Longlisted in the Summer 2022 Reflex Flash Fiction Competition, ‘Words on the page mean I am afraid / A conversation with my therapist’ was published by Reflex Fiction on 13 August.

A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters showcases the discursive nature of history through the reconstructions of the metanarratives. In ‘The Stowaway’, Julian Barnes demonstrates, what Linda Hutcheon calls, one of ‘the paradoxes that characterize all postmodern discourses’ when he assumes the ‘genuine historicity’ of the Bible narrative in an attempt to destabilise its authority as the determining source of historical knowledge.

Brian Friel’s Translations presents cultural identity as an ongoing discourse. Set in 1833, the play deals with the cultural effects of the English colonising mission in Ireland—namely, the systemic dismantling and erasure of Gaelic culture via the anglicisation of Irish place names and maps, and the replacement of Irish hedge-schools. In response to the inevitability of ‘cartographic violence’, Friel argues for the ‘renewing of images’ as a way for victims of colonialism to reclaim their cultural identity from the English.

In the Romantic period, the concept of the ‘genius’ moved out of the external realm of ‘pagan piety’ and into the inner realm of the lone suffering artist afflicted by their own genius. John Keat’s Ode to Psyche sits at the intersection between two worldviews—one of antiquity which looks outwards for creative inspiration, and that of the more ‘modern’ view, which confuses the ‘genius’ for the artist. This has inadvertently proven to be the root of creative neurosis.

Armed with the flippancy and intellectual conceit which were second to none, W. N. P. Barbellion recorded a future ceaselessly spurned by sickness and circumstance. Born in 1889 in Barnstaple, he aspired to be a naturalist and began keeping a diary at the age of thirteen. His lust for life antagonised by his social class and ill health stationed him at a uniquely tragic standpoint from which he witnessed fin de siècle.