CEEOL - Browse Subjects Result

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.

From Man to Woman to a New Understanding of Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve

Author(s): Ángela LÓPEZ GARCÍA / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

Both Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve depict the transformation of a male character into a female one. In both texts these changes are not initially desired by the subjects but rather they are imposed on them by forces outside their control. Their transitions from male to female stirs in both novels a debate regarding the construction of gender by society and its influence in people. This article will analyze the way Orlando and Evelyn/Eve enter womanhood after going through a sex change and how both transformations imply a loss of power and privilege once the characters are no longer men. It will also compare and discuss the alternatives Woolf and Carter offer in terms of the new understandings of gender they propose.

More...

From Religious Belief to Identity Games in Ted Hughes’s Early Poetry

Author(s): Florin ANDREI / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

For many years, Ted Hughes had challenged the beliefs of his ancestors, engaging in identity games that revived pre-Christian mythologies, which he recycled in novel ways. Identity games refer, much in the fashion of Wittgenstein’s language games, to dynamic sets of contrasts and the games they involve in the construction of poetic identity not as a stable entity, but as a living and developing configuration, involving both continuity and change, sameness and difference. Such a view is particularly useful when dealing with poets like Ted Hughes, whose literary careers span several decades, in which significant developments do not support the claim that identity mainly involves stability. What follows will content itself to the examination of some significant identity games being performed in a few poems from Ted Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal.

More...

11.98 €

From Rhetoric to Aesthetics: Wit and Esprit in the English and French Theoretical Writings of the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

Author(s): Klára Bicanová / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 2013

The thesis deals primarily with the term wit and its modern and historical usage in literary and aesthetic theories. Further, it concerned with the literary and aesthetic implications of the terms wit and esprit as they were theorized in critical writings of several authors of the early modern England and France. The thesis has two primary goals. The first goal is to re-assess the English concept of wit, nowadays regarded as an out-dated device of past poetic systems, and to present it as vital and useful part of the contemporary discourse. The second goal is to provide comparative reading of early modern English and French theoretical texts dealing with wit and esprit, respectively. Presenting ideas on the English term wit as employed in the theoretical writings in the light of its French equivalent esprit, I wish to demonstrate a gradual development of the terms from rhetoric to aesthetic.

More...

From Wilderland to East End and Back Again: On the Links between Harold Pinter’s The Dwarfs: A Novel and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

Author(s): Łukasz Borowiec / Language(s): English / Issue: 11/2020

The article focuses on the links between Harold Pinter’s only work of fiction entitled The Dwarfs: A Novel and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, with special emphasis on the figures of dwarfs as well as the characters of Len and Bilbo within the spaces of post-war London and Middle-earth, respectively. Pinter seems to have created a compelling multi-level variation on the themes from Tolkien’s book. A careful examination of the thematic and structural role of the dwarfs reveals intriguing echoes of Tolkien’s novel in Pinter’s book. The Dwarfs thus turn out to be infused with Pinteresquely transformed mythology and folklore to the extent which seems to have neither precedent nor continuation in his other writings.

More...

FUNCTIONS OF THE DOUBLE PERSPECTIVE IN JOHN FOWLES’ THE COLLECTOR

Author(s): OTILIA Simion / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

IN HIS NOVEL ENTITLED THE COLLECTOR, JOHN FOWLES TELLS THE STORY OF FREDERICK CLEGG, AN ENTOMOLOGIST WITH SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL INADEQUACIES, AND MIRANDA GREY WHOM HE FALLS IN LOVE WITH AND SOON KIDNAPS.FREDERICK CLEGG’S MONOLOGUE AND MIRANDA GREY’S DIARY RECONSTRUCT THE EVENTS OF THE HERO’S IMPRISONMENT OF MIRANDA GIVING TWO PERSPECTIVES ON THE SAME STORY AND ENHANCING THE SENSE OF AUTHENTICITY AND VERISIMILITUDE OF THE NOVEL.MIRANDA’S DIARY NOT ONLY GIVES THE VICTIM’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE SAME EVENTS PREVIOUSLY NARRATED BY CLEGG BUT ALSO PROVIDES GLIMPSES INTO HER PAST LIFE, THE LAST PART OF HER DIARY RECORDING HER AGONY WHICH IS REFLECTED IN THE DELIRIOUS AND DISJOINTED SENTENCES FROM THE END.FINALLY, CLEGG TAKES OVER NARRATION ONCE AGAIN AND DESCRIBES THE MOMENTS BEFORE MIRANDA’S DEATH(DUE TO PNEUMONIA) AND THE NOVEL ENDS WITH CLEGG’S PREPARATIONS TO CAPTURE HIS NEXT RARITY, A GIRL WHO WORKS AT WOOLWORTH’S.

More...

Gdyby Ofelia przy zdrowych zmysłach pozostała…

Author(s): Monika Sosnowska / Language(s): English,Polish / Publication Year: 0

The article focuses on literary representations of women’s sight and hearing in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the example of Ophelia

More...

GENDER SUBVERSION AND VICTORIANA IN A. S. BYATT’S “MORPHO EUGENIA”

Author(s): Antonija Primorac,Ivana Balint-Feudvarski / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2011

The article explores the concept of Victoriana and its relationship to the Victorian as presented in A. S. Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia” from Angels and Insects (1992). The analysis is done on two levels: firstly, on the level of form, or different narrative strategies that Byatt is using in order to make her text “Victorian.” Secondly, the article detects, explores and describes those aspects of Victoriana in “Morpho Eugenia” which relate to the gender roles and relationships of its three central characters: William Adamson, Eugenia Alabaster and Matty Crompton. The argument is based on the supposition that Byatt uses Adamson’s character in order to both alienate the reader from and attract her/him to the text by reversing the gender roles and subverting our expectations of “Victorian” fiction. By choosing the “New Woman” Matty over the “Old Woman” Eugenia, Adamson’s character confirms and promotes the progressive worldviews thus addressing not only the Victorian time but our own time (and expectations) as well.

More...

Gender/Genre Disruption in Bryony Lavery’s Her Aching Heart

Author(s): Edyta Lorek-Jezińska / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

The objective of the present paper is to examine the two contrastive yet interconnected processes activated in parody: conservative and revolutionary. The conservative drive is associated with the continuation and reinforcement of the parodied original while the revolutionary drive refers to the transgressive and critical potential of the parodic text, often realised in mockery, satire or deconstruction. Her Aching Heart by Bryony Lavery, a parody of a Gothic romance, displays both of these tendencies, which in their interplay and opposition lead to the point of the cultural disruption in an attempt at lesbian representation. The parody of the Gothic historical romance in Her Aching Heart is performed through exaggeration, replacement and experiment in gender roles distribution. With the Gothic romance’s heavy dependence on clear gender oppositions, Lavery’s exploration of the same-sex casting, multiple role-playing, and cross-dressing necessarily and subversively redefines the genre’s formula, leading to the point of its disintegration. In this respect, the play can be classified as selfparodic and self-referential. Its interest lies in questioning the possibility of representation of alternative forms of love within as well as without the convention of romance, and thus indirectly searching for the possibility of formulating alternative lesbian dramaturgy.

More...

Genesis Revealed in Every Third Thought by John Barth

2.50 €

Preview

Genesis Revealed in Every Third Thought by John Barth

Author(s): SORIN ŞTEFĂNESCU / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2018

This article endeavors to establish the inner strategy that the text employs to trigger the narrative process by depicting a transdimensional journey between the fictitious Stratford College in Maryland, U.S.A., and Stratford-upon-Avon in England. Through visions and illuminations resulting from banging his head on the very steps of Shakespeare’s birthplace, the apparently homodiegetic narrator finds himself under the spell of his own muse who directs him to access memories and devise the narrative of a lifetime. The whole process is supported by a series of “clunky coincidences,” too many not to suggest a brush with magic realism.

More...

Geographic Transgression and Epic Theatre: The Subversiveness of the Pastoral Idyll in Edward Bond’s Lear

Author(s): Schardt Andreas / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

The pastoral has often been defined in terms of an idyllic retreat where man can regain his former unity with nature, from which he has been alienated as a consequence of urban life. At the same time, however, the pastoral is not merely escapist, but explores the very problems of the city, contemporary society, politics and the human condition in general. It can thus be called a subversive form, serving as a vehicle to question contemporary values, roles and morals by offering a context where these issues can be freely scrutinised and criticised. A similar interest in contemporary affairs underlies the concept of the epic theatre, which, by definition, intends to create an awareness of existing social plights in the audience, thus aspiring to political reforms. This article analyses the overlap between pastoral elements and the notion of the epic theatre using Edward Bond’s Lear (1971). Not only will it be demonstrated how Bond uses the king’s retreat into a pastoral idyll to convey his views about the origins of extreme behaviours like cruelty and violence in modern societies but also to what extent this attempt at a redefinition of received standards fits the notion of the epic theatre. Contrary to the opinion expressed by some scholars that the pastoral has become obsolete in modern times, this paper hence argues that this mode is a broad and flexible category that has survived up to the dramatic tradition of the twentieth century and is, due to its oscillation between evasiveness and subversiveness, capable of being incorporated in such a “radical” concept as Brecht’s theatre.

More...

Geopolitics and Contesting Identities in Shakespeare’s The First Part of Henry VI

Author(s): I-Chun Wang / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

Histories always deal with the construction of cities, announcements of new eras, and strategies of reformations; human history also shows that the bitter human experience of struggles, disputes and wars involve shifting identities or rivalries over territories. Among Shakespeare’s war plays, The First Part of Henry VI is one of the most significant representations of the war between France and England; the play refers to the Treaty of Troyes, an Anglo-French Treaty in 1420, which recognizes Henry V as heir to the French throne, resulting in internal divisions and tremendous chaos in France. This play by Shakespeare refers to the intrigue, spatial contest, politics of kingship and spatial struggle between England and France. Calais had been an enclave of England in France before Henry V succeeded to the throne; securing Calais, Henry V, the warrior king of England, attempted to build up another enclave at Harfleur. With the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, the Dauphin Charles, and Joan of Arc faced two enemies, England and the Dukedom of Burgundy. England and Burgundy had been allies against France in the Hundred Years’ War since 1415. Burgundy, because of its geographical location, is to play the key role in the tug of war between the two forces. Geopolitics and contesting identities are two intertwining motifs in the First Part of Henry VI. Shakespeare portrays the conquest of France by England and represents diplomatic relations and shifting identities through geography and spatial politics as related to nationhood. This paper by examining the conflicts between France and England, will discuss geopolitics and contesting identities, the territorial disputes as well as spatial politics in an era when boundary politics was in flux.

More...

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND THE ECOLOGICAL BALANCE OF WILDNESS

Author(s): Mirko Starčević / Language(s): English / Issue: 3-4/2019

In the nineteenth century, the swing of anthropocentric forces wrought profoundly deleterious changes upon the face of the natural environment. Witnessing these metamorphic processes at work was Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose unique sensibility found the despoilment of nature by human hand no less than extremely dispiriting. Against a backdrop of the vanishing beauty, Hopkins fervidly engaged with the transforming world in his ecopoetical ruminations. He was not the first poet of ecolo¬gical dissent, for during the Romantic period John Clare had poignantly expressed the anguish at what had then been the incipient stages of nature being disrobed of its inherent singularity. Being quite familiar with Clare’s ecopoetical meditations, the Jesuit poet was able to further elaborate upon Clare’s vision, while proving successful in presciently observing the discrepancies between wilderness as a cultural construct and a wildness whose emphasis upon the appreciation of the global through the local corresponds closely to the present-day awareness concerning the fragility of ecosystems. Most vividly and extensively, Hopkins explores the dyad of wildness and wilderness in poems like “Inversnaid,” “Duns Scotus’ Oxford,” and “Binsey Poplars,” wherein he truly establishes himself as one of the essential forerunners of modern ecological science.

More...

Granātābola semantika O. Vailda pasaku krājuma "Granātābolu naminš" un P. Rozīša stāstu krājumā "Granātu ziedi"

Author(s): Ilze Kačāne / Language(s): Latvian / Issue: 1/2006

In culturological discourse pomegranate contains extensive and diverse semantics. It can be interpreted as a symbol of fertility, resurrection, and rebirth, In Oscar Wilde's fairy-tales many such symbols are present. Among them the pomegranate is one of the semanthemes that repeats. This repetition is the significant component of the writer's poetics. O. Wilde and his creative works have influenced many Latvian writers. Pavils Rozitis gets acquainted with his works when translating his "Aesthetic Manifesto" in 1909 and the supplemental Wilde's fairy-tale "The Fisherman and His Soul" Pomegranate is one of the images in P. Rozltis's collection of short stories "The Blossoms of Pomegranates". The article is an attempt to clarify common and different pomegranate semantics in Wilde's and Rozitis's works.

More...

Great Expectations: Incest and Incompleteness in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School

Author(s): Mark Tardi / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Often situated as a radical response to the late 1970s New York punk scene, the work of American writer Kathy Acker leverages an array of subversive literary techniques to actively interrogate extremely uncomfortable social terrain: profound violence against women, physical and emotional abuse, incest, disease and severe neglect. Many of her protagonists navigate through a continual proliferation of atrocities. Yet rather than situate her characters as victims, Acker instead inverts prescribed social scripts and proactively constructs narrative webs of deeply embedded critiques of patriarchal and sexual oppression. By deploying a vast repertoire of forms – theatrical dialogues, drawings, dream maps, blatant plagiarism of canonical figures (e.g., Hawthorne, Mallarmé, Céline), fake translations – Acker paints a vivid and inventive picture of the apparatuses of control and manipulation, aggression and alienation. This essay seeks to examine how applications of logician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and cultural critic Nick Mansfield’s ideas about “masochism as a theatrical space of power” elucidate Acker’s watershed novel Blood and Guts in High School and examine the novel’s critique of social and sexual power.

More...

Growing Up with (Ir)Replaceable Parents: Neil Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book

Author(s): Marek Oziewicz / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2015

One of the most popular fantasy authors today, Neil Gaiman has been notorious for representing children’s ambivalent perceptions of parents and creating stories based on a child’s fantasies of replacing parents with better or kinder ones. This essay offers a reading of The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish (1998/2004), Coraline (2002), and The Graveyard Book (2008) as narratives in which this desire is sublimated, allowing the young reader to vicariously experience the empowerment and the danger that accrue from replacing, getting rid of, or exchanging one’s parents. I demonstrate that in each of the three books Gaiman confirms the child’s perception of parents as potentially replaceable, but suggests that this awareness serves a vital developmental purpose. First, it helps the child protagonist outgrow dependence on the parents and, often in rebellion to them, begin to move toward emotional and psychological independence. Second, it leaves the protagonists with a more mature understanding of the parent-child relationship – a realization that the agency they seek is spurious when achieved by finding parents who would cater to all of one’s desires. In struggling to come to terms with their parents’ limited availability and imperfections, Gaiman’s protagonists learn that lasting human relationships are built not in the absence of but despite our own and other people’s shortcomings.

More...

Hamlet and Protestantism or What Martin Luther Had To Do With It

Author(s): Naum Panovski / Language(s): English / Issue: XVIII/2017

Many people may ask, what can you say today that is new about Hamlet? And most often they are right. There are tons of valuable volumes written on Hamlet. However, that does not stop us to take on an exciting and challenging task to talk about Hamlet time and time again.However, this time our argument is from a slightly different point of view.That is, we will try to discuss here Martin Luther’s views on justice and righteousness and his influence on Shakespeare and his renowned Hamlet.I believe Martin Luther’s philosophy and his view of the world are hidden between the lines of this unmatched play.

More...

Hamlet: Can One Death Justify Several Others?

Author(s): Mihai Cosoveanu / Language(s): English / Issue: XVIII/2017

Considered a “revenge tragedy” since it observes all its conventions, “Hamlet”is, by far, the most complex play within the Elizabethan period. Even if the main goal is to punish the murderer and, if possible, all its accomplices, there are also characters who die for nothing, such as Ophelia. Considering the number of deaths, can we talk about a purification of the kingdom?

More...

1.50 €

Handel’s Samson and the Art of Adaptation

Author(s): Maria Błaszkiewicz / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

The paper explores the interpretative possibilities offered by the libretto to Handel’s Israelite oratorio Samson by Newburgh Hamilton, which is a double adaptation of the Biblical story and its dramatic rendering in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes. The specificity of the demands of the new genre of the oratorio in England and its dramatic and musical affinities is analysed on the example of a libretto combining the Scriptural and dramatic heritage of its sources with the requirements of the Baroque musical stage. The tripartite structure of the story inherited from Milton and the order of appearance of Samson’s visitors (father, woman, foe) allows not only for a tripartite presentation of the central figure, but also for the exceptional variety of musical expressions. As a result, the oratorio offers a full spectrum for emotional appeal, through penetrating sadness of the first part, romantic tensions of the central one to sombre military tones of the finale. Of the three, naturally the central theme is the most attractive from the point of view of the composer eager to display his talent and to satisfy the demands of the audience. This is also the only part where a Miltonic rendering of the story of Samson allows for a major female role, a factor not to be ignored. As a consequence, Newburgh Hamilton not only borrowed Milton’s addition to the story of Samson, the hostile giant Harapha, but also transformed Milton’s relatively simple figure of Dalila into a most complicated and beguiling character allowing for a true mastery of musical expressions and ambiguities.

More...

HARD MEN AND SOFT WOMEN: THE GENDERING POWER OF THE VIRTUAL

Author(s): Boris Berić / Language(s): English / Issue: 13/2015

John Milton has frequently been accused of multiple sexisms in his Paradise Lost. However, when he, or rather Satan, contemplates the gender of hard men and soft women, he actually leans on a long standing tradition in philosophy, theology, and medical science, from Aristotle and Galen to Isidore of Seville and Milton’s own time. This gendering tradition had close ties with the virtual, which has been misunderstood as “fake,” “illusion,” and “unreal” in more recent times. In its original form, the virtual had dialectical ties with the actual and it meant power, the power that operates in the manner of Moebius strip and, in the sphere of language, manifests itself in reading, interpretation, translation and derivation of words. So, to be more virtual did not mean to be more “unreal,” “disembodied,” or “dehumanized” but to be empowered with the potential of becoming a male. Derived from virtus and vir, the virtual was even an etymologically gendering power. The lack of this power deprived some fetuses of being fully actualized as men, so they became women or, rather, failed men.

More...

Harry Potter jako potencjał edukacyjny, nie tylko dla dzieci

Author(s): Klaudia Komenda / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2020

The process of raising a child is undoubtedly a great challenge for the carer: it involves taking responsibility for the young person, who like a sponge absorbs the knowledge and point of view provided by the educator. It is also a process ‒ in which an adult is forced to make many educational decisions, the sum of which will contribute to what kind of adult the child will become. One of these decisions is to choose the style of upbringing that the carer ‒ more or less consciously ‒ manifests towards the child. The following essay provides a short description of these styles, demonstrating their occurrence in the first part of J.K. Rowling’s novel about Harry Potter, and also presents some initial reflections on the power relationship between the carer and the child.

More...