MFS: Modern Fiction Studies

Review of Modern Fiction Studies

The Times Literary Supplement
4 Nov. 2005, page 21+
by Michael Caines

Taken together, the pictures that grace recent issues of Modern Fiction Studies, a journal based at Purdue University in Indiana, tell their own curious story. They include film stills taken from Hollywood adaptations of Lord of the Rings and The Beach; Vanessa Bell's 1912 portrait of Virginia Woolf; Max Weber's Cubist "Rush Hour, New York"; and, with reference to Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon, a map detailing a chunk of the American East Coast. These images accurately intimate the journal's range. MFS has Henry James sharing the house of fiction with Alex Garland, Margaret Atwood, and Jack Kerouac. The introduction to an issue on the theme of "Racechange and the fictions of identity" warns that the ensuing variations will extend to "social, cultural, biological, and ideological fictions that are manifested in and around literary texts" as well as "narrative literature." "Narrative literature" remains, nonetheless, at the core of MFS's concerns. A single issue treats J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy to racial, mythological, and homosocial readings. Ken Cooper astutely reassesses Jonathan Livingston Seagull, championing its prescience about the "emergent information economy," "excruciating as its cheesy moments may be." The book reviews run the gamut from Asian-American women writers to Zora Neale Hurston. The most bemusing cover features a young F. Scott Fitzgerald dressed as a chorus girl, for the purposes of advertising the Princeton Triangle Club's "new musical play" ("He is also the author of the lyrics").

Although relatively little will be found in MFS's pages about modern fiction in languages other than English, this summer's issue on "Modernism's Jews/Jewish Modernism" provides a few excellent exceptions, with its articles on Proust, Joseph Roth, and the "Yiddishisms" of Abraham Cahan's writings in English. There is nothing in its rubric about submissions to deter such contributions, and the journal could do with more on these other moderns to complement what it has to say about American literature in its themed issues ("Sexuality and Narrative," "Technocriticism and Hypernarrative," "Gothic and Modernism").

Not that MFS gives "racechange," for one thematic example, short shrift. On the contrary, this is a particularly successful issue. Susan Gubar, whose 1997 book lends this issue its name, offers a polemical postscript that should be read first, on the "heirs of minstrelsy's stereotypes," those "brutalities of a racist past." Scott Fitzgerald crops up again, this time as the author of The Great Gatsby-a novel about a man who sheds his skin. "The scandal of Jay Gatsby's success," writes Meredith Goldsmith, "can only be described it seems, through a series of ethnic and racial analogies."

The most intriguing of these pieces is Jinny Huh's account of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Africa. It was there that the creator of Sherlock Holmes met the great abolitionist and former slave Henry Highland Garnet, on a steamer during a voyage of 1881-2, and took many photographs for the British Journal of Photography, including one of a native prince ("His highness did me the honour of informing me that it was wonderfully unlike him"). No mean detective herself, Huh offers convincing evidence for rereading "The Yellow Face," a Holmes story first published in the Strand Magazine in 1893, in the context of his African travels of the previous decade. It was in this period, no doubt, that he evolved certain ideas about detection that he could not have learned from Dr. Bell in Edinburgh.

Race has emerged as a presiding concern of this journal, with its issues on "Queer Fictions of Race" and "South African fiction after Apartheid," as well as a forthcoming special issue on Toni Morrison (echoing MFS's response to Morrison's Nobel Prize of 1993). Issues like these profit from "intersectional approaches" to modern fiction-readings, that is, along parallel, complementary theoretical lines. Yet this is very much the creation of the past few years. In the beginning, MFS was predominantly a journal about dead white males-Joseph Conrad, Henry James, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence-although it also managed some live white males (J. D. Salinger, Graham Greene) and the odd female (Iris Murdoch, in 1969 and 2001).

Most consistently, special issues of MFS indicate the continued dedication of American academics to one particular dead white upper-class female, Virginia Woolf, to whom four separate issues have been devoted, from 1956 ("early recognition," according to Laura Doyle) to 2004 (edited by Laura Doyle). These have included checklists of Woolf scholarship and criticism that form a useful whole, and the 1992 issue reprints some previously "unrecorded" TLS reviews with a note by B. J. Krikpatrick.

The latest in this series within a series is fascinating in the offbeat combinations it offers: Mark Hussey's essay on "Mrs Thatcher and Mrs Woolf," Grantham versus Bloomsbury; Scott Cohen on Woolf's visit to the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, the inspiration for her brilliant essay "Thunder at Wembley"; and Emily Delgarno on Woolf reading Tolstoy. It is Urmila Seshagirir who provides this issue of Modern Fiction Studies with its finishing touch, in the form of "Orienting Virginia Woolf," an essay arguing that "some of Woolf's radical literary innovations arise from a material and a formalist politics of race." Who would have guessed it?