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Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the London Quaker John Fothergill, M.D., established himself as an essential node in a transatlantic epistolary network. Via letter writing, Fothergill closed book deals, forwarded anatomical drawings, and exchanged botanical seeds and investment schemes that eventually culminated in the financial politics of the first North American hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He also provided books for the Hospital’s first Medical Library and made suggestions for people to be employed and teaching tools to be used in the first anatomical lectures in Philadelphia. Fothergill’s network sheds much needed light on transatlantic trade and the circulation and commercialization of medical print media in North America’s first regulated medical institutions. The many letters that he wrote provide insights into practices of knowledge production in these institutions. In this article, Fothergill’s epistolary web is represented as a semi-institutionalized network showing colonial medical practice to have been linked to semi-institutionalized spaces that were themselves connected to custodians of knowledge but also functioned as social networks. I argue that such networks were user-based and community-driven, and that they relied on a semi-authoritarian dispersion of knowledge.
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The article explores changing attitudes to western Europeans in the Byzantine Empire from the eleventh century until the Fourth Crusade and for some time after it. Special attention is paid to the development of old stereotypes and the emergence of new ones. More active contacts between the two halves of Christendom from the eleventh century onwards did not result in an expected rapprochement, but rather led to hatred and resentment. The article focuses on a number of texts by Byzantine authors, such as Michael Psellos, Anna Komnena, John Kinnamos, Eustathios of Thessaloniki, and Niketas Choniates. In my view, the changes in Byzantine perceptions of the west could be represented in terms of the following metaphorically named stages: Calm, Menace, and Bitterness and Despair.
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“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –,” a line of poetry by the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson can be used as a signpost for this article, which attempts a hermeneutic regress from the postmodern to the archaic, in search of a rhetoric for the aesthetic. In this textual tour, some of the master narratives of our culture examining various versions of the story of beauty and truth are visited, and more specifically (always in backward motion), the work of the postmodern theorists Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, the German philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, the English Romantic poet John Keats, the Greek philosophers Plato and Parmenides, and, last but not least, the Greek poet Sappho. Paul de Man, the “sad” patriarch of postmodernism, who engaged deeply with the cardinal problem of the truth of poetry and its relation to reality, contests that all language is figurative and rhetorical, and hence unable to represent the real. De Man demystifies aesthetics exploding a whole tradition of aesthetic theory based on the ontology of language, that is, the relation between “word” and “thing.” Along the same lines, the deconstructive critique of Jacques Derrida supports that linguistic figurality contaminates not only literature but philosophy as well, playing mimetic games of seduction that limit reality to a textual frame. On the far side of deconstruction, the hermeneutic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger give figurality an overwhelming power by establishing a rhetoric of ontology and presence. Heidegger’s radical reformulation of truth as aletheia and its conjunction with beauty, not only reflects the romantic identification of “beauty is truth,” as best expressed by the poet John Keats, but also points back to Plato who “aporetically” devoted a lifetime to a search for the beautiful and the true, coming up with multiple and contradictory views. As we move into archaic times, the whispering voice of Parmenides unexpectedly recommends the rhetoric of persuasion as the way to truth, while Sappho, celebrating presence and union, employs an erotic rhetoric that names not only human, but natural and divine encounters of beauty and truth.
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The article discusses a selection of poems from Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800), offering a close reading to show how Robinson engaged with pertinent historical issues, such as slavery, war and power relations, that marked the last decade of the eighteenth century. It explores Robinson’s use of Gothic and sublime aesthetics to communicate the ruptures found in society and to represent various states of otherness. In the poems under discussion, the Gothic is used to externalize both psychological and social collapse, communicating the sense of instability, vulnerability, alienation, anxiety, and fragmentation. Robinson’s use of Gothic conventions creates a gloomy atmosphere which seeks to accentuate the ills of eighteenth-century British politics and society and to engage the reader sympathetically.
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This article explores how Hugo Hamilton’s childhood memoir The Speckled People works through the postmemory of the narrator’s paternal grandfather’s enlistment in the Royal Navy. The narrator’s father has concealed the photograph of the “sailor in the wardrobe” from his children, and in parallel has built a linguistic wall around his family, denying them access to the English language. In his memoir, Hamilton manages to “walk on the wall” by poetically merging the two languages, and writing in Hiberno-English, which circumvents his father’s binary view of the Irish and English languages.
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The purpose of this article is to analyse Roddy Doyle’s representations of Irishness and Ireland in Oh, Play That Thing (2004). The novel is the second instalment in Doyle’s The Last Roundup Trilogy, a historical fiction describing the making of the Irish nation through the adventures and misadventures of Henry Smart, its protagonist. In the novel, constructions of Irishness are projected onto the outside world through Henry’s picaresque travels in the United States. The article examines how Irishness is construct¬ed in the book and how it becomes intertwined with identity construction in other minority groups.
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The article takes on a direction which has great potential for further studies of contemporary Irish poetry: studying the work of Irish poets through their relation to Russian literature. It focuses on the reception and reimagining of Russian poetry in the work of Desmond O’Grady, one of the leading figures in Irish poetry, who started writing in mid-1950s. The article studies three poems by O’Grady which are ad¬dressed to his Russian counterparts: “Missing Andrei Voznesensky,” “Joseph Brodsky Visits Kinsale,” and “My City,” a translation from Anna Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero.” None of these poems has yet been subject of thorough critical analysis. Each of the poems has become a signpost on O’Grady’s poetic map and an important element of his own “private mythology.” When analysed in the wider context of Irish poetry, they help form a clearer picture of the influence Russian literature has had on contemporary Irish poets.
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This article examines the efforts of postcolonial creative writers, particularly dramatists, who attempt to rethink the seeming erosion of African culture in the face of western cultural expansion. The present research adopts the methods of descriptive and content analysis, as it dwells on books, journal articles, and internet materials to examine its subject. Of immediate interest are two Nigerian plays, Ata Igala the Great by Emmy Idegu and Emotan: A Benin Heroine by Irene Salami-Agunloye, which are read as paradigmatic texts for interpreting problematic postcolonial relationships. The article contributes to discussions related to colonialism and the hidden agenda of neo-colonialism, which are often interpreted in terms of western economic interests underlying cultural expansion. The article demonstrates how Af¬rican postcolonial writers have striven to reverse this trend by promoting Africa’s cultural aesthetics as they represent indigenous ways of life and their problematic interaction with western cultural patterns. The discussed works focus on cultural canons related to African life, such as consultation with oracles, ancestor worship, and festivals; and they demonstrate the aesthetic specifics of African dance, music, songs, and their semiotic significance. The article concludes that even though the two plays “speak back” to power, their strength lies in the articulation of certain aesthetic patterns that contribute to African self-location. Thus, the plays not only attempt to assert African culture, but they also strive to rethink the meanings of western cultural imperialism.
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The article explores the relation of Gerald Durrell’s 1979 short story “The Entrance”, published in a collection titled “The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium”, to the concept of the uncanny, as it appears in Sigmund Freud’s work “The Uncanny” (1919). I first discuss Freud’s account of the concept, highlighting the main points in his theory, and then I subject certain points of the narrative in “The Entrance” to an analysis in an attempt to show that the story provides numerous illustrations of the Freudian concept of the uncanny.
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The article discusses the representation of the servant‘s body in George Moore‘s 𝐸𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑊𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 and the Mayhew brothers‘ 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑔𝑢𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒: 𝑂𝑟, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝐿𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑆𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝐺𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑆𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑡. It considers the various uses that the servant‘s body is put to, focusing in particular on the figures of the wetnurse (𝐸𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑊𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠) and the footman (𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑔𝑢𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒). The article explores the numerous acts of appropriation and commodification of the servant‘s body – including its costing – and its peculiar vulnerability. It also considers instances of the body‘s intransigence: its refusal to abide by class boundaries and its subversion of the purposes it is required to fulfil. By addressing these issues, the article demonstrates the intimate connections which Victorian fiction traced between problems of class and social identity and problems of the body.
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Viewed from the perspective of the trickster-type main character Ignatius Reilly and his engagement with his surroundings and other characters as citizens in a series of picaresque adventures, the city of New Orleans in the novel 𝐴 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠 (1980) becomes a space of pathos and comfort, indicative of Ignatius‘s paralysis and inability to leave it, caused by his innate paranoia of the doctrine of progress in the modern age. At a point in history when the postcolonial and postindustrial city is trying to rebrand itself as a tourist haven, the chronotope of New Orleans functions as a place of suspended modernity, offering comfort in the pathos of its entropy, stagnation and nostalgia against the raging torrents of modernity that reign outside its city limits in the rest of the country.
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Poetry and painting were “the twin obsessions” of the American modernist E. E. Cummings. His engagement with more than one artistic practice makes his work suitable for a case study of polytextuality, which is the purpose of the present article. First, a brief theoretical introduction to polytextuality is offered. Then, four of Cummings’ poems are read against the background of their visual counterparts. Since the poem-picture pairs are treated as polytexts, the discussion focuses on the “intersemiotic transposition” involved in the process of transferring thematic and material data from one sign system to another.
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The article analyses the philosophical features of M. J. Hyland‘s novel 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝐷𝑜𝑤𝑛 (2006), spotlighting this text in the espistemological paradigm of post-postmodernism. The analysis considers some of the distinctive features of the irish novel in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such as anticolonial explications and the smashed type of identity of the characters. 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝐷𝑜𝑤𝑛 reveals the post-postmodern tendency of searching for the truth and explaining the nature of human beings as a combination of the humanitarian and the biophysical. The novel‘s protagonist has a special superpower of detecting lies in the discourses produced by other characters. His inability to accept lies physically may be linked to the post-postmodern tendency of rejecting the hybrid combination of truth and untruth, typical of some kinds of postmodernist writing. The analysis also explores the representation of trauma in Hyland‘s novel.
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The article presents an analysis of Richard K. Morgan‘s novel 𝐴𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛 with a focus on postmodern, neo-Gothic perspectives on death. More generally, it explores Gothic thanatology in the postmodern world. Attention is also drawn to the representations of death and technological survival in Morgan‘s novel 𝐴𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛.
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This text is an attempt to read Mircea Cartarescu’s prose as a systematic reproduction of archaic ritual-mythological practices, plots and characters: the walling up of shadows, rainmaking rituals, cosmogonic and eschatological reconstructions, crossing real and imagined labyrinths, levitation, all kinds of initiatic passages, the myth of twins, the myth of the androgyny etc.
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Research in this paper is focused on identifying and analizing the ideological aspects of reception of the two recognized Serbian writers (Njegoš, the most famous Serbian poet of 19th century; and Ivo Andrić, the Nobel prize winner) in late 20th and early 21st century slavic and historical research. It is shown that a considerable number of foreign academic reviews of Serbian literature subjected it to exclusively political contextualization and interpretation, misinterpreted it as nationalistic and orientalistic, and finally – in many examples the reason for including it in the sphere of academic interest was completely outside the domain of literature.
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In Richard III, Act 3, young Prince Edward’s insistent questions about the origins of the Tower of London bring the issue of historical transmission to the foreground. Furthermore, the survival of truth across time is thematised throughout the first tetralogy. References to fame recur obsessively in the three parts of Henry VI, while in Richard III, Shakespeare subtly plays with a historical and historiographical tradition that is much indebted to memorial transmission. In this play, historical distortion is materialised in the deformed body of its protagonist, who becomes the emblem of a past reinterpreted and rewritten in the light of present interests. The article will show how, on the one hand, the dramatist goes beyond what already was a “vituperative history” and brings the so-called Tudor myth to its apex while, on the other hand, undermining this same myth.
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Joseph Conrad, a writer of Polish origin, who wrote in English, could be seen as a precursor of today’s transnational writers. It seems that few, if any, other writers of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods had Conrad’s open-minded view of other cultures. The variety of nationalities represented in his novels and short stories reflects his thorough immersion in the cultures that he encountered during his travels and proves that his imagination was not limited by imaginary notions of geographical boundaries. The present article focuses on the Malay trilogy where none of the characters seems to be complete or sufficiently able to express themselves. Self-identification is achieved dialogically in their interactions with each other, but also in the ways in which they relate to their own complex selves. In this process, Conrad deliberately reverses and/or deforms certain categories of self-definition.
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