Text Matters No. 9 (2019)

Issue 9 (2019) of Text Matters, titled Roguery & (Sub)Versions, edited by Aritha van Herk (University of Calgary) and Vanja Polić (University of Zagreb), focuses on the figure of the new rogue as a personification of subversion in literature and film. Roguery is understood here both as a feature of characters who break up societal conformity through their creativity, and of texts which embrace liminality and defy discursive boundaries. These visions of roguery are ad-dressed by the volume’s first section, “New Versions of Roguery,” which contains papers dealing with Bruce Chatwin’s rogue appropriation of the concept of songlines, the representation of women manipulating others through wealth, the rogue protagonist of the film Monster, mobility in the road movies Scorpio Rising and Duel as well as fiction by Guy Vanderhaeghe, the self-fashioning rogue in a short story by Aleksandar Hemon and in Ned Bunt-line’s fiction, rogue textuality in comics, a subversion of roguery in Patrick deWitt’s novel, and roguery understood as disappearance. The second section, “(Sub)Versions and (Re)Visions,” builds on the rogue’s subversive potential, and includes papers on the figure of Mary Magdalene in Michèle Roberts’s book, the figure of the heretic in the secular age, life writing by Joe Brainard, the Irish noir by Lisa McInerney, and the hardboiled fiction of Ross Macdonald. The following section called “Negotiating Traumas” contains essays that discuss the ability of per-formance art to heal trauma, the figure of the trickster in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, as well as trauma in hag horror. Finally, “Liminal Spaces” includes papers focusing on the environmental disaster in the poetry of Robert Minhinnick, spatial representations in J. G. Ballard’s novel, a Virilian reading of Don DeLillo, and the development of American improvisational theatre. The volume ends with reviews of works by Sam Solnick and Bret Easton Ellis.

NEW VERSIONS OF ROGUERY Aritha van Herk (University of Calgary), Vanja Polić (University of Zagreb) New Versions of Roguery Christine Nicholls (Australian National University, Canberra) A Wild Roguery: Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines Reconsidered Veronika Schuchter (University of Oxford) Of Grim Witches and Showy Lady-Devils: Wealthy Women in Literature and Film Michelle D. Wise (Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN) “You’ll never meet someone like me again”: Patty Jenkins’s Monster as Rogue Cinema Kornelia Boczkowska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Steven Spielberg’s Duel/ Jason Blake (University of Ljubljana) Roguish Self-Fashioning and Questing in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Everything” Jordan Bolay (University of Calgary) “Same Old Ed, . . . Uncommitted”: BMW Socialism and Post-Roguery in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Early Fiction Ronnie Scott (RMIT University, Melbourne) Aussies, Rogues and Slackers: Simon Hanselmann’s Megg, Mogg and Owl Comics as Contemporary Instances of Rogue Literature Hilde Staels (Leuven University) The Rogue as an Artist in Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers Mark Metzler Sawin (Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA) The Lynching and Rebirth of Ned Buntline: Rogue Authorship during the American Literary Renaissance Kit Dobson (Mount Royal University, Calgary) Men Without Fingers, Men Without Toes (SUB)VERSIONS AND (RE)VISIONS Dorota Filipczak (University of Łódź) “Let me hear Thy voice”: Michèle Roberts’s Refiguring of Mary Magdalene in the Light of The Song of Songs Marta Zając (University of Silesia, Katowice) Heresy and Orthodoxy Now: The Zigzagging Paths of the Lawful Wojciech Drąg (University of Wrocław) Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Fragmentary Life Writing and the Resistance to Narrative and Identity Katarzyna Ostalska (University of Łódź) “A right kind of rogue”: Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies (2015) and The Blood Miracles (2017) Lech Zdunkiewicz (University of Wrocław) Three Layers of Metaphors in Ross Macdonald’s Black Money NEGOTIATING TRAUMAS Nicole Fayard (University of Leicester) Spaces of (Re)Connections: Performing Experiences of Disabling Gender Violence Monika Kocot (University of Łódź) On Unruly Text, or Text-Trickster: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as Healing Tomasz Fisiak (University of Łódź) What Ever Happened to My Peace of Mind? Hag Horror as Narrative of Trauma LIMINAL SPACES Agata Handley (University of Łódź) “But what a place / to put a piano”: Nostalgic Objects in Robert Minhinnick’s Diary of the Last Man Marcin Tereszewski (University of Wrocław) Liminal Space in J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island Hossein Pirnajmuddin (University of Isfahan), Bahareh Bagherzadeh Samani (Qeshm Branch, Islamic Azad University) Don DeLillo’s White Noise: A Virilian Perspective Magdalena Szuster (University of Łódź) Theater Without a Script—Improvisation and the Experimental Stage of the Early Mid-Twentieth Century in the United States REVIEWS Wit Pietrzak (University of Łódź) Poetry, Environment and the Possibility of Future. A Review of Sam Solnick’s Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017) Mark Tardi (University of Łódź) Review of White by Bret Easton Ellis