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The present essay was originally a paper presented at a scholarly conference in San Francisco (2014). It is part of a longer series of discussions of the mode in which very long novels strive to replicate integrally the social and natural cosmos. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (18th century) endeavors, the critic argues, to reconstitute an idyllic universe, a modest copy of the Garden of Eden.
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As an Anglo-Jew with ambivalent views regarding her Jewish heritage, a free-thinking New Woman writer, and platonic lesbian, late Victorian authoress Amy Levy is the epitome of the outsider. Keenly aware of the judgment of Victorian society as well as having suffered the pangs of rejection multiple times, Levy portrays love essentially as a binary experience since it incites both joy and pain. Her meditations on the duality of love focus especially on visual contemplation of beauty as the incentive of love, while the unrequited desire to possess the beloved’s physical beauty, a desire deemed unacceptable by Victorian society, leads the lover to an obsession with the beloved. This article deals with the problem of objectivity and subjectivity in the love poetry of Amy Levy as reflective of the poetess’ ambivalent attitude towards romantic love. The main contention is that in these poems, we can isolate an objective space, which correlates roughly, with Gaston Bachelard’s “dehors” and a subjective space (a space of subjective values), which is more or less the equivalent of Bachelard’s “dedans”. In Levy’s poems, the “dehors” is presented by the evocation of the outside world and of those elements (society, social events, social conventions, etc.) that are part of it. The “dedans” is the evocation of the inner world of the speaker and her subjective imaginings.
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In the summer of 1912, James Joyce spent several weeks in Galway, visiting Nora Barnacle’s family and writing essays for Il Piccolo della Sera. Two essays produced during his stay in the West of Ireland are directly concerned with the region and its inhabitants: one describes the past and present of Galway city and the other is an account of his trip to Aranmor, the biggest Aran Island off the west coast of Galway. Joyce’s selective focus on the past glories of those places and utopian vistas connected with the development of the Galway Harbour is interesting as a counterpoint to the notion of the West of Ireland, shared by representatives of the Anglo-Irish Revival who saw a relatively homogeneous repository of traditional Celtic values in the region. Joyce’s journalistic representation of Galway and Aran deserves attention also because it anticipates late twentieth-century emphasis on hybridity, miscegenation and transcultural mobility. Finally, Joyce’s two 1912 essays are a significant reflection of his own fluctuating attitudes to Ireland and its history, at a point when he was gradually abandoning his epideictic rhetoric of “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” to embrace a more cosmopolitan view of the West of Ireland as a milieu shaped by various European influences.
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In “A mobility of illusory forms immobilized in space.” James Joyce and the Pre-Einsteinian Universe James Joyce’s Ulysses is discussed as an ironic farewell to the pre-Einsteinian worldview. This paper aims at examining the “world picture” Joyce is sketching by reconstructing and juxtaposing the models of the Universe that his characters, Stephen and Bloom imagine. Joyce’s protagonists need to conceptualize the Universe; they crave to be able to mentally grasp every facet of external reality and the human place in it. The two protagonists in two diverse ways ‒ the “scientific” and the “artistic” ‒ visualize the earth among the stars and try to understand the nature of time. The pre-Einsteinian “scientific” way of Bloom fails him. Stephen is also accustomed to pre-Einsteinian physics but thanks to his “artistic” temperament he is able to add to his divagations an element of creative speculation.
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In his renowned Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Aime Cesaire points out that the kind of contact which was typically established when the European colonizers encountered other civilisations was not wholesome or mutually beneficial, as the Europeans rarely made any genuine effort to acknowledge the values and achievements of other cultures; instead, their focus was primarily on exploitation and material gain. Such dynamic is also evident in Peter Shaffer’s play The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), where most of the members of the sixteenth-century Spanish expedition to Peru treat the Inca culture with hostility and disdain, or even regard some of its aspects as a threat which needs to be eliminated. The exceptions to this attitude may be found at the individual level, where some attempts at recognizing the cultural values of the Other are made by the protagonist, Pizarro, and the narrator, Martin. The paper examines these attempts, but aims to demonstrate that, in the final analysis, they also fail, so that Shaffer’s play as a whole conveys a message that imperialist ambitions inevitably undermine any opportunity for a beneficial cross-cultural encounter. In addition to Cesaire, other authors in the field of postcolonial and ideological criticism, such as Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, and Roland Barthes will also be referred to.
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The article focuses on the symbolic meanings of birds in selected verse of two distinguished 20th century English language poets—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and Edward Thomas (1878–1917). There have been hardly any critical attempts to compare their creative output, despite Thomas’s reviews of Yeats’s works which prove a strong impact of Yeats’s style and sensibility on Thomas’s mind. Here, a comparative analysis is offered of bird symbolism in “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1917) by W.B. Yeats and “The Unknown Bird” (1915) by Edward Thomas, where both poets use birds as symbols of the creative process. In their reliance on symbols, they draw heavily on Romantic dialectic to resolve the inner conflict in consciousness and bridge the gap between the poetic self and the natural world. Also, the article is intended to show the impact of Romantic sensibility on the poets’ original styles, which confronts tradition with modernity.
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The aim of this paper is to examine Edward Thomas’s literary representations of his walks and bicycle rides from the perspective of the development of the genre of the travel book in Britain. The paper provides a brief outline of the history of the synergy and friction of travel books with the genres of the novel and the autobiography, and the ways in which the developing naturalist and pedestrian discourses influenced travel books and travel accounts. A key argument constructed and developed in the second part of the paper is that the combination of Thomas’s dissatisfaction with the loose collage-like nebulousness of his early travel accounts from Beautiful Wales (1905) to The South Country (1909) and his wide knowledge of 19th-century British travel writers resulted in two ‘conventional’ travel books The Icknield Way (1913) and In Pursuit of Spring (1914), in which Thomas relied on such standard generic features as the diary format and the central role of the narrative persona.
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The aim of this paper is to show how in recent years a comparatively little-known period of Newton's life, his work as the Warden and then Master of the Royal Mint, has entered the popular imagination. Analyzing Philip Kerr's detective novel set in the 17th century, Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton, I discuss his depiction of the Great Re-Coinage and the criminal world of cockney counterfeiters and 'clippers' whom Newton so successfully prosecuted. Additionally, the paper demonstrates how the "Britishness" of Newton and of old London becomes commodified; Kerr sells the myth of British history, Britain’s greatest minds, and British urban folklore for the global market.
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In our paper, we analyse and compare the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost, as well as in Genesis B and Christ and Satan – two works of Old English literature – in order to see whether the poems in the Junius Manuscript might have served as a source of inspiration for Milton’s epic. The comparison was based on the individual analysis of three different factors. In the first part of our paper, we study the characterisation of Satan, his reactions, emotions, and responses to the event of his exile. In the second part, we concentrate on Satan’s social function as a leader, his relationship with his subjects, their responses to his actions and the overall evaluation of his position based on the assumed rules of the societies in which the Satan-figures were created. Lastly, we contrasted the motivation of Satan in the three poems. Our comparison showed that parallels between Satan in Paradise Lost and Old English poetry exist in many respects.
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John Milton’s posthumously published A Brief History of Moscovia (1682) is one of the lesser-known works of the great poet, in which eyewitness reports and early modern travelogues are collected to provide a concise summary of Russian history, geography, ethnography, and Anglo-Russian relations. This work also played some role in Milton’s Hungarian reception: Miklós Szenczi, the great 20th-century Miltonist, published an article in the late 1960s which, quite uniquely for a Central-Eastern European English Studies scholar, made its way to mainstream Milton criticism. In my paper, I consider Szenczi’s position on Milton’s treatise.
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Apart from the Passion Story, the Book of Revelation, or, as it is commonly known, the Apocalypse, was perhaps the most important biblical influence in medieval and Renaissance English literature. In this paper I discuss the most significant Apocalyptic authors and works form these periods.
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Komáromy Zsolt – Gárdos Bálint – Péti Miklós (szerk.): Az angol irodalom története 3: Az 1640-es évektől az 1830-as évekig, Első rész, Budapest, Kijárat Kiadó, Budapest, 2021, 516 o. Komáromy Zsolt – Gárdos Bálint – Péti Miklós (szerk.): Az angol irodalom története 4: Az 1640-es évektől az 1830-as évekig, Második rész, Budapest, Kijárat Kiadó, Budapest, 2021, 331 o.
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Miklós Péti: Paradise from behind the Iron Curtain: Reading, Translating and Staging Milton in Communist Hungary, London, UCL Press, 2022, 296 pp.
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The article looks at Kathleen Jamie’s collection of essays entitled Surfacing (2019) and explores the issue of narrative in-betweenness and liminality. The focus in the first part of the article is on the liminal features of Jamie’s essays, on the way the collection is designed, but it also discusses the importance of paratexts such as the book cover. It introduces the concept of spiral time, and liminal space-time so characteristic of Jamie’s writing. The second part analyses an essay entitled “A Tibetan Dog” in which Jamie creatively investigates multimodal “threshold” connections between the present and the past, the realm of reality and the realm of dreams, and, last but not least, the link between intellectual knowledge and bodily wisdom.
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B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) and Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) are among the most formally inventive and materially unique literary responses to personal loss. The first novel-in-a-box in English literature, The Unfortunates is a poignant account of the premature death of Johnson’s best friend Tony Tillinghast. Also contained in a box, Carson’s elegy is printed on a 25-metre-long concertinaed scroll, which contains a collage of textual and visual fragments of various artefacts connected with Carson’s dead brother.This article considers the implications of certain visual and tactile properties of both works for their representation of loss and the work of mourning, as theorized by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. It argues that both the card-shuffle structure and the scroll format accentuate the ongoingness of mourning and convey scepticism about the possibility of any closure. The article also examines the significance of encasing the contents of both elegies in coffin-like boxes and the importance of their extensive use of fragmentation.
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In his Confessions, Saint Augustine formulates the idea of human time as distentio animi (extension/distraction of the soul/spirit), which he contrasts with divine eternity. The opposition between the temporal and subjective ‘earthly’ and the eternal ‘heavenly’ is part of the Augustinian ‘analogical matrix’ that has been part of the framework of Western thought for more than a millennium. Medieval thought on time is situated within this framework, although other influences should also be added (e.g. the archaic conception of cyclical time perceptible in the liturgy), and its characteristic duality is reflected in literary texts. This article aims to demonstrate the exceptional complexity and originality of the reflection on time in Thomas of England’s Tristan, as well as its links with the Augustinian matrix. The analysis focuses on a double temporality contained in the narrative: one, linear and subjective at the same time, tends inexorably towards death; the other ntroduces a dimension of eternity through the ideal of love, represented by the golden ring, whose role goes beyond a symbolic function, since it can revive the past and determine the future. In this way, Thomas offers a substitution of the elements of the Augustinian matrix, replacing the divine absolute by that of the fin’amor raised to the level of the spiritual ideal.
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One of the leading authors of the Victorian era with her important novels well known for realistic depictions of the nineteenth-century English society and providing an insight into the psychology of her characters, George Eliot (1819-1880) focuses on social arena in the early decades of the era with Silas Marner (1861) that juxtaposes a lower-class protagonist with middle class norms and represents a highly controversial account of religious and social interaction. Eliot’s Silas Marner is preceded by Adam Bede (1860) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), both of which are masterpieces for Victorian novel, and it is one of the lesser works due to its popularity back in the day. However, the novel invites a critical analysis due to the representation of the dynamics between religious faith and devotion to ethics resulting from the infamous decision and the fate that befalls on the protagonist Silas. Silas Marner marks a controversial point in the understanding of Victorian religiousness due to the protagonist’s association of faith with the result of his betting. Therefore, the novel is analysed as an account of paradoxical middle-class values based on the dichotomy between the highly promoted religious understanding and the infamous fate of Silas following his adherence to social and religious teachings. Through social criticism, the aim of this study is to demonstrate that the notions of individuality and individual’s happiness traditionally represented in Victorian fiction have been deceptive and misleading from the beginning of the industrial era.
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The life and literary contributions of Archibald Joseph Cronin have been understudied and there remains a need for deeper exploration. His most popular and successful novel, The Citadel, has been deemed to be a semi-autobiographical novel. Informed by Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, this study scrutinises the multifaceted elements that moulded Cronin’s journey. Tracing the historical contexts and formative experiences that shaped Cronin’s trajectory, this research casts some light on less-explored facets of his life. Embedding personal experience into his narrative, Cronin’s work captures the intricacies of medical practice, unveiling unethical practices, dubious treatments, and the significance of research and of occupational medicine. This study not only offers an encompassing portrayal of the literary figure, but also emphasises the link between personal encounters and artistic creation in shaping his literary work.
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The article discusses the concept of multisensuality in the satirical prints of the Georgian era in England, focusing on how the sensory perception enhances the visual humor. Drawing upon historical and cultural contexts, this study investigates how English caricaturists employed various sensory elements, such as sight, sound, smell, taste and touch to convey satire and provoke emotional responses among viewers. Ten satirical prints by five different authors were chosen for the analysis.
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The Concept of the Three Orders of Society in Late Old English Prose. Between the years 991 and 1012, the English suffered one of the worst Viking onslaughts in history. The relentless invasions coupled with an ineffective administration which was crumbling from within almost brought England to its knees. There was dire need for reformation. The first step in this process was a clear assessment of the situation. To this end, Archbishop Wulfstan of York and Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham rediscover and use the concept of the tripartite society to show the desperate need for all three social orders of England (laboratores, oratores, bellatores) to unite in support of the office of kingship, lest everything be lost. The present paper aims to present the evolution of the concept of a tripartite society in Anglo-Saxon England from its (pseudo)Alfredian origins to its integration into the political tracts, law codes, sermons and homilies of late Anglo-Saxon England.
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