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One cannot write about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without considering the footnotes. The experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of grounding the text in reality. But footnotes are also an intervention, or intrusion into the flow of the text, and Clarke takes advantage of this figuring. In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it is in the footnotes that the world of the fantastic slips through to disrupt the m..
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susanna-clarke
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Farah Mendlesohn |
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One cannot write about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without considering the footnotes. The experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of grounding the text in reality. But footnotes are also an intervention, or intrusion into the flow of the text, and Clarke takes advantage of this figuring. In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it is in the footnotes that the world of the fantastic slips through to disrupt the m..
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susanna-clarke
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Farah Mendlesohn |
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Neither they nor Warren Rochelle (' Dual Attractions', 1999) nor Chris West (' Queer Fears and Critical Orthodoxies', 2002) (who focuses on homosexuality) ground their critiques in the periods in which Heinlein was writing, the editors he was writing for, or the librarians who could decide whether books did or did not make it onto the shelves in a period in which libraries were only just starting to retreat from the position of major purcha..
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Farah Mendlesohn |
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Whether readers loved or loathed a book, whether reading for pleasure or for criticism, there has been a repeated tendency to take the strongest character voice in a Heinlein novel as an authorial voice, as in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), or in Time Enough for Love (1973); or to read a political system as either flawless and to be taken as a political rallying cry for libertarianism, as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), or as a ..
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Farah Mendlesohn |
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Oddly, Leon Stover, in Robert A. Heinlein, one of the best close readers in other ways, comes away with the idea that Heinlein 'defends the traditional ethics of Christian civilisation' (p. 61) which is a hard argument to make given the amount of out-of-wedlock sex in his work and the satirisation of so much Christian practice in Stranger in a Strange Land and Job.
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Farah Mendlesohn |
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Increasingly-and mirroring what was happening in American politics-Heinlein would attract single-issue or single-novel admirers. Starship Troopers was just the first inkling of this.
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Farah Mendlesohn |
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It is not clear when cats became a 'thing' in science fiction but Heinlein made a significant contribution to their presence and to the construction of that presence.
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Farah Mendlesohn |