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За един разрешен опиат в романа на Уилям Голдинг „Морски обреди“

Author(s): Nikolay Aretov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2020

This paper briefly deals with the presentation of the Paregoric (camphorated tincture of opium) and the attitude of the characters of the novel to it. For the time when the plot took place the use of this drug was not formally forbidden, although it was not regarded as something fully acceptable. When Golding published the book in the 1980s these kinds of drugs, are under strict control by the medical authorities; at the same time, literature and art are changing their ambivalent attitude towards drug usage. The article looks at the use of the narcotic in the context of the use of alcohol in “Rites of Passage”, the use of some uncommon substances in the other Golding’s novels, and attempts to find some kind of link with the decease of the author. The aim is to ask the question about the function of the Paregoric in the narrative.

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Утопичните острови на тропиците – възможни и реални

Author(s): Maya Gorcheva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2021

In the European cultural tradition, the image of the islands brings together the geographical strangeness with a social utopia. The paper traces its historical alterations, as attested in documentary and literary travel stories, in comparison with Leibniz's thesis of the “best world”.

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“Mocking Eternities”: Writing Beyond the Ending of Possession, or A.S. Byatt’s Intersections between Academia, Literary Criticism, and Fiction

Author(s): Alexandra Cheira / Language(s): English Issue: 40/2023

In 1995, a two-page-long letter signed by Professor Maud Michell-Bailey – which furthermore enclosed two original poems by Christabel LaMotte – prefaced a special edition on women poets in the academic journal Victorian Poetry. The letter and poems invite a critical return to Possession, since they are a complex game in which made-up characters come to life and actual people are fictionalized. They also raise significant theoretical issues while appearing to break free from the limitations imposed by what Victorian Poetry editor Linda Hughes has correctly described as “overdetermined readings, simplification, distortion” (6). In doing so, they masterfully create a parodic and intertextual dialogue in an inverted mirror game that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined and invites the reader to engage in an active participation. When combined, Maud’s letter and LaMotte’s poems offer an intriguing look at the fruitful fusion of A.S. Byatt's critical and literary imagination. Therefore, this article explores Byatt’s intersections between academia, literary criticism, and fiction by analysing her metafictional discourse on fictional Victorian poems vis-à-vis the real contemporary academic journal in which they were published.

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Identitate și adevăr la Salman Rushdie

Author(s): Adrian Niță / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 52/2023

The paper analyzes the signs of the age of the spirit in the work The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, with a particular emphasis on the membranes of identity, the truth and the spiritual experiences through which the characters of this work are led. From the perspective of the multiple layers of meanings, in other words, from the perspective of the membranes of understanding, the world in Rushdie's sense is a set of dream membranes and reality membranes, of membranes of good and membranes of evil, which intertwine, sometimes it moves in harmony, sometimes in dissonance, but in which there is always room for love.

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Karel Čapek vs Agatha Christie

Author(s): Dagmar Mocná / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2024

This essay focuses on the issue of semantic and expressive specificity that is midlevel in the vertical model of literature (known as Midcult). It explores this issue through a comparative analysis of two short stories on the same theme. This essay focuses on two particular aspects: thematic construction (one thematic line versus multiple thematic lines) and the nature of the narrative (objective versus subjectivized narrative). The essay thus sees Povídky z jedné kapsy (translated by Norma Comrada as Stories from One Pocket) as a typical product of the middle literary level, which it considers an essential part of any developed literary culture with the important function of cultivating and mediating for the reader.

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Trauma I wojny światowej (shell shock) w poezji brytyjskich żołnierzy oraz w modernistycznej prozie kobiecej

Author(s): Martyna Grodzka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 15/2015

The purpose of the following article is to compare and contrast the literary modes of representation of the First World War shell shock in the poetry of soldier-poets and in the prose of women writers. The war trauma called “shell shock” had a profound impact on British literature and the common memory of the Great World. At the time, the poets who were soldiers expressed their traumatic experiences in their works. Meanwhile, women authors who observed veterans suffering from trauma explored the causes and effects of shell shock in their prose.

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Border Crossing and Exile in Vesna Goldsworthy’s 𝐼𝑟𝑜𝑛 𝐶𝑢𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛 (2022)

Author(s): Sava Stamenković / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The novel 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐼𝑟𝑜𝑛 𝐶𝑢𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛: A Love Story by the British and Serbian writer Vesna Goldsworthy is set in London and in the capital of an unnamed state-socialist country behind the Iron Curtain. It follows the fate of young Milena Urbanska, a privileged “red princess” but also a victim of the communist regime, both in exile and on her return to her homeland. The protagonist leaves her homeland in pursuit of freedom and love, but her return becomes an act of vengeance, casting her in the role of a latter-day Medea. This article focuses on the themes of border crossing and exile, which are central to this exophonic novel.

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Intermediality in Alasdair Gray’s "Lanark" Film Storyboard

Author(s): Petra Pugar / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

This article analyses Alasdair Gray’s storyboard for a never made film adaptation of the novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) as a self-standing intermedial artwork. It presents an argument that the specificities of the nested graphic narrative medium, or “graphicality”, can be used not only for the reading of the storyboard’s text/image/space convergence, but for a better understanding of the textual and visual elements of the source novel as well. Gray’s autoreferential process, recognized in previous analyses of his literary work, is thus approached through the optics of his foregrounded media materiality. What takes centre position is the process of realising the story, and of the new artistic object made in the process. Such an object questions the reading and viewing regimes reproduced and displaced by every artwork. The analysis of the Lanark storyboard, which is an artwork “between” literature, graphic arts, and film, is a contribution to a rising body of scholarly work that uses a comprehensive theoretical approach to gain a better understanding of such syncretic artworks.

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Архетип «байронического героя» в литературе XIX века

Author(s): Elena N. Kornilova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2024

In the second period (after his expulsion from England), J. G. Byron created his most mature and most innovative works, which struck the imagination of his contemporaries and made the poet an iconic thinker for the European youth. The plots of the dramatic poem “Manfred” and the mystery “Cain” were based on the mythological structures of German folklore (the legend of Dr. Faust) and the biblical canon (Book of Genesis). However, in Byron’s imagination, they acquired a philosophical and social content that they had lacked before, exclusively characteristic of Romanticism and the period of disappointment in the Enlightenment ideals. This transformation resulted from the interaction of several contradictory influences in Byron’s poetic laboratory: the rebellious humanistic traditions of the Enlightenment, the declared Classicist doctrine, the apparent influence of the Gothic genre on mass consciousness, and the individualistic tendencies in public life (at least among the British aristocracy), up to a complete severance of old social ties. Unique archetypal models of the Modern times were born from this explosive mixture, including the “Byronic hero” and the “titanic images” of Manfred and Cain, around which a certain mystically tinted poetics of “formula literature,” such as the hermetic chronotope, was formed.

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Концепция трагедии Шекспира в литературной критике Ю. Айхенвальда

Author(s): Dmitry N. Zhatkin,Vera V. Serdechnaia / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2024

The authors analyze the Shakespearean studies by Yuly Aykhenvald (1872–1928), a famous literary critic who substantiated the method of immanent criticism and is better known as the creator of Russian writers’ “portraits.” The purpose of the work was to consider and streamline the principles of analysis of Shakespearean images in Aykhenvald’s legacy. The objectives of the work included identifying the main images for the critic in Shakespeare’s tragedies; analysis of the principles of his criticism; identifying the ideological foundations of criticism. Results of the work: Aykhenvald considers Shakespeare’s tragedies a timeless phenomenon, telling us not so much even about the life of the human spirit, but about the laws of the development of the world. Aykhenvald interprets Shakespeare as a sage immersed in the truths of world dualism as a Neoplatonic teaching of the Gnostic persuasion. The critic sees in Caliban the embodiment of crude matter (which then makes it possible to liken him to the Bolsheviks with their materialistic philosophy), in Ariel he sees pure spirituality, and in Hamlet — the transitional period of human existence between them. Hamlet is understood by Aykhenvald as the central Shakespearean character, a kind of archetype of the Shakespearean hero, reflected in the others: Lear, Romeo, Macbeth. Hamlet is also considered by Aykhenvald to be an image of our contemporary, with his inherent dominance of reflection and inaction. However, Aykhenvald expresses the hope that beyond the Hamlet stage, humanity will reach a spiritual existence, which is symbolized by Ariel.

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Orwell’s warning of totalitarianism for today

Author(s): Luke Harding / Language(s): English Issue: 05 (57)/2023

Review of: George Orwell and Russia. By: Masha Karp, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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THE CONCEPT OF ALIENATION IN SALAH ABD AL-SABUR’S AND T. S. ELIOT’S SELECTED POEMS

Author(s): Khalid Qais Abd,Mushtaq Abdulhaleem Mohammed Fattah / Language(s): English Issue: 37/2024

Two of the most significant poets of the 20th century, Salah Abd Al-Sabur and T. S. Eliot write poems that depict their experiences of alienation in various historical and cultural situations. This paper compares and contrasts the idea of alienation in selected poems by the two poets who relate their personal, societal, and political circumstances to their sentiments of alienation, fragmentation, and isolation. It looks at how the two poets express their alienation through the use of different poetic tropes such as symbolism, intertextuality, and imagery. The poems that exemplify the work of both poets are Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,”; Abd Al-Sabur’s “Ahlam Al-Fares Al-Qadeem” [Dreams of Ancient Knight], “Oghnia lil Shitaa” [A Song for Winter], and “Oghnia lil Layl” [A Song for Night]. The study makes the case that although alienation is a common subject across both poets, their approaches to expressing, understanding, and resolving it are different. Abd Al-Sabur's alienation is a result of his post-colonial Arab world theological crisis, cultural dislocation, and political disillusionment. By recovering his heritage, reaffirming who he is, and reviving his faith, he aims to overcome his estrangement. Eliot's moral degradation, cultural degeneration in the contemporary West, and spiritual emptiness all contribute to his alienation. He rejects his identity, runs away from reality, and embraces his tradition to overcome his estrangement.

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CHARLES PERRAULT AND THE CONTEXT OF HIS CREATION; INTEGRATION IN HIS EPOCH; NARRATIVE STRATEGIES

Author(s): Ana-Maria Torkos / Language(s): English Issue: 37/2024

Perrault impregnated to his work mentions and explanations of the 17th century life. Thereby, he succeeded to put old texts, the oral folk tales, in the modern context of that period. Secondly, other tales were influenced by parts of earlier writings: The Decameron by Boccaccio and the Golden Ass by Apuleius, and last, the other tales are his original creation. Charles Perrault, in writing his fairy tales, was motivated to create his work for the amusement of his children. During the last three hundred years, Perrault’s tales became the most influential works in literature of children. In her works, Angela Carter uses magical realism and postmodern elements: fantasy, intertextuality, myths and gothic elements. She shares her opinions on feminism in his novels, short stories in which she puts certain elements of traditional tales, she achieves a woman empowerment, a sort of invitation for the women to fight for equal rights, freedom, against the male dominant society.

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TRAVEL LITERATURE AND THE LIMINALITY OF UGLINESS

Author(s): Laurențiu Boșog / Language(s): English Issue: 37/2024

While positive aesthetic expressions, those of ‘beauty’ are often associated with travel literature, it is important to understand its corresponding antithesis, ugliness. As aesthetic factors can be a reason for one to undergo the process of travelling to another place, it should be proposed that ugliness, in its ability to subvert expectations, is a major player in the traveller’s experience. To see how it does that, we must first understand where does ugliness stand in relation to one’s view; exploring then the reactions to such a phenomenon.

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„Worthless and in Fact Harmful” – Censorship in Poland in 1951 on Two English Writers: Graham Greene and Gilbert Chesterton

Author(s): Gabriela Gajda / Language(s): English Issue: 56/2023

Censorship in Poland during the Stalinist Era was one of the most important organs of power which made it possible to infl uence the worldview of citizens. As a propaganda tool, it decided what to convey to the recipients and in what interpretation. The aim of the article is to present how the works of two English authors were assessed by the employees of the censorship offi ce. The accusations and the interpretations of the novel made by the censors help to understand how the West was perceived in the country of people’s democracy and how capitalist countries were wanted to be presented to readers.

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MARIN BARLETI’S HISTORY OF SCANDERBEG IN ENGLISH, 1560-1596

Author(s): David Hosaflook / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2019

If the history of a particular figure is not recounted across multiple languages, then that figure is destined to remain obscure beyond the geographical boundaries of his or her own ethnic group. In 1968, at the Second Albannological Conference dedicated to George Castriot Scanderbeg, on the 500th anniversary of his death, various scholars highlighted world literature as a primary factor spreading Scanderbeg’s renown. The three papers that emphasized this were: “Scanderbeg in World Literature” (Androidi Kostallari), “Scanderbeg in Italian Literature” (Henrik Lacaj) and “Scanderbeg in English Literature” (Skënder Luarasi).1 Building upon these foundational works, this paper shall examine in greater detail the English translations of Marin Barleti’s History of Scanderbeg. This is of particular importance because of the role English plays today as the world’s, foremost language, due to the spread of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and the growth of America’s culture influence in the twentieth. In particular we shall present several impressive details that do not appear to have been treated before in Scanderbeg studies related to English literature.

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Patriarchal Intolerance in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees

Author(s): Andreea Ionescu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

Elif Shafak, a best-selling novelist of Turkish origin, once self-declared bisexual, is controversial today in her motherland, as she questions the patriarchal culture and all its traditions. In her latest novel, Shafak speaks about migration and relocation, and chooses to include two homosexual characters facing the intolerance of the islanders from the two communities in Cyprus’ divided capital ‒ Nicosia. The two male characters are not only in a love affair, but they also belong to politically opposing nationalities: Greek and Turkish. Shafak’s talent makes the story to be very meaningful for our complex existences and the next generations to come.

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The House of Pain: The Island of Dr. Moreau and Post/Trans/ Humanism Today

Author(s): Elana Gomel / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) is a bleak critique of the Victorian notion that evolution can provide ethical or social guidance to humanity. This essay reads the novel in the context of the contemporary debate between posthumanism and transhumanism. By applying theoretical models derived from Braidotti, Agamben, Wolfe and others, the essay argues that Wells’ evolutionary antihumanism provides a corrective to both critical posthumanism’s attempts to articulate a nonanthropocentric ethics, and to transhumanism’s dreams of transcending humanity. The essay considers the chronotope of an island polity in the context of evolutionary antihumanism by comparing Wells’ novel with the contemporary biotech thriller Island 731 (2013) by Jeremy Robinson.

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,,Als Hitler das rosa Kaninchen stahl" von Judith Kerr: Geschichte mit den Augen eines Kindes betrachtet

Author(s): Alexandra Nicolaescu / Language(s): German Issue: 4/2022

The novel 'Als Hitler das rosa Kaninchen stahl' was published 1971 in Great Britain, translated into German by Annemarie Böll in 1973 and the author Judith Kerr has been awarded just one year later with the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. The story about nine year old Anna, who has to escape in 1933 together with her family from Nazi Germany and relocate to Switzerland and later on to France was influenced by Judith Kerr's biography. The book finds itself nowadays in the required reading lists at many German schools an has been regarded as Judith Kerr's most famous novel. It is actually part of a trilogy in which the writer expresses her own experiences while reflecting in her writing the spirit of the 1930s an 1940s. Judith Kerr presents the perspective of a child and therefore the political aspects are not at the center of the story, quite the opposite, they move to the background, while the focus is being placed on the main character's personal perception of exile and a life dominated by fear and insecurities. This perspective makes the storyline in my opinion even more revealing and touching at the same time. In the following article I aim to analyze the literary manner in which Judith Kerr transforms the story of her family into the story of a whole generation and by doing that she earns her place amongst the authors who contributed to the process of reconstruction of collective memory.

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Britské cestopisy o Španělsku z pohledu časopisu Critical Review

Author(s): Martin Branda / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2023

The aim of this study is to analyse the reviews of travelogues on Spain that appeared in British literaryperiodicals in the second half of the 18th century. Based on a study of three reviews in the Critical Review,it notes how such texts were structured, how the reviewers approached the task of travel writing,and how they viewed the usefulness of the genre for the reader. Given the particular position of Spain inBritish discourse of the time, the study also considers the individual reactions of reviewers in their descriptionsof that country, providing an insight into their opinions of Spain and the Spaniards and theprevalent stereotypes that informed them.

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