Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Creaturely Shifts : Contemporary Animal Crossings through the Alluring Trace of the Romantic Sublime
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'This paper considers the transformative use of the sublime aesthetic in two contemporary Gothic novels, Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969) and Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). My exploration begins with the Romantic sublime, defined here as a mode of perception created through art that is concerned with the awe-inspiring, the frightening and the ineffable. Sublime metamorphosis extends the Romantic sublime alongside the more fragmentary postmodern sublime through posthumanism. Sublime metamorphoses occur in these two speculative novels when their protagonists pause in the moment of sublime arrest in response to nonhuman others. Such moments create new embodied potentialities that may reshape human/nonhuman relations. When Carter’s central protagonist Marianne considers her position in moments of terror, she improves her marginalised status. She pushes through the boundaries of her species and the limitations of an injured world of mutation and brutality, evolving, in the end, to Tiger Lady. In Wood’s novel, the entrapped Yolanda shifts from prey to predator to a new kind of self-determination that frees her from her human confinement. Yolanda’s friend Verla follows with her own radical transmutation. In these novels sublime metamorphosis resists ideas of human exceptionality and troubles typologies that separate humans from other creatures. This approach may be of interest to creative writers concerned with more generative relations with the world’s nonhuman creatures. My own creative efforts are learning from such work.' (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon TEXT Special Issue Website Series Romanticism and Contemporary Australian Writing : Legacies and Resistances no. 41 October 2017 12933044 2017 periodical issue

    'Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literary and artistic conceptions may seem far removed from the complex, global materialism that characterises contemporary culture, yet many ideas associated with historical Romanticism continue to influence the study and practice of creative writing throughout the world. This is partly because of the power and diversity of the Romantic legacy – so many fine writers are associated with Romanticism – and partly because Romanticism continues to inform the contemporary zeitgeist in a variety of complex ways. J.M. Fitzgerald contends that one of Romanticism’s best known works, William Wordsworth’s The Prelude ushered in the idea ‘that each individual constructs themselves … and that each individual’s story is his or her own unique[ly]’ (2002: 101). This fundamental and far-reaching idea of the (more-or-less) separate self remains with us, however much it may have been reinflected by postmodernity.' (Editorial introduction)

    2017
Last amended 28 Aug 2024 11:22:57
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