Kate O'Brien and the Fiction of Identity: Sex, Art and Politics in Mary Lavelle and Other Writings
The Rescue explores the uses of theatrical metaphors to signal moments of nonrecognition in the exotic and romantic setting of Lingard’s Malay Archipelago. The final chapter, on The Rover, argues that the romantic characters are left to haunt an isolated, post-romantic world; Peyrol’s death, however, ensures that romance will reappear in material and narrative form to those left behind. The title of the study derives from Conrad’s claim that The Rescue is “the swan song of romance”. The suggestion is that there is no more to be said on the subject. Baxter questions this assumption, demonstrating that romance will endure because it doubts its own death. Conrad’s fiction reveals its limitations and even its own disintegration. Fiction, like mankind, is vulnerable because it has a precarious hold on life. It is only in The Rover that narrative can be seen as a consolatory action. In the absence of the hero, heroism emerges. There is consolation in the reconstruction of a past that is lost to us. While the renewal of romantic narrative can never bring back that lost past, it demonstrates the arbitrariness of the present. Based on wide reading and an acute sense of cultural history, Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance offers many original interpretations of Conrad’s works and a new appreciation of the ways in which he continued to experiment, even in his later fiction.
These Irish Investments: Money as an Organizing Principle in As Music and Splendour (1958)
Since Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour (1958) follows the careers of two Irish opera singers in the 1880s as they travel from Paris to Rome, to Milan, to Florence and Naples and beyond, it is ...
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited