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This chapter explores the concept of ‘heteroglossia’ as it might apply to comics production. After adopting the word from Bakhtin, the chapter explores in particular its uses by Martin and White as a component of ‘appraisal’ in language, investigating the ways in which a range of voices might be incorporated in comics form. Using concepts drawn from Michael Halliday, it establishes that there is phylogenetic and ontogenetic dialogue of voices behind comics, before concentrating on the logogenesis of the comics text in the use of hypotactic as well as paratactic forms of image relationship. It argues that the engagement of the reader in mutual text construction, and the necessary incorporation of multiple viewpoints and voices in the text, support the interpersonal and evaluative functions of the comics text.

This chapter examines the history of translation in/of the picaresque novel in relation to the concepts of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1935) and intertextuality (Kristeva, 1984), studying the systematic strategy of borrowing intertexts that may be said to have played an important role in the development of the picaresque novel in Spanish, French, and Portuguese as a heteroglossic genre. The first part discusses the theoretical framework and designates as intertexts the translated fragments inserted as episodes or intercalary short stories into Spanish, French, and Portuguese picaresque novels. The chapter contends that the identification of such (translated) intertexts allows picaresque novels from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to be described as eclectic translations (Ringmar, 2007). The second section dialogues with previous critical works on Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35) that have demonstrated the presence of a strong component of translation in the making of the picaresque novel, first in Spanish (Berruezo, 2011) and later in French (Cavillac, 1984). The last section uncovers alien discourses within four picaresque novels published in Portuguese in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

The author links the purview of the “new-consciousness” novel to Edward Said’s conceptualization of “decentered consciousness,” a term he uses to describe postcolonial cultural and intellectual efforts that aim at disrupting constituencies and ideologies of dominance and essentialism. Following a historical approach to understanding the emergence of novelistic genres, this chapter reviews the historical conditions surrounding the production of several Egyptian novels—from Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab to what Sabry Hafez calls the “New Egyptian Novel” of the 1990s—to exhibit how the novel, in responding to its historical moment, defies definitional stability due to the dialectical process of historical change. The socio-political and cultural context underlying the rise of the new-consciousness novel is similarly analyzed to detect the homologies and disjunctures it has with its antecedent counterparts as well as highlight its new distinct and cohesive semantic and formal features of heteroglossia and what it achieves as a corpus.

Chapter Seven examines Pa negre (Villaronga 2010), which is a dark parody of the nuevo cine con niño’s bildungsfilms such as Secretos del corazón and El espinazo del diablo. The chapter attends to heteroglossia–with regards to language, class, culture, sexuality, and politics–in the nuevo cine con niño. The analysis of Urte ilunak (Lazkano 1992), a film in Basque, and Pa negre, a feature in Catalan, considers the experiences of regions from the periphery that would form the basis of plurinational Spain and challenge the binary of the two Spains. With the example of Urte ilunak, ‘queer’ translates to that which is non-normative in terms of Spanish centralist identity and language. Both Urte ilunak and Pa negre depict regions and languages on the margins of the dictatorship and recognize their difference and skepticism towards the master narratives of nationalisms. Villaronga’s film queers its protagonist, per Stockton’s ghostly gay child, and the now canonical hauntological narratives of the nuevo cine con niño by virtue of a cast of marginalized characters and a collection of phantom intertexts.

This chapter considers how the magazine's satire resisted, disrupted or traversed boundaries and, rather than interpreting the magazine as the uncomplicated propaganda tool of the Soviet state, suggests how Krokodil may better be understood as a Menippean satire, according to Bakhtin's definition, and a "politcarnival" development in a long Russo-European satirical tradition. This new explanation of Krokodil's satire highlights the journal's heterogeneity and heteroglossia (multivoicedness), and explains Krokodil as a site of ongoing, intertextual, subtle, serio-comic critical counter-commentaries on Soviet orthodoxies and political policy. Interpreting Krokodil as a Menippean satire provides a theoretical basis for the observation that the magazine comprised diverse intertextual satirical critiques, and it thus clarifies the dialogic relationships between different schemata, and shows that (for example through the magazine's red crocodile avatar, who may be interpreted as a trickster) the magazine's satire of domestic subjects may be subtler and more implicit than its criticisms of non-socialist ideologies.

This chapter discusses how two graphic novels—The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar and Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Diary by KeshniKashyap—illustrate awe, sanctity and ineffability. In exploring how each narrative exposes the sacred, this chapter looks at the interplay between word and image, suggesting multiple, concurrent, and layered definitions of divinity. Each text creates a multi-layered conversation inviting the reader to explore textual/visual accounts of the sacred. This dynamic relationship between visual and written narratives informs how readers integrate words from a type of visual dialogue in order to unpack multiple meanings. That kind of agency suggests a graphic articulation of what Mikhail Bakhtin named heteroglossia (multi-languagedness)—the multiple contemporaneous literary exchanges that operate in different spheres. The heteroglossia of the graphic novel allows the reader to envisage multiple, simultaneous interpretations of the sacred.

This article investigates the complex network of non-hierarchical, transcolonial connections that underpin the French-language translation of Anglo-Guyanese writer David Dabydeen's The Counting House by Indo-Mauritian author and translator, Ananda Devi. Focusing on language at both thematic and formal levels, this article addresses the following, interrelated questions: What kinds of language does Dabydeen use in his novel, and how do these reflect the heteroglossic nature of the vernacular of its multiethnic cast of characters± What translational approaches does Devi employ, in Terres maudites, to reflect the linguistically innovative features of Dabydeen's original text, and how might her comprehension of the novel's historical, cultural and linguistic contexts influence these approaches± How does Devi's treatment of Creole and Indian terms as a translator compare with her approach as an author± The responses to these interrelated questions emphasise the need, in Translation Studies, to pay due attention to the identity of the translator and hence to the individual and contextual influences that so profoundly shape his or her intercultural engagement with source text, languages and cultures.

This chapter examines the fiction of Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, With different narrative techniques, each of them dramatise ethical and political concerns about the viability of a second world war. They also reshape the genre of spy fiction by creating women protagonists who represent keen insights into narrative and political relationships, particularly deracination, exile, and antisemitism. Their novels respond critically to the way conventional spy thrillers draw heroes and villains as caricatures of good and evil and women as disposable attractions. Each writer engages gender analysis as a significant part of international politics and the genre of spy fiction.