In an alternative British universe, Thursday Next, a special operative in literary detection, takes action after someone abducts Jane Eyre.
Jasper Fforde's first novel, THE EYRE AFFAIR (Viking, $23.95), is a spirited sendup of genre fiction -- it's part hard-boiled mystery, part time-machine caper -- that features a sassy, well-read "Special Operative in literary detection" named Thursday Next, who will put you more in mind of Bridget Jones than Miss Marple.
He has been, by turns, freelance reporter, literary agent, pulp novelist, FBI operative and private-sector spy.
The Voice stood in sharp contrast to other literary magazines published by female operatives, such as the Lowell Offering, which painted a sanguine picture of life in the mills.
The 1975 thriller stars Robert Redford as a CIA operative working at an office disguised as a literary-historical research center.
("Lectures and Learning", Voice of Industry) The corporations happily publicized the efforts of these "literary mill girls", boasting that they were the "most superior class of factory operative," which greatly impressed foreign visitors to Lowell.
Except, that is, for Mr. Owen, as an Interpol operative, and Ms. Watts, as a lawyer in the Manhattan district attorney's office, who have the improbably literary surnames of Salinger and Whitman.
The requirement that literary movements push off from something -- a euphemism for a scholarly interest in poststructuralist dialectics -- is no longer operative, or at a minimum is now differentially operative, which is how and why metamodernism can be at once bourgeois and radical.
