Rosemarie Bodenheimer

The Interregnum of Ownership in July’s People

When Nadine Gordimer takes the Smales family to the South African bush in flight from a revolution they support, she deliberately invokes for the first time in her career the Heart of Darkness pattern of colonialist fiction. Marooned in an alien culture, the identities of the white liberals disintegrate, their morality and their language rendered impotent before the returned gaze of the black servant and the political paradoxes of black revolution. Gordimer’s rewriting of this story accomplishes a number of important political reversals, beginning with the fact that the whites appear as dependent refugees rather than as imperialist adventurers; throughout the novel the old white fictions that control colonialist representations — fictions of adventure, ethnography, rural development, miscegenation — are elicited, diminished and dismissed.1

Dickens and The Writing of a Life

The opening of the twenty-first century offers new opportunities to imagine a biographically inflected literary criticism. The individual career of a writer has come to be recognized as a significant aspect of cultural history, while the boundaries between psychoanalytic and historical approaches to interpretation have become more flexible. Innovative ways of linking a writer’s published and unpublished material point toward newly sophisticated methods of straddling the gap between the lost “real” and the textual imaginary. In the case of Dickens studies, the 2002 publication of the final volume in the magnificent Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s letters might be read as the sign of a renewed “best of times” for biographical-critical work on Dickens.1