We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
This essay is devoted to Shakespearean criticism in the UK between 1920 and 1940. I begin by examining the origins of Shakespeare study at Oxford and Cambridge, by figures such as I. A. Richards (1929) and William Empson (1930). I follow this by looking at F. R. Leavis and his journal Scrutiny, but I also trace his influence on his fellow Cambridge colleagues highlighting instances where they collaborated, as did Caroline Spurgeon with Arthur Quiller-Couch (the latter two co-editors of the New Cambridge Shakespeare series, 1921-1966) on the famous 1921 study for the British Board of Education entitled “The Teaching of English in England”—also referred to as The Newbolt Report, after the chairman of the committee, Sir Henry Newbolt.
More...
India has the longest engagement with Shakespeare of any non-Western country. In the eastern Indian region of Bengal, contact with Shakespeare began in the eighteenth century. His plays were read and acted in newly established English schools, and performed professionally in new English theatres. A paradigm shift came with the foundation of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817. Shakespeare featured largely in this new ‘English education’, taught first by Englishmen and, from the start of the twentieth century, by a distinguished line of Indian scholars. Simultaneously, the Shakespearean model melded with traditional Bengali popular drama to create a new professional urban Bengali theatre. The close interaction between page and stage also evinced a certain tension. The highly indigenized theatre assimilated Shakespeare in a varied synthesis, while academic interest focused increasingly on Shakespeare’s own text.Beyond the theatre and the classroom, Shakespeare reached out to a wider public, largely as a read rather than performed text. He was widely read in translation, most often in prose versions and loose adaptations. His readership extended to women, and to people outside the city who could not visit the theatre. Thus Shakespeare became part of the shared heritage of the entire educated middle class. Bengali literature since the late nineteenth century testifies strongly to this trend, often inducing a comparison with the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa. Most importantly, Shakespeare became part of the common currency of cultural and intellectual exchange.
More...
India’s rejection of Macmillan’s English Classics series constitutes an important counter-origin that exposes and dismantles underlying assumptions about how colonial Indian readers valued and consumed Shakespeare. In this paper, I examine the failure of Macmillan’s English Classics series to bring about Indian assimilation to British values. I specifically consider Kenneth Deighton’s Shakespeare editions in the series and argue that Deighton’s Shakespeare attempted to utilize its extensive explanatory notes as a primer on Englishness for Indians. The pedantic notes, as well as the manner in which the texts were appropriated into Indian educational systems, were determining factors in their ultimate failure to gain widespread popularity in the colony. The imperial agenda that insists upon one dominant, valid discourse led to Macmillan misreading the market and misreading an already viable field of Shakespeare studies in India. Reflecting on narratives and histories surrounding the origins of Shakespeare studies in India, as well as how Shakespeare’s works were produced for the colonies and the way in which they were duly rejected, reveals how exchanges of power and capital between metropole and colony shape Western systems just as heavily as they do others.
More...
Shakespeare’s travels into Persia started in the middle of the nineteenth century when modern socio-political forces and the need for a powerful army were fomenting important changes in the traditional structure of government, production, and culture alike. Shakespeare appeared in Persia at a time when the country was experiencing a fundamental transition from older traditions into a western-like government, infrastructure, education, and ideas. Shakespeare was important to this process in two ways. He was enlisted to enrich the cultural property of the country and therefore became ensconced in the educational system. Perhaps more importantly, his plays were used to critique the ruling political system and the prevailing habits of the people. Hamlet has always been a favorite play for the translators and the intellectuals because it starts with regicide and ends with murdering a monarch and replacing him with a just king. Othello, another favorite, was frequently retranslated partly because there were similar themes in Persian culture with which readers could easily connect. Thus, Shakespeare became a Persian Knight and moved from one historical era to another to function as a mirror to reflect the aspirations of the elite, if not those of the common folk. This paper traces Shakespeare’s steps in Persia chronologically, expounding the socio-political context in which Shakespeare and his plays operated not only within the context of academia, but also without in society amongst the people and the elites as political allegories to sidestep censorship and to attack the despotic monarchs and ruling power.
More...
Shakespeare is among the most important non-Turkish authors in Turkey and has become an indispensable part of the theatre repertory and the educational curricula. Yet, the origins of Shakespeare studies have a complicated legacy dating back to the imperialistic motivations of foreign schools in Ottoman Turkey. However, starting with the republican period, Shakespeare productions and studies were utilised to spread the progressive reforms of the republic that were maintained through the theatres and the various universities primarily set in Istanbul and in Ankara. Accordingly, this article will explore the origins of the academic study of Shakespeare in Turkey.
More...
In this article, I will take up the idea of “origins” as it pertains to Finnish Shakespeare during Finland’s time as an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia from 1809-1917. While not technically the beginning of Shakespearean performances, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the beginning of the rhetorical use of Shakespeare in public discourse used to establish cultural sovereignty distinct from Sweden and Russia. Beginning with a brief overview of Shakespearean mentions in the latter half of the eighteenth century, I will analyse the public discourse found in Finnish literary journals and newspaper articles in the 1810’s and 20’s. Following an analysis of J. F. Lagervall’s 1834 Ruunulinna, I will then briefly track how shifting attitudes towards translations such as those found in J. V. Snellman’s writings influenced the emerging Finnish literary and theatre tradition, most notably with Kaarlo Slöör and Paavo Cajendar’s Shakespeare translations and the establishment of the Finnish Theatre in 1871. Finally, an analysis of Juhani Aho’s untranslated essay in Gollancz’ 1916 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare will highlight the legacy of prior Finnish Shakespearean traditions, while also highlighting the limits of translation. Ultimately, I suggest that Shakespeare was appropriated early on as an accessible figure of resistance in the face of Swedish linguistic supremacy and the increasing threat of Russian assimilation and oppression.
More...
This essay reconsiders interpretations of Shakespeare by Irish writer Anna Murphy Jameson and the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Developing an informal method in which the voice of the female critic rallies in defence of Shakespeare’s heroines, they intervene in a male-dominated intellectual sphere to model alternative forms of women’s learning that take root outside of formalized institutional channels. Jameson, in Shakespeare’s Heroines, invokes the language of authentic Romantic selfhood and artistic freedom, recovering Shakespeare’s female characters from earlier critical aspersion as figures of exceptional female eloquence and resilience; she adopts a conversational critical voice to involve her female readers in the interpretative process itself. Fuller, in Woman in Nineteenth Century, speaks authoritatively as a kind of female prophet to argue that women’s creative reinterpretations of Shakespeare point the way to a revitalization of a sterile literary critical field. Both writers call for the reform of women’s education through revisionist interpretations of history attuned to the representation of female exceptionalism. In embryonic form, these nineteenth century feminist writings formulate a persistent strain of socially engaged, activist feminist criticism of Shakespeare.
More...
Despite independence as a country, Canada belongs to the Commonwealth and has deep colonial roots and the British educational system was key in creating Canadian curricula. Given the centrality of Shakespeare’s work in the British literary canon, it follows that it would also figure heavily in the academic requirements for Canadian students. At the dawn of the Confederation (1867), the high school curriculum used Shakespeare to emphasize a “humanist” approach to English literature using the traditional teaching methods of reading, rhetoric, and recitation. Presently, Shakespeare continues to be the only author in the high school curriculum to whom an independent area of study is dedicated. The origin of Shakespeare in Canada through curriculum and instruction is, thus, a result from the canonic tradition imported from Britain.This traditional model no longer fits the imperative of multiculturalism, as reflected in the Canadian Constitution Act (1982). Yet, with the appropriate methodology Shakespeare’s texts can be a vehicle for multiculturalism, social justice, and inclusivity. In light of recent disillusionments concerning the relevance of Shakespearean texts in high school curricula, this paper proposes an alternative pedagogical approach that envisages changing this paradigm and fostering a re-origin of Shakespeare studies in Canada through an intentional pedagogical process grounded in individual experience.Scholarship has highlighted the importance of autobiographies in the learning process and curriculum theorists William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet designed a framework that prioritizes individual experience. Our approach to teaching Shakespeare’s works aligns with the four steps of their currere method, presented as: (1) contemplative, (2) translational, (3) experiential, and (4) reconceptual, fostering an opportunity for self-transformation through trans-historical social themes present in the text.The central argument is that Shakespeare’s text can undergo a re-origin when lived, given its initial conception as embodied, enacted narrative in the early modern period. In this method, students immerse themselves in Shakespeare’s text through films and stage productions and then manifest their interpretations by embodying the literature based on their autobiographical narratives. To undergo a re-origin in the Canadian secondary curriculum, current pedagogical approaches to teaching Shakespeare require a paradigm shift.
More...
This essay historicizes the Shakespeare curriculum at UC Berkeley’s English department over the last one hundred years. An elite research university in the United States, UC Berkeley’s extensive course offerings have expanded due to changes in undergraduate education and external cultural shifts. With a growing number of courses on sexuality, race, gender, etc., that became part of the purview of an English department, the teaching of Shakespeare expanded as well. I demonstrate how the emphasis on Shakespeare in the U.S. undergraduate curriculum shifts over time from one form of recognition—an acknowledgement of his value or worth—to a recognition of identifying with his work based on prior experience. Distinguishing between courses that combine “Shakespeare and” and those that combine “Literature and,” I expose the consequences each has for the canonicity of both Shakespeare and subject fields with which his works are placed in conversation, explicitly and implicitly. I argue that the expansion of Shakespeare in the American undergraduate curriculum coincides with and depends on the compression of key aspects of interpretation that pose challenges for the new knowledges it seeks to create. I illuminate how an expanded Shakespeare curriculum saw a compression of Shakespeare into metonymic mythic status, which has implications for the teaching of literature from various identity and cultural groups. I demonstrate how the origins of an expansive undergraduate Shakespeare curriculum in the United States positions Shakespeare as the interlocutor for a wide range of topics.
More...
The article is devoted to an analysis of the concept of “water” in the short prose of Joseph Conrad – the famous British writer of Polish origin, who was born in Ukraine. The purpose of the study was to research the linguistic and cognitive nature of the concept “water” as an indicator of the author’s individual style. The study confirms that new scientific approaches (linguocognitive, linguocultural, and linguoconceptual) open up wide opportunities for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of Joseph Conrad and allow a new approach to understanding both the author’s personality and the key concepts in his work. In the course of the analysis, it was found that the concept of “water” in the writer’s works is cognitively multifaceted, polysemantic, and axiologically labeled. The peculiarities of its linguisticization have shown an extensive system of nominations for its designation, numerous conceptual meanings, and the ambivalent nature of the conceptualized concept, which confirms the importance of the corresponding image in the writer’s idiom and helps the reader to model the author’s image, realize the importance of his life experience, and understand the depicted events more deeply. All this gives grounds for the conclusion that the concept of “water” is a relevant feature of the writer’s idiom in Joseph Conrad’s short prose.
More...
A comparative study of the novels Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wide Saragasso Sea by Jean Rhys enabled us to reveal different intertextual aspects in which these two works are touching, and the presentation of space is one of those aspects. The paper is dedicated to discovering, analyzing and comparing images of space in these novels, in order to establish a meaningful connection between them and determine the functions of their appearance. Upon careful reading, we noticed that the space can be seen as a shelter of the main characters; it can also be an indicator of their emotional state; space can be an announcement of future events; it can be a link between the past and the present; it may depend on the perspective from which the characters speak; it was also noticed that the image of the characteristic space from the canonical novel was transported into the modernistic novel. Both main heroines feel most secure when they are on the margins, when they are invisible. Only then they can establish a stable relation with their inner being, and that connection is the one that provides peace, a sense of security and tranquility. That feeling is very close to the feeling of belonging to a certain place, which both are looking for.
More...
According to S. Tomkins’ classification of affects, the paper explores the role of disgust, anger, sadness and fear in the gender identity constructs in the Croatian postmodern drama Woman- Bomb (2004), written by the playwright Ivana Sajko. The methodological framework relies on the affect theories by S. Tomkins and A. Lucas, which are used to investigate the emotional communication between characters in the drama. Based on the research of N. Govedić, the affective reaction is hypothesized to result in communication, i.e., in revealing one’s own emotional states to others. Reception and the reshaping of the charge of the other are inherent to the affects themselves. They may also subject to political scrutiny and function as moral guides. Thus, this research focuses on the socio-affective (non) communication between the characters of the drama, constructed by the socially and symbolically marked feminist body of the ‘bomb-woman’ (‘terrorist-woman’). The body of a terrorist resonates with that of a ‘queer body’ (“the unfortunate one”, “the source of affliction”). By examining the construction of the gender identity of the ‘bomb-woman’ in postmodern drama, we conclude that Sajko’s literary strategies move away from stereotypical representations of gender identities, i.e., the role of women was regularly represented through motherhood in the literary practice of the 19th and most of the 20th century, while their potential for the social or “street-activist” engagement was overlooked. In accordance with postmodernist practice, through irony, paradox, intermediality, fragmentation, culture of performance and self-referential actions, in the character of the female terrorist – ‘bomb-woman’, the author expresses resistance to the traditional gender identity ‘conventions’, and this is especially evident in the analysis of disgust as the negative affect. Therefore, along with anger, sadness and fear, disgust becomes apostrophized in the feminist manner as the main affect in this monologic tragicomedy. The disgust with the stereotypical representation of women symbolically results in the identity of a “woman as a time bomb”.
More...
The following article looks at a contemporary children’s time travel story, The Dog Who Saved the World by Ross Welford, written and published just at the very outset of the COVID-19 epidemic. The novel is itself about an even more potentially dangerous epidemic which might have serious consequences in the near future for the whole of humanity. The author skilfully uses the narrative in order to include the child reader by replicating the mood and atmosphere of the current pandemic, thus, effectively empowering them against it. To achieve this, the author foregrounds what he considers to be “good” as opposed to “bad” technology and enables the child to comfortably deal with its complexities along with the complexity of time travel through scientific initialisms and other forms of abbreviation which children are highly familiar with (texting friends on smartphones or using the social media).
More...
Drawing on recent developments in unnatural narratology, this paper reads entangled temporalities of Kim Newman’s gamebook novel Life’s Lottery in relation to David Deutsch’s quantum theory of the multiverse. The forking narrative structure of the novel, which allows the reader to influence how a particular storyline will develop by choosing from a set of predetermined options, subverts such commonly assumed characteristics of time as unidirectionality and immutability, and undermines classical narratological models of temporal relations between story and discourse. In Life’s Lottery time constantly branches into contradictory timelines, which not only run in parallel but also crisscross one another and loop upon themselves, thus allowing transition between universes and times. Far from a mere exercise in narrative interactivity, a complex multiverse thus created can be construed as a paradoxically verisimilar representation of life’s contingency.
More...
Part of Chesterton’s imagery that he often employs in his writing is the motif of light and darkness, which in The Ball and the Cross takes the form of the cycle of night and day. This cycle dictates a specific rhythm, which rules over both the ongoing duel and other events. Thus, the evening and night time is rather reserved for considerable and profound insights, found in, for instance, the opening and closing scenes and in all the events that reflect or decide about the characters’ spiritual growth. The day time seems to contribute more to the development of the protagonists’ relationship with each other and the world around.
More...
Тhis paper will explore the portrayal of popular culture in Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The introductory part of the paper presents a review of the terms culture and popular culture and their interrelationship in order to shed light on the space in which popular culture emerges in this novel. Kureishi examines the subcultural scene of England, where the concept of popular culture represents the spirit of the new age that the novel’s characters encounter. The main part of the paper is dedicated to the elements of popular culture, their representation and interpretation through the actions of the characters in The Buddha of Suburbia. The paper aims to describe the concept of popular culture through fashion, music and lifestyle, but also the re-examination of the London suburb and the way it has been described in the English literature.
More...
In this paper, elements of popular culture in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway are analyzed, and the theses from John Fisk’s Popular Culture are used as a concept for the analysis. In addition to basic data on the concept of popular culture, the paper presents the novel Mrs. Dalloway and the way in which they modify the purchased products according to their own expectations, giving them a special im- pression and meaning. Purchased products, advertisements and public places, such as the shopping districts of London, shopping malls and private entertainment, are colored by the emotions of the characters, but at the same time, they awaken the emotions of the hidden desires and encourage them to think. Based on Fisk’s theory, the connection between the elements of popular culture in the work and the char- acter’s inner life is determined.
More...
The paper is focused on the interpretation of the notion of Truth in Ukrainian translations of Hamlet through the lenses of the contemporary Ukrainian Shakespeare Studies scholar Maria Hablevych (1950). In particular, it deals with the reproduction of Truth based on the notion of agent’s professional habitus, which is regarded as a heterogeneus entity with several sub-habiti. The paper is an attempt to prove that multifaceted agency as the result of complex habitus, reflected in the agent’s hexis, or style, facilitates better understanding and re-interpretation of the issues raised in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The research touches upon the Ukrainian translator-agents, with some of them being committed to more than one agency, to trace the influence of the existing restrictive norms on their habiti and the respective interpretation of Truth in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
More...
Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) which portrays the story of Michael Beard revolves around Beard’s attempt to actualise his artificial photosynthesis project, which is designed to reduce the impact of global warming. This project, which he plagiarised from a young colleague, is developed to produce solar energy that mimics photosynthesis to decrease the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Yet, Beard, a middle-aged physics professor, believes that environmental problems are exaggerated and, as a result, he rejects the existence of climate change. Rather than taking interest in the eco-friendly aspect of solar energy, he is attracted to the economic profit and academic prestige that he will gain from the solar project. Although McEwan has received much criticism regarding the idea that Solar is not a provocative environmentalist novel as it is not nature-oriented, this article claims that McEwan provides an alternative stance to raise awareness to environmental problems. Beard’s ethics about environmental problems and his false appearance as an environmentalist with a world-saving project initiate a critical conflict that draws attention to the toxic landscape in the novel. Thus, this study discusses that Beard’s actions, thoughts, and objectives reveal the hypocritical discourse of climate change which, as a result, generate a “toxic consciousness” in Solar. “Toxic consciousness” raised by Beard’s anti-heroic qualities foreground the toxic identifications of both nature and culture. In this sense, this study opens a new line of enquiry by arguing that, to develop awareness towards humanity’s waste, Solar demonstrates toxic landscapes and, therefore, represents “toxic consciousness” by means of Beard’s anthropocentric stance.
More...