Grace Dane Mazur: The Whistling Roar; or The World of Fiction and the Land of the Dead (July 2005)

What happens when we “curl up with a novel?” What world do we enter, and how do we enter it? Looking at work by Proust, Lewis Carroll, Paula Fox, Charles Baxter, Parmenides, Katherine Mansfield, and Eudora Welty, as well as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Mazur suggests that we might understand the world of fiction as a kind of underworld, or Hades; she examines the ways specific moments in novels, particularly the opening pages, function as crucial liminal moments that guide us between these worlds.