A biographical essay about John Buchan, with brief critical analysis of major works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biographical essay about John Buchan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explain the surprising appearance of fifth-century Gallo-Roman poet and bishop Sidonius Apollinaris in 'The Wind in the Portico' (1928), a fantastic tale by John Buchan. It first situates the story among a group of works in which Buchan treats the First World War as an unleashing of primal or subconscious energies often portrayed in the form of revived pre-Christian rites. It argues that Buchan is here alluding to a particular strand of post-war atavism: the irrational impulses which, in his analysis, feed into Celtic nationalism. Buchan draws on his reading of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Helen Waddell, as well as a long-standing interest in Late Antiquity, to present Sidonius Apollinaris as a 'troubled' Christian whose vivid evocations of pagan deities risk awakening them from their sleep. 'The Wind in the Portico' is not, however, simply a cautionary tale warning of the dangers of toying with the barbaric. While Buchan's heroes wrongly seek to repress or to exorcise the primitive and subconscious and return to a state of prelapsarian purity, Buchan himself indicates that innocence and barbarism are two sides of the same coin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Buchan was a noted novelist of Empire, yet his short stories on Imperial subjects and settings have rarely received critical attention. A careful reading of his shorter fiction reveals an alternative commentary on Empire that has been ignored. The works discussed problematize the common assumption that Buchan's views on Empire in his fiction are Victorian, by showing that he replaced the nineteenth-century model of Imperial rule by military force with the importance of the administrator and the knowledgeable man on the ground. The first part of this essay will survey Buchan's trajectory as a writer of Empire, in fiction and journalism, and discuss two key Edwardian short stories, 'The Kings of Orion' (1906) and 'The Grove of Ashtaroth' (1910), to illustrate how Buchan used Imperial themes to advocate the benefits of colonial rule. An extended analysis of Buchan's short story 'A Lucid Interval' (1910) and its publishing, political and social history forms the second part of the essay, since this story offers an unusual insight into the complexity of British imperial ideology in the early twentieth century. Buchan's political narrative uses the then common assumption of racial superiority to engage with complex ideas about the ethics of state politics and the feudal relationships that Imperialism promoted. It is his only attempt to write from the perspective of a non-white character, deploying the Indian Ram Singh's legitimate objections to make a party-political point against Liberalism in favour of Imperialist Conservatism. The story associates 'civilisation' with Imperial values, making antiImperialist thinking a form of anarchism. Its plot enacts anarchist views in the heart of the political establishment, to show their effect on the Imperial project as a whole. 'A Lucid Interval' is read as an investigation into the ethics of Imperial politics, and the essentially feudal basis for Imperial power relationships, today one of the principal objections to Imperialism as a system of governance. Buchan's use of humour undercuts the extremes of ideological arrogance that he assigns to the politicians. They utter expressions of their own power and position without truly comprehending what they are saying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of landmark slave narratives demonstrates how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition No literary genre speaks as directly and as eloquently to the brutal contradictions in American history as the slave narrative. The works collected in this volume present unflinching portrayals of the cruelty and degradation of slavery while testifying to the African-American struggle for freedom and dignity. They demonstrate the power of the written word to affirm a person's—and a people's—humanity in a society poisoned by racism. Slave Narratives shows how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and, through their expression of anger, pain, sorrow, and courage, laid the foundations of the African-American literary tradition.This volume collects ten works published between 1772 and 1864:• Narratives by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772) and Olaudah Equiano (1789) recount how they were taken from Africa as children and brought across the Atlantic to British North America.• The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) provides unique insight into the man who led the deadliest slave uprising in American history.• The widely read narratives by the fugitive slaves Frederick Douglass (1845), William Wells Brown (1847), and Henry Bibb (1849) strengthened the abolitionist cause by exposing the hypocrisies inherent in a slaveholding society ostensibly dedicated to liberty and Christian morality.• The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) describes slavery in the North while expressing the eloquent fervor of a dedicated woman.• Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) tells the story of William and Ellen Craft's subversive and ingenious escape from Georgia to Philadelphia.• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is Harriet Jacobs's complex and moving story of her prolonged resistance to sexual and racial oppression.• The narrative of the “trickster” Jacob Green (1864) presents a disturbing story full of wild humor and intense cruelty.Together, these works fuse memory, advocacy, and defiance into a searing collective portrait of American life before emancipation. Slave Narratives contains a chronology of events in the history of slavery, as well as biographical and explanatory notes and an essay on the texts.