International Fiction Review back issues from January 2001:
Great War Narrative into Film: Transformation, Reception, and Reaction.
Jan 01, 2001; ... It is a truism of twentieth-century European history that the First World War formed or, from certain points of view, deformed all aspects of European life. Certainly, the commemoration of that war occupied a central position in European thought in the two decades following its conclusion ....
International Fiction vs. Ethnic Autobiography: Cultural Appropriation in Mark Twain and Edward Rivera.
Jan 01, 2001; ... Negotiating foreignness has been at the heart of two subgenres of American prose literature, international fiction dealing with Americans in the Old World and ethnic autobiography depicting the fate of newcomers in the United States. The former flourished between the end of the Napoleonic ...
Nawal El Saadawi's The Fall of the Imam and the Possibility of a Feminine Writing.
Jan 01, 2001; ... The writing of Nawal El Saadawi(1) reminds readers that not all "democracies" of what we used to be comfortable calling the "free world" are quite as respectful of civil liberties as we often naively assume them to be. Saadawi was trained first as a physician and later as a ...
Phoenix Has No Coat: Historicity, Eschatology, and Sins of Omission in Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path".
Jan 01, 2001; ... Unsurprisingly, Eudora Welty's short story "A Worn Path" has inspired many interpretations. Most critics, including Elaine Orr, James Walter, Peter Schmidt, and James Robert Saunders, assert the work as an optimistic depiction of its protagonist, Phoenix Jackson.(1) However, no previous ...
J. M. Coetzee and the Postcolonial Rhetoric of Simultaneity.
Jan 01, 2001; ... Having published nine novels and won such prestigious literary awards as the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1980), the Booker Prize (1983, 1999), and the Jerusalem Prize (1987), J. M. Coetzee has become one of the most important late twentieth-century authors to emerge from South Africa, ...
The Paradox of Globalization as an "Untotalizable Totality" in Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Jan 01, 2001; ... In his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie explores the shifting cultural ground upon which identifies, nations, and empires are built. In its evocation of music as a "globalized cultural phenomenon,"(1) Rushdie's novel is at once a celebration of a fluid, hybrid vision ...
Oral Tradition and Modern Storytelling: Revisiting Chinua Achebe's Short Stories.
Jan 01, 2001; ... An exclusive preoccupation with Chinua Achebe's novels has somewhat decidedly deflected attention away from his work both as a short-story writer and as a writer of children's fiction.(1) The aim of this essay is to rekindle interest specifically in Achebe's short fiction. Numerically, ...
German Minority Literature: Tongues Set Free & Pointed Tongues.(Anant Kumar and Elias Canetti)
Jan 01, 2001; ... When Elias Canetti--polyglot, author, Spanish-speaking, Bulgarian-born Jew, and 1981 Nobel laureate--wrote his 1977 autobiographical novel The Tongue Set Free, from which the title of this article is taken, he could have had no inkling that he would be recruited two decades later for the ...
Reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita from the Perspective of Hinduism.
Jan 01, 2001; ... Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1966-67)(1) has been praised highly for both its literary merit and its spiritual significance. Many critical studies explain the complex nature of the interrelationship between the natural and supernatural in the novel. The unexpected roles ...
Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Celia M. Britton Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance New World Studies Series Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Pp. 224. $55.00 $19.50 The work of Edouard Glissant, arguably the most influential and most difficult ...
Understanding Christa Wolf: Returning Home to a Foreign Land.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Margit Resch Understanding Christa Wolf: Returning Home to a Foreign Land Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 182. $29.95 Resch argues that Wolf's literary achievement is one of East Germany's "most stubborn and enduring treasures" (171). With this first ...
The Prince of Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Short Stories.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Radmila J. Gorup and Nadezda Obradovic, eds. The Prince of Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Short Stories Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Pp. 375. $19.95 "Ah, the Serbs! Until recently no one knew very much about them ... and now almost everybody has ...
Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Clayton Koelb Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pp. 186. $40.00 This book consists of "a set of readings of novels that seemed to contribute most to an understanding of the revolution in the `sense of history' that ...
The Conversion.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Aharon Appelfeld The Conversion Trans. from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green New York: Schocken Books, 1998. Pp. 228+. $17.95 Aharon Appelfeld, a child Holocaust survivor from Czernowitz, in Bukovina, Rumania, is one of Israel's internationally acclaimed novelists. He is inspired ...
History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the Past.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... David W. Price History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the Past Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pp. 338. $49.95 The modest claim of History Made, History Imagined is that novels offer a "countermemory or counternarrative to ...
The Companion to African Literatures.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Doug Killam and Ruth Rowe, eds. The Companion to African Literatures Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Pp. 322. $49.95 Several months back, a former student from my African literature course popped into my office to ask a question. He was preparing for a trip to ...
Wordsworth and the Victorians.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Stephen Gill Wordsworth and the Victorians Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. 346. Although William Wordsworth and the Romantic movement have enjoyed much critical attention in recent decades, comparative studies of this author and period are relatively scarce. Several ...
The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... J. Michael Dash The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Pp. 197. $42.50 J. Michael Dash's The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context is a remarkable achievement of scholarship on ...
Reflections of Loko Miwa.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Lilas Desquiron Reflections of Loko Miwa Trans. Robin Orr Bodkin Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Pp. 198. $55.00 Lilas Desquiron's novel Reflections of Loko Miwa, originally published in French in 1990 and only recently available in Robin Orr Bodkin's ...
Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the "Time of Greatness" in Germany.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Wolfgang G. Natter Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the "Time of Greatness" in Germany New Haven: Yale University Press. 1999. Pp. 280. $35.00 In this intriguing new study, Wolfgang Natter revises the definition of German war literature, and inverts conventional ...
Spiderweb.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Penelope Lively Spiderweb London: Penguin, 1999. Pp. 218. $18.99 Novels chronicling the parallel lives of groups of female college friends have proliferated in recent decades, ever since Mary McCarthy's The Group in 1963. Spiderweb, the latest novel by Lively, an Egyptian-born ...
Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Constance Markey Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Pp. xxii + 170. $49.95 This book is useful for undergraduates and nonspecialists interested in Calvino; it furnishes a broad overview of Calvino's creative prose with ...
Abelard's Love: Abelards Liebe.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Luise Rinser Abelard's Love: Abelards Liebe Trans. Jean M. Snook European Women Writers Series Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pp. 151. $35.00 $15.00 Rinser's treatment of one of the great medieval love stories shows the writer, who at the time of publication of ...
A Patchwork Planet.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Anne Tyler A Patchwork Planet Toronto: Penguin Books, 1998. Pp. 288. $9.99 Tyler, author of over a dozen novels and dozens of stories, may be the best novelist writing in the United States in recent decades. Her latest novel, A Patchwork Planet (originally published by Viking), ...
Andre Gide: A Life in the Present.(Review)
Jan 01, 2001; ... Alan Sheridan Andre Gide: A Life in the Present Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. 709. $35.00 Writing the biography of an author who left considerable autobiographical works is a rather intimidating venture; no wonder that so few notable ones have been published on ...