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"Shields Fiction."
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Giganta's colossal double-cross
Wonder Woman is taking the Golden Shield of Dolos, a gift from the trickster god, Dolos, to the Gateway City Museum of Antiquities, but when Gorilla Grodd steals it, she finds herself teaming up with the villain Giganta, who wants revenge on the Gorilla--and has plans of her own for the magical shield.
Book
Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction
Award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields has garnered praise from scholars and an international audience of readers. Inspired by the quality and scope of Shields's work,Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fictionaddresses her creative exploration of postmodernism. As the first thorough examination of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this collection of essays establishes the groundwork for future studies of her oeuvre.
The collection begins with a significant new essay from Shields herself, 'Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,' perhaps her most substantial commentary upon her own aims as a writer. In addition, scholars from Canada, England, the United States, and Australia explore the complexity of Shields's work and her contributions to the genre of the novel. These lively essays reflect Shields's verve and her playful approach to today's sophisticated critical thinking. Among the topics are Shields's use of biography and autobiography, metafiction, popular romance, and symbolism. While the essays foreground the unreliability of language, and hence our inability to know one another or even ourselves, the contributors argue that Shields has taken a step beyond postmodernism by suggesting that we can transcend the limitations of its epistemology.
Containing several essays onSwannandThe Stone Diaries, Shields's most popular works, and the most extensive annotated bibliography available of works by and about Shields, this collection will appeal widely to scholars, students, and readers of Carol Shields and Canadian fiction.
eBook
The “Cinderella Fantasy”: Reading Jane Austen’s “Darling Child” Pride and Prejudice through the Lens of Carol Shields’s Biography Jane Austen: A Life
Shields claims that Austen revolutionized the novel by domesticating and thus feminizing it, transforming it from novels that bark, like Scott's \"Big Bow-Wow\" books,4 to fiction that purrs-from a macrocosmic world reflecting male power to a microcosmic setting-about \"3 or 4 Families in a Country Village\" (Letters 401), that reflect a woman's world in miniature on \"the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour\" (Letters 469), as Austen described her own fiction.5 Shields declares, \"The novelistic architecture may have been borrowed from the eighteenth-century novelists, but [Austen] made it new, clean, and rational, just as though she'd taken a broom to the old fussiness of plot and action,\" adding, \"She did this all alone\" (143). Shields, who wrote Jane Austen: A Life after receiving a terminal breast cancer diagnosis in 1998, hypothesizes, for example, that Austen died of breast cancer, perhaps implying a desire to recreate Austen in her own image or at least an urge to identify with her (173). Melissa Pope Eden claims in \"The Subjunctive Mode of One's Self\": \"this particular literary biography is both about a renowned woman writer and written by a renowned woman writer who not only identifies herself as a feminist but also identifies Austen as a literary foremother, as \"Shields effectively sets her reader up to think of Austen in terms of a tradition of literary mothers and daughters\" (147, 169, n2).10 Faye Hammill affirms in her review of Shields's life of Austen that her emphasis on the mother-daughter relationship \"raises the idea of a female tradition, and constructs Austen as a literary foremother to Shields\" (143). The difference is that Shields, writing in the postmodernist era, portrays intelligent women who are also writers, from biographer and would-be novelist Judith Gill of her first novel Small Ceremonies in 1977 to Reta Winters, author of comic fiction, in her last novel Unless in 2002, allowing for the self-reflexive meta-fictionality that Shields enjoys in her portrayal of writing as performance.
Journal Article
\Fragments on my Apple\: Carol Shields' unfinished novel
Pve lost my way into writing poems,\" she reminisced to me. Since her first unpublished novel, The Vortex, focused on a modernist poetry journal called The Vortex-echoing Ezra Pound's 1914-1915 magazine Blast, which launched the \"Vorticism\" movement- \"Moment's Moment\" would have brought her fictional oeuvre full circle.7 Structure is the operative principle in this draft novel: [...]Moment's Moment\" would have carried Shields' innovative fictional structure to new heights and linked her poetry to her prose fiction once again.
Journal Article
THE ANXIETIES OF AUTHENTICITY IN POST-2000 BRITISH FICTION
This essay argues that the issue of what it means to live an authentic life in the twenty-first century has been a significant trope in recent British fiction. Negotiating between universalizing humanist perspectives and the radically individualizing politics of late-capitalist philosophy, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts pose the question of whether any authenticity of the self can be imagined in an increasingly globalized, mediated, and digitalized world. Contextualizing these novels within contemporary British writing, this essay locates a profound psychological anxiety as the dominant mode for engaging with authentic subjectification.
Journal Article
Bring Out Your Dead: The Ethical Dilemmas of Writing Family Secrets
Years ago, I was told the story of one of my ancestors. The tale was dramatic – filled with sex, scandal and intrigue as well as with inconsistencies, gaps, and silences. Fascinated though I was by this woman’s story, I was also aware that the piecemeal information resulted from the shame that my family carried about this woman. This sanction on telling the stories of some women’s lives, because of shame or fear of giving offence is not unique to my experience, and there are obvious ethical concerns that we, as writers, have to take into consideration when we tell stories based on real people’s lives. Although I was tempted to take the scraps of what I had found out about my ancestor and weave a story out of it, there were ethical considerations to confront. I knew my family might be angered, embarrassed or ashamed if I revealed the details of her life. However, I was mindful of the fact that many women’s stories are not told; either in empirically-based discourses like history, or even in fiction, due to this very lack of available historical information about women. Given this larger silencing, the biggest ethical problem seemed to be not telling the story at all. Fiction seemed the safest way to protect my family’s privacy. But, given the prohibitions I had placed on myself, I knew it would have to be fiction written differently. This led me to engage with a practice-led research in dealing with the black spots about the past. Drawing on this methodology, as well as the creative work of Carol Shields and Anne Enright, this paper will examine the implications of writing fiction based on real people, and discuss the ways in which practice-led research can enable the writer to tell authentic stories about the past.
Journal Article
Reluctant Autofictionalists: Early Twenty-First-Century French and German Experiments with the Autofiction Genre
This thesis comprises six case studies of the twenty-first-century French and German autofictional novel by the authors Amélie Nothomb, Felicitas Hoppe, Michel Houellebecq, Thomas Meinecke, Clemens J. Setz, and Anne F. Garréta and Jacques Roubaud. This study is concerned with novels which, although they might not fully conform to the autofiction genre, are clearly aware of and respond to many of the same concerns with which the genre engages or which it raises. Significantly, while none of these texts adopt quite the same approach to genre subversion, they can all be read as experimentations with the autofiction genre, with the various aims of affirming or critiquing it, or drawing attention to related concerns regarding contemporary (first-person) narrative conventions and storytelling. Precisely because autofiction is experiencing a surge in popularity, on the one hand, and because it is a genre that, despite its inherent difficulties in terms of reception, is often approached by readers in quite a careless, biographical manner, on the other, it lends itself as a genre through which contemporary authors may explore newer developments in novelistic genres and contemporary forms of storytelling more broadly. As my close readings and engagement with relevant theories of autofiction, genre, and narratology will show, these novels demonstrate an extreme self-awareness and self-consciousness with regards to their generic status and engage in explicit or implicit dialogue with autofiction and genre theory. They make use of postmodern tools such as metafictionality and extremely complex associative narrative structures in order to subvert both the autofictional character's authority and the reader's expectations. However, as this thesis argues, these novels are not representative of an entirely new genre or literary era, even though the more experimental and open-ended texts in the latter half of this study gesture toward potential changes in the future, as influenced by models of digital textuality.
Dissertation
Notes on Hybrid Novels and Ethical Discourse
The article investigates contemporary European novels that challenge the borders between fiction and nonfiction. Analyzing, among others, works by Antonio Franchini, Javer Cercas and Jonathan Littell, I seek to demonstrate that today’s use of a hybrid genre serves authors as a narrative device to prove the factual truth of their narrations, therefore assuring their social relevance, without losing the capacity to convey a archetypical, meaning of human history. From this perspective I analyze the connections between literature and ethics, suggesting a theory of recognition between the reader and the character and examining in particular the problematic case of the reader’s identification with a morally flawed character.
Journal Article
Hollywood Reborn
As studio and star systems declined in the 1970s, actors had more power than ever, and because many had become fiercely politicized by the temper of the times, the movies they made were often more challenging than before. Thus, just when it might have faded out, Hollywood was reborn-but what was the nature of this rebirth? Hollywood Reborn examines this question, offering new perspectives through the lens of important stars, and illuminating in the process some of the most fascinating and provocative films of the decade.
eBook
Ephemeral Literature and Liberties: Early American Periodicals and the Development of American Identities
Ephemeral media—especially the newspaper, pamphlet, and broadside—were an important part of early American politics and culture. They disseminated knowledge and ideas across space and time, and they both reflected and generated shifting paradigms in early American culture. Most scholarship, however, has focused on the explicitly political, prosaic tracts of early American ephemeral media. This dissertation diverges from that pattern by examining the role of ephemeral poetry, fiction, dialogues, cartoons, and anecdotes in generating new public consciousnesses between 1733 and 1829. Through analyses of these literary texts, it articulates a fuller understanding of print media’s powerful influence on concepts of nationalism, identity, and belonging, especially among marginalized groups. The project focuses on four moments in early American history, beginning with the 1733 founding of the subversive New-York Weekly Journal as a populist, oppositional mouthpiece. Close attention to its ephemeral literature uncovers the discourse of disgruntled provincialism, frustrated colonial identities, and an emerging American consciousness. Subsequent readings of poems, dialogues, and cartoons from a pamphlet war following the 1760s Pennsylvanian “Paxton Uprising” suggest that ideas of language, belonging, and Britishness were at the heart of Pennsylvanian society’s turmoil. The ephemeral literature concerning marginalized groups like women and African-Americans in the decades following the American Revolution indicate the importance of the newspaper and the limits of American values of liberty and equality. At times, cultural resistance to socio-political progress is apparent in texts such as the poetry found in New Jersey’s newspapers between 1789 and 1807, when some women were able to vote. At other times, poems and fictions like those in Freedom’s Journal, America’s first black-owned and operated newspaper, illuminate underexplored themes of cultural reform and even radical rebellion. This project demonstrates the value of literary investigation in traditionally historical areas, and it expands critical understandings of early American identities and nationalisms.
Dissertation