Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 9 (2019)

Aritha van Herk, Vanja Polić

Issue 9 (2019) of Text Matters, titled Roguery and (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 addressed 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 Buntline'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 Michele 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 performance 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.