The Totally Incredible Obscenity of Letty Fox

The Comparatist, 2010

2002

Like Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter (1801) are experimental fictions that require the reader’s identification with a sexualized heroine marked as transgressive and persecuted by society. Indeed, as I suggest in the first chapter, Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman models the rebellious and outspoken Romantic heroine I am delineating. In many ways, Maria Venables represents an extreme of the type; she leaves her husband, takes a lover, and presents her case for divorce to a court of law. Her suit fails, but it is a noble failure. Furthermore, as Tilottama Rajan has taught us to recognize, Wollstonecraft’s unfinished narrative invites its readers to “complete the text by unfolding a truth it does not yet contain” (“Wollstonecraft and Godwin” 223). As I note in the Coda to Chapter 1, The Wrongs of Woman was published with six different endings, all drawn from the author’s working notes, most of w...

Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi sosyal bilimler dergisi, 2020

The aim of the present paper is to reveal how Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000), the well-known English writer, employs defamiliarization device in her second novel The Bookshop (1978). Penelope Fitzgerald is mainly known for her distinctive and elegant style, called by many critics the "quiet genius" of the late twentieth-century English fiction. She can also be called the master of the uncanny, or ostranenie (making it strange), as the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky defined it. Penelope Fitzgerald brings quite new and original interpretations to the familiar concepts like morality, courage, kindness, help and hope. Through the literary concept of defamiliarization, the reader gains a new awareness of these issues. In her novels, essays, reviews and letters, she surprises the reader by defamiliarizing these well-known notions, loading them with new meaning and surprising the reader with the newly discovered truths which had always been there unnoticed by readers. By doing so, Penelope Fitzgerald's aim is far from lifting the readers' hearts. On the contrary, she tries to draw their attention to the life without any illusions, life "as it really is."

2020

TEXTJournal, 2021

Australian readers have a thirst for non-fiction books. A growing preference for autobiographies and biographies, true stories and criticism, investigative journalism and narrative journalism (Thompson, 2017, p. 204) showcases a trend towards “real” content that piques readers’ curiosity and offers deeper insight into the lives of public persons, and sometimes a perspective that might otherwise be considered private. But writing the tell-all or exposé is not without consequences, particularly with Australia’s defamation laws notorious for casting a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech (Dent and Kenyon, 2004, p. 3; Amponsah, 2005, p. 1) by regarding reputation above publications with a public interest element. This paper explores non-fiction trade book publishing alongside a contemporary construction of reputation and argues that in Australia “reputational interests” (Partlett, 2016, p. 67) in defamation law have created a practice of implicit censorship through legalling manuscripts, avoiding publication entirely, or even intercepting book distribution. In comparing the Australian legal framework with recent UK developments, this paper also asks if law reform can correct the balance between reputation and freedom of speech, thereby allowing authors more autonomy and allowing literary culture to thrive in the contemporary Australian publishing landscape.

The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel, 2008

Literature under censorship does not always get "repressed"; certain landmark progressive writers of the twentieth-century channeled the forces of censorship to embed them thematically and in narrative forms in their novels. I extensively examine four modernist and postmodernist novels that prompted in their day harsh external censorship because of their sexual content—Ulysses, Lolita, Time of Silence, and Russian Beauty. I show how motifs of censorship, with all its restrictions, pressures, rules, judgments, and forms of negation, became artistically embedded in the novels’ plots, characters, settings, tropes, and themes. These novels contest censorship’s status quo and critically explore its processes and power. This study reveals the impact of censorship on literary creation, particularly in relation to the twentieth century’s growing interest in sexuality and its discourses.