Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware
Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2010), 35-46

Anita Brookner’s narrative strategies as a fiction-writer grow directly out of her practices in her other profession as an art historian. Like her greater predecessor, Jane Austen—a moralist wrongly categorized as a miniaturist—Brookner both creates her own world and connects to a larger world in multiple ways. One of the chief linkages occurs through repeated evocations of the heritage of Western visual art. Her novels take place in a psychological landscape that opens limitlessly into an allegorical world through references, in particular, to European painting. Brookner thus ennobles and dignifies the tragic-comic sufferings of her characters as they re-enact the recognizable visual tropes found in images by Bellini, Dürer, Goya, and other masters. Unfortunately though, Brookner remains best known to the public through the continued circulation of the film version of Hotel du Lac, a 1986 BBC television adaptation that removes her work from the broader contexts of art history and moral allegory and confines it instead to the narrow realms of travelogue and social comedy.

Ann V. Norton, Saint Anselm College
Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2010), 19-33

Anita Brookner’s novels explore moral, social, and gender issues similarly to her great influences Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her narratology, however, more exhaustively and less decisively analyzes humanity’s limited comprehension and consciousness, reflecting an uncertain postmodern world. Brookner’s fascination, like Wharton’s, with women’s competition for men and the choices some make to win or lose precludes overt feminist themes and emphasizes a Darwinian survival ethic rather than traditional virtue. Brookner also conveys the Jamesian tragedy of lives unfulfilled through misperception and fear, and she insistently returns to themes of innocence betrayed and the disillusion of experience. James’s and Wharton’s characters, however, live among people who witness and appreciate their probity, and their protagonists do not envy or think fortunate those who lack integrity. Conversely, Brookner’s characters believe that their moral compass isolates and defeats them, a failure that happens, significantly, outside other characters’ awareness. Still, Brookner’s morality ultimately resembles Wharton’s and James’s, since her novels, even if unintentionally, praise empathetic, imaginatively introspective characters.

Dianne Johnson, University of South Carolina
Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2009), 337-355

This essay explores the significance of literary representations of African American hair as a marker of identity and cultural legacy. By situating an examination of hair within a long-ranging tradition of children’s literature from Jessie Fauset and W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Brownies’ Book, to more recent children’s books, Camille Yarbrough’s Cornrow (1979), Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991), and Carolivia Herron’s Nappy Hair, (1997), among others, the essay demonstrates how descriptions of hair embrace racial pride and, at times, enforce perceived standards of racial inferiority. It argues that African American characters relations with their hair illustrates a dynamic of acceptance and rejection of external, white understandings of beauty, which is also associated with belonging to more than one culture, African and Western. The essay further argues that more recent depictions of black hair in children’s literature have directly challenged the negative, or conflicted, perceptions of African American beauty by celebrating its difference.

Joyce Green MacDonald, University of Kentucky
Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2009), 315-336

Since the publication of her first novel in 1979, Gayl Jones’s fiction has consistently imagined the history of African Americans as extending beyond the borders of the United States. Her most recent novel, Mosquito (1999), takes up her familiar pan-Americanism as it recounts the story of a black woman who works to smuggle political refugees from Mexico and Central America to the United States. But Mosquito augments Jones’s familiar sense of the hemispheric shaping of black American culture with a transatlantic element, as it exploits the rich cross-cultural valences of Shakespeare’s Othello. This essay argues that the tragedy informs Mosquito’s deep concern with the erasure of deeply drawn borders between cultures, nations, races, and registers of language. The novel reorients readers’ understanding of the play, inviting us to imagine its significance to the construction of the identities of African American women, rather than primarily of African American men, as has been the focus of much nationalist recuperation of this Shakespearean text.