Justin Cartwright

2013

I, the undersigned, hereby declare that the work contained in this thesis consists of my own original work, and that I have not previously in its entirety, or in part, submitted it at any university for a degree.

This Companion examines the full range and vigor of the American novel. From the American exceptionalism of James Fenimore Cooper to the apocalyptic post-Americanism of Cormac McCarthy, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics chronicle the major aesthetic innovations that have shaped the American novel over the past two centuries. The essays evaluate the work, life, and legacy of influential American novelists including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison, while situating them within the context of their literary predecessors and successors. The volume also highlights less familiar, though equally significant writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Djuna Barnes, providing a balanced and wide-ranging survey of use to students, teachers, and general readers of American literature. Table of Contents Introduction Timothy Parrish 1. James Fenimore Cooper Stephen Railton 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne Robert Milder 3. Herman Melville Clark Davis 4. Harriet Beecher Stowe Arthur Riss 5. Mark Twain Peter Messent 6. Henry James Thomas J. Otten 7. Edith Wharton Pamela Knights 8. Theodore Dreiser Clare Eby 9. Willa Cather Timothy Parrish 10. F. Scott Fitzgerald Ruth Prigozy 11. Ernest Hemingway Eugene Goodheart 12. William Faulkner Philip Weinstein 13. Henry Roth Hana Wirth-Nesher 14. Djuna Barnes Alex Goody 15. Zora Neale Hurston Lovalerie King 16. Richard Wright William Dow 17. Raymond Chandler Leonard Cassuto 18. Ralph Ellison David Yaffe 19. J. D. Salinger Sarah Graham 20. Patricia Highsmith Joan Schenkar 21. Vladimir Nabokov Julian W. Connoly 22. Jack Kerouac Joshua Kupetz 23. Saul Bellow Victoria Aarons 24. Kurt Vonnegut Todd Davis 25. John Updike James Schiff 26. Thomas Pynchon David Seed 27. Toni Morrison Valerie Smith 28. Philip Roth Debra Shostak 29. Don DeLillo Thomas Heise 30. Cormac McCarthy Brian Evenson Guide to further reading Index.

African American Review, 2019

The award-winning Ali Smith and the social-oriented Anthony Cartwright could not have written more stylistically and thematically different novels. However, an analysis might still be conducted taking into consideration narrative form and the reader's role. With reference to Ali Smith's How to be both and Anthony Cartwright's The Cut (2017), this essay aims to explore two narrative techniques shared by both novels in the attempt to demonstrate how these techniques succeed in captivating the reader's attention. It will do so by looking at a first technique responsible for time shifting in the novels, which will be defined in the present essay as time distortion, and at a second technique defined as variable internal focalization, a term coined by Genette (1980: 189) to explain when in a novel several points of view are adopted, providing a glimpse inside the minds of the main characters.

Ontario Review, 2014

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2013

This article aims to open academic debate about Justin Cartwright’s fiction set in England by examining the first of Cartwright’s major novels about England, namely In Every Face I Meet (1995). Although South African-born Cartwright has lived in London for more than 40 years, the majority of his novels, about England and Englishness, have received little previous academic attention. We claim that In Every Face I Meet offers social commentary in the form of a subtle, humane critique of English society and culture. Tracing the novel’s intertextual allusions, not only to the work of William Blake, but also to a text by the notoriously racist South African writer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, we examine the ways in which In Every Face I Meet explores the interface between metropole and former colony. We conclude by discussing the relevance of Cartwright’s interest in the ideas of the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin to reading the novel as meta-commentary, and the tension between reading the ...

Image & Narrative, 2009

This interview with Robert Pogue Harrison discusses his work on memory and ecology. The conversation mainly centers around Harrison's intellectual background, his view of theory and literature, modern memory and ecology as well as existentialism and Christianity. Résumé: Dans cet entretien avec Robert Pogue Harrison parle de ses recherches sur la mémoire et l"écologie. Les questions abordées traitent essentiellement de ses conceptions sur la pensée critique et la littérature, le rôle de mémoire moderne et de l'écologie et enfin l'existentialisme et le christianisme. What if forests are not simply natural but also cultural sites? If deforestation is not only depleting our oxygen supply but also our cultural memory? And what if living human beings are always already dead, being fundamentally connected to the afterlives of their predecessors and of their offspring? What if our expulsion from the Garden of Eden was not a curse, but a blessing? If paradise was notandcan never beparadise? These are just some of the fascinating questions Robert Pogue Harrison has raised in his seminal studies on Forests, The Dominion of the Dead, and Gardens. As I have tried to show in my essay on Harrison"s work in the previous issue of Image & Narrative, these studies have established the Stanford professor as an important critic with regard to topics such as ecology, memory, and humanity. His oeuvre lends a voice to the cultural echoes of phenomena, the things in the world. But how did this oeuvre about the earth and its dead, about natural and cultural conservation first emerge? And what is the relationship between these three studies which, as Harrison suggests, actually constitute a trilogy? How does he position himself vis-à-vis issues as diverse as Deconstruction and ecocriticism, humanism and existentialism, modernity and Christianity? What is the nature and value of literature, to his mind? And what, finally, does the future hold in store for him?

Histos 14, 2020