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The paper, starting from the analysis of Northanger Abbey, suggests reflection on the attitude of Jane Austen to her predecessors, Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth etc., but also the other both fertile and popular authors of the end of 18th and the beginning of 19th century. Using the research of Dale Spender and Brian Corman, the authorpresents the novelist as a conscious heiress of a significant, though successfully marginalised in the Victorian period and overlooked even today, female literary tradition. Taken from Linda Hutcheon, the definition of parody allows to compare in the end Northanger Abbey to Strach w Zameczku of the first Polish novelist, who referred in a very similar way to her foreign predecessors, Anna Mostowska.
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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is without doubt a popular science-fiction novel, which has inspired many generations of artists and creators in popular culture and mass culture. It has also become an inspiration for scientific studies in the field of robotics and cybernetics. Modern cognitive sciences are looking for the perfect pattern that will allow artificial intelligence to be achieved. An important problem for scientists was the lack of full knowledge about consciousness. We are able to recreate the structure of the human body in a machine, but we are not able to fully simulate the neural processes that would create human consciousness. This problem is perfectly illustrated by cultural works, including literature and cinematography. We see in them both the emanations of the motifs contained in Shelley’s novel and the realization of scientific hypotheses that shape our image of a conscious, thinking machine.
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Section 9 deals with variation, i.e. words that are used in different combinations, section 10 with the sequence of the elements and possible reasons for the sequence (phonologic, semantic, translational), and section 11 with the relation to Lydgate’s Latin source. Section 12 traces Lydgate’s relation to Chaucer: It is well known that Lydgate was a Chaucerian, i.e. an admirer and follower of Chaucer, but perhaps not so well known that he also used many binomials which Chaucer had used. Section 13 lists the binomials that can be regarded as formulaic, and section 14 singles out a pair of binomials where the first binomial is apparently learned, while the second states the same fact in more popular terms. Section 15 provides a conclusion, and Appendix I lists all binomials that occur at the beginning of Lydgate’s Troy Book. The figure in Appendix II shows the Primum Mobile and the seat of God according to the Medieval world picture (as discussed in section 14)
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The author investigates how James Joyce stylizes the space in his novel Ulysses for drama. For this purpose he carries out a comparative analysis of some episodes in this book. This analysis leads to the conclusion that Joyce transposes some dramatic genres and specifically dramatic writing techniques, especially associated with August Strindberg. Kozłowski emphasizes the dramatic character of some motifs that create spatial conditions in Joyce’s novel. Furthermore, he compares these motifs with the literary works of the greatest modern dramatists.
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The paper applies selected devices of the methodology of Object-Oriented Ontology to study William Golding’s novel Free Fall. Particular attention is given to Graham Harman’s project, whose definition of an object accounts for all beings, humans included. Within the ontological structure of an object two components can be distinguished: the “sensual object”, which can engage in relationships with other objects, and the “real object”, which refrains from any connections. The author aims to show how the main protagonist of Golding’s novel is impacted on by material objects, how other humans are perceived by him as inherently dual beings, but most importantly how the protagonist himself discovers the thing-like quality of his own human condition.
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This article attempts to read Juliusz Słowacki’s Arab from the comparative perspective of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The protagonist of Słowacki’s oriental tale, who is a variation on the Byronic hero, also shows similarities with Milton’s Satan: unceasing motion, obsession of revenge, loneliness, axiological preference of evil. The analysis of those similarities creates a new interpretative context for Arab, which was hitherto regarded as a superficial study of the pathological psyche or a caricature of the Byronic model.
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J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly one of the most widely read epic fiction writers, translated into almost forty world languages. His works describe the entire history of an imaginary world, from the very beginning of its creation until the creation of man and are imbued with a constant struggle between good and evil. On the opposite sides, there are different races of humanoid creatures, among which are: elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, trolls, etc. They all have elaborate genealogies and cultural characteristics. The extremely rich philological education of the author himself contributed to that. The connections between Tolkien’s work and Nordic myths have been shown in detail in science so far. This is most obvious when choosing mythological symbols and names. The author even created an elven language inspired by the Finnish language, for which he used runic alphabet. However, the names of the places where orcs, goblins and other servants of evil live, as well as their personal names, were not created after the example of elves. According to their phonetic characteristics, these names are significantly different from elven and human ones. In this paper, attention will be focused on such names, considering that they possess phonetic and semantic characteristics of the Turkish language, especially its older variants, and that they carry certain meanings that still exist in the modern Turkish language.
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This paper demonstrates that T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is a magic incantation to restorethe lost values of the Western culture on realistic foundations. The poem’s intertextuality,together with its versification are analyzed in order to show Eliot’s view on Western man’shistory: one of sin, fall and increasing decay. The main argument is that, through his poem, Eliotis attempting to restore humanity and its destiny away from the sad history in which it was castfrom the beginning.
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The compositional characteristics of the English cooking recipes dating back to the second half of the 19th century were analyzed in detail using the Book of Household Management compiled by Isabella Mary Beeton (also known as Mrs Beeton), a famous Englishwoman, and published in 1861. Owing to the growing interest in the gastronomic discourse, this research is of particular relevance – although the language of cooking is rich, its specifics and evolution have been still understudied. It was found that the soup recipes from the book under consideration have such structural elements as titles, ingredients list, main bodies, and, in some cases, optional elements. All of these elements were described. A classification of the obligatory and optional elements was introduced. All recipe parts (in accordance with P.P. Burkova’s classification) were divided into introductory (title, list of ingredients), instructive (recipe body), and concluding blocks (time and money required for cooking, seasonality of ingredients, number of portions, information about the history of a particular ingredient). It was concluded that the structure of the English cooking recipes of the second half of the 19th century is stereotyped, which can be explained by the author’s ambition to make it easy for young and unskilled housewives to master the art of culinary and housekeeping.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her long narrative poem titled Aurora Leigh portrays a heroine that struggles to be a poetess rather than a submissive wife in accordance with gender conventions. Her struggle shows that women attempting to go beyond domesticity to pursue a career encounter certain obstacles because marriage is regarded supreme career for them. Despite those obstacles and gender-specific applications, Aurora Leigh, the heroine, becomes a poet and marries her cousin. Her poetic career and marriage display that womanhood is not an obstacle to pursuing a career. By such a plot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, challenged patriarchal society and the attribution of both frailty and certain fixed roles to women. Rather than presenting a conventional marriage in the end, Browning utilizes an unconventional marriage as a challenge to the patriarchal Victorian society because she underlined the fact that a marriage is not a career for women but a necessity. Discussing unconventionality of the marriage in Aurora Leigh, this study investigates how Browning problematizes conventional gender roles and presents marriage as a part of women’s powerful side rather than as a sign of subjection.
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This article places Graham Swift’s latest novel Here We Are (2020) in the context of his previous writing and argues that much of his fiction is underpinned by the characters’ desire to transcend the limitations of their ordinary lives and to seek solace or a temporary escape within the realm of illusion. The analysis aims to demonstrate that the opposition between the two realms is the central preoccupation in Here We Are. The wish to surmount the mundane is fulfilled quite literally through the protagonist’s dedication to the practice of magic. The meaning of magic as a craft is briefly discussed, especially its quasi-religious connotations. It is also suggested that magic may be a tentative, personal answer to the problem of the “disenchantment” of the world, as diagnosed by Max Weber a hundred years ago. In Swift’s novel, far from being only a set of professional skills, magic creates an illusory realm, alternative to and more appealing than daily life.
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The article focuses on Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, a sui generis work, in which the writer explores metaphysical and epistemological issues such as the meaning of selfhood, time and identity as flux, silence and language, the self as defined by language, and other fundamental concerns. These topics are explored through a dualistic perspective. This duality permeates the entire structure of the novel through binary oppositions: the self as one/the self as plural; the lyrical/the novelistic; the mystical/the rational; narrative/formlessness; the embodied/the disembodied; potentiality/actuality; language/silence. Woolf’s ambivalent approach is also at work in the way she uses language in the novel. The urge towards a teleological existence prompts her characters to turn events into a narrative that would arrange and combine them into one thread. The present article, however, shows that in The Waves the very human propensity to turn experience into a coherent story is countered by the opposite perception that this narrativizing drive is only an illusion.
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Twentieth-century drama has made the stage a site for reflecting on science. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, considered by many as one of the most striking contributions to “science plays,” portrays the elusive yet crucial short meeting of the two pillars of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in the autumn of 1941. The play employs ‘real’ scientists as characters that recurrently refer to and explain their scientific ideas such as uncertainty and complementarity, recognized as the Copenhagen Interpretation. Adopting the approach of possible worlds theory, this article analyses the concept of ‘possible worlds’ as projected in Copenhagen in light of the idea that physics itself has proposed a proliferation of parallel universes (multiverse). In fact, our main thesis is that the play offers an alternate history and brings about a myriad of counterfactuals that are tested as “drafts.
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The paper deals with one of the women’s roles in Anglo-Saxon literature: the peace-weaving tradition. For many decades, the female characters from several Old English epic poems have all been considered marginal and excluded figures (Overing, 1995: 216-260) because of their representations in these literary creations. In this paper, we try to offer an anthropological approach to womanhood in Beowulf, taking into account the context of the society presented in the epic poem, emphasizing the woman’s central role for the sealing of peace between two rival tribes/populations, thus representing the hope for the whole Anglo-Saxon society, for its continuity and development. We will present the women’s roles in Beowulf within the story itself and the society presented in the poem. Our investigation of these women in relation with their men indicates the preservation of memories about the pagan Germanic past for the Anglo-Saxon poet who will include these details further in the Anglo-Saxon traditions and culture.
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The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s late pieces which poses questions that inquire into the political and aesthetic conditions of the early modern period. In the winter of the revolutionary momentum of the English Renaissance, this play, by means of the character of Hermione, recovers the value of secularised rhetoric as a political tool to act upon reality and exposes the limits of Humanism as an avant-garde, whose tenets, in some cases, prove to be idealist expressions, as exemplified by her husband Leontes. This process is staged as a threat to her life, though she does not submit to a tragic destiny; instead, she manages to reappear at the end of the play in the shape of a statue that becomes alive. Thus, her possibility of intervening in her context is reborn. Hermione’s return is then an instance of hope understood as a form of resistance to a tragic denouement, now linked to art, which absorbs the critical function attributed to politics: in a context in which Humanism is in retreat, the female character starts to use the language of suggestion to relate to others and the world around her, preserving such language from a merely instrumental use.
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Cătălina Bălinișteanu-Furdu, 2021, Old and Middle English Literature. The Literature of the Renaissance, Bacău, Alma Mater Publishing House, ISBN 907-606- 527-673-4, 212 pages
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While projecting the readers into a dystopian future world, Nicola Barker’s novel H(A)PPY (2017) is deeply and poignantly rooted in contemporary life and records the anxieties of our age. As developed in this article, it presents a dystopian way of living in a technologically driven and heavily virtualized reality dominated by monitoring, surveillance and control, leading to conformism and uniformization, depersonalization and detachment, as well as degradation and sickness. These effects are not left without reaction, as the protagonist seeks independence and well-being by means of forms of resistance and escape. The article explores all these interrelated features of the way of living depicted in Barker’s visionary satire, which invites the contemporary individual to reflect (once) more on the potential dehumanizing harm caused by mechanization and technologization.
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This paper examines Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016) as a metatextual adaptation of Shakespeare’s literary classic The Tempest. The terms “adaptation” and “classic” are employed to explain the relation of Atwood’s work to its source material. The performance of The Tempest prepared by the characters of the novel that engages convicts is a form of multi-media interactive theater, and the classical text of the Shakespearean play is considered a form of “sacra” (Turner), which has educational and utilitarian purposes. Michel Foucault’s analysis of prison, his concept of “heterotopia”, and Victor Turner’s concept of “liminality” are introduced to discuss the convicts participating in a theatrical workshop as liminal individuals during the ritual of transition while in the heterotopian space of a prison.
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Review of: Sławomir Wącior - Lucasta Miller. Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epigraph. Vintage Books, Jonathan Cape, 2021, 368 pp., ISBN: 9781787331617
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