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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.

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The Imagination of Criminals in Victorian London in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Author(s): Wong Hiu Wai / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

In this article I write about the split of London described in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll, decent and belonging to the middle class, fail s to resist the transformation into Mr. Hyde, gross and belonging to the lower class. It represents the fear of the West Enders, who thought that the East Enders were uncivilized and threatening. In order to rationalize their fear, the West Enders imagined the East Enders as criminals, which corresponds to Edward Said’s discussion of Orientalism. In Orientalism, Said discusses how the West represents the Orient as the Other, and produces the category of the Orient grounded on a geographical framework of thinking. In much the same way, the story of Jekyll and Hyde demonstrates a narrative construction of the lower class living in the East End London as criminals. The influence of Cesare Lombroso’s theory of criminology present in the story serves as important evidence of the West Enders’ imagination. In Criminal Man (1876), Lombroso investigates the atavistic criminal, which illustrates the middle-class imagination of the body of the East Enders. Establishing the notion of atavism, Lombroso belittles the lower class by criticizing them as the demonstration of “regression to an earlier stage of evolution.” Examining the details of the geographical demarcation portrayed in the story, this paper hopes to elucidate the cultural imagination of criminals in Victorian London.

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Trauma Freud: Sigmund Freud as a Fictional Character in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel

Author(s): Miroslav Kotásek / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2013

The paper views the novel The White Hotel (1981) written by D. M. Thomas as a specific model of a general situation of a human in Modernism. It points at specific instances where the text of the novel itself refers to certain limitations of such a view of trauma which interprets it as an effect of a real (primal) event onto the life of an individual (i.e. as a structural trauma), while the attempt to overcome the personal horizon, so as to apply a general psychoanalytic structure of human existence (structural trauma) onto an individual trauma implies unacceptable consequences. For the purpose of “criticizing” psychoanalysis the text of the novel employs different strategies, especially an imitation of the genre and structure of a Freudian “case study” (Krankengeschichte), making Sigmund Freud one of the main characters in the novel at the same time. The second part of the paper focuses on the article concentrates on the relationship between the traumatizing event and its possible or necessary deformations caused by its later attempted linguistic account. Especially relevant in this context is the way in which Anatoly Kuznetsov used the eye witness testimonies of the Babi Yar massacre survivor, while the article stresses the strategy D. M. Thomas employed when using Kuznetsov’s “documentary novel” in The White Hotel.

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The Call of the Wild: John Buchan’s Heroes and the Decline of British Aristocracy

Author(s): Pilvi Rajamäe / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

The article will look at how John Buchan (1875–1940) has traced the decline of British aristocracy in his novels that cover the time period when the power radically shifted from the landowning to the middle class, with concomitant feelings of confusion, loss, disillusionment and inadequacy on the part of the class whose very existence was being undermined. Buchan wrote at the time when the spirit of chivalry, so carefully cultivated by the Victorian chivalric revival, still coloured the thinking of the aristocracy and the upper middle class, soon to be extinguished by the trenches of the Great War. This spirit abhorred middle-class mercantilism and pragmatism. Thus we see Buchan’s aristocratic heroes, beleaguered by the encroaching spirit of worldliness, going questing in the wilderness to regain their mental balance and purpose. Romantically communing with nature and following their ideals, they fulfill their personal quests, thus reasserting the concepts of duty and selfless service that had been part of the aristocratic code of honour before it was made redundant by middle-class materialism.

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IDENTITY AND BELONGING: INSIDER/OUTSIDER IN ED HUSAIN’S THE ISLAMIST

Author(s): Jillian Curr / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

Since the events of 9/11 and the so-called „war on terror‟ „Muslim‟ has been used synonymously with„terrorist‟ dividing particularly those Muslims living in the West into either „good‟ Muslims or „bad‟Muslims. Ed Husain uses in his memoir The Islamist this dichotomy, as well as that of the „witness‟ in presenting himself as a credible analyst in answering why some young Muslims become attracted to fundamentalist Islamist groups hostile to the West. The author is a second generation British Asian Muslim who rejected the Sufi political quietism of his parents for the revolutionary ideologies of Islamic „idéologues‟ such as Abu A‟la Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb and particularly Taqi al-Din al Nahbani, joining Hizb-ut-Tahrir as an active member. Husain‟s story is one of a fractured past,manhood, the search for an authentic Islam and becoming British.

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Szalona czy obłąkana? Świadectwa wizualne Ofelii Heleny Modrzejewskiej

Author(s): Alicja Kędziora / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2014

This article is devoted to the visual evidences of Ophelia, one of Shakespeare's greatest roles of the great Polish actress Helena Modjeska (1840-1909). All hitherto found iconographic materials – atelier photographs, engravings, paintings – documenting this remarkable, evolving over the years role of the actress are presented. The analysis included three major creations of Ophelia – Cracow, Warsaw, and American, documented respectively by photographers such as: Walery Rzewuski, Jan Mieczkowski, Napoleon Sarony and Benjamin Falk. Reflections were placed in the context of the contemporary debate on the place of the images in the history of theater studies.

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Contribuţia noului istorism în cercetarea operei lui Danilo Kiš

Author(s): Lidija Čolević / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 3/2013

The present paper delineates the works of Danilo Kiš from the perspective of the alliance between the cultural codes and the position of power within the context of the new historicism based upon the conception of the anthropological literature. It is offered by the talented researcher of Shakespeare’s works, Stephen Greenblatt. The works of Danilo Kiš becomes a complex system of diverse discourses that oppose each other. They are not only part of the culture but an active dynamic part of historical processes and not their echo or picture. At first sight, the barely visible link between Stephen Greenblatt and Danilo Kiš realizes itself in the manner they are writing, in their social ethics and creative aesthetics, taking into consideration the fact that art is indicative of ethics and not only an aesthetic orientation in which we can see the position of the artist in the continuous process of oscillation between homo-politicus and homo-poeticus. The aim of this article is to explain how the manner of narration from Shakespeare’s works could be recognized 400 years later in the works of Danilo Kiš. Viewed from this perspective, the common features of the two characters Eduard Sam - Danilо Kiš and Hamlet – W. Shakespeare opens a series of thematic tendencies: the problem of history, of the state, of the role of the individual within the state, of politics, revenge, crime, morality, insanity, human body, of the unconscious.

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Преобразените класици: Дефо и Дикенс в първите им появи на българската литературна сцена

Author(s): Maria Pileva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2022

The article examines two of the first translations in modern Bulgarian language of works of fiction by English classical authors Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens. Made from adaptations, they do not present their writers in full, but rather their Germanised and Russianised versions, which significantly change their reception. Attention is drawn to the problems of translation in the mid-19th century, as well as the fact that Young Robinson remains in manuscript, and the first translation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol was recognised as his work only at the beginning of this century due to the change in title.

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The Phenomenon of Unreliable Narration in the British Intellectual Prose of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century (Golding, Murdoch)

Author(s): Olha Shapoval,Ivan Bakhov,Antonina Mosiichuk,Oksana Kozachyshyna,Liudmyla Pradivlianna,Nataliia Malashchuk-Vyshnevska / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

The article is devoted to the consideration the problem of the phenomenon of an unreliable narration in the British intellectual prose of the second half of the twentieth century (Golding, Murdoch). The meaning of the words “narrator”, “unreliable narration” is investigated. The unreliable narration is reviewed based on the example of the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding (1980). It is noted that the aforementioned work has a vibrant didactic component. It has been found that Golding uses a wide range of narrative techniques. The emphasis is made on the critical analysis by other literary scholars of the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding. The use of narrative strategies in accordance with the scientific classification by Genette (1980) is investigated. The markers of unreliability of the narrators are emphasized. Attention is focused on the fact that a high degree of unreliability is based on the limited knowledge of the heroes, direct participation in the events, a problematic system of values. It is noted that the unreliability of narration in the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding forces the reader to doubt not only the narrator but oneself. The use of the narrative method in the intellectual prose of the British writer Iris Murdoch is investi-gated. It has been found that the novel “The Black Prince” by Iris Murdock (2006) is one of the best examples of an unreliable narration. The genre specifics of the novel are emphasized, which combines the forms of the diary, of the memoir and of the confession. In addition, Murdoch creates a narrative strategy, which combines signs of various forms of “I am the narrator” within the framework of one narrative. In addition, “The Black Prince” is a unique model of modern artistic and philosophical metatext genre formation.

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"Lumberjanes" e "Hilda", serie a fumetti scout tra ecocritica ed ecofemminismo

Author(s): Dalila Forni / Language(s): Italian Issue: 1/2022

Among the forms of children’s literature that deal with the complex relationship between humanity and nature, comics can offer various insights on the topic for boys and girls. In particular, children’s stories have recently revitalized the scout movement, interpreting it through new values related to identity, gender and ecology. This paper will consider two comic book series on scouting, Hilda (Luke Pearson, 2011–2019) and Lumberjanes (Noelle Stevenson, 2014–2020). Both works tell the story of a diverse group of characters involved in scouting activities: the stories, developed in natural settings, portray the growth of young and peculiar characters who, through constant contact with the environment, show a strong respect for both nature and the peer group, in a peaceful and adventurous coexistence with the environment and the different forms of life that inhabit it. The essay aims to develop a first state of the art that highlights new interpretative strands in this literary genre through an ecocritical and ecofeminist lens. The study explores the two works in a comparative perspective, so as to show how comic book narratives can present interesting ecological and egalitarian dynamics, in this case through the experience of scouting.

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"Wasted world" o "sporco mondo": tradurre i testi divulgativi per ragazzi sull’ambiente

Author(s): Annalisa Sezzi / Language(s): Italian Issue: 1/2022

The paper focuses on the Italian translations of two English informational books for children: Wasted World (2009) and Kids Fight Climate Change (2020), which deal with environmental issues. Informational books texts result from a complex dissemination process aimed at making specialised knowledge comprehensible to young readers. To achieve this purpose, informational books rely on various discursive popularising strategies, such as an array of explanations, and various methods for eliciting readers’ engagement, such as questions and irony. Indeed, they are part of what has come to be known as “edutainment,” in which education and entertainment are intertwined to create a “hybrid genre” (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2005). As the texts examined in the paper engage with ecology and environmental issues, they have a dual purpose: to inform and to raise awareness (ecoliteracy). Despite the importance of popularising texts, the translation of such products is still an underexplored field of research. The comparative analysis of the two English texts and their respective Italian translations centres on how global warming and climate change are described in the source and target texts. It examines how the popularising strategies are translated, given their importance in knowledge dissemination for children. The findings indicate that Italian translations, though retaining the combination of education and entertainment, tend to be more precise and more complex than the source texts. This is in line with the intercultural differences identified between Low Context (LC) cultures and High Context (HC) cultures.

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THE CONVENTIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PERCEPTION OF THE SOCIETY IN WILLIAM GOLDING’S THE PYRAMID

Author(s): Alina Ungureanu / Language(s): English Issue: 29/2021

William Golding’s novel, The Pyramid, is innovative in its structure, technique and theme. It represents a satire on class structure, but it is also about individual development, dramas and evolution. The Pyramid describes the ordinary universe of the characters that live in different social milieus.

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The Ingression of Beauty

Author(s): Robert M. Randolph / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

An aesthetic for travel experience can be developed from the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and Carl Jung. The thesis is that an aesthetic experience occurs if a traveler is changed by an occurrence of harmony that lures the traveler into new selfhood, which is centered on a more complex recognition of beauty. An interpretation of a short, beautiful prose piece entitled “The Secret of Light” by the American poet James Wright reveals the process of developing an aesthetic experience.

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Noaptea bufonilor

Author(s): Visarion Alexa,Ilie Gheorghe,Constantin Chiriac / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2015

The article is focused on Fool’s Night, a play directed by Alexa Visarion at Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu, in 2015. Starting from a theoretical approach of A. P. Chekhov and William Shakespeare’s plays, Alexa Visarion, together with his interlocutors (Constantin Chiriac and Ilie Gheorghe) are emphasizing the importance and the place of this production in the contemporary performing arts landscape. According to the director, Fool’s Night was a project that took many years of meditation research and its success is related to the excellent collaboration with two of the most important actors in Romania – Ilie Gheorghe and Marian Râlea.

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PICTURES OF THE DECADENCE IN WORDS – REMEMBER AND THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY – A CORPUS LINGUISTIC APPROACH

Author(s): Gabriela-Corina Șanta (Câmpean) / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The current research paper aims to establish the frequencies of terms belonging to the semantic fields of senses, arts, physical appearance and beauty, colours and illness in two works representative of the Decadent movement in the English and Romanian literature, i.e. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Mateiu Caragiale’s Remember. A comparative approach of the authors’ intentions to picture their worlds is performed to reveal similarities and differences between the literary works under scrutiny and how they are relevant for the literary movement, studying them solely from a linguistic perspective. The methods chosen to perform the study belong to corpus linguistics, i.e. an online available software programme named Word Counter is used to detect the number of occurrences, followed by the interpretation stage using charts. Results prove that the words from the semantic field of physical appearance have the highest frequency in both works, senses and colours are significant aspects in the works under scrutiny, illness is not stressed in both stories, and art is more important in The Picture of Dorian Gray than in Remember. The occurrences of the terms reveal similarities and differences which validate the statement that the texts belonging to a certain literary period, i.e. the Decadence, focus on the physical appearance, beauty and art, values promoted by the literary movement.

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‘Kresy’ as The Heart of Darkness: Reading Polish and Belgian Colonialisms

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‘Kresy’ as The Heart of Darkness: Reading Polish and Belgian Colonialisms

Author(s): Anna Shimomura / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

‘Kresy’ [borderlands/outskirts] is a sentimental term used by Poles to denote the lands of today’s Western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The Polish rule in that region has rarely been discussed in terms of colonialism. In this article, I employ the framework of postcolonial theory within the context of Polish rule in ‘Kresy’. The article juxtaposes anthropologist Józef Obrębski’s ethnographic writings about Polesia region (a part of ‘Kresy’ that was polonised in the most extreme manner) with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – a Polish-British author born and raised in ‘Kresy’, that during his time was subjugated by Russian Empire. The figure of Conrad, whose ambivalent relationship with colonialism was pointed out by many postcolonial scholars starting with Chinua Achebe, becomes a point of departure to think about what Maria Janion describes as ‘the paradoxical Polish postcolonial mentality’: the ambivalence of being a colonised coloniser. The article is an attempt of contribution to the ongoing debate about identity and dependence in the East Central Europe region.

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From Culinary Practice to Printed Text: The Eighteenth-Century Language of London Cookbooks

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From Culinary Practice to Printed Text: The Eighteenth-Century Language of London Cookbooks

Author(s): Elena Butoescu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The present article will explore the role that cookbooks had in eighteenth-century London, being extremely popular and highly pirated, probably the most successful women’s printed genre of the eighteenth century. These cookery books represented a reliable source of information not only about social distinction and food practices, but also about urban development and marketability. This is not only an analysis of the literature and culture of food as printed in the eighteenth-century by well-known London publishing houses, but also an insight into the vast scope of city dwellers. I will look at how the rhetoric of food reveals the mentality, customs, and culinary developments of eighteenth-century urban practices, ranging from the private area of the home to the public space of the print market. The catalog of didactic language on how to pluck poultry, burn charcoal, or prepare dishes in a clean and hygienic environment expresses the richness of food-related terminology, as well as the diversity of epithets praising the quality of the book or indicating the expected market. The article argues that the terminology used in these cookbooks, the paratexts and the systematic structure of the recipes reflect a specific country/city divide, since they provided instruction on how to adapt rural recipes to an urban kitchen, acknowledged the social division between servant and mistress, and shaped a new consumer behaviour.

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Bridging the Gap between Cultures: The Translation of Cockney and Slang in G. B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion”

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Bridging the Gap between Cultures: The Translation of Cockney and Slang in G. B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion”

Author(s): Iris Rusu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

This article analyses the main drama translation strategies pertaining to the rendering of dialect and slang from English into Romanian with practical emphasis on “Pygmalion” (1914; 1941) by George Bernard Shaw. Moreover, it aims to review translation techniques and strategies which facilitate the translation of slang and dialect, more precisely Cockney, from English into Romanian. Amongst the strategies discussed here are: the application of a cultural filter and of local adaptation, the use of dialect compilation, pseudo-dialect translation, parallel dialect translation, dialect localization, and standardisation. The second half of this article scrutinises a selection of lines extracted from G. B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” comparing and contrasting the existing Romanian translations and suggesting new solutions to rendering culture-specific terms into Romanian.

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The Island Nation and Euroscepticism: Revisiting Europe’s Heritage in Brexit Poetry

Author(s): Mandy Beck / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2022

The idea of “Britain and Europe” that David Cameron emphasised in his speech on 23 January 2013 is a curious one – it evokes a shared history full of intricate twists, which spans over several centuries, and at the same time, preserves the apparent incompatibility of the island nation and the continent. Cameron even proposed an “in-out referendum” to determine the future of the British people, and its realisation in 2016 made Brexit an unexpected reality and signifies a crucial setback in the history of the European project. Brexit is furthermore an expression of “a perceived cultural distinction between Britain and Europe” (Spiering 2015) that seems to persist in British discourse specifically. The paper thus uses Menno Spiering’s concept of “British Euroscepticism” (2004), a unique form of Euroscepticism in terms of history, politics and culture, to discuss the cultural aspects of British differentness as entailing not only an opposition to Europe but also a potential to reflect on shared values and experiences. Based on this, the paper will trace the presentation of Europe in contemporary literature that emerged as a reaction to Brexit, especially poetry by Simon Armitage, Sean O’Brien and David Clarke, to ascertain the British perspective on the continent as either the paradigmatic Other or a constituent part for defining British identity.

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Discursive Intertextuality, Parody, and Mise en Abyme in A.S. Byatt's Short Stories

Author(s): Francesca Pierini / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2022

This essay analyses three short stories from A.S. Byatt's collection Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998) in light of several self-reflexive strategies. The short narratives Crocodile Tears and Baglady will be discussed from the perspective of “discursive intertextuality,” a literary practice that foregrounds a discursive element established and detectable across genres. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary will be examined from the standpoint of intertextuality and mise en abyme. Once again, the study of this narrative will hinge on the discursive aspects of mise en abyme as a meta-generic approach put in place not to indefinitely reiterate “the same” concept, but to show the potentially endless possibilities of interpretation a text may offer its readers. Across these short stories, the opposition between fire and ice gets reworked in corresponding dichotomous sets: North vs. South, West vs. Orient, contemplative vs. active life. The specific goal this article sets itself to achieve is to show the contrasting trajectories at play in these short stories. Dense with contrasting and intersecting meta-generic paths, such narratives perform and make visible a double register of devotion/affection and questioning/deconstruction of genre norms in relation to established Anglophone discursive tropes.

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