English Language, Literature & Culture

Special Issue

Memory and Counter-memory in Postmodern British Fiction

  • Submission Deadline: 18 December 2024
  • Status: Open for Submission
  • Lead Guest Editor: Elena Bollinger
About This Special Issue
This Special Issue addresses the intersections between Memory and Counter-Memory in Postmodern British Fiction. Its central concern is to outline the role of writing in memory studies, shedding light on literature as a predominantly reflexive and productive medium of cultural memory. As a 'media of memory’, literature not only permeates the imaginative creation of the past, but also features negotiation of competing memories and a reflection upon complex processes of cultural remembering and forgetting. Defined as “the very condition for remembering”, forgetting constitutes a symbolic form of cultural counter-memory in literature, operating by means of condensation, narration and genre. Resting upon the idea of a multilayered superimposition of different images and different meanings, the narrativization of experience between forgetting and remembering may constitute one of the most valuable (counter)-memory figures in memory culture. Focusing on a constant revision of culturally available constructive and creative processes responsible for the representation of the past, postmodern British fiction actively contributes to reflect upon blurred borders between remembering and forgetting, memory and counter-memory, 'memory from below' and the versions of former experience registered in official historiographies. Looking at semantic and structural complexity of several postmodernist texts, displaying highly ambiguous, non-linear representations of the process of memory, might add to current intellectual debates on the integration of some politically controversial and socially contradictory elements into the representation of the past. Key features might include, but are not restricted to, the following issues: perspectives on the collective past composed from white, western middle-class perspectives, inclusion of women's writings into the literary canon, 'tyranny' of the official memory, history versus memory, postcolonial memories and counter-memories, representation of war and social violence.

Keywords:

  1. Counter-memory
  2. Multidirectional Memory
  3. Post-colonial Studies
  4. Canon Controversy
  5. Literary Representations of Remembering / Forgetting
  6. History and Memory
  7. Culture and Memory
Lead Guest Editor
  • Elena Bollinger

    University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

Manuscript Submission

This special issue is now open for submission. Please click here to submit the manuscript.

Published Articles
  • Cultural Memory in Contemporary Fiction: F. R. Leavis’s and Matthew Arnold’s Intellectual Presence in A. S. Byatt’s Work

    Alexandra Cheira *

    Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
    Pages: 97-107
    Received: 12 March 2024
    Accepted: 22 April 2024
    Published: 23 September 2024
    DOI: 10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.11
    Downloads:
    Views:
    Abstract: The concept of “cultural memory” serves as the foundation for this article, which explains the complex relationships between two prominent figures in the history of English letters, Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, as well as how A. S. Byatt’s own work was influenced by their combined, though occasionally diametrically opposed, approaches to litera... Show More
  • “The Shifting Light of History”: Addressing Philosophy of Memory in Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch

    Elena Bollinger *

    Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
    Pages: 108-117
    Received: 12 March 2024
    Accepted: 15 April 2024
    Published: 23 September 2024
    DOI: 10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.12
    Downloads:
    Views:
    Abstract: This article discusses the narrative construction of various philosophical reflections on cultural memory in Julian Barnes’s novel Elisabeth Finch. It addresses the dichotomy between recollection and oblivion, presenting a memory process as a the “problem of forgotten evidence”, thoroughly discussed in today’s Cultural and Memory Studies. While con... Show More
  • ‘Lift me up!’: The New Major Discourses of Care and Ageing in Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers

    Zuzanna Zarebska *

    Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
    Pages: 118-124
    Received: 12 March 2024
    Accepted: 13 May 2024
    Published: 23 September 2024
    DOI: 10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.13
    Downloads:
    Views:
    Abstract: The genre of Reifungsroman considers different temporal aspects of individuation. It aids and assesses the capacity of an older person to re-story their life, enter meaningful relationships, make amends with the past and productively evolve as an individual. Instead of focusing solely on the present, time is seen as a continuum in Reifungsroman wit... Show More
  • The Archaeology of Absence in Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone

    Margarida Pereira Martins *

    Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
    Pages: 125-131
    Received: 12 March 2024
    Accepted: 7 April 2024
    Published: 23 September 2024
    DOI: 10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.14
    Downloads:
    Views:
    Abstract: Approximately 1.4 million Indians were recruited to the First World War. Despite their role in the war and the high number of deaths, most of the literature in English on the Great War has been narrowed down to British experience. However, in recent years their stories have been emerging through fiction, in academic research and educational project... Show More
  • The (Re)imagined Shades of Alice Gray: The Counter-Memory of a Woman-as-Witch in Stacey Halls’ The Familiars (2019)

    Inês Tadeu Freitas Gonçalves *

    Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
    Pages: 132-137
    Received: 11 April 2024
    Accepted: 27 April 2024
    Published: 23 September 2024
    DOI: 10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.15
    Downloads:
    Views:
    Abstract: Historical fiction is a way of dealing with painful pasts and traumatic events as counter-memories. Long-forgotten events are (re)created in a safe space in historical fiction. Set in seventeenth-century Lancashire, in her modern historical fiction The Familiars (2019), Stacey Halls narrates Alice Gray’s painful past as a woman-as-witch into existe... Show More
  • Julian Barnes’ England, England: Beyond Postmodernism and Dystopia

    Majid Sadeghzadegan *

    Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
    Pages: 138-149
    Received: 17 April 2024
    Accepted: 12 June 2024
    Published: 23 September 2024
    DOI: 10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.16
    Downloads:
    Views:
    Abstract: Julian Barnes’ England, England lends itself to many types of critical readings as it garners many concepts and themes as diverse as identity, memory, history, nationality, rise and fall of a nation, and individual crises. All these are incorporated satirically, if not farcically, into the life a Martha Cochrane whose life milestones run in tandem ... Show More