Buckton, Oliver

The South Seas Writing of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals a crisis in colonialism: Stevenson saw how colonial exploitation of natives for their island resources was corrupting the morality of imperial countries, while colonialism also brought disease and conflicts to the remote margins of empire. Stevenson exposes how unfounded was Victorian imperial ideology of cultural and religious superiority. He objects to the colonial powers' policies that tend to wipe out native cultures. His travel narratives and fiction not only voice this objection to colonial usurpation, but also stand up for the native peoples who strive to establish a literary voice of their own. In this way Stevenson anticipates the post-colonial age when colonized peoples fight for their independence, and when their own voices help establish their legitimate cultural heritage.

There is deep personal and artistic empathy for T. S. Eliot's modernist poetry in Doris Lessing's early novels and two later autobiographies. As Eliot did, Lessing uses the modernist doctrine of difficulty to portray the education and development of the writer-artist as a long, problematic process, involving prodigious, rigorous, energetic reading efforts, and self-conscious reflexive writing. Lessing also frequently quotes other authors, and she thoroughly uses subverted allusive schemes and extrusive structural complications to render realism in her narratives more vividly. Her mature aesthetic sets at a distance a sense of personal displacement, exile, and uncertain cultural identity and echoes Eliot's dictum that the Poet needed to be impersonal and to seek the significant emotion. Her search for moral intelligibility by narrative framing that combines both fiction and autobiography in autobiographical space or 'pact' may also arguably be modernist.

Considering the fervent Catholicism of convert G. K. Chesterton's societal views, his championship of Charles Dickens, a seemingly avid non-Catholic, may appear misplaced. Upon examination, however, the wisdom of Chesterton's rationale will manifest itself; in fact, rereading Dickens's Dombey and Son through the eyes of Chesterton's Orthodoxy will prove Dickens himself to be a champion, albeit an inadvertent one, of the very core of Catholicism. Presenting Florence Dombey as a heroine, as a paragon of religious strength, and as a path to salvation for her misguided father, I present her not only as Dickens's literary and moral contribution to readers of his age, but also as a symbolic Marian model to readers of any age. Through a Chestertonian reading of Dombey and Son, two things become overwhelmingly apparent: Dickens's own "orthodoxy" and his powerful optimism.

The common intellectual ground shared by Mikhail Bakhtin and Georges Bataille routinely suffers from a dearth of consideration. Yet Bakhtin's celebrated "carnival" writings are invested in undeniably Bataillean interests---death, excess, transgression, heterogeneity. Both Bakhtin and Bataille inherited the Wagnerian Nietzsche's nostalgia for effusive communal ritual, collapsing the boundaries between bodies and the boundary between life and death (this is "transgression," eroticism , according to Bataille; too often transgression is spoken of in terms of stealing a pornographic magazine). Thus bodies in Bakhtin and Bataille are "open," mainly in comic and inglorious ways, and death is the cynosure of festival. Death for Bakhtin and Bataille is not negative; it is "sacred" (Bataille's term), serving as communal cement and a celebration of life. Not, however, life in the sense of 401k's and insurance. Rather, life as exuberance and generosity ("sovereignty" according to Bataille).

The concept of time in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey is examined from social, biological, psychological, and spiritual perspectives. In Arthur C. Clarke's novel, his version of the film, he treats the nature of time as a cyclical process. He eventually explains that the notion of physical time is non-existent or an impermanent illusion. While Clarke's novel interprets time, the film projects and manipulates the nature of space and time, which spectators may experience as reality. Time's direction can be viewed or experienced as a cycle from an Eastern philosophical perspective. However, a Western interpretation requires a compromise between two separate directions of time, one as a cycle, the other as linear. The film and novel ultimately negates the direction of linear time through the appearance of the mysterious monolith, which transcends and reincarnates human beings.

G. K. Chesterton is known for writing detective fiction, his Father Brown crime stories being his most popular works. Chesterton, however, wrote more than a hundred books. The Man Who Was Thursday is Chesterton's fictional masterpiece. The novel reveals the author as a creative genius, at least equal to now-better-known writers of his time, such as Conrad and Kafka. Chesterton tells detective Gabriel Syme's tale in the novel, which also exudes an autobiographical flavor, giving fragments of Chesterton's own story of his escape from fin-de-siecle pessimism. As literary art, the novel merges the detective genre with the genre of the fantastic. The result is a wild tale of fun and romance, with more than a little philosophical argument in the mix. Using Tzvetan Todorov's theory of structuralism, I unveil the many masks of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. The outcome is a better understanding of G. K. Chesterton's rebellion into orthodoxy.

Wilkie Collins (1824--1889) changed the direction of English fiction during his lifetime and created the prototype for a new and lasting genre. "The Diary of Anne Rodway," The Dead Secret, The Woman in White, No Name, and The Law and the Lady all exemplify his skill in crafting tales of mystery and detection, and feature women as detectives. He was one of the most feminist of Victorian writers in his portrayal of women as intelligent, assertive and resourceful, as well as in his attacks on gender and class prejudices. His innovative plot devices established him as the founder of English detective fiction. Collins's interest in social and legal reforms, especially of the laws relating to marriage and family, informs his novels foregrounding women as sleuths. Female incursions into masculine domains of law and detection represent a bold departure from convention; his transgressive heroines challenge stereotypes and succeed where men have failed.

Published in 1895, Jude the Obscure was Thomas Hardy's last novel. With the approach of the turn-of-the-century, Victorian England experienced profound changes in its social structure. The writing of novels about oppressed women was popular in the late nineteenth century. As the narrative voice in Jude, Thomas Hardy sought to challenge the current conditions for women and men in society. His novel explores the reality of these conditions, and his characters, namely Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley, show readers what can happen when people are unable to adapt to the laws and conventions set forth by society.