Academic literature on the topic 'English literature English literature City and town life in literature'

John Galt, town-planner and novelist, differed from contemporary writers such as William Wordsworth in his response to nature and to urban life. As agent for the Canada Company, he had the chance in 1827 to put some of his theories about town building into practice. Four years later, his novel Bogel Corbet presented a fictional version of that experiment in urbanism. All Galt's writings about the founding of a town emphasize community rituals and unity. His hope was that his settlement would move through an ascending order from village to town to garrison to city. The actual town of Guelph was of course unable to satisfy his ideal; in Bogle Corbet he adopts an ironic tone at the expense of the little town. But Bogle Corbet has another importance: in its random form as well as in its tone it emphasizes discontinuity. It foreshadows later treatments of small town life as well as has antecedents in English and Scottish literature. Since Galt's time, the ironic sequence sketch has proved a very appropriate literary genre for reflecting the disharmony of small Canadian towns.

<p>Kostas Raptis, Middle classes and middle class culture in Europe, 1789-1914: approaches in modern historiography</p><p>The history of the european middle classes from the late 18th to theearly 20th century is a very wide topic and relates to economic, social,political, gender and culture history. This essay gives a brief overviewof the main subjects regarding it. It draws mainly on (pioneer) germanspeaking,but also on english and french literature. Following the currentdebate, it points to the different social and economic groups making upthe so called ((Bürgertum», to their common characteristics, as well astheir specific culture, the ((Bürgerlichkeit)).More specifically this paper is concerned with the followin subjects:— the composition of the «Bürgertum» and the features of its maingroups (professionals, bourgeois of money and bourgeois of knowledge)— the relevant terminology in german, french and english language— the comparison between upper middle class and nobility— the social position and role of the lowermiddle classes— the relation of the bourgeoisie to liberalism and nationalism— the study of the history of the middle classes in the specific contextof a town or a city (as an urban phenomenon)— the position and role of middle class women in a bourgeois society— the middle class family— the bourgeois way of life and culture in general</p>

In this period the city of Rouen is known for commercial activity and for certain literary connections, but its status as a centre of sorts for English-French translation has gone unrecognized. This paper explores the writers involved (some well known, some less familiar), the rationales for their translations (particularly from the poetry of Alexander Pope), and their relation on the one hand to the commercial life of Rouen, on the other to its Académie Royale, founded in 1744.

The research is aimed to find the answer for the research question: Do the researchers demonstrate economic or financial substantiation for implementation of smart solutions for different dimensions of smart city? The goal of the research is to determine the publications presenting the economic or financial substantiations for smart solutions for smart city and to determine the type of the provided substantiation. It is very important, since Smart City is becoming our life step by step, though the components of it are introduced without any economic study, estimation and substantiation. This research is done to discover the areas where such substantiations exist, and to estimate the possibility of applying the methods, described in these studies, for smart solutions in smart city. The study considers the academic articles in English included in Scopus database and available online in full text. The primary selection comprised 927 publications for the period 1993-2020, and only 22 of them contained the comprehensive or close to comprehensive economic or financial analysis. This fact demonstrates the lack of economic and financial researches in the sphere of Smart City. The study allows the scholars to use the reviewed publications as providing the economic and financial basis for smart city; it also demonstrates the areas of smart city and smart solutions where specialists in economy can apply their competences.

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA–eclectic, vibrant, and heterogeneous–still bears the marks of its past as a site of Victoria's empire. The city abounds in English Victorian artifacts: buildings, statues, fountains, streets and their names (even to Victoria Street and Rhodes Drive) are all reminders of the period, but one wonders what, if anything, they mean to the people who live with them. Some recognize them as a legacy–pleasant or unpleasant– of the days when the Cape was a British colony; to others they are symbols whose context has been forgotten, to yet others, they are simply objects devoid of extrinsic meaning. All are, however, artifacts of imperialism, in its broader sense of the social, political, economic, and cultural domination of one group over all others.

“…before I die I must know my beloved London again: for me it is the centre of civilization—tolerant, intelligent and completely out of control now, I hear”—Hanif Kureishi, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988)“D'you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Bri. The game is up!”—Mike Leigh, Naked (1993)In an essay published in 1969, Alastair Macintyre reflected upon the contradictory place of faith in the modern world, caught between absence and presence, absent because it is apparently no longer central to life, present because its structures still lie all around us. Macintyre suggests that it is at the moment when faith is lost that it becomes more easily, if trivially, incorporated into modern life: “[o]nly since the crisis of belief in the last century, however, has theism so emptied itself of any content that might affront us culturally that it has proved wholly assimilable.”From the contemporary perspective, one might make the same observation of the secular creed of “Englishness.” It has been suggested that the post-1945 crisis of confidence in the pillars of that mythic “Englishness”—imperial greatness, economic strength, a uniform national and racial identity—can be set against the relatively easy and successful assimilation of past notions into perceptions of the present, perceived, for instance, in the “heritage” industry, whether in tourism or in film. If, as Macintyre remarks of faith in the modern world, we are saddled with “an identity that we can now neither fully recover nor yet quite disown,” it might be argued that England enjoys or endures the same predicament with regard to its national identity.

I begin with a warm welcome for Evangelos Alexiou's Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century bc, a ‘revised and slightly abbreviated’ version of the modern Greek edition published in 2016 (ix). Though the volume's title points to a primary focus on the fourth century, sufficient attention is given to the late fifth and early third centuries to provide context. As ‘rhetoric’ in the title indicates, the book's scope is not limited to oratory: Chapter 1 outlines the development of a rhetorical culture; Chapter 2 introduces theoretical debates about rhetoric (Plato, Isocrates, Alcidamas); and Chapter 3 deals with rhetorical handbooks (Anaximenes, Aristotle, and the theoretical precepts embedded in Isocrates). Oratory comes to the fore in Chapter 4, which introduces the ‘canon’ of ten Attic orators: in keeping with the fourth-century focus, Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias receive no more than sporadic attention; conversely, extra-canonical fourth-century orators (Apollodorus, the author of Against Neaera, Hegesippus, and Demades) receive limited coverage. The remaining chapters deal with the seven major canonical orators: Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, and Dinarchus. Each chapter follows the same basic pattern: life, work, speeches, style, transmission of text and reception. Isocrates and Demosthenes have additional sections on research trends and on, respectively, Isocratean ideology and issues of authenticity in the Demosthenic corpus. In the case of Isaeus, there is a brief discussion of contract oratory; Lycurgus is introduced as ‘the relentless prosecutor’. Generous extracts from primary sources are provided, in Greek and in English translation; small-type sections signal a level of detail that some readers may wish to pass over. The footnotes provide extensive references to older as well as more recent scholarship. The thirty-page bibliography is organized by chapter (a helpful arrangement in a book of this kind, despite the resulting repetition); the footnotes supply some additional references. Bibliographical supplements to the original edition have been supplied ‘only in isolated cases’ (ix). In short, this volume is a thorough, well-conceived, and organized synthesis that will be recognized, without doubt, as a landmark contribution. There are, inevitably, potential points of contention. The volume's subtitle, ‘the elixir of democracy and individuality’, ties rhetoric more closely to democracy and to Athens than is warranted: the precarious balancing act which acknowledges that rhetoric ‘has never been divorced from human activity’ while insisting that ‘its vital political space was the democracy of city-states’ (ix–x) seems to me untenable. Alexiou acknowledges that ‘the gift of speaking well, natural eloquence, was considered a virtue already by Homer's era’ (ix), and that ‘the natural gift of speaking well was considered a virtue’ (1). But the repeated insistence on natural eloquence is perplexing. Phoenix, in the embassy scene in Iliad 9, makes it clear that his remit included the teaching of eloquence (Il. 9.442, διδασκέμεναι): Alexiou only quotes the following line, which he mistakenly assigns to Book 10. (The only other typo that I noticed was ‘Aritsotle’ [97]. I, too, have a tendency to mistype the Stagirite's name, though my own automatic transposition is, alas, embarrassingly scatological.) Alexiou provides examples of later Greek assessments of fourth-century orators, including (for example) Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Hermogenes, and the author of On Sublimity (the reluctance to commit to the ‘pseudo’ prefix is my, not Alexiou's, reservation). He observes cryptically that ‘we are aware of Didymus’ commentary’ (245); but the extensive late ancient scholia, which contain material from Menander's Demosthenic commentaries, disappointingly evoke no sign of awareness.

Shortly before C. R. Ashbee transplanted a hundred and fifty Cockneys to Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, in 1902 to form a utopian arts-and-crafts community, two other back-to-the-land settlements were also established, one located outside the market town of Stroud, a mere bicycle ride away from Ashbee and his guild. These Tolstoyan colonies – Purleigh, founded in 1896 in Essex, and Whiteway, founded in 1898 in the Cotswolds – fostered goals of fellowship and the simplification of life, as had been modeled by Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman in the United States and Edward Carpenter in Britain. Yet, whereas Ashbee was inspired by the model of William Morris and nostalgia for a pre-industrial England, English Tolstoyans looked not to craft, but to a less Aesthetic “bread labor” as a respite from modernity's corruption. Visiting Whiteway in 1904, Ashbee observed the Tolstoyans’ struggles to live off the land and commented, “they hold the other end of the stick we are ourselves shaping at Campden” (qtd. in MacCarthy 100). As his metaphor implied, both groups shared utopian aspirations, but Whiteway's settlers had sought the perfection of life from another vantage point and through other means. Ashbee regarded the austerity of their lives with distance and, as we will see, even with some distaste. Nevertheless, some features of the guildsmen's lifestyle at Chipping Campden mirrored those at Whiteway. This essay uses memoirs and fictions by C. R. Ashbee, his spouse, Janet Ashbee, and the Tolstoyans to disentangle the threads of “Aestheticism” and “simplification,” and to mark places of their conflation.

The purpose of this paper is to present and exploit fundamental information, such as semantic meanings and geographical features, of phytotoponyms (a type of toponym that includes plant names) in Kazakhstan and the UK (United Kingdom). Toponymy data for this study were obtained from the place names database of Kazakhstan and the UK (United Kingdom). The results showed that the most common plant names recognisable in place names are common plants that have a close connection with daily life and positive morals in Kazakh and English culture and literature. The occurrence of plant names can reflect the characteristic plants of a city. The vegetation coverage rate where phytotoponyms are located is higher than that in non-phytotoponym areas. Altitude has a stronger correlation with the number of phytotoponyms than slope and vegetation coverage degree. The toponymic image of the world can be characterized from two sides as the relation to the ethnos (nation, nationality) and to the person (toponymic person, representative of the nation). A phytotoponym is also defined as a unit of vocabular relating to the area of spatial relationships and reflecting the location of a particular specified object.

This text’s title makes a reference both to Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s eponymous work and to the meaning contained in the English phrase “in a free state”, the latter being directly implicated in one of the difficult questions regarding this artists: where does Naipaul belong (1932 - 2018) – is he an English, an Indian or a Trinidadian author, or is he one to whom such categorizations do not apply because in the course of his life he came to embody the very idea of the artist’s being “in a free state”. However appealing it might be to assume the latter idea, his works as well as the many debates surrounding them actually question this freedom. Because the Trinidad born future Nobel laureate (the name of the city is evocative of the Holy Trinity), had at least three homes, even though his attitude to his “homelands” was a controversial one and even though he articulated his own identity controversially and not in one go. In his Nobel lecture Naipaul suggested that the credit for the Nobel Prize should go to England where his home was, and to India, where the home of his predecessors was, but he did not emphasize the significance of Trinidad where he had been born and had grown up.

Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.<br>ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My thesis is on the literary imagining of the city in Zimbabwean literature that emerges as a re-visioning and contestation of its colonial and postcolonial manifestations. Throughout the seven chapters of the thesis I conduct a close reading of literary texts engaged in literary (re)creations of the city. I focus on texts by selected authors from 1949 to 2009 in order to trace the key aspects of this city imagining and their historical situatedness. In the first chapter, I argue the case for the inclusions and exclusions that are evident. In this historical span, I read the Zimbabwean canon and the city that is figured in it as palimpsests in order to analyse (dis)connections. This theoretical frame brings out wider relationships and connections that emerge in the (re)writing of both the canon and city. I adopt approaches that emphasise how spaces and temporalities ‗overlap and interlace‘ to provoke new ways of thinking about the city and the construction of identity. I argue for the country-city connection as an important dynamic in the various (re)imaginings of the city. Space is politicized along lines of race, ethnicity, gender and class in regimes of politics and aesthetics of inclusion and exclusion that are refuted by the focal texts of the thesis. I analyse the fragmentation of rural and urban space in the literary texts and how country and city house politico-aesthetic regimes of domination, exclusion and marginalisation. Using tropes of the house, music and train, I analyse how connections in the city are imagined. These tropes are connected to the travel motif found in all the chapters of the thesis. Travel is in most of the texts offered as a form of escape from the country represented as a site of essentialism or nativism. Both settlers and nationalists, from different ideological positions, invest the land and the city with symbolic political and cultural values. Both figure the city as alien to the colonised, a figuration that is contested in most of the focal texts of the thesis. Travel from the country to the city through halfway houses is presented as a way of negotiating location in new spaces, finding new identities and contending with the multiple connections found in the city. The relentless (un)housing in Marechera‘s writing expresses a refusal to be bounded by aesthetic, nationalist and racial houses as they are constructed in the city. In Vera‘s fiction, travel – in multifarious directions and in a re-racing of the quest narrative in Lessing – becomes a critical search for a re-scripting of gender and woman‘s demand for a right to the city. The nomadism in Vera‘s fiction is re-configured in the portrayal of the marginalised as the parvenus and pariahs of the city in the fiction of Chinodya and Tagwira. In the chapter on Chikwava and Gappah, in the contexts of spatial displacement and expansion, the nationalist nativist construction of self, city and nation comes under stress. I interrogate how ideologies of space shape politico-aesthetic regimes in both the country and the city throughout the different historical phases of the city. In this regard I adopt theoretical approaches that engage with questions of aesthetic equality as they relate to the contestation of spatial partitioning based on categories of race, gender and class. In city re-imaginings this re-claiming of aesthetic power to imagine the city is invoked and in all the texts it emerges as a reclaiming of the right to the city by the colonised, women, immigrants and all the marginalised. I adopt those approaches that lend themselves to the deconstruction of hegemonic figuration, disempowerment and silencing of the marginalised, especially women, in re-imagining the city and their identities in it.<br>AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: My tesis se onderwerp is die literêre voorstellings van die stad in Zimbabwiese letterkunde wat ontstaan as ‗n herverbeelding van en teenvoeter vir beide koloniale en postkoloniale manifestasies. Regdeur die sewe hoofstukke van die tesis voer ek deurtastende interpretasies van literêre tekste aan, wat die stad op nuwe maniere uitbeeld. My fokus val op tekste deur geselekteerde skrywers van 1949 tot 2009 ten einde die sleutelelemente van hierdie proses van stadverbeelding en die historiese gesitueerdheid daarvan te ondersoek. In die eerste hoofstuk bied ek die argument aan betreffende die voor-die-hand liggende in- en uitsluitings van tekste. Deur hierdie historiese strekking lees ek die Zimbabwiese kanon en die stad wat daarin figureer as palimpseste, ten einde die (dis-)konneksies te kan analiseer. Hierdie teoretiese beraming belig die wyere verhoudings en verbindings wat na vore kom in die (her-) skrywe van beide die kanon en die stad. Ek gebruik benaderings wat benadruk hoe ruimtes en tydelikhede oormekaarvloei en saamvleg om sodoende nuwe maniere om oor die stad en oor identiteitskonstruksie te besin, aanmoedig. Ek argumenteer vir die stad-platteland konneksie as ‗n belangrike dinamika in die verskillende (her-)voorstellings van die stad. Ruimte word só verpolitiseer met betrekking tot ras, etnisiteit, gender en klas binne politieke regimes asook ‗n estetika van in- en uitsluiting wat deur die kern-tekste verwerp word. Ek analiseer verder die fragmentasie van landelike en stedelike ruimtes in die literêre tekste, en hoe die plattelandse en stedelike ruimtes tuistes bied aan polities-estetiese regimes van dominasie, uitsluiting en marginalisering. Die huis, musiek en die trein word gebruik as beelde om verbindings in die stad te ondersoek. Hierdie beelde sluit aan by die motif van die reis wat in al die hoofstukke manifesteer. Die reis word in die meeste tekste gesien as ‗n vorm van ontsnapping uit die platteland, wat voorgestel word as ‗n plek van essensie-voorskrywing en ingeborenheid. Beide intrekkers en nasionaliste, uit verskillende ideologiese vertrekpunte, bekleed die platteland of die stad met simboliese politieke en kulturele waardes. Beide verbeeld die stad as vreemd aan die gekoloniseerdes; ‗n uitbeelding wat verwerp word in die fokale tekste van die studie. Reis van die platteland na die stad deur halfweg-tuistes word aangebied as metodes van onderhandeling om plek te vind in nuwe ruimtes, nuwe identiteite te bekom en om te leer hoe om met die stedelike verbindings om te gaan. Die onverbiddelikke (ont-)tuisting in die werk van Marechera gee uitdrukking aan ‗n weiering om deur estetiese, nasionalistiese en rassiese behuising soos deur die stad omskryf en voorgeskryf, vasgevang te word. In die fiksie van Vera word reis – in telke rigtings en in die her-rassing van die soektog-motif in Lessing – ‗n kritiese soeke na die herskrywing van gender en van die vrou se op-eis van die reg tot die stad. Die nomadisme in Vera se fiksie word ge-herkonfigureer in uitbeelding van gemarginaliseerdes as die parvenus en die uitgeworpenes van die stad in die fiksie van Chinodya en Tagwira. In die hoofstuk oor Chikwava en Gappah word die nasionalistiese ingeborenes se konstruering van die self, stad en nasie onder stremmimg geplaas in kontekste van ruimtelike verplasing en uitbreiding. Ek ondervra hoe ideologieë van spasie vorm gee aan polities-estetiese regimes in beide die platteland en die stad regdeur die verskillende historiese fases van die stad. In hierdie opsig maak ek gebruik van teoretiese benaderings wat betrokke is met vraagstukke van estetiese gelykheid met verwysing na kontestasies oor ruimtelike verdelings gebaseer op kategorieë van ras, gender en klas. In herverbeeldings van die stad word hierdie reklamering van die estetiese mag om die stad te verbeel, bygehaal in al die tekste as herklamering van die reg tot die stad deur gekoloniseerdes, vroue, immigrante en alle gemarginaliseerdes. Ek maak gebruik van benaderings wat hulself leen tot die dekonstruksie van hegemoniese verbeelding, ontmagtiging en die stilmaak van gemarginaliseerdes, veral vroue, in die herverbeelding van die stad en hul plek binne die stadsruimte.

This thesis analyses the function of the provincial town in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and George Eliot (1819-1880). It demonstrates that the small town, far from being a neutral backdrop to their narratives, functions as a sociological space in which to appropriate or challenge the discourses of modernity with which Dostoevsky and Eliot were explicitly preoccupied. The first chapter examines how their provincial communities negotiate biblical narrative in a world in which, thanks to nineteenth-century attempts to historicise the Bible, an acceptance of the Bible's authoritative status is no longer a given. The instability of language itself is then interrogated in my second chapter, which shows that the transition from denotative, referential meaning to connotative, abstract forms causes ethical and narrative tension within the world of the novel, and which explores the aesthetics and ethics of gossip in the provincial town and novel. The third chapter details what becomes of the nineteenth-century discourse of heroism when characters seek to enact it in a provincial setting, showing that the environment of the provincial town proves hostile to heroic ambition, whilst the fourth argues that the provincial application of professional discourse (particularly that of medicine and the law) is critiqued and perfected by these authors. Through the analysis of this discourse, it is shown that Eliot and Dostoevsky's treatment of provincialism is ambivalent. As urban intellectuals who did not consent to inhabit the provincial milieu they depict, they in many respects censure the world they describe. However, this censure is not absolute, and through their chosen setting, as well as their chosen genre of the novel, they provide ethical instruction for their readers, then and now. Ethics, for them, are best tested in community, and explored in narrative.

The thesis examines some of the short and long fiction set in Johannesburg, which is published between approximately 1980 and 2003. The thesis examines how the residents viewed themselves, and evaluates the various social and political struggles and strategies that were employed in an attempt to belong, imagine the city differently and establish strategic identities that would enable them to live a better life during the focused quarter of a century of experiences in an ever-changing fictive Johannesburg.<br>Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

The dissertation focuses on the mapping of the southern African urban spaces and how it is linked to the urban dwellers' constitution of their identities, agency and subversion of the obtaining bleak and hegemonic conditions as represented in current fiction set in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Chapter 1 of the dissertation gives an overview of the social and historical developments characterising the construction of the southern African city from the colonial up to the current global city. The subordinate and marginal identities inscribed upon the Southern Africans as well as early forms of agency and subversion of the Western social, political and economic hegemony that has defined the city through out history will be looked at. Michael de Certeau's (1993) ideas showing the hegemonic Western socio-economic agenda's creation of ordinary urban dwellers' invisibility and fragmentation, which they later subvert by renaming and remapping the alienating urban spaces of New York to improve their own lives, will be taken into consideration in this chapter's definition of the construction of the city and urban identities. In Chapter 2, the representation of the southern African urban spaces' cartography in the fiction is discussed. The characteristic spaces ranging from the socially and morally decayed inner-city, the well-built postmodern and elite Central Business District, the affluent low-density suburbs and the far-away impoverished highdensity suburbs will be explored. The discussion attempts a complex unpacking of linkages between the mapping of Harare and Johannesburg with the hegemonic western social and economic agenda as well as the current urban dwellers' state of individual and psychological fragmentation. Chapter 3 examines the way in which the current southern African urban social dislocation is represented in the fiction. The complexity of the urban dislocation signified by the prevalence of violence, xenophobia and HIV/AIDS is discussed. There is also a dialectical analysis ofhow the depicted urban dislocation is located within the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, the western global cultural and economic influence as well as individual effort and decision-making in the chapter. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which gendered urban spaces are portrayed in the fiction. The subordination of primarily women, as well as the weak and dependent irrespective of gender is discussed. The resultant anxieties, alienation, marginalisation of women and the subservient are viewed from the traditional and colonial patriarchy's construction of the city as a predominantly masculine space excluding women. The western global cultural and economic hegemony's creation of a new gendered ideology characterised by the exclusion and feminisation of the poor, invisible and dependent is also discussed in this chapter. Nevertheless, the chapter ends with a discussion of the existing possibilities of female empowerment notably inscribed in the city's open education system, informal trade space as well as the provision of a social space encouraging pragmatic female decision-making especially in relation to HIV and AIDS. Finally the dissertation's concluding note is based on an evaluation of the postcolonial condition of southern Africa in relation to the mapping of the urban spaces and various identities represented in the fiction. An attempt is also made to place the research within the problematic of whether the mapping is based on postcolonialism or postmodernism. The objective here is to offer the importance of a cross-reading between the two as enabling a more meaningful conception of the region's current urban space.<br>Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

In this article I examine as mediations of urban experience poems written by Koos du Plessis. a contemporary Afrikaans poet. together with their musical rendition by Johannes Kerkorrel. a singer and musician from the Afrikaans altemative music scene and former member of Die Gereformeerde Blues Band. The poetry was initially published with musical arrangements in the volume Kinders van die Wind : En Ander Lirieke (1981) . In order to use this material in an article produced as part of an English study . I have translated the poetry into English . The translation (in linguistic and performative terms) of these poems has the dual effect of rendering them more appropriately for this study, and making them accessible to a wider audience. I am concemed with the way poems written by a poet from an earlier decade (the 1980s) interpret and mediate an urban identity and. further. with the fact that performance not only gives them a new lease of life. but also transforms them into works which have meaning and appeal for a more contemporary, broader audience. The fundamental issues addressed in this poetry , namely a response to and a negotiation of urban (South African) experience. continue to speak compellingly today.<br>Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.

Cette thèse commence comme une simple question en réponse au modèle du « parfait flâneur » que Baudelaire a élaboré dans Le peintre de la vie moderne (1853): un flâneur peut-il être imparfait? Je suggère trois interprétations possibles du mot « imparfait ». Il permet d’abord de sortir le flâneur du strict contexte du Paris du dix-neuvième siècle et permet des traductions imparfaites de personnages dans d’autres contextes. Ensuite, le flâneur déambule dans la dimension « imparfaite » de l’imagination fictionnelle – une dimension comparable à l’image anamorphique du crâne dans la peinture Les ambassadeurs de Holbein. Enfin, il réfère à l’imparfait conjugué, « l’imparfait flâneur » peut rappeler le personnage antihéroïque de l’humain dont l’existence est banale et inachevée, comme la phrase « il y avait ». Ces trois visions contribuent à la réinterprétation du flâneur dans le contexte de la fin du vingtième siècle. Mon hypothèse est que l’expérience urbaine du flâneur et la flânerie ne sont possibles que si l’on admet être imparfait(e), qu’on accepte ses imperfections et qu’elles ne nous surprennent pas. Quatre études de romans contemporains et de leurs villes respectives forment les principaux chapitres. Le premier étudie Montréal dans City of forgetting de Robert Majzels. J’examine les façons par lesquelles les personnages itinérants peuvent être considérés comme occupant (ou en échec d’occupation) du Montréal contemporain alors qu’ils sont eux-mêmes délogés. Quant au deuxième chapitre, il se concentre sur le Bombay de Rohinton Mistry dans A fine balance. Mon étude portera ici sur la question de l’hospitalité en relation à l’hébergement et au « dé-hébergement » des étrangers dans la ville. Le troisième chapitre nous amène à Hong-Kong avec la série Feituzhen de XiXi. Dans celle-ci, j’estime que la méthode spéciale de la marelle apparait comme une forme unique de flânerie imparfaite. Le quatrième chapitre étudie Istanbul à travers The black book d’Orhan Pamuk. Inspiré par les notions de « commencement » d’Edward Saïd, mon argumentaire est construit à partir de l’interrogation suivante : comment et quand commence une narration? En lieu de conclusion, j’ai imaginé une conversation entre l’auteur de cette thèse et les personnages de flâneurs imparfaits présents dans les différents chapitres.<br>This dissertation begins with a simple question in response to “the perfect flâneur” model that Baudelaire elaborated in his 1853 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: can a flâneur be imperfect? I suggest three possible inferences behind the word “imperfect.” First, it should liberate the flâneur from the strict context of nineteenth-century Paris, and allows for imperfect translations of the figure into other urban contexts. Second, the flâneur also strolls in the “imperfect” dimension of fictional imagination, a dimension comparable to the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. Third, in the grammatical meaning of imperfect verb tenses, “imperfect flâneur” can also refer to the anti-heroic figure of the living, whose existence remains incomplete and mundane as in the phrase “it was.” All three implications contribute to the reinterpretation of the flâneur in late twentieth-century contexts. My premise is that to experience the city as a flâneur, or to make flânerie possible in the city, one should concede being imperfect, anticipate imperfections, and come to terms with them. Four in-depth studies of contemporary novels and their respective cities constitute the main chapters. Chapter One reads Robert Majzels’s City of Forgetting and Montreal. I examine the ways in which homeless characters could be said to occupy – or, fail to occupy – contemporary Montreal from their dislodged position. Chapter Two focuses on Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Bombay. My reading evolves around the question of hospitality in relation to the accommodation and un-accommodation of strangers in the city. Chapter Three brings us to XiXi’s Feituzhen series and Hong Kong: I address the special method of hopscotching as a unique form of imperfect flânerie in XiXi’s works. In Chapter Four, I study Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Istanbul. Inspired by Edward Said’s notions of beginning, I frame my argument with the enquiry: how and when does a narrative begin? In lieu of Conclusion, I imagined a conversation between the writing subject of this dissertation and the imperfect flâneurs featured in each chapter.

This chapter presents a 1997 interview with Mustafa Badawi and includes sections relating to his early life and education until 1947 when he was sent to England to pursue further studies in English. Badawi first talks about the years of his early formation in the family, the neighbourhood and his various schools in Alexandria before discussing his cultural formation in the city. He reveals that he decided to specialise in English language in order to deepen his study of English literature so that he could see Arabic literature in the wider context of world literature. Badawi also describes his attitudes towards literature and criticism, which he says involved three essential questions: the relationship between literature and politics; the relationship between literature and morality; and the nature of language and its function in poetry, and consequently the relationship between poetry and science, or between poetry and thought or knowledge in general.

This book is about the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi, who may be regarded as the father of the study of modern Arabic literature in the United Kingdom and the United States based on the impact of his career and his publications. Badawi's arrival at Oxford University in 1964 as lecturer in modern Arabic literature transformed the teaching of and research into this subject in western academia. Trained in the University of Alexandria and in the UK in English literature, Badawi applied his passion for teaching, researching and translating English literature and criticism to the modern literature of his native language. This book begins with Alexandria, the city that exerted a key formative influence on the cosmopolitan culture characteristic of Badawi as individual and scholar. It goes on to document Badawi's intellectual and literary journey through his life as scholar, critic and translator and ends with a discussion of Badawi's academic legacy.

During Shakespeare's lifetime, England became conscious of holiday custom as it had not been before, in the very period when in many areas the keeping of holidays was on the decline. Shakespeare, coming to London from a rich market town, growing up in the relatively unselfconscious 1570s and 1580s and writing his festive plays in the decade of the 1590s, when most of the major elements in English society enjoyed a moment of reconcilement, was perfectly situated to express both a countryman's participation in holiday and a city man's consciousness of it. This chapter considers two principal forms of festivity, the May games and the Lord of Misrule, noticing particularly how what is done by the group of celebrants involves the composition of experience in ways which literature and drama could take over.

As one of the important representative works of Chinese Modern Literature, Bian Cheng (Border Town, in English) consists of folklore of different categories which reflect the life of Chinese people seeming to live in Shangri-la. Image is ‘words to present ideas’ of an author. The images of folklore in Bian Cheng are its author’s idea on life of Chinese people. Food belongs to material folklore. It is important to present the images of food for better understanding Chinese people’s life. This descriptive study focuses on the presentation of the images related to food in Bian Cheng. The image is identified by figures of speech and tied images. The findings show that the images of food mirror Chinese life in terms of priorities on food, marriage, individual propensity for food, history and customs.