This essay briefly sets out some of the main themes of Monika Fludernik’s path-breaking monograph and goes on to present the eight articles by the contributors. Among the topics covered are from the natural to naturalization, competing conceptions of experientiality, the role of diachronicity in reading, experientiality in factual narratives and experientiality in posthuman narratives.

How do women travelling the colonial frontier create a feminine, and potentially less hierarchical type of modernity? And how does Neo-Victorian fiction explore gendered and racialized types of modernity through the use of travel? Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) represesnts the quest for a postcolonial and feminine modernity through the trope of the woman traveler, worker, storyteller and entrepreneur. In particular, protagonists Anna Whetherell and Lydia Wells oppose the highly racist and sexist societies of gold rush frontier towns of the 1860s New Zealand through solitary travel on foot, by sea and across textual layers. This paper argues that such independent solitary women travelers stand for a new representation of white women in colonial contexts and challenge traditional categories of Victorian femininity, such as the dichotomous opposition between the Angel in the House and the fallen woman. By shifting across white femininity and queer Chinese identities (in Anna’s case), and by embracing a masculine, capitalist model (for Lydia), Catton’s heroines survive, on their own, as members of a minority in the communities of white, male miners. The two women thus embody new types of femininity and, while placing themselves outside the colonial hierarchy, they question the social structure, the exploitation of the Other (the woman, the Chinese) and set an example for a more viable and more equal society born out of colonial settlement. Finally, while shaping modernity through their female gaze and a free way of travelling the peripheries, the two women also accomplish their own Bildung process and, forgers of their own fortunes, symbolize the shift from masculine, imperial modernity to a feminine, neo-Victorian, postcolonial paradigm.

Yaakov Mascetti is lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. His work focuses on metaphysical poetry, early-modern conceptions of sight and cognition, the role of occultism in the rise of modernity, and definitions of femininity in early-modern English literature. He recently completed his first book on Humanist sign-theory and Protestant sacramentalism in early-modern English religious lyrics, and is now working on a new project on shifting conceptions of truth and sight in early-modern and enlightenment England.

In addition to broadening the range of examples with which narratology deals, Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology draws on cognitive theory to describe the ways in which readers process language to make even highly anomalous texts narrative –an important contribution. But her emphasis on readers’ success in “naturalizing” the apparently deviant or nonsensical makes it difficult to find ways of resisting critical misreadings that conceal the potential force of disruptive elements. Naturalization is not a wholly benign operation.

This article examines the view of the Brazilian Jewish author Clarice Lispector on the triangular relation between Jewishness, the Shoah and the chosenness of the Jewish people by combining biographical evidence with a close reading of her short story “Perdoando Deus.” Through an analysis of allegorical motifs, “Perdoando Deus” emerges as a historical, philosophical, and personal (anti)theological process. As such, this short story, mostly overlooked due to its obscurity, marks a watershed in Lispector’s oeuvre in terms of the recognition of her Jewishness — which she defines not as a religion but as an ethnic category and a collectivity of survivors.

Lucy Strange, the protagonist of Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004), can be seen as an early example of a global citizen. Travelling between the periphery and the center of the British Empire, Lucy repeatedly makes sea-journeys that last for months — a kind of journey that no longer exists in today’s world. Although this travelling helps shape her identity, it also makes her incapable of calling any one location her home. This article discusses the portrayal of Lucy as a modern 19^th-century woman who is simultaneously a 21^st century, neo-Victorian creation. It analyzes the links between femininity and voyages in the novel. Lucy’s travels serve to depict the movement of women and mothers across the sea as an inherent part of globalization, writing them into what was often seen as a development led by male adventurers and businessmen. Jones presents Lucy as a young woman at the edge of modernity. Nevertheless, Lucy’s lack of rootedness also questions whether travelling requires different — more modern — constructions of female identity.

The article traces the theoretical reader position implicitly constructed in Fludernik’s natural narratology. Fludernik’s diachronic method assumes a conceptual reader figure trained by the texts she encounters while making her way in diachronic succession from oral to the written, ending up with literary deconstruction of language and narrative. Along the way, she gains the required reading strategies and cognitive parameters, finally being able to make narrative sense of — narrativize — (almost) any representation. I claim that this non-empirical (and as such, “non-natural”) reader position marks the cornerstone of postclassical narratology, suggesting a necessary departure from the synchrony of “natural” cognitive parameters. Eventually I will ask if diachronic narratology, as originally initiated by Fludernik’s book, has the potential to deal also with the synchronicity of narrative sense-making through its manifestly non-natural reader construct.

Maria Mäkelä is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Currently she is running two research projects, Dangers of Narrative (2017–2020) and the research consortium Instrumental Narratives (2018–2022). In 2018, she is Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University. She is co-editor of Narrative, Interrupted (De Gruyter, 2012) and Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (Routledge, 2015). She has published on consciousness, voice, and realism across media, the literary tradition of adultery, authorial ethos, and critical applications of postclassical narratologies.

updated on September 26, 2018