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Introduction: Alasdair Gray's Poor Things
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10892 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1993 |
270 Words |
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American readers likely will be amused, teased, and a little dumbfounded by Alasdair Gray's pseudo-Victorian romance, which took the United Kingdom by storm last year and garnered the prestigious Whitbread Prize. His comic novel, excerpted and analyzed in the following pages, spoofs the scarifying creations of the novels of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Conan Doyle and echoes a dozen works of the period. But while smirking at the shuddery tales of a bygone age, Gray also shows the cruel social conventions of the period, which are worth shuddering at.
Gray begins with a romance between a young Scottish physician and woman, allegedly revived from the dead, who is more than a match for her male contemporaries. But there is a story within a story within a story and, frequently, three different versions of the same set of events. Where is Sherlock Holmes when we really need him? In place of Holmes, we assigned the case to novelist and critic R.H.W. Dillard, who explores the structure and meaning of Poor Things in depth (p. 288). Dillard concludes that here is pastiche with a purpose: The reader is obliged to help construct the story and its meaning at every turn. Thus, he escapes the trap of literary realism, a closed text in which the reader is expected to accept the authority of the author and the political and cultural status quo. Upholding the status quo of nineteenth century or that of modern Britain is likely the last thing Gray intends, as he explains in an interview with Doug Burton of THE WORLD & I (p. 304).
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