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"Wills Fiction."
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Thomas Kinkade's Cape Light : a Christmas secret
\"Martin Nightingale is no stranger to Cape Light. He spent many happy summers there as a boy. Now he has returned to fulfill the unusual terms of his grandfather's will. In order to collect his inheritance, Martin must spread joy throughout the town with anonymous gifts. A shy man who doesn't make friends easily, Martin is stumped by his new role as Secret Santa. But as a pretty police officer named Louisa Tully shows him, 'A stranger is just a friend you haven't met yet'\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925
Focusing on the last will and testament as a legal, literary, and cultural document, Cathrine O. Frank examines fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras alongside actual wills, legal manuals relating to their creation, case law regarding their administration, and contemporary accounts of curious wills in periodicals. Her study begins with the Wills Act of 1837 and poses two basic questions: What picture of Victorian culture and personal subjectivity emerges from competing legal and literary narratives about the will, and how does the shift from realist to modernist representations of the will accentuate a growing divergence between law and literature? Frank’s examination of works by Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and E.M. Forster reveals the shared rhetorical and cultural significance of the will in law and literature while also highlighting the competition between these discourses to structure a social order that emphasized self-determinism yet viewed individuals in relationship to the broader community. Her study contributes to our knowledge of the cultural significance of Victorian wills and creates intellectual bridges between the Victorian and Edwardian periods that will interest scholars from a variety of disciplines who are concerned with the laws, literature, and history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Contents: Part I Writing the Will: Introduction: novel bequests; Writing the will: Victorian testators and legal culture; Writing the novel: Victorian testators and literary culture. Part II Proving the Will: Victorian daughters and the burden of inheritance; Edwardian sons and the burden of inheritance redux. Part III Contesting the Will: Broken trusts: Cy Près, fiction and the limits of intention; Fictions of justice: testamentary intention and the illegitimate heir; Conclusion; Works cited; Index.
Cathrine Frank is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New England, USA.
eBook
Homo chimaera after homo sapiens?: the legal status of human–non-human chimaeras with human brain cells
Recent scientific developments have made possible something that would once—not long ago—have seemed out of a science fiction film: the creation of a human and non-human chimaera with human brain cells and their eventual birth. This has posed novel challenges for lawmakers. Laws have been established to allow for the creation of these entities; the challenge now is to define their legal status. Such chimaeras are neither entirely animal nor entirely human, but unlike other chimeric creatures, they share a feature with humans that has long been considered the basis of the special legal status afforded to the human person: human brain cells. This feature is unlikely to prove sufficient to replicate the human brain. Likewise, it is improbable that these creatures will reach the same levels of autonomous thinking and consciousness as humans. Still, such enhanced chimaeras might acquire capacities that distinguish them from other animals. As such, a special legal status must be created to accommodate their specific characteristics. This paper will analyse the legal status that should be granted to these chimeric entities in light of the existing laws.
Journal Article
The widows of Malabar Hill
\"Bombay, 1921: Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father's law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a law degree from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes her especially devoted to championing and protecting women's legal rights. Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen is going through the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. What will they live on if they forfeit what their husband left them? Perveen is suspicious, especially since one of the widows has signed her form with an X--meaning she probably couldn't even read the document. The Farid widows live in full purdah--in strict seclusion, never leaving the women's quarters or speaking to any men. Are they being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous guardian? Perveen tries to investigate, and realizes her instincts about the will were correct when tensions escalate to murder. Now it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are in further danger. Inspired in part by a real woman who made history by becoming India's first female lawyer\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Paradox of Choice in Interactive Fiction: A Critical Analysis of Bandersnatch's 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure' Structure
This paper explores the emerging field of interactive fiction, with a special focus on the Netflix film Bandersnatch, and investigates whether interactive fiction truly empowers its audience to 'choose-their-own-adventure' through the use of free will or if it is simply a pre-scripted illusion. In particular, the paper explores the important role of artificial intelligence (AI) in interactive fiction, and how AI can be used to enhance the audience's experience of narrative agency and choice. The findings suggest that while interactive fiction offers a degree of choice and agency, the options presented to the audience are ultimately predetermined and limit the degree of free will available to the audience. However, the study also highlights the potential for AI to create more complex and dynamic narratives in interactive fiction that offer a greater degree of narrative agency and choice to the audience. The research contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature of narrative agency and the ways in which it is constructed in interactive fiction, as well as highlights the importance of balancing free will and pre-scripted elements in designing engaging and satisfying interactive fiction experiences. Keywords: Interactive fiction, Bandersnatch, artificial intelligence, free will, narrative structure
Journal Article
On the Road Again: James Sallis’s Neo-Noir Fiction
James Sallis’s Death Will Have Your Eyes (1997), Drive (2005), and Driven (2012) comprise a triad of neo-noir narratives that exploit but also undercut the American archetype of the open road as a mythic space of possibility. Like picaresque antiheroes, the protagonists of these minimalist novels find themselves caught up in webs of suspicion and pursuit that they can evade only by recourse to perpetual movement. In the course of their peripatetic journeys the main characters find temporary escape from victimization, but ultimately they know only the grey and depleted horizons of landscapes already traversed. In this regard Sallis’s neo-noir fiction reveals an affinity to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006).
Journal Article
The Existentialist Contradiction in David Foster Wallace: How Wallace’s Sociology Illuminates the Contradiction in Wallace’s Ethics
This essay argues that Wallace’s non-fiction presents a sociology that constitutes the foundation of Wallace’s literary project. By tracing the influences of Wallace’s sociology and by contrasting Wallace’s non-fictional works with those of Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Christopher Lasch, this essay provides a necessary contribution to an adequate critique of the foundation of Wallace’s literary ethics. Finally, the analysis proposes that an existentialist contradiction pervades Wallace’s work. This contradiction revolves around the problem of free will, and it characterizes a particularly strong wave of contemporary western ethics.
Journal Article
Trope analysis and folk intuitions
This paper outlines a new method for identifying folk intuitions to complement armchair intuiting and experimental philosophy (X-Phi), and thereby enrich the philosopher’s toolkit. This new approach—trope analysis—depends not on what people report their intuitions to be but rather on what they have made and engaged with; I propose that tropes in fiction (‘you can’t change the past’, ‘a foreknown future isn’t free’ and so forth) reveal which theories, concepts and ideas we find intuitive, repeatedly and en masse. Imagination plays a dual role in both existing methods and this new approach: it enables us to create the scenarios that elicit our intuitions, and also to mentally represent them. The method I propose allows us to leverage the imagination of the many rather than the few on both counts—scenarios are both created and consumed by the folk themselves.
Journal Article
TOLKIEN'S UNIQUE RECEPTION OF PYTHAGOREAN ‘DISSONANCE’ IN THE AINULINDALË OF THE SILMARILLION
This article is about J. R. R. Tolkien's adaptation of Pythagorean musical elements in the ‘Song of the Ainur’ of the Silmarillion. It details Tolkien's use of Pythagorean dissonance, along with what that amounts to in terms of musical theory, and explores the epistemological origins of the concept and how it found its way into this work of fiction. On the latter point, Platonism, Neoplatonism, and early Christian theology are considered. This includes the likes of Prudentius, pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, and Aquinas, among others. The article observes that Tolkien has deliberately chosen a somewhat esoteric element of Pythagorean musical theory, albeit highly relevant to his own historical context, in order to explore concepts of morality along with the traditional, Christian conundrum of predestination vs. free will.
Journal Article