In Nicola Barker’s novel H(A)PPY the individual’s struggle to resist and escape from a virtualized, monitored and uniform world is masterfully reflected typographically. Just as the individual defies this new reality, the text also subverts narrative and typographical norms, inviting readers to partake in a journey of deciphering codes and signs. This article explores the typographical experiments with form, which assist the textual interpretation at the level of other narrative components. It identifies and analyses twenty artifices connected to typographical innovation in the novel in order to expand the possibilities of understanding the novel’s multiple meanings.
The article investigates the concept of authorship in the works of two authors separated by three centuries, namely, Daniel Defoe and J. M. Coetzee, both concerned, in different ways, with aspects regarding the origin and originators of literary works or with the act of artistic creation in general. After a brief literature review, the article focuses on Coetzee’s contemporary revisitation of the question of authorship and leaps back and forth in time from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Coetzee’s Foe (1986). The purpose is that of highlighting the multiple perspectives (and differences) regarding the subject of authorship, including such notions and aspects as: canonicity related to the act of writing and narrating, metafiction, self-reflexivity and intertextuality, silencing and voicing, doubling, bodily substance and the substance of a story, authenticity, (literary) representation and the truth, authoring, the author’s powers, the relation between author and character or between narrator and story, authorial self-consciousness, agency, or ambiguity. The findings presented in the article show that both works are seminal in their attempts to define and redefine the notion of authorship, one (Defoe) concerned with the first literary endeavours of establishing the roles of professional authorship in England, while the other (Coetzee), intervenes in existing literary discussions of the late twentieth century concerning the postmodern author and (the questioning of or liberation of the text from) his powers.
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