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This article explores the prominence of the body in Janice Galloway’s short fiction. Drawing mainly on Kristeva’s notions of the semiotic and the abject, the argument initially establishes the central place of physicality in Galloway’s poetics. Her creative project is inspired by a desire to transmit in writing the experience of being alive, of how being is intrinsically fragile, inexorably bound to extinction. In a particularly sharp manner that engages the reader more actively than her novels, her short stories exhibit both formally and thematically an interaction of the symbolic and the semiotic. As being attentive to life entails an awareness of death if one is to write realistically, the ensuing discussion of stories from her three collections –Blood (1991), Where you find it (1996) and Jellyfish (2015)– reveals that abjection, the extreme version of the semiotic that threatens to cancel out the symbolic, is paramount in her creative universe.

Sound Effects combines literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory in eleven original articles which explore the potential of the object voice as an analytic tool to approach fiction. Alongside the gaze, the voice is Jacques Lacan's original addition to the set of partial objects of classical psychoanalysis, and has only recently been theorised by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More (2006). With notable exceptions like Garrett Stewart's Reading Voices (1990), the sonorous element in fiction has received little scholarly attention in comparison with poetry and drama. Sound Effects is a contribution to the burgeoning field of sound studies, and sets out to fill this gap through selective readings of English and American fiction of the last two hundred years.Contributors: Fred Botting, Natalja Chestopalova, Mladen Dolar, Matt Foley, Alex Hope, Phillip Mahoney, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Jorge Sacido-Romero, Marcin Stawiarski, Garrett Stewart, Peter Weise, and Bruce Wyse.

Poe began his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales by making clear that not all of the pieces collected there were \"tales\"; some were \"pure essays\" that lacked the remarkable \"precision and finish\" of the others which, unlike \"the ordinary novel\", were endowed with \"true unity\" and organic \"totality\" (45, 47). [...]he \"perceive [d] that the Novel and the Short-story are essentially different - that the difference between them is not one of mere length only, but fundamental\" (57). Inversion of gender roles and models, portraits of unhappy marriages, and disruption of patronising attitudes towards the poor figure largely in the short stories carried by the Yellow Book and other highbrow journals of the period. Because formal innovation in these short stories went hand in hand with ideological critique, we can place the genesis of English modernism more firmly around 1890.1 As Hunter states: this interest in destabilizing familiar narrative structures, both as a way of identifying one's work in contradistinction to popular, mass-market fare and creating a fictional form adequate to the representational demand of the modern world, would come to dominate the work of the succeeding generation of modernist writers, among them James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Emphasis added). [...]Jameson points out that while a writer such as Joseph Conrad (one of modernism's \"progenitors\" [Levenson 1-10], to say the least) was painfully aware of the split between high art and mass literature, a realist like Honoré de Balzac could not possibly have been, as \"no contradiction [was] yet felt in his time between the production of best sellers and the production of what will later come to be thought as 'high' literature\" (Political Unconscious 208). [...]if modernism is \"subjective\", it is so in a more positive sense: not as subjection to a totalised version of social reality which obliges the individual to internalise imposed rules and act accordingly, but as subjectivity proper, as the subject's experience of a desire which ideology cannot appease.5 It is not by chance that the beginning of psychoanalysis, the discourse that explores the tensions of the divided subject, coincided in time with the onset of modernism, some of whose canonised texts (Ulysses, or Mrs Dalloway) were \"originally conceived as short stories\" (Head 6).6 To speak of the autonomy of literary work in modernism - a phenomenon which is undoubtedly in tune with the increasing compartmentalisation and tendency toward autonomy affecting other spheres of life - is not the same as saying that the work is an autotelic object that exhibits organic unity based on aesthetic principles alone, a view inherited from the Paterian aestheticism promoted and celebrated by the New Critics and by modernists authors, and criticised by others such as Marxist critics (for being politically crippling), or some postmodernists (for its elitism).

From Romanticism onwards, childhood was constructed as an alternative to the alienating world of modern progress. Though this idealised version of childhood consecrated in Romantic literature was questioned by the end of the nineteenth century, the child’s perspective on the adult world has remained throughout a useful way of exploring social deficiencies and of exposing some of its most unpalatable aspects. In the present essay, the authors trace the transformation in the conception of childhood to then focus on Ian McEwan’s “Homemade”, the opening story in First Love, Last Rites (1975), the collection that marks the author’s literary debut. The particularly evil nature of the child protagonist as well as his frustrated passage into adulthood after his pathetic first and single sexual experience (the rape of his own sister) is related to the major historical transformation of the traditional model of paternal authority in the postmodern period which engenders a cynical and perverse type of subjectivity that is nevertheless marked by its paradoxical inability to enjoy.

One of the most salient developments in recent short story criticism focuses on the genre’s connection with liminality. Both short fiction’s suitability to convey the liminal and liminality as a defining feature of the short story are at stake. The short fiction of contemporary author Janice Galloway is a good example of this. After a brief introduction to the concept of liminality, I discuss one story from each of Galloway’s collections of short fiction: “Frostbite” is the story of how a young music student crosses an existential boundary and leaves behind disabling expectations and fears; “jellyfish” features a divorced woman undergoing a liminal moment in her experience of motherhood, whereas the woman in a homeless couple in “a night in” narrates her experience as a privileged witness to ontological liminality affecting both space and language.

From the late nineteenth century onwards the genre of the ghost short story has served as a vehicle for the exploration of female concerns. Women's ghost narratives feature heroines haunted by spectral apparitions that give expression to the characters' inner tensions with their assumption of socially sanctioned female roles. This essay reads three stories, by Fay Weldon, Janice Galloway and Ali Smith, to show how the potential of the genre to question the norm and to give shape to personal, intergenerational and historical conflicts continues to be deployed by contemporary women writers. As in the stories of their female predecessors, the effects of the literary ghost's disturbing liminality vary in each of the cases under consideration here. Thus, the apparition in Weldon's \"A Good Sound Marriage\" (1991) works as a contested mouthpiece of traditional sexual ideology, the oneiric revenant in Galloway's \"it was\" (1991) is the figuration of unconscious desire, while the doppelgänger in Smith's \"The Hanging Girl\" (1999), despite her spectrality, inhabits a less empty and more amiable world than that of real flesh-and-blood people. Desde finales del siglo XIX el género del relato breve de fantasmas ha servido de medio para la exploración de inquietudes femeninas. Las historias de fantasmas escritas por mujeres están protagonizadas por heroínas rondadas por espectros que encarnan tensiones internas relacionadas con la asunción de roles femeninos impuestos por la sociedad. El presente artículo analiza tres relatos de Fay Weldon, Janice Galloway y Ali Smith con la intención de demostrar que las escritoras contemporáneas continúan explotando el potencial del género para cuestionar la norma establecida y para articular conflictos personales, intergeneracionales e históricos. Al igual que en los relatos de sus predecesoras, los efectos de la liminalidad inquietante del fantasma literario varían en cada uno de los casos aquí tratados. Así, el espectro en \"A Good Sound Marriage\" de Weldon (1991) funciona como una portavoz cuestionada de la ideología sexual tradicional, el fantasma onírico en \"it was\" de Galloway (1991) es la representación del deseo inconsciente, mientras que el doppelgänger en \"The Hanging Girl\" de Smith (1999), a pesar de su espectralidad, habita un mundo menos vacío y más amable que el de las personas reales de carne y hueso.

It is quite remarkable how Marlow's recurrent characterisation of Kurtz as a spectre in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' has passed almost unnoticed in the large body of criticism on the novella. This essay interprets Marlow's persistent expression of loyalty to Kurtz's ghost as the last in a series of ideological strategies that endow the imperialist culture in which he is embedded with a minimum degree of consistency that counterbalances the debilitating exposure of its evils. The ensuing pages develop this central thesis concerning Kurtz's ghostly status by drawing on Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian approach to the ideological function of the spectre, which allows the author to diverge from other readings of 'Heart of Darkness' relevant to this topic. An exploration of the logic of spectrality helps to explain why the novella falls short in its indictment of imperialist ideology, a failure which, in the last instance, amounts to an endorsement. Sorprende el hecho de que la recurrente caracterizarión de Kurtz como espectro en 'Heart of Darkness' de Conrad haya pasado prácticamente desapercibida en la ingente cantidad de trabajos críticos sobre esta novela corta. En este ensayo se interpreta la persistente expresión de lealtad de Marlow hacia el fantasma de Kurtz como la última de una serie de estrategias ideológicas que dotan a la cultura impenalista en la que está inscrito de un mínimo de consistencia que contrapesa el desenmascaramiento debilitador de sus males. En las páginas que siguen se desarrolla esta tesis central sobre el estatus fantasmal de Kurtz tomando como base la interpretación lacaniana que Slavoj Žižek hace sobre la función ideológica del espectro, lo que permite al autor distandarse de otras lecturas de la obra de Conrad relevantes para el tema tratado. Un análisis de la lógica de la espectralidad ayuda a explicar por qué la novela no acaba de condenar del todo la ideología impenalista, una inhibición que equivale, en última instanda, a una adhesión.

Desde finales del siglo XIX el género del relato breve de fantasmas ha servido de medio para la exploración de inquietudes femeninas. Las historias de fantasmas escritas por mujeres están protagonizadas por heroínas rondadas por espectros que encarnan tensiones internas relacionadas con la asunción de roles femeninos impuestos por la sociedad. El presente artículo analiza tres relatos de Fay Weldon, Janice Galloway y Ali Smith con la intención de demostrar que las escritoras contemporáneas continúan explotando el potencial del género para cuestionar la norma establecida y para articular conflictos personales, intergeneracionales e históricos. Al igual que en los relatos de sus predecesoras, los efectos de la liminalidad inquietante del fantasma literario varían en cada uno de los casos aquí tratados. Así, el espectro en \"A Good Sound Marriage\" de Weldon (1991) funciona como una portavoz cuestionada de la ideología sexual tradicional, el fantasma onírico en \"it was\" de Galloway (1991) es la representación del deseo inconsciente, mientras que el doppelganger en \"The Hanging Girl\" de Smith (1999), a pesar de su espectralidad, habita un mundo menos vacío y más amable que el de las personas reales de carne y hueso.