Academic literature on the topic 'Home invasion – Fiction'

This paper examines the struggle of American-Muslim women to negotiate their identities in literary works published after the invasion of Iraq (20 March-1 May 2003). In this case, I examine Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008) in order to investigate how Jarrar both negotiates her identity through folktales, naming, and rites of passages. By engaging with postcolonial studies, and working within the frameworks of cultural studies, this paper aims to investigate aesthetic strategies that Jarrar (Egyptian-Palestinian-American) deploys in her writing. Jarrar also respects her Muslim intellectual forebears, such as Muhammad al-Ghazali (Iran), Muhyiddin al-Arabi (Spain), and Jalaluddin Rumi (Turkey), by emulating their tendency to combine in their writings allusions to the Qur’an, ancient storytelling traditions, and contemporary social issues in order to engage with their readers. In doing so, Jarrar uses folktales, naming, and rites of passages to question American belonging and eurocentrism in her fiction. These techniques enable Jarrar to reveal her multiple and complex identities and work to represent both her pride in being Muslims and her desire to claim her rights as American citizens of Muslim descent. Keywords: Randa Jarrar, A Map of Home, folktales, Rites of Passages, US-Muslim women’s literature Artikel ini membahas perjuangan perempuan Amerika-Muslim untuk menegosiasikan identitas mereka dalam karya sastra yang diterbitkan setelah invasi ke Irak (20 Maret-1 Mei 2003). Dalam hal ini, saya meneliti Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home (2008) untuk menyelidiki bagaimana Jarrar menegosiasikan identitasnya dan menentang orientalisme di sepanjang novelnya. Dengan menggunakan studi postkolonial dan studi budaya, artikel ini bertujuan untuk menyelidiki strategi estetika yang Jarrar (Mesir-Palestina-Amerika) gunakan dalam tulisannya. Jarrar juga menghormati leluhur intelektual Muslimnya, seperti Muhammad al-Ghazali (Iran), Muhyiddin al-Arabi (Spanyol), dan Jalaluddin Rumi (Turki), dengan meniru kecenderungan mereka untuk menggabungkan dalam tulisan-tulisan mereka kiasan Alquran, kuno tradisi mendongeng, dan masalah sosial kontemporer untuk menarik pembaca mereka. Dalam hal ini, Jarrar juga menggunakan dongeng, penamaan, dan ritus-ritus untuk mempertanyakan kepemilikan Amerika dan Eurosentrisme dalam fiksinya. Teknik-teknik ini memungkinkan Jarrar untuk mengungkapkan identitasnya yang beragam dan kompleks yang berfungsi untuk menunjukkan kebanggaannya sebagai Muslim dan keinginannya untuk mengklaim hak-haknya sebagai warga negara Amerika keturunan Muslim. Kata kunci: Randa Jarrar, A Map of Home, cerita rakyat, ritus peralihan, sastra Muslimah-Amerika

Celebrities playing fictionalized versions of themselves in commercials, campaigns, and video spots have become an increasingly viral phenomenon. The George Clooney commercials for Nespresso are circulated and promoted on various media platforms, segments from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon are released on NBC.com and shared on YouTube, and some videos are explicitly created to go viral and even published on social media sites. In this article, I draw on recent work in fictionality studies and studies of virality to investigate how the celebrity trend of ‘vitafiction’ possesses a viral potential. In vitafictional performances, the relationship between fiction and reality is thematized through a concurrent surplus of fictionality and biographical details, which invites recipients to negotiate between the celebrity’s performance and the receiver’s media cultural knowledge. Taking vitafictional performances in two online circulated spots as case studies – ‘Bono rides a bike with Jimmy Fallon’, a spot for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, and Peter Jackson’s Facebook video post ‘Home Invasion’, a video that thematizes Jackson’s role as director of an episode of Doctor Who – this article demonstrates how the equivocality that is central to the vitafictional performance comprises a force that prompts receivers to circulate the vitafictional message. It is argued that the mediatization of society and the virality that this brings about create new possibilities for the impact of this kind of celebrity self-fashioning.

Readings of films involving alien invasions do not take into account the fact that in many science fiction films, notably 'E. T', aliens are benign and friendly, are trapped in human societies, and desire above all to return to their homelands. A key to understanding such good aliens is the idea of the 'Indian', a figure widely used in the US to encode ideas about home, belonging and identity, often through the deployment of New Age discourses.

Attention is paid in the article to the landmark event of modern Ukrainian culture – the book celebrating its anniversary in 2024 – Ivan Bahrianyi’s novel the Tiger Trappers and the rethinking, interpretation of this work in the modern Ukrainian artistic space, in particular in cinematographic and theatrical texts. This year, 80 years have passed since the world saw the adventure work with autobiographical elements, which resonated not only at home, but also abroad. And this is not surprising, because Tiger Trappers has been translated into many languages of the world and had a circulation of over a million copies. Ivan Bahrianyi has submitted to a wide audience a very Ukrainian in spirit and worldview action, which even today in the 21st century is able to interest young people with its truthfulness and insight, its thirst and desire for freedom. The film version of the Tiger Trappers novel, which has appeared in 1994 at the Ukrtelefilm studio is analysed in the investigation. A well-known figure of Ukrainian culture Rostyslav Synko is a director and screenwriter of the film. The film text is based on the original source, but there are also differences those testify not only to another time period, the other era in which the film was shot, but also to certain new accents, a new vision, a reinterpretation of Ivan Bahrianyi’s novel about the young aviator Hryhorii Mnohohrishnyi. According to the plan of the author of the film story has another name. He is called Andrii Chumak in the film. There are also the other details those differ in the novel and in the fictional strip of the same name. And this is quite natural, because it is about the author’s interpretation, reinterpretation of a well-known work. The film of the same name also draws the viewer’s attention to the two Ukraines of the main characters: to the distant, dreamed-of real Ukraine with Golden-topped Kyiv and to the Second Ukraine, which immigrants, exiles from their native land, have built for them in the Far East in the bloody 20th century. In our time, this motif acquires new shades, because again, already in the 21st century, there are Ukrainian immigrants, again there are people who are forced to seek refuge all over the world, escaping from the terrible Russian invasion. Will new immigrants be able to find their Second Ukraine? Will they be able to return to their homeland? Life will show... The interpretation of the novel in modern Ukrainian musical theater is considered. Last year the musical Tiger Trappers directed by Serhii Pavliuk has been released basing on the novel of the same name by Ivan Bahrianyi. This fact, without exaggeration, has become a landmark artistic event, which has success with the audience and favourable reviews of critics. It is emphasized in the article that when we see a finished cultural product of the Ukrainian artistic space, whether it is a film or a theatrical production, a musical, etc., based on a certain work of fiction, we realize that this is already an interpretation, a reinterpretation. So, we are already talking about the creation of a new cultural text – a film text, a theatrical text, a musical text, etc. The significance of modern theater and film art is understood. It is claimed that the mission of art today is exactly rehabilitation through art. An artistic product should give hope, show a happy version of the course of events. Faith in the victory of good over evil, glorification of love that does not pass away – all this should be present in modern theatrical, musical and film texts today. After all, there is a demand for such cultural products in the modern time slice of the 2020s.

The analogy of critical representation of the feminine issues prohibits the sustained continuation of the ideological manuscript of gender division in Pakistan. The Postcolonial nativity, the charisma of nationalism, the rigid concentration of aristocratic Westernization create a hard line between the social, cultural, and political identification of regional/national roles after the establishment of Pakistan. Bhabha (1994) reminds us that ‘postcoloniality is a salutary reminder of the persistent neo-colonial relations within new world order’(p.06). The structure of crucial gender boundaries is drawn in Pakistani society to promote the collective nationalistic consciousness in the wake of political achievements. Whereas, ‘the recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions’ (1994, p.09).This invasion confuses the ‘borders between home and world’ and combines the public and private to a more disorienting vision of life. This paper tries to recollect the gist of deformed gender rhetoric in the nationalistic restructuring of Pakistani society in Meatless Days by Sara Suleri. The paper concentrates on the artistic development in the course of the memoir to identify the irony of people as a dichotomy between the real and the fictional re-appropriation of Postcolonial Pakistan. Key Words: Feminism, Nationalistic consciousness, Gender-boundaries, Memoir, Irony, Postcolonial Pakistan.

Area studies, as a newly fashionable field of academic research, needs to recognize its less likely precedents if it is going to secure for itself a fresh start. The question of “desire” is relevant here because it indicates the less value-free aspects in its genealogy. As shown in Emma Bovary's embellished representation of Paris at her provincial home, an understanding of an area often reflects the particular needs and desires of the one who understands that area. Such restricted and restricting views of an area repeats itself outside the world of literary fictions, as is shown by the example of Guizot's picture of Europe in which his own country is given a privileged place as the very center of Western civilization itself. An instructive case showing the thin line between the projected desire of one who strives to know a geographical area and the scientific purity of the labor itself is further offered by Napoleon Bonaparte's heavy reliance on Orientalist scholarship in his invasion of Egypt. Moving further east from Egypt to China, we witness the denigrating remarks on China made by the great German thinkers of the past century, Hegel and Weber. Although their characterization of Chinese culture could find echoes in unbiased empirical research, they reveal all the same the trace of Europeans' desire to affirm their superiority over the supposedly inferior and false civilization of the East. Similarly, the Americans who divided the Korean peninsular at the 38th Parallel, with unquestioning confidence in their knowledge of the area and in the justice of their action, rightfully deserve their place in the tradition of Western area studies of serving the needs to dominate, control and exploit an objectified overseas territory. He assumed that words had kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a single direction, and that ideas retained their logic; and he ignored the fact that the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys. From these elements, however, genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles. — Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (Foucault 139–40).

Abstract British pre-First World War culture has often been described as militaristic. An Englishman’s Home, Guy du Maurier’s 1909 play about a German invasion of Britain, forms part of this picture. Yet the message of the play was not clear-cut, and Edwardian society reacted as much with bemusement and criticism to the idea that Britain could be invaded as with militaristic fervour. This article investigates the reactions to du Maurier’s play, and sets it in the context of the wider invasion-scare and future-war genre, a popular element in late Victorian and Edwardian culture. The play was quickly linked with a recruitment drive for the newly organised Territorial Force, and its success has been interpreted as a sign of increased British uncertainty, militarism and xenophobia. However, the play was also mocked, its success as a recruitment vehicle was uncertain, and the audience interpreted the play in different and often contradictory ways. The article offers a reinterpretation and a critical assessment of the pre-war period, showing that Edwardian society was not as militaristic or fearful of invasion as has previously been argued. It presents a new interpretation of invasion-scare and future-war fiction, and a new analysis of the question of pre-war militarism in Britain.

Over the last two decades the female forensic pathologist investigator has become a prominent figure in crime fiction. Her presence causes suspicion on a number of levels in the narrative and this article will examine the reasons for that suspicion and the manner in which it is presented in two texts: Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem and Tess Gerritsen’s The Sinner. Cornwell and Gerritsen are North American crime writers whose series of novels both feature female forensic pathologists who are deeply involved in homicide investigation. Cornwell’s protagonist is Dr Kay Scarpetta, then-Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Gerritsen’s is Dr Maura Isles, a forensic pathologist in the Boston Medical Examiner’s office. Their jobs entail attending crime scenes to assess bodies in situ, performing examinations and autopsies, and working with police to solve the cases.In this article I will first examine Western cultural attitudes towards dissection and autopsy since the twelfth century before discussing how the most recent of these provoke suspicion in the selected novels. I will further analyse this by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. I will then consider how female pathologist protagonists try to deflect their colleagues’ suspicion of their professional choices, drawing in part on Judith Butler’s ideas of gender as a performative category. I define ‘gender’ as the socially constructed roles, activities, attributes, and behaviours that Western culture considers appropriate for women and men, and ‘sex’ as the physical biological characteristics that differentiate women and men. I argue that the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed as suspicious in the chosen novels for her occupation of the abject space caused by her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist, her identification with the dead, and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles. Scholars such as Barthes, Rolls, and Grauby have approached detective fiction by focusing on intertextuality, the openness of the text, and the possibility of different meanings, with Vargas being one example of how this can operate; however, this article focuses on examining how the female forensic pathologist investigator is represented as suspicious in mainstream crime novels that attract a readership seeking resolution and closure.A significant part of each of these novels focuses on the corpse and its injuries as the site at which the search for truth commences, and I argue that the corpse itself, those who work most closely with it and the procedures they employ in this search are all treated with suspicion in the crime fiction in this study. The central procedures of autopsy and dissection have historically been seen as abominations, in some part due to religious views such as the belief of Christians prior to the thirteenth century that the resurrection of the soul required an intact body (Klaver 10) and the Jewish and Muslim edicts against disfigurement of the dead (Davis and Peterson 1042). In later centuries dissection was made part of the death sentence and was perceived “as an abhorrent additional post-mortem punishment” that “promised the exposure of nakedness, dismemberment, and the deliberate destruction of the corpse,” which was considered “a gross assault on the integrity and the identity of the body, and upon the repose of the soul” (Richardson 154). While now a mainstay of many popular crime narratives, the autopsy as a procedure in real life continues to appall much of the public (Klaver 18). This is because “the human body—especially the dead human body—is an object still surrounded by taboos and prohibitions” (Sawday 269). The living are also reluctant to “yield the subjecthood of the other-dead to object status” (Klaver 18), which often produces a horrified response from some families to doctors seeking permission to dissect for autopsy. According to Gawande, when doctors suggest an autopsy the victim’s family commonly asks “Hasn’t she been through enough?” (187). The forensic pathologists who perform the autopsy are themselves linked with the repugnance of the act (Klaver 9), and in these novels that fact combined with the characters’ willingness to be in close proximity with the corpse and their comfort with dissecting it produces considerable suspicion on the part of their police colleagues.The female sex of the pathologists in these novels causes additional suspicion. This is primarily because women are “culturally associated [...] with life and life giving” (Vanacker 66). While historically women were also involved in the care of the sick and the dead (Nunn and Biressi 200), the growth of medical knowledge and the subsequent medicalisation of death in Western culture over the past two centuries has seen women relegated to a stylised kind of “angelic ministry” (Nunn and Biressi 201). This is an image inconsistent with these female characters’ performance of what is perceived as a “violent ‘reduction’ into parts: a brutal dismemberment” (Sawday 1). Drawing on Butler’s ideas about gender as a culturally constructed performance, we can see that while these characters are biologically female, in carrying out tasks that are perceived as masculine they are not performing their traditional gender roles and are thus regarded with suspicion by their police colleagues. Both Scarpetta and Isles are aware of this, as illustrated by the interior monologue with which Gerritsen opens her novel:They called her the Queen of the Dead. Though no one ever said it to her face, Dr. Maura Isles sometimes heard the nickname murmured in her wake as she travelled the grim triangle of her job between courtroom and death scene and morgue. [...] Sometimes the whispers held a tremolo of disquiet, like the murmurs of the pious as an unholy stranger passes among them. It was the disquiet of those who could not understand why she chose to walk in Death’s footsteps. Does she enjoy it, they wonder? Does the touch of cold flesh, the stench of decay, hold such allure for her that she has turned her back on the living? (Gerritsen 6)The police officers’ inability to understand why Isles chooses to work with the dead leads them to wonder whether she takes pleasure in it, and because they cannot comprehend how a “normal” person could act that way she is immediately marked as a suspicious Other. Gerritsen’s language builds images of transgression: words such as murmured, wake, whispers, disquiet, unholy, death’s footsteps, cold, stench, and decay suggest a fearful attitude towards the dead and the abjection of the corpse itself, a topic I will explore shortly. Isles later describes seeing police officers cast uneasy glances her way, noting details that only reinforce their beliefs that she is an odd duck: The ivory skin, the black hair with its Cleopatra cut. The red slash of lipstick. Who else wears lipstick to a death scene? Most of all, it’s her calmness that disturbs them, her coolly regal gaze as she surveys the horrors that they themselves can barely stomach. Unlike them, she does not avert her gaze. Instead she bends close and stares, touches. She sniffs. And later, under bright lights in her autopsy lab, she cuts. (Gerritsen 7) While the term “odd duck” suggests a somewhat quaintly affectionate tolerance, it is contrasted by the rest of the description: the red slash brings to mind blood and a gaping wound perhaps also suggestive of female genitalia; the calmness, the coolly regal gaze, and the verb “surveys” imply detachment; the willingness to move close to the corpse, to touch and even smell it, and later cut it open, emphasise the difference between the police officers, who can “barely stomach” the sight, and Isles who readily goes much further.Kristeva describes the abject as that which is not one thing or another (4). The corpse is recognisable as once-human, but is no-longer; the body was once Subject, but we cannot make ourselves perceive it yet as fully Object, and thus it is incomprehensible and abject. I suggest that the abject is suspicious because of this “neither-nor” nature: its liminal identity cannot be pinned down, its meaning cannot be determined, and therefore it cannot be trusted. In the abject corpse, “that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight [...] that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything” (Kristeva 4), we see the loss of borders between ourselves and the Other, and we are simultaneously “drawn to and repelled” by it; “nausea is a biological recognition of it, and fear and adrenalin also acknowledge its presence” (Pentony). In these novels the police officers’ recognition of these feelings in themselves emphasises their assumptions about the apparent lack of the same responses in the female pathologist investigators. In the quote from The Sinner above, for example, the officers are unnerved by Isles’ calmness around the thing they can barely face. In Postmortem, the security guard who works for the morgue hides behind his desk when a body is delivered (17) and refuses to enter the body storage area when requested to do so (26) in contrast with Scarpetta’s ease with the corpses.Abjection results from “that which disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4), and by having what appears to be an unnatural reaction to the corpse, these women are perceived as failing to respect systems and boundaries and therefore are viewed as abject themselves. At the same time, however, the female characters strive against the abject in their efforts to repair the disturbance caused by the corpse and the crime of murder that produced it by locating evidence leading to the apprehension of the culprit. Ever-present and undermining these attempts to restore order is the evidence of the crime itself, the corpse, which is abject not only for its “neither-nor” status but also because it exposes “the fragility of the law” (Kristeva 4). In addition, these female pathologist characters’ sex causes abjection in another form through their “liminal status” as outsiders in the male hierarchy of law enforcement (Nunn and Biressi 203); while they are employed by it and work to maintain its dominance over law-breakers and society in general, as biological females they can never truly belong.Abjection also results from the blurring of boundaries between investigator and victim. Such blurring is common in crime fiction, and while it is most likely to develop between criminal and investigator when the investigator is male, when that investigator is female it tends instead to involve the victim (Mizejewski 8). In these novels this is illustrated by the ways in which the female investigators see themselves as similar to the victims by reason of gender plus sensibility and/or work. The first victim in Cornwell’s Postmortem is a young female doctor, and reminders of her similarities to Scarpetta appear throughout the novel, such as when Scarpetta notices the pile of medical journals near the victim's bed (Cornwell 12), and when she considers the importance of the woman's fingers in her work as a surgeon (26). When another character suggests to Scarpetta that, “in a sense, you were her once,” Scarpetta agrees (218). This loss of boundaries between self and not-self can be considered another form of abjection because the status and roles of investigator and victim become unclear, and it also results in an emotional bond, with both Scarpetta and Isles becoming sensitive to what lies in wait for the bodies. This awareness, and the frisson it creates, is in stark contrast to their previous equanimity. For example, when preparing for an autopsy on the body of a nun, Isles finds herself fighting extreme reluctance, knowing that “this was a woman who had chosen to live hidden from the eyes of men; now she would be cruelly revealed, her body probed, her orifices swabbed. The prospect of such an invasion brought a bitter taste to [Isles’s] throat and she paused to regain her composure” (Gerritsen 57). The language highlights the penetrative nature of Isles’s contact with the corpse through words such as revealed, orifices, probed, and invasion, which all suggest unwanted interference, the violence inherent in the dissecting procedures of autopsy, and the masculine nature of the task even when performed by a female pathologist. This in turn adds to the problematic issue here of gender as performance, a subject I will discuss shortly.In a further blurring of those boundaries, the female characters are often perceived as potential victims by both themselves and others. Critic Lee Horsley describes Scarpetta as “increasingly giv[ing] way to a tendency to see herself in the place of the victim, her interior self exposed and open to inspection by hostile eyes” (154). This is demonstrated in the novel when plot developments see Scarpetta’s work scrutinised (Cornwell 105), when she feels she does not belong to the same world as the living people around her (133), and when she almost becomes a victim in a literal sense at the climax of the novel, when the perpetrator breaks into her home to torture and kill her but is stopped by the timely arrival of a police officer (281).Similarly, Gerritsen’s character Isles comes to see herself as a possible victim in The Sinner. When it is feared that the criminal is watching the Boston police and Isles realises he may be watching her too, she thinks about how “she was accustomed to being in the eye of the media, but now she considered the other eyes that might be watching her. Tracking her. And she remembered what she had felt in the darkness at [a previous crime scene]: the prey’s cold sense of dread when it suddenly realises it is being stalked” (Gerritsen 222). She too almost becomes a literal victim when the criminal enters her home with intent to kill (323).As investigators, these characters’ sex causes suspicion because they are “transgressive female bod[ies] occupying the spaces traditionally held by a man” (Mizejewski 6). The investigator in crime fiction has “traditionally been represented as a marginalized outsider” (Mizejewski 11), a person who not only needs to think like the criminal in order to apprehend them but be willing to use violence or to step outside the law in their pursuit of this goal, and is regarded as suspicious as a result. To place a woman in this position then makes that investigator’s role doubly suspicious (Mizejewski 11). Judith Butler’s work on gender as performance provides a useful tool for examining this. Because “the various acts of gender create the gender itself” (Butler 522), these female characters are judged as woman or not-woman according to what they do. By working as investigators in the male-dominated field of law-enforcement and particularly by choosing to spend their days handling the dead in ways that involve the masculine actions of penetrating and dismembering, each has “radically crossed the limits of her gender role, with her choice of the most unsavoury and ‘unfeminine’ of professions” (Vanacker 65). The suspicion this attracts is demonstrated by Scarpetta being compared to her male predecessor who got on so well with the police, judges, and lawyers with whom she struggles (Cornwell 91). This sense of marginalisation and unfavourable comparison is reinforced through her recollections of her time in medical school when she was one of only four women in her class and can remember vividly the isolating tactics the male students employed against the female members (60). One critic has estimated the dates of Scarpetta’s schooling as putting her “on the leading edge of women moving into professionals schools in the early 1970s” (Robinson 97), in the time of second wave feminism, when such changes were not welcomed by all men in the institutions. In The Sinner, Isles wants her male colleagues to see her as “a brain and a white coat” (Gerritsen 175) rather than a woman, and chooses strategies such as maintaining an “icy professionalism” (109) and always wearing that white coat to ensure she is seen as an intimidating authority figure, as she believes that once they see her as a woman, sex will get in the way (175). She wants to be perceived as a professional with a job to do rather than a prospective sexual partner. The white coat also helps conceal the physical indicators of her sex, such as breasts and hips (mirroring the decision of the murdered nun to hide herself from the eyes of men and revealing their shared sensibility). Butler’s argument that “the distinction between appearance and reality [...] structures a good deal of populist thinking about gender identity” (527) is appropriate here, for Isles’s actions in trying to mask her sex and thus her gender declare to her colleagues that her sex is irrelevant to her role and therefore she can and should be treated as just another colleague performing a task.Scarpetta makes similar choices. Critic Bobbie Robinson says “Scarpetta triggers the typical distrust of powerful women in a male-oriented world, and in that world she seems determined to swaddle her lurking femininity to construct a persona that keeps her Other” (106), and that “because she perceives her femininity as problematic for others, she intentionally misaligns or masks the expectations of gender so that the masculine and feminine in her cancel each other out, constructing her as an androgyne” (98). Examples of this include Scarpetta’s acknowledgement of her own attractiveness (Cornwell 62) and her nurturing of herself and her niece Lucy through cooking, an activity she describes as “what I do best” (109) while at the same time she hides her emotions from her colleagues (204) and maintains that her work is her priority despite her mother’s accusations that “it’s not natural for a woman” (34). Butler states that “certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that expectation in some way” (527). Scarpetta’s attention to her looks and her enjoyment of cooking conform to a societal assumption of female gender identity, while her construction of an emotionless facade and focus on her work falls more in the area of expected male gender identity.These characters deliberately choose to perform in a specific manner as a way of coping and succeeding in their workplace: by masking the most overt signs of their sex and gender they are attempting to lessen the suspicion cast upon them by others for not being “woman.” There exists, however, a contradiction between that decision and the clear markers of femininity demonstrated on occasion by both characters, for example, the use by Isles of bright red lipstick and a smart Cleopatra haircut, and the performance by both of the “feminised role as caretaker of, or alignment with, the victim’s body” (Summers-Bremner 133). While the characters do also perform the more masculine role of “rendering [the body’s] secrets in scientific form” (Summers-Bremner 133), a strong focus of the novels is their emotional connection to the bodies and so this feminised role is foregrounded. The attention to lipstick and hairstyle and their overtly caring natures fulfill Butler’s ideas of the conventional performance of gender and may be a reassurance to readers about the characters’ core femininity and their resultant availability for romance sub-plots, however they also have the effect of emphasising the contrasting performative gender elements within these characters and marking them once again in the eyes of other characters as neither one thing nor another, and therefore deserving of suspicion.In conclusion, the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed in the chosen novels as suspicious for her involvement in the abject space that results from her comfort around and identification with the corpse in contrast to the revulsion experienced by her police colleagues; her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist where these roles are conventionally seen as masculine; and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles as she carries out her work. This, however, sets up a further line of inquiry about the central position of the abject in novels featuring female forensic pathologist investigators, as these texts depict this character’s occupation of the abject space as crucial to the solving of the case: it is through her ability to perform the procedures of her job while identifying with the corpse that clues are located, the narrative of events reconstructed, and the criminal identified and apprehended.ReferencesBarthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape. 1975. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal. 40.4 (1988): 519–31. 5 October 2011 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893›Cornwell, Patricia. Postmortem. London: Warner Books, 1994. Davis, Gregory J. and Bradley R. Peterson. “Dilemmas and Solutions for the Pathologist and Clinician Encountering Religious Views of the Autopsy.” Southern Medical Journal. 89.11 (1996): 1041–44. Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. London: Profile Books, 2003.Gerritsen, Tess. The Sinner. Sydney: Random House, 2003. Grauby, Francois. “‘In the Noir’: The Blind Detective in Bridgette Aubert’s La mort des bois.” Mostly French: French (in) detective fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.Horsley, Lee. Twentieth Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Klaver, Elizabeth. Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture. Albany: State U of NYP, 2005.Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.Mizejewski, Linda. “Illusive Evidence: Patricia Cornwell and the Body Double.” South Central Review. 18.3/4 (2001): 6–20. 19 March 2010. ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190350›Nunn, Heather and Anita Biressi. “Silent Witness: Detection, Femininity, and the Post Mortem Body.” Feminist Media Studies. 3.2 (2003): 193–206. 18 January 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1468077032000119317›Pentony, Samantha. “How Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection Works in Relation to the Fairy Tale and Post Colonial Novel: Angela Carter’s The Blood Chamber and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” Deep South. 2.3 (1996): n.p. 13 November 2011. ‹http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol2no3/pentony.html›Richardson, Ruth. “Human Dissection and Organ Donation: A Historical Background.” Mortality. 11.2 (2006): 151–65. 13 May 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576270600615351›Robinson, Bobbie. “Playing Like the Boys: Patricia Cornwell Writes Men.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 39.1 (2006): 95–108. 2 August 2010. ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00205.x/full›Rolls, Alistair. “An Uncertain Place: (Dis-)Locating the Frenchness of French and Australian Detective Fiction.” in Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.---. “What Does It Mean? Contemplating Rita and Desiring Dead Bodies in Two Short Stories by Raymond Carver.” Literature and Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. 18.2 (2008): 88-116. Sawday, Jonathon. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1996.Summers-Bremner, Eluned. “Post-Traumatic Woundings: Sexual Anxiety in Patricia Cornwell’s Fiction.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. 43 (2001): 131–47. Vanacker, Sabine. “V.I Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta: Creating a Feminist Detective Hero.” Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. Ed. Peter Messent. London: Pluto P, 1997. 62–87. Vargas, Fred. This Night’s Foul Work. Trans. Sian Reynolds. London: Harvill Secker, 2008.

Autumn is not only a gloriously colourful time of the year, it is a time when a plethora of children’s book related events and awards take place. Just see what is happening in the next few months:IBBY: “Silent Books: Final Destination Lampedusa” travelling exhibit In response to the international refugee crisis that began last year, the Italian arm of the International Board on Books for Young People has launched a travelling picture-book exhibit to support the first children’s library on the island of Lampedusa, Italy where many African and Middle Eastern refugees are landing. After stops in Italy, Mexico, and Austria, the exhibit is currently touring Canada. It premiered in Edmonton at the Stanley A. Milner Library in August. Next are three Vancouver locations: UBC Irving Barber Learning Centre (Oct. 1 to 23), Vancouver Public Library central branch (Oct. 8 to 18), and the Italian Cultural Centre (Oct. 10 to 22). Then the North York Central Library in Toronto from Nov. 2 to Dec 11. Recognizing Lampedusa island’s cultural diversity, the exhibit comprises exclusively wordless picture books from 23 countries, including three from Canada:“Hocus Pocus” by Sylvie Desrosiers & Rémy Simard’s (Kids Can Press), “Ben’s Big Dig” by Daniel Wakeman and Dirk van Stralen’s(Orca Book Publishers)“Ben’s Bunny Trouble” also by Wakeman and van Stralen (Orca Book Publishers). Other books are drawn from an honour list selected by a jury of experts from the 2015 Bologna Children’s Book Fair including Ajubel’s “Robinson Crusoe” (Spain), Ara Jo’s “The Rocket Boy”(Korea), and Madalena Matoso’s “Todos Fazemos Tudo” (Switzerland), among others. The full catalogue can be viewed online.TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.Next year’s TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will take place from May 7-14, 2016. Thirty Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and storytellers will be touring across Canada visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres. Visit the TD Book Week site (www.bookweek.ca) to find out who will be touring in your area and the types of readings and workshops they will be giving. If your school or library is interested in hosting a Book Week visitor, you can apply online starting in mid-October.Shakespeare Selfie CBC Books will once again be running the Shakespeare Selfie writing challenge in April 2016. Shakespeare took selfies all the time but instead of a camera, he used a quill. And instead of calling them "selfies," they were called "soliloquies."The challenge: Write a modern-day soliloquy or monologue by a Shakespearean character based on a prominent news, pop culture or current affairs event from the last year (April 2015-April 2016). It can be in iambic pentameter or modern syntax with a word count from 200 to 400 words. There are two age categories: Grades 7-9 and 10-12. Details at: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/10/the-2016-shakespeare-selfie-writing-challenge-for-students.html Awards:The winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, celebrating Jewish literature and culture in Canada, have been announced. Amongst the nine awards is one for Youth Literature which was awarded to Suri Rosen for “Playing with Matches” (ECW Press). See all the award winners here: http://www.cjlawards.ca/.The Canadian Children's Book Centre administers several awards including the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. This year’s winners will be announced on November 18, 2015. http://www.bookcentre.ca/awardThe Fitzhenry Family Foundation has revealed the winners of its Lane Anderson Awards for the best Canadian science books published in the previous year. Selections are made based on a title’s pertinence to science in today’s world and the author’s ability to relate scientific issues to everyday life. Prolific Halifax kids’ science writer L.E. Carmichael was awarded the YA prize for “Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild” (Ashby-BP Publishing), about using forensic science to fight crimes against animals. Uxbridge, Ontario–based environmental journalist Stephen Leahy received the adult prize for “Your Water Footprint” (Firefly Books), which examines human usage of the valuable natural resource. http://laneandersonaward.ca/The Edmonton Public Library has named Sigmund Brouwer (author and Rock & Roll Literacy Show host) as the winner (by public vote) of Alberta Reader’s Choice Award. Sigmund’s “Thief of Glory” (WaterBrook Press) is about a young boy trying to take care of his family in the aftermath of the 1942 Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. The prize awards $10,000 to an Alberta-based author of a work of excellent fiction or narrative non-fiction. http://www.epl.ca/alberta-readers-choiceHarperCollins Canada, the Cooke Agency, and the University of British Columbia have announced the shortlist of the annual HarperCollins Publishers/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction awarded to students and alumni of UBC’s creative writing program, and offers the winner literary representation by the Cooke Agency and a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada.“Between the Wind and Us” by Iranian-Canadian writer Nazanine Hozar, the story of a young abandoned girl set during the political unrest of 1953–1979 Iran.“Learning to Breathe” by B.C.-based Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel about a Caribbean teenager’s struggle to establish herself in a new city and home life.“At The Top of the Wall, Alight” by Sudbury, Ontario, author Natalie Morrill, which follows a Viennese Jew separated from his family during the Second World War. An early version of this novel was previously nominated for the award.Novelist and University of Guelph writing professor, Thomas King, and L.A.-based author, graphic novelist, and musician, Cecil Castellucci, have been named winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for excellence in Canadian literature of the fantastic. Castellucci won in the YA category for “Tin Star” (Roaring Brook/Raincoast), the first novel in a planned series about a teenager who struggles to survive parent-less in a space station where she is the only human, and which played scene to a brutal assault that haunts her memory. King won in the adult category for his novel “The Back of the Turtle” (HarperCollins Canada), for which he also received a Copper Cylinder Award from the Sunburst Society last week. The book follows a First Nations scientist who finds himself torn after he’s sent to clean up the ecological mess his company has left on the reserve his family grew up on.Be sure to save October 28th on your calendar for the GG book awards announcement. Of course, “GG” stands for Governor-General. The short lists can be viewed here:http://ggbooks.ca/books/. There are categories in both English and French for both children’s text and illustration books.Online ResourcesPodcast: Yegs and Bacon: Episode 22: the full audio from our recent Indigenous Representation in Popular Culture panel. In the audio, you’ll be hearing from (in order of first vocal appearance) Brandon, who introduces the panelists, James Leask, Richard Van Camp, Kelly Mellings, and Patti Laboucane-Benson. Recorded on Monday, September 28th, 2015. http://variantedmonton.com/category/yegs-and-bacon/European Picture Book Collection: The EPBC was designed to help pupils to find out more about their European neighbours through reading the visual narratives of carefully chosen picture books. Here you can find out about how the project began, the theoretical papers that have been presented on European children's literature, and how the materials were initially used in schools. http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/EN/index.aspMore next time around,Yours in stories, Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

The novel challenges the derealization loss in the context of Iraqi war fiction by trying to portray the dark reality of the US invasion. The American granddaughter is not only about war trauma, memories, atrocities, and the huge loss caused by an endless and unjust war waged against a sovereign country. It is about, as the paper argues, a disoriented homecoming and the scattered identity of Zeina, the protagonist, who appears to be a dissociative personality. This paper also explores how the protagonist’s dual identity crisis is of a unique type as it is being questioned through three stages. Exile and the coming back on an American military truck as a translator for the invaders’ army attacking her origin homeland and finally returning to the United States only to find herself unfit for both homes.

This chapter examines the careers of two of Kyiv’s most prominent Russophone authors, Andrei Kurkov and Alexei Nikitin, who had very different publication experiences both at home and abroad. I focus on the reception of their prose fiction in English translation in the US; since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2023, I have updated this chapter to address some of the sweeping, ongoing changes in Russophone culture and its perception in the west. My analysis draws on my extensive personal and professional relations with literary and scholarly figures in Ukraine, including the two authors under discussion and their publishers and translators.

This chapter focuses on fear of crime, and particularly on the fear of home invasion (burglary). It links back to the ways in which we are taught to fear in our childhood homes, and the contemporary forces which continue to boost the perceived need for home defence. Data on burglary rates and fear of crime are deconstructed, and the interconnected roles of the media and of government in feeding fear are analysed. We suggest that the news media's singular focus on rare and horrific events have a cumulative and traumatic effect on our perceptions of the relative safety of the home. The chapter also looks at the treatment of the home, crime and fear in popular culture, through fiction, films and videogames which highlight terrorised occupants and invaded homes.

This chapter examines the impact on recent Irish fiction of the border dividing British Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, ‘the most militarised border in the archipelago’. This border is deplored as a spatial heresy by Irish nationalists who envision a united Ireland, but defended as an orthodoxy by Unionists who insist on their political allegiance to the British state. This chapter compares two thrillers set in borderland territory, Eugene McCabe’s Victims and Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera, with Anna Burns’s deconstructed bildungsroman No Bones, set in Belfast. While McCabe’s and Kiely’s novellas rework the conventions of the Big House novel, with its traditional focus on domestic space, at once imprisoning and open to invasion, Burns shows how the border spreads division through the home, the city, and the mind, undermining the distinction between outside and inside, public strife and private madness.

Jocelyne Saab’s first feature film A Suspended Life (1985), tells the story of a teenage girl whose family finds refuge in an abandoned palace in Beirut. Saab’s own home was initially supposed to serve as film set, but it was destroyed on the first day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. Its ruins appear in the opening view of Beirut My City (1982), a documentary shot during the siege of the Lebanese capital that lasted until the evacuation of the Palestinian forces, 21 August 1982. This chapter proposes to read Beirut My City and A Suspended Life as a diptych. The first, a documentary, is a prequel to the second, a fiction. The second, produced during a lull in the war, includes rushes from the first. Both pieces take an abandoned dwelling as the point of departure for an exploration into the urban territory of West Beirut.Besides their existence as acts of resistance and invaluable documents for a critical period, these films question the relationship between life and death, and between the image and the cadaver, three decades after Blanchot’s reflections in The Space of Literature.

Abstract Hope added Caught in the Draft. Even Walt Disney injected a hint of belligerence into Dumbo. In the film’s closing moments, the baby elephant’s giant ears inspire a breakthrough in military aviation: “Dum bombers for our defense!” Of all Britain’s allies in Hollywood, Walter Wanger remained the most enthusiastic. But Britain could not always repay his devotion. Hitchcock recalled Sidney Bernstein gently explaining to Wanger that he could not be given exclusive film rights to the Nazi invasion of Britain.115 The year 1941 brought a more serious strain on the Mol’s romance with Wanger. Inspired by London Can Take It, Wanger proposed that he and the MoI cooperate to produce a documentary-feature on the newly formed Eagle Squadron. Wanger hoped that this would be “the greatest picture of aviation ever produced,” but instead it showed the limits to which the documentary genre was subject during wartime. Work on Wanger’s Eagle Squadron started well. The MoI agreed to co operate so long as the film did not overlap with A Yank in the RAF. Wanger hired Harry Watt of the Crown Film Unit to direct and C. S. Forrester of BIS to write the fictional continuity scenes. By the summer of 1941, his production staff were en route for England. Then the problems began.