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1
Drozdovskyi, Dmytro. "HISTORICAL MEASURES AND PHILOSOPHICAL FEATURES OF BRITISH POST-POSTOMODERNISM: OUTLINING THE CONCEPT OF «CONNECTEDNESS»." English and American Studies 1, no. 17 (December 22, 2020): 97–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.15421/382017.
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In the paper, the author states that in the UK the emergence of theoretical compendia that represent and simultaneously revise the literary landscape of this country (as well as the United States), determines the necessity to outline the boundaries of the period, which in these works is defined as post-postmodernism. The latter concept has no clear theoretical explication and is discussed in the form of literary directions (altermodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism) that define new aesthetic and philosophical grounds that differ from postmodernism. In the paper, the author substantiates the historical boundaries of post-postmodernism, in particular emphasizing the factors that led to the formation of a new literary paradigm after 2000s. The ideas of British theorists on «realisms» in contemporary British literature have been developed with the emphasis on the presentation of new worldview models and identities in the contemporary British novels. A review of «The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction» (edited by D. O’Gorman and R. Eaglestone) is represented, which gives a condensed view of the aesthetic and philosophical pursuits of the contemporary British novel. The transformation of the archetype of Home in the paradigm of the contemporary (postpostmodern) novel has been spotlighted. Attention is drawn to explaining the representation of «one’s own» and «another’s» («alien») concepts, which reconstructs the traditional idea of Home as a space of protection and security. The transcultural processes inherent in the British novel have been discussed. The new character of the worldview (based on the materials of the novels by D. Mitchell and M. Haddon) has been outlined, which gives reason to speak abouta special postpostmodern way of observing the reality and provide its interpretations. The outline of the corpus of epistemological problems in the contemporary British novel actualizes the experience of philosophy of I. Kant, which is emphasized primarily by British theorists, referring in their own interpretative models to this tradition of German classical philosophy, which becomes important for the post-postmodern novels since 2000s.
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Chmielewska, Anita. "The Absent Parent Figure as a Representation of Post-trauma in Contemporary British-Jewish Novels." Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature 8 (December 8, 2020): 21–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.25167/exp13.20.8.3.
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A missing parent is an element that is often found in contemporary British-Jewish novels. These are mainly texts written by granddaughters of those who lived through World War II. The novels analyzed herein tend to be very similar in their depiction of parent figures, who appear to represent the remaining presence of post-trauma from the World War II era. The concept of survival during the Shoah may include various experiences but is mostly associated with those who directly experienced the Holocaust. Yet, British Jews are often those who fled the Jewish extermination before it happened and, as a result, are frequently excluded from the discussion of World War II survivorship
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Drozdovskyi, Dmytro. "Traditions of Skepticism and Discourse of Post-Truth in British Post-Postmodern Novels." Pitannâ lìteraturoznavstva, no. 100 (December 27, 2019): 72–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.31861/pytlit2019.100.072.
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In the paper, the forms of critical perception of reality inherent to the protagonists of contemporary British novels (“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, “Carry Me Down”, “Little Stranger”, etc.) have been discussed. The author has analyzed strategies for reactivation of skepticism in British post-postmodern novel “Cloud Atlas” by D. Mitchell. The specificity of the representation of skepticism in literary post-postmodernism is investigated; in particular, theoretical considerations of L. Miroshnychenko, O. Boynitska and other experts in English/British literature have been developed. The peculiarities of dystopia as a part of the metageneric phenomenon of post-postmodernistic novel “Cloud Atlas” have been revealed. The features of representation of propositional and existential truths in contemporary British novel are outlined. The mechanisms of counteraction to the forms of post-truth and the simulacrum “truths” represented in “Cloud Atlas” as part of capitalist ideological discourse, which leads to a distorted perception of reality and civilization catastrophe, have been outlined. It is revealed that in “Cloud Atlas” there is a critique of hypertrophied consumerism and the loss by contemporary literature the ability to be the source of existential meanings. The specific features in human representation as a dual phenomenon in post-postmodern British novel (Nietzsche's conception of the revaluation of values and the will to power in “Cloud Atlas” is depicted ambivalently) has been explored in the paper. I state that post-postmodernism is a cultural paradigm that unites aesthetic and philosophy of modernism and postmodernism. Besides, the post-postmodern novel has a specific feature resulted in a special narrative mode that combines scientific discoveries that influence the narrative with a special philosophical realm. In the paper, David Mitchell’s novel “Cloud Atlas” has been discussed as an example of post-postmodern writing that reveals emotional sincerity and skepticism, utopic way of thinking and anticolonial discourse. The novel exploits epic beginning to involve the reader in a special atmosphere created by the omnipotent narrator. The end of the story is a metaphorical return to the beginning; however, the starting point was changed. The novel exploits six separate stories that are interlinked according to the idea of eternal returning presented by Nietzsche and realized in the novel in the image of “Cloud Atlas” (symphony). The reality in the novel is exploited as a multifaceted phenomenon and time is depicted according to super-string astrophysical theory. The research gives a clue to understanding the philosophical boarders of post-postmodernism and demonstrates the combination of different discourses (humanitarian and scientific) in contemporary British novel. The paper provides new findings in explaining philosophical parameters of post-postmodern novels.
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Weiss, Michaela. "[Anténe, Petr. Howard Jacobson's novels in the context of contemporary British Jewish literature]." Brno studies in English, no. 2 (2020): 302–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.5817/bse2020-2-18.
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Rychter, Ewa. "When the Novel Meets the Bible. The Flood in Four Contemporary British Novels." Caliban, no. 33 (April 1, 2013): 183–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/caliban.161.
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Kazunari Miyahara. "Why Now, Why Then?: Present-Tense Narration in Contemporary British and Commonwealth Novels." Journal of Narrative Theory 39, no. 2 (2009): 241–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jnt.0.0030.
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Mohammed, Marwa Ghazi. "Woman’s Identity vs. Beauty Ideals: A Comparative Study of Selected Contemporary Novels." Journal of University of Human Development 5, no. 3 (July 21, 2019): 87. http://dx.doi.org/10.21928/juhd.v5n3y2019.pp87-90.
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Cultural notions about woman’s identity play a role in woman self-acceptance and self- worth. Generally speaking, these ideas affected women since they have shaped their feelings of worth and beauty. Nowadays pursuit of beauty ideal has become one of the problematic issues to meet particular standards. Moreover, the development of selfhood is influenced by the mirror of the society. Ethnicity, body shape, skin colour, age, and wrinkles are various forms of society standards of beauty which some women shape their identities by modifying accordingly. Thus, beauty ideals become a form of restriction and enslavement because women are forced to follow and sometimes suffer to have the sense of belonging. Three novels are selected in this paper to study the problematic issue of what is meant by beauty ideal. Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of the Face (1994) depicts the suffering of a woman who has a struggle with jaw cancer since early childhood. Surviving the cancer means removing part of her jaw which causes the tragedy of her life. Zadie Smith’s The White Teeth (2000) is a work about the postcolonial society of London where Irie considers herself British despite her dark skin due to her Jamaican roots. White skin is one of the ideals of beauty according to the British standard. Ellen Hopkins’ Perfect (2011) is a novel in which the writer asks the question who defines the word ‘perfect’, the question is asked through Kendra whose dream is to be a model and a star.
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Ackermann, Zeno. "Struggling with the Rhetoric of Exemption: Figurations of the Holocaust in Contemporary British Novels." Holocaust Studies 14, no. 3 (December 2008): 85–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2008.11087224.
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Drozdovskyi, Dmytro. "Representation of the Problem-Thematic Unit “Finance” in the Contemporary British Novel." Pitannâ lìteraturoznavstva, no. 102 (December 28, 2020): 148–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.31861/pytlit2020.102.148.
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The problem-thematic unit “Finance” is outlined in the theoretical work “The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction” (2018). The importance of this unit is due to the presence of texts in which to understand the worldview of the characters it is important to take into account the socio-economic environment in which the characters live and which affects their behavior. In the novels “NW” (2012) by Zadie Smith, “Other People’s Money” (2011) by Justin Cartwright and “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” (2010) by Jonathan Coe, the writers offer a new representation of the image of money, which distances money from the material world and becomes a transcendental value. Monetary processes are perceived as imaginary phenomena that the characters perceive speculatively. This leads to cataclysms and painful experiences arising from the loss of the characters of their work and the total banking crisis. The representation of money in the novels exploits the tendency that contemporary British authors discover trends related to German philosophy and the ideas of Kantianism. Money is not a form of achieving material goods, but a tool that shows that the characters are able to create another virtual world, which can exist as a speculative phenomenon. The presented range of novels confirms the ideas of B. Shalahinov that the sources of philosophical thought of German Romanticism were nourishing both for the Modern period and the Post-postmodern one, in particular exploited in the British post-postmodern novels.
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Sidorova, O. "KAZUO ISHIGURO. THE WRITER IN THE ‘FLOATING WORLD’." Voprosy literatury, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 301–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-4-301-318.
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Novels by the Nobel Prize winner in literature 2017 K. Ishiguro are analyzed chronologically, from the first novel A Pale View of Hills (1982) to the latest one The Buried Giant (2015). As the article shows, the author, who represents two cultural traditions, the Japanese and the British ones, reflects this quality in his works. The writer himself states that his works were mainly formed by the European literary tradition and, consequently, his novel The Remains of the Day has become a concentrated study of Englishness, one of the most vivid in contemporary British literature. Experimenting with traditional literary forms, Ishiguro uses the stream-of-conscience technique, elements of science fiction, fantasy, detective genres, but each of his novels is unique and is characterized by deep overtones. Some constant elements of the writer’s works are discussed: unreliable narrators, the opposition of memory and history, the special role of children and of old people in his novels, the significant role of periods before and after historic events that are omitted in his novels, and recognizable language and style – compact, reserved and precise.
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Ildarhanov, Ilias. "The Mysterious Talent." Social Phenomena 10, no. 2 (November 1, 2020): 62–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.47929/2305-7327_2020.02_62-69.
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The article studies giftedness and talent representation in contemporary British literature by means of analysing three novels: “When We Were Orphans” by Kazuo Ishiguro, “The Thirteenth Tale” by Diane Setterfield and “Milton in America” by Peter Ackroyd. The topic of giftedness appears in these works as part of the genre and form game, which is an important immanent property of postmodern literature. The plots and themes are reconsidered and played with like a set of toy building blocks used to construct a new building that makes sense only in the context of the already existing constructions. The paper shows that the concept of giftedness appears in contemporary British novels mainly as part of a game of parody, which reflects the idea of the world as imagery and confusion.
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Branach-Kallas, Anna. "Traumatic Re-enactments: Portraits of Veterans in Contemporary British and Canadian First World War Fiction." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 31 (December 15, 2018): 149. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/raei.2018.31.09.
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The paper focuses on the portrait of the First World War veterans in selected British and Canadian novels published at the turn of the twenty-first century. The authors use various means to depict the phenomenon of trauma: from flashbacks disrupting the present, through survivor guilt, nightmares and suicide, to aporia and the collapse of representation. The comparative approach used in the article highlights national differences, yet also shows that the discourse of futility and trauma provides a trasnational framework to convey the suffering of the First World War. As a result, although resulting in social castration and disempowerment, trauma serves here as a vehicle for a critique of the disastrous aftermath of the 1914-1918 conflict and the erasures of collective memory. Re-enacting traumatic plots, the British and Canadian novels under consideration explore little known facets of the 1914-1918 conflict, while simultaneously addressing some of our most pressing anxieties about the present, such as social marginalization, otherness, and lonely death.
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Povilaitienė, Justė. "Migrantų tapatybių ir kasdienio gyvenimo konstravimas šiuolaikiniame lietuvių ir britų moterų romane." OIKOS: lietuvių migracijos ir diasporos studijos 23-24 (2017): 201–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2351-6561.23-24.12.
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Babcock, David. "We Are All Administrators Now: Contemporary Governmentality and Its Novel Genealogies." Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 18, no. 3 (September 2015): 404–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.18.3.404.
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This article reviews John Marx’s Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890-2011, a study of how the novel has sought to intervene in global administration over the long twentieth century. Adopting a genealogical approach, Marx aims to identify the discursive conditions through which literature came to have something to say about global governance. The anglophone novel, he argues, has evolved in conversation with a sociological discourse of professionalized governmentality that took root in the age of imperial British liberalism and reinvented itself through successive stages of post-World War II globalization. For instance, Marx’s chapter on failed-state fiction shows how certain novels engage with competing professional knowledge about states in crisis in order to reassess who is truly qualified to administer in those zones—including those who do not fit traditional, class-based notions of “professionalism.” In this and other chapters, Marx attempts to tease out the positive political potentials that emerge from the novelistic engagement with these complex discursive systems. Ultimately, he offers a measured optimism for a reinvented liberalism in our present moment, one that is needed to contest neoliberalism’s claim to be the sole heir to liberal ideas. Novels, he concludes, can indeed work incrementally in collaboration with social sciences to set new agendas and frameworks for global governance. Overall, Marx’s book offers a fresh perspective for theorizing literary agency on a global scale, while simultaneously revealing the need for a more thoroughgoing analysis of interdisciplinary exchange within governmentality.
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Zymomria, Mykoła. "The Rules of How Reality Works Through the Prism of Post-Postmodern Prose." Czytanie Literatury. Łódzkie Studia Literaturoznawcze, no. 9 (December 30, 2020): 347–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2299-7458.09.18.
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The reviewer analyses the monograph Problematic-Thematic Units and Philosophical-Esthetical Parameters of the British Post-Postmodern Novel (Kyiv, 2020) written by Dmytro Drozdovskyi, a Ukrainian scholar from Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, member of The European Society for the Study of English (Bulgarian branch). In the monograph, the author has outlined the theory of the post-postmodern novel based on the analysis of the key novels of contemporary British fiction (David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Sarah waters, Mark Haddon, etc.). The review states that the Ukrainian scholar has developed the theory proposed by Fredric Jameson regarding the post-postmodern features of Cloud Atlas and also discusses the concept of meta-modernity as one of the sections in the post-postmodern literary paradigm in the UK. Drozdovskyi argues that meta-modernism cannot be the only term that explains all the peculiarities of contemporary British fiction, which also cannot be outlined as meta-modern but as post-postmodern. The scholar provides a new theory of the novel based on the exploitation of real and unreal historical facts and imagined alternative histories and multifaceted realities. Furthermore, the reviewer pays attention to the contribution this monograph has for world literary studies spotlighting the theory of literary meta-genre patterns, as Drozdovskyi provides a theory according to which literary periods can be divided into those in which the carnival is the dominant meta-genre pattern (like postmodernism) and those that exploit the mystery as the meta-genre pattern (post-postmodernism). The reviewer analyses the key thematic units explained by Drozdovskyi as the key ones that determine the semiosphere of the contemporary British novel (post-metaphysical and post-positivist thinking of the characters, medicalisation of the humanitarian discourse, and the representation of the temporal unity of different realities). The scholar also states that the post-postmodern British novel exploits the findings of German Romanticism and Kant’s philosophy.
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Townsend, Sarah L. "“Certainly forbidden” subjects: Race, migration, and the vanishing points of post-imperial British security." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52, no. 1 (July 27, 2016): 183–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989415592661.
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This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), the article identifies the school as a fraught ideological site wherein conceptions of national insularity collide with the complex pressures of British globalization. Spark’s Marcia Blaine School and Ishiguro’s Hailsham masquerade as microcosms of a homogeneous British nation only through a rigorous process of racial redaction. By adapting Joseph Slaughter’s concept of the “vanishing point”, the article traces two nonwhite immigrant characters whose brief, silent appearances unsettle the novels’ optics of power, thereby intimating a vast history of racial violence disavowed in the name of bodily, cultural, and political security. Connecting the novels’ vanishing acts to the discursive lacunae perpetuated in the war on terror, the article also considers the imperial residues that continue to shape the contemporary security state.
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Felski, Rita. "Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 115, no. 1 (January 2000): 33–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/463229.
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In contemporary literary and cultural studies, little attention has been paid to the lower middle class, described by one scholar as “the social class with the lowest reputation in the entire history of class theory.” This article discusses the representation of the lower middle class in literature and scholarly writing. George Orwell's novels of the 1930s and Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia offer some illuminating perspectives on the British lower middle class, though Orwell's novels also reveal a conspicuous disdain for their subject. This disdain is echoed in much of the scholarly writing on the lower middle class. Decried for its reactionary attitudes by Marxists, the “petite bourgeoisie” also poses problems for a contemporary cultural politics based on the idealization of transgression and on the romance of marginality. Rather than embody an outmoded or anachronistic class formation, however, the lower middle class may offer an important key to the contemporary meaning of class.
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Rychter, Ewa. "“We will call the damsel, and enquire at her mouth”. Re-writing Biblical Women in Contemporary British Novels." Essais, no. 10 (September 15, 2016): 19–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/essais.3732.
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Humphries, Chelsea. "Off the Rails: The Influence of the British Railway on Nineteenth-Century Publishing." IJournal: Graduate Student Journal of the Faculty of Information 5, no. 1 (January 3, 2020): 41–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/ijournal.v5i1.33473.
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This paper examines two copies of The Fortunes of Nigel by Sir Walter Scott, exploring the novel’s transformation from a three-volume book published by Archibald Constable & Co. in Edinburgh in 1822 to a cheap yellowback published by James Campbell & Son in Toronto in 1866. By investigating the history of the spaces in which such three-volume novels and yellowbacks would have been purchased and read, while simultaneously considering the material qualities of these formats, it is possible to make clear connections between Victorian railway culture and the contemporary literary world. These books stand as material evidence of the far-reaching impact of the railway on nineteenth-century book publishing.
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Gill, Patrick. "“The drops which fell from Shakespear’s Pen”: Hamlet in Contemporary Fiction." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 25 (November 15, 2012): 257. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/raei.2012.25.19.
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Questions of gender, ethnicity and sexuality have all been raised by novelists intent on rewriting Shakespeare from the position of what have been seen as cultural margins. While discussions of such rewritings are ongoing, few concerted efforts have been made to trace a pattern in the treatment of Shakespearean allusion and adaptation at the hands of British and American writers of the literary mainstream. The present essay sets out to investigate the way in which three such writers —Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and John Updike— employ allusion to/adaptations of Hamlet in their novels and what their respective stances reveal about their understanding of their role as canonical writers.
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Hauthal, Janine. "Rewriting ‘white’ genres in search of Afro-European identities." English Text Construction 10, no. 1 (June 15, 2017): 37–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/etc.10.1.03hau.
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Presuming that both travel and crime fiction can be described as traditionally ‘white’ genres, this article investigates how contemporary Black British authors appropriate these genres. Focusing on Mike Phillips’s A Shadow of Myself and Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists, the article examines how the two novels redeem and suspend the traditional racial and national coding of travel writing and crime fiction by rehabilitating black mixed-race characters. In both novels, moreover, the rethinking of traditional popular genres coincides with, and is partly enabled by, a transnational shift in focus from Britain to Europe. A closer look at the novels’ respective endings, finally, reveals how each conceptualises the relationship between Britain and Europe differently, and how this difference can be explained by the impact of genre.
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Makala, Melissa Edmundson. "BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: RACIAL IDENTITY IN ALICE PERRIN'S THE STRONGER CLAIM." Victorian Literature and Culture 42, no. 3 (June 6, 2014): 491–508. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150314000114.
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Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.
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Hale, Frederick. "Envisioning a Dystopian, Post-Christian Society in P. Anderson Graham’s The Collapse of Homo Sapiens." Religion and Theology 28, no. 1-2 (July 27, 2021): 83–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15743012-bja10020.
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Abstract As one of many contemporary British dystopian novels, P. Anderson Graham’s 1923 The Collapse of Homo Sapiens envisaged Britain in the twenty-second century as a devastated society that has largely reverted to a primitive, non-Christian state. However, a remnant of the surviving population has memories of the religious dimensions of national life, helping them to cope with the exigencies of their meagre existence. A modest revival of the faith of their forebears ensues, which in turn triggers a reaction against the re-assertion of Christianity by nationalistic elements that regard it as too charitable a social force to fortify their efforts to revitalise British culture in a hostile geopolitical setting. The narrative perspective of the novel is critical of the truncated state of that religion in Britain in the 1920s and how this was failing to guide and inspire peoples’ lives at that time.
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Bowyer, Andrew D. "Inner-Space and Liquid Myths: J.G. Ballard as a Post-Secular Writer." Literature and Theology 34, no. 3 (June 5, 2020): 304–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/litthe/fraa010.
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Abstract British novelist James Graham Ballard (1930–2009) was an inveterate mythmaker. In this article, I characterise him as a post-secular writer who saw the imagination as a means to confront trauma, probe memory, and salvage meaning in a secular age. Anchoring the argument in a selection of novels and works that constitute his ‘autobiographical turn’, I suggest that resonances with contemporary theology may be detected, particularly the disruptive, anti-fascist, postmodern, ‘tehomic’ theology of Catherine Keller.
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Ivushkina, T. A. "ALLUSIVE ELEMENTS IN JULIAN FELLOWES’S PAST IMPERFECT AND AMOR TOWLES’S RULES OF CIVILITY (SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND COMPARATIVE APPROACHES)." Philology at MGIMO 19, no. 3 (October 3, 2019): 74–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.24833/2410-2423-2019-3-19-74-82.
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In the focus of the article are allusive elements (allusions and quotations) in two novels − Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes (Great Britain) and Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (USA) which are studied from sociolinguistic and comparative points of view in order to determine correlation between allusive elements used in the text and social status of an author/personage, common “core” of allusions in both novels and culturally specific types of allusive elements serving as signs of identity. Both contemporary writers have classical education at the best universities and socially belong to the classes depicted in their novels. On the material of two novels it has been revealed that allusive elements are proper to upper class speech, and literature abounding in allusions is aimed at the reader of the same social background. There were singled out different types of allusions common for both British and American novels and culturally specific allusive elements signaling the identity of the speaker. The comparative study allows one to see historical background underpinning culturally specific varieties of allusions as well as the results of sweeping processes of globalization.
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Rees, Kathy. "The Heinemann International Library, 1890–7." Translation and Literature 26, no. 2 (July 2017): 162–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/tal.2017.0287.
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William Heinemann's first major publishing venture was the ‘Heinemann International Library’ edited by Edmund Gosse. This grew into a series of twenty works of fiction translated into English. Notable for introducing Victorian readers to cultures as unfamiliar as those of Austria, Bulgaria, and Poland, the series is sometimes viewed as illustrating the growing British interest in little-known European literatures. An examination of the interactions between authors, translators, publisher, and editor, together with a sample of comments by contemporary reviewers, suggests, however, that this series of mostly realist novels was more contentious than has previously been recognized. This analysis explores the difficulties of marketing foreign novels in translation, particularly the demand for dynamic equivalence, achieved at the cost of suppressing innovative stylistic or linguistic qualities.
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Ponnuswami, Meenakshi. "Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. By Gabriele Griffin. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. x + 291. $75 cloth." Theatre Survey 46, no. 2 (October 25, 2005): 317–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557405240206.
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Gabriele Griffin's study of black and Asian women playwrights in contemporary Britain fills a gap in British theatre studies. Although a comprehensive study of black British theatre has yet to see print, two developments have, in the past decade or so, begun to stimulate critical attention in the field. One is the publication of plays by black and Asian authors, including collections of plays exclusively by women (such as Khadija George's edition of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers of 1993), as well as the more systematic inclusion of works by writers such as Winsome Pinnock and Trish Cooke in anthologies of plays by new British dramatists. A second is the work of British cultural-studies scholars and sociologists during the same period, which has offered theatre historians some new approaches and challenges: Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle (1994); Catherine Ugwu's Let's Get It On (1995); Baker et al.'s Black British Cultural Studies (1996); Heidi Mirza's edited volume Black British Feminism (1997)—not to mention a vast body of work by Stuart Hall, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and others. Still, as Griffin notes at the outset, while immigrant and second-generation novels and films have received attention and accolades, black British theatre has tended to be ignored except by a handful of feminist theatre scholars.
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Oldham, Joseph. "‘Disappointed romantics’: Troubled Heritage in the BBC's John le Carré Adaptations." Journal of British Cinema and Television 10, no. 4 (October 2013): 727–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2013.0172.
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This article analyses three serialised adaptations of John le Carré novels produced by the BBC: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), Smiley's People (1982) and A Perfect Spy (1987). It aims firstly to position them in the context of developments and trends during the period of the serials' production. It explores how, on the one hand, they were produced as variants on the classic serial model which aimed for a more contemporary focus and aesthetic in response to concurrent developments in British television drama, and on the other, how they have a complex and ambivalent relationship with the genre of television spy fiction. Secondly, this article builds upon this positioning of the serials to explore how the themes of le Carré’s novels are interpreted specifically for the television medium. Central to this is the issue of temporal displacement, as television's process of ‘working through’, often considered as characteristic of the medium's immediacy and ‘liveness’, is in this case delayed over many years by a cycle of continual adaptation. Here a particular narrative – the defection of Kim Philby in 1963 – resonates across three decades and is worked through in a variety of approaches, initially in the novels and subsequently reworked on television. It then examines how this manifests in the television adaptations in a contemporary heritage aesthetic which is complex and highly troubled.
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Donaldson, Peter. "‘We are having a very enjoyable game’: Britain, sport and the South African War, 1899–1902." War in History 25, no. 1 (July 20, 2017): 4–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0968344516652422.
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This article explores the relationship between sport and war in Britain during the South African War, 1899–1902. Through extensive press coverage, as well as a spate of memoirs and novels, the British public was fed a regular diet of war stories and reportage in which athletic endeavour and organized games featured prominently. This contemporary literary material sheds light on the role sport was perceived to have played in the lives and work of the military personnel deployed in South Africa. It also, however, reveals a growing unease over an amateur-military tradition which equated sporting achievement with military prowess.
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Sá, Luiz Fernando Ferreira. "Collections in Atonement, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Bring up the bodies, and Cloud Atlas: A prelude." Scripta 24, no. 52 (December 18, 2020): 502–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.5752/p.2358-3428.2020v24n52p502-527.
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I will read the fascination with collectors and collecting in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies (2012), and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) regarding at least two theoretical questions. Can collected things and objects ever assist in the imagination of more satisfying social roles and identities? Can collecting material traces lead to an accurate or truthful depiction of the past-present-future life writing? Those novels represent one of the most popular and critically acclaimed examples of the widespread interest in collecting apparent in contemporary British fiction.
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Kingsepp, Eva. "The Second World War, Imperial, and Colonial Nostalgia: The North Africa Campaign and Battlefields of Memory." Humanities 7, no. 4 (November 8, 2018): 113. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h7040113.
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The article addresses the function of (post)colonial nostalgia in a context of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) in contemporary Europe. How can different cultural memories of the Second Word War be put into respectful dialogue with each other? The text is based on a contrapuntal reading (Said 1994) of British and Egyptian popular narratives, mainly British documentary films about the North Africa Campaign, but also feature films and novels, and data from qualitative interviews collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, during visits 2013–2015. The study highlights the considerable differences between the British and Egyptian narratives, but also the significant similarities regarding the use and function of nostalgia. In addition, the Egyptian narrative expresses a profound cosmopolitan nostalgia and a longing for what is regarded as Egypt’s lost, modern Golden Age, identified as the decades before the nation’s fundamental change from western-oriented monarchy to Nasser’s Arab nationalist military state. The common elements between the two national narratives indicate a possibly fruitful way to open up for a shared popular memory culture about the war years, including postcolonial aspects.
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Pividori, María Cristina. "“Prefer not, eh?”: Re-Scribing the Lives of the Great War Poets in Contemporary British Historical Fiction." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 31 (December 15, 2018): 125. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/raei.2018.31.08.
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Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted process of sifting and discerning what should be remembered, neglected or amplified from the stream of war experience. In his book about Pat Barker, Mark Rawlinson argues that “historical fiction has been transformed in the post-war period by the way writers have exploited the porous and unstable demarcation between fiction and no fiction, stories and history” (14). Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), Geoff Akers’s Beating for the Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006) and Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light (2008) have not become best sellers like Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; yet, they too represent the predominant commemorative drift in contemporary British fiction about the Great War. Without doubt, these three authors have followed in Barker’s steps in their purpose of holding a mirror to real people and real events in the past and of deciphering the deleted text of ‘the war to end all wars.’ However, while Barker chose to write about the often-anthologised Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dawson, Akers and Edric base their narratives on the writings, and lives, of Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney respectively. My discussion of these three novels will explore the various ways in which the past can be accessed and interpreted from the present and represented in fiction. The authors’ decisions as to what historical instances to unravel do not just reveal the relation that contemporary British fiction entertains with the Great War and with history, but also how the past erupts in the present to interrogate it. Taking three salient features of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1988)—intertextuality, parody and paratextuality—as my theoretical points of departure, I will explore the dominant frameworks and cultural conditions (that is the propagation of either patriotic or protest readings) within which the Great War has been narrated in the novels and the new approaches, opportunities and ethical implications of using historical and literary sources to re-scribe a previously non-existent version of the lives of the iconic Great War Poets.
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Kuehn, Julia. "Journeys to a war, and the literature of the 1860s and 1870s." Literature & History 29, no. 1 (May 2020): 60–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306197320907455.
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Analysing Albert Smith’s and Charley Dickens’s 1858 and 1860 trips to the sites of the Second Anglo-Chinese War, the article suggests that the experience of war, especially of wars fought abroad, is characterised by affective unease and epistemological breakdowns. Smith and Dickens enact war tourism in Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai as they perform incongruous and tone-deaf cross-cultural relations in a ‘theatre of war’. Similarly, contemporary novels reveal the complicated entanglements of the Sino-British (opium) relationship as writers try to make sense of a world in which cultural contact is fraught with violence and cognition is brought to its limits.
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von Rosenberg, Ingrid. "Old Age as Horror Vision or Comfort Zone in the Late Fiction of Contemporary British Novelists." Anglia 139, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 494–515. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2021-0040.
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Abstract Old people have always figured in literature, but the unprecedented and worldwide growth of longevity in the twentieth century has triggered new fictional approaches to the topic of aging. Thus, since the late 1980 s, an ever growing number of established British writers, reaching their own advanced years, have written on age from an insider’s perspective, creating old main characters and focusing on their mental and physical experiences. I have examined six of such novels, published between 1986 and 2019, trying to find out how the authors construct their heroes’ and heroines’ aging selves by imagining their attitudes to certain central issues like time, death, physical decay and human relationships. Of the classical formative categories (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) gender has proved to be the most essential, especially when it comes to the perspectives on time. While the view of heroes created by male writers remains fixed on the past, often with nostalgia, sometimes with regret, the women authors’ heroines focus on their present situation with a view to the future, represented by children and grandchildren. Class turned out to be a second important category: the (uncontemplated) safe middle-class position of all protagonists appears as an indispensable precondition for the free choice of attitude to the challenges of aging.
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Taylor, Antony. "‘At the Mercy of the German Eagle’." Critical Survey 32, no. 1-2 (June 1, 2020): 59–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/cs.2019.112603.
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In the years before 1914 the novels of William Le Queux provided a catalyst for British debates about the economic, military and political failures of the empire and featured plots that embodied fears about new national and imperial rivals. For Le Queux, the capture of London was integral to German military occupation. Representative of the nation’s will to resist, or its inability to withstand attack, the vitality of London was always at issue in his novels. Drawing on contemporary fears about the capital and its decay, this article considers the moral panics about London and Londoners and their relationship to Britain’s martial decline reflected in his stories. Engaging with images of anarchist and foreign terrorism, and drawing on fears of covert espionage rings operating in government circles, this article probes the ways in which Le Queux’s fiction expressed concerns about London as a degenerate metropolis in the process of social and moral collapse.
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Harrison, Christine. "Spatialising Early and Late Modernity: Representations of London in Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr. Dee and Hawksmoor." Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, no. 8 (December 1, 2015): 63. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/syn.16213.
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Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Dr. Dee (1993) are examples of a distinctive British form of contemporary experimental historical fiction, and through representations of London they explore the popular dimension of early modernity, showing how the capital’s spaces both embodied and produced multiple modernity, as well as the unsung pre-modern allegiances that critiqued modern forms. While the novels’ respective Renaissance and post-Restoration settings allow them to explore different stages in the development of both London modernity and resistant forms, their juxtaposition of early and late modern narratives establishes a compelling parallel between early modern and late twentieth-century London. Both sets of narratives also stage a shift away from modern forms towards inherited pre-modern allegiances, connecting this to a new relationship with the capital’s inheritance of pre-Reformation and Gothic built space, as well as an equivalent tradition of London writing, one in which Ackroyd’s novels themselves participate.
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Oró Piqueras, Maricel. "Towards old age through memory and narrative in Penelope Lively’s "The photograph" and "How it all began"." Journal of English Studies 12 (December 20, 2014): 113. http://dx.doi.org/10.18172/jes.2826.
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This article analyses two novels by contemporary British author Penelope Lively by focusing on a recurrent topic in Lively’s fiction: the interrelation between memory and narrative in order to make sense of lived time as opposed to chronological time. In Lively’s "The Photograph" (2003) and "How It All Began" (2011), two apparently insignificant episodes force the two main characters, Glyn and Charlotte respectively, to revise their memories as well as life stories when entering their old age. Revising their life narratives by going back to their memories and making sense of their present situations proves to be a rewarding exercise which helps both protagonists to be ready to step into a new life stage. On the other hand, the narrative of each of the novels is constructed through the voices of those family members and friends who are part of Glyn’s and Charlotte’s past and present, and who contribute to add information to the respective revision processes of the protagonists, showing that time and memory, as well as narrative, are subjective constructed categories.
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Höfele, Andreas. "The Erotic in the Theatre of Peter Zadek." New Theatre Quarterly 7, no. 27 (August 1991): 229–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x0000573x.
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In NTQ 4 (1985) we included a fully-illustrated interview with the German director Peter Zadek conducted by Roy Kift. Here, Andreas Höfele explores one of the subjects touched on in that interview, as in most responses to Zadek's work: the utilization of the erotic as a recurring motif. From his introduction to London of the then little-known work of Jean Genet to his most recent productions – of Wedekind's Lulu and of Chekhov's Ivanov – Zadek has, in Höfele”s words, opted for ‘the kaleidoscopic uncertainty of play’ and a ‘deliberate lack of closure’, which are here analyzed in terms of Baudrillard's ‘structure of seduction’ employed both as aesthetic principle and as working method. Andreas Höfele, who has taught in the German Department of Edinburgh University and in the English Department at Würzburg, has been Professor of Theaterwissenschaft at the University of Munich since 1986. Apart from four novels, and books on Shakespeare's stagecraft and Malcolm Lowry, he has published articles and lectured on contemporary German productions of Shakespeare, on contemporary British drama, and on aspects of theatrical theory.
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Zacharias, Robert. "In-Between WorldandWorlds Within: Reading Diasporic Return in Vassanji and Bissoondath." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 2 (June 5, 2014): 207–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2014.12.
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The return journey has long been recognized as a central feature of diaspora, yet contemporary diaspora studies have conventionally understood it in stubbornly mythological terms. This paper looks to foster discussion about physical diasporic return journeys by juxtaposing M. G. Vassanji’sThe In-Between World of Vikram Lall(2003) and Neil Bissoondath’sThe Worlds Within Her(1998). Although the two novels overlap in their exploration of the Indian diaspora against the backdrop of racially volatile independence movements in former British colonies, they offer starkly different renderings of diasporic return that are reflected in their engagements with diasporic history. The paper closes with a consideration of the critical assumptions that have allowed the return journey to be overlooked in diaspora literary studies to date, suggesting that its absence may reflect the methodological nationalism of the field.
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Dorst, Aletta G. "More or different metaphors in fiction? A quantitative cross-register comparison." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 24, no. 1 (February 2015): 3–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947014560486.
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This article presents a quantitative cross-register comparison of the forms and frequency of linguistic metaphor in fiction based on a 45,000-word annotated corpus containing excerpts from 12 contemporary British-English novels sampled from the British National Corpus. The results for fiction are compared to those for three other registers, namely news texts, academic discourse and conversations. The linguistic manifestations of metaphor in the corpus were identified using the MIPVU procedure (Steen et al., 2010), a revised and extended version of the original Metaphor Identification Procedure, or MIP, as developed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007). Contrary to common expectations, fiction was not the register with the highest number of metaphors, but was situated in between academic discourse and news on the one hand, and conversation on the other. However, it turned out that metaphor signals and direct expressions of metaphor (e.g. simile) were typical of fiction, as has been claimed in the literature (e.g. Goatly, 1997; Lodge, 1977; Sayce, 1953). Based on these quantitative findings, this article will show that fiction does not contain more metaphors than the other registers, but rather, different ones.
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Oró-Piqueras, Maricel. "The Pain and Irony of Death in Julian Barnes's Memoirs Nothing to Be Frightened Of and Levels of Life." European Journal of Life Writing 10 (April 22, 2021): 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.10.36183.
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Julian Barnes is one of the best-known contemporary British authors, not only for his taste for formal experimentation well-documented in the novels and short stories he has published since the 1980s, but also for his obsession with death. Despite the fact that death – as a prime concern expressed through his characters’ discussions, particularly when they are in their old age – has been present in most of Barnes fictional works, the topic becomes centre-stage in the two memoirs that he has published, namely, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) and Levels of Life (2013). In his memoirs, Barnes connects his personal experience with the works of philosophers and writers and with the experiences of those around him with the aim of trying to discern how he himself and, by extension, his own contemporaries and Western society have dealt with death. For Barnes, writing becomes a therapy to confront his own existential fears as well as traumatic experiences – such as the sudden death of his wife as described in Levels of Life – at the same time that he reflects on the place death occupies in contemporary times.
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Siberry, Elizabeth. "Fact and Fiction: Children and the Crusades." Studies in Church History 31 (1994): 417–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0424208400013024.
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In addition to those who could bear arms, the crusade armies included numerous camp-followers. They came in a variety of forms—the old and infirm, women (who posed a different set of problems), the clergy, and children. It is the latter who are the subject of this paper. In the first part I will examine the evidence for children on the crusades in contemporary sources— histories of individual expeditions written by participants or drawing upon eyewitness accounts. I will then go on to examine how the image of children on the crusades has been passed on to subsequent generations. I do not intend here to offer a comprehensive survey of children’s literature about the crusades. I will merely try to highlight some themes, in particular, from British historical novels and adventure stories written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Włodzyńska, Ewelina. "Współczesna (re)interpretacja powieści Jane Austen – o poszukiwaniu wolności." Przegląd Humanistyczny 63, no. 2 (465) (October 25, 2019): 161–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.5604/01.3001.0013.5521.
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Contemporary (Re)interpretation of Jane Austen’s Novels – about Looking for Freedom is a comparative study of the works of the author of Sense and Sensibility and the British series Taboo. As the main aim of paper the author took the search for analogies in these, far and totally different, as it may seems, texts of culture. Naming after Carrie Vaughn the works of Miss Austen as the “universe mirrors”, the author drew the attention to the modern “reflections” of Austen’s characters (anti-heroes, look-alikes) and today’s reinterpretation of the 19th century. For the palimpsest reading of the Austen’s novel she used the tools of the feminist criticism and the postcolonial theory. It allowed her to observe the femininemasculine relations, the relations based on a master-servant pattern, and, at the end, to analyse the political, social, cultural image of the coloniser and the colonised, which has been made by the colonial regime at that time. The author of the article put these two discourses together in order to prove that the rights of the 19th century wife were limited to those of a slave from the Dark Continent.
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Ciocoi-Pop, Ana-Blanca. "Amorality, Immorality and Individualism in Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy." Sæculum 48, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 83–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/saec-2019-0033.
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AbstractHanif Kureishi, an acclaimed contemporary British writer of Pakistani origin, is known to the Romanian reading public primarily through the translations (under the aegis of the Humanitas publishing house) of his novels Intimacy, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Nothing, Gabriel’s Gift and Something to Tell You. One of the foremost representatives of British postcolonial literature, Kureishi masterfully, and at times shockingly, explores the postmodern urban world of human desolation, loneliness and alienation, with the surgical precision and mercilessness of a “terrorist”, as he himself describes the writer and his artistic mission in an interview. Intimacy, in a classic Proustian or Joycean manner, offers a glimpse into twenty-four hours in the life of a middle-aged Londoner, Jay, who fed up with the monotony and routine of his marriage, decides to leave his wife and children in order to pursue a passionate sexual relationship with a younger lover. The novel thematizes such concerns as the clash between traditional values and (post)modern society, between individualism / narcissism and moral duty, morality versus amorality / immorality, and the inevitable alienation of the individual who experiences these conflicts. The present paper aims at offering a reading of Kureishi’s text starting from the writer’s claim that “I’ve never had any desire to be good. (…) I don’t like goodness particularly. I like passion.” From the vantage point of this confession we shall proceed to analyze Intimacy not as a moral handbook, but as the eternal plight of the human soul, caught between the painfulness of duty and the irresistible call of passion.
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Huck, Christian. "Travelling Detectives." Transfers 2, no. 3 (December 1, 2012): 120–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/trans.2012.020308.
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This article is concerned with travelling detectives in two different but related senses. On the one hand, it considers the relevance of trains and other vehicles of mobility for detective fiction, both as a topic of fiction and a place of consumption. On the other hand, it registers that detective fiction has to “travel“ in a more abstract sense before the reading traveler can enjoy it. German publishers appropriated the genre, originally a nineteenth-century American and British invention, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Based on contemporary observations by German cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the essay examines German crime-fiction dime novels from the interwar period, compares them to their American predecessors, and analyzes their relationship to mobility and cultural transfer. The text argues that the spatial mobility of the fictional detective is only possible in a specific cultural environment to which the moving but corporeally immobile reader has to be transferred imaginatively.
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Sugiera, Małgorzata. "Other Stories: Experimental Forms of Contemporary Historying at the Crossroads Between Facts and Fictions." Art History & Criticism 14, no. 1 (December 1, 2018): 5–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/mik-2018-0001.
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Summary The process of questioning the authority of academic history—in the form in which it emerged at the turn of the 19th century—began in the 1970s, when Hayden White pointed out the rhetorical dimension of historical discourse. His British colleague Alun Munslow went a step further and argued that the ontological statuses of the past and history are so different that historical discourse cannot by any means be treated as representation of the past. As we have no access to that which happened, both historians and artists can only present the past in accordance with their views and opinions, the available rhetorical conventions, and means of expression. The article revisits two examples of experimental history which Munslow mentioned in his The Future of History (2010): Robert A. Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine (1988) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926 (1997). It allows reassessing their literary strategies in the context of a new wave of works written by historians and novelists who go beyond the fictional/factual dichotomy. The article focuses on Polish counterfactual writers of the last two decades, such as Wojciech Orliński, Jacek Dukaj, and Aleksander Głowacki. Their novels corroborate the main argument of the article about a turn which has been taking place in recent experimental historying: the loss of previous interest in formal innovations influenced by modernist avant-garde fiction. Instead, it concentrates on demonstrating the contingency of history to strategically extend the unknowability of the future or the past(s) and, as a result, change historying into speculative thinking.
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Rychter, Ewa. "Defamiliarizing the popular image of the bible in some contemporary rewritings in english." Journal of Literary Semantics 47, no. 1 (April 25, 2018): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jls-2018-0001.
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Abstract This paper focuses on the ways some recent British and Irish rewritings of the Bible estrange what has become the publicly accepted and dominant image of the biblical text. Recently, the Bible has been given the status of “home scripture” (Sherwood, Yvonne. 2012. Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age. Cambridge: CUP) and become a domesticated and conservative text, a rather placid cultural/literary monument, an important foundation of democracy, a venerable religious document judged more tolerant and liberal than other scriptures. Though the Bible used to be perceived as an explosive text, peppered with potentially offensive passages, today its enmity is neutralised either by linking the Bible with ancient times or by relating it to people’s religious beliefs and by entrenching its more scandalous parts within the discourse of tolerance. It is such an anodyne image of the Bible that the biblical rewritings of Roberts, Winterson, Barnes, Crace, Pullman, Tóibin, Alderman, Diski defamiliarize. By showing biblical events through the eyes of various non-standard focalizers, those novels disrupt the formulaic patterns of the contemporary perception of the Bible. It is through these strange perspectives that we observe the critical moment when the overall meaning and the role of the biblical text is established and the biblical story is actually written down. Importantly, it is also the moment when somebody moulds the scripture according to their ideas and glosses over all the complexities, violence and immorality related to the events the biblical text describes. Also, contemporary biblical rewritings defamiliarize the currently popular image of the Bible – that of a whitewashed text which inculcates morality, conserves social order and teaches love and tolerance, by employing images of disintegration, dirt and contagion as well as by constructing a figure of a fervent believer in the Bible and its ideas.
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Biswas, Sankar. "NAGA IDENTITY POETICS IN CONTEMPORARY NAGA ENGLISH LITERATURE (A KALEIDOSCOPIC VIEW)." International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH 8, no. 11 (November 22, 2020): 35–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.29121/granthaalayah.v8.i11.2020.2076.
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The Nagas originally a Sino-Mongoloid tribe are substantiated to have originated around 10th century B.C. in the plains between Huang Ho and Yangtze Ho in North Central China. As migration is a process which is reported to have been going on since time immemorial, the Nagas too could not have isolated themselves from being a part of the mass odyssey from their homeland with the anticipation of exploring and settling in naturally upgraded habitats. Hence today, the Nagas have been found to inhabit the banks of Chindwin and Irawaddy Rivers in Myanmar, and Nagaland in India. As far as their language is concerned, it is said to be an affiliate of the greater branch of Sino-Tibetan besides sharing certain similarities with Tibeto-Burman languages. As for the etymology of the word Naga is concerned, it is said to have been derived from either of the Sanskrit word namely Nagna or Nag with respective meanings ‘naked’ or ‘mountain. Frankly speaking both the etymons in question validate the universally recognized conception of Naga identity. Nagaland itself is dotted with multiple number of hills and a faction of people among all the Naga Tribes are said to have been still embracing primitivism. But what is most conspicuous about the Nagas is that though today we know Nagaland as a self-Governing state, the fact can never be contradicted that Nagas have never considered themselves part of India despite the state being taken over by India in 1952. Right from their partially being colonized by the British in the middle of the 19th century, to their strict resistance to both the British-Indian Government and then to the post-Independence Indian Government, the Nagas have shown that their assimilation to Indian mainstream is a daunting and cumbersome exercise. The origin of the Naga National Council, preceded by the armed resistance movement of Rani Gyindulu and that of the genesis of National Socialist Council of Nagaland simply bespeak that this prospect of wholesale assimilation into Indian Sense of Nationality will await the elapse of an elongated stretch of historical time. This very aspect has been enjoying international attention and the literary activists of Nagaland such as Dr Temsula Ao and Dr Easterine Kire have contributed a lot through their literary output in harnessing this aspect, throwing new critical insights into the same. This avouched denial cum resistance to be assimilated into the greater Indian National Fabric is one of the many facets of Naga Identity which also encompasses other cultural traits such as patriarchal ideology, Naga Heraka Practices, Animism, Mythogenesis and Head-Hunting Practices.
Objective of this write-up: This write-up endeavours its best to foreground the very traits of Naga Identity Poetics by taking into consideration selective but relevant literary fabrications, the brainchilds of one of the two internationally recognized Naga Writers, Dr Easterine Kire with the other being Dr Temsula Ao.
Methodology: This write-up is built upon the selective reading of the summary of the novels and poems of both the writers with selective perusal of secondary anecdotage in the form of critical essays, the Naga History of Independence and Naga Anthropology.
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Navarro Romero, Betsabé, and Toby Litt. "Coming Terms with 21st Century Bristish Politics : An interview with Toby Litt." Journal of English Studies 9 (May 29, 2011): 265. http://dx.doi.org/10.18172/jes.177.
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English novelist and short story writer, Toby Litt is the author of the novels Beatniks: An English Road Movie (1997), Corpsing (2000), Deadkidsongs (2001), Finding Myself (2003), Ghost Story (2004), Hospital (2007), I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay (2008), Journey into Space (2009), and King Death (2010). He is also known for his collections of short stories Adventures in Capitalism (1996) and Exhibitionism (2002). Toby Litt was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 “Best of Young British Novelists” in 2003. He is an authorised voice among young writers deconstructing contemporary consumer society. In this interview, held at the University of Almería during the 34th AEDEAN Conference (11-13 November 2010), he provides an assessment of modern politics, shares his ideas concerning the recent political affairs in the UK, such as the ideological modernisation during the previous New Labour years or the latest social changes in Britain, and he finally examines the position of writers and intellectuals as regards to power and their political commitment.
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Barrett, Cyril. "Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception." Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 21 (March 1987): 123–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1358246100003520.
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It is over forty years since Merleau-Ponty published his first major work, Le structure de comportement (‘The Structure of Behaviour’) (1942) and a quarter of a century since he died. He belongs, therefore, with Sartre and Marcel, to the first post-War generation of French philosophers. Like his friend Sartre's, his philosophy may be regarded as dated, passé, of no interest or relevance to truly contemporary thought. In philosophical terms forty years are nothing; in terms of trends, fashions and novelties they are an eternity. But perhaps the work of Merleau-Ponty has not dated because it was never in vogue. He did not write plays and novels, or take part in political demonstrations, though he was involved in politics, or win a Nobel prize and refuse to receive it. He was very much a philosopher's philosopher, eminent in his field, well known in academic circles in France but hardly a household name. In this country he is hardly known even in philosophical circles, except by name. More is the pity, since his philosophical approach and manner of philosophizing have much in common with certain modes of British philosophizing, as I hope to show.