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The present work is devoted to the problem of reception of the Sicilian literature in the Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s oeuvre. The article is an analysis of the Herling-Grudziński’s essay on “The Leopard” published in 1959 in “Kultura”. Herling in his work analyzes the crucial problem of the sicilianity (sicilianità) and the obsession with death. In the “Journal Written at Night” and in the essay about Lampedusa Grudziński “rewrites” the vision of Sicily and diagnoses the problem of insularity (insularità).
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The aim of my article is to explore the representation of the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues in “The Prospector” (1985) by French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and of the Solomon Islands in the “Regeneration” trilogy (1991—1995) by a British writer Pat Barker. Both Le Clézio and Barker use and challenge the pastoral recourses belonging to the tradition of Great War writing and the convention of idealising remote Arcadian lands. Several insular myths are thus undermined by the two writers, who thus resituate remote islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as integral parts of European modernity.
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Mauritius is a small island in the Indian Ocean, whose population approximates to that of Warsaw. Since its discovery, the island was ruled by several governments: Dutch, French, and English, before it finally became independent in 1968. On this piece of land of about 2,000 m2 live direct descendants of the inhabitants of three continents: Europe, Africa and Asia. The history of the island and the Mauritian people create its specificity. Undoubtedly, the fact that Mauritius is an island largely influences the Mauritian society. In my article, I will study how this impacts on the society, including its writers. I will seek to define the nature of their relationships. I will try to describe the various representations of the island in Franco-Mauritian literary fiction at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since this topos is in dichotomy of good and evil, I will consider the island as a synonym of a half-paradise and a half-prison. Subsequently, I will analyse it as a character of its own. Finally, I will argue that Mauritius can be seen as a reflection of the world, a miniature model. In summary, after examining the various images of Mauritius, I will try to demonstrate its special status in the Mauritian society, especially in literature.
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The article is an attempt at studying the image of Hannibal as presented in “Punica”. The aim of the paper is to sketch a portrait of the Carthaginian in “Punica” (with the image preserved both in historiography and in poetic epithets in mind), which would be a literary realisation of historiographic matter, with variatio typical for poetry, which was extended, shortened and mixed by Silius. The following review also looks at the topic of cruelty, which was a feature attributed to Hannibal himself as well as to Carthaginians in general, and that of death – demonstrated by such actions as (not) burying the bodies of Roman consuls or utilising bodies of the dead to build a bridge.
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The imagination of Théophile Gautier has long time been opposed to that of E. A. Poe, with the argument of a profound difference in sensitivity and imagination between them. No doubt, these differences exist, but they have prevented any serious analysis (there are no studies on the attitude of Gautier to Poe, as evidenced by the large comprehensive bibliography compiled by Paolo Tortonese that we can find on the Internet). However, Gautier was initiated to Poe through Baudelaire, and has demonstrated his knowledge of the works of the American writer by repeated allusions. My intention is to analyse Gautier’s attitude towards Poe's work, especially important when we know how Gautier himself exercised a fundamental influence on the symbolism, on Mallarme and on the aesthetic decadence for which Poe was a master.
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The article discusses a variety of opinions related to the first English translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s poem Pan Tadeusz published in 1885 by Maud Ashurt Biggs (1857-1933). The main point for the author is to analyse the scope of the Polish critics’ opinions and attitudes towards this translation. Some of them were issued by well-known experts in literary translation at the time (for example Stanisław Tarnowski), as well as critics who regularly published notes on British literature and culture in Polish periodicals (Edmund Naganowski). The article points out that the translation of Pan Tadeusz triggered neither numerous, nor enthusiastic reviews; it did, however, contribute to the publication of several interesting reflections related to poetry translation.
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The article constitutes a re-reading of Charles Baudelaire’s Correspondences in the light of the controversial concept of ideasthesia. The author proposes that the sonnet operates on three levels of sensory cognition: an initial stage of rational sensory segmentation, a subsequent synaesthetic fusion of odours, sounds and colours, and finally – an ideasthetic synthesis of feeling and knowing. The final stage of sensory processing triumphantly concludes the Symbolist quest for an elusive “beyond”, approximating the material and the ideal – the mechanism of which resembles an ideasthetic processing of sensory data. The poem mirrors the cognitive optimism characteristic of Baudelaire’s early thinking, soon to dissipate into melancholic (or Manichean) cognitive bankruptcy.
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The goal is to see how the transpacific travel of the immigrant Piscine from India to Canada in the best seller and Booker Prize novel “Life of Pi” allows us to revisit the dynamic of exclusion, and the idea of nation and place as well as to recognize alterity in perspectives emphasizing more transculturalism than multiculturalism. This anthropo-thematic analysis will lead us to a theoretical perspective based upon the comparison between trans-multi-interdisciplinary and trans-multi-intercultural perspectives and to establish links between the trans, the multi and the inter in the context of the legitimacy of symbolic and geographic displacements and of multiple encounters as they are linked to the Americas.
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‘There are no political panaceas, except in the imagination of political quacks’. These are the words used by the American historian Francis Parkman (1823–1893) to suggest that the English and French settlements on the North American continent had been quite different from their onset and were quite possibly bound to remain as such in years to come. His History of France and England in North America (1865–1892) provides us with a historical account of the colonization of New France which sheds some light on the colonial beginnings of New England as well. Like all Romantic or literary historians of the time, Parkman had a story to tell, novelistic in style and all-encompassing in theme and subject matter, which in this particular case is as much about France’s status as a colonial power as about England’s. Drawing on part four of his History, entitled the “Old Regime in Canada” (1874), this paper examines the failure of France to establish the basis of a well-regulated political community in North America in the context of the Anglo-French rivalry for the control of that continent. It aims to determine to what extent Parkman’s historical narrative on New France also gives us an insight into New England’s history; what does it tell us about the political culture of both colonies? and what vision, if any, of America/of the Americas does it offer us?
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This paper examines the significant progress that women made during the Great Depression and will focus its attention on the Roosevelt era, a period in which women not only reached key posts in the administration but also managed to acquire a new dignity and social status. Besides, it will try to explore the echo that some of these significant women had across other countries, giving as an example the Spanish case. Roosevelt’s four terms in office (1933–1945) were a clear example of a time when women participated actively in public life. Women were appointed to relevant government positions and played key roles in the development of the Roosevelt Administration. Roosevelt himself and his federal government fostered these expanded roles for women who worked as heads of Federal agencies, as political advisers, in the New Deal’s relief programs, etc. Behind these appointments, we have to highlight the support and compromise of relevant women such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, Mary Bethune and Molly Dewson, just to mention some of the most inspiring figures during this era. Women worked in two main areas: Democratic Party politics and social welfare. As Susan Ware points out, there was ‘a network of professional contact and personal friendship that linked the women in top New Deal positions’. In summary, this paper tries to acknowledge and pay tribute to those women, who proved their talent and self-worth and to the ones who were deeply committed with the defence of social reforms and participated actively in politics and social welfare legislation during the Roosevelt era.
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The past few years have witnessed the Obama administration’s rhetoric from ‘return to Asia-Pacific’ to ‘pivoting/rebalancing toward Asia-Pacific’ under which a comprehensive package of political, economic and military moves has been implemented, signifying America’s endeavor to shift its focus from the Middle East to Asia-Pacific. However, the notion of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ by Hillary Clinton and the strategy of ‘America’s Re-balancing toward Asia-Pacific’ evade the persistently long history of America’s dominance in Asia and the Pacific and America’s cultural representation and construction of Asia-Pacific as one region. by reading Obama’s foreign tactics toward Asia-Pacific as literature and tracing the translation of America’s cultural literacy of this region into policy, this paper treats Obama’s pivoting/rebalancing toward Asia-Pacific as a cultural heritage and historical continuity rather than a gravity shift in America’s global strategy. That is, such political trope and actions need to be scrutinized from a historical and cultural perspective and the cultural logic behind deserves a careful examination. To do so, I would examine the hegemonic vision and free-trade imperialism, historically upheld and culturally shaped by America, in the very ‘fashionable’ transpacific project promoted by US-TPP (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) in the climate of globalization and transnational capitalism. Also, the discourse of sublimity and American Orientalism should be evaluated in the course of America’s ambitious political engagement and aggressive military deployment in this region. In conclusion, the cultural logic of the current U.S. foreign policy toward Asia-Pacific is inextricable from the Imperialist Imaginary, American Orientalism and American Sublime, all of which but not limited to, render this rebalancing strategy problematic. Rather than dealing with a rising Asia, particularly being anxious about China’s threat, America needs a critical self-reflexive examination of its imperialist culture which has shaped the Asia-Pacific Other and translated into its current foreign policy toward Asia and the Pacific.
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The purpose of this article is to study some aspects of Gender Studies in Modern Chinese Literary criticism, which were not the subject of study in Ukraine. It will give an opportunity to the orientalists (as well as anyone who is interested in the problems of gender) to expand the understanding of the possibilities of the existing interpretive theories of feminist criticism. The author of the study applies the method of structural description. Particular attention is paid to Chinese methods of the “alternative reading” of classical texts. The article presents three strategies of conceptualization of female characters in Chinese literature mainstream, represented by Meng Yue, Li Ling, Liu Huiying, Wu Yuming, Chen Shunxin: 1) determination of the symbolic female types in the works of writers-men to rebuke false notions about the nature of women; 2) Criticism of the plot models of ancient and modern literature, which demonstrates the masculine nature of image system of the novels; 3) a combination of the abovementioned strategies. The study results demonstrated the dual nature of gender studies in the Chinese literary criticism. On the one hand, the universality of interpretative methods was demonstrated by Western feminist critique (e.g. the method of “a woman’s re-reading” by E. Shovalter, S. Gilbert and S. Gubar). On the other hand, the Chinese researchers have shown constant reinterpretation in the borrowed methodological approaches. It formed new research strategies: the criticism of women's images in the literary mainstream has led to the study of man's psychology of creativity and analysis of archetypal values of feminine discourse eliminated the need for the gender differentiation of the literary canon. Actually such departures from the basic theories define national models of scientific knowledge.
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The series Harry Potter, proposed by Mrs J.K. Rowling, is a good case in order to understand and analyse the emergence of the fear. Harry Potter, traumatized, orphan and mistreated baby is confronted with the dread when he meets “Dementors”.Who are Dementors? How does Harry discover their existence ? Why is Harry more sensitive to the confrontation with the dementor than the other children ?To answer to this question, we shall study the link between the trauma and some kind of depression in early mourning. Those are the “white” depression and the “cryptophorie”. On the other hand, Mrs. Rowling proposed a therapeutic solution to the despair : the production of a “Patronus” and the reference to the paternal function.
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In this article we analyse the peculiarities of chronotope in Laurence Sterne's novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”. Our research is focused on the final stage of the development of the 18th century English novel as considered from the viewpoint of the genre characteristics of the novel under study. We show that Sterne, having created the novel-dialogue and the novel-conversation, on the one hand, continued the European epic tradition, and, on the other hand, was the first who made the game of chronotopes an independent subject of artistic interpretation and understanding.
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The article deals with the issues related to the narrative structure of the text in the autobiography The Days of My Life by H.R. Haggard. We study role of the author in the author–reader communicative chain in the transmission of information to a recipient by means of a literary text. The predominance of dialogic relations in the narrator–narratator communicative chain and the presence of status-orientated narration prevents from regarding the text as an example of documentary prose and suggests the presence of the genre modifications typical of non-fiction literature.
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This article is dedicated to the analysis of the well-known work Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs written by H.S. Thompson, one of the most notorious American writers of the 20th century. Using different literary techniques typical of the New Journalism, the author represents to the reader his own perception of this socially and historically important phenomenon. A conclusion is made that the book is written in a new form of fiction, where facts and their literary implementation create a single whole.
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This paper examines the use of techniques of storytelling and self-narration on the English stage in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, with an emphasis on Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. The playwrights of the period were negotiating their way in a new world in which language was a medium which was coming more and more to be respected, and those who could wield it had the potential for advancement in ways never before conceivable. In the forefront of those negotiating for such a place through their art was Thomas Kyd. He may be considered the pioneer in the development of the self on the English stage in the early modern period through storytelling and self-narration as representational techniques. The paper also examines some of the profound changes in dramaturgy which took place in the period in question and which culminated in the drama of Thomas Kyd.
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The paper analyzes the elements of the historiographical metafiction in Swift’s novel The Shuttlecock (1981), that is, it analyzes those aspects of the novel dealing with the issues of inscribing subjectivity into historical context and examining the connection between the fictional and historical, focusing on the (un)reliability of narrative texts inscribed in the individual and collective history and the past, focusing on Swift’s use of specific narrative techniques and intertextuality.
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The aim of this paper is to argue that The Law and the Lady highlights the existence of a male-female binary opposition the characters must adhere to, with conventional gender roles that must be performed by each. Throughout the novel, as the female protagonist continues an investigation to uncover her husband’s involvement in the murder of his first wife, she struggles with adhering to traditional gender roles, while simultaneously feeling the pressure to reach a certain standard of femininity in order to obtain the information she needs. By using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this paper will also examine the manner in which identity and gender performativity are connected and how they influence the protagonist to challenge conventional gender norms
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