture. Comparatively liberal mission presses were overtaken by Afrikaans publishing houses as the centers of publishing for black education, and little interesting vernacular literature was encouraged or allowed. IsiXhosa-language writers who came to the fore in this difficult period include Enoch Fikile Gwashu, Knobel Sakhiwo Bongela, Randall Langa Peteni, and the prolific Peter Thabiso Mtuze, an academic and man of letters whose novels include UDingezweni (1966), Umsinga (1973, A Tide), and Indlel' ecand' intlango (1981, The Road through the Wilderness).

In Sesotho, or Southern Sotho (spoken by 7.9 percent of South Africans, and the majority language of neighboring Lesotho), writers like Bennett Makalo Khaketla (1960, Mosali a nkhola; A Comforting Woman) and Kemuel Edward Monyatsi Ntsane (ca. 1967, Bao Batho; Those People) produced novels blending sociocultural concerns with a cautious note of political protest. Kgotso Pieter David Maphalla has published numerous prizewinning and much-prescribed short stories, poems, dramas, and novels, the latter including Nna ke mang? (1991, Who Am I?) and Ha maru a rwalellana (2007, The Clouds Eclipse One Another). The academic Nhlanhla Paul Maake's novels include Ke Phethisitse Ditaelo tsa Hao (1994, I Have Fulfilled Your Commands), Kweetsa ya Pelo ya Motho (1995, The Depth of the Heart of Man), and Mme (1995, Mother).

Amongst less widely spoken languages in South Africa are Setswana (the majority language of neighboring Botswana) and Northern Sotho (or Sesotho sa Leboa, sometimes called Sepedi, though this refers to a dialect in this group), with less than 10 percent of the population as home-language speakers, and Xitsonga (Shangaan in Mozambique), SiSwati (spoken, too, in Swaziland), Tshivenda, and isiNdebele, with less than 5 percent. Among contemporary Setswana novelists in South Africa, Kabelo Duncan Kgatea's Monwona wa bosupa (2008, The pointing finger) features a quest narrative, elements of pan-African transnationalism, and contemporary issues such as the legal custody of children.

Afrikaans Novels

The “Boer” Republics established in the interior from 1854 onward (after the migration of many “Dutch” farmers—or Boers—from the British-ruled Cape Colony in the mid-1930s) were annexed by Britain after the Anglo-Boer War. Their spoken language differed from the Dutch used in the church and courts, and assimilated vocabulary from contact with autochthonous languages and the so-called “Malay” creole of slaves from the Indian Ocean rim. A concerted movement to recognize this as a new language began in 1874 and intensified in the early twentieth century, resulting in state recognition in 1925. The developing literary culture soon included significant novels by Johannes van Melle, Mikro (pseud. of C. H. Kühn), and C. M. van den Heever, whose pastoral novels in the plaasroman (farm novel) tradition (see Coetzee) included Somer (1935, Harvest Home) and Laat Vrugte (1939, Late Harvest). More complex representations of life in South Africa, including the dilemmas of racial politics, came with C. J. M. Nienaber's Keerweer (1946, Cul De Sac), which J. C. Kannemeyer regards as “the only novel written at this time showing any sign of genuine innovation” (61). F. A. Venter published a tetralogy in the 1960s—including Geknelde land (1960, Oppressed Land), Offerland (1963, Land of Sacrifice), Gelofteland (1966, Land of the Covenant), and Bedoelde land (1968, Intended [or Promised Land])—that explored Afrikaner struggles, in particular the mythology of the Voortrekkers, implicitly expressing optimism in the future of the white-ruled state. He is better known for his “Jim-comes-to-Jo'burg” novel about the supposed perils of urbanization, Swart pelgrim (1952, Dark Pilgrim). It is worth noting that some other Afrikaans novels in this genre were written by black Afrikaans authors—including Sydney Vernon Petersen's As die son ondergaan (1945, When the sun sets) and Arthur Fula's Jôhannie giet die beeld (1954, The Golden Magnet).

Anna M. Louw published historical novels, including Die banneling: Die lyfwag (1964, The Exile: The Bodyguard) and Die groot gryse (1968, The Great [or Honored] “Gray One” [or Old Man]; it was about Transvaal president Paul Kruger) in the 1960s, but is best known for books like Kroniek van Perdepoort (1975, The Chronicle of Perdepoort), a farm novel combining allegory, satire, and symbolism in a potent mix. Wilma Stockenström, better known as a poet, also engaged with the farm novel in Uitdraai (1976, Turn-off). Elsa Joubert published important work in the 1960s and 1970s, including, most famously, a novelized version of her black female employee's struggles (including with apartheid bureaucracy), Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena (1978, The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena).

The 1960s saw the flowering of the “new” novel in Afrikaans, heavily indebted to existentialism, psychoanalytic theories, and the nouveau roman. Writers—many of whom spent time in France or the Netherlands—explored myth, deployed extensive symbolism, and were comparatively daring in representing sexuality and political dissent. Chief among this Sestiger (sixties) school are Jan Rabie, author of Ons, die Afgod (1958, We, the Idol), and Etienne Leroux (pseud. of S. P. D. le Roux), who is best known for the Silberstein trilogy: Sewe Dae by die Silbersteins (1962, Seven Days at the Silbersteins), recounting feckless Henry van Eeden's week with his fiancée's family on a wine farm in the Western Cape, is a symbolically complex exploration of good and evil; Een vir Azazel (1964, One for the Devil) explores culpability and moral judgment, drawing on classical rhetorical patterns, detective-fiction formulae, and Greek tragedy; Die Derde Oog (1966, The Third Eye) is loosely patterned on the Hercules myth. They were published in English as To a Dubious Salvation (1972). The banning of Leroux's Magersfontein, O Magersfontein (1976) by the apartheid censors in 1977 was a cause célèbre, hastening changes in the restrictive censorship regime (discussed extensively by Peter McDonald).

Another Sestiger, André P. Brink, is perhaps the best-known Afrikaans novelist abroad, particularly for 'n Droë Wit Seisoen (1979, A Dry White Season), later filmed. Highly prolific and eclectic, Brink has experimented with surrealism, social realism, political reportage, a version of magical realism, historical romance, confessional first-person narratives, and sweeping family sagas. The banning of his 1973 novel Kennis van die Aand (Looking on Darkness)—it was the first Afrikaans novel to be so censored—cast Brink as the spokesperson for enlightened Afrikanerdom. (Since the 1970s, he has prepared simultaneous English and Afrikaans versions of his novels). Post-apartheid fiction includes Sandkastele (1996, Imaginings of Sand) and Donkermaan (2000, The Rights of Desire).

Other significant novelists include John Miles. His Donderdag of Woensdag (1978, Thursday or Wednesday) and Stanley Bekker en die boikot (1980, Stanley Bekker and the Boycott) were both banned: the former featured artists planning to kidnap the president; the latter dealt with racial discrimination and school boycotts through a formal engagement with the children's story. Miles is best known for Kroniek uit die Doofpot (1991, Deafening Silence: Police Novel), which was based on the case of the police killing of Richard Motasi—also recounted in Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog's creative nonfiction prose account of the TRC hearings, Country of My Skull (1998).

Karel Schoeman's many novels show a range of influences, including—unusually for an Afrikaner— conversion to Catholicism, and a later interest in Buddhism. A period as a novice in an Irish monastery informed By fakkellig (1966, By Torchlight), a historical novel about Irish nationalism in the late eighteenth century. Later novels included Na die geliefde land (1972, Promised Land), Die hemeltuin (1979, The Heavenly Garden), and a trilogy: Hierdie lewe (1993, This Life), Die uur van die engel (1995, The Hour of the Angel), and Verliesfontein (1998). Another writer who wrote historical novels, though in a more popular—and very successful—vein, is Dalene Matthee, whose series set in the southern Cape's Outeniqua forest (around present-day Knysna) includes Kringe in 'n bos (1984, Circles in a Forest), Fiela se Kind (1985, Fiela's Child; also filmed), and Moerbeibos (1987, The Mulberry Forest).

Significant voices in contemporary fiction include Jeanne Goosen, Marié Heese, Chris Pelser, Ingrid Winterbach, Christoffel Coetzee, and Eben Venter, whose well-received novels include Ek Stamel Ek Sterwe (1996, My Beautiful Death) and the dystopic Horrelpoot (2006, Trencherman). Mark Behr's Die Reuk van Appels (1993, The Smell of Apples), well received in the country and abroad, a tale of lost innocence, is also partially an example of grensliteratuur (border literature), engaging with the legacies of South Africa's costly covert military operations in Angola in the late 1970s and 1980s. Behr now writes in English (2009, Kings of the Water). Etienne van Heerden is prolific and highly regarded; his best-known novel is Toorberg (1986, Ancestral Voices). Marlene van Niekerk's harrowing 1994 novel Triomf (Triumph), is named for the working-class white suburb built by the apartheid government on the ruins of the famed center of black Johannesburg culture, Sophiatown, and follows a trio of poor white siblings, the Benades, in the run-up to the first democratic elections of 1994. Van Niekerk's Agaat (2004, The Way of the Women), an ambitious revisioning of the plaasroman, has been received as amongst the most accomplished South African novels in any language in the new millennium.

Other Countries

In all countries of the South African Development Community (SADC), the usual delimitation of South Africa as a region, novelists have felt tensions between demands that writing act in support of projects of national self-definition in the postcolonial era, and concerns to interrogate the pitfalls of nationalist rhetoric or the disappointments of independence and neocolonialism. Attempts to write for a living in what are very small markets also pose dilemmas.

Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony in 1923. Early novels include colonial romances, although some work is critical of white racial attitudes and policies, including Arthur Shearly Cripps's Bay Tree Country (1913). Doris Lessing, the 2007 Nobel literature laureate, is sometimes regarded as a Rhodesian novelist; she spent the years 1925–49 in the colony, and The Grass Is Singing (1950), her first novel, is set there (as are parts of The Golden Notebook, 1962). The white minority Rhodesian government declared itself unilaterally independent of Britain in 1965, precipitating a protracted and bitter conflict with armed black nationalist guerrillas that culminated in the election of a majority government, and independence as Zimbabwe, in 1980.

Stanlake Samkange's On Trial for My Country (1966) is among the first significant proto-Zimbabwean novels, restaging the encounter between late nineteenth-century Ndebele/Matabele king Lobengula and Cecil Rhodes. Samkange also published The Mourned One (1968) and Year of the Uprising (1978). Charles Mungoshi's Waiting for the Rain (1975) compares earlier wars of liberation with the anticolonial struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, but was an indictment of the Rhodesian government's cultural policies, too, in that it was published in English in London, in the Heinemann African Writers series, so escaping Rhodesian censorship and defying the white government's attempts to corral black writers into writing in their vernaculars and being published by government-controlled presses (though Mungoshi did contribute greatly to the development of a literary Shona in his several novels in that language).

Much writing produced during the struggle (1966–79) is marked by a sense of psychic as well as spatial displacement, as writers attempted to balance aesthetic with political concerns. Nowhere is this more marked than in the work of Dambudzo Marechera, whose The House of Hunger (1978; strictly a short-story collection, but featuring an eponymous novella), Black Sunlight (1980), and Mindblast (1984) have earned him considerable regard as a high Modernist representing extreme alienation and psychological difficulties. Chenjerai Hove's Bones (1988) and Ancestors (1997) display striking formal inventiveness, including the use of Shona idioms and expressions. Like Shimmer Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns (1989) and Chairman of Fools (2005), Hove's writing engages with idealism and disappointment, solidarity, and the pitfalls of national identity. Chinodya's other novels include Dew in the Morning (1982) and Farai's Girls (1984).

Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988), the narrative of a young rural Shona girl's education and coming to consciousness, and of her female family members’ struggles with the twin burdens of colonialism and the chauvinism of traditional society, has received much critical attention. The much-anticipated second novel in a projected trilogy, The Book of Not, was published in 2006. Yvonne Vera published her first novel, Nehanda, in 1993, and followed it with four more, including the prizewinning Butterfly Burning (2000) and The Stone Virgins (2002). Vera has received praise for her poetic prose and sophisticated engagement with questions of gender identity. She died in Canada in 2005.

Vera's work is regarded as having been influenced by the form and style of the novel as it had developed in Shona, as well as of Shona oral culture. Important early work in Shona includes Bernard Chidzero's Nzvengamutsvairo (1957, Mr. Lazybones), published by the Rhodesia Literature Bureau and widely read in schools in the colonial period. Catholic clergyman Patrick Chakaipa's romances Karikoga Gumiremiseve (1959, Karikoga and His Ten Arrows) and Pfumo Reropa (1961, Spear of blood), and the didactic Rudo Ibofu (1961, Love Is Blind), which also draws on traditional storytelling, were influential. Garandichauya (1963, Wait, I Shall Return) deals with disruptions wrought by colonial intrusions into traditional life. Paul Chidyausiku produces mostly shorter work (and is also a poet). Raymond Choto's satirical novel Vavariro (1990, Determination) offered a departure from nationalist fictions. A journalist, he was arrested and tortured by Mugabe's regime in Dec. 1998. Ignatius Tirivangani Mabasa, a former senior editor of the Herald newspaper, has had great success with his novel Mapenzi (1999, Fools), a satire on post-independence Zimbabwe drawing on aspects of Shona orature and contemporary urban slang.

A literary tradition in Sindebele (or Northern Ndebele) is less developed, as is the case in South Africa (where the variety of the language is isiNdebele, or Southern Ndebele, where, as a written language, it is one of the youngest in the region). In Zimbabwe, Barbara C. Makhalisa's Qilindini (1974, Crafty Person) won a Rhodesian Literature Bureau award and explores issues of tradition and modernity, although apparently endorsing mission schooling and colonial governance. She also published Impilo Yinkinga (1983, Life Is a Mystery).

Malawi, with a history of mission education and a literate elite, produced a more robust literary culture earlier than neighboring Zambia, which, as Northern Rhodesia, had developed economically primarily on the basis of colonial mining interests. A joint Northern Rhodesian and Nyasaland (Malawi) publications bureau, established in 1947, attempted to encourage literary production but too often promoted writing which endorsed colonial attitudes. Aubrey Kachingwe's No Easy Task (1966), about the anticolonial struggle, is regarded as the first Malawian novel in English. The first major Zambian novel was arguably Dominic Mulaisho's The Tongue of the Dumb (1971), while other significant writers include Gideon Phiri, Binwell Sinyangwe, and Andreya Masiye.

Angola and Mozambique achieved independence from Portugal in 1975. Despite economic difficulties and protracted civil conflicts that lasted into the 1990s, both countries have witnessed significant literary production, before and since independence, in Portuguese and in autochthonous languages. Among the better known are Angola's Pepetela (pseud. of Arthur Carlos Pestana), whose Mayombe (1971, pub. in Portugal 1980; Mayombe: A Novel of the Angolan Struggle) dramatizes debates about commitment and politics. Mozambican novelists include Paula Chiziane and António Emílio Leite (Mia) Couto, acclaimed author of, among other novels, Terra Sonâmbula (1992, Sleepwalking Land), A Varanda do Frangipani (1996, Under the Frangipani), and O Último Voo do Flamingo (2001, The Last Flight of the Flamingo). He is one of the best-known proponents of a regionally inflected magical realism. Angolan-born (now largely Lisbon-based) José Eduardo Agualusa (Alves da Cunha)'s O Vendedor de Passados (2004), translated as The Book of Chameleons (the translation won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007), is rendered in a similarly fantastic—though lightly dazzling—style, featuring a character, Félix Ventura, who is a seller of pasts. Nação Crioula (1997, Creole) first won Agualusa notice as a leading young Lusophone writer; it followed Estação das Chuvas (1996, Rainy Season).

Bibliography

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Southern Cone (South America)

Kelly Austin

Southern Cone narratives have captured the attention of readers around the world partly because of supremely talented writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Carlos Onetti, and, more recently, Manuel Puig, Diamela Eltit, Luisa Valenzuela, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Roberto Bolaño. Then there is the unique notoriety of the region that inspires musicals, movies, documentaries, and histories about political upheaval. Critics, too, have accorded the Southern Cone novel greater attention than other novels in Latin America, with the exception of the Mexican novel. Popularity has shaped the region's narrative production, and critics have seen to it that these narratives receive special care and scrutiny.

Academic critics often stress the vicissitudes of the Southern Cone's novelistic production in terms of national and regional histories, especially political histories: for example, the nineteenth-century revolutionary struggles, the nineteenth-century dictatorship of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, his enforcement of the official use of Guaraní in Paraguay, Perón's populism in Argentina, the struggle of the “common man,” the rise of the Left, the Pinochet and Perón dictatorships, the disappearance of tens of thousands of people, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, as well as the trials and triumphs of redemocratization. Academics write often of narratives of nation formation, dictatorship novels, and the novels of exile in the Southern Cone, although these genres are not peculiar to the region. Even as it is certain that Southern Cone novels respond to and are embedded in political histories, correlating the developments of these novels too closely with the geography and events of the nations that comprise the region—Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay—can easily obscure the intellectual and artistic independence of their extraordinary novelists. Exile, international travel, libraries filled with world literature, and cosmopolitan creativity—to name but a few—have contributed to Southern Cone novels of enormous import, just as political forces, local culture, and border-bounded intellectual arguments—to name but a few elements of the lives of Southern Cone novelists—have also contributed to Southern Cone novels of enormous import. Neither an aesthetic nor a political history alone can do justice to the developments of Southern Cone fiction. One might say, for purposes of introduction, that a history of the narratives spun in Southern Cone novels leads directly to questions concerning the literature and literary culture of newly forming (and constantly generated) nation-states.

This much may seem obvious, but the aesthetic positions taken by novelists and critics swirl, reverse, and rotate all around the eddies of individual national histories and of global intellectual priorities and preoccupations. To tie the novels of the Southern Cone closely to a unified history or even to differentiated histories of each nation would be as misleading as it would be to ignore the role of these histories in the founding of such a potent genre as the Southern Cone novel. What one wants is a way to see the political and social significance of these novels without attributing to such forces the very great artistic merit of individual novels.

From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, politics and art have been closely intertwined in the Southern Cone. In the 1840s, while Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was in exile, enforced by the Argentine Federalist government he criticized, he participated in what became a fundamental debate with Andrés Bello and José Victorino Lastarria about the formation and generation of language and literature in then-fledgling Latin American nations. As Efraín Kristal concludes:

they set up the terms in which discussions about cultural emancipation of Hispanic America have been framed ever since: whether to apply the positive elements of Hispanic America's cultural and historical heritage in an original way (which is Bello's project), or to try to make a clean slate of the Hispanic cultural and historical heritage, viewed as a barrier to modernity (which is Sarmiento's position). (68)

Bello holds to the preservation of a common language as a foundation for and sign of shared human heritage across vast geographical spaces. Sarmiento envisions language as positively malleable: it expresses distinct ideas in locally established forms, and also exercises the freedom to alter and invent forms to encourage the development of a distinct art in Latin America. These arguments urge that the theoretical commitments that drive our choices about language use go far to determine the nature of civilization in the New World. The conflict between preservation and change resurfaces in later debates regarding the status of indigenous languages in relation to colonial language. For our purposes in describing the rise of the Southern Cone novel, it is important to highlight the fact that these thinkers' concern over a future Latin America and literature of the Americas reflects the notion that intellectual foundations should arise from open, public debate among persuasive individuals.

Sarmiento's highly influential Facundo (1845) in many ways sets ideological patterns that shape the development of the novel in the Southern Cone (especially in Argentina), although critics have argued whether and to what extent they should place this eclectic work within the literary genre of the novel. To understand Sarmiento's role in the literary history of the Southern Cone, one must remember that he was not only a prose writer but a head of state. First, in response to the political divisions between the Federalists and the Unitarians that then dominated Argentina, Sarmiento creates a narrative that establishes Buenos Aires as a civilized center opposed to the barbaric lands to the west, the Pampa. Second, he helps to construct and entrench a prehistory for the nation by artfully elaborating an account—from the eastern city, Buenos Aires—of the life of the Gauchos in the west. Between the city center of Arts and Letters and the unthinkable threat of the Indigenous or the Pampas as Wilderness, the Gaucho represents a middleman who adheres to neither pole but is necessary to enable civilization: to build society, to facilitate progress, and, eventually, to serve his passing part in founding a nation with boundaries worthy of its visionaries. Eventually, during Sarmiento's own presidency, he sought to realize the settlement of the Pampas, the extension of the railroad and telegraph westward, and the extermination of the Indigenous populations. His extermination policy was, in large part, an horrendous consequence of his understanding of the U.S. as a model for modern progress.

Nineteenth-Century Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism

Critics on the whole agree that in the Southern Cone three modes of prose fiction take hold in the nineteenth century: Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism. Doris Sommer has argued, based in part on representative samples from these three modes, that the romantic love plots in Latin America often signify, obliquely or forthrightly, the desires for unified countries and the resolution of social conflict. Among the novels she treats in Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America is the first novel published by an Argentine, Amalia (1855), written in exile from the Rosas government while its author, José Mármol, was in Montevideo. This novel blends the influences of Romanticism with polemics against the Rosas government. Daniel and Amalia pursue impossible love within a plot filled with intrigue, political violence, and dissidence. The failure of their relationship mirrors what Mármol sees as the national failures of the country to progress within the chaos engendered by a Federalist Argentina. Since Amalia fails to protect the life of pro-Unitarian Daniel from the Federalists who seek to murder him, under the Federalist government the doomed romance of Daniel and Amalia in this pro-Unitarian novel names violence as one of the main reasons that Argentina is unable to resolve intranational differences.

The rise of Realism in the Southern Cone does not, as often is the case in literary history, shake free of its Romantic precursors. Martín Rivas (1862), the most critically recognized novel by Chilean Alberto Blest Gana, is written on the heels of a decade of civil discord. It emphasizes national unity, consensus despite conflict between classes and regions in Chile. Set in Antofagasta, it portrays the social conditions brought about by class difference, social rank, and political division, yet a love is ultimately realized between Martín and Leonor, a woman of a social class above Martín's own. The optimistic union of Romanticism and Realism in this novel turns a socially blocked love to one that can represent reconciliation. Blest Gana consciously attempts to apply the Realist techniques of European authors such as Honoré de Balzac, whom he read during his four years in France, to fictional themes germane to Chilean history. His later work Durante la reconquista (1897, During the Reconquest), although remaining close to Realist roots, incorporates the methods of Naturalism more boldly to critique a squandering upper-class society.

Years earlier, Argentine Eugenio Cambaceres wrote the novel critics claim comes closest to Naturalism in Spanish America, Sin Rumbo (1885, Without Direction), and charts this familiar theme of upper-class decadence. The novel centers rather relentlessly on the nausée of a landed Argentine who, as the title implies, represents a man who appears to have been born without sufficient fortitude and stability to take seriously his responsibilities as a landowner, a representative of his class, or, ultimately, as an exemplar of the ideals of manhood. When the tide seems to turn as he takes on the care of his illegitimate daughter, her death proves too much for him, and he commits a gruesome suicide. His character leads to his own destruction, but Cambaceres points to the more general danger of carelessness in “the man of a certain class” that may lead to widespread financial destruction and moral corruptness in the nation as a whole.

Early Twentieth-Century Modernismo and Vanguardia

The Southern Cone novel placed a premium on subjective experience, metaphysical questions, and aesthetic experimentation in its modernista and vanguardia incarnations. When Rubén Darío praises Francisco Contreras for his patriotism and cosmopolitanism in the prologue to La piedad sentimental: Novela rimada (1911, Sentimental Pity: A Rhymed Novel), Contreras's novel composed of poetry and prosaic verse advertises its ties with modernismo. Contreras follows the thoughts of the influential Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó, who values both avant-garde experimentation and the maintenance of regional and local culture. Both are worthy of the aims of literature not only because innovation has at its foundation artifice rather than utility, but also because they encourage the enrichment of cultures along local lines. This is of special import to Rodó since he sees the pragmatism of the U.S. as encroaching on, and even threatening to, the diversity of Latin American habits. This similarity is striking since Contreras moved to and lived his entire life in Paris from 1905 onward. He shared this exile with a community of Latin American writers and intellectuals who hailed from such diverse places as Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and Argentina: Rubén Darío; Enrique Gómez Carrillo; Amado Nervo; Ventura, Francisco, and José García Calderón; Rufino Blanco Fombano; and Enrique Larreta. In fact, Contreras became a part of French intellectual life as the contributor to the Mercure de France of a column called “Lettres hispano-américaines” (Hispano-American Letters) for over twenty years (Weiss, 8–9). Although at a great distance physically from Latin America, in Contreras's El pueblo maravilloso (1927, The Wonderful Town), published first in French in 1924 as La ville merveilleuse, he named a movement that proclaimed its subject to be based in community and history, focusing on land, tradition, and the people that would, like all superior literature, be interpreted by writers to reinforce through difference what he viewed as a shared primordial universality: mundonovismo.

Argentine Macedonio Fernández was a precursor of the ultraísta movement of the 1920s. His Papeles de recienvenido (1929, Papers of the recently arrived), although some would not strictly categorize it as a novel, later influenced the development of the novel in the 1960s and 1970s. The story consists in an accident in the street that leads a first-person narrator to a chain of apparently free associations that emphasize the absurdity, irrationality, humor, chanciness, and paradoxes of social and personal experience. Some of his most striking work was published posthumously: Adriana Buenos Aires (Última novela mala) (1974, Adriana Buenos Aires: The Last Bad Novel) and Museo de la novela de la Eterna (Primera novela buena) (1967, The Museum of Eterna's Novel: The First Good Novel). Only recently, seventeen years' worth of his correspondence with Jorge Luis Borges was published by Corrigedor. It reveals a meaningful literary bond of long mentorship and friendship that some critics believe inspired, developed, and refined Borges's opinions about issues many had previously believed to be largely particular to him (although Borges himself would likely disagree). The letters point especially to their shared preoccupation with how metaphysics (for example, the notion that our lives may be dreams) bears upon literary production.

It is widely known that Adolfo Bioy Casares collaborated closely with Borges. He began his career writing short fiction, and in 1937 he published his most significant work, La invención de Morel (The Invention of Morel). Borges wrote the introduction to this novel that incorporates Modernist and Surrealist aesthetic models. He draws upon avant-garde movements and cinematic technology to write a highly fragmented narrative that mimics filmic montage. It both undermines the notion of film's privileged relationship to reality and questions the ontological status of a novel. Further, he creates a protagonist who is also the narrator of the diary that largely comprises the text. Bioy Casares capitalizes on opportunities to destabilize the novel's referential truth value. For example, when the protagonist describes the island he fled to from Venezuela, he believes it is Villings, located in the archipelago Las Ellice (Ellis Islands). Bioy Casares turns editorial convention against itself by inventing an editor, N. del E., who writes his first footnote explaining that the identification is unlikely, since the island does not have the common characteristics of the islands of Las Ellice (Casares, 17). Bioy Casares innovates in order to turn the predominant literary themes of nation and local color toward cosmopolitanism.

Borges, it might be said, never penned a novel, yet in his own literary universe he just might have done so through translation. Borges fondly revised the fantastic, the detective genre, and the Gauchesque genre because of his faith and pleasure in human imagination and infinite libraries; he expressed gratitude for the accumulated art of the word, a glorious consolation for the writer who believes there is nothing new under the sun. In essays such as “Pierre Menard, el autor del Quixote” (1939, “Pierre Menard, the author of Quixote”), he reveals the ways that history creates readership. His ideas later appealed to the Boom writers, even though they would distance themselves from him politically. (The actions in question: Borges resigned from his position as the director of the Argentine National Library in 1973 when Perón was reelected, and he accepted an award from Augusto Pinochet, then dictator of Chile.)

In the first half of the twentieth century, Chilean María Luisa Bombal wrote two highly influential and beautiful narratives, La amortajada (1938, The shrouded woman) and La última niebla (1935, House of mist), that critique the national romance narrative in multiple ways. Her prose moves away from the dominant movements of the nineteenth century and toward more imaginative and experimental modes of writing: narrating a funeral from the point of view of an omniscient narrator and also from the perspectives of multiple characters in La amortajada, including that of the deceased woman. Bombal's French education, as well as her residence in Chile, Argentina, and the U.S., afforded her unique opportunities for contact with leading writers of the time, such as Borges and Pablo Neruda. Her unconventional aesthetic achievements were revisionary and forward-thinking, especially because she opened the category of gender to more varied representation than nineteenth-century national romance narratives had allowed.

Roberto Arlt, an Argentine, reoriented narrative on themes of the city, in his case Buenos Aires, with his first novel, El juguete rabioso (1926, Mad Toy), but with a difference. He turns away from the perils of social problems and policies and toward absurd characters. His character Silvio Astier not only feels degraded by the danger of the city (as Naturalism's characters regularly do), but contributes to his own degradation. He is a man who perpetrates random wrongdoing, yet remains impotent on the periphery of societal norms. He has not the full agency of a wicked person and thus is not held personally responsible for his offenses. Arlt's story hinges on both the senselessness of Astier's character and of his surroundings. This work influences Boom and post-Boom narratives, even as it reaches back to the concerns of Naturalist representation.

Mid-Twentieth-Century Realism

Writers indeed took a backward glance as the Southern Cone novel developed in the mid-century. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, a Realist mode reemerged in order to express social protest. In Argentina and Paraguay, several works responded directly to living conditions during the Perón regime (1946–55) and the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–89). Argentine Bernardo Verbitsky found fame as a Socialist-Realist novelist. His Un noviazgo (1956, An Engagement) tells of working-class suffering during political upheaval in the 1930s and 1940s. Paraguayan Gabriel Casaccia wrote La llaga (1964, The Sore) and Los exiliados (1966, The Exiled) in part to denounce Stroessner's militarized strategies of political repression. Yet La llaga interprets an attempted coup of the government by using the intimacy of interior monologue; the thoughts of some characters, among them Atilio and his mother Constancia, open the public protest novel to personal stories of psychological complexity and sexual perversion. The Chilean generation of 1938 declared as their aims political and social reform in urban settings. Among these writers, the most critically recognized are Carlos Droguett and Fernando Alegría. Droguett's historical novel Eloy (1960) fictionally relates the last hours of the outlaw Eliodoro Hernández Astudillo's life from his own perspective, one that includes consciousness of his inevitable death. Droguett's Patas de perro (1965, Dog's Paws), on the other hand, pursues an unrealistic premise—a man born with dog's paws (Bobi)—to explore, through interior monologue and free indirect speech, the psychological and social consequences of an unwilled transgression of society's norms. Alegría's Los días contados (1968, The Counted Days) uses similar novelistic techniques as he reveals in the life of a boxer the range and depth of human experience in Santiago's slums. In the final chapter, Alegría takes advantage of the literal meaning of his name when he writes himself as narrator and/or author into the plot. In the end, he implies that a character told him the story of his novel. She says, symbolically, “Adiós Alegría” (literally, “Goodbye Happiness”), and he replies, “Adiós Anita,” ending his book with a melancholy metatextual flourish. Although Chilean Marta Brunet shares concerns and methods with Drogett and Alegría, her extensive body of work was considered controversial when it first appeared. Her most ambitious and appreciated novel, Humo hacia el sur (1946, Smoke toward the South), focuses on women's lives in a boom town in southern Chile in 1905. She explores how the individual is shaped by social dynamics, especially the forces of gender and class norms. The pressure of daily life in the mid-century was so great that even very talented writers reached back in the history of the novel to produce an art sufficiently rich in the representation of social life to express the political moment.

Mid-Twentieth-Century Modernisms

There was also a rejuvenation of Modernist aesthetics in mid-century. One sees plainly in a number of novels the main literary and intellectual currents of Europe moving through the literary culture in the Southern Cone. Leopoldo Marechal, Felisberto Hernández, and Ernesto Sábato all drew from and contributed to what is known as World Literature. Marechal's most important work was Adán Buenosayres (1948). He claimed a forefather in James Joyce's Ulysses that he adapted to his native Buenos Aires; instead of Homer, Genesis was his intertext. Its eponymous hero makes his way through the city as Bloom did, in a mixture of modes, languages, and moods. Catholic and Peronist, Marechal thumbed his nose at what he saw as the liberal literary establishment.

The great Modernist lessons seemed to authorize some novelists' freedom from the political and social commitments of the preceding generation of intellectuals. For example, Uruguayan Hernández focuses his narrative works on unusual, surrealistic (not representative) scenes. He was admired by Julio Cortázar and known as a precursor of the neo-fantastic. Perhaps his most famous work, Las hortensias (1945, The Daisy Dolls), represents the power of a subject's psyche to animate empirical objects. Hernández creates a story of a man's obsession with dolls that borders on fetishism and pornography. And yet the narrative fosters sympathy by portraying the dolls as objects of love. The novella creates just enough narrative distance to make a reader feel complicit in these fantasies and to hold her at bay with the omission of crucial details.

Ernesto Sábato in particular is an Argentine artist to be reckoned with in post-WWII circles. His involvement with the canonical Argentine literary magazine, Sur, helped him to make an early mark. His novels Sobre heroes y tumbas (1961, On Heroes and Tombs) and Abaddón, el exterminador (1974, Abaddon, the Exterminator) are widely considered major works. Yet Sábato's El túnel (1948, The Tunnel) is perhaps one of the most popular Latin American novels that center on both city life and existentialist agency. The protagonist's perspective, that of Juan Pablo Castel (whose first names he shares with Jean-Paul Sartre), puts weight on the choices of the individual in this novel. The narration of his story from jail only heightens the sense that each of us is alone; Castel's misunderstanding of his lover and subsequent murder of her reveals the ways that accidents and disorder set limits on reason vis-à-vis deliberative choice. Mid-century writers in the Southern Cone, then, resourcefully developed literary precedents within their own traditions as well as the literary and philosophical life of Europe and the U.S. at the time.

Latter Twentieth-Century Skepticism and the Boom

A general intellectual courage seemed accessible not to any one party or school of thought, but to several novelists in the 1950s. One sees in Southern Cone novels, then, a development of independent skepticism. Argentine David Viñas, for instance, was among those who questioned not only Perón populism, but the nation's institutions generally and its people of influence. His work reflects a neorealism, an effort to represent social life as it was actually experienced, rather than as it had been imagined. Although Los años despiadados (1956, The Ruthless Years) takes aim at a society virtually contemporary with its writing, Viñas was especially concerned with historical accuracy when he told this story about the friendship of a middle-class boy and a proletarian boy who is associated with peronismo. In one of his most critically acclaimed novels, Cayó sobre su rostro (1955, He Fell on His Face), Viñas layers multiple viewpoints in order to revise radically the official history of one of Argentina's acclaimed heroes: General and later President Julio A. Roca, the “Conqueror of the Desert.” Roca's 1879 military attacks on the Indigenous in Patagonia are exposed in the novel as having been devastatingly violent and fraudulently rationalized.

Juan Carlos Onetti, who lived in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Paris, is considered the most important Urugayan novelist in the twentieth century; his work reflects an impressive intellectual integrity. His skeptical search for meaning through existentialist philosophies brought his novels to the attention of writers in the decade preceding the Boom of the 1960s. He deftly adapted European and American Modernist aesthetics in his major novels: La vida breve (1950, A Brief Life), Los adioses (1951, The Goodbyes), and El astillero (1961, The Shipyards). In these novels he employs doppelgängers, a narrator with multiple versions of the story, and a continual sense of alienation in his invented city of Santa María (placing him between the Yoknapatawpha County of Faulkner and the MacOndo of García Márquez). In his final novel, Dejemos hablar al viento (1979, Let the Wind Speak), his skepticism moves as close as one may, while still writing, to nihilism. Medina, the protagonist of many Onetti novels, loses his battle to create a world for himself in Santa María. Many of the bases on which individuals and collectives may create meaning and value—capitalist success, romantic love, religion, psychoanalytic cures, and utopian politics—come to nothing in the novel; a reader inevitably arrives at the dark sense that all these means to satisfaction are equally empty. In 1980 Onetti received the Miguel de Cervantes literary prize.

Augusto Roa Bastos is the preeminent Paraguayan novelist, but this does not take one far in assessing his literary achievement. His 1959 Hijo de hombre (Son of Man) combines the use of the indigenous language Guaraní, virtually independent chapters, and highly metaphorical writing in a Modernist-inspired style that revises official histories of both the colonial period and the 1930s Chaco War. In his masterpiece, Yo, el supremo (1974, I, the Supreme), Roa Bastos offers a fictional autobiography and metafictional account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. Written under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, this novel is often read as a veiled attack on Stroessner's regime. The novel has achieved preeminence among dictatorship novels and New Historical novels, and has become one of the most comprehensive metatextual manuals since Don Quixote. As John King writes:

It is impossible to summarize this extraordinary novel in a few lines. It incorporates the latest developments in linguistic theory and practice, talks of the arbitrariness and unreliability of language that purports to describe reality, rereads and comments upon the various histories and travelers' accounts of Paraguay, ranges across the breadth of Latin American history, implicitly condemning Stroessner and debating with Fidel Castro, and exploring once again the gap between writer and reader. (291–98)

The dictator and his secretary exemplify the Chinese boxes of interest in written and voiced multilingualism; the dictator pronounces and the secretary records truth and lies as autobiography is framed within the novel. Thus the aesthetic method creates and resists the novel as auto-verifiable.

Julio Cortázar—Argentine short-story writer, novelist, and translator—plays a central role in Latin American letters in the twentieth century, even though after 1951 he lived in exile in Paris. In addition to his highly influential collections of short stories (1951, Bestiario, Bestiary; 1956, Final del juego, End of the Game; 1962, Historias de cronopios y de famas, Cronopios and Famas; 1965, Las armas secretas, The Secret Weapons; and 1966, Todos los fuegos el fuego, All Fires the Fire), Cortázar wrote one of the most seminal and lauded novels of Latin America: Rayuela (1963, Hopscotch), a book as hip as its readers, and just as likely to send them up as itself. As his lector cómplice (complicit reader) we are free to read the novel chronologically, page after page, or in another order suggested by the text, even as this alternative reading leads us to an endless back-and-forth between two chapters. In this alternative reading, the progress of the text relies finally on the reader's effort, paralleled by that of the narrator, Morelli, an emblem of the novelist's desire for an active reader. On the other hand, La Maga advocates for a lector hembra or lector pasivo (passive reader), a position that is as easily defensible in the textual world of Rayuela, a turn as much toward happenstance as toward order. The novel establishes a dialectic of the narrated life of Horacio Oliveira between Paris and Buenos Aires, destinations of order and the annihilation of order: sex, alcohol, mate, and jazz. Between the narrator and his character lie the perils of existential freedom and literary liberation from tradition. One should recognize that the general literary success of the Southern Cone novel has, in some part, depended on translation. Cortázar in particular has been very well served by his collaborators. His 62; modelo para armar (1968, 62; A Model Kit) and Libro de Manuel (1972, A Manual for Manuel) have also attracted wide attention among literary critics, thanks partly to their masterful translation into English by Gregory Rabassa.

Chilean José Donoso became an integral part of the Boom, though he has been less recognized outside of Latin America. Unlike his Boom contemporaries, Donoso shied away from grand, explicitly historical novels about Latin America. An elite education at the Grange School led him to meet Carlos Fuentes, a lifelong friend, and to begin his practice as a writer. He eventually studied at Princeton, encountering R. P. Blackmur and Allen Tate. During the 1950s Donoso was stylistically bound neither to the Realist aesthetics of his contemporaries nor to those of the Modernists. He then wrote psychologically driven novels, such as Coronación (1957, Coronation). The criticism this book expressed of the Chilean oligarchy was amplified in his novel Este domingo (1966, This Sunday). This stylistic tendency continued into what many consider his masterpiece, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970, The Obscene Bird of Night). Donoso concerned himself with creating surreal dreamlike states, the psychological and emotional conditions of characters who lie, for some reason or another, on the margins of society. The narrator Mudito, Humberto Peñalosa—a frustrated or aspiring writer—along with Jerónimo and Inés Azcoitía and their deformed son, whom they conceal on their estate, La Rinconada, may be the main players in El obsceno pájaro. Yet, the fact that the novel never settles on a consistent narrator, or on a main character, or even on a plot heightens the purposefully dizzying metadiscursive experiments of the novel. Donoso undermines the notion of a safe vantage point from which to construct stable hierarchies. Casa de campo (1978, A House in the Country) creates two worlds that exist simultaneously but cannot both be true. On the paradox of the adults of the Ventura y Ventura family enjoying a pleasant picnic day away from the manor while the children simultaneously endure the onslaughts of nature, attacks by the indigenous, political schisms, and more over the course of a year in the country manor, Donoso creates a novel that critiques the Pinochet dictatorship, the entire history of Chile, and various artistic and literary codes. For example, the famous entrance of the author as a character in the novel speaks to an awareness of reading models and expectations that heighten a reader's suspicion of his or her own practices. Donoso is also well known for other works: El lugar sin límites (1966, Place without Limits), Historia personal del “boom” (1972, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History), and El jardín de al lado (1981, The Garden Next Door).

The Late Twentieth-century Post-Boom

Argentine Manuel Puig's La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968, The Betrayal of Rita Hayworth) forthrightly shifts the art of the novel. He subtly uses popular culture, especially film, and employs a vertiginous narrative technique of multiple narrators and dialogue to disperse narrative authority. The absence of a controlling narrator undermines the stability of a world that shuns Toto's burgeoning sexuality. Puig especially trains a critical light on unjust principles that undergird the popular and the elite in equal measure. The novel that won Puig world acclaim was El beso de la mujer araña (1976, Kiss of the Spider Woman), which both undermines and recuperates mainstream gender and genre thoughts and practices. By layering low and high cultural elements in the context of a relationship between one man imprisoned for his politics and another for an affair with a young man, Puig constructs a critical perspective on civic and private autonomy in the 1970s.

The famous first words of Argentine Ricardo Piglia's Respiración artificial (1979, Artificial Respiration), “¿Hay una historia?” (Is there a history, a story?; historia means both history and story), indicate the multiple ambitions of this novel: to negotiate the strictures of official history imposed by political regimes and institutionalized narratives, the poststructuralist assault on the referential value of language, literature's capacity to intervene in social life, the ability of narratives to capture the heart, and, most of all, singularity. The novel is divided into two parts. The first concerns Emilio Renzi's collaboration with his uncle in telling the story of Juan Manuel Rosas and his private secretary, Enrique Ossorio. In the second, a Pole named Vladimir Tardewski, who lives in Argentina, narrates a conversation of some twenty hours' length about Argentine political and cultural history. Taken together, the two parts of Piglia's novel forefront the collaborative construction of national histories and language.

Critics group Chilean Diamela Eltit with Piglia as prominent postmodern writers in Latin America. Their work reflects the influence of recent literary and political theory, and the alignment of the novel with the intellectuality of the academic sector. Because she remained in Chile throughout the Pinochet dictatorship, Eltit holds the status of an artist of “inner exile.” Her first book, Lumpérica (1981), is a morbidly fascinating, ethically troubling book about the body, language, capitalism, commodities, public pressure, public display, exposure, and power—subjects well known to academic intellectuals. Her prose frames a multiply named woman vagabond as if through the lens of a camera. Through analysis of the sacred and the profane Eltit critiques a country under revised and, often, disorienting codes regarding the traditions of both in Chile. In truth, the most compelling hold her writing has over its reader comes from its density. The novel's title, perhaps the least example of its poetic prowess, provides an amazing neologism combining lumpen with américa where Eltit reaches for a wide audience for a subject below social boundaries and polite discourse. Some of her other acclaimed works are Por la patria (1986, For the Mother Country) and Vaca sagrada (1991, Sacred Cow).

Argentine Luisa Valenzuela writes one of the most complexly surreal and simultaneously allegorical and realist novels in all of Latin American history about the Dirty War in her homeland: La cola de lagartija (1983, Lizard's Tail). El Brujo, the protagonist of her novel, stands in for José López Rega, a Rasputin figure who became the Minister of Social Wellbeing when Isabela Perón was the regime's figurehead. Valenzuela's use of the doppelgänger, signifying fictional and real accounts, emancipates the confusing emotions of those living under the regime's control. When it is most important to distinguish the real from the fictional, beyond all poststructuralist accounts, she writes a provocative narrative about what one might believe as real and true. Her magnificent play with the acronym for the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), AAA; the attempts by La Bruja to auto-impregnate himself with his third testicle, Estrella, as a vesicle; and her devastating accounts of the rivers of blood all reveal amazing control of language, especially in the second part. She signs her name to the first part, announcing her authorial effort to transform the novel into a meta-testimonial account of her search for her missing lover. In the juxtaposition of the radically different discursive parts of the novel Valenzuela may make her most important intervention into the dictatorship novel, realizing in one book the power and persuasiveness for both oppressor and oppressed of diverse novelistic strategies. Her most striking novels include Aquí pasan cosas raras (1975, Strange Things Happen Here) and Cambio de armas (1982, Other Weapons).

For political reasons, Cristina Peri Rossi left Uruguay for Spain in 1972 and eventually became a citizen there. Her novel Nave de los locos (1984, The Ship of Fools) uses multiple narrators and an avant-garde pastiche travel narrative to explore the plight of exile, migration, and estrangement. The protagonist, Equis, points to her engagement with Foucault and other theorists (as the title suggests an allusion to Madness and Civilization). Not only does the ship of fools refer to the stories of medieval practices of exclusion, but also, in this novel, to a busload of pregnant women on their way from Spain to an abortion clinic in London and elusive concentration camps. One's inability to locate precisely the concentration camps makes the horror extend, through displacement, across the world. She creates situations that push an openly universal agenda where the horror takes place in many locales, not only in the local one. These ethical dilemmas inevitably hit home. The final scene in the final chapter of the novel famously complicates performativity by portraying Equis finding Lucía (previously disappeared) in a transvestite club, in an act where she is dressed as a man, impersonating Charlotte Rampling, impersonating Helmut Berger, impersonating Marlene Dietrich in drag, dancing with a partner who wishes to be someone she desires to be, and who seems to be Dolores del Río (Kantaris, 74). Peri Rossi is thus a part of a wave of post-Boom writers who examine and engage contemporary philosophies of identity, language, and place.

Turn-of-the-Century Trends

Indeed, since the late 1990s the Southern Cone narrative has engaged increasingly global themes and audiences. Chilean Isabel Allende is one of the most commercially successful writers to emerge from the Southern Cone. Her first novel, Casa de los espíritus (1982, The House of the Spirits), is widely recognized as a rewriting of Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude). Set in Chile, it blends historical fact with extravagant invention; Allende made a critical incursion into the genre of magical realism. She stays relatively true to the magical realist style as she chronicles four generations of the Trueba-del-Valle family, even as she focuses especially on the matrilineal: Nívea, Clara, Blanca, and Alba. Her most significant turn from the Boom is an alternative ethical gesture implied by the temporality of the final chapter. Although Allende's novel can be read as circular, since the last words echo the first, it proposes that telling and retelling are ethically progressive in combating forgetting. The worst injustice from this point of view is a life condemned to oblivion. Moreover, Alba's narration in the final chapter points to forgiveness rather than vengeance as a proper reaction to the atrocities of the military coup of 1973. Allende's second most acclaimed book about Chile is De amor y de sombra (1985, Of Love and Shadows), and she continues to write prolifically in the U.S.

Chilean Alberto Fuguet has written a series of novels in the wake of being among those who founded the influential literary group McOndo in 1996. His most widely read and acclaimed novel, Mala onda (1991, Bad Vibes), portrays the lives of teenagers in Santiago de Chile caught up in a globalized and fast-paced world unknown to previous generations. Its abundant use of slang and countercultural references explore youth culture alongside an increasingly open discontent with the Pinochet dictatorship in the early 1980s.

Roberto Bolaño became the darling and talented enfant terrible of many recent accounts of the Southern Cone novel. He was born in Chile but spent much of his life wandering through France, Mexico, and El Salvador, and he finally settled in Spain. Stories of his “vagabond” or “beatnik” life have fascinated contemporary critical accounts: was he actually detained by the forces of the 1973 Chilean coup? Was he truly a recovered heroin addict? One wonders whether these conjectures derive from a sensationalist journalist looking for the Romantic in the modern writer, or the author's efforts to show how stories and representations, even of the self, both reveal and conceal. Bolaño's career as a novelist is astonishingly dense in the ten years before his death in 2003: La pista de hielo (1993, The Skating Rink), Literatura nazi en América (1996, Nazi Literature in the Americas), Estrella distante (1996, Distant Star), Los detectives salvajes (1998, The Savage Detectives), Amuleto (1999), Monsieur Pain (1999), Nocturno de Chile (2000, By Night in Chile), and Amberes (2002, Antwerp). The most highly acclaimed novel published during his lifetime was Los detectives salvajes. In this postmodern detective novel, the array of voices describing the literary and adventurous ramblings of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano lets the reader know she is on unstable ground. In the opening and final section, Juan García Madero describes his involvement with Ulises and Arturo, ever-promising writers who lead a literary group that espouses radical and erratic literary doctrine. In the end, the group is whittled down to these same three characters and a prostitute they are attempting to protect as they quixotically attempt to find a nearly forgotten poet of the 1920s avant-garde. Their only evidence of her work is a sheet of indecipherable writing. In the middle, various voices narrate the destinies of Ulises and Arturo. Contradictions and coincidences entice the reader to attempt to weave together the story of their lives while making it impossible to connect the warp and weft of their tapestry. The novel 2666 (2004) was unfinished and published posthumously, but critics concur that its dense allusions and postmodern devices identify ethical dilemmas of literature confronted by the world's horrors.

Conclusion

The push and pull between local and cosmopolitan communities needed thoughtful answers as Southern Cone political beliefs and national literatures evolved. Each novelist was called upon to write according to his conscience and to develop the gifts of Spanish in the Americas. The growth of the Southern Cone novel relied, like most literature, upon an individual mustering his widest resources to confront the most important dilemmas at hand.

Bibliography

Bioy Casares, A. (1983), Invención de Morel.
Kantaris, E.G., (1995), Subversive Psyche.
King, J. (1987), “Augusto Roa Bastos,” in Modern Latin American Fiction.
Kristal, E. (1993), “Dialogues and Polemics,” in Sarmiento and His Argentina, ed. J.T. Criscenti.
Weiss, J. (2002), Lights of Home.

Space

Julie O'Leary Green

At least since Plato and Aristotle, space in narrative has often been seen as ornamental rather than functional, relegated disparagingly to the realm of the descriptive or the merely representational (as opposed to the artful or rhetorical) and subordinated to plot and character. It is often seen as nonpurposeful or as mere amplification, and within discourse on the novel it is considered unnecessary (although not useless): most definitions of narrative include tellers and events, but none includes any mention of or relation to space.

Despite this bias, the nineteenth century saw a new interest in narrative space on the part of both authors and scholars. Developments in sociology, biology, and anthropology affirming the individual's dependence on his or her environment influenced aesthetic theories of fiction. These ideas about the role of space in the novel continued to develop throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Importantly, the human-centered bias remains: while there has been more interest in the ways in which narrative space functions, character still remains the nexus around which studies of space revolve.

Today, space is thought to function in the novel in significant ways: it is a frame of action (a place in which things happen), it conveys thematic information, it reveals information about characters and character relationships, it can influence reader expectations, and it is an active partner in the governing of how narrative progresses (i.e., certain spaces allow certain events to occur while other spaces prohibit events).

Spatial Form

In 1766, eighteenth-century dramatist and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) characterized literature as a temporal art, opposed to spatial arts like painting and sculpture (see TIME). His argument centered on the assumption that an artwork's form is dependent on its manner of perception. Centuries later, the novel is still considered an inherently temporal medium. Objects and spaces must be incorporated into a temporal sequence in order to be represented in narratives; spatial structures must be transformed into temporal ones.

Beginning with his 1945 essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” and continuing for the next three decades, American literary scholar Joseph Frank broke new critical ground with his argument that a hallmark of modernist literature was that it was meant to be apprehended spatially rather than sequentially (see MODERNIS). He argued that because language proceeds in time and literature is naturally temporal, modernist writers like James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, Djuna Barnes, and Marcel Proust had to find new ways to manipulate novelistic form in order to express their desired simultaneity. The result is that meaning, relationships, and references are arranged across the narrative without respect to temporal sequence and must be connected by a reader and viewed as a whole before meaningful patterns emerge.

Frank's essay drew responses from prominent literary scholars who returned to Lessing's claims and argued that the mode of perception (reading from beginning to end) makes modernist plots no less temporal than any others. Other critiques have centered on the fact that Frank's argument is not actually about space in the novel but rather an alternative reading process.

One frequently invoked theory of space in the novel that both contends with the temporal nature of narrative and focuses on literal spaces is Mikhail bakhtin's (1981) theory of the chronotope, which states that space and time are mutually constitutive and interactive, comprising a single unit of analysis for studying literary texts. Chronotopes are narrative hubs where meanings are housed. They highlight the intrinsic connectedness of time and space. For Bakhtin, the road narrative, in which time spent means distance covered, is the clearest textual expression of the chronotope. It not only illustrates the interconnectedness of time and space but also provides narrative potential: potential for encounter, collision (i.e., of characters who might not have come in contact if they had not met at that exact time and place), and change across time and space.

The French philosopher Michel de Certeau makes a similar claim in “Spatial Stories” (1987), where he argues that every story is a travel story. He also argues for the necessity and ubiquity of boundaries, claiming that stories authorize the establishment, displacement, or transcendence of limits and that they set in opposition two movements that intersect.

All of these arguments about spatial form implicate plot. They all implicitly or explicitly argue that spatial form relates to the temporal organization of words and events in the novel, whether spatial form is created by temporal fragmentation (disjointed plots), as in Frank's understanding; is mutually constitutive of plots and meaning, as in Bakhtin's understanding; or is what actually drives the plot of a narrative forward toward climax and conclusion, as in de Certeau's understanding.

Typologies of Space

Analyses of spatial form tend to focus on the overall shape and progression of a novel. However, such analyses do not provide a way of studying and comparing specific representations of space in the novel. In other words, we must distinguish between spatial form and space as a formal element. Ruth Ronen has characterized two primary ways of classifying types of narrative space. In the first, space is understood in terms of its proximity to characters; in the second, it is understood according to its factuality.

Proximal and Distant Spaces

On this scale, spaces are classified according to how close and/or how accessible they are to characters in the narrative present. The most immediate narrative space is setting: the place where characters in the narrative present interact and where story-events take place. Setting is considered continuously relevant, capable of extending over a sequence of actions, events, and situations without needing to be rearticulated. As a result, setting is well suited to discussions of why certain authors, in certain texts or certain moments within texts, make widely differing choices about how, when, why, and how much to articulate setting.

Spaces near characters in the narrative present and accessible to them via their senses are called secondary spaces. In Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), the narration follows Sethe in the kitchen as a group of women assemble within earshot outside; the kitchen is the setting, and outside is a secondary space. Secondary spaces allow myriad possibilities for overhearing, misunderstanding, misdirecting, etc., and thus can directly influence a novel's plot.

Fictional spaces might also be nearby but inaccessible to the characters in the narrative present. This inaccessibility may be provisional, thus linking inaccessible frames to narrative progression (meaning that something must happen for characters to gain access, and often gaining access causes other things to happen). In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), the third floor of Mr. Rochester's mansion is an inaccessible space for most of the novel; the moment when it becomes accessible constitutes a significant climax, the result of which is a complete reorganization of the household and all of the relationships therein.

Fictional spaces might also be geographically or temporally distant from the present setting. When Marlow sits aboard the Nellie at the beginning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and tells of his trip up the Congo River, that river is geographically distant. The events he retells are temporally distant.

Finally, narrative space can have an ambivalent degree of immediacy. Frequently, novels make reference to generalized or nonspecific spaces. Examples of this include references to “the world” or “the horizon.”

Factual and Counterfactual Spaces

Fictional space can also be classified according to its degree of actuality, where actuality does not refer to the space's verisimilitude (see DECORUM) but rather to whether the characters in question are actually in those spaces. Actual spaces include all of the frames explained above; and non-actual spaces (these might be potential or hypothetical spaces, counterfactual spaces, and nonfactual spaces) are spatial articulations that are subordinated to future-tense sentences, imperatives, conditionals, questions, negative sentences, predictions, or the subjunctive mood. In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), the narrator explains Tayo's thought processes as he flees two men on horseback: “They were about a mile away when he first saw them, so he would try to find a deep grove of pine where he could stay until they passed” (198). He never does find a grove, so it remains a hypothetical space. Often, the non-actual space matters less than whether it remains non-actual or is eventually actualized.

Non-actual spaces have various relations to the actual space of the narrative. They can have ramifications for interpreting a novel's overall meaning or thematic bent by establishing binaries, by making or encouraging an evaluation, or by conveying emotion, for example.

Space and Character

As these typologies reveal, what makes space interesting to most authors, readers, and scholars is its relation to narrative agents. Classifying a particular space depends on which characters the narrative follows in the narrative present.

Additionally, descriptions of fictional spaces are often used to provide information about character. In the novels of Henry James, as many have noted, the homes of main characters often function as metaphors for their owners. Miss Birdseye's apartment in The Bostonians (1886) articulates her identity with its refusal to conform to Victorian standards; her somewhat muddled and crowded home is seen as an expression of her character.

Motivation and Focalization

How descriptions of space are inserted can also tell us about character. Because setting and other narrative spaces do not require constant articulation, understanding the motivation for insertions of spatial descriptions can yield insight into characters and narrators. As Mieke Bal points out, the manner of description of a given fictional passage characterizes the rhetorical strategy of the narrator.

Bal lays out three primary motivations for spatial description in the novel. The most obvious (because it is voiced by a character) is motivation via speaking: these are spatial articulations that occur in dialogue (“I went here” or “His house was very large”). Motivation via speaking can help us understand a character's attitude toward space.

Motivation via action occurs when an actor carries out an action with an object, e.g., a character rides a bicycle. The very act of riding that bicycle motivates a description of the bicycle and provides a justification for any related spatial description. This kind of spatial description can, but need not, reveal something about the character's relationship to his or her space.

Motivation via looking occurs when the narration (not the dialogue) describes what a character sees or saw. The narrator of Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) follows Briony as she stands at a window and sees “a scene that could easily have accommodated, in the distance at least, a medieval castle. Some miles beyond the Tallises' land rose the Surrey Hills and their motionless crowds of thick crested oaks, their greens softened by a milky heat haze” (pt. 1, chap. 3). This description of the landscape is motivated by the act of Briony's looking.

Spatial articulations motivated by looking are the most common and often the least noticeable kinds of descriptions of space. They are also the motivations that, so far, have yielded the most significant understanding of the relationship between characters and the fictional spaces in which they interact. This is because spatial descriptions motivated by looking are often a case of focalization (see NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE). Focalization refers to the perspective from which particular events or elements of the narrative are narrated. When fictional spaces are described via the narration (i.e., via looking), places are linked to certain points of perception: how space is articulated tells us about the ways in which characters bring their senses to bear on space, especially as they see, hear, and touch their surroundings. In the Atonement example, the narrator adopts the limited point of view of one character (Briony) not only to motivate a description of the scene she is about to witness but also to portray Briony's particular mindstyle. How she sees the landscape tells us about how she sees the world.

Space and the Reader

Recent work in cognitive narratology has explored other possible functions of space. Here, we find not only an interest in the relationships among places and agents in the narrative world but also an interest in the interaction between readers and the spaces of narrative. David Herman, Monika Fludernik, Marie-Laure Ryan, and others have suggested that space functions in narrative at the same time that narrative helps us create mental representations of space. Thus, story-telling necessitates modeling and enabling others to model spatially related entities.

The concept of deixis is important in this account of fictional space. Deixis is any reference to the context of the production of an utterance (as in the expression “come over here”). Herman argues that narratives, including novels, prompt readers to relocate from their own here and now to the here and now of the storyworld. Others, like Ryan, argue that paying attention to spatial deictics allows us to construct mental maps of the world inside the novel. These cognitive maps, which may be rudimentary or elaborate depending on both the reader and the amount of spatial data provided in the novel, can help readers orient fictional characters, places, and positions in terms of relational systems rather than geographically located points, which in turn can help them develop thematic readings of characters or places in spatial relationships. Recent research suggests that readers may construct cognitive maps of fictional space as background for understanding plot, character motivation, and moral or ethical issues articulated in the text. Furthermore, the extent to which readers compare their mental models of fictional spaces to their mental models of real-world spaces is also a focus of recent literary inquiry, particularly under the rubric of possible-worlds theory (see Ronen, 1994).

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. (1981), “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist.
Bal, M. (2002), Narratology, 3rd ed.
de Certeau, M. (1984), “Spatial Stories,” in Practice of Everyday Life, trans. R. Rendell.
Fludernik, M. (1996), Towards a “Natural” Narratology.
Frank, J. (1963), “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in Widening Gyre.
Frank, J. (1978), “ Spatial Form: Some Further Reflections,” Critical Inquiry 5: 275–90.
Herman, D. (2001), “ Spatial Reference in Narrative Domains,” TEXT 21(4): 515–41.
Herman, D. (2002), Story Logic.
Lessing, G.E. (1962), Laocoön, trans. E.-A. McCormick.
Ronen, R. (1986), “ Space in Fiction,” Poetics Today 7.3: 421–38.
Ronen, R. (1994), Possible Worlds in Literary Theory.
Ryan, M.-L. (2003), “Cognitive Mapping and the Representation of Narrative Space,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. D. Herman.

Speech Act Theory

Kim Emery

Speech act theory names a body of thought in which the use of language—a speech act—is conceived as a kind of action within the material world, rather than a description of or a reference to a discrete and exterior reality. Although anticipated in different ways by the works of Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–96), American pragmatist C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), and German phenomenologists Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), among others, speech act theory is most famously associated with Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–60). In a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955 and published posthumously in a volume called How to Do Things with Words, Austin outlined what has since come to be considered the first systematic elaboration of speech act theory.

In these lectures, Austin begins his discussion of the speech act by distinguishing between two types of utterances that, despite their resemblance in grammatical form, may be seen to serve quite distinct functions. The statements studied by philosophers of language, on the one hand, are taken to describe an external reality or to report a fact. Such statements may be categorized as “descriptive” or, as Austin prefers, “constative,” and are subject to evaluation on the basis of their truth or falsity. However, a second type of utterance may also assume the first-person singular present-indicative active form of simple declarative sentences without submitting to such characterization. These utterances, which Austin terms “performative,” do not make the kind of claim that can be tested against an external reality, and hence cannot be classified as simply true or false; instead, utterances of this sort perform an action, or are part of the performance of an action, that “is not normally thought of as just saying something” (7). Austin's examples include such actions performed in words as betting, bequeathing, promising, marrying, and christening. To say “I bet...,” “I promise...,” or “I christen...,” in certain circumstances, is indeed to bet, promise, or name; the utterance itself accomplishes the act, rather than reporting on or referring to an act accomplished elsewhere or by other means.

Austin is careful to explain that the requirement of specific circumstances or, indeed, of correlative supporting actions does not vitiate the performative aspect of the utterance itself; hence, the bet must be accepted, the will must be signed and notarized, the minister officiating a marriage must be duly authorized and the participants eligible—but the fact remains that the words themselves are not only necessary to the act, but in an important sense are understood to themselves constitute the act. More importantly, he contends that the intention or inward state of the interlocutors is not critically at issue: the performative does not report on an inward act of, for example, committing to a marriage; one may be duly and legally married whether one “means” one's vows or not. A promise may be given in bad faith, but this does not mean that no promise has been made. Although such performatives may “misfire” in a variety of ways—on which Austin elaborates at some length—misreporting on an inward state is not among them, as the function of the performative is not to reflect an independent reality (either inward or exterior), but rather to act on the reality within which it is enmeshed. A performative is neither true nor false, but rather, in Austin's words, felicitous or infelicitous, happy or unhappy; it is evaluated not in terms of veracity, but in terms of performative force.

Austin further categorizes such explicit performatives as “I bet...,” or “I promise...,” as illocutionary acts, which he describes as actions accomplished in saying something and reliant on convention for their performative force. These he distinguishes from the more familiar sense in which saying something is already doing something: i.e., making sounds (the phonetic act) in a certain order (the phatic act) with a certain meaning (the rhetic act). This he calls the locutionary act, a concept that encapsulates “the full normal sense” of saying something (94) without excluding the possibility of the utterance exerting a further performative force. To these two categories Austin adds a third: the perlocutionary act, which is accomplished by saying something, or as an effect of saying something, but not performed in and of the utterance itself. Hence, the illocutionary act of a promise being made is accomplished in the utterance of promising, provided only that the most minimal conditions are met (e.g., that uptake is secured and the act is not voided by virtue of going unheard). The consequences of the promise, in contrast to the act itself, constitute its perlocutionary effect: the addressee may be thrilled by a promise, or unimpressed; this does not affect the illocutionary force of the promise, but it does make for a different perlocutionary act. There is in perlocution a certain gap or noncoincidence between utterance and effect that is not characteristic of illocution and its force. Although the coincidence of an illocutionary act and its performative force is merely prototypically and not necessarily temporal, it is in essence conventional and therefore inescapable; the relation of a perlocutionary act to its consequences, in contrast, is not in essence conventional and therefore not inevitable, however likely or predictable those consequences may be. Austin is clear that “there cannot be an illocutionary act unless the means employed are conventional”; however, as he also acknowledges, “it is difficult to say where conventions begin and end” (119).

Austin's method is to work from observations offered as “provisional, and subject to revision” (4n1). Just as the illocutionary act is revealed to have its locutionary and, inevitably, perlocutionary dimensions, the explicit performative that constitutes its prototypical appearance cannot in the end be cleanly separated from the constative. Illocutions involve reference and sense, and constative utterances exert performative force. Indeed, Austin concludes that “in general, the locutionary act as much as the illocutionary is an abstraction only: every genuine speech act is both” (147). The perlocutionary effects of a locution, moreover, are unpredictable and in theory infinite. In working through these mutual entailments so thoughtfully, Austin thoroughly undermines the “descriptive fallacy” for which he faults “both philosophers and grammarians” (2–3)—i.e., the idea that the primary function of language is mimetic or referential and its fundamental form, therefore, the declarative statement. By refusing to misrecognize abstraction for actuality, Austin reimagined the relation of language to the material world and offered a powerful model that would be taken up by deconstructionists, literary scholars, and gender theorists—as well as philosophers of language—in years to come.

Literary Speech Acts

Despite his insistence on separating questions of inward states from the functional operation of illocutionary acts, Austin limited his discussion in these lectures to the “normal use” of language in “ordinary circumstances”—explicitly excluding from consideration, for example, theatrical and literary utterances, which he categorized here as “parasitic” (22). The grounds for this exclusion were soon questioned, however, by literary scholars concerned with the conventional, contextual, and social dimensions of literature. In a series of essays in the early 1970s for example, Richard Ohmann argued that literature comprises a kind of “quasi-speech-act,” distinct from nonliterary language but dependent nevertheless on readers' immersion in sociality. In the late 1970s Mary Louise Pratt would reject categorical distinctions between ordinary and literary language altogether, contending that Ohmann's qualification itself relies on a misapprehension of ordinary language as lacking in ostensibly literary qualities on which it often depends. Drawing on the pragmatics of Austin's contemporary H. P. Grice (1913–88) and the work of sociolinguists including William Labov, Pratt offered a theory of literature as a linguistic activity continuous with oral narrative and imbedded in social interaction. Others, including Monroe C. Beardsley (1915–85), Seymour Chatman, and Marcia Eaton, have examined the use of speech acts within works of literature.

The engagement most important to contemporary theory, however, would come from philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who proposed that the distinction between “normal” and “parasitic” uses is impossible to maintain because it is in the nature of language to be quoted. Against the “pure singularity” attributed to Austin's speech act proper—the illocution fully present to itself and fully congruent with its performative force—Derrida posits a principle of general iterability, contending that ordinary language is itself characterized by a “structural parasitism” (17). In this view, there can be no “pure” performative because each speech act relies for its success on the citation of an iterable (endlessly repeatable) model; only by invoking a recognizable formula—i.e., by citing a convention—can an illocution exert a performative force. Moreover, while convention must be cited, it can never be fully realized or exactly repeated; reiteration is required, but—strictly speaking—impossible. What Austin calls “the total speech act in the total speech situation” (52), the object of his study, can never be fully or finally defined, because the total speech situation—the act's salient context—is not “exhaustively determinable” (18). In citing an iterable model, the performative is not fully present to itself, but neither can it replicate in toto “the total speech act in the total speech situation” of any prior iteration or ideal model. Hence, Derrida concludes, citationality or parasitism is not a “special circumstance” to be held in abeyance or excluded from consideration, as Austin posits, but is instead integral to “‘ordinary’ language” as such—its “internal and positive condition of possibility” (17). Just as Austin decenters the constative, suggesting that language is not secondarily or peripherally performative, social, and materially situated, but fundamentally so, Derrida deconstructs the presumed primacy of so-called ordinary language, revealing the citationality at its core and arguing that Austin's a priori separation of normal use from special circumstances imputes to language “an ethical and teleological determination” in fact imposed by the assumptions of analytic philosophy (17).

Derrida's contention that this principle of iterability introduces a philosophically significant gap or “dehiscence” between the intention animating an utterance and the act of utterance has been strenuously challenged by American analytic philosopher John Searle, an important interpreter of Austin noted for his taxonomy of illocutionary acts, among other contributions. Searle maintains that iterability functions in service to intention, and he insists that the “parasitic” relation of literary speech acts to ordinary language is “fairly obvious” (1977, 204). Searle suggests that Derrida misreads Austin's merely strategic segregation of parasitic speech acts from normal use as a “metaphysical exclusion” (205). In maintaining that intention is the “heart” of the speech act (207–8), however, Searle has drawn the criticism that the role of intention is less central to Austin than he implies. Similarly, Derrida's decentering of intention does not entail an “essential absence” in the sense that Searle contends (207). Instead, “the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance” (Derrida, 18).

Whereas Searle assumes that a relation of logical dependency obtains between literary language, on the one hand, and the ordinary uses of language on which it is presumably based, on the other, Derrida observes that the rules governing their relation are “not things found in nature,” but human inventions—conventions “that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional” (134). In an important amplification of this insight, psychoanalytic literary critic Shoshana Felman elaborates Searle's own focus on the promise as the prototypical illocution into an extended meditation on the role of seduction in language and literature. The speech act, she suggests, finesses the disjuncture between “the order of the act and the order of meaning, the register of pleasure and the register of knowledge” by creating a separate, self-referential linguistic space and sidestepping the entailments of absolute truth (31). Refiguring the performative as a ritual of desire, Felman restores to the act an intentional dimension while respecting the elements of fictionality and noncoincidence at its core.

For Felman, literary language comes to serve as “the meeting and testing ground of the linguistic and the philosophical, the place where linguistics and philosophy are interrogated but also where they are pushed beyond their disciplinary limits” (11).

Gender Theory and Performativity

Speech act theory sketches both a slippage and an entanglement between language and the material world that has proven especially important to queer and gender theorists in recent years. Feminist philosopher Judith Butler famously observed that gender represents a copy for which there is no original (1991), an insight elaborated in her influential analyses of gender as performative (1990, 1993). Like Derrida, she suggests that the putatively parasitic, peripheral, and extra-ordinary performance may reveal an absence at the core of the “ordinary”—arguing, for example, that the practice of drag within queer subcultures points not to a derivative or imitative logical dependence of homosexuality on heterosexuality, but to the performative nature of gender as such (1990). Indeed, Butler contends that the sexed body itself is not the origin of gender expression, but a kind of back formation projected by the compulsory practice of gender performativity (1993). In undertaking to examine the social, pragmatic, and conventional dimensions of sex and gender, queer theorists such as Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009) have drawn extensively on speech act theory to sketch the noncoincidence of intention—understood in the philosophical sense to encompass both will and meaning or referentiality—and actuality in the enactment and experience of gendered being. For Butler, it is the inevitable gap between performative citations and the ideal and iterable model that compels the endless reiteration of gender while simultaneously obscuring its normative and compulsory dimensions. For queer and gender theorists generally, speech act theory has provided a supple and productive model for thinking through the entanglements of language, knowledge, and materiality, while also revaluing marginal and non-normative realities. Perhaps most importantly, speech act theory acknowledges and helps to expose the ethical and teleological determinations conventionally obscured by “ordinary language” and the constative presumptions of philosophical traditions on which its identification has historically been predicated.

Bibliography

Austin, J.L. (1962), How to Do Things with Words.
Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble.
Butler, J. (1991), “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out, ed. D. Fuss.
Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter.
Derrida, J. (1988), Limited Inc, trans. S. Weber and J. Mehlman.
Felman, S. (1983), Literary Speech Act, trans. C. Porter; reiss. 2002 as Scandal of the Speaking Body.
Ohmann, R. (1971), “ Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 4: 1–19.
Pratt, M.L. (1977), Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse.
Searle, J. (1969), Speech Acts.
Searle, J. (1977), “ Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph 1: 198–208.
Sedgwick, E. (1993), “ Queer Performativity,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 1: 1–16.

Speech, Represented see Dialect; Dialogue; Discourse; Narration

Stacked Narrative see Frame

Stanzel, Franz see Narrator

Story/Discourse

Ryan Kernan

The concepts of histoire (story) and discours (discourse) constitute the fundamental elements of the formalist (see FORMALISM) theory of narrative. Story resides in the content, the chain of events (the actions or happenings), and what is often labeled the “existents”: the characters, settings, and the objects or persons that serve as a background for these events. Discourse refers to the means by which the content is communicated. In short, the story is that which is depicted, and the discourse is the actual narrative statements, the form of expression. While the distinction between story and discourse is most often associated with practitioners of narratology (the study of narrative) who can be classified as formalist, to a lesser extent it has also been incorporated into the arguments of structuralist and poststructuralist theorists of narrative (see STRUCTURALISM). Indeed, as Jonathan Culler emphasizes, most strands of narratology are united by the recognition that any theory of narrative requires a distinction between story and discourse.

Conventional theorizing about the story/discourse dichotomy is said to begin with the Russian formalists, and in particular with Boris Tomashevskii's Theory of Literature (1925) and Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928). The Russian formalist employed the concepts of fabula (story) and siuzhet (discourse) to distinguish between the raw material of literature and its aesthetic rearrangement in narrative fiction. The basic difference between the two stems from their contrasting treatment of chronology (see TIME) and causality (see PLOT). Usually, the story is constituted of what is narrated as a chronological sequence of logically and causally related themes, motives, and plot lines that explain why its events occur. Discourse, in turn, describes the stylistic choices that determine how the text appears before the reader.

The Russian formalist articulation of this dualistic distinction has certain antecedents in Aristotle's Poetics as well as in the third book of Plato's Republic (ca. 380 BCE), but it came to the fore in continental narrative theory during the late 1960s in the work of Tzvetan Todorov and via the structural linguistics of Émile Benveniste. Nevertheless, it is most commonly associated with the work of the French literary theorist Gérard Genette and with the arguments contained in his 1976 essay “Frontières du récit” (“Boundaries of Narrative”). In the case of Genette, however, the double-tiered base structure of narrative levels becomes tripartite. In addition to the division between story and discourse, Genette employs the term “narration” to forefront the transaction between narrator and narratee. The récit (narrative discourse) is the actual text produced by the act of narration, and it conveys the story of the narrative. His categories of temps (tense) and mode (mood), in turn, describe the relationship between the levels of story and discourse on the surface level of the text. Here, past-tense verbs delivered by a third- or first-person narrator constitute story, while discourse is marked by the present tense of dialogue or reported speech.

Given Genette's tripartite structure and the fact that story disappears—in his (markedly Hegelian) vision of the novel's future—leaving a fully emancipated discourse, it is somewhat curious that he is the theorist most commonly associated with the binary of story/discourse as it is rigidly employed elsewhere. This curiosity, though, is a testament to the enormous influence that his thought exerted over theorists writing both alongside him and in his wake. Several other influential narratologists, most notably Seymour Chatman, extrapolate the phenomenon of voice from the textual level and adhere to the aforementioned bipartite schema. These different uses of the terms story and discourse in narratology—the first where story and discourse correspond respectively to what the text is about and to how it is told—and the second, Genette's, has caused a considerable amount of confusion within the field itself.

The enduring importance of Genette's “Frontiers of Narrative” with respect to this dualistic binary is, in part, a function of the fact that his essay excavates Classical arguments concerning epic poetry, dramatic poetry, mimesis (imitation), and diegesis (narrative) not only to provide illustrative case examples of the differences between story and discourse, but also to qualify both as aspects of narrative. To support this bold assertion about the domain of narrative and to draw his readers' attention to the fact that, from time immemorial, the distinction between story and discourse has been of the utmost concern for theorists of literature, Genette points to two contradictory theorizations about the relationship between narrative and imitation that find their origin in Antiquity. The first frames narrative as the antithesis of imitation, and is exemplified by Aristotle's contention that narrative poetry (the poetry of diegesis) and dramatic poetry (the poetry of mimesis or the direct representation of events by actors speaking before the public) should be considered separate and distinct modes. The second frames imitation as one of the modes of narrative, and originates in Plato's Republic wherein Plato makes the distinction between logos (that which is said) and lexis (the manner of speaking), which can be further divided into mimesis (imitation) and diegesis (instances where the narrator speaks in his own name).

Genette subscribes to neither of these traditions, but nevertheless turns to Plato's reading of bk. 1 of the Iliad to delineate story (or simple narrative) from discourse (or imitation). With respect to this distinction, Genette's example is canonical and worthy of full citation:

By simple narrative Plato means all that the poet relates “in speaking in his own name, without trying to make us believe that it is another who speaks.” Thus in Book I of the Iliad Homer tells us of Chryses: “He came to the Achaeans' great boats to buy back his daughter, bringing a tremendous ransom and bearing the bands of Apollo the archer on the golden staff in his hand. He entreated all the Achaeans, but especially Atreus' sons, two fine military leaders.” In contrast, the next verses consist in imitation, because Homer makes Chryses himself speak, or rather Homer speaks, pretending to have become Chryses, and “strives to give us the illusion that it is not Homer speaking, but really the old man, Apollo's priest.” Here is the text of the discourse of Chryses: “Descendents of Atreus, and you also, well-armed Achaeans, may the gods, dwellers on Olympus, allow you to destroy Priam's city and then to return without injury to your homes! But for me, may you also give me back my daughter! And for that, accept this ransom, out of respect to the son of Zeus, to Apollo the archer.” But Plato adds that Homer could as well have continued his narrative in a purely narrative form by recounting the words of Chryses instead of quoting them. This would have made the same passage, in indirect style and in prose: “Having arrived, the priest implored the gods to allow the Achaeans to take Troy and to keep them from destruction, and he asked the Greeks to give him back his daughter in exchange for a ransom and out of respect for the gods.” (2)

For many critics who distinguish story from discourse at the surface level of the text, this citation from “Frontiers of Narrative” describes sufficiently the difference between them. What “Homer tells us of Chryses,” or what the poet speaks “in his own name,” comprises a structural level of the surface text that can be labeled the story or the narrative. The portion of the text where dialogue intrudes, or where “Homer makes Chryses himself speak,” constitutes the elements of the text that can be identified as discourse. Indeed, Genette himself would concur with these designations.

What Genette finds troublesome about Plato's reading of the Iliad is Plato's assertion that what we have just labeled “story” and “discourse” (or, in Plato's lexicon, diegesis and mimesis, the elements of lexis) can be adequately distinguished from logos (“what is said”). This is the case because to assume a distinction between “that which is said” and “the manner of speaking” in a work of fiction is to conceive of “poetic fiction as a simulacrum of reality.” Unlike a history or a landscape painting, a work of fiction does not necessarily have an event or landscape which is exterior to the artifact that represents it. The distinction between lexis and logos therefore posits a distinction between fiction and representation that is untenable, or—in Genette's words—the distinction reduces “the object of the fiction” to “a sham reality awaiting its representation.” Hence, the very notion of imitation with regard to lexis is ephemeral at best—language can only perfectly imitate language. This, in turn, leads Genette to a startling, yet logical, conclusion that troubles both contradictory Classical theorizations of the relationship between narrative and imitation at their very core: in the literary realm, mimesis is diegesis.

Genette's dismantling of the Classical theorization between “what is said” and the “manner of speaking” neither leads him to cast aside the distinction between the content of expression (story) and the “mode of expression” (discourse), nor does it prompt him to deny the representational function of narrative altogether. Rather, it leads him to propose a new understanding of diegesis (narrative) that subsumes story and discourse and that locates both on the surface level of the text. The fundamental difference between “story” (narrative) and “discourse” is, for Genette, that the former is objective and the latter subjective, but only in strictly linguistic terms. Récit (story) makes use of the third person and discours (discourse) the first. Where the former in its most “pure” incarnation is marked—ever since the advent of realism in the novels of Honoré de Balzac—by a desire to efface all reference to a narrator and to arrange events in some type of chronological order, the latter—in the presentation of reported speech or dialogue—forefronts its speaker and defines the present as the instant in which the discourse is held. Hence, for Genette, story and discourse are distinguishable by temps (tense) and mode (mood), and constitute the “semiological existence” of the literary narration which—insofar as literary representation is concerned—has no concrete referent outside the text.

For Genette, both story and discourse are always present (to varying degrees) in narration. Story may be conceived without discourse, but any such conception does not exist in the real word of texts. The same can be said of an independently conceived narrative of pure discourse. This, however, is where the symmetry ends. Story is a very particular, restrictive mode marked by a number of exclusions and conditions, and any intrusion of discourse into story—in Genette's words—“forms a sort of cyst, easily recognized and localized.” The slightest general observation, the slightest comparison, or even the tiniest adjective introduces an element of subjective discourse into story. In contrast, discourse does not have to answer to a concomitant demand of purity because it is, for Genette, “the natural mode of language” (12). Hence, although no novel of pure discourse yet exists, Genette sees it as a possibility for the novel's future.

For both Genette and for theorists like Seymour Chatman who adhere to the bipartite schema of story and discourse, time plays a key role in distinguishing one entity from the other. This is the case for Genette not only because he distinguishes discourse from story by making recourse to tense and mood, but also because of his understanding of diegesis (narrative) that posits the existence of two types of literary representation that use time in different manners, narrative and descriptive. These two types do not have what Genette labels a “semiological existence” (description is not its own mode but rather an aspect of narration), but they do bring to light how temporality differs in different modes of literary representation. Narration, insofar as it is tied to actions and events, puts an emphasis on what Genette labels “the temporal and dramatic aspects of narrative.” Conversely, description suspends the flow of time because it “lingers over objects and beings considered in their simultaneity” (8). For theorists like Chatman, the analysis of narrative must also observe two time scales not because of the difference between description and narrative, but rather because the narratologist must distinguish between the inner time of the content (story time) and the outer time (discourse time), the time that it takes the audience to peruse the story. Chatman's theorization of temporality in story and discourse differs markedly from Genette's distinction between the temporality of narrative and description. Nevertheless, it is worth noticing that here and elsewhere, the distinction between story and discourse consistently engenders questions about the different functions of time in the fundamental layers of narrative.

For many structuralists like Claude Bremond, story is distinguished from discourse as a layer of autonomous significance that can be isolated from the whole of the narrative message. This autonomous layer manifests in the same way regardless of the means of narrative conveyance, independent of the techniques that bear it along. Hence, story—in this formulation—may be transposed from medium to medium without losing its essential properties. For example, the subject of a novel may serve as the argument for a ballet. Whether it manifests in a novel, in a stage performance, in a piece of cinema, or even in a summary, it is the story that we follow. Raconte (that which is narrated) has its own racontants (story elements), and these elements do not correspond to words, images, or gestures but rather to the events, situations, and behaviors signified by them.

Bibliography

Bal, M. (1985), Narratology.
Benveniste, É. (1996), Problèmes de linguistique générale.
Bremond, C. (1973), Logique du récit.
Chatman, S. (1978), Story and Discourse.
Culler, J. (1981), Pursuit of Signs, Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction.
Genette, G. (1976), “ Boundaries of Narrative,” trans. A. Levonas, New Literary History (1): 1–13.
Genette, G. (1980), Narrative Discourse.
Miller, J.H., ed. (1970), Aspects of Narrative.
Prince, G. (2003), Dictionary of Narratology.
Todorov, T. (1965), Théorie de la littérature.

Stream of Consciousness see Psychological Novel

Structuralism/Poststructuralism

David Herman

Theorists working under the auspices of both structuralism and poststructuralism have developed ideas of broad relevance for the study of the novel. Although they evolved from a common heritage of concepts—in particular, those associated with Saussurean language theory, with its bipartite analysis of the sign into signifier and signified and its account of language as a system of differences—structuralist and poststructuralist approaches rely on different analytic procedures and set themselves contrasting investigative goals. Notably, whereas structuralism begins from the premise that cultural practices of all sorts are grounded in rule-systems that are subject to conscious scrutiny as well as unconscious mastery, poststructuralism is a version of antifoundationalism, i.e., skepticism concerning the existence (or accessibility) of ultimate foundations for knowledge, bedrock truths that subtend and guarantee the process of interpretation (Singer and Rockmore).

Having reached its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, structuralism openly aims for explanatory reduction; it distinguishes between metalanguage and object-language, recasting ostensibly diverse textual phenomena (e.g., different novelistic genres, or novels originating from different periods and cultural traditions) as manifestations of a shared underlying code or structure (Jakobson). Thus, the early narratologists participated in a broader structuralist revolution when they sought to use Saussurean linguistics as a “pilot-science” for studying narrative in all of its many guises. Narratologists such as Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette, and Algirdas Julius Greimas adapted Saussure's distinction between parole and langue to construe particular stories as individual narrative messages supported by an underlying semiotic code.

And just as Saussurean linguistics privileged code over message, focusing on the structural constituents and combinatory principles of the semiotic system of language rather than on situated uses of that system, structuralist narratologists privileged narrative in general over individual narratives, emphasizing the general semiotic principles according to which basic structural units (characters, states, events, actions, and so forth) are combined and transformed to yield specific narrative texts. In this context, Genette's work has been especially influential for research on the novel. In particular, Narrative Discourse—with its account of narrative temporality under the headings of order, duration, and frequency; its distinction between narration and focalization, voice and vision; and its taxonomy of narrative levels (extradiegetic, intradiegetic, hypodiegetic) and voices (homodiegetic, autodiegetic, heterodiegetic)—suggests that the distinctiveness of a given text can be captured by studying how it recruits from a common stock of narrative design principles (see DISCOURSE).

By contrast, poststructuralism makes a case for the irreducible specificity and heterogeneity of texts, their limitless semantic productivity or capacity for meaning generation, including their ability to generate incompatible interpretations. The goal for poststructuralists is not to partition the textual field into particular classes or kinds (e.g., narrative, argument, or instruction), each defined by a closed system of features and principles, but rather to demonstrate how a given text submits itself only more or less to the law of any particular genre (Derrida), orienting itself to multiple generic norms at the same time. From this perspective the domain of novelistic discourse overlaps with those of philosophical, psychological, and other “nonliterary” discourses, jeopardizing the very opposition between literary and nonliterary texts, and for that matter between the object-language of fictional texts and the critical metalanguages that might be used to explicate them. Yet poststructuralist theorists, far from engaging in an anything-goes modus operandi, rely on specific, recurrent procedures for analysis. For example, deconstructionists working in the Derridean vein seek to reveal how texts signal the collapse of binary oppositions on whose force and integrity the texts simultaneously insist; those working in the tradition of Paul de Man highlight how a text's rhetorical profile (the tropes it deploys) can be at odds with its explicit themes or overt semantic content. Thus, in these and other varieties of poststructuralism (e.g., Jacques Deleuze and Félix Guattari's schizo-analytic account of literary and cultural phenomena in terms of de- and reterritorialized flows of desire), a species of explanatory reduction can be detected, however different in style or purpose from that informing structuralist analyses.

The Case of Roland Barthes: A Science of the Text?

As one of founding practitioners of structuralism in France, Roland Barthes, in his early writing, examined cultural phenomena of all sorts through the lens of Saussure's structural linguistics (Culler, Dosse). Barthes's Mythologies (1972) characterized diverse forms of cultural expression (advertisements, photographs, museum exhibits, wrestling matches) as rule-governed signifying practices or “languages” in their own right. In his classic 1966 essay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” published as part of the special issue of the journal Communications that effectively launched structuralist narratology, Barthes adopted the same approach to narrative practices in particular. He used Ian Fleming's James Bond novels to explore the nature and distribution of fundamental narrative units, and more generally to outline a method of narrative analysis based on hierarchically arranged levels of description (spanning functions, actions, and, at the highest level, narration).

By the time he published “The Death of the Author” in 1968, however, Barthes had begun to speak about literary discourse in a very different way. Resisting the use of words like “code” and “message” as terms of art, and reconceiving texts as gestures of inscription rather than vehicles for communication and expression, he had come to embrace a Derridean view of the text as “a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred” (147). The text is, as Barthes now put it, “not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning ... but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). The scientific decoding of messages has given way to the interpretative disentanglement of strands of meaning, “rendering illusory any inductive-deductive science of texts—no ‘grammar’ of the text” (1997c, 159). Barthes here disavows the possibility of a science of the text that just a few years earlier he had, if not taken for granted, assumed as the outcome toward which structuralist research was inexorably advancing.

Barthes's autocritique of structuralism, which would eventuate in the publication of S/Z (1974), was part of a broader reaction against structuralist assumptions and methods articulated by commentators as diverse as Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-François Lyotard. Because of Barthes's uniquely double identity, as one of the world's foremost practitioners first of structuralism and then of poststructuralism, his revolution in thinking can be viewed as emblematic of this larger shift in critico-theoretical discourse. In particular, his 1971 essay “From Work to Text” can be read as a kind of internalized dialogue or debate, with Barthes adopting a persona who now embraces key tenets of Derridean poststructuralism, for example, and who thus takes issue with the author's own earlier, staunchly structuralist persona, champion of a classically semiolinguistic approach to literary and cultural analysis.

“From Work to Text”: Implications for the Study of the Novel

Though it articulates seven “principal propositions” about the nature of texts, Barthes's essay suggests that these statements should be construed less as “argumentations” than as “enunciations” or “touches” (156). The self-reflexivity, playfulness, and anti-exhaustive spirit of Barthes's proviso stems from the new, poststructuralist research paradigm that his essay goes on to outline. As Barthes puts it at the end of the essay, “a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied by a metalinguistic exposition: the destruction of meta-language ... is part of the theory itself” (164). But what are the constructive, as opposed to critical, goals of Barthes's account? And how do those goals pertain to research on the novel?

Text versus Work

Since one of his major concerns is to distinguish between the classical concept of the work and the new, interdisciplinary notion of the text, Barthes's first proposition is that “the Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed” (156). (Throughout the essay Barthes uses the capitalized term “Text” as a mass noun, like “water” or “space,” and the uncapitalized term “text” as a count noun, like “cat” or “pencil.”) Barthes writes: “the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse,” such that “the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text” (156–57). Hence, Barthes emphasizes, “the Text is experienced only in an activity of production” (157). This proposition echoes Barthes's emphasis, in S/Z, on readers' use of codes of signification to participate in the active structuration of texts, instead of merely passively appreciating works as pre-given, inert structures (18–21). Barthes's account thus points ahead to reader-response and other contextualist approaches to literary interpretation. More than this, structuralist methods of decomposing fictional narratives into their constituent features must be rethought when the basic unit of analysis becomes texts-in-contexts, as Barthes makes even more explicit in some of his other propositions.

Genres and Filiation

Another proposition put forth in “From Work to Text” is that “the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres” (157). This statement or theme can be traced back to Mikhail bakhtin's investigations into the polygeneric origins and dialogic profile of novelistic discourse, but it also harmonizes with a broader deconstructive critique of evaluative hierarchies (Derrida, 1967, Of Grammatology). Further, the theme of genre is bound up with what Barthes terms “filiation.” Whereas the idea of the work is caught up in an institution that bears striking similarities to that of patrilineal descent, originating from an author and relating to other works via principles of succession, the dominant “metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic” and “can be read without the guarantee of its father” (161). Discrete, autonomous works, linked to one another in a causal and chronological sequence, give way to the Text viewed as a network of reversible, multilinear, intertextual relations, only a small subset of which can be captured by classical concepts such as “genre,” “allusion,” and “citation.” Such generalized intertextuality became not only a watchword of poststructuralist approaches to fiction but also the basis for Barthes's proposal to replace the notion of the author with that of the scriptor, who “is always anterior, never original” and whose “only power is to mix writings” 1977b, 146). Yet later analysts—e.g., those focusing on texts by women writers and others seeking to claim a voice for themselves—have taken issue with Barthes's attempt to evacuate the communicative intentions of writers, his embrace of a scriptor who functions merely as a kind of switch operator between (anonymous) discourses.

Signs and Plurality

The idea of the sign and of plurality constitutes other dimensions along which work and Text can be contrasted. On the one hand, the work “closes on a signified,” and insofar as modes of signification oriented around the signified involve either evident or hidden meanings, the work is the proper province of philology or hermeneutics, as the case may be. On the other hand, “the Text ... practi[c]es the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier” (158). Hence terms like “undecidability” and “indeterminacy” take their place alongside “intertextuality” as hallmarks of a poststructuralist approach to interpretation, which foregrounds the process over the target of signification. Another way of talking about this infinite deferment of the signified is to talk about the Text's radical plurality. The Text is plural not because (like the work) it is ambiguous and can be assigned several candidate interpretations, but instead because it involves an explosion, or dissemination, of meanings. Here readers familiar with S/Z will recall Barthes's influential distinction between classical, “readerly” (lisible) works, which he characterized as only parsimoniously plural, and postclassical, “writerly” (scriptible) texts, which are limitlessly plural and thus “make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (4).

Barthes's account of the readerly and the writerly (like his opposition between work and text) leaves it an open question whether these terms are classifications of particular kinds of fictional texts or rather different stances toward the process of interpretation itself. The non-resolution of this issue may in turn reflect Barthes's understanding of the poststructuralist approach as fundamentally relativistic (1977c, 156). In contradistinction to structuralist methods, Barthes refuses to distance his own discourse from the research object—texts of all kinds—that he now construes as being shaped in part by the commentator's own interpretive practices.

Bibliography

Barthes, R. (1972), Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers.
Barthes, R. (1974), S/Z, trans. R. Miller.
Barthes, R. (1977a), “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath.
Barthes, R. (1977b), “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath.
Barthes, R. (1977c), “ From Work to Text,” in Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath.
Culler, J. (1975), Structuralist Poetics.
Derrida, J. (1991), “The Law of Genre,” in Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge.
Dosse, F. (1997), History of Structuralism, vol. 1, trans. D. Glassman.
Genette, G. (1983), Narrative Discourse, trans. J.E. Lewin.
Singer, B. and T. Rockmore, eds. (1992), Antifoundationalism Old and New.

Style see Narrative Technique

Style indirect libre see Discourse

Superfluous Man Novel see Russia (18th–19th Century)

Supernaturalism see Gothic Novel; Magical Realism

Surrealism/Avant-Garde Novel

Deborah Jenson

Surrealism itself was conceptualized by its founder André Breton as an antidote to the novel. In the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Breton described the novel, shaped by realist and positivist conventions (see REALISM), as hostile to the growth of the reader's intellect or ethical sense. The realist novel's informational and descriptive style, epitomized by the phrase “The Marquise went out at five” (7), had all the clarity of “a dog's life” (6) and fostered characters who represented the repetitive construction of a human type in the context of a prescriptive social logic. In the face of the novel's ready-made humans, Breton concluded: “The only discretionary power left to me is to close the book” (7). But although the Surrealists consistently aligned themselves against stasis, convention, and the psychosocial character formation that perpetuate them, they were also intrigued by the possibility of using narrative techniques and literary character formation to cultivate alternative experiences of the world in authors and readers. The psychic revelations of the avant-garde novel associated with Surrealism were born of the imagination's encounter with the technology of narrative, inflected by the fields of psychiatry and neurology in which Breton had been trained.

The first published book of literary Surrealism, Breton and Philippe Soupault's Les champs magnétiques (1920, Magnetic Fields), has been called a novel, but its strict use of psychic automatism, displayed at three writing “speeds,” deconstructs or avoids constructing virtually all temporal and spatial narrative continuity of character and story (see TIME, SPACE). Other Surrealist novels from the early 1920s include Mort aux vaches et au champ d'honneur (1923, Death to the Pigs and to the Field of Glory) by Benjamin Péret and, in Spain, El Incongruente (1922, The Incongruent One) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

The best-known example of a Surrealist avant-garde novel is Breton's 1928 Nadja. Nonlinear in its structure, this hybrid photo-narrative, anchored partly in the tradition of intimate or autobiographical writings, represents the Parisian trajectory of the author's brief relationship with a young woman who was a patient of the psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859–1947). Nadja is an interrogation of the subjective relation to the enigma of the other's existence, mapped in urban space. The unpredictable female protagonist stimulated productive forms of non-knowing and experimental cognition for the author, who opens the text with the question “Who am I?” Nadja was preceded by Le paysan de Paris (1926, Nightwalker) by Louis Aragon and La Liberté ou l'amour! (1927, Give Me Liberty or Give Me Love!) by Robert Desnos. It was contemporaneous with the composition of the novel Aurora by Michel Leiris and Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (Last Nights of Paris) by Soupault.

Visual artists figure strongly in the history of the Surrealist avant-garde novel also, showing its fundamentally transmedia approach to experimental narrativity. Giorgio de Chirico published Hebdomeros in 1929, and Salvador Dalí published Hidden Faces in 1945. Max Ernst innovated with the collage novel A Week of Kindness or the Seven Deadly Elements (1934), in which illustrations from pulp novels and catalogues were arranged in book form so as to stimulate unconscious or libidinal narratives in the viewer (see PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY). British painter and writer Leonora Carrington, born in 1917, wrote novels including The House of Fear (1938) and The Oval Lady (1939). Her fiction served as an inspiration to later avant-garde novels by women writers like Angela Carter and Kathy Acker, in which the hierarchies of gender and power that had been so evident in avant-garde works such as Nadja were destabilized.

The Surrealist avant-garde novel is related to novelistic experimentation in the Bloomsbury group and also to other areas of the modernist tradition, including novels such as Nightwood (1936) by expatriate Djuna Barnes (see MODERNIS). Raymond Queneau, who was briefly affiliated with Surrealism, later founded the avant-garde literary group OULIPO (“Workshop for Potential Literature”), famous for its use of constrained writing techniques. Queneau's surrealist novel Le Chiendent (1933, The Bark Tree) was a precursor to the avant-garde genre of the nouveau roman or “new novel,” and shows a genealogy leading from the Surrealist novel to later avant-garde fictional forms. In effect, despite the Surrealist rejection of the novel as the emblematic form of bourgeois modernity, iconoclastic Surrealist revisions of the novel mark a lasting tension between the realist mode and the experimental mode in fiction, rather than a disavowal of the novel per se. It is in this sense that Breton ultimately would claim the novel as one of Surrealism's lasting claims to the avant-garde. Maurice Nadeau notes that after the two world wars, Breton cited a Surrealist novel by Julien Gracq as a sign that in the absence of a “more emancipating movement,” Surrealism remained in the front lines—“in the avant-garde” of experimental culture (216).

Bibliography

Biro, A. and R. Passeron (1982), Dictionnaire général du Surréalisme et ses environs.
Breton, A. (1960), Nadja, trans. R. Howard.
Breton, A. (1969), Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. R. Seaver and H.R. Lane.
Breton, A. (1978), What Is Surrealism?, ed. F. Rosemont.
Breton, A. and P. Soupault (1985), Magnetic Fields, trans. D. Gascoyne.
Chadwick, W. (1998), Mirror Images.
Nadeau, M. (1989), History of Surrealism.