This article appraises the debt that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After clearly mapping a history of Hoban’s philosophical perspectives and Mitchell’s inter-textual genre-impersonation practice, the article assesses the degree to which Mitchell’s metatextual methods indicate a nostalgia for by-gone radical aesthetics rather than reaching for new modes of its own. The article not only proposes several new backdrops against which Mitchell’s novel can be read but also conducts the first in-depth appraisal of Mitchell’s formal linguistic replication of Riddley Walker.
Eve, Martin Paul. 2014. ‘“some Kind of Thing It Aint Us but yet Its in Us”’. SAGE Open 4 (1). doi:10.1177/2158244014521636. http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/4/1/2158244014521636.
You can either download the article directly from SAGE, download a copy from this site, or grab the version from the University of Lincoln repository. All the versions should be the same as this is a Gold open access article.
You can copy and re-share this article anywhere you like without asking me for permission, so long as you cite the original, including: my name, the original venue and date of publication, the original URL and the original DOI. If you make changes to the piece, I would ask that your citation note that your piece is a derivative of this work and that I do not necessarily endorse it.