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From his first travel book Twilight in Italy (1916) to the posthumously published Etruscan Places (1932), Lawrence’s travel writing shows a continuous experimentation with the genre, which in his hands, always escapes any fixed scheme. In spite of their stylistic difference and the variety of images and contents, his travel books lay bare a common intention, which is the author’s attempt to escape the wasteland of mechanization and industrialization, the upsetting, fragmented world of Europe at the time of World War I, and to find an ideal place for a rebirth, a palingenesis, a place (remote in space and, in the case of Etruscan Places, also in time) where human beings could live an harmonious relationship with Nature, with the Other and with the Self.
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The theoretician of Aestheticism in English literature, Walter Pater, materializes the principles and concepts of Aestheticism in his novel Marius the Epicurean. His student and follower Oscar Wilde expresses the ideas of Aestheticism in his own novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which also revives and rewrites the myth of Faust with regard to the character representation strategies in the work. The present study, on comparative grounds of analysis, attempts to reveal the ways in which Wilde’s novel unites in one fictional discourse the principles of an artistic theory with those of a literary myth in order to build a distinct world vision and provide a point of view reified by both an aesthetic and a mythic context.
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There are few professions and professionals to be constantly perceived as ambivalent. But for interpreting and interpreters, this seems to be the norm, rather than the exception. On the one hand, there has always been a sense of fascination for these extraordinary people who speak so many languages and have such a wide knowledge of the world. On the other, they have inspired reluctance, distrust or even fear. While literary works sometimes reflect one or the other perception, James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Ispahan, in England (1828) reflects both and provides us with an insight into the nature and circumstances of the situation. By following the attitude towards the mehmandar throughout the novel, the present paper considers a set of memes that seem to be still valid today. The reasons this is so relate to features inherent in the profession, the privilege of understanding both sides ‘of the coin’, the power tamper with information, the risk of misunderstanding, etc
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This paper will deal with the reasonings in some of the works of Agatha Christie (1890-1976), who is among the foremost representatives of the genre of detective novel. The paper will try to show what kinds of reasoning this author used in her detective novels, whether these reasonings are clear or not, whether the conclusions are drawn from the premises or the conclusions are given first and the premises later, i.e. whether they are based on reasonings in ordinary language.
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The purpose of the study is to examine the pedagogical usability of interactive e-learning materials for foreign language practice. It is based upon two studies of the expected between-group and within-group differences among participants in the educational process. The sample consists of two groups – lecturers and students, a total of 100 participants, each evaluating four materials specifically prepared for this study. Two consecutive repeated measures ANOVA were conducted in which the gender/age, the position of the participants in the educational process, and usability dimensions were the independent variables. Results indicated that all independent variables and their interactions have a significant effects on the evaluations of the pedagogical usability. Women tend to assign higher values than men. Аge groups generally differ in their evaluations, although there is a tendency to give similar ratings for the individual dimensions of pedagogical usability. The 31-40 years age group evaluates the materials higher while the lowest evaluations are given by the groups of 21-30 and 50+ year old participants. Students tend to rate the pedagogical usability systemically higher than the lecturers. Usability dimensions also have a significant effect on evaluations. The most prominent feature of the materials, by a great margin, is their Applicability. The findings corroborate previous research which show age and gender differences in web usability do exist. We conclude that these differences exist as much in pedagogical usability as in technical usability. Further investigations are suggested to explore more deeply the differences in the perceived pedagogical value of e-learning materials as this has implications for instructional designers, teachers and learners alike.
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The recusant culture in the time of the queen Elizabeth (1558–1603) developed a lot of rhetorical devices, figures, tropes and allegories to convey hidden religious and political meanings. Apostle Peter, whose authority had been lessened by reformers, epitomized the institution of papacy and the Roman Church for the Catholics as is clearly understandable from the poem Saint Peter’s Complaint by Robert Southwell or from the motet Tu es Petrus by William Byrd. In The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare creatively adapted motifs taken from his sources (Brooke, Painter) but added to them a remarkable number of allusions, canonical terms, and references to St. Peter the apostle, to the Ecclesia Romana and to Rome as well as to the liturgy of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, thereby underlining a sacrificial value of Juliet’s suffering in figura Christi for the sanctity of her marriage. This article supports the thesis that Shakespeare made use of the Bible and scholastic philosophy for his dramatic purpose, and deliberately imbued the secular subject-matter with a religious vocabulary and imagery.
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Any attempt to compare and contrast the poetics of modernism and postmodernism must focus on the important question of the authorial principle, more precisely, on the relation between the author and the textual creation, as a more or less autonomous artefact. This paper will, therefore, deal with a possible understanding of this phenomenon, exploring it, on the one hand, through the work of one of the most important authors in the modern English literature – James Joyce, while, on the other hand, it will reflect on narrative procedures of one of the most popular post-structuralist practioners of the second half of the 20th century – John Fowles.
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Old English poetry is very little known in Hungary. Most of the corpus remains untranslated to the present day, although many of the translations that do exist were made by renowned Hungarian poets and literary translators, such as Sándor Weöres. Beowulf is the best represented among the translations, as it has a complete verse translation published in 1994, and several excerpts have also been translated by various authors. Further translations include some of the elegies and riddles, as well as The Battle of Brunanburh, The Dream of the Rood and Caedmon’s Hymn, but very little of Old English religious poetry in general. The aim of the present article is to present a brief overview of the history of translating Old English poems into Hungarian, and to provide a comprehensive list of all published verse translations.
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The text illustrates the changes in representations of the Invisible in religious poetry: the crisis of language caused by the rejection of the idea of the Logos in Western culture leads to the obscuring of the symbolic transparency present in the sacred art created in the medieval and early modern period. The traditional animal imagery used in the past to illustrate the mysteries of the faith is replaced in twentieth-century poetry by opaque representations of the non-human face of God. The argument is illustrated by reference to the “speaking” and simultaneously “mute” pictures in the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. The poems of Thomas, which reveal clear traces of apophatic theology, can be viewed as a response to the challenges of the post-secular age.
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This is the first reconstruction in either Britain or Poland of the life of Bartłomiej Beniowski, a Polish post-1831 émigré who was the only foreign refugee to play an identifiable role in early London Chartism.It places Beniowski’s Chartist record in the context of his earlier political affiliations, and explores his post-Chartist political allegiances. It investigates his success in 1840s London as a mnemonist who developed a system that he called “Phrenotypics,” and his invention in the 1850s of printing techniques which were taken up for commercial exploitation by a group of entrepreneurial Liberal M.P.s.It is the biography of an exceptional and colourful individual, acted out against a vast multi-cultural backdrop, from tsarist Russia to Liberal England via Orléanist France and Muhammad Ali’s Egypt. It reveals a life-long commitment to the cause of Polish independence, along with consistent advocacy of democracy and championship of the oppressed, including vocal campaigns for Jewish civil rights. It provides the narrative of a life that illustrates contemporary European political and social movements and their bearing on 19th-century British labour history.
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Christina Reid was a Northern Irish playwright whose plays maintained a distinctly socially-oriented perspective. In her works from 1980s and 1990s, she penetrated spaces of Belfast city inhabited by marginalized, Protestant working-class communities. Her writing stands in conspicuous contrast to stereotypical plays written in the South of the island. If the South playwriting could be associated with imaginative, poetic, unrealistic representation of rural life on the one hand, and traditional, Gaelic heritage on the other, the Belfast scenery is that of working-class, post-industrial depression. Here, political violence equals social injustice, contributing to the realistic presentation of characters on the verge of survival in socially, economically, and politically troubled environment.
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Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) is a prime specimen of post-Joycean heteroglossia in Irish fiction. The novel exhibits a programmatic dialogical/intertextual orientation orchestrated with its own parodic and ironic modes, which makes McBride’s work uniquely capable of re-energizing Irish cultural tradition. Simultaneously, her novel contributes its own distinct voice to the impressive amplitude of artistic expressions which have emerged from Irish culture in the wake of Joyce’s writings. Mikhail Bahtin’s approach to the novel (as discussed in The Dialogic Imagination), in turn, is particularly relevant to McBride’s fiction because of her incorporation (as well as adaptation) of a variety of voices and perspectives.
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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a multilayered work and, as such, enables multiple interpretations. One such interpretation is the application of Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic, feminist theories to Mary Shelley's biography. By following Sigmund Freud's and Jacques Lacan's theories, Julia Kristeva thematized the influence of the mother in a patriarchal world. The character of the mother is at the center of her theory. She claims that one needs to separate from the mother and her body if one wishes to be independent. To be more precise, one needs to commit matricide as a first step towards independence. However, a mother's body can never be completely rejected and as such, it always exists on the „borders of one’s identity.” Kristeva's theory is especially applicable to Mary Shelley's biography – the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft; Mary Shelley's alienation from her father; several miscarriages and tragic deaths in the family. To Shelley, as well as Kristeva, the character of the mother, is the focus of interest. Even though the character of the mother is present in Frankenstein’s text and subtext, the novel is not only about mother(s) but also about father(s). Through the motif of asexual creation, Mary Shelley criticizes her father, William Godwin, for neglect; male encroachment into the female sphere of childbearing and childrearing and finally, she criticizes patriarchal society for marginalizing women. Thus, Frankenstein can be understood as a critique of inadequate parenting that thematically wavers between matricide and patricide.
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Metaphysics, history and utopianism merge in Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs. McEwan presents contrasting metaphysical systems: the feeling of mystic oneness with the rest of creation vs. scientific reasoning and utilitarian ethics (the female vs. the male principle). McEwan traces these metaphysical outlooks in the historical background of World War II, and he comments on the perversity of various cultural practices (racism, violence, aggressiveness, etc.), which are seen as the products of the modern demythologized tradition. According to the author, resistance to these perverted cultural practices can be found in the mysticism of June’s utopian vision.
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The beginning of the twenty first century can be described as a liminal period of discarding old interests and preoccupations in preparation for the arrival of something new. This feeling of standing on a threshold is also visible in literature where the growing impatience with the postmodern technique of formal play may result in the creation of a new kind of fiction. David Foster Wallace’s collection of short stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) is a critique of the postmodern society and its representative literary form which not only convincingly argues that the formula of metafiction has been exhausted but also points to a possible way out of the postmodern impasse and to a different kind of writing. This essay outlines the major points of the critique of metafiction as presented by Wallace and analyses his work as an example of “new” metafiction. The new form – which both embodies and departs from the “old” metafictional devices – may be best approached via reference to the mechanism of trauma, particularly to its compulsive desire to repeat the “painful” metafictional event.
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Geoffrey Chaucer has traditionally been seen as indebted to the great male writers of medieval Europe: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut. However, less has been written about the European woman who was Queen of England and his possible patron: Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and wife of Richard II. Although Chaucer explicitly compliments the Queen in his work, most scholars have not engaged seriously with the question of her role in Chaucer’s oeuvre. Alfred Thomas’s article shows that Anne came from a long line of highly educated and multilingual royal women and he rereads some of the famous stories from the Canterbury Tales alongside contemporaneous works in Czech, German, and Latin – languages with which the Queen was familiar. Thomas argues that even if she did not literally commission any of his works, Chaucer seems to have been writing for Anne as an imagined reader and this awareness shaped the way he wrote and what he chose to write.
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The concepts of multiculturalism and otherness that emerged after the migrations following the postcolonial period became popular in literature as in most fields. The multicultural policy regarded as a magic stick in the societies where the cross-cultural tolerance is nearly disappeared and the members of different cultures are labeled as “other” has been questionedfor both its defıinition and accomplishments. In this study, the terms multiculturalism and otherness will be examined in Chris Cleave ’s Little Bee which can be classifıed as a work of post colonial literature. The main themes of the work such as migration, immigrant problems, colonialism be among some of the reasons of why multiculturalism and otherness appeared. Based on this common ground the essence of the concepts mentioned and the point reached will tried to be explained.
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In this article the author discusses the relationship between fantasy genre literature and Christian theology. The introduction briefly characterizes the religious experience as a significant component of mythological consciousness and one of the basic indicators that proves the fantasy genre to be myth-oriented. The body of the paper compares and contrasts children's fantasy works by two English writers - The Chronicles of Narnia by Clive Staples Lewis and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Christian concepts form the backbone of both series; however, their interpretations strictly oppose each other. The author draws the following conclusions - the fact that a religious dimension occupies a central position in a range of contemporary fantasy prose demonstrates that the topic has once again acquired general interest. Nevertheless, the different approaches to the religious sphere prove that modern society prefers mythological thinking rather than traditional religion.
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Doris Lessing’s short story “An Old Woman and Her Cat” from her collection, The Temptation of Jack Orkney, revolves around the nomadic experiences of an old and homeless woman in various places and her survival under poor living circumstances with her cat. The places occupied by the old woman in this story such as the Council flats, the room in the slum and the ruined flat in a wealthy neighbourhood cannot be considered as proper homes where people have a sense of belonging; rather, they are just material places she tries to appropriate as shelters temporarily on the way without a feeling of warmth and attachment to them. Focusing on the woman and the cat’s relationship with their surrounding provides a discussion on space and nomadism within the framework of Henri Lefebvre’s spatial tripartite - the perceived, the conceived and the lived - which is related to Rosi Braidotti’s theory on nomadism. It also reveals the social norms and values, which disregard an old woman and her cat’s struggle for life in a metropolis.
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