Mourning/Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic aesthetics in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (1986)
This paper deals with the way in which Jane Urquhart negotiates cultural heritage in The Whirlpool, testing diffident forms of generic affiliation inherited from the British tradition, most prominently the Gothic novel and Romantic poetry. Urquhart’s mourning of a British aesthetics must be distingu...
Guardat en:
| Publicat a: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
|---|---|
| Autors principals: | , |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicat: |
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2022
|
| Accés en línia: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumari: | This paper deals with the way in which Jane Urquhart negotiates cultural heritage in The Whirlpool, testing diffident forms of generic affiliation inherited from the British tradition, most prominently the Gothic novel and Romantic poetry. Urquhart’s mourning of a British aesthetics must be distinguished from its repudiation, or deconstruction, in other writings of the same period. In The Whirlpool, the resurgence of romantic motifs leads to burlesque reconfigurations which question the stability of the relation between language and context. By choosing Robert Browning as a literary reference, and opting for the whirlpool, rather than Niagara Falls, as the location of her novel, Urquhart articulates both a post-Romantic and a post-colonial ethos. While the eponymous whirlpool becomes a metaphor of intertextuality, certain objects become metonymies of hegemonic domination, whether Imperial or gendered. The vortex may be considered as a metatextual emblem of postcolonial literature, not flowing straight ahead but breaking with conformity and continuity, circling round with its “floaters,” the floating signifiers of cultural inheritance, and seeking a way out, its own direction, sideways. |
|---|