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Literature & Criticism

Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.

9 itemsCategory: Literature & Criticism · newest first
  1. PDF

    Queen and Games Mistress

    Emily A. Bernhard Jackson reviews new editions of Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth and Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive as evidence that women and gender-nonconforming writers have a deeper history in science fiction and literary utopia than is often recognized. She finds Clyde’s women-only Armeria imaginatively and materially distinctive but fundamentally conservative, especially in its monarchy, rigid class hierarchy, child barter, and unchallenged slave labor. Ertz’s novel has a more preposterous premise—a games mistress becomes the last surviving woman and Queen of England—but Jackson argues that it succeeds through its attractive vision of technological and social reform, psychological insight, intrigue, and romance. Their republication recovers neglected feminist speculative fiction, though the two works offer sharply different social visions.

    Literature & Criticism#HigherRealms#QueenMother
  2. PDF

    Golden Foolery

    Andrew Hadfield assesses George Chapman as an enigmatic poet whose difficult, learned writing combines esoteric and neo-Platonic interests with irony, humour, and acute awareness of poetic artifice. In The Shadow of the Night, apparently exalted invocations of darkness and divine inspiration coexist with striking absurdities, while Ovid’s Banquet of Sense leaves unresolved whether sensual experience leads toward higher love or matters chiefly in itself. Hadfield therefore questions editor Zenón Luis-Martínez’s consistent interpretation of Chapman as a convinced neo-Platonist offering readers a window onto the divine, arguing that occult philosophy did not necessarily define or constrain Chapman’s imagination. Nevertheless, he judges the edition extraordinarily detailed and helpful, crediting its extensive introduction, section summaries, and full notes even where its governing interpretation remains debatable.

    Literature & Criticism#Platonism
  3. PDF

    A Sense of Endings

    Dinah Birch reviews Melissa Harrison’s The Given World as a sombre novel about endings in Lower Eodham, an English village followed from early spring to autumn. Harrison links the inhabitants’ personal and economic losses to unstable weather, retreating wildlife, failing crops, and the decline of established rural patterns, while her knowledge of plants, animals, and agricultural labour gives the threatened landscape persuasive specificity. Birch finds this lament coherent and authoritative but argues that curses, ancestral wisdom, a river spirit, and other quasi-mystical elements distract from it. She concludes that the supernatural framing risks encouraging skeptical readers to dismiss the novel’s grounded account of damage to the English countryside as fantasy.

    Literature & Criticism#Books#TheVillage
  4. PDF

    Mr Wells and Mr Buchan

    Kate Macdonald uses 508 rediscovered letters from John Buchan’s early years at Thomas Nelson’s to illuminate his wide-ranging work as an editor, rights negotiator, marketer and architect of the cheap Sevenpennies series. The correspondence shows Buchan enthusiastically pursuing H. G. Wells’s fiction and, in 1908, urging Nelson’s to acquire Ann Veronica after reading it, while requesting that Wells revise a sexually explicit passage. Wells instead sold the novel to T. Fisher Unwin, which published his preferred text in 1909, prompting controversy that later made Buchan call it “indefensible.” Subsequent disputes over Wells’s publications and threatened litigation hardened the relationship, revealing both Buchan’s initial commercial optimism and Nelson’s growing concern about the reputational risks of publishing Wells.

    Literature & Criticism#JohnBuchan#H.G.Wells
  5. PDF

    Life as a Dropout and Colonial Soldier

    Daniel Culpan reviews Pierre Guyotat’s Idiocy as a comparatively conventional but still stylistically intense memoir of his coming of age from 1958 to 1962, spanning his Paris dropout years, conscription into the Algerian War, interrogation, and imprisonment. Culpan argues that bodily degradation, sexual awakening, Catholic guilt, artistic ambition, and military humiliation converge in a narrator who rejects purity and stable moral identities rather than claiming innocence. Guyotat’s sympathy for Algerian independence and depiction of French colonial brutality coexist with scrutiny of his own compromised position, while art offers a means of psychic survival rather than escape. For Culpan, the memoir ultimately shows war and colonialism consuming claims to civilization, yet preserves a fragile faith in humanity and the possibility that life might be otherwise.

    Literature & Criticism#PierreGuyotat#DivineSpirit
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    They Sold Their Shadows

    Alexander Voloshin’s 1953 rhyming mock epic Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood traces the upheavals from the Bolshevik Revolution to Pearl Harbor through the precarious lives of Russian émigrés in Los Angeles. The writer connects the poem’s satire to Voloshin’s own itinerant career, including work as a Hollywood extra and taxi driver, and emphasizes its depiction of refugees who offered their labor and images to the film industry while struggling to survive. Judging Boris Dralyuk’s English translation brilliant, the writer argues that this publication should rescue Voloshin from obscurity and establish his reputation in the West.

    Literature & Criticism#DivineSpirits#Post-WWI/IIEra
  7. PDF

    At Leopardi’s House

    Tim Parks uses a visit to Giacomo Leopardi’s house in Recanati to examine what happens when writers lose faith in their community of readers. Leopardi’s pursuit of truth led him from youthful scholarship to a bleak view of existence, yet he believed people still required consciously cultivated illusions, including his own hope for literary glory. Repeated disappointments persuaded him that original literature is recognized by only a tiny minority and that posterity offers no reliable consolation, a predicament Parks connects to other alienated authors and to the erosion of a shared vision between writers and readers. Recanati’s largely superficial commemoration of Leopardi sharpens the irony, while his imagined robotic companion prompts Parks’s closing suggestion that neglected writers may seek appreciative readers in AI.

    Literature & Criticism#DivineSpirits
  8. PDF

    The Roots of Treasure

    This review discusses Jeremy Harte’s Treasures on Earth, arguing that folklore about hidden riches reflects deep desires for transformative wealth and fears of loss across the British Isles. It draws on tales of guarded hoards, doomed treasure hunts, dreams, spirits, beasts, and accidental discoveries—including Murthly’s treasure-guarding black dog—and examines regional patterns such as storms interrupting Welsh quests and golden coffins appearing chiefly in southern England. Although such oral traditions are difficult to date and document, Harte organizes them through recurring local themes and ultimately emphasizes that the people within treasure stories are more compelling than the gold itself.

    Literature & Criticism#Britishfolklore#regionalfolklore
  9. PDF

    The World in Gentle Collapse

    This review examines Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s novel Into the Sun, originally published in 1922 as Présence de la mort and newly translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, in which a shift in Earth’s axis sends the planet toward the sun. It argues that the novel is both timely in its depiction of denial and profound in its reflections on nature, daily life, and humanity’s inability to comprehend catastrophe, citing the townspeople’s initially sharpened perceptions, the failure of collective action, and the descent into hysteria and violence. The review praises the translators’ rendering and retitling of the novel, concluding that it presents the end of the world as a gentle collapse marked by confusion and fear of an unimaginable fate.

    Literature & Criticism#Prediction#ClimateChange